Georgia pressed the center of the panel lightly. Nothing happened.
She ran her fingers along the edges of the panel. Nothing.
She pressed the left side of the panel — and the right side sprang away from the wall. Georgia gripped the panel before it could fall to the floor. She placed it on her bed. Then she reached her hand into the dark space, but withdrew it quickly and reached for her flashlight as an image of her hand closing over a spider came to mind.
Georgia shined the light into the hole. There they were, in an untidy stack. Five ancient journals. She pulled out the top one, recalling that it was Nell’s last. Below it were the four earlier ones. Georgia set all five on her bed and once again arranged them chronologically. She wanted to read about the babies, the lost babies, but remembering what she had learned about the end of Nell’s life, she realized now that she wanted to start at the beginning and read the journals in order. She wanted to understand Nell. Georgia reached for the blue journal with the dangling spine and the broken clasp.
That was how Georgia Eleanor Goldberg Noble entered the life of her great-great-grandmother Eleanor Richmond Durbin at the end of 1917.
Georgia considered the date. Late 1917. Close to the end of the first world war. Although, she realized, back then it wouldn’t have been called World War One, because nobody knew there would be another world war. It was just the World War, she supposed. The war to end all wars.
In 1917 Eleanor Durbin was, as far as Georgia could tell, about eighteen years old. Georgia didn’t know when her great-great-grandmother had been born, but at the start of the journal, Nell was working in a milliner’s shop (it took Georgia some time to figure out that a milliner’s shop sold hats), and she had apparently graduated from high school recently.
Eighteen years old, already working, living with her parents, and no mention of going off to college. Nell was an adult, not quite independent yet, but she had moved into the next phase of her life. Georgia couldn’t imagine being in Nell’s situation in just five years.
The village where Nell lived with her parents was called St. George. Nell’s older sister, Betty, lived there, too, with her new husband, Marshall. Georgia had heard of St. George. It wasn’t far away, although it wasn’t any village now. It was a bustling town.
Not in 1917, though.
In 1917 the St. George described by Nell Durbin was even smaller than Lewisport was now, but it did have a few stores, and Georgia’s great-great-grandmother had worked in the hat shop. She had made hats and she had sold hats. And in the quiet moments between, she had dreamed about Ralph Saunders, a boy she had known since they were in third grade.
Perhaps my Ralph will come by the shop at the end of the day to walk me home, Nell wrote.
And in another entry: One day my Ralph and I will have the perfect wedding.
My Ralph, thought Georgia. How nice to have a boy you could call your own.
Nell wrote often about marrying Ralph. She recalled that they were in fourth grade the first time he proposed to her.
We held a wedding on the beach! she wrote giddily. I wore my best church dress and Ralph wore his best suit. We were barefoot. Betty, who was eleven, was the minister. Edward (Ralph’s brother, Georgia realized) was the ring bearer. Four of our classmates came to watch.
Apparently the ceremony had been slightly marred by two other boys from their class who had hidden behind some rocks on the beach and leaped out shrieking just as Ralph was about to slip a ring on Nell’s finger.
A ring of twined dandelion stems, Nell wrote. I thought it was the loveliest ring I’d ever seen.
Nell and Ralph had graduated from grammar school and gone on to high school in Barnegat Point. They’d been sweethearts from the day they entered until the day they graduated. And then Ralph had been called to join the army.
He was proud. Proud to be called to serve his country, even though the war should be coming to an end soon.
Before he left, he proposed to Nell again. This time the proposal was serious. Onto my finger he slipped a ring of silver with a tiny diamond chip in the center. He wanted to know if I would marry him when he came home. Of course I said yes. Of course!
Nell passed her days working in the hat shop and dreaming of her wedding and the life she and Ralph would have. They would move to Barnegat Point, she thought. A town bigger than St. George would be nice.
We will live in a little house near the center of town. We’ll have three children. A boy, a girl, and another boy. The first boy will be named Ralph. The girl will be named Eleanor. And the second boy, I think, should be named James. Or maybe Jonathan.
