relationship—along with all the others, before, after, and during the marriage—had felt risky, and some of her original readers didn’t want to come along for the ride. But enough did, and the reviews for The Eternal Wife were even better. Of course, that was because My Father’s Daughter had barely been reviewed upon release.
Then, just eighteen months ago—not enough time, she decided now, she hadn’t allowed the novel to steep as the memoirs had—she had checked into the Greenbrier, again in West Virginia, but much removed, in miles and amenities, from that sadly would-be romantic place where the first memoir had begun. Perhaps that was the problem—she had been too self-conscious in trying to recapture and yet improve the circumstances of that first feverish episode. The woman who had started scratching out those pages in the West Virginia bed-and-breakfast had an innocence and a wonder that had been lost over the subsequent fifteen years.
Or perhaps the problem was more basic: She wasn’t a novelist. She was equipped not to make things up but to bring back things that were. She was a sorceress of the past, an oracle who looked backward to what had been. She was, as her father had decreed, Cassandra, incapable of speaking anything but the truth.
Only this time, the answers were not inside her, not most of them. Last night, in her sterile rental, she had started jotting down, stream of consciousness, what she could remember. Her list wasn’t confined to Calliope but covered every detail of life at Dickey Hill Elementary, no matter how trivial, because she knew from experience that small details could unearth large ones. The memories of the latter had come readily: foursquare, the Christmas pageant, Mrs Klein teaching us about Picasso and Chagall, the girl group. The girl group—she hadn’t thought about that in ages, although it had been key to a scene in the first book. Now and Later candies—did they even make those anymore?—the Dickeyville Fourth of July parade, her own brief television appearance, lumpy in a leotard, demonstrating how adolescent girls cannot do a full, touch-your-toes sit-up at a certain point during their development. She couldn’t decide what was funnier—her desperation to be on television or the fact that people believed those sit-ups accomplished anything.
But where was Calliope in all of this? The girl-woman who was supposed to be at the center of Cassandra’s story remained a cipher, quiet and self-contained. No matter how hard Cassandra tried to trigger memories of Callie, she was merely there. She didn’t get in trouble, she didn’t not get in trouble. Was there a clue in that? Was she the kind of child who tortured animals? Did she steal? There had been a rash of lunchbox thefts one year, with all the girls’ desserts taken. Was there something in Callie’s home life that had taught her early on that it was better not to attract attention? Cassandra had a vague impression—it couldn’t even be called a memory—of an angry, defensive woman, quick to suspect that she was being mocked or treated unfairly, the kind of woman given to yanking children by the meat of the upper arm, to hissing, You are on my last nerve. She had done that at the birthday party, upon coming to gather Callie. No, wait—Fatima’s mother had picked the two up, and she would not have grabbed another woman’s child that way. Still, Cassandra believed she had witnessed this scene with Callie, not Fatima.
Abuse—inevitable in such a story, but also a little, well, tiresome. She hoped it didn’t turn out to be that simple, abused child grows up to be abusive mother. Hitting the wall of her own memory, but feeling too tentative to press forward in her search for the living, breathing Calliope, she decided to spend an afternoon at the library, researching what others had learned about the adult woman presumed to have murdered her own child.
The Enoch Pratt Central Library had been one of the places where her father brought her on Saturday afternoons, after the separation. That was the paradox of divorce in the sixties—fathers who had never much bothered with their children were suddenly expected to do things with them every other weekend. It was especially awkward in the Fallows family because Ric wanted to involve Annie in their outings and Lennie had expressly prohibited Annie’s participation. Ric defied his estranged wife, setting up fake chance encounters with his girlfriend. At the library, at the zoo, at Westview Cinemas, at the bowling alley on Route 40. Why, look who it is! You couldn’t even say he feigned surprise; it was more as if he feigned feigning. Annie, at least, had the grace to look embarrassed by their transparency. And nervous, with good reason. People were not comfortable with interracial couples in 1968 and not at all shy about expressing their objections.
Cassandra liked Annie. Everyone liked Annie—except, of course, Cassandra’s mother, and it was hard to blame her for that. In fact, the outings were more fun when Annie was along because Annie didn’t give the impression that she felt debased by the things that a ten-year-old found pleasurable. Annie was only twenty-six, and a young twenty-six at that, but her interest in Cassandra was always maternal. She expected to be Cassandra’s stepmother long before anyone else thought this might be possible, including Ric. In his mind, he was having a great romance, and romance was not possible within a marriage.
But Annie assumed she would be his wife. ‘She set her cap for him,’ Cassandra’s mother said with great bitterness, and Cassandra had tried to imagine what such a cap looked like. A nurse’s hat? Something coquettish, with a bow? (She was the kind of ten-year-old who knew words like coquettish.) She imagined the hat that the cinematic Scarlett O’Hara lifted from Rhett Butler’s box, the girl in Hello, Dolly! who wanted to wear ribbons down her back, the mother in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, setting her jade green velvet hat at a jaunty angle. But Cassandra could not imagine round-faced Annie, who wore her hair in a close-cropped ‘natural’, in any kind of hat, much less see her as calculating.
Annie had been literally thrown into her father’s arms, her dress torn, people ebbing and flowing around them. Then, even as Ric tried to help her out of the melee, he had been sucked in, with far more serious repercussions. ‘A riot is…an odd thing,’ Annie had told Cassandra years later, when she was trying to re-create that scene for the first memoir. ‘Remember when Hurricane Agnes came through, and the stream flooded, and that man got out of his station wagon and saw it just float away, even as he stood there, holding on to a tree? It was like that, but the water was people, the wind was people. They didn’t know they were people anymore. Does that make sense?’
Cassandra had thought it made perfect sense, and when the book was published, Annie’s passages were often the ones cited in the reviews. Yet Annie was the one person who would never speak to the press, no matter how much she was pursued. ‘I owed you my story,’ she told her stepdaughter. ‘But I don’t owe it to anyone else.’ Five years later—her words translated into twenty-eight languages, her likeness, in one of the frontispiece photos, having traveled to countries that Annie herself had never heard of—Annie was dead from ovarian cancer at the age of fifty-nine. Cassandra had worried her father would be one of those men who begin ailing upon their wife’s death, especially given that she was so much younger. But, while he had a thousand minor complaints, he remained robust. Too robust, according to the administration at the retirement community where he now lived. Cassandra was going to have to make nice with the director on her next visit there and she was dreading that visit. But for now, she had to go to the library.
Cassandra had to endure a tedious explanation of how things worked—where to find the reels, how to load them, how to print, where to return the reels when finished—before she was allowed to take a spin on the microfiche machines. Orientation done, she began yanking out the drawers of boxed reels, feeling as if she were at the beginning of a scavenger hunt. Calliope’s life as a headline had coincided with the merger of the city’s last two newspapers, the Beacon and the Light, which meant there was only one newspaper to study, but it was still more than she had anticipated. Various Internet searches had narrowed down the year for Cassandra, but not the month of the precipitating incident, and the newspaper’s pay archive didn’t go back that far. She would have to start at January and trudge through all of 1988. But the snippet of film she had seen on CNN had clearly been from a cold, wintry month—there had been a bare tree in the background.
It
