Chapter Three

21 June 1943

The Legend of Emma Withe (Part One)

The morning paper was the usual dog of war. Other than a follow-up article about a peculiar fire at the Dow Hotel, the Charleston Sun was, as always, heavy with the blare and thump of the trumpets and drums of war. And there were the usual op-ed pieces that scolded the young men who were “waiting for an invitation to the party” instead of volunteering to defend the land of the free, home of the brave and so forth. Emma felt that these writings would carry more weight if not written by men who were safely exempt from service on account of age. Moreover, it should have been noted by the writers that most of the men of service age in Charleston were there to build and refit warships at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. At seventy-one, Emma long knew that there were few things on earth more tiresome than an old man who has something to say.

With great reluctance, Emma turned to a quieter page in the paper. Running her finger down the updated casualty list (even the smallest communities had such a list), she waited for her heart to snag on a half-forgotten name as it had six times in the past year and a half. Whenever Emma found one of those snags, she’d send her mind back to when the dead soldier was a boy and she was his teacher at Charleston Elementary. She would endeavor to remember a day when the boy had seemed at his happiest, then she’d seal that memory in her heart and never think about the boy again.

There hadn’t been any snag in that week’s list. Emma sighed and rolled a cigarette. She pitied the boys on the list who had not been her pupils, but she had no space in her heart for them. Their deaths (which probably did not occur with the blare and thump of trumpets and drums) were just faceless redundancies to her, as they were to most everyone else. True–each had been a person with his families and friends and likes and dislikes; hopes and dreams. No disputing that. But there were just so damned many of them; lives stamped out short by foreign events already begun while they were still children. And as scarcity drives up value, a glut drops the price. A similar economy guided Emma’s heart; and she could only invest–however briefly–in the boys who had attended her fourth-grade class at Charleston. Even in retirement she could not afford to dwell long on such dark matters.

Emma laid the newspaper aside. She had a second dreary matter to dispense with.

For two weeks, Margaret’s letter had followed Emma around her rooms like a stray dog. For the first week it was stuffed inside a drawer. Unfortunately, Emma never realized just how often she needed to get into that drawer. Emma had hoped that the top cupboard would take the letter in and give it the same air of urgency that Christmas decorations have in the summertime. But the relocation to Emma’s version of Siberia proved ill-timed, for it coincided with the cupboard’s hitherto unknown busy season. And every time Emma found herself teetering on the stool, seeking out some suddenly required item, the letter wafted down onto the counter. Inexorably, Margaret’s letter found its way on to the table, the final stop.

Lewis had wondered why she just didn’t just burn the letter unopened. “That way it won’t be a bother to you.”

But that was Lewis, dear and sweet. Still a lap cat to her, even after all these years.

Always helpful, always caring, always advising. Poor Lewis. Never that helpful, caring, nor wise unto his own affairs. A buffoon, really. Lewis was too sincere to have prospered. But Lewis was the one person Emma wished to outlive; her death would hurt him immeasurably.

“All right Peggy,” Emma laughed, for the third to the last time in her life, “you win.” If it were only Peggy who had written this, she thought, knowing better, but hoping right along. Peggy was the sort of girl who’d rub daisies on her letters to “AMERICA, U.S.A.” How Emma lived for those correspondences from London. Home. Whenever she got a letter from Peggy, Emma would tear it open on the spot and hold it up against her nose; and somehow the seven thousand miles lying between Emma and her little sister were eliminated. Emma had promised to send for Peggy, someday. But promises have a knack of making liars of us all. By the time Emma finally relented and opened Margaret’s letter, forty-three years had passed since they had seen one another. And in that space of time, much had happened to both. Too much, to be honest. Little Peggy was all gone. In her place there was Margaret, which would’ve been fine if Margaret hadn’t grown up to be such a strange, one-note woman, who, like clockwork, sent equally strange, one-note letters every six months.

