The Housekeeper's Share — Chapter 13: What Eleanor Wrote

It was eleven pages, written on both sides, in the heavy cream paper, in an ink that had not faded because it was only two years old.

Grange read it aloud, because Margaret asked him to, and because after the first page it became clear that none of the three of them was going to be able to.

My dears.

If Ellis is reading this then you have filed something against Rosa Delgado, and I am sorry, and it is my fault, because I set it up so that you would have to.

I could have written you three letters in November and had them handed out with the will. I thought about it for a long time. I decided against it because a letter handed to you is a letter you did not choose to receive, and you would have read it with my body still warm and no ability to decide anything, and it would have been the last unfair thing I did to you.

So instead I built a door. I told you where it was and what opened it and I asked you not to open it. That was not a trick. If you had let it alone, you would have grieved a mother who did something odd at the end, and got on with your lives, and I would have been content with that. I mean this. That was a real ending and I would have taken it.

But you are here, so you want to know, so here it is. All of it, and in order, and I am not going to soften any of it, because you are grown people and I have spent thirty-nine years deciding what you could handle and I have come to think that was its own kind of contempt.

Your father assaulted a twenty-six-year-old woman who worked in our house, more than once, over the course of about six months in 1985 and 1986.

Her name was Teodora Delgado. You will not remember her. Diane, you might — she taught you the Spanish for fork and you laughed until you sat down on the stairs, and I heard you from the hall, and it is one of the four or five happiest sounds of my life.

I knew what your father was before any of you were born.

I want that sentence to stand on its own, because everything else in this letter is downstream of it and because I have watched a great many women in my life arrange the story so that they found out late. I did not find out late. I found out in 1971 and I decided to stay, and I built a life on top of that decision and it was, in most respects, a good life, and the three of you were in it.

When Teodora came in 1983 I told myself he was old and tired and that it was finished. In September 1985 she told me it was not finished. I did not put her on an aeroplane that week, which is what I should have done. I did something much more elaborate instead: I spent six months rearranging a household of fourteen rooms so that she would never be alone with him, and I did it so cleverly that not one of you noticed, and I was proud of it. Margaret, you will find the evidence of it in my 1985 datebook, which I have kept, and I would rather you found it than that you took my word.

I have had thirty-nine years to work out what that six months was, and here is my conclusion. It was not protection. Protection would have been a plane ticket in September. What I did was hold two things up at once — her safety and the shape of my life — and I told myself I was doing it for her.

On the eleventh of March 1986 I came down the back stairs and found that I had failed at it.

Now I am going to write about that night, and I am going to do it in the plainest words I have, and then I am not going to write about it again.

He came in from the Rossiters’ having had a great deal to drink. Teodora was in the kitchen, which she should not have been at that hour; the boiler man had come late and she had stayed down to lock up after him, and my arrangements did not have a provision for the boiler man.

He went into the kitchen. I heard her say no twice and I heard a chair go over and I came down the stairs past Mrs. Cudahy, who was our night nurse and who I hope is dead by now for her own sake, because if she is alive she has been carrying this too.

When I got to the kitchen he was on the floor. It was his heart. He had had a first attack at Christmas and had done nothing about it for ten weeks.

He was alive. He was conscious. He looked at me.

I sent Mrs. Cudahy upstairs with Teodora and I told her to shut the door.

And then I stood in my kitchen and I did not telephone anybody for eleven minutes.

I am not going to tell you what I was thinking, because I have never been able to establish it and I will not invent something tidy at eighty-two. I have four candidates and I have never been able to put them in an order. One: that if he lived, she would have to be got out of the country in a week and I had six hundred and ten dollars. Two: that if he lived, it would happen again, if not to her then to somebody. Three: that I was forty-five and had been married for twenty-four years to a man I had known about since 1971. Four: that I was frightened and could not move.

I do not know which of those it was. I know that I could see the telephone the entire time.

At about eleven o’clock I called Dr. Hallendale, and he came, and your father was dead, and Ray Hallendale wrote coronary on the certificate, which was true.

I have had thirty-nine years to consider whether the eleven minutes killed him. I asked a cardiologist in 1994, in a completely different context, in a way that I am sure he has forgotten and that I have never forgotten, and the answer is that it almost certainly did not. It was a massive infarct in a heavy man of fifty-six and he would very likely have died in an ambulance or on a table.

