The Housekeeper's Share — Chapter 8: The Datebooks

Eleanor Vance had kept a datebook every year since 1962, and she had kept them all, and they were in the attic at Harrow Lane in two cardboard boxes marked, in her handwriting, ELEANOR — DO NOT DISCARD.

Margaret found them on a Tuesday in December, with Nadia Okafor’s written permission and Rosa’s key and a court-appointed observer named Mr. Fenn sitting on a folding chair at the top of the attic stairs with a clipboard, because that was what the inventory order required and because nobody in this case trusted anybody any more.

She sat on the floor of her mother’s attic in her coat and opened 1994 first, which she had not intended to do.

Feb 3 — M home. Blue room. Say nothing.

Feb 4 — M slept 14 hrs.

Feb 9 — M ate a whole meal. Did not ask.

Feb 17 — M laughing on the telephone. Did not ask about what.

Mar 11 — M gone back. House very quiet.

Margaret Vance-Halloran sat on the attic floor with her mother’s datebook for 1994 open on her knees and made a sound that brought Mr. Fenn halfway out of his chair before she waved him off.

Did not ask. Four times in five weeks. Her mother had written it down like a discipline. Like a woman keeping score against herself.

She went through them in order after that, quickly, the way you read a language you already know.

They were not diaries. Eleanor had not been a woman who explained herself to paper. They were logs — appointments, weather, what was planted, who telephoned, what a thing cost. The emotional content was almost entirely in what got recorded at all.

1983: Sept 9 — girl arrives from agency. Teodora. 26. Very young.

Margaret stopped.

She had spent five weeks trying to remember that woman’s face and here she was in her mother’s handwriting on the ninth of September, 1983, in blue ink.

1984: Jan 14 — T reorganised linen. Better than mine.

Apr 2 — T learning English off the radio. Asked D for words. D delighted.

Nov 28 — Thanksgiving. 11 at table. T would not sit. Asked twice.

1985 began the same way and then, somewhere around September, changed.

It did not change in what it said. It changed in what it was.

Sept 21 — Cancelled bridge.

Sept 24 — Drove A to station. Waited. Drove back.

Sept 26 — Cancelled Hartford. A drove himself.

Oct 1 — Cancelled bridge.

Oct 3 — A late. Sat up.

Oct 8 — Cancelled bridge.

Margaret turned the pages faster.

October, November, December 1985 and January and February 1986 were a solid wall of it: cancellations, waitings, sittings-up. Her mother had not gone to a bridge evening in five months. Her mother had played bridge on Tuesdays for eleven years and had complained about it for ten of them, and in September 1985 she had simply stopped, and had recorded stopping, every single week, without ever once writing down why.

And threaded through it, in the same blue ink, entries Margaret could not parse at all:

Nov 12 — 40.

Nov 26 — 65. Total 105.

Dec 10 — 50. Total 155.

Jan 7 — 80. Total 235.

Running to Mar 4 — 90. Total 610.

Six hundred and ten of something, accumulated over five months in irregular amounts.

Margaret looked at that column for a long time before she understood it, and when she did she put the book down on the attic floor and put both hands over her face.

Her mother had been saving cash. In amounts of forty and sixty and ninety dollars — housekeeping money, grocery money, the kind of sums a woman in 1985 could take out of a household budget without a husband noticing — for five months, and keeping a running total in a datebook in a code so simple it was not a code at all, and she had got to six hundred and ten dollars by the fourth of March.

Six hundred and ten dollars in 1986 was about eighteen hundred now.

It was an escape fund. And Margaret, who had spent five weeks and eleven thousand dollars building a theory that Rosa Delgado had extracted money from her mother, sat in the attic and understood that she was looking at a woman assembling somebody’s freedom forty dollars at a time.

Not her own.

Mar 4 — 90. Total 610.

And then nothing.

The 1986 datebook ran from January the first to the end of December, in her mother’s hand, complete.

Except that February was not there.

Not blank. Not skipped. Cut out — the whole month, both sides of seven leaves, removed with a straight edge so cleanly that the book still closed flat, leaving a stub of a quarter-inch along the gutter where the paper had been.

Margaret ran her thumb along it.

March was there. Mar 4 — 90. Total 610. And then Mar 11, and beside it, in handwriting that was recognisably her mother’s and recognisably not — larger, unsteady, pressed hard enough to score the page:

A died at home. 11.40pm. Dr Hallendale.

And that was all. Nothing on the twelfth. Nothing on the thirteenth. The funeral on the seventeenth appeared as 17 — 2pm. St. Michael’s. in the ordinary hand, as though the woman who wrote it had gone somewhere for six days and come back.

Then:

Mar 19 — T left. 6.10am. Drove her myself.

Margaret read it four times.

Her mother had driven her out to the airport at six in the morning, eight days after burying her husband. Herself. Not a car service, not the agency man from Waterbury.

She turned the page.

Mar 20 — House very quiet.

The same three words she had written on the eleventh of March, 1994, when Margaret went back to her own life after five weeks in the blue bedroom.

“Mr. Fenn,” Margaret said. “Would you come and look at something, please, and initial it.”

He came over with the clipboard. He was about seventy and had done this for twenty years and had the manner of a man who had seen a great many families in a great many attics.

“This book,” Margaret said. “1986. I want it recorded that when I opened it, February had already been removed. I didn’t do it. I want that on your inventory with the time.”

Fenn looked at the stub, and at her, and made a note.

“That’s a scissors cut,” he said. “Or a scalpel. Somebody was careful.”

“Yes.”

“Not recent, either. Look at the edge — that paper’s aged the same as the rest of it. That’s not been done in the last few years.” He handed the book back. “For what it’s worth, ma’am. I’ve seen people cut a page out last week and try to tell me it was 1970. That isn’t that.”

Margaret held the book.

“Mr. Fenn, can I ask you something outside your function?”

“You can ask.”

“In twenty years of doing this. When somebody removes a month from their own diary and keeps the rest of it for thirty-nine years.” She looked up at him. “What is that?”

Fenn considered it seriously, which she appreciated.

“In my experience,” he said, “people burn the whole book when they’re ashamed. Whole book, no book, gone.” He nodded at the stub. “That’s not shame. Somebody kept forty-one years of these on purpose, in a box marked don’t throw away, with one month taken out.”

“Then what is it?”

“That’s a woman leaving a hole where she can see it,” Fenn said. “Every time she opened that book she’d have felt that gap under her thumb.” He shrugged. “That’s not hiding something, ma’am. That’s a person making sure she never forgot it.”