A Person Should Know

The tin stood on the table under the lamp from four o’clock on Monday afternoon, and for eight hours Gideon did not open it.

He did the things he could do first. At five he rang Imogen Farr’s direct line and told her what had happened in the pastry kitchen. She listened without interrupting.

“I told you files get opened,” she said.

“You did. I want all of it, Imogen. I want everything your office holds under that matter. Your note of my call, the opening memo, whatever went to the executor, my instruction on Thursday and the certificate that the drafts were destroyed. Send it to me tonight.”

“Is it for her?”

“It’s for her.”

“Then my note of the call goes on top, as I wrote it that night. It isn’t flattering to you.”

“Good,” he said.

It came at eight, eleven pages. At ten, when the inn was dark except for the lobby, he walked up by the cedars so as not to cross the lawn in sight of the cottage. He let himself into the office and printed the pages on the machine beside Winnie’s rolltop, which jammed twice. Imogen’s note was in her own small handwriting, timed at a quarter past nine on the twenty-first of May. It recorded that the client had given the mother his word in writing. It recorded that she had advised him a draft was a paper, and that he should tell the mother soon and himself. The last line said, Client says he knows the difference. I am not sure he does.

He went back to the boathouse and wrote one page of his own with a black pen. It took four attempts, because the first three explained things. The fourth only said what he would do. He put it on top of the eleven pages, sealed them in a brown envelope from the office and wrote her name on the front.

That left the tin. It was twelve minutes past midnight.

The lid stuck, as she had said it did. He lifted the three envelopes out and laid them on the table in the order of their postmarks. He would not tear the flaps, because her mother’s address was written across each one. He opened his pocket knife and slit the first along its top edge.

There were two sheets inside, torn from a kitchen order pad. The printed columns for quantity and item ran down the left side, and she had written straight across them in blue ballpoint.

August 30, 2021

Jamie,

Winnie let me copy this address off your card. I hope that’s all right, and I hope it’s the right place.

I found your note under the kitchen door on Tuesday morning. I’ve read it enough times now. It doesn’t say where you went or how bad it is. Is your father all right? Are you?

I was angry for about a day. Then I thought that a person doesn’t leave nine words unless he hasn’t time for ten.

Winnie had fourteen children on the dock that Tuesday and nobody to teach them. Emmett took them out in the skiff two at a time. Henry asked where you were and I said your father was sick. Somebody had turned Biscuit over on the sawhorses and tied her down before the storm. I knew it was you from the knots.

I go to Lyon next month. I have the ticket in my drawer. I would like to hear from you before I go, even one line. If you can’t write, you could telephone the inn. I’m in the kitchen from five until three, and Winnie would come and get me.

I miss you so much it’s stupid. There, I’ve put it in ink and I can’t get it out. I still bake one extra of whatever comes out last, and then I stand there holding it.

Camille

He read it once, slowly. Then he put it down and sat with his hands flat on the table.

She had told him the hours. She had been in the kitchen from five until three, and Winnie would have come and got her. He had held a telephone every day of that first year and dialled six digits. His father had been dead ten days when she asked whether he was all right.

He slit the second envelope. It held one sheet, and the writing was smaller and pressed harder.

September 13

Jamie,

The first letter came back. Somebody wrote REFUSED on it. I don’t know if that was you. I’ve decided it wasn’t, because I have to tell you something and I can’t tell it to a person who would do that.

I’m pregnant. I took a test on Thursday and another on Friday, because I didn’t believe the first one. It was the Fourth of July or close to it. You can count as well as I can. There hasn’t been anyone else.

I don’t know what to do. I’m supposed to be on a plane before the month is out. I haven’t told my mother, and I live in her house. I’m sick every morning in the staff washroom and Winnie pretends not to hear. I have a job that pays for one person.

I’m frightened. I’m writing that down because there is nobody I can say it to.

I’m not telling you so you’ll come back and do the right thing. I don’t know what the right thing is. I’m telling you because it’s yours too, and I would very much like not to be the only one who knows.

Please write, or telephone. The other address is on the back. It’s my mother’s house, in case you would sooner come to a house than a hotel.

Camille

He got up. He went to the window that faced the lake and stood there with his forehead against the cold glass. She had been twenty-five. She had written I’m frightened on an order sheet and walked it down to a mailbox, and a man in a front hall had looked at the outside of it and thought she was persistent.

It was some time before he could sit down again.

The third envelope was the one with the deepest dents. The letter in it was on plain white paper, and the writing was large and even. She had taken her time over it.

November 1, 2021

Jamie,

This is the last one. Two have come back and I expect this will too. I would still rather send it and know that I did.

The baby is due in late March. I am not asking you for anything. I only think a person should know.

I’m keeping it. I told my mother. She said one word in French and then she went up to the attic and found my old crib. I wrote to the school in Lyon and gave up my place. Winnie says I can work until I can’t reach the bench.

