One in seven marriages now is a mixed marriage, the New York Times article said, but less than three percent of Americans are multiracial even now. When I showed it to my mom, she said, “You wouldn’t believe the stares your father and I used to get.” As if I’d never been stared at, even before I started seeing Kevin. As if my children and I wouldn’t be stared at, too.
I wrote: But it would have made Mom hurt to hear me say that.
Is that why reading Mom’s journals is so disturbing, because of all the conversations I never did have with her? It didn’t feel like that, either. It felt like Mom was a different person in those journals, at the Lakes by herself, planning to write a biography when she’d always written children’s books.
“I wrote the books for you and Sammy,” she told me—this when Sam was a grown man who didn’t much like being called Sammy. “They’re your books. You two decide what to do with them.”
As if there might be something to do with them other than box them up and stick them in an attic. Save them to read to the children I wasn’t sure I would ever have. Yes, Sammy and I had loved them as kids, but what three-year-old doesn’t love everything her parents do? Even the Wednesday Sisters used to laugh at them. Even my mother did. “Remember that first story you wrote, that one about the duck?” Aunt Frankie would say, and Aunt Kath would say, “That duck, she wouldn’t quack even for a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven,” and they all would have a big old laugh.
Still in my pajamas, I slipped on hiking shoes and a jacket, found Anna Page’s international phone, and went out into the night. It was utterly quiet this late, even the insects silenced, only my footsteps on the path and on the mossy planks of the pier, where I sat and pulled my knees to me, trying to keep warm, and dialed home.
“Hey,” Kevin said. “I was hoping you’d call. I miss you.”
“There’s no phone reception in the cottage,” I said, glad of the excuse not to have called in the long days since I’d called from the airport to say we’d arrived.
“I see,” he said. “All right. But are you okay?”
“Anna Page is being all Anna Page,” I said.
He muted the sound on a television in the background. He’d be leaning against the pillow, waiting to see where I was going with this. Or not in bed yet; it was still early evening there. He was sitting in his favorite chair, images from the NewsHour flashing silently across the screen.
“There’s this guy here, Robbie the boat rower,” I said.
“Anna Page is sleeping with him?” Kevin said.
I could hear a small smile in his sigh; he’s quite fond of Anna Page. Had they slept together before I met him? Should I care if they had?
“She’s doing the Anna Page Woodhouse thing, trying to match him with Julie,” I said.
“Anna Page doesn’t know how to grieve,” he said. “She soldiers on in the same way her mother does, refusing to have emotions she can’t address. But she loved your mom. You can’t think Anna Page didn’t love your mom.”
“Mom was my mom, not hers.”
“Of course she was. It’s okay, Hope. It’s okay. But be easy on Anna Page, she’s—”
“She’s what?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry.”
“Aunt Kath called Anna Page. She’s coming up from London earlier than we agreed, on the first train tomorrow.”
“Called?” Kevin said. “But there’s no phone reception.”
“While we were out at our cookery lesson,” I said.
“Tea and Temptations?” he asked, his voice lingering on “temptations,” intimate.
“With the added temptation of Robbie the boat rower in an apron.” He laughed gently and said, “Don’t you let any crazy Brit tempt you, Hope.”
“He’s Irish, actually.”
He laughed more loudly. “What have I done, letting my lover go off on an adventure with the recently liberated Julie Mason and the ever wild Dr. Anna Page?”
Julie Mason. She hadn’t changed her name when she married, saving herself the need to change it back.
“I can’t get the box open, Kev,” I said. “I can’t get the box open.” And I started weeping.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey. Why don’t you let me come? I can be on the next plane.”
I pulled my knees in more tightly. The lake was so still. If the swan pair was out there, they were hidden from sight.
“I’m just tired. I had a nightmare.” I wiped my eyes. “And now I can’t open the box.”
“You started at the baby’s halo?” he said. “Traced around to the flower?”
The pale perfect baby’s perfect like-the-mother face under the perfect damn halo.
“Then you adjust the thing at the left forward, and then the almost farthest right bottom panel.”
