out a boy, so something had to be done.
The story goes (though maybe someone’s only talking through his hat) that the father picked several possibilities and scribbled them down on bits of paper, then invited his mother to draw the winner from a hat.
Take a chaaance, Mark encouraged, passing the hat as Felicity sat in the lounge at Ixia Court, sipping tea, Why not, Ma? This could be your lucky day. His eyes twinkled, his eyebrows wiggled.
Oh my son, she said, teared with laughter and shaking her head, You and your nonsense! And then she felt, with feeling, and picked.
There is no written record of the odds; nor is it known what the infant’s mother thought of her husband’s impulsive strategy. Though the winner, as you know, is Halley. Which for the child doesn’t feel like her real name, even though she will come to appreciate that she has reasons to count herself fortunate. For she is not Dorcas or Zibbeth or Zillah. Not Winifred or Zenobia. Among these may be good names, even good biblical names, and good enough for some people, but they’re definitely not hers. Not her. Any of these names would be a terrible cross to bear.
She’d heard some rumours that in the hat of names had been Karen and Barbara, two among her father’s scrawled possibilities when he’d found himself stumped for ideas when faced with the flabbergast of a female child.
And that Nana had almost cuffed him, after she’d drawn the lucky winner and was casually going through the hat, checking for the names that didn’t make it. Because Karen and Barbara were recent granddaughters from her other sons, born a few months ahead of Mark’s girl.
What were you thinking? his mother persisted, although Mark’s face was all fallen and forlorn, meaning why must someone always spoil the party.
Or not thinking, as usual! she shoved her silly son hard in the chest. Lord have mercy, did this man have no brains beyond the merest stretch of empty imagination?
In the beginning, when Halley thinks about her name, the fact that most stubbornly demands attention is the idea of the hat. A pebble in the shoe. A mote in the eye. An annoying fly in the ointment.
A hat.
She’d asked her mother, who’d only shrugged at this nit-picking, and observed that hats hadn’t been particularly fashionable for men back then. And Nana? Halley wondered, but she’d never seen her Nana wearing hats. Not even one single hat.
So the hat must have been her mother’s. If it was that obvious, why didn’t she just say so, then Halley could figure out where to start?
For Nora wore hats, many different hats, all of which she’d made herself.
After finishing school, which wasn’t finishing school like some place fancy in Switzerland, only Matric, but actually for a poor female at that time was exceptional enough and one of the upsides of the orphanage, which was sponsored by church and state, when she’d done with high school Nora was enrolled in a six-month evening milliner’s course at the Bloemfontein Technical College, so that she might acquire a socially useful skill.
The fruits of her youthful labour remained in Ixia Court, stored in hinged hat boxes on top of the bedroom wardrobe. In one box, she’d even kept the milliner’s blank form, a funny wooden blockhead without hair or features, little more than a domed crown on a metal stand upon which to shape and balance her decorative craft, though these days she never did.
Halley knew about the headgear, having often seen her mother in a hat. But once, also, she’d gone mining in her mother’s things.
For years, the sisters were convinced that their mother had kept something mysterious from them. And if only they could sniff it out.
So one day when she was at work and the boring afternoon was stretching out beyond the possible, they dragged a kitchen bankie into their mother’s bedroom and stacked a chair on it so as to reach the untouchable hatbox collection stored on top of the high wardrobe.
They’d find something, they knew, because Halley said so. Something would be in there.
And something was. Hats.
Along with a hideous, perversely flattened albino cockroach, scurrying out of one box as if it had been pressed dead but a single chink of light had coaxed it back to life.
With such a skrik, Halley sent everything tumbling, hats, tissue wrappings, herself included, nearly conked on the head by the heavy wooden dummy, and she abandoned all their mother’s things where they fell in a headless sprawl of satin and ostrich feathers and nubbled felt. She quickly slammed shut the bedroom door, as if it might become at once an impenetrable boundary and an invisibility cloak.
After, when she discovered the meddling, Nora was really mad. As a snake. A hatter. A hooded spitting cobra, the images whirled in Halley’s head.
What the heck were they doing, rummaging like that? Fossicking among her things.
That fossilised word, plus the intensity of their mother’s anger, only convinced Halley that Nora really did have something to hide. More than ordinary hidden treasure even.
Plus, the girl had found the letter, folded among the hats, and she’d clutched it in her fall from the tower of boxes when she’d been startled by the monstrous kokkerot.
My dearest Nora, she read later, locked in the toilet . . .
You will excuse my writing to you, but as Mark’s mother I of all women know that he is not an easy man, and that things between the two of you have been difficult. As he tells me, they seem now to have reached an impasse and so I would understand if you threw him over.
I myself, dare I admit, had occasion to experience similar feelings towards his father, who as you’ve heard was a well-meaning but misguided person.
But please, my dear, please. If only for my sake and that of the unborn child: think about how much you love him. Without you, my son is likely to be ruined. He has always been slow to settle, and I fear that you will tip him over the edge when you could just as clearly save him. I know it.
I know my son. He has never loved any woman as much; I have never seen him so besotted. He merely needs a little time to work the waywardness out of his system.
Although I don’t wish to make excuses for him. Only to beg that you allow him a final chance to commit.
He has, I admit, made yet another mistake. One of consequence. Yet he has come clean, has found the humility to confess to you, and apologise. Won’t you be big enough, once again, to forgive him?
Please. Do not abandon him. The two of you can make it work.
And, Nora, you know that love is never easy, especially for the woman. Men are very weak. It is the woman who must be strong. You are strong, determined. I have seen this quality in you already. I admire it, and trust it will be the making of the relationship between you and Mark.
With my fondest wishes,
Felicity
Halley felt breathless, unsure about what she’d discovered. Had to tell Jen.
You can hardly blame Mommy, she said quietly to her sister, I think she wanted to believe in something, even if it was only herself.
Hatbox upon hatbox