I’ll write it once more, so that it can’t be read another way. I am not asking you for anything. I don’t want money or your name or a visit.

I don’t know why you went the way you did, or why my letters come back. I’ve stopped trying to work it out. I hope your father is better.

If you ever want to know how it came out, the inn will know where I am.

Camille Bouchard

He read that one twice. The girl who had written the first letter had been worried, and the second had come from someone badly frightened. The third was by the woman he had found in April with her back to a window, kneading dough. She had become that woman between September and November, at twenty-five, with no word from anyone, and she had still hoped his father was better.

She had asked for nothing, and it had been true. In April she had asked for eight Saturdays and an honest plan, and a promise about lawyers. Those were three small things after five years. He had kept the first two.

He did not weep, though he would have liked to. He folded each letter along its own creases and slid it back into its envelope. He put the envelopes in the inside pocket of his jacket, and the empty tin in his bag.

Then he packed. It did not take long. He stripped the iron bed and folded the old quilt at its foot, as he had found it. He switched off the lamp. Since April he had kept it lit in the window that faced up the lawn, because he had thought it was a kind of company. He understood now that for a week it would be something she had to look at or look away from.

In the boat bay Biscuit lay on her fenders under the tarp, with the bundle of forty-one stakes beside her. He took his navy life jacket off the rack. It was his own, and he had paid sixty-four dollars for it. He put it on the back seat of the car.

Winnie was at the front desk at six, in the grey cardigan. She looked at the bag in his hand and at his face.

“She won’t tell me what that man wanted yesterday,” she said. “Will you?”

“It’s hers to tell. I can give you my part. I gave her my word about something in April and I broke it in May, and last week I lied to her about another thing. Pike only carried the news.”

Winnie’s mouth went thin. “I told you about a mailbox.”

“You did.”

“Are you leaving?”

“I’m going seven miles. I’ve taken a room at the Otter Creek Motel on Route 7 until the board meets. She’s asked me to keep away from the cottage, and she shouldn’t have to see whether my light’s on. Anything I need from the kitchen comes through you, and so does anything she wants from me.” He laid the boathouse key on the blotter, on its loop of tarred twine. Beside it he laid the brown envelope. “That’s for Camille. It isn’t a letter asking for anything. It’s papers she’s entitled to, and she’ll know what they are.”

Winnie picked up the key and weighed it in her palm. “I’ve still got six hundred dollars of yours in a box.”

“Keep it against the room.”

“Hm,” Winnie said. It was the cold one. But she put the envelope in the pocket of her cardigan and kept her hand on it.

The motel was a single row of twelve doors north of the town, across the highway from a feed store. It was a long way from Mill Lane and nowhere near the school. The room cost eighty-nine dollars a night. He paid through the twenty-sixth, left his bag on the bed and drove south.
***
He reached East 74th Street at a quarter to one. He had telephoned from Albany, and Bea was already there, sitting on the hall stairs with her shoes off.

“You look terrible,” she said, and then she saw the envelopes in his hand and stood up. “Gid. What’s happened?”

“Come and sit down. I’m only going to say it once.”

The dining room was at the back of the house, a long cool room with a mahogany table that seated fourteen. His mother sat at its head. Rosalind Hallett’s silver hair was pinned, and her back did not touch the chair. She had ordered lunch laid for three. She looked at him as he came in and told the maid, quietly, to leave the soup.

“You said dinner, in April,” she said. “This is Tuesday lunch, and you’ve driven five hours for it. Sit down and tell me who has died.”

“Nobody’s died.” He sat on her right, with Bea across from him. He laid the three envelopes face down by his plate. “Mother, I’m going to tell you something I’ve kept from you for nine weeks. Then I’m going to tell you something I only learned last week. It will go better if you hear all of it before you speak.”

“That is how Desmond begins.”

“I know it is.”

He told her. He began with the summer of 2021, and he saw her face close at the first mention of it.

“I have never liked that summer,” Rosalind said. “You were needed in this house, and you were on a dock teaching other people’s children to tie knots. I’ve said so before.”

“You have. There was a woman at the inn that summer. Her name is Camille Bouchard. She was a cook in the kitchen then, and she runs it now. She has a daughter who was five in March. Her name is Matilda, and she’s mine.”

His mother did not move. Her hands lay one on the other on the white cloth. Only her eyes changed.

“Yours,” she said.

“She has Dad’s eye. The left one, in the same place. Nobody could doubt it who’d seen the two of us.”

“And you have known this since April.”

“Since the fourteenth of April.”

Rosalind turned her head. “Beatrix?”

“Since the fifteenth,” Bea said. Her voice was small. “He made me promise. I’ve been biting my tongue so hard I can’t taste anything. I’ve met her, Mother. She told me I’d put a green card in with the yellows, and she was right.”

“I see. So the two of you have had her for nine weeks, and I was to be told at a convenient moment.”

