Pioneer Girl (15 page)

“You stole this.”

“I needed proof.”

Gregory read the letter several times, turning it over. I could tell that he believed it. Of course, he would know what a letter from 1918 would look like, feel like, smell like.

This part of the library, the reading area and research area, and the hallway leading back to the archives kept under lock and key—all felt so empty that a humming noise rose in the place of voices.

“My grandfather was Albert Stellenson,” Gregory admitted, and I felt that weight in my chest again, becoming something larger, a thrill. “And he
was
adopted. I only found that out a few years ago.”

“Do you know anything about his birth parents?”

“No. But there are boxes I've never looked through, sitting in my mother's house.”

“You've never looked through them? Why?”

“My mother meant to go over them with me. But she was sick with cancer—she died two years ago.”

“I'm sorry.”

He nodded. “I just never got around to those boxes on my own.”

“Even though you work as a historian.”

“Information science, actually.” Gregory handed the letter back to me. “How did you get on this trail in the first place?”

I told him about my grandfather and mother, about a woman named Rose who went to Vietnam in 1965. About the gold pin that she had, whether by accident or design, left for my grandfather, who had in turn given it to my mother, who had brought it with her when they fled for America in 1975. I told him about the oblique lines of scrawled poetry I'd found in the archives of the Hoover Library, and how they had led me to Rocky Ridge, and the room where I'd trespassed and found the letter from his great-grandmother.

“There appears to be a lot of theft going on in your life,” Gregory remarked.

“It's not the norm.”

He seemed to consider this, then said, “Wait here for a minute.” He left the reception area and headed toward the employees-only office. I had the fleeting thought that he was calling the authorities or something, but he returned with his book bag and stainless water bottle.

“Let's go,” he said.

—

I
went to Russian Hill after all, with Gregory, to 1019 Vallejo Street.

We got to the house from Taylor Street, where we had to climb a steep stone staircase to reach Vallejo. Rose's former house was tucked away among overgrowths of greenery. It was a mansion, really, a rich person's summerhouse, Tudor-ish, with dark brown shingles and many-mullioned windows. More than a century ago it had been a single-family home, then a series of apartments during Rose's era, and now it was one person's house again. A high-rise obstructed part of the view to the water. The great bridge hadn't existed when Rose was here.

At the top of the stone stairs we landed on a sidewalk that curved around a cul-de-sac of parked cars.

“Funny thing is,” Gregory said, “my father's last name was, or is, Wilson, and so was mine. But he left when I was five, and hasn't been a part of my life since. When I went to college I changed my name to Stellenson. If I hadn't done that you might not have found me so easily.”

The high sun glared off the windows of Rose's old house, making it impossible to glimpse anything inside.
But I would have found you
, I wanted to say.

“I feel like I've been past this place before,” Gregory said.

I told him how Laura had visited Rose here during the 1915 World's Fair. While Rose worked at the
Bulletin
, her mother took in the sights. They were years away from writing the
Little House
books.

Was she still living here three years later? Gregory wanted to know, but I wasn't sure. I knew that Rose and Gillette finally divorced in 1918, and sometime that year she left the
Bulletin
, moved to Sausalito, and turned her focus to full-time freelance writing. Two years after that she left California altogether. If she had lived at 1019 Vallejo during a pregnancy it could have served as a hideout. A safe place high in the hills. Rose could have kept writing from home, quitting the newspaper when her belly grew too large.

“What about the father?” Gregory asked, but he knew as well as I did that the question was unanswerable. Even if we found a birth certificate it probably wouldn't have listed either parent's name.

Gazing up at the house again, I wondered if someone inside was looking right back at us. What would
we
look like?

My phone made a little chiming sound in my bag and I checked it, remembering, abashedly, Amy. But it was Alex.
Did you find Mr. Long-Lost?
I texted back:
Not yet
.

Gregory shaded his eyes. “Around 1918, did she have any male friends she wrote about?”

“Well, there was Fremont Older,” I said. I had thought of him already. As longtime editor of the
Bulletin
, he had hired and mentored Rose, and she had become close with him and his wife, Cora. Sometime in 1918 Older left the
Bulletin
as well, taking a job at the competing
San Francisco Call
. He and Cora had had no children.

Gregory was intrigued. “I know who Fremont Older is. Have you seen his house in Cupertino? It's an architectural explosion, mostly designed by him and his wife. It makes sense that he and Rose would have had a relationship from the
Bulletin
.”

“I don't know if it means that.”

“But think of it. If he was her mentor. They worked together. Socialized together. Maybe Rose was afraid that he and his wife would want the baby, to raise as their own. Or maybe he didn't even know.”

