The Diary
Chapter 08 - The Diary
Catherine Rosewood's diaries, eleven volumes covering the years 1942 through 1972, had been stored in archival boxes in the Rosewood estate's secondary storage facility, a climate-controlled room in the family's Connecticut property that Victoria had visited exactly twice in her adult life, neither time with any intent of excavating the contents.
James arranged for the volumes to be transferred to the New York apartment within forty-eight hours, and Victoria spent the following four days reading them in the order they'd been written, with Clara present for the later volumes at Victoria's invitation and Clara's cautious acceptance.
They found the relevant entries in the eighth volume, covering 1965 through 1968, written in the slanted, forward-leaning cursive of a sixty-five-year-old woman whose handwriting had become less careful as she aged and more honest, apparently, by the same measure.
March 14, 1965. I've maintained this silence for seventeen years now and I don't know whether it has served its intended purpose or simply cost the wrong people everything. Eleanor married well this year and seems happy. I receive no word about Margaret but I have arranged for regular reports through the agency, so I know she's healthy and living in a good home and that her parents are the kind of people I hoped they would be. I tell myself this is sufficient. On most days I believe it.
September 3, 1966. A visitor came today from Pittsburgh. I didn't receive him. He had the look of someone employed to carry inconvenient questions from one wealthy household to another, and I've had sufficient practice at refusing to answer inconvenient questions that the refusal required nothing more than a nod to the household manager. But afterward I found I couldn't stop thinking about the distance between Pittsburgh and this library. Seventeen hours by train. I have never made that trip. I don't know if I'm a coward for that or simply consistent.
October 19, 1967. I've left provision in the will. Both girls. The estate will reflect both daughters upon my death, which Eleanor may or may not challenge, depending on whether she knows by then. I haven't decided whether to tell her. I keep hoping the decision will make itself somehow.
March 2, 1968. It has been decided. The decision made itself, after a fashion. The doctors tell me I have perhaps two years at the pace things are currently moving. The Connecticut property will go to Eleanor directly, as will the New York holdings. But the provision in the will names both girls explicitly, and I have given the sealed instructions to the attorney with the specific directive that he notify both of them upon my death.
March 14, 1968. Twenty years exactly since I separated them. I've thought of little else all week. What I had in mind when I made that choice was the specific cruelty of a family fortune that insufficient to divide in ways that would sustain both of them adequately. I told myself it was generosity. I told myself one whole life was better than two insufficient ones. I'm not certain I was wrong. I'm also not certain I was right.
Victoria read this last entry three times, and then set the diary down on the library table, and did not speak for several minutes.
Clara sat across from her, having read along, her expression carrying the specific, complicated quality of someone processing information about a woman she had never met but who had nevertheless determined the entire shape of her existence.
"She planned to tell both of you," Clara said finally.
"And then she died eleven years before she intended to," Victoria said. "And the provision she'd left with the attorney was apparently never executed."
"James is looking into that," Clara said.
"James believes the attorney who held the provision retired in 1972 and the file was misrouted during the transition to his successor," Victoria said. "Misrouted, or suppressed by my mother, who may or may not have known about the provision. We may never know which."
"Does it matter," Clara asked. "For what we do now."
Victoria looked at her sister across the library table, at her own face reshaped by different years, thinking about a seventy-six-year-old woman in Pittsburgh who had held a sixteen-year-old girl's hand for a long time and said nothing about the whole truth of what connected them.
"Not for what we do now," she said. "No."
She reached out and slid the diary across the table to Clara.
"Keep this one," she said. "It should belong to you as much as me."
Clara touched the cover carefully, the way you touch something very old and very significant.
May you like
"She wasn't a monster," Clara said. "Your grandmother. She was just a woman who made a decision before she understood completely what it would cost."
"Most of the worst decisions are made exactly that way," Victoria said.
