Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“No, Brother Ian, it is not a matter of opinion. Goodness! What a notion.”

That more or less finished the conversation, Ian figured. He gave up and raised a hand amiably in farewell. But then he paused and turned back. “Brother Eli?” he said. “I wonder. Do you think you could locate a missing person for me?”

“Why, I’ll do my best,” Eli told him.

He didn’t seem at all surprised by the question. It was Ian who was surprised.

“His name was Tom Dean,” he told Eli. “Thomas Dean, Senior. He was married to my sister-in-law before she married my brother, and he’s the only one who might be able to tell us who my sister-in-law’s family was.”

He and Eli sat on the couch in Sister Bertha’s living room. No doubt Sister Bertha was wondering what business Ian could possibly have here, but she stayed out of sight, ostentatiously rattling pans in the kitchen and talking to her daughter. Her house was a ranch house with rooms that all flowed together, and Ian distinctly heard her discussing someone named Netta who had suffered a terrible grease fire.

“I don’t know where Tom Dean grew up,” Ian said, “but sometime in the spring of ‘sixty-five he wrote to Lucy from Cheyenne, Wyoming. Or maybe he phoned; I’m not sure. Somehow he got in touch, asking her to send him his things.”

“How long had they been divorced?” Eli said.

“I don’t know. The kids were still small, though. It can’t have been too long.”

“And what state was this divorce granted in? Maryland? Wyoming? What state of the Union?”

“I don’t know that either.”

Eli surveyed him mournfully. He had taken off his suit coat and the armpits of his white shirt showed a faint bluish tinge.

“It was only mentioned in passing,” Ian said. “You don’t discuss your divorce in detail with the family of your new husband. So when my brother died, and then Lucy died, there was no one we could ask. She had left behind the three children and we were hoping some of her relatives could take them, but we didn’t know if she had any relatives. We didn’t even know her maiden name.”

Beyond the plate glass window, Sunday traffic swished along Lake Avenue. Sister Bertha said Netta had escaped unburned and so had her husband and baby and her dear, darling, wonderful, incredible little dog.

“Still,” Eli said, “your sister-in-law must have had some kind of document. Some certificate or something, somewhere among her papers.”

“She didn’t leave any papers. After she died my dad went through her house and he couldn’t find a one.”

“How about her billfold? Driver’s license?”

“She didn’t drive.”

“Social security card?”

“For Lucy Dean. Period.”

“Photos, then. Any photos?”

“None.”

“Your family must have photos, though. From after she married your brother.”

“We do, but my mother put them away so as not to remind the children.”

“Not to remind them? Well, land sakes.”

“My mother’s kind of … she prefers to look on the bright side. But I can find them for you, I’m sure.”

“Maybe later on,” Eli said. “Okay: let’s talk about your sister-in-law’s friends. You recall if she had any girlfriends?”

“Not close ones,” Ian said. “Just a couple of women she waitressed with, back before she married Danny. One of them we never tracked down, and the other my mother ran into a year or so after Lucy died but she said she really didn’t know a thing about her.”

“Didn’t no one ever ask this Lucy anything?”

“It does sound peculiar,” Ian said. This was the first time he’d realized exactly how peculiar. He was amazed that they could have been so unaware, so incurious, living all those months alongside another human being.

Eli said, “Tell what was in her desk.”

“She didn’t have a desk.”

“Her topmost bureau drawer, then. Or that ragtag drawer full of string and such in her kitchen.”

“All I know is, my dad went through her house and he didn’t find anything useful. He talked about how people don’t write letters anymore.”

“So: no letters.”

“And no address book, either. I remember he mentioned that.”

“How about her divorce papers? She couldn’t have throwed them away.”

“Maybe after she remarried she did.”

“Well, then, her marriage certificate. Her marriage to your brother.”

“Nope.”

“You know she would’ve kept that.”

“All I can say is, we didn’t find it.”

“She must’ve had a safe deposit box.”

“Lucy? I doubt it. And where was the key, then?”

“So you are trying to tell me,” Eli said, “that a person manages to get through life without a single solitary piece of paper in her possession.”

“Well, I realize it’s unusual—”

“It’s impossible!”

“Well …”

“Had her place been burglarized recently? Did the drawers look like they’d been rifled?”

“Not that I heard of,” Ian said.

“Was anybody else living in the house with her?”

“No …”

But a dim uneasiness flitted past him, like something you see and yet don’t see out of the corner of your eye.

“Anyone suspicious hanging about her?”

“No, no …”

But wary, suspicious Agatha pushed into his mind — her closed-off face with the puffy lids that veiled her secret thoughts.

“Now, I don’t want you to take this wrong,” Eli said, “but you are about the most unhelpful client I ever had to deal with.”

“I realize that. I’m sorry,” Ian said. “I shouldn’t have wasted your time.”

Eli shook his head, and his cowlick waggled and dipped. God’s arrow with no place to go, Ian couldn’t help thinking.

Monday noon, he told Mr. Brant he was eating at home today. He drove home and let himself into the house, announcing, “It’s me! Forgot my billfold!”

“Oh, hello, dear,” his mother called from the kitchen. Then she and his father went on talking, no doubt over their usual lunch of tinned soup and saltine crackers.

He climbed to the second floor and onward, more stealthily, to the attic, to Daphne and Agatha’s little room underneath the eaves.

Girls tended to be messier than boys, he thought. (He had noticed that in his college days.) Agatha’s bed was heaped with so many books that he wondered how she slept, and Daphne’s was a jungle of stuffed animals. He went over to Agatha’s bureau, a darkly varnished highboy that had to stand away from the wall a bit so as not to hit the eaves. The top was littered with pencil stubs and used Kleenexes and more books, but the drawers were fairly well organized. He patted each one’s contents lightly, alert for something that didn’t belong — the rustle of paper or a hard-edged address book. But there was nothing.

He knelt and looked under her bed. Dust balls. He lifted the mattress. Candy-bar wrappers. He shook his head and let the mattress drop. He tried the old fiber-board wardrobe standing at one end of the room and found a rod of clothes, half Daphne’s and half Agatha’s, packed too tightly together. Shoes and more shoes lay tangled underneath.

He bent to poke his head inside the storage room that ran under the eaves. In the dimness he made out a dress form, a lampshade, two foot lockers, and a cardboard carton. He crawled further inside and lifted one of the carton’s flaps. The musty gray smell reminded him of mice. He dragged the carton toward the door for a closer look: his mother’s framed college diploma, a bundle of letters addressed to Miss Beatrice Craig … He pushed the carton toward the rear again.

Turning to go, he saw a faded, fabric-covered box on the floor — the kind that stationery sometimes comes in. He flipped up the lid and found a clutter of barrettes and hair ribbons and junk jewelry. Agatha’s, no doubt. He let the lid fall shut and crawled on out.