Then one evening not long after Nell had arrived home from the hat shop, a knock had come at the door. The Durbins were eating supper, and Nell’s mother was displeased by the interruption.
“I’d better see who it is,” said Nell. She folded her napkin and set it by her plate.
Then she opened the front door.
There are some things a person doesn’t ever forget. Images that stay in your mind like a photograph. That scene … Edward standing on the porch with his hat in his hands, his head bowed. The image is in black and white and brown.
Nell felt her knees buckle then, but she remained standing. She embraced Edward after he had given her the news and then she went inside to tell her family that Ralph wouldn’t be coming home. His plane had been shot down, and although his body hadn’t been found and he was listed as missing in action, he was presumed dead.
Georgia thought that this entry would be followed by pages and pages of grief, by descriptions of a memorial service, perhaps, of tearful conversations with Betty.
Instead there was a long gap. Days went by. Then this abrupt note:
I have had to let go of the dream of our future together.
The morning rolled on, the house quiet except for the sounds of Georgia’s mother as she tidied the kitchen, made coffee, checked her email, spoke on the phone. Georgia read through the first journal, fascinated. How quickly Nell’s plans had come apart, as quickly as if they had been a glass that had shattered. In the weeks that followed, her family had tried to console her, but Nell couldn’t let go of her plans for the wedding, the house in Barnegat Point, the babies.
Ralph could still come back, she confided in the journal. He’s listed as missing in action. Missing.
But months had gone by and finally a year had passed since Edward had delivered the terrible news to Nell.
As Georgia read the story of Nell’s life she was aware of how much time went by between some entries. A month or more, and then Nell would write in a burst, long entries every single day. On the one-year anniversary of the news of Ralph’s disappearance, Nell wrote simply: A year has passed. An entire year. I walk into town and nothing has changed. The shop is the same, the streets are the same. Home is the same.
Still, everything has changed. Ralph’s family is gone.
(Georgia didn’t know where they had gone or when they had left. Nell hadn’t written about it.)
Then came an entry that caught Georgia’s eye. It was dated August 17th, 1919, and in it Georgia found the first reference to Luther Nichols.
“Nell’s husband,” Georgia murmured. “Great-Grandma Abby’s father.”
They had met at an ice-cream social. (Georgia had to stop reading the journal, get out her laptop, and find out what an ice-cream social was. It turned out to be a gathering, probably held at a church, the purpose of which mainly seemed to be socializing over ice cream, which seemed like an enormously good idea to Georgia.)
He told me he’s just moved here from Connecticut. He wanted to know my name and brought me ice cream and asked Father if he could call on me sometime. Mother is pleased.
The courtship seemed to progress rather quickly, Georgia thought. Luther was building a cottage for her in Lewisport. That seemed to mean a lot to Nell. And to her parents.
He’s making the furniture, too. All of it with his own hands. Father is impressed.
&nbs
p; But there was also a hint, if not of trouble exactly, then of a sense that things were not quite right: He doesn’t like Faye. That much is clear. (Faye, Georgia knew, was Nell’s best friend from school.) He doesn’t want to spend time with her, and doesn’t want me to see her either. He seems to want me for himself. I try to feel flattered, but the effect is of smothering.
A mere two months later, Luther asked Nell’s father for her hand in marriage. When he agreed, Luther proposed to Nell. She accepted and he gave her a plain silver band.
Nothing fancy. We must save our money. I don’t understand, though. As soon as the ring was on my finger, he said I’m to leave my position at the shop. He said no wife of his will go to work. He doesn’t want anyone thinking he can’t support his family.
Still … his family! That means he wants children. Three boys, he says. (What will happen if I give him girls?)
Georgia read on as Nell’s new life unfolded. She and Luther moved not to Barnegat Point, but to the cottage in which Georgia Noble was at that very moment sitting.
Two years after their wedding, Nell gave birth to their first child, Abigail Cora Nichols.
