Essay by Andrea Jackson
She was a charming woman…
intelligent, a chemist in a time when women didn’t go in for the sciences. She told me about the three European war orphans she had raised, how they had formed an unofficial family without legal adoptions and lived in her small house in St. Louis, as happily as they could manage in view of the children’s traumatic war experiences. The German boy grew up to be a horse trainer, the French girl was soon to be married in Paris to the scion of a famous banking family, and the Spanish boy raced cars. I invited her to join my book club, a small group that met in each other’s homes, but she graciously declined.
She had come to me for a will and a power of attorney – I was practicing law then. She wanted me to pull the plug if she were in a coma. She said the children couldn’t handle it, they would be too emotional, especially the German boy. She left everything – it wasn’t much – to her college. The children didn’t need it, she said, they were all well off. A few years later, the mailman noticed that she no longer picked up the mail he dropped through the slot in the door, he could see it piling up on the living room floor. The police found the will among the papers on the floor and called me.
When I entered the house, I discovered papers and books and grocery supplies piled on every surface, a freezer held closed with duct tape, two dead cats in the basement. I found the file copy of her income tax return on the floor in the doorway of her study, next to the file copy of her prior year’s income tax return. The study itself could not be entered as it was stuffed with papers and boxes. In the living room I saw a journal entry of sorts in a notebook: reasons to clear up the house “in order to live a more gracious life” and a list of steps to follow that began sensibly enough, then degenerated into ever more ambitious plans for perfecting her house and herself, and finally trailed off to be dropped onto the pile on the floor. I stood bewildered among the unopened letters, the canned goods, the giant bags of fertilizer, the seventeen rolls of duct tape, the dead cats, the 400 classical CDs, and the shelves of mystery novels and thrillers.
Neighbors were eager to talk. They told me how her parents came to visit unannounced, all the way from New Hampshire to St. Louis, and she wouldn’t open the door, she hid and pretended she wasn’t home while they waited outside, until finally a neighbor invited them in and gave them coffee cake and promised to let them know if anything important happened, “like if she died or something.” Another neighbor said: “There were never any children in that house. She hated children.”
It took weeks for me to accept that there had been no children: no French daughter engaged to a Belgian financier, no German son training horses in Texas, no daredevil Spaniard. Her postage-stamp back yard was much too small to have held the RV she’d said she put there for the boys to bunk in while she and the French girl slept in the little house. I combed through her computer and the papers she’d left behind, but every time I found a reference in a letter or an email that seemed to confirm the children’s existence, I realized it was something she’d created herself, one more elaboration of the fantasy world in which she’d lived.
Photo by Cihan Çimen.
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