I thought of Alex and his skepticism:
maybe it wasn't Rose at all.
“Or maybe the baby was Gillette's. Years later, after he remarried, his wife said that Rose had always been the love of his life. Or then again, maybe it was just a nameless affair. She wasn't a prude. She even wrote somewhere that part of the reason she married at all was for sex.”

“Not unusual for her time period,” Gregory said.

In high school, Rose and her friends had wondered if they could get pregnant from kissing. But a couple of years after that, while she was working as a telegrapher in St. Louis, Rose made sure to lose her virginity before marriage—driven, apparently, by curiosity.

“She never remarried either. She had some relationships, but they didn't last. Or she took care not to say much about them in her journals.”

“She knew people would read them. You know what?” I thought Gregory was going to suggest another possibility, but instead he said, “We should go before someone thinks we're casing the place.” He led the way back down the stone steps, which smelled of moss and ruined leaves, to where 1019 Vallejo became invisible once again.

We walked on, to what purpose I didn't know, and I couldn't help glancing back; a casual passerby would never be able to tell that Rose's old apartment, full of history and mystery, existed there.

Gregory said, “You only looked through some of her papers, right? Maybe she wrote about the guy somewhere and it hasn't turned up yet.”

“What about those boxes you have? Maybe someone in your family knew something.”

“I had a feeling you were going to say that.” He looked at his watch. It was early afternoon, and though I was hungry for lunch I was more anxious about what else we could find.

“They're in my mom's house in Corte Madera,” Gregory said. “My house now, I guess. I haven't been there in a while.”

“Is that far from here?”

We stopped at the corner. Up ahead, a classic touristy cable car slid heavily down a hill, stuffed with people.

Turning to face me, Gregory said, “I can't do this right now.”

“Why not? Because of work?”

“It's not because of work.”

“But the thing is, I'm only here three more days.”

“I understand this is important to you.” He pushed his hands into his pockets. “I'm sorry.”

“Will you take my number, then?” I practically forced him to add my number into his phone and hit dial so that his number would show up on mine.

“Think about it?” I pleaded.

Gregory nodded okay. He slid his phone into his book bag, shifting the strap over his shoulder, and walked away from me down Taylor Street.

I
had intended to give Amy every awful detail from the day. Together, I figured, we could convince Gregory to change his mind. Amy could make anything seem logical. She would get us to his mother's house, where a store of information maybe lay in wait.

But then he called that night while Amy was at a work dinner. I was in her living room, reading about Rose's travels in Europe. When Gregory said, “What are you doing tomorrow?” I knew I was going to lie to her. It was my new pattern, my new survival. No truths for anyone in my life.

“We can get to Corte Madera by ferry or by bus,” he said. “I don't have a car here because of parking.”

“Boat,” I said, and we set a time to meet at the Ferry Building.

Later, when Amy returned, I told her about Sam. I kept my focus on that. About Gregory I said I'd called the library and found out he was off until the weekend. Amy was disappointed but said at least Saturday would be easier for her. She was tired from her evening of forced networking, and when she went to change out of her suit I searched her cable for a movie we could watch instead of talking.
Walk the Line
was on—the kind of movie that was easy to sink into. With that and wine and a lemon-lavender cake I'd bought on the way home from seeing Gregory, I convinced myself that I wasn't doing any real harm. Amy needed to work anyway, and didn't I have some kind of right to pursue, on my own, whatever was to be pursued?

But still I felt guilty the next day when Gregory and I boarded a ferry together. I had to sweep Amy from my mind as, like guided magic, the boat took me and Gregory northward along what seemed to me the majestic bay. All the corny thoughts—the wind in our hair, the swooshing of the water and churning of the motor, the postcard thrill of the Golden Gate Bridge—I kept to myself. We glided past Angel Island, where so many hundreds of thousands of Asian immigrants had waited, leaving poems of loss and homesickness on its walls. Gregory knew more about Angel Island than I did. He'd been there dozens of times, had helped curate an exhibit about its history.

Sitting side by side, heading toward the house where he had grown up, Gregory said he'd started reading about Laura and Rose Wilder. Before that, what he'd known about them came mostly from the TV show reruns he had sometimes watched as a kid.

“Now you know that Michael Landon looked nothing like the real Pa,” I said.

“Isn't that always the way.”

“The real Pa never cried and never wore his shirts half open to expose his chest hair.”

When Gregory laughed, I felt better. “I can't believe I'm doing this,” he said. He stretched out, his leg touching mine for a moment. “You with your stolen documents.”

He spoke lightly, but the words brought me back to the reason we were there. If Gregory was related to Rose, then he was related to the real Pa too.

“What was your grandfather like?” I asked.