“I know how to open the box!”
The silence at the end of the line matched the silence of the lake, Kevin counting to thirty-three the way he does. Thirty-three, his lucky number. The age we were when we met.
“I’m just tired,” I repeated. “I’m exhausted. We’re all in this one tiny cottage. We’re on top of each other.”
“Of course you are,” he said. “Of course you are, Hope.”
“I don’t want Aunt Kath to come. She’s only coming to get her hands on my mother’s stupid book, the stupid Potter biography that isn’t even here.”
There was a long pause on his end, Kevin perhaps distracted by some image on the TV screen. Then he spoke in a soft, soothing, serious voice, saying, “You need to let her come, Hope. Aunt Kath needs to—”
“None of the other Wednesday Sisters feels the need to intrude on this.”
“Lee had a stroke, Hope.”
“You’re kidding.” I reached in my coat pocket for a tissue, found only a residue of the dust of my mom. “You’re kidding,” I repeated.
“He’s fine. He’s doing okay, but Kath wants to tell Anna Page herself. You know how Anna Page is about her father.”
Her “daddy,” she still called him.
“The thing is, he wasn’t with the other Kath,” Kevin said. “He was at the house. At Kath’s house.”
“At Aunt Kath’s?” Trying to get my head around what Uncle Lee would have been doing at Aunt Kath’s when Anna Page and her siblings weren’t there, and why it should matter.
“Apparently the other Kath has found another Lee,” Kevin said. “Although I don’t think his name is actually Lee. Apparently Lee has been bunking at the Palo Alto house until he finds another place to live.”
“With Aunt Kath?”
“At the house, yes. Don’t tell Anna Page, Hope. Let her mother do this.”
“Of course. Of course.”
“It was a small stroke,” Kevin said. “A blessing, honestly. A wake-up call. No paralysis. No speech loss. Maybe he’ll stop smoking now.”
“He won’t be able to operate, will he?” I said. “Not after having a stroke.”
“I guess not.”
“It’s hard to imagine an Uncle Lee who isn’t Dr. Montgomery.”
“I know.”
“How is everyone suddenly so old and dying, Kev?”
With Mom’s death, I was the oldest in my family. There were my aunt and my cousin, Carrie, but I had no parents left, no grandparents. Just one younger brother, one nephew.
“Hope,” Kevin said, “if you want to open the box, why don’t you try it now, while I’m on the phone with you? I won’t tell you how to do it. I promise. I’ll just be here for moral support.”
“But it’s … I don’t have it. It’s back in the cottage.”
“Where are you?” Kevin asked.
“I opened it fine earlier, Kev.”
“Why don’t you go get the box and bring it to the phone, Hope,” Kevin suggested. “I’ll hold. I’ll wait right here for you.”
The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust
myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old-fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.
—BEATRIX POTTER, IN A MAY 8, 1884, JOURNAL ENTRY
AUNT KATH IS ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO SEEM TO REMAIN UNCHANGED every day of their lives. Yes, her hair is a striking silver-gray now where her daughter has just a sprinkling at the part line, and her face is lined and jowled, but what you see is her strong chin and her strong cheekbones, her strong eyes that are determined and caring all at once. “I’m not one to gripe with a hand under each arm,” she likes to say, which, when you parse it, means she’s pretty happy with her editorial job (which, even at seventy, she has no thought of relinquishing) and with her children (although she wouldn’t mind if Anna Page and her sister made up).
“Robert Smythe?” she said when we introduced her to Robbie. “Do go on.”
“Robbie,” he insisted. “Those who know me call me Robbie.”
He’d taken us on the Argo again, this time across the lake to the train station in Windermere. Graham had come as well, to meet this stranger he’d somehow agreed to put up at Ainsley’s End for a few days. We were standing inside the spare station, the train outside at the end of the line, about to head back the way it had come. Aunt Kath smiled warmly and extended a hand to Robbie, their palms and fingers lingering together. “Well, I’m tickled pink to meet you, Robbie,” she said.
