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Chapter 39
In a personal fuck-you to the disease that derailed my life, I schedule my Covid vaccine for the anniversary of David’s death, driving down to Albany for my first shot instead of waiting for the county to set up an inoculation site at the local senior center. That’s where Wren and Mrs. Ferguson line up, along with Joe and Nancy. Aisha’s father is a police officer, her mother a paramedic; as first responders, they were vaccinated in February, allowing their daughter to return home for the first time in nearly a year. Lucinda gets her shot in the city, where she’s staying in her editor’s empty apartment while she finishes her book.
“How are the revisions coming along?” I ask when she calls. After eschewing the lucrative auction her agent recommended, Lucinda made a very nice deal with an independent Brooklyn-based publisher. It didn’t give her the flash-in-the-pan payoff of a significant deal with one of the Big Five, but it was important, she felt, that her book find the right home. Compiled from transcripts of the talks she’s given as the Cozy Cozy Lady, the final product will include a foreword written by a scholar of African-American history and photographs by an up-and-coming Black filmmaker she connected with through her YouTube channel. A documentary is in the works.
“I miss Aisha something awful, but the change of scene has been invigorating,” Lucinda says. “The edits are nearly finished and we’ve agreed on a layout, but we’re holding off on photographs until there’s some green on the trees near Lake Placid. I want to take pictures in your barn, too, with the sheep. My editor’s planning a virtual publication event, but I’d like to have the in-person launch at Red Barn Books.”
“Here?” I haven’t thought ahead to hosting author events. For now, I’m focused on turning in my taxes and finishing up the semester. “When?”
“August thirty-first. I trust the bookshop doesn’t have any conflicting events on the calendar for that date?”
I don’t even have a calendar for Red Barn Books, let alone anything on it, but that date feels fateful. The faculty meeting marking the start of the academic year is always held on the last Tuesday in August. For the first time in seven years, I won’t be attending. Because I failed to apply for tenure, my contract with the college is about to expire. Adjuncting from a distance is out of the question, too. The college president, adamant about providing students with an on-campus experience, has revoked the remote teaching that’s allowed me to hang on to my job for an extra year. It seems I’ve run out of reprieves once and for all. Joe appearing on his snowmobile is the last deus I expect to emerge from the machina.
“I’ll save the date for you, Lulu.”
I’m not having second thoughts about abandoning academia, but the truth is, Red Barn Books has yet to return my investment with anything close to a living wage—if by “living” one means health insurance and retirement savings and enough money for food and fuel and firewood. My taxes, complicated by purchasing a home and owning a business as well as withdrawing tax-deferred savings, suck up the entirety of my withholdings as well as hundreds more in fines and fees for an accountant’s help. I file early to get it over with, then review my bank statements with a dispassionate eye. I’m on track to pay off my credit card debt with the last of my college paychecks, but I’ll be starting the fiscal year with no savings and no safety net.
Evelyn wrote about enjoying entrepreneurial success as a single woman, but her definition of success was admittedly austere. If I want my existence in Schuywich to be more than meager, it’ll be up to me to wrangle Red Barn Books into profitability. It’s time, I decide, to get serious about the book business.
Any minute I’m not in front of a Zoom class I spend researching how best to run a bookshop. In the barn, I find a 1969 edition of A Manual on Bookselling, as well as the George Hecht pamphlet Evelyn quoted in her column. Reading them reveals that bookselling is a business whose fundamentals haven’t changed all that much over the years. Following Evelyn’s example, I join the American Booksellers Association, which does, indeed, offer a health insurance plan, as well as online classes I eagerly sign up for. I get an account with Ingram, the distribution warehouse that services independents, and put together a plan to carry new summer reads alongside the used books that came with my purchase of the property. With a little coaching from Aisha, I invest in targeted social media advertising and create a Google business profile so Red Barn Books will appear on map searches. I place an ad in Saratoga Today, leave brochures at the Capital Region Welcome Center on the Thruway, and put signs along the state road that leads to Schuywich.
