The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [138]
Flanked by two bright reading lamps, I am quietly absorbing a rather too sweet novel sent by a book club that I subscribe to, when the telephone rings again. Speaking breathlessly, Neve tells me that she has been looking through albums all evening with a magnifying glass. She has understood something that she should have realized long ago.
“My brother has the real collection,” she says, her voice squeaking in huge distress. “I took the money and let him paw through the stamps. At the time, I didn’t know. I hadn’t any idea that he knew what he was looking for. The upshot is: mine are worthless. His are worth…” She cannot speak. Her voice catches and she mews softly. Her lips are pressed against the receiver. “A million. Maybe. He cheated me.”
I restrain my laughter and do not say, “Everybody knows you cheated him!”
As she has continued to sift through Octave’s papers and letters, she has found something else that distresses her. In a file that she had never before opened, a set of eight or nine letters, all addressed to the same person, with canceled stamps, the paper distorted as though it had been wet, the writing smudged, each varying from the other by some slight degree—a minor flaw in the cancellation mark, a slight rip. She had examined them in some puzzlement and noticed that one bears a fifty-cent violet Benjamin Franklin issued two years after the cancellation, which was dated just before the sinking of the Titanic.
“I am finding it very hard to admit the obvious,” she said, “because I had formed such a sympathetic opinion of my uncle. But I believe he was experimenting with forged disaster mail, and that what I found was no less than evidence.” She sounds furious, as though he had tried to sell her the item himself. (Perhaps, I think, she has.) “He was offering his fake authenticated letter to a dealer in London. There were attempts at, and rejections of, certification letters, too.”
I try to talk Neve down, but when she gets into a mood like this all of her rages and sorrows come back to her and it seems she must berate the world or mourn each one. True, she has some tenuous family outside the area and will not be trapped here like me. But I do not want her to say it. As soon as possible, I put the phone down, and my insipid novel as well. Neve’s moods are catching. I try to shake off a sudden miasma of turbulent dread, but before I know it I have walked into my bedroom and am opening the chest at the foot of my bed and I am looking through my family’s clothes—all else was destroyed or taken away, but the undertaker washed and kept these (kindly, I think) and he gave them to me when I moved into this house. I find the somber envelope marked Jorgenson’s Funeral Parlor, and slip from it the valentine, within its own envelope, that must have been hidden in a pocket. It is a hideous thing, all schmaltz and paper lace. I note for the first time the envelope bears a commemorative stamp of the Huguenot monument in Florida. What a bloody piece of history to place on a valentine, I think, and yet, inadvertantly appropriate.
Sometimes I wonder if the sounds of fear and anguish, the thunder of the shotgun, is hidden from me somewhere in my brain, the most obscure corner. I might have died of dehydration as I wasn’t found for three days, but I don’t remember that, either—not at all—and have never been abnormally afraid of thirst or obsessed with food or water. Apparently, so I’ve been told, I was fed by one of the Indians later hanged. No, my childhood was very happy and I had everything—a swing, a puppy, doting parents. Nothing but good things happened to me. I loved getting high marks and having friends. I was chosen queen of the prom. I never underwent a shock at the sudden revelation of my origins, for I was told the story early on and came to accept who I was. The only thing is, I was allowed to believe that the lynched Indians had been the ones responsible. I believed that until