“And this is Graham Wyndham,” Anna Page repeated, so anxious to get her intended romance started that she missed the surprise in her mother’s voice at Robbie’s name—surprise I’d dismissed as surely as I’d dismissed the idea that Robbie might have known Graham when we’d introduced them at the Ainsley’s End pier.
They were about the same age, Graham and Robbie, which surprised me. Robbie seemed so much younger. That introduction had been more awkward than I’d imagined. The disaster of who was who to whom that had erupted during dinner at Ainsley’s End still hung over us, despite our tacit agreement over a boiled-egg breakfast at the cottage with Graham that it would not. Robbie’s usual charm seemed to have abandoned him, laying bare his curiosity, while Graham drew back from Robbie’s prying questions as if from a snake he couldn’t bring himself to step across. Graham was the “lord” here, something like royalty—not the type of person Robbie met on a daily basis, I supposed. And Graham had said when they were introduced, “Robbie Smythe, it’s a common name, isn’t it,” with some emphasis on “common” that did make him seem arrogant. Robbie hadn’t seemed miffed, though; with a glance at Julie—who was watching the exchange with surprising attention—he had replied that it was not as common as you might think. Even when Graham had said, “You’re a boatman? That’s how you earn your living?” Robbie had only studied Graham for a moment longer than was comfortable before answering, “It’s an honest enough living, idn’ it?” He’d said he knew of the Wyndhams, everyone in the Lake District knew of the Wyndhams even if almost nobody claimed them as friends. “It’ll be hard to collect friends when folks hold you in awe, now, won’t it?” Robbie had said. But then he’d surprised us by going on at length about Graham’s family—which was only Graham, and had been for all the time Robbie was talking about. The Wyndhams had contributed more than anyone but Beatrix Potter to the preservation of the Lakes, he told us, going on in detail with the kind of appreciation people who adopt a home often have when lifetime residents don’t realize their luck. The Wyndham family had restored buildings and preserved the history, he said. Mended footpaths. Replanted native trees. It left me wondering why Robbie hadn’t told us any of this before, why he’d shared only the story of the Crier of Claife.
Now, as the introductions to Aunt Kath were being made, Anna Page said, “Graham will be your host while you’re here, unless you’d like to sleep on Aunt Ally’s kitchen floor, Ma. And it’s cold, hard stone, without so much as a rug by the sink.”
I told her we planned to do a once-around-the-lake in Robbie’s launch first.
“Graham,” Aunt Kath said, seeming not quite to know what to make of him.
“If you’re spent from your journey, Kathleen, we could instead have tea at Lindeth Howe,” Graham offered. “It once belonged to Beatrix Potter—it’s an inn now—and is a short hop down the road.”
“There’s not a view quite like that of the lake from a boat, though, is there?” Robbie said.
Anna Page and Julie and I exchanged glances. Graham had suggested all manner of alternatives to a boat tour when we’d proposed it back at the cottage, before he’d confessed to a hatred of boats; it wasn’t until Anna Page had insisted that a boat tour of the area wouldn’t be the same without his running commentary that he’d removed his glasses and wiped them, his lovely dark lashes and cheekbones so like my mother’s, and agreed to come along.
Aunt Kath assured him the train from London had been no trouble at all, and she’d been in England for a week, so there was no issue of jet lag.
“Brilliant.” Graham sighed. “Brilliant.”
Robbie took Aunt Kath’s arm and led us to the launch.
Graham looked up at the sky before he stepped aboard again: blue as blue could be, but it was very changeable here. He positioned himself up against the cabin, as close as he could get to the boat’s exit ladder and still be a safe distance from the water. He leaned back as if casually, but his grip on the railing around the cabin was two-handed and as tight as it had been even inside the cabin on the trip across. He startled visibly when Robbie, who’d taken the helm, slid the front window glass open so he could hear the rest of us.