That is a comfort and I have used it, and I want you to know that I know exactly what it is worth, which is nothing at all. Whether he would have lived is a fact about him. The eleven minutes are a fact about me.

I told Mrs. Cudahy what the story was going to be, and she kept to it for the rest of her life, and if she is alive I would like one of you to find her and thank her, because she was fifty-two years old and she stood on a landing and she was never anything but decent to me afterwards.

I did not do it to protect myself. I want to be exact: I did it, at the time, believing that if the truth came out it was Teodora who would be destroyed. An undocumented woman of twenty-eight, alone in a kitchen with a rich man who died in it, in this county, in 1986. I believed that then and I believe it now.

But I have also had thirty-nine years to notice that the story I chose was extremely convenient for me. Both of those are true. I have stopped trying to make one of them cancel the other.

I drove her to the airport on the nineteenth. I sewed six hundred and ten dollars into the lining of her coat because she would not take it from my hand, and I put a letter in with it, and I told her not to write to me.

She did not write to me. Not once in twenty-eight years.

In January 1999 I received a letter from a woman in Bridgeport that said, in its entirety, that she was Teodora Delgado’s daughter and that she was looking for work.

I have never been able to decide whether Teodora sent her to me as a gift or as an account. I asked her, once, in 2014, in a telephone call that was the only conversation the two of us had in thirty-nine years, and she said: “Neither. I sent her because she needed a job and I knew there was one.”

That was the whole of it. She had no design on me at all. I had spent thirteen years imagining a judgement that was simply not coming, which I have since learned is the ordinary condition of the guilty.

Now. Rosa.

Rosa Delgado has been in this house for twenty-six years and has never once asked me a question about her mother, and I am certain she has wanted to every day.

She does not know what is in this letter. She does not know why I hired her. She has never known and I have never told her and she has never asked, and I want the three of you to understand what that is: it is twenty-six years of a woman living in the same house as a locked door and not putting her hand on the handle, because she worked out early that it would cost me something and she decided not to charge it.

I did not leave her this house because I was confused, or lonely, or manipulated. I want to be very clear, because I know exactly what will be said in a courtroom if you are reading this.

I left her this house because it is not mine.

Your father’s money built it out. The partnership, the 1978 extension, the land at the back — all of it came from a man who did what he did in a kitchen in this house to a woman who cleaned it, and who died on the floor of it while his wife stood four feet away and watched a telephone.

I have lived in this house for sixty-two years on the proceeds of that arrangement, and so, my dears, did the three of you, and so did your schools.

I am not asking you to feel guilty about that. You were children. You did not know and you could not have.

But I knew. I knew for fifteen years before it happened and thirty-nine years after, and I did nothing except pay nine hundred dollars a month to a woman in Puebla for the last eleven years of her life, in secret, which cost me nothing I would miss and which I have no intention of describing as decency.

So the house goes to the daughter. That is not charity and it is not a delusion. It is the smallest available approximation of a debt, paid thirty-nine years late, by the only person left who is in a position to pay it.

Two more things and then I am finished.

Peter. You will need money, and you will not ask. I know about the note; I have known since August, and I am sorry that I found out the way I did. I have made an arrangement with Ellis, which he will explain, and which is separate from the estate and does not touch it. I have made it in a way that does not require you to ask me for anything, because I know you would not, and because I have understood since about 1989 that you would rather be destroyed than ask, and I have never worked out how much of that is my doing.

Margaret. You have wanted this house since you were nineteen. I have known that since the February you came home and slept in the blue room for five weeks and I brought you soup and asked you nothing.

I want you to know that not asking was the hardest thing I have ever done as your mother, and I did it because it was what you needed, and I have been proud of it for thirty-one years.

And I want you to know that I am aware — completely, and with my eyes open — that I am doing to you now the exact thing I taught you to expect from me. I am asking you to accept something and not inquire. If you have opened this letter then you could not, and I understand that, and I would probably not have been able to either.

Diane. You went away, and everybody in this family has treated that as a defection for thirty-four years, and I want it in writing, in my own hand, that going was the correct decision and that I would have done it in 1962 if I had been braver.

You asked me once on the telephone whether I was all right in this house on my own. It was about four years ago and you asked it lightly and I said something amusing.

The true answer was no, and it had been no since 1986, and I was not alone: there was a woman upstairs sleeping with her door open so she could hear the hall.

I love you all. Please do not fight about the money.

Mummy