Harry’s left. I don’t know what I was doing with myself before. How did I fill the days? Reading, letter writing? Is that all it was? I had begun to look forward to having my life back to its old order, but now that he’s gone the quiet feels like loneliness, where it did not before. At least, if it did, I didn’t realize. There is a half-complete 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle on the formal dining table. It’s not quite so fun without Harry. I’ll probably put it away.
Anyway, Mick Watts is back to inviting me down to Texas, and I’ve run out of excuses, so I have said I’ll go. I leave June 16 and I’ll be gone a week. I’m flying, which I dread, but Trudy and Millie (who love the idea of Mick, though they haven’t met him obviously) are going to come help me pack my things and take me to the airport. It’s a direct flight from Baltimore to Houston, and Mick said he will meet me at the airport. I wonder, Felix, why he wants me to come so badly, an old dog like me. Surely there is a queue of (younger) women vying for his bachelor attention and his money.
Please send along your dates for November so I can clear my schedule. You can, of course, borrow the car. I haven’t told you this, but I’m not driving much. I get a ride with the birds or my neighbor Theodore for the most part.
Your loving (seventy-eight-year-old) sister,
Syb
Rosalie Van Antwerp
33 Orange Lane
Goshen, CT 06756
June 5, 2017
Hello, Rosalie. I am writing because I know Paul’s surgery is Friday. I hope you have prepared well in advance, and have some kind of assistance with care lined up. To answer your questions, Harry has left, I have not heard from the DNA relation in Scotland, and things are going along fine with Mick Watts. I am readingTo the Lighthouseby Virginia Woolf.
And lastly, you asked if everything is all right. No, everything is not all right. I cannot quite manage to move past the fact that you, my best friend, the person I held dearest to myself, would betray me by hosting my own daughter, who, as you very well know, I see once a year if I am lucky, andkeep it from me. How humiliating, that you and she should see fit to need to conduct clandestine meetings. How wonderful it must be for you to have such a strong bond with Fiona, such an intimate, confiding relationship. I cannot imagine such a pleasure, but it sounds WONDERFUL. I just relish the thought of her cozying up in your den telling you all the ways in which I have failed her as a mother, and how glad she is to have a surrogate in you. I hate to think how bereft she would be if not for you, Rosalie.
You and I have enjoyed an honest, confrontational friendship for going on sixty years, and I cherished it. Good luck with Paul next week. In all hope, it’ll go smoothly for him.
Sybil
Postscript: For your information, before the letter in which you confessed to your little surprise reunion behind my back I wasunaware of Fiona’s troubles with infertility and miscarriages, so thank you for providing me with that information.
Sybil Van Antwerp Stone
17 Farney Road
Arnold
MD 21012
United States of America
11 June 2017
Greetings, Sybil,
I received your letter from January at the end of April. The letter went to an old address, then it seems it went round and round never finding its way and finally it did come to me all bent and rumpled as if it’d been shoved someplace. I kept the letter to myself for several days and read it repeatedly, so many times the paper began to soften, stunned so I was. When I started with Kindred it was to trace familial lines of my father, an American, about whom I have very little knowledge, and when they began the DNA testing it was offered to me free of charge, so I did it rather without much thought, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say, seems a bit foolish, doesn’t it? And anyway, shortly after it I was going through some bills and trying to tidy up and cut back (I’d really already got as much information as I could about my paternal lineage), so I printed out the family history I’d found and closed the account. Hadn’t given Kindred a thought again until I read your letter.
I am a botanist, familiar with DNA. Initially, I thought the letter had to be some kind of hoax. A 49% match is absurdly high, and with you materialising from thin air it was something I couldn’t believe. And yet there was your pristine penmanship on the cream paper, the names of your children. There is no other way to say it: I believed you. I took your letter down to my brother, who runs the pub and a hardware store and we mulled it over for a while. (This was after weeks.) Then I was down in Glasgow teaching a summer course at university, and turning this overand over again in my mind all the time, and now I’m back and made it my first task on returning to my house to write.
I was born in October of 1943, and my brother Declan the year after me. John and Douglas are twins, and were born in 1948. Would you please, if it isn’t a bother, send along a copy of the report of our DNA match? Please don’t take it as rudeness, it’s only I feel the need to see it with my own eyes.
If you will, please send to my correct address, and that is
Hattie Gleason
Bodney Cottage
Fassfern
Fort William PH33 7NP
Scotland