“Pretty as a pat of butter melting on wheat cakes,” Aunt Kath proclaimed the upper lake as we circled it, charming Graham and Robbie both without appearing to be charming anyone. It was so odd to see this woman I’d seen only as a mom like my mom—older and vaguely asexual—here in this other life, free of my idea of her. She would have men other than Uncle Lee if she wanted them. Anna Page’s ease with the opposite sex, which I’d always imagined came from her father, might have come from Aunt Kath. What did I know about Uncle Lee, anyway? I saw him primarily through Anna Page’s eyes.
Graham plunged into a lecture on the origins of Cumbria, “which means ‘brothers,’ ” he said.
“Brothers,” Robbie repeated from the helm.
Graham, taking the tone as a challenge, said, “From the Celtic words ‘cymri’ and ‘cumber.’ ”
Robbie watched him through the opening but said nothing more.
“The borders of this area—modern-day Cumbria—roughly equate to those of the Celtic kingdom Rheged.” Graham’s head dipped to Aunt Kath’s level as he reluctantly let go of the rail with one hand to direct her attention to a white house on the cliff. “That’s Brockhole, perhaps the Lake District’s loveliest gardens.” He pointed out Low Wood Bay, with all the sailboat masts in the foreground, and Storrs Hall, a Georgian mansion where in summer they deliver to your boat afternoon tea sandwiches and scones and cakes served on bone china.
“That’s your favorite way to spend a summer afternoon, Graham?” Anna Page teased. “Tea on a boat?”
Graham laughed as he gripped the rail with both hands again. “Careful there, Miss Montgomery, or your ace tour guide will insist on being put ashore.”
Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden, Mom would have said. Your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor. But there was something familiar in Graham’s voice, if not in his words—a tone and a cadence. Or was that me looking for something of my mother that might survive?
“Dr. Montgomery,” Anna Page said.
“Dr. Montgomery,” Graham acknowledged.
He had the dates at his fingertips: The Romans arrived in AD 43 and established a fort at Ambleside. Hadrian’s Wall was built on the order of the Roman emperor to separate the Romans from the barbarians. “So many tourists c
ycle and hike these roads with no idea of the history,” he said. By AD 410 Britain was largely ruling itself, he told us, but it wasn’t until the beginning of the Dark Ages that the Romans abandoned Cumbria.
Robbie left Graham to his soliloquy, remaining at the helm and saying little. He seemed to be listening for something more than was there in Graham’s words. Aunt Kath stifled a yawn no longer attributable to jet lag or the travel fatigue she’d denied, although perhaps she could lay it off on the gentle rock of the boat. It’s such a funny irony that when men are trying hardest to impress, they become their most tedious. I had half a mind to tell Graham to give up with Aunt Kath; she and Uncle Lee had moved back in together after decades of being estranged, for heaven’s sake. I couldn’t say that with Anna Page there, though, and I didn’t have the sense that they were back together so much as Uncle Lee needed a place to stay and Aunt Kath was letting him use the guest room.
As it became clear that Graham was heading into the same kind of excruciating detail about the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings settling the Lake District, Aunt Kath said, “I do believe God must have taken as much pain creatin’ the Lake District as he did creatin’ the South.” She suggested he might tell us about the Lake Poets, somehow deftly leaping centuries of history without giving offense. “Wordsworth,” she said. “I adore Wordsworth, although that’s like saying I adore Frost. It doesn’t separate me from the other heifers quite so clearly as I like to imagine it does.”
Graham adjusted his wire-rims with one hand, his other firm on the rail, and said, “Wordsworth lived here at Dove Cottage, then at Rydal Mount. His sister Dorothy, too. Also Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lloyd, Thomas De Quincey, and Robert Southey.”
“Robert Southey?” Aunt Kath said, though more to Robbie than to Graham.
“ ‘Once more I see thee, Skiddaw!’ ” Robbie practically sang out from the cabin. “ ‘Thou glorious Mountain, on whose ample breast / The sunbeams love to play, the vapours love to rest!’ ”
“That’s here?” Aunt Kath asked him. “Skiddaw?”
Robbie said it was, although his answer seemed directed at Julie rather than Aunt Kath.