Would You Like a Rose

Chapter 07 - Margaret Rosewood

The woman who had been born Margaret Rosewood and had spent the next seventy-six years as Margaret Alcott, wife of Frank Alcott Senior, mother of Frank Junior and Ruth Anne, grandmother of various grandchildren scattered across Pittsburgh and the surrounding area, had died three years before Clara found the adoption records.

She had died in a hospital in Pittsburgh, which was both close enough and far enough from New York to seem, in retrospect, like either coincidence or careful arrangement depending on how suspicious your disposition happened to be.

Victoria found the obituary online through a genealogy service James had arranged access to, and she read it twice in the library with the ring back on her finger and Clara's birth certificate folded and replaced in the desk drawer where it had been.

Margaret had married Frank Alcott Senior in 1968. She had worked as a schoolteacher for thirty-one years. She had raised two children, both of whom were present at her death. She had, according to the obituary's careful phrasing, a rich and full life.

The obituary contained no mention of the Rosewood family, no mention of New York, and no mention of the twin sister who had inherited everything that might otherwise have been divided between them.

Victoria called Clara that evening, using the number she'd been given the previous afternoon.

"I found your grandmother's obituary," she said. "Margaret Alcott."

"She was a good woman too," Clara said. "I met her once, when I was sixteen, at Ruth's invitation. Ruth had tracked her down somehow. I didn't know then who she was, exactly, only that she was somehow connected to where I'd come from. She held my hand for a very long time."

Victoria felt something catch in her chest at the image.

"Did she ever say anything about the Rosewood family," she asked. "About why she'd left. Why the adoption was arranged the way it was."

"She said one thing," Clara said. "She told me that her mother had made a decision for both of them before either of them was old enough to understand it was being made, and that she had spent her entire life wondering whether her sister knew the truth, and that she hoped she was still alive somewhere living well."

The silence between them on the phone was the specific silence of two people sitting with a story that is both very old and very immediate, the specific sadness of understanding that a woman had spent seventy-six years of her life wondering about her sister's wellbeing without ever once receiving the confirmation she deserved.

"Your grandmother," Victoria said carefully, "my grandmother. Catherine Rosewood. She gave one daughter to a family in Pittsburgh in 1948 and raised the other herself, and then spent twenty-three years dying without ever telling anyone in the family she'd kept what she'd actually done."

"Why," Clara asked.

"I don't know yet," Victoria said. "But James is pulling the family's original estate records. Letters, diaries, anything Catherine left behind. I think the answer is in there somewhere."

"You don't have to do this," Clara said. "I don't need you to explain your grandmother's choices on her behalf. I'm not looking for an explanation. I just wanted you to know I existed."

"I know," Victoria said. "But I'm looking for an explanation. I think I've been entitled to one for quite a long time, and nobody in this family had the courage to give it to me while they were alive. The least I can do is find it myself."

She paused.

"Clara," she said. "I'd like Lily to come to dinner this weekend. If you're both willing."

Another pause, longer, carrying a weight that Victoria was learning to read as the specific, complex processing of someone who has spent years wanting something and is only now being asked to actually have it.

"She'll like that," Clara said quietly. "She's been asking me since yesterday what you were like."

"What did you tell her."

"I told her you were scared," Clara said. "But that being scared doesn't mean being wrong about something. She thought about it for a while and said that made sense."

Victoria looked at the ring on her hand, at the ruby center that had been named for a family whose name both halves of the next generation had been prevented from sharing, and felt the particular grief of understanding that an entire life of assumed singlehood had actually been something else entirely.