My great-grandmother, thought Georgia. Great-Grandma Abby.
Nell wrote: He isn’t pleased. This isn’t what he wanted. I didn’t give him a boy. He holds the baby, but there’s no light in his eyes. He doesn’t love her yet.
Georgia felt her stomach drop. What kind of father didn’t love his own child?
The first journal ended, and Georgia immediately opened the next one.
Two years later, she read, another girl was born. Rose.
How I long to share this news with Ralph. No, how I wish Ralph were the father of the girls. He would love them. He would love them no matter what.
“Lunchtime!” called Mrs. Noble from the kitchen, and Georgia jumped. She realized that her father and Henry had returned, and then she heard Richard’s voice, too. Her whole family was at home and she hadn’t noticed. She was lost in Nell’s world of 1924; her life with a man who, Georgia suspected, she didn’t love after all, and with two little girls Luther didn’t want.
“Coming!” said Georgia, glad for a break.
But as soon as lunch was over she retreated to her bedroom, settled Noelle in her lap, and picked up the old journal.
After Rose’s birth, Nell’s entries became even more sparse. There were notes here and there — Abby’s first steps; a trip to visit Nell’s parents, who had moved away from St. George; Christmas with Betty and Marshall and their children. Mundane entries that continued into the third journal until the summer of 1927 when Georgia came across the name Millicent Pryor Nichols.
“The first baby,” she said. “The first baby that died.”
The tears keep falling, Nell wrote. They fall and fall and fall. Luther is past being annoyed with me. Now he doesn’t know what to do. Some days I can’t keep track of Abby and Rose.
Georgia did some math and realized that Abby and Rose were five and three.
I told Luther I want some way to mark Millicent’s birth. Luther didn’t understand. She has to mean something, I explained. He planted a rosebush in the yard. “It’s where you can see it,” he said. Now he expects me to go on with our life. But I can’t stop looking at the rosebush.
The rosebush wasn’t put there out of love, Georgia thought. Luther had planted it so Nell would stop crying and start cleaning the house again. He had planted it for the wrong reason, and it had the wrong effect. Nell couldn’t look at it without thinking of her lost little girl.
The second rosebush had been planted the following year, when Luther Randolph Nichols Jr. had been born. A boy. A boy for Luther, but he hadn’t lived.
How could Nell and Luther stand it? Georgia wondered. How could any of them stand it?
Then, halfway through the third journal, Georgia read an entry that astounded her. It was dated March 24th, 1929.
Of all things — I got a letter from Ralph today.
From Ralph? Georgia wondered if Nell had made a mistake, had written the wrong name. In almost the same instant, she suspected that it was no mistake, and she suddenly knew why the journals were hidden in the wall of the cottage. Nell had to keep them from Luther. It was imperative that she keep them from him. He must never see the things she was writing. Georgia realized with a pang of hurt for Nell that it must have become much more difficult for her to pour her feelings onto the pages after her family had finally moved to Barnegat Point and used the beach cottage only as a vacation spot. Unless she had had an equally good hiding spot for the journals after they moved to the new house, she would have had to save her thoughts for visits to the cottage.
Nell’s secret life, thought Georgia.
She read on. Yes, Nell had received a letter from Ralph Saunders in March of 1929, more than ten years after she had heard the news that he was presumed dead.
It was a long letter, apparently. It must have been, since Nell detailed all that had happened to Ralph in the past decade.
And what did Nell do with that letter? Georgia wondered. She flipped through the last few pages of the journal expecting a fat envelope to drop out. Then she flipped carefully through the other journals. Nothing. She shined the flashlight in the hidey-hole. Nothing but dust. If Nell hadn’t hidden the letter then she couldn’t have kept it, Georgia realized. She wouldn’t have risked Luther finding it.
Georgia envisioned Nell reading the letter, reading it again — and maybe again and again — then tearing it into fine pieces, crossing Blue Harbor Lane, and scattering the bits of paper in the ocean, like ashes.