After tumbling down the rabbit hole of food service regulations in the state of New York, I realize running a real café out of my kitchen will be more headache than help. Instead, I pick up a glass-front refrigerator from a restaurant that’s gone out of business, which I fill with bottled beverages and canned cold brews that I buy in bulk and mark up a hundred percent. At the farmer’s market, I strike commission deals with vendors who’ll stock a snack bar at my bookshop with homemade jams and dehydrated fruits and roasted nuts. I supplement these local offerings with a variety of nostalgic candies, packets of organic baby food, and the protein bars bicyclists prefer.
Sandra, back from Arizona frustratingly unvaccinated but fortunately healthy, assures me that the energy I’m releasing into the universe will be rewarded in some esoteric balancing of cosmic books. As if to prove her point, she offers to set up her massage chair at the reopening of Red Barn Books to knead the tension from necks still knotted by the stresses of a pandemic that modern medicine has slowed but not stopped.
After turning in my students’ grades and bidding my colleagues a virtual farewell, I devote the days remaining in May to getting the bookshop ready for its June first opening. When Wren asks if I’d like to sell books on commission at his antique shop, I jump at the chance. He’ll handle the sales, he says; all I have to do is select decorative books I think will appeal to his customers. My mind immediately turns to a set of Charles Dickens novels with forest-green covers that have been stacked, untouched, on a bottom shelf in the dining room since Rhonda first showed me the place. That evening, after a late supper, I sit cross-legged on the floor and pull the books forward on the shelf. Great Expectations catches on something that topples the stack and rips its leather binding.
“Shit,” I mutter. Lowering my chest until it touches my knees, I reach behind the books and feel some sort of metal ridge. I shine my phone’s flashlight for a closer look. Along the back of the shelf, I spy a piano hinge that hints at a secret compartment.
Intrigued, I remove the books, reach under the lip of the shelf, and give it a tug. It lifts about an inch before getting stuck, just enough to reveal a cutout in the toe kick. Is it meant to be a handle? I wonder. I lower the shelf and stretch out on the floor, cheek pressed to pine planks. From down here, the cutout looks less like a handle and more like a mail slot.
I get to my knees and tug harder. Again, the shelf sticks. Thinking the shadowy compartment would be the perfect place for a hibernating snake to ride out the winter, I take some flash pictures and scroll through the images. No coiled snake or shed skin, either. Only cobwebs and curl-edged newspaper clippings and dusty envelopes.
I don’t know anyone who could leave this mystery to be investigated another day, especially not a writer. I pull on a sweatshirt and run out to the workshop for a pry bar. Back in the dining room, I wedge the pry bar in the cut-out space and push. The shelf doesn’t budge. I put my foot on the pry bar and give it all my weight. Suddenly, the board splinters, leaving me sprawled on the dining room floor. Rubbing my bruised tailbone, I set aside the broken shelf and take out an envelope.
It’s addressed to Evelyn Cabot, which isn’t surprising, but without the stamps or postmarks necessary to have come through the mail. Hand delivered, then, but by whom? Sliding out the pages, I read a salutation in perfect schoolroom cursive: My darling Evelyn.
“Evelyn, you vixen,” I say aloud, envisioning her secreting away precious correspondence from a long-ago lover. But no, this letter is dated March 17, 2015. That was the last year Red Barn Books was open. Evelyn must have been in her eighties by then. Who, I wonder as I unfold the pages, writes love letters to an old woman?
The script sits neatly atop thin blue lines, the smooth white paper ridged across the top. Torn from a pad, then, I think, as my eyes convey handwritten words into my brain for processing.
I saw Lulu at the Price Chopper today, it begins, situating me in a familiar setting alongside a character I’m acquainted with. There’s mention of a Dr. Singh and cognitive decline, along with the cryptic statement there’s something I never had the courage to tell you before. The “you” is obviously Evelyn, but who is the speaker here? I resist turning to the signature, challenging myself to piece together the point of view from context cues. I consider the sentence: Running into Lulu got me thinking about when we took in Marcus’s sheep.