“He was kind. A representative of his generation, you know? World War II veteran. Show little emotion. Keep moving forward. I was in eighth grade when he died.”

“Did he talk about
his
parents? Did your mother?”

“She always said they were good, upstanding-citizen types. Civic pride and all that. Californian pride. That was important to my grandparents too. I remember that.”

“And you only found out about his being adopted a few years ago.”

“My mother didn't even find out until after he died. I remember when she told me, it was after a round of radiation. She said she wanted me to help her go through her grandmother's things, and I said I would, but somehow we never got around to it.” Gregory turned his face to the sunlight, considering this. “I know we should have talked about it more. But I guess she figured—well, those things would be mine. She figured I would see for myself. She was never as interested in the past as I was. Better to keep things there, you know? History was like trivia. She didn't seem particularly curious to know the circumstances of her father's birth.”

I didn't admit to Gregory that I felt suddenly jealous, thinking about all the family history he had right here for the taking. To be looked at or not, ignored or not. It was, at least, there. Possible. It could be pored over and preserved. My own origins were forever vague to me, lost through language and war, maintainable only through Ong Hai's remembered stories that had no documentation. No wonder my mother, and now I, held on to that gold pin.

“Your grandfather and your mother—they didn't move a lot? They weren't wanderers?” I asked.

“No. They stayed here all their lives.”

“She was a wanderer. Rose, I mean. She and Laura both were, and Laura's Pa. They were called homesteaders and settlers, but really they wanted to keep going, see what else lay beyond the visible horizon.”

I didn't say that my family too had wandered and settled, had sought a home in the Western world that they'd never quite found.

When the ferry docked in Larkspur we got a cab toward the village of Corte Madera a couple miles away. This was part of Marin County, Gregory explained, which a lot of people now considered total yuppieburbia. But it was not like the McMansioning in the Chicago suburbs, bloated with circle driveways and three-stall garages. Here, fancy houses hid themselves in the hills or in conspicuously understated neighborhoods. Shrubbery edged over some of the narrow streets, nearly concealing stone driveways and dirt walking paths, pickup trucks and Volvos, picket fences and chicken coops, in what were apparently multimillion-dollar backyards. It wasn't always this way, Gregory said; his house was the only one he knew of that had stayed in the same family over generations.

It occurred to me that I was following a stranger to his childhood home. What did I really know of Gregory beyond his supposed lineage, his connection to Laura and Rose? I tried to keep track of the street names and told myself to call Amy, even while justifying not calling by telling myself that everything would be fine. In spite of Gregory's hesitation the day before, he was easy to be with, easy to talk to. We were, it seemed, familiar to each other, hadn't suffered a single lull in conversation.

When the cab turned and a gray-shingled bungalow came into view, I didn't need Gregory to tell me that this was the house that had been built for his grandparents over sixty years ago. Though it had the seacoast cottage look of other homes in the neighborhood, I was comforted by its shaggy paint and unmowed yard. I could see families gathering for holidays here, wrapping themselves in blankets to sit on the porch a while longer. They would keep a fire going; they would light candles at dinner and stay up late, talking to each other. It was the kind of place that would look good in any weather, that would appeal even in the dreariest of rains.

Did people actually live this way?

I wondered if I would ever know that for myself, if anyone in my family would. Was it possible my mother and Ong Hai were already there—did they really love wherever they lived? In the
Little House
books, you knew when their house really seemed like home because Ma Ingalls would bring out her delicate china shepherdess figurine, one of the few adornments she owned.

Gregory and I paid the driver. A narrow path, with tassels of grass erupting between flagstones, led to a door at the back of Gregory's family house. Through its square window I could see part of a yellow kitchen.

In 1948 Albert Stellenson had had the house built on several acres. The town was sleepy then, surrounded by hills and orchards. Gregory's mother had slowly sold off parcels of land as wealthier people moved into the area and property taxes spiked. Now the house was Gregory's, and he said he wasn't sure what to do with the responsibility. He didn't want to live there—the commute to the city was too long for him, and the idea of being in that house, just him, was too isolating. He said he should probably rent it out, but that would mean packing up and moving all of his mother's things, and, more than that, relinquishing a hold on the place as he knew it.

He hadn't wanted an inheritance so soon, but now it was his, waiting: this solid structure, this compass point.

Inside, the dusty, locked-in smell of minor neglect. A few withered plants, a stack of mail and magazines on the kitchen table. The living room was in a state of in medias res—blankets bunched up on the sofa, books open on the coffee table and soaking in the light from the large front windows, the sheers pushed back unevenly.

As I looked out at the overgrown greenery in the front yard, I let myself pretend that I was staying here. I imagined myself coming downstairs to the kitchen in the morning, bringing a cup of coffee to the living room or maybe out to the old, vine-tangled pergola in the backyard.

