For several hours, I twisted and writhed in bed, drenched in a cold sweat, hallucinating as do those gripped by malaria in novels of the tropics.
When the torment passed, I was barefoot on the balcony, letting the cool breeze dry my nightdress. The sky was clear. The moon was in the west. The stars seemed to invite me. I don’t know what I mean by that, but the stars seemed to invite me.
Before I realized what I was doing, I’d taken off my nightdress and the underclothes that Marjorie Hollingsworth Merrimen designed for me and still produced for me annually.
In all my years at the Bram, I had never been naked elsewhere than in my private bathroom. Yet there I stood on the balcony with all revealed.
I felt so light. I have always been a small person, five feet and very slender. But never before had I felt so light. Through all my years on Earth, I had felt heavy, so heavy. But now I felt very light.
What I thought happened next could not have happened. It had to be a waking dream, hallucination, proof that my mind must be deteriorating. I will not embarrass myself by writing of it.
I had become shameless. I left my clothing on the balcony and returned naked to my room. After a life of shame and humiliation, I was shameless.
I found my diary and pen beside the bed and wrote these last words. I thought they were my last. I knew I had not long to live.
Then a knock came at my living room door. I hadn’t strength to get up from the edge of the bed, where I sat writing.
I called out, “Come in, Mother,” for I knew who was there. My voice was weak, but she must have heard me, for she came to me.
Stepping into the bedroom, she said, “Oh, my darling girl,” and she rushed to me, and I wrote these words about her coming to me, my mother.
She kneels before me as I sit here on the edge of the bed. She is weeping, as she should be, for I am naked and shameless.
“What ... what’s happening, Addie? For God’s sake, what’s happening to you?”
“Something,” was all I said, for I was a stranger to myself.
“What’s that you’re writing?” She seems not to know what she should do. That is not like her. “Put it aside. Let me take care of you, Addie.”
“I’m writing in the diary. That’s what I always do first. Then I edit when I type it. I type it carefully, without errors. Then I put it in a ring binder. For you. All of you. For when I am gone. Writing is what I do. It’s why I am.”
“Why you are? What do you mean, sweetheart?”
“I write about my family. I tell the story of my family. It’s what I can do. The story of my family.”
“What’s happening?” she asks again. “You’re ...”
The words of Captain ballyhooing on the pitchman’s platform came to me, and I spoke them. “‘See the strangest freaks on Earth. Pay fifteen cents for ten priceless astonishments. All visitors must befourteen years old or older.’” The last lines of Mr. Dickens’s novel also came to me, lines I had long loved, and I spoke them as well. “‘It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done ... a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’”
“You aren’t a freak. Addie, you never were. Never. You are so beautiful.”
“Am I? If I am, it’s as if I always could have been if I’d known how.”
“What can I do?”
“There is a time for all things.”
Mother’s voice is breaking. “What can I do?”
“Let me write this last bit. Then just ... just hold me.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Mother, so very much,” I say, and this will be the last thing I write, for nothing that could be said after “love” would be worth saying.
Forty-Four
Loretta’s Note
