Madaket tipped the western edge of the island, past fields and bright yellow flowers and bushy trees. Nancy’s cottage lay outside the village proper, tucked high up and covered in roses. Noah parked and we walked under an arbor to knock on the gray slate door.
A woman who looked to be in her sixties opened it. “You must be Abigail. I’m Laurie, come in. My mother’s out back.” She led us through the small and neat house. “It’s so nice you came. Mom misses young people. She’s been talking about this ever since you called.”
“Oh.” Great. Now I felt added pressure.
A woman in a wheelchair beamed up at us when we stepped onto the porch overlooking long, rolling fields. Despite the day’s perfect warmth, she wore a sweater and long pants. “So you’re Ruth’s granddaughter.”
“Yes. Thanks so much for seeing me. This is Noah.”
“Of course.” She smiled at him. “Noah Barbanel.”
He jerked his head up. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I know your grandparents.”
Noah and I exchanged a quick look. But of course she did; Edward had written of her in the letters. And everyone on Nantucket seemed to know the Barbanels.
“Come, sit down. Would you like some lemonade?”
We took our seats in wicker chairs around a table with a pitcherand a plate of shortbread cookies. Mrs. Howard poured us tall glasses of lemonade, and the loose floating pulp made me think she’d made it herself. “I was so sorry to hear about Ruth’s passing.”
Another surprise. “Um. Thank you.”
She nodded. “We hadn’t seen each other in years, but we still wrote occasionally. Your grandmother wrote wonderful letters.”
Apparently. “Had you known her a long time?”
“Since we were little girls.” She smiled fondly. “My mother was the housekeeper at Golden Doors, and Ruth and I used to play together. We had quite the imaginations. Ruth said she knew the house was hers as soon as she heard its name.”
Only it hadn’t really been hers, had it? “What was she like as a kid?” I asked. “My mom and I don’t know too much about her past. She never mentioned Nantucket.”
Nancy smiled. “Most people would have called her quiet, but most people didn’t know her, not like I did. She had a will of iron, Ruth. And there was a brightness about her, when we got older—when she talked, people listened. She didn’t mince words. People wanted to hear what she had to say. And she was very pretty, of course, which helped.”
“She was?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Do you think...” I hesitated over the question, something I never would have dared asked O’ma directly. “She was happy?”
“Oh, well, what’s happiness?” Nancy said, which wasn’t the kind of response I’d expected. She smiled wryly. “It wasn’t such a bad childhood. She and Eva were very close.”
“Eva?” I echoed, confused.
“Mrs. Barbanel. Your great-grandmother,” she added, with a nod to Noah.
Mrs. Barbanel. The woman who’d taken in my grandmother—who’d raised her. “How were they close?”
Nancy considered. “Mrs. Barbanel didn’t have any daughters, so I think she bonded with Ruth differently than she had with her sons. They had a special connection. She didn’t dote—she wasn’t given to large displays of emotion—but I remember Ruth telling me they learned to bake together. Eva went out of her way to learn how to make German pastries, kuchens and gugelhopf, so she could teach Ruth. So Ruth would feel connected, and know something, about where she’d been born.”
O’ma had taughtmeto make apple kuchen and gugelhopf. Crystalline memories of forming dough for the pie crusts flashed through my mind, of O’ma urging me to reallylearnhow the dough should feel. Of O’ma showing me how to place dollops of chocolate batter on top of the vanilla batter in the gugelhopf pan, and using fork tines to swirl it in. I’d never questioned how she’d learned to make them. “That was good of her.”
“Eva was a good woman. Tough, but good. I think she wanted to keep the memory of Ruth’s parents alive—even if Ruth didn’t have much of a memory of them.”
Poor O’ma. Poor Eva. Poor everyone. “Did my grandmother tell you about her parents? I know their names, but nothing else, and I can’t find anything online.”
“Only once.” Nancy met my gaze. Her eyes were a pale, filmy blue, gauzed over by time. “She wrote me, to say her parents had died. She’d suspected, I think. But she held out hope until some organization wrote to her, after the war.”
I nodded, throat tight. “And she didn’t mention other family, or people in Germany?”
