Excerpts
Chapter One
The Beginning
The day we packed the house, i was in the living room sorting family pictures and papers when the movers came. One mover, to be precise: He was the advance guard, the packing man.
It was a beautiful October day in 1992, still warm but with an edge in the air. Fall had come to the mountains around the small Virginia town where I'd grown up, but the flame-colored ridges weren't what I'd come for. I was wrestling with the contents of a chest of drawers where my mother had deposited a pile of family papers. There were genealogy charts, military commendations, fragments of biographies, letters from the War of 1812, a photocopy of a journal dating from the 1840s, and what seemed like dozens of little framed daguerreotypes of people whose identity was a complete mystery to me. All had to be sorted and packed, because when my sister, Jeanne, came later that week, we'd be helping our eighty-three-year-old mother move--not particularly willingly--to a retirement home from the house she'd occupied for forty years. It had been her parents' house, then hers and Daddy's.
She had been living alone for almost twenty-five years now, and people had recently started calling us with worrisome anecdotes and dire predictions, all of course veiled in polite concern, this being a small town where certain formalities still obtained. She was making unexplained withdrawals from her bank account. She would walk aimlessly, turning up at the church at unexpected times. Her driving was atrocious, had been for years.
Mother had told us herself that she really didn't think she should be living alone, and for a while my nephew had lived at the house with her. We'd looked for live-in help without much success. There weren't many options. I'd found only one candidate, a woman who didn't drive and who smoked. We're a small family, just Jeanne and me in our generation, and we were both living hundreds of miles away. What were we to do?
The only retirement home--we didn't want a nursing home, just someplace safe where she would have help--was the old hotel, a relic of an earlier time, as the worn carpet and small, rather dark rooms reminded us when I went with her to look at it. She agreed to the corner room overlooking the street all too close to our house--her house--just a quick walk down to the corner, across the street, and down the alley. Acceded with teeth clenched, a gracious face, and the steely determination to fight again as soon as the opponent's back was turned. We thought she was adjusting remarkably well to the inevitable. She fooled us.
The men of the family--on both sides, Mother's and Daddy's--had been high-ranking military officers, their wives gracious hostesses. The accumulated social power of that household, reflected in all its furnishings and memorabilia, made moving out quite a comedown. For Mother, leaving all that gentility behind must have seemed like an admission of weakness, a failure, a defeat. She was abandoning ship, and I think it broke her heart. But, as was typical of our true-blue military family with its Victorian ways, she didn't say, and we didn't ask, how she felt about it. She put on her stiffest upper lip and moved.
She would be dead within six months. But we didn't know that then, of course. On this mid-October day, the move and all that would follow were still ahead of us, and I was on an archaeological dig, plowing through layers of family possessions we'd managed to ignore for decades, or in some cases had never seen before. And that's when the man we would come to know as Roger arrived.
"Where...