Who besides Evelyn would use the plural possessive to discuss those sheep? This must have been written by the roommate Evelyn sometimes references in her columns, the librarian who recommended Wren for his summer job in the bookshop. A snippet of dialogue gives her the name Hazel. I get it now: An affectionate Hazel is recalling for a forgetful Evelyn the time they took in Marcus Green’s sheep. But why does Hazel need to rehash the same events Evelyn herself described when she wrote about becoming a shepherdess?
I reach the end of the letter, flabbergasted by the flip side of a story I thought I knew. Evelyn wasn’t a single woman who renovated her house and started a business all by herself. Hazel wasn’t her spinster librarian roommate. The women were lovers—and Lucinda knew it. I understand why Hazel and Evelyn’s relationship was hush-hush back in the day, but those dark times are long in the past. I thought Lucinda was my friend; I feel duped at being denied the real story. Then again, Hazel herself never told Evelyn that Lucinda knew their secret. Everyone, I realize, was warped by the need for silence. What other secrets will these letters reveal? I wonder.
I empty the hiding place of correspondence and clippings. Setting aside the curled columns of newsprint, I remove each letter from its envelope and arrange them on the dining room table by date, starting on New Year’s Day in 2015 through the final missive from September. Do I spare a thought for privacy as I settle in to read the words Hazel addressed to her lover? In passing, I suppose, but neither Hazel nor Evelyn is alive to object, and the dead can’t sue for libel. Besides, writers are by nature cannibals of other people’s stories, whether we read them in books or overhear them on the subway or steal them from our friends.
My face is salty from the tears I’ve shed by the time I finish reading the letters. In just a couple of hours, an entire life has passed before my eyes. Two lives, really—Hazel’s and Evelyn’s, entwined for six decades. Who even knew there were vacation camps for lesbians in the 1950s, or that women could be marines back then? Hazel saw The Children’s Hour on Broadway; I watched the movie with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine and—oh, what’s his name, from The Rockford Files? I can imagine Hazel’s amazement as the tumult in her heart was given voice by an actress onstage. The meaning of the mysterious wire is revealed when Hazel writes about traipsing through the woods to care for her dying mother—an image that recurs, with devastating effect, in Hazel’s last letter.
Through all the letters, there’s a running tension between Hazel and her family. Her father comes across as an ogre, but with a backstory pitiable enough to make him sympathetic, too. Her mother remains a cipher, hardened by losing a child and caring for a damaged spouse. Hazel had every right, I think, to accept her inheritance, but the misunderstanding that drove her and Billy apart seems overly tragic. How could all those years slip away without a reconciliation between the siblings? But Hazel and Evelyn’s prime directive, as it were, was protecting the secret of their love. They did their best by creating a trust, but in the end, they were cheated of a wedding that might have brought their families back together.
I thought I knew what it meant to be closeted: To pretend crippling depression is just a case of the winter blues. To portray a mother’s suicide attempt as simply falling asleep in the bath. To present a false front at work or school or to one’s father. To lie that the thin scars on your thigh are merely stretch marks and be disappointed when your husband believes you. But to carry a closed door through your entire life the way Evelyn and Hazel did? What courage that took, and what a toll, too.
I can’t believe I so lazily accepted the confident persona Evelyn constructed for the readers of Mademoiselle. The first lesson every English major learns is to be suspicious of unreliable narrators. Wren shared some memories, sure, but I should have pushed him to tell me more. I ought to have questioned Lucinda’s sanitized anecdotes as too charming to be the whole truth. And why didn’t I interrogate Rhonda about the woman whose estate I purchased? I’m a memoirist, trained to burrow beneath the surface, to excavate the telling detail, to put into words what goes unspoken. Reading “A Woman’s Place” added zest to Evelyn’s image without disrupting that narrow framing. It took Hazel’s letters to reveal an alternate history beyond my ability to imagine.
Memoirists plant our flag on the subjective telling of one’s own truth, but so much lies beyond our ken. There’s more to my story, too, that I haven’t yet had the courage to face.
