“Hey, bro. You’re up late, and you’re not partyin, unless it’s with a bunch of mutes.”
“No, I’m in my hotel room. Too excited to sleep. Did I wake you?”
“No,” Barbara says, sitting up in bed and propping an extra pillow behind her. “Just reading myself to sleep.”
“Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton?” Teasing.
“A novel. The guy who wrote it actually taught up the ridge for awhile.” Up the ridge meaning Bell College. “What’s going on with you?”
So he tells her everything he already told his parents and Holly, spilling it out in an exuberant rush. She is delighted for him, and says so. She marvels over the hundred thousand dollars, and squeals when he tells her about the possible tour.
“Bring me along! I’ll be your gofer!”
“I might take you up on that. What’s going on with you, Barbarella?”
She almost tells him everything, then holds back. Let this be Jerome’s day.
“Barb? You still there?”
“It’s been pretty much the same old same old.”
“Don’t believe it. You’re up to something. What’s the big secret? Spill.”
“Soon,” she promises. “Really. Tell me what’s up with Holly. I kind of blew her off the other day. I feel bad about that.” But not too bad. She has an essay to write, it’s important, and she hasn’t made much progress. Much? She hasn’t even started.
He recaps everything, ending with Ellen Craslow. Barbara says yes and wow and uh-huh in all the right places, but she’s just half-listening. Her mind has drifted back to that damned essay again, which has to be in the mail by the end of the month. And she’s sleepy. She doesn’t connect the disappearances J is telling her about with the one Olivia Kingsbury told her about, even though Jorge Castro’s novel is facedown on her comforter.
He hears her yawn and says, “I’ll let you go. But it’s good to talk to you when you’re actually paying attention.”
“I always pay attention to you, my dear brother.”
“Liar,” he says, laughing, and ends the call.
Barbara puts Jorge Castro aside, unaware that he is part of a small and extremely unlucky club, and turns out her light.
That night Holly dreams of her old bedroom.
She can tell by the wallpaper it’s the one on Bond Street in Cincinnati, but it’s also the museum exhibit she imagined. Those little plaques are everywhere, identifying objects that have become artifacts. LUDIO LUDIUS next to the sound system, BELLA SIDEREA beside the wastebasket, CUBILE TRISTIS PUELLA on the bed.
Because the human mind specializes in connectivity, she wakes thinking of her father. She doesn’t often. Why would she? He died a long, long time ago, and was never much more than a shadow even when he was home. Which was seldom. Howard Gibney was a salesman for Ray Garton Farm Machinery, Inc., and spent his days traveling the Midwest, selling combines and harvesters and Ray Garton TruMade tractors, all in bright red, as if to make sure nobody mistook Garton farm gear for John Deere equipment. When he was home, Charlotte made sure he never forgot who, in her words, kept the home fires burning. In flyover country he might have been a sales dynamo, but at home he was the original Mr. Milquetoast.
Holly gets up and goes to her bureau. The records of her working life—the life she has made for herself—are either at Finders Keepers on Frederick Street or in her little home office, but she keeps certain other records (certain artifacts) in the bottom drawer of this bureau. There aren’t many, and most bring back memories that are a mixture of nostalgia and regret.
There’s the plaque she received as second prize in a speaking contest in which several city elementary schools participated. (This was when she was young enough and still confident enough to stand up in front of large groups of people.) She recited a Robert Frost poem, “Mending Wall,” and after complimenting her, Charlotte told her she could have won first prize if she hadn’t stumbled over several words halfway through.
There’s a photograph of her trick-or-treating with her father when she was six, he in a suit, she wearing a ghost costume that her father made. Holly vaguely recalls that her mother, who usually took her (often dragging her from house to house), had the flu that year. In the picture, Howard Gibney is smiling. She thinks she was smiling, too, although with that sheet over her head it’s impossible to tell.
“I was, though,” Holly murmurs. “Because he didn’t drag me so he could get back home and watch TV.” Also, he didn’t remind her to say thank you at every house but simply assumed she would do so. As she always did.
But it isn’t the plaque she wants, or the Halloween photograph, or the pressed flowers, or her father’s obituary, carefully clipped and saved. It’s the postcard. Once there were more—at least a dozen—and she assumed the others were lost. After discovering her mother’s lie about the inheritance, a less palatable idea has come to her: that her mother stole these souvenirs of a man Holly can remember only vaguely. A man who was under his wife’s thumb when he was there (which was seldom) but who could be kind and amusing on the rare occasions when it was just him and his little girl.
He took four years of Latin in high school and won his own award—first prize, not second—for a two-page essay he wrote in that language. The title of his essay was “Quid Est Veritas—What Is Truth?” Over Charlotte’s strong, almost strident, objections, Holly took two years of Latin in high school herself, all that was offered. She did not shine, as her father had done in his pre-salesman days, but she carried a solid B average, and remembered enough to know that tristis puella was sad girl and bella siderea was star wars.
What she thinks now—what is clear to her now—is that she took Latin as a way of reaching out to her father. And he had reached back, hadn’t he? Sent her those postcards from places like Omaha and Tulsa and Rapid City.
Kneeling in front of the bottom drawer in her pajamas, she searches through these few remnants of her tristis puella past, thinking even that last card is also gone, not filched by her mother (who had completely erased Howard Gibney from her own life) but lost by her own stupid self, probably when she moved to this apartment.
At last she finds it, stuck in the crack at the back of the drawer. The picture on the front of the card shows the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The message, no doubt written with a Ray Garton Farm Machinery ballpoint, is in Latin. All of his postcards to her were written in Latin. It was her job—and her pleasure—to translate them. She turns this one over and reads the message.
Cara Holly! Deliciam meam amo. Lude cum matre tua. Mox domi ero. Pater tuus.
It was his one accomplishment, something that made him even prouder than selling a new tractor for a hundred and seventy grand. He had told her once that he was the only farm machinery salesman in America who was also a Latin scholar. He said that in Charlotte’s hearing, and she had responded with a laugh. “Only you would be proud of speaking a dead language,” she said.
Howard had smiled and said nothing.
Holly takes the card back to bed and reads it again by the light of the table lamp. She can remember figuring out the message with the help of her Latin dictionary, and she murmurs the translation now. “Dear Holly! I love my little girl. Have fun with your mother. I will be home soon. Your father.”
With no idea she’s going to do it until it’s done, Holly kisses the card. The postmark is too blurry to read the date, but she believes it was sent not too long before her father died of a heart attack in a motel room on the outskirts of Davenport, Iowa. She remembers her mother complaining—bitching—about the cost of having the body sent home by rail.