“Her mother asked that nobody be told,” Gideon said. “It was her right to ask. I’d already told Bea by then. I’m breaking that today, and I’ve written to Camille to say so. I’ll come to why.”

“Then come to this first. Why did this woman say nothing for five years?”

“She did say it. She wrote to me three times that autumn, to this house. She told me in September and again in November. She said she asked for nothing.”

He turned the envelopes over and slid them an inch toward her.

Rosalind looked down. She read her own address, in blue ballpoint. Her eyes went on to the four green words, and stopped there.

Bea had leaned across the table. She made a sound as though she had been pinched. “That’s Desmond,” she said. “That’s Desmond’s writing. Gid, that’s his pen.”

“He was here every morning at eight that autumn, in the front hall, going through the post for the estate. He took them out and sent them back. He never opened them. He’s told me so himself, on Thursday, across his desk. He thought she was after money and that I wasn’t steady enough to be told.”

“I telephoned him,” Rosalind said. She spoke slowly. “From Connecticut, that October. You had asked me about a Jamie Rourke and I thought it strange. I asked Desmond whether anything had come, and he said that nothing had.”

“He told me that as well. He says it’s the only inaccurate thing he has ever said to you.”

“How considerate of him to have kept count.”

She was silent then. A clock ticked on the mantel. Bea had both hands over her mouth.

“Rourke was my father’s name,” Rosalind said at last. “I should like to see one of those properly. Give it to me.”

He handed her the last of the three. She held it by its edges, at arm’s length and then nearer, and looked at Jamie Rourke in a young woman’s hand with REFUSED printed across it. She ran one fingertip over the dents the pen had made. She did not look inside. The slit along the top was plain to see, and she did not ask what the letter said. He would not have told her.

“I have forty years of Christmas cards in that ink,” she said.

“There’s more. It’s about me, and Desmond means you to hear it in Vermont on the twenty-sixth. I’d sooner you had it from me.”

He told her the rest as plainly as he had told the beginning. He told her about the paper Camille had written and the promise about lawyers. He told her about the logging truck, the telephone call to Imogen and the trust and petition he had ordered drawn in secret. He told her that he had recognised the green hand a week ago in Camille’s kitchen and had said that he did not.

“Desmond took her a copy of the petition yesterday. He offered her two million dollars of his own to keep quiet about the letters. She refused it. Then she asked me two questions and I answered them. She has ended the arrangement. I’m not permitted near the child.”

“Oh, Gid,” Bea whispered.

Rosalind set the envelope down on the cloth and kept her hand on it.

“You concealed a grandchild from me for nine weeks,” she said. “You went to my lawyers behind that young woman’s back, and you lied to her face. Have I left anything out?”

“No. That’s the account.”

“And now you have come to ask me for twenty shares.”

“No. I came so that you’d hear it from me and not across a table from him. The plan for the inn will be in your board book by Friday. It was written by three people, and the best lines in it are hers. Vote on what’s in the book. I’ll also be moving on the twenty-sixth that Desmond be removed from his office. I’m telling you so that it isn’t a surprise. I’m not asking you how you’ll vote on that either.”

His mother looked at him for a long moment. He had expected anger, and it was there. There was something under it that he could not read.

She rose without a word and went out. Bea looked at him with wet eyes and said nothing, for once. When Rosalind came back she was carrying the silver-framed photograph from the desk in the morning room. She set it on the table in front of her own place, facing her. Conrad Hallett looked out of it, broad and impatient.

“Is it exactly the same?” she asked.

“Exactly.”

“What is she like?”

“She’s exact. She keeps count of things in a jar. She told me on the first day that I wasn’t allowed to close the inn, and she’s asked me every Saturday since whether I’m going to. She sailed forty yards alone last week and told the gardener it was forty-one.”

“Have you a photograph?”

“No. I wasn’t given one, and I didn’t take one.”

Rosalind looked at the frame a while longer.

“I shall be in that dining room on the twenty-sixth,” she said. “Am I to walk past my son’s child and see nothing?”

“You’re to do whatever her mother asks. I’ll find out what that is, if she’ll tell the innkeeper. Nobody writes to her and nobody goes near that cottage.”

“I do not care to be managed, Gideon.”

“No. I’ve managed you for nine weeks and her for six days. I learned it from the man who managed us both for six years, and I’ve finished with it.”

She lifted her hand from the envelope and pushed it back across the cloth to him.

“Return that to its owner,” she said. “You needn’t give her any message from me. I shall make my own introductions, when I am invited to.” She drew her soup plate toward her and found it cold. “You will not stay to dinner, I suppose.”

“I’ve a room at a motel in Vergennes. It’s eighty-nine dollars a night and it looks at a feed store.”

Bea gave a short damp laugh. His mother did not.

He put the three envelopes back in his jacket and stood. At the door he looked round. She was sitting very straight at the head of the long table, with her husband’s photograph in front of her and her hands folded. She had not said one word about the vote, and he went out without asking.
***