He turned the first few pages slowly, reading every word. An entry from last July read,Replaced my morning meal of toast with a banana. Felt like I could have swum forever, and he had to stop. He wasn’t going to be able to get through it, not in front of Anna. “Here,” he said, handing the notebook to Anna. “Will you take a look? It’s just an address I’m looking for. So I can write to him. Tell him she’s—”
Anna nodded, opened the notebook, and began to turn its pages.
Joseph admired the girl’s seriousness, her ability to focus on the task at hand. “You remind me a great deal of your mother,” he said as he watched Anna study his daughter’s neat handwriting. “Inez was the type of girl who couldn’t be easily distracted.”
Anna beamed. “She doesn’t talk much about—her childhood.”
“By that, do you mean, she doesn’t talk much about me?”
The girl flushed.
“Why should she?” he said. “I am the past.”
“Our pasts are important, no?”
Joseph shrugged an acknowledgment. He wondered how much Inez had told her, knew that, at the very least, she’d read the words he’d included in her affidavit of support. “It’s funny what we remember.”
Anna stopped turning the book’s pages and looked at him, expectantly. He nodded his head at the notebook, urging her onward, then kept talking.
“Your mother had a bicycle and we used to ride it along the river. I pedaled, and she steered, and what I remember most of all is that her hair was always in my eyes and mouth.”
“How old were you?”
He smiled to himself. “Maybe nine or ten years old. Just children.”
Anna kept turning the pages of the notebook but her pace had slowed. “Did you ever think about staying?” she asked.
“I did.” It was all he had thought about the autumn they were seventeen, after the steamship ticket had arrived in the mail from his brother. Inez had stared at the ticket when he’d presented it to her, as if she could will it away just by looking at it hard enough. “Marry me, then,” she had said when she knew there was no keeping him in Lackenbach. “Take me with you.”
Anna wanted a story, but Joseph wasn’t sure she wanted this one. The hurried marriage proposal, the promise that he would send for Inez when he had saved enough money, the letters back and forth across the Atlantic, which came to a sudden halt when he met Esther—none of it made him look very good.
“How much has your mother told you?” he asked Anna.
“Not much,” she said, looking up from the notebook once more. “Just that you were engaged and that it didn’t work out.”
Inez was a good woman, too decent to color her daughter’s opinion of him with the truth.
“Anna,” he said as she returned her attention to the task at hand, “Idon’t want you to worry about your mother. Your parents. If the affidavit doesn’t work, there are other things we can try.”
A tear slipped down Anna’s cheek, and she wiped it away with the heel of her hand. “You don’t think the consul will accept it?”
Securing a student visa for Anna had been one thing; securing visas for her parents was turning out to be quite another. Since Joseph wasn’t a relative, he had to prove that Inez and Paul would not become public charges upon their arrival in the U.S.—that they could support themselves indefinitely, all without taking a job away from a deserving American. An impossible feat, considering the fact that their assets were frozen.
Joseph wondered how honest he should be with Anna. “I suspect we’ll need more than my affidavit alone. But who can say?”
“You’re kind to be considering this now, after—everything.”
He had been willing to help Inez and Paul before Florence’s death, so it seemed antithetical to turn his back on them now. He told himself that Florence would have wanted it this way but that wasn’t all of it. Joseph appreciated staying busy and knew he got some relief from focusing on anything as straightforward as a visa application, for all its perils and pitfalls. If he followed the right practices and procedures, paid the proper fees, it might at least be possible to conjure Anna’s parents out of thin air. The same could never be said for Florence. “It’s nothing,” he said as he watched Anna come to the last page.
“The address isn’t here,” she said as she closed the notebook. “Stuart will have it. Or be able to get it for you.”
He reached for the little book, and she gave it to him with two hands, as if it were something fragile and dear.
Stuart was sitting in the beach chair, quite awkwardly, when Joseph arrived at the office on Friday morning. As Joseph entered the room, the boy stood, too fast, and the chair folded in on itself. The frame banged loudly against the floor, and Joseph flinched.
“Your secretary said you wanted to see me.”
Joseph didn’t say a word, just walked across the room to his desk, picked up the heavy oak swivel chair behind it, and carried it over to the fireplace.