From the kitchen, where Gregory was opening cupboards, he said that his last serious relationship, which had almost turned into an engagement, had ended because of this house. This was too interesting not to pursue.

“What happened?” I asked, going in to take a seat at the scarred wooden table where Gregory and his mother must have sat countless times.

Haley was the woman's name, and she had envisioned the two of them living there together, eventually raising a family. This was before Gregory's mother died, and Gregory couldn't help thinking Haley was counting the days to death so she could move in. It wasn't fair or rational of him; his mother had liked the girl, and wanted the house to remain in the family. But it made Gregory realize that he wanted everything to stay stopped in time a while longer. He wanted a preservation house. He wasn't yet willing to inhabit the place on someone else's terms.

“And what happened to Haley?”

“She's engaged to someone else. A friend of mine from Berkeley. I'm going to their wedding next year.”

“So you probably wouldn't have stayed together anyway.”

“Probably not.”

He was standing in front of the open refrigerator, surveying the door shelves full of condiments. He picked up a jar of olives, looked at the expiration date, and put it back.

“I'm never here on the trash-pickup days,” he said apologetically. He filled two glasses with water, handing one to me. “There's also tea and coffee, if you don't mind it straight up.”

“This is fine,” I said. I told him I liked the kitchen, and I did, even if the counters and cabinets looked like they had last been updated in the eighties. The floor was vinyl-tiled and a lapis-colored light fixture hung over the table. I thought if I squinted I could imagine what the room had looked like in the forties and fifties. Gingham and floral curtains at the windows, enamel stove and oven. I remembered how so many old-timey children's books and cartoons had images of pies cooling on windowsills, and usually a comic character—a dog, a rapscallion, a hobo—was angling to steal them. I had loved these dreamscapes, where neighbors popped by to borrow eggs and sugar. I wasn't much of a baker, but I imagined rolling out a piecrust in Gregory's mother's kitchen, filling it with tart cherries or apple slices. I'd slide the pie into the oven until it turned a perfect golden brown, edges ruffled, then I'd set it on the windowsill, where occasional breezes would lightly stir the poplin curtains. All of this part of a grand tradition, reaching back to Laura Ingalls Wilder and further. If the
Little House
books were to be believed, Ma Ingalls was capable of baking anything; as Pa said, she
could always beat the nation cooking
. Once, she had even concocted a new delicious pie out of green, unripe pumpkin.

“Was your mother a good cook?” I asked as Gregory glanced through a utility drawer. He seemed to be reminding himself of what was there.

“Yeah, actually, she was.” He looked up, smiled. “You know how people say that you're either good at cooking or you're good at baking? She was good at both. Just sort of intuitively. I remember the last thing she baked—I know this might sound morbid, but I don't mean it to be. I remember it because she knew it. She baked this lemon cake with fresh fruit in the middle, with lemon curd made from scratch and mixed with mascarpone—it was complex and took a long time, and it completely wore her out. And she said, as we were eating it, that it was probably the last cake she'd ever make.”

“I'm really sorry, Gregory.”

He picked up a box of tea from the counter and regarded it. “Thanks. I'm sorry too. It's still kind of weird for me to be here. Even though it's been two years, this house is still hers.”

I kept forgetting that we'd met only two days before. Maybe he felt the same way, or realized it, because he seemed almost embarrassed as he changed the subject.

“You sure you don't want some tea?” When I said no thanks, he said, “Well, I guess we should start looking through that stuff.”

We went upstairs, to a spare bedroom jammed with artifacts from a leftover, unfinished life. There was a mannequin in one corner, with a half-sewn polka-dot dress on it. Filing cabinets and plastic storage bins were stacked against the walls, and bookshelves held everything from photo frames to old board games to zip-locked bags of ribbon.

“Here they are,” Gregory said. There were only three boxes, cardboard that had been softened by years of being moved around. We carried them down to the living room.

Gregory brought his book bag over and took out a notebook. “I should be cataloging all of this,” he said.

“Is that going to take a long time?” I asked.

“Fine, fine,” he said. “I'll do it later.”

The first box contained photo albums, some of which he said he remembered seeing before. Most of the pictures were stuck to the pages, which made Gregory wince, muttering about having to transfer everything to archival-quality stock. He carefully peeled one off to check the back and found it labeled in that classic slanted old-fashioned cursive that reminded me of Rose's hand, of Mrs. Louis Stellenson's hand.
Louis and Mary, 1912
.
Honeymoon
. Gregory's great-grandparents were leaning into each other as if bracing against a wind tunnel. Beneath their feet, cobblestones, and a hazy European village in the background.