Peter Geye - Wintering

My mother was sickly, my father despairing. We’d already lost our modest home and moved into my spinster aunt’s even more modest home. It was a story playing out all over the country, my father assured anyone who would listen. I suppose it was his attempt to console himself for the most difficult decision he had to make, which was to send me off so I might earn a few dollars and ease his burden. I doubt he thought I’d be gone forever.

I did not want to leave my parents, but, even so young and naïve, I understood our situation. It wasn’t hard to see how the Depression afflicted nearly everyone. And perhaps because of my youth I saw an opportunity here, and was frankly excited when Rebekah Grimm replied with a letter of her own, addressed not to my father, as might have been expected, but to me.

Miss Berit Lovig:

Find enclosed passage for one aboard the Northland bus service from Duluth to Gunflint for January 13. When you disembark in Gunflint, come without delay to 1 Lighthouse Road. Dress appropriately. No pants. Only dresses, unruffled or otherwise unfancified. If you do not own such dresses, they will be provided for you, and the cost will be deducted from your wages. You will be paid $.35 per hour in accordance with the standard of this town for unskilled lady laborers. Of that wage, you will have $6 deducted for room and board at the end of each week. I expect you to work daily except Sundays, when you are free to attend church should you go in for that sort of foolishness. I await your arrival.

— Miss Rebekah Grimm.

When I found that old letter in a desk drawer, it took me back to my girlish days with force. There it was after almost sixty years: my passport to the place I’ve called home for my whole adult life. What if my father hadn’t seen that ad? What if he’d felt too weak or too proud to reply? What if I’d seemed unsatisfactory to Rebekah Grimm? These questions troubled me, but I will admit to something: the first thought I had on reading that letter again (for the first time in 708 months, in 21,568 days, I’ve counted it both ways) was not of my own life, not exactly, but, rather, of what my life would have looked like had Harry been absent from it. It would have been different in a hundred different ways.

Of my bus ride to Gunflint in January of 1937 I remember only the miserable faces, fewer and fewer of them as we passed through each small town, until, finally, only a little old lady and I myself remained. She stepped off the bus before me in Gunflint and I never saw her again. I asked someone for directions to the given address and they directed me the few blocks there. I remember walking up the wide wooden staircase, the cold winter breeze and weak sun on my back. Rebekah stood at the window. She must have been watching me. I carried only one suitcase and a hand-me-down purse my mother suggested would make me seem more ladylike. I set them both down as I entered the store. Rebekah came and stood before me.

“Miss Grimm?” I asked.

She lowered her eyeglasses and looked down her fine nose. She was as beautiful as she was strange, two facts obvious at first glance, and already she scared me.

“You’re rather less pretty than I expected,” she said. “Less pretty than that picture you sent, certainly.” She closed her eyes as though exhausted and said, “Take off your coat and stand up straight. There will be no slouching here.”

When I took off my coat and stood up straight, she walked around me as if inspecting a museum piece.

“Another photograph telling lies,” she said, somewhat under her breath. “But that’s just fine. That’s good. Plainness will keep the likes of Charlie Aas from loitering.”

She crossed the room to the counter and I followed. When we got there she stopped and looked down her nose yet again. “This is your finest dress?”

“It is my only dress,” I admitted.

In my memory, she stared for an hour, but likely it was only a second or two. “We’ll have to order you another dress, then. We might fix your hair as well.” Seeming satisfied with this assessment, she then began showing me around.

I knew from that first day that in her company I would be lonely. But I knew also that my loneliness — no matter how it came to bloom — would always pale beside hers. In the vacancy of her eyes and the timbre of her voice I could gauge how the years had done their work on her. And in that selfsame moment I vowed I would never become a woman like her.

—

Gus stood at the glass countertop, where the letters were laid out like a game of cards. I’d called him at the school to ask him to stop by after class, and he came without asking why. After a few minutes he set his satchel down and took off his coat and rubbed his hands through his hair. He picked a letter and looked at it front and back, then rubbed the Norwegian stamp and laid the envelope in its place on the counter. “You found them in a safe?”

I nodded.

“What else was in there?”

“Money. Lots of it. A property deed. A hairbrush with a mother-of-pearl handle. Those letters. And a Norwegian Bible.”

“Son of a gun.” He picked up another letter, one of Thea Eide’s, and inspected it as he had the other. “How much money?”

“I don’t honestly know. Scads of it.”

“Dirty money?”

“I doubt much clean money passed through his hands.”

He set the second letter down. “What actually happened to all his wealth?”

“It went to Rebekah. A kind of justice, really, seeing how much he made off her likeness.”

“What did she do with it?”

“Well, she lived to be ninety-four. That alone was expensive. There were those ten years at the rest home to pay for. She took care of me. My pension, she called it. It’s how I built my home. How I buy my groceries. She left a huge sum to the Gunflint Historical Society. It’s how we’re paying for all these renovations.” I couldn’t tell if he was even listening. “I think she knew that if she tried to give it to your father, or to you, she’d have been rebuffed. She wouldn’t have been able to bear any more rejection.”

He hefted the Bible.

“That was Thea Eide’s, no doubt.”

“And the hairbrush?” he said.

I pulled it from my pocket and laid it beside the letters. “I presume this was Rebekah’s. Thea’s belongings were quite meager.”

Gus picked up a third letter, from Norway, and walked over to the front window, held it up to the late afternoon light, and looked back at me. “Can I open it?”

“I figure they belong to you and your sister.”

He returned to the counter, took a letter opener from a leather cup filled with pens and scissors and bric-a-brac, and slit the envelope open. He blew gently into it and removed the single sheet of paper and smoothed it carefully on the glass counter. The letter was covered in faint black ink, and Gus looked down on it for as long as it might have taken him to read it.

“Does anyone in town still speak Norwegian?” he asked.

“Signe does.”

“And she’s in Minneapolis.”

I thought about Ingrid Gunnarson, sitting in her shared room up at the rest home, her mind gone much as Harry’s had. Her daughter was living somewhere out on the East Coast. It seemed unfathomable that there were no longer any Norwegian speakers here. “I can’t think of a single one,” I admitted.

“So that’s that,” he said, motioning at the letters. “They were locked in a safe for a hundred goddamn years and now they’re still mute. Jesus.”

He cut open another letter, written by his great-grandmother, and stared at it for a long time, shaking his head and gritting his teeth.

“Rebekah used to talk about what a crook Hosea Grimm was. I know a lot of the stories. But this?”