I skipped down to Caroline’s comment section. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but Caroline had known Letty for a long time, in the Before Harry years. When Caroline showed up in Clairmont, Letty was a freshman in high school. I guessed that the town was still just a spot in the road then, mostly working ranchland.
Caroline’s remarks about Letty were relatively kind. She took only a few stabs. Letty’s senior homecoming queen mum was so large it would have been more appropriate on a coffin. And several years later: Letty’s wedding dress was a $10,000 piece of Chinese crap that my girl could have sewn.
Letty and Harry had settled in Houston after their marriage, but four years ago moved home to Clairmont after what Caroline intriguingly referred to as “Harry’s setback.” A newspaper article neatly paper-clipped to the page cited numerous possible SEC violations by the Driscoll Investment Co., which mostly specialized in handling the multimillions of Texas and Oklahoma oil- and gas men.
The last paragraph of the story, faintly underlined in pencil, read: The SEC investigation follows last month’s firing of a high-level executive involved in questionable overseas investments, including Asian pornography and German sexual gadgetry. From what I could gather, three months after this little “setback,” Harry accepted a job from Letty’s daddy, overseeing Lee family real estate.
My eyes roamed to the part of the application filled out in Letty’s loopy hand. She married Harry two weeks after graduating from Southern Methodist University with a 3.82 GPA in biology and a declaration of pre-med. Wow. She was smart. She just didn’t put it out there. Maybe this was a Texas thing. After all, George W. Bush matriculated at Harvard.
Shortly after she graduated, Letty’s father rented Bass Performance Hall in downtown Fort Worth for her wedding. The painted clouds and sky in the dome hovered over seven hundred guests, including a former president (first name, George). In the reception that followed at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden, the flower girls set two thousand monarch butterflies free. Twelve bridesmaids (but only two groomsmen) traveled down the aisle in Oscar de la Renta black. The pearl-studded train on Letty’s gown measured fifty feet. Style magazine featured the near-architecturally impossible, ten-tiered white macadamia nut rum cake in its June bridal issue. The two honeymooned in a luxuriously appointed hut staked over aqua waters in Tahiti.
Letty had so much to say about the wedding that she jumped to a separate page of personally engraved stationery, inserted when she ran out of space.
Her dissertation was in answer to a single question: What was the most memorable moment in your life?
A wife and mother, and the best moment of her life was like a day at Disney World-not real, ephemeral, and in her case a harbinger of bad things to come. Harry Dunn, a black crow in a tuxedo.
Maybe I was just jealous. Mike and I tied the knot at the justice of the peace with only his parents; my best friend, Lucy; and Mike’s best buddy, Leroy, as witnesses. I wore a creamy, ankle-length antique lace number from the twenties, scored from an estate sale rack at Poppet on 9th Street. Every second, I wished for my parents to show up, courtesy of the same random, illogical forces that stole them from me.
Letty was a piece of work, but I felt less hateful toward her.
I thumbed through to the last page of the file. A document from the Robert E. Lee Society declared that the Lees of Clairmont were not part of their official ancestral rolls and that “our research points to them being related to the Lees of Coal Hill, Arkansas.” Now, that was blackmail material.
I moved on to Dr. Liesel, fully aware that I needed a shower and that Caroline’s files were like a drug I couldn’t stop mainlining.
I expected this file to resemble everybody else’s, but it was very different, almost like a diary. Notebook pages filled edge-to-edge with Caroline’s A-plus-worthy cursive writing, the kind nobody takes pride in except people who came out of elementary school before 1960. Mike’s eighteen-year-old niece had told me last summer that the hardest part of the SAT for her was the instruction to copy out three sentences in cursive.
Caroline’s writing flowed like the great Mississippi.
12 NOVEMBER: Gretchen is a lovely girl. And a doctor! She welcomed me here with an invitation to lunch at the local café. (I sipped at a terrible attempt at onion soup, probably from a packet, can you imagine? and a very weak iced tea.) She asked me to come over in several days to play cards with some of her friends. I believe I will go.
16 NOVEMBER: I had an enjoyable evening at Gretchen’s home with “the girls,” even winning the door prize (a sad little autumn wreath that I will toss directly or give to my girl). And a warm Brie appetizer with some kind of store jam spread on top! A very nice try. I told them about the accident with my husband and son and they were very sympathetic. I’m beginning to think moving here was a very fine idea. I believe I can help these women.
Caroline’s assessment of Gretchen grew more critical in tone as time wore on. Gretchen’s lack of care with her appearance (people might think she’s lesbian), her husband (stubby-chinned and Jewish-looking), her son (not worth the price of tuition at his fancy-pantsy university)-all were noted in the file. But affection wasn’t absent.
14 MAY: Gretchen saved a breech baby today and delivered Clairmont’s first triplets! I am so proud. There is a spot for her in heaven. I had my girl make her a lovely chicken pot-pie.
Again with my girl. Why was it that some Southerners still thought it perfectly OK to attach a possessive pronoun to someone who worked for you? And to rank domestic help? There was “hired girl” (to remind us that she was actually paid, not a slave), “my girl” (to imply some kind of benevolent relationship), “cleaning lady” (totally impersonal, somebody filling in), and “maid” (requires a uniform).
I flipped a few more pages. I’d never finish Gretchen Liesel’s file in the half an hour I had left. My eyes stopped short on a word.
Nazi. What a load of power in that shorthand.
Nazi, the abbreviation for Nationalsozialist. My father, a World War II history buff, made me learn to spell it. Taught me that the swastika was an ancient symbol for good before the Third Reich got hold of it.
I backtracked to the page before, the beginning of the entry.
2 JULY: I found out quite by accident that one of Gretchen’s ancestors was an officer in Hitler’s army. Her husband is an extremely Jewish professor, who specializes in Israeli studies or some such. He even wears the little hat occasionally. I’d just stopped over for a visit and Gretchen’s worthless maid stuck me in the library. Gretchen hadn’t yet arrived from the hospital and I found a stack of old picture albums simply by lifting the window seat to see how much storage it could hold. Her family did not carry the gene for good looks. I picked up the knit afghan on top to admire the stitching. And quite a shock! Underneath those, a Nazi uniform folded neatly in a plastic zip-up bag with a picture of the young man who wore it. There was some kind of World War II family tree drawn out by hand. I could not make head nor tails of it. Of course, when I see her, I will not say a word. The whole thing reminded me of that framed Hitler stamp collection that Dickie inherited from his father when he died. It was one time in our marriage that I put my foot down. I let Dickie hang the Confederate flag from that pole outside, but I wasn’t going to let him hang Hitler in my house.