The letter was, as Emma had feared, all-Margaret. No “Dearest Sissy”; no stale, yet wondrous scent of daisies (which Emma allowed would have been peculiar to find in a letter sent by a fifty-four year old woman); no hint of Peggy. Like the Sun, the letter was thick with war; but not even an event as momentous as the Second World War could take the spotlight off God when Margaret wrote Emma her bi-yearly letters:

“…God found England Decadent. He commanded Satan to marshal the Nazis to smite England for its Wickedness…A Bright Day cometh, Emmalene! Our Homeland has seen the Evil of its ways! Soon She shall rise again! Come Home to God, Emmalene. Take Jesus back into your Heart! and we shall Rejoice Together! Evermore in Heaven!…”

That was the general smell of the thing. Although Emma had no reason to believe that Peggy might crawl out of Margaret like a survivor emerging from the rubble long after her empty casket had been laid into her grave, Emma always had her hopes. And no matter how many times Emma sealed Peggy into the vault, that winsome, beloved phantom always found a way to slip her chains. Emma carried Margaret’s letter to the sink. She held it by a corner, like one might hold a dead rat by its tail. She then put a match to it, and held it until she was certain that the fire wouldn’t go out when she dropped it into the basin.

The flames reminded Emma about the queer fire that had happened three nights earlier at the Dow Hotel. The blaze was confined to a single room and had taken the life of a woman. To Lewis, and half of Charleston (the other half had yet to hear), “confined” was an understatement.

“I got it all out of Joe Parnell,” Lewis, a most credulous sort of man, said, in reference to an ex-dentist who served as Deputy Coroner. “Told me if I breathed a word that he’d deny he ever said it… Told me that it was off the record.”

To which Emma smiled. Telling Lewis anything worthwhile or interesting was the same as publishing it in the Sun (which, to its credit, never ran the unsavory rumor that clung to the story–but did print an awful lot of follow up stories about the fire’s lone victim).

“’Spontaneous combustion,’” Emma said, laughing for the second to the last time in her life; echoing the thing Lewis had told her, and watching Margaret’s letter burn into Peggy’s ashes.

“Sister dear,” she said, “if not Heaven, then where else shall we meet?”

****

Emma had no plans to visit Mary in New Town Cemetery that day, even in retirement she remained a slave to routine. It was Monday, and she had gone the day before; for that is what she did on Sunday. And yet there she was, fully aware of the day, but not questioning why she had automatically walked to New Town instead of the Park Avenue Diner, where she ate lunch six days a week. It was through she had been guided like a sheep and was just as unquestioning as livestock. It was not until after death that she finally approached the why of the thing and, even more importantly, how and who?

Again, there she was standing at the foot of the Withe family plot. Which contained Mary’s grave and that of Emma’s departed and never missed husband, Robert. There lay an already paid for empty space between them.

Mary Elizabeth Withe

1900-1906

Here Lies a Mother’s Heart

Although it had been exposed to thirty seven years of weather, Mary’s headstone was polished and in all ways kept immaculate. Nary a finger of moss had invaded a letter, nor were weeds allowed to take root in the plot. Emma had twiced replaced the stone when the inevitable cracks had formed and figured she should do it again, before it was too late. Robert’s grave was untended and looked like something that had been ignored since it was filled in 1908.

Emma had complete control of her emotions. Hurtful memories could not sneak up on her. She could only experience emotions when she wanted to; only when she let them out of their cells. Mary’s death had changed Emma. It made her cold and ruthless, but only on the inside, for she was able to affect an acceptable, though aloof demeanor; her insensitivity, however, did not extend to children, or to persons such as Lewis who had something good and childlike about him that survived the push to adulthood.

Thus, she allowed herself to feel Mary only on special occasions. Regardless, at all times what passed between Emma and Mary’s memory lay beyond the reach of anyone else’s power of description. She had no feelings about Robert’s grave, nor her part in filling it. He was a closed book never to be reopened.

Upon gazing at Mary’s stone, strange emotions, lacking enough substance to gather into thoughts, began to swirl in Emma’s mind; a blizzard of half thoughts and indescribable feelings. I know this–I know all about this–why can’t I remember? She saw a small party of people moving toward her, and the sun began to move crazily in the sky, east to west with stunning speed, night and day alternating and gaining and gaining until it was all a blur. And numbers entered her thoughts: she first saw the meaningless number 20,058 and watched it reduce by one at a time with the same velocity the whipping sun marked new days.  It stopped at one. Then Emma laughed for the last time in her life. It was all clear to her. I remembered everything. But she didn’t remember everything long. A tremendous flash burst inside her head. The left side of her body died milliseconds before the rest; she fell in that direction, striking her head on Mary’s stone.

And somewhere, where cosmic records are kept, Emma’s one became zero. Yet that too wouldn’t last long.

(Author’s note. The image is obviously not June, unless at the poles. But I like it. LA)

End chapter three