“Oh. I’m so sorry.” I contemplated telling Truman my mother had miscarried two babies in between me and Tommy. I was about to when he went on.
“I think Wilson would have been a good big brother. Having a sibling would have taken the focus off himself, and that probably would have been a good thing, too.” He turned to look at me with his hands in the suds. “It must be hard for you now with the loss of your own brother. I would often see you at the cottage with him. Even from up here on the hill, I could see he was very fond of you.”
A lump bloomed quickly in my throat. “I do miss him. Very much. Tommy liked trailing around after me, even with six years between us. But... I could tell things were starting to change for him. He was starting to want to spend more time with his friends at school than with me.”
Truman turned his attention back to the dishes. “I know what you mean. Helen is eight years older than me and we were close when we were young, but we didn’t like the same things after a while. The older we got, the more the gap widened. And of course, with Helen living so far away in Europe, I hardly ever see her. She is my sister, though, and the only one I have. But you already know that.”
I had met Helen Calvert twice. The first time I didn’t even remember, as I’d only been two. She’d apparently taken a fancy to me. Or maybe it was more like I had taken a fancy to her. Helen had come at harvesttime, and everyone at the vineyard, evenCeline and Truman and Wilson, participated in harvest. Helen had played with me in the vines while my parents clipped fruit, and the way Momma remembered it, I had charmed her. After that, whenever Helen wrote to Truman and Celine, she’d tell them to say hello to me.
Once when I’d been called up to the house to help polish forks and spoons, I’d marveled at the pretty foreign stamps on the envelopes of Helen’s letters. With Helen’s blessing, Celine and Truman had begun routinely giving me the letters when they were done reading them.
The second time Helen came to California for a visit was when I was nine.
By then, I had a little pile of her letters all collected over the years. I was excited to meet her because of those letters and all the greetings she had sent me through Celine and Truman. Even though I didn’t know her, she felt like a friend. I knew that she worked as a nanny in Europe and I thought she must be a very good one. I could tell by the way she treated Wilson and little Tommy and me that she loved children.
When we talked, I confessed to her that it wasn’t the stamps I loved most about her letters; it was what she’d written about her life in faraway places. I knew she’d traveled across Europe and had even visited Egypt and India. The names for the places Helen had been to and the children she cared for and the names of the food she ate had such happy sounds when I said them out loud. And the colors of those words were just as magical. I’d been forbidden by my parents to tell anyone about what I could see that no one else did, but I couldn’t help whispering to Helen that her letters made me see all the colors of the world. It was the closest I’d come to telling anyone what I saw in my mind when I heard words like Paris and Cairo and Bombay.
Helen had loved that. Loved the way I’d said “all the colors of the world.” She didn’t know what I’d truly meant by it, but Ididn’t care. It was enough that she’d been delighted to hear me say what I did. I felt the glow of her attention and friendship then.
After she returned to Europe, she occasionally wrote a letter addressed only to me. When Helen moved to Vienna the year I turned ten, she wrote to me about the opera house and the taste of good Viennese coffee and how big the horse fountain was in Salzburg and how beautiful the meadow flowers were in summer, high up in the Alps. I wrote her back, as I always did, careful to mind the secret I’d promised I’d keep, even though it weighed on me to do so because Helen’s words brought so many colors to mind.
In time it became easier to stop replying to Helen’s letters than continue to withhold the truth from her. It seemed deceptive to say nothing of the colors when she’d ask how I was, how my family was, and especially how the vineyard was. The two letters she wrote to me when I was twelve I left unanswered. She did not write to me again, though in her subsequent letters to Celine and Truman she always ended them with “and give my love and the stamps to Rosie.”
Helen had surely supposed I’d outgrown my interest in her letters. That was not the case. I still read the contents of every envelope Celine gave me.
Truman now set a wet dish on the drainboard. “I forgot to tell you we’ve just had a new letter from her. She spoke of you in it.”
“She did?” I grabbed a towel and lifted the clean dish to dry it.
“She was very sad to hear of the accident. But glad to hear we’d taken you in.”
He kept his eyes on the bubbles in the sink.
“How is she?” I said.
“She says she’s fine, though I don’t expect Vienna is a pleasant place to be at the moment with Germany having marched in there like it owns the place. She loves it there, though, and is devotedto that family she works for. She won’t leave. Not even now, when it seems like there might be a war.”
I had been hearing the radio broadcasts from the Calverts’ living room when I cleaned up the supper dishes. I knew there was unrest in Europe and that an angry man named Adolf Hitler had risen to power in Germany. I knew this man had marched his troops into Austria a few months earlier to absorb the whole of it. The sound of those broadcasts had summoned willowy streaks of gloomy gray.
“She’s not afraid?” I asked.
“Europe is home to her now, she says. And that family she’s with in Vienna has six or seven children. I can never remember. She’ll be an old woman by the time the last one’s out of that house.”
“My goodness,” I said, imagining for a moment the colors I might see if I lived a life as thrilling as that. “I think she’s very brave.”
“Braveis an interesting word to describe it. Her deciding to become what our father said is an overpaid babysitter drove him nuts. God, how he blew his top over that. And then he blew it again when she announced she was leaving for England to be a nanny over there. All these years later, he’s still not happy about her choices. But then Pops has never been an easy man to please.”
“What does your mother think?”
“She died when I was four. It wouldn’t have mattered if she thought it was a great idea. He wasn’t a fan of things that happened without his say-so. Helen going off to Europe because she wanted to travel and then staying there happened without his say-so.”
“Oh.”
“He liked it when I married Celine, though. He sure liked that. Until he realized it wasn’t going to benefit him in the least.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. I wiped a drinking glass dry and said nothing.
“I don’t know why I told you all of that.” Truman felt for the stopper and pulled the drain open. The dishwater swirled and gurgled as the sink emptied. In my mind’s eye, pops of aquamarine went with it.