She turned back to the journal. Nell might not have kept the letter itself, but she had written about its contents, and Georgia read on eagerly.
When Ralph’s plane had been shot down he had been injured seriously and had spent nearly two years recovering in a hospital in London. He had no identification and was suffering from something Georgia didn’t quite understand from Nell’s description, but decided must be some sort of brain trauma. Also, his face had been disfigured in the accident.
Georgia set the journal down. This was almost like that movie The English Patient, she thought. So romantic. Except maybe not very romantic at all when your fiancée is at home in Maine, first mourning your loss, and then getting on with a life that no longer includes you.
By the time Ralph had recovered enough to explain to the hospital staff who he was — and after he had finally managed to locate his family, who by then were living near relatives in Bar Harbor — he instructed his parents not to contact Nell. He didn’t want her to see his ravaged face. Eventually, he learned that she had wed Luther, and he decided to start a new life of his own. But now, with a decade gone, still unmarried and still longing for the girl he once married barefoot on the beach in St. George, he decided to contact her after all. He just wanted to see her.
And so, Nell wrote, we have agreed to meet.
“What?!” cried Georgia. “They agreed to meet?!” How was that going to happen? What would Nell tell Luther? Surely, timid, obedient Eleanor Durbin Nichols wasn’t daring enough to go behind his back.
But that’s exactly what she’d done.
Heart pounding, Georgia turned the page.
He’ll be here in ten days! Nell had written, in a voice much lighter than before. She sounded buoyant, nearly effervescent. The visit is planned for the day Luther will be in Portland. I must instruct the girls not to say anything about Ralph’s face. I need to prepare them, Rose especially. We shall have a picnic. A picnic in the back garden.
The next entry was dated eleven days later, and Georgia practically tore the page in her eagerness to start reading.
Heaven, the entry began. It was heaven. Heaven having Ralph here. The girls were angels. They sat in his lap and asked for stories. Rose patted his face, but said nothing. Abby smiled at him. Then she asked if he knew the tale of Red Riding Hood, and he said he did. He told it as naturally as a father might (Here several words were crossed out befor
e the entry continued.), as naturally as a teacher. Then when Rose asked for a story about fairies he made one up just for her.
Ralph was enchanted by the girls, I think. I asked them to take a nap in their room after our picnic and they agreed — as long as Ralph would tell them one more story. When they were asleep Ralph and I sat in the kitchen and had tea. It was as if the years hadn’t passed at all. Funny. Ralph is wounded — disfigured — and was sitting in my kitchen in a chair built by my husband, and still it was as if the years hadn’t passed. I could look into his eyes and see the man who had said good-bye to me on the evening before he left for Europe.
When Abby and Rose had awakened, their mother had told them it was time for Ralph to leave. “Now, this must be our secret,” I instructed them later. “Secrets are fun, aren’t they? So this is our own fun secret.”
“Ralph is a secret?” Abby asked. She wanted to be sure.
“Yes. Ralph is a secret. His visit is a secret. Do you understand? We mustn’t talk about his visit.”
Then Abby surprised me. She said, “We mustn’t talk about it in front of Pop, is that right?” She understands more than I give her credit for.
“Yes, that’s right,” I said.
And they kept the secret. My girls kept our secret.
“Georgia, what are you doing in there?”
It was Richard’s voice.
“Nothing!” Georgia called through her closed bedroom door.
“But you’ve been in there all day.”
Georgia looked at her watch. It was only 3:00 and Richard had only been home since lunchtime. How would he know how long she’d been in her room? “Do you want something?” she asked him.
“I want to know what you’re doing.”
“Reading.”
“Oh.” She heard his footsteps trail away. Then she heard the front door open and close.
Georgia set down Nell’s journal and rubbed her eyes. Through her open window she could hear lazy crickets, the sound of a radio playing faintly (where? next door?), and the whoosh, whoosh of the ocean, which was ever-present in her life, so she rarely noticed it. It was like a heartbeat, necessary, dependable, relegated to the background.