The Fate of Mercy Alban (5 page)

“Sure, honey.” I nodded, and she flounced toward the door. “I’ll join you in a little while.”

But I stayed right where I was, sitting on the floor of my mother’s closet, still holding the satchel, until Amity had closed the door behind her. I hadn’t been truthful with my daughter and I didn’t quite understand why. There
was
a return address on those letters.

Well, not a return
address
exactly. The initials
D.C
. were written in the corner of each envelope. When I saw them, I felt a shiver down my spine. Something about those initials gnawed at me—who was D.C.? Certainly not my dad. They sounded vaguely familiar somehow, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I drew the stack of letters out of the satchel and slowly untied the worn silk ribbon around them. I knew I shouldn’t be reading my mother’s private correspondence, but I couldn’t stop myself. This felt important somehow. I opened the first envelope and began to read.

My eyes grew wide. A love letter? I knew very little about my mother’s life before she married my father, and certainly nothing about her romantic life. I had always thought my dad was her first love.

I knew my mother had grown up in a middle-class family that lived a few miles down the road from Alban House and she had been the childhood best friend of my father’s sister, Fate. I just assumed she and my dad knew each other as children, and he basically married the girl next door. Theirs was a lifetime romance—at least that’s how they told the story to us.

So who was this charmer writing to young Adele Mitchell—I looked back at the date on the letter—just a year before she and my father were married?

She kept the letters all these years, so obviously he was very special to her, somebody whose memory she didn’t quite want to let fade. It seemed romantic and lovely, and I smiled at the thought of it. “You can still surprise me, Mom,” I said.

I turned to the last page of the letter to read the signature.

There it was again, that gnaw of familiarity. I could feel my thoughts reaching back through all of my memory banks, searching for the information that hung just out of reach. I knew who D was, I just
knew
it.

I turned back to the first page of the letter and began to read.

I let the letter drop to the ground and stared blankly at it, my heart beating hard and fast in my chest.

I didn’t need to read the rest of it to know the man who wrote these letters was David Coleville, my father’s best friend when they were in college.

Before settling in at Harvard, where he met my father, Coleville was a celebrated war correspondent whose stories about the lives of ordinary people in Europe during World War II for magazines like
Life
and the
Saturday Evening Post
had won him the Pulitzer Prize three years in a row. After the war, he began to focus his writing on the home front, illuminating the zeitgeist of a generation coming of age in the early 1950s. His work has been required reading in English classes at colleges nationwide ever since.

Amid considerable buzz in the country’s literary circles that he was working on his first novel, David Coleville’s spectacular career ended when he shot himself to death at Alban House during a party in the summer of 1956, the same night my aunt Fate disappeared without a trace.

David Coleville and my mother, in love with each other the year before he killed himself right here at Alban House? I can’t explain exactly why, but I felt as though the entire world had shifted on its axis because of what I now knew.

That summer night in 1956, when Coleville took his own life and my aunt disappeared, had always been shrouded in a kind of mystery that was hard to define, like a shameful family secret better buried than aired. My mother had never said a word about it, never hinted that she even knew Coleville, much less loved him.

When I was in school, Coleville’s work was part of the English class curriculum. The fact that he committed suicide
at my home
always came up, with the other students and even the professors looking to me for additional insight into what was generally believed to be a tragedy for modern literature. But I had no insight to give.

I had asked my parents about it when I was younger but was always rebuffed in the sternest of tones. My brothers and I whispered about it—did the writer kill Aunt Fate and then kill himself? Did she run off when she found his body? We, and all of history, knew what had happened to Coleville, but nobody knew what had happened to my aunt. It was as though the family closed ranks around that night in a secret agreement to keep silent about whatever had gone on.

That’s why Jane’s revelation that my mother had intended to talk to a journalist about it the day she died was so stunning to me.

“What were you going to say to him, Mom?” I whispered into the air.

And then I took a quick breath in as an icy thread crept its way through my veins. My mother died the very day she was planning to talk about something the family had kept hidden for decades. I shook my head, trying to shake off the thoughts that were taking hold. Were the two connected somehow? It just couldn’t be.
Could it?

I tried to reason it out. What possible relevance could a decades-old tragedy have today? I hadn’t even thought about Coleville’s suicide and my aunt’s disappearance for many years. Decades. By the time I was an adult and had a family of my own, it had simply become part of the past, and not even my direct past. It was just one more scandalous tragedy at Alban House, and frankly, after my brothers’ deaths, I didn’t even care about it anymore. Theirs was the Alban House tragedy that haunted me, not something that had happened before I was even born.

But now, as I sat cross-legged on the floor of my mother’s closet, I let my mind drift back to what I knew about that night: He was found in the main garden in front of the house during a summer solstice party, the same night my aunt Fate disappeared. That was the standard family line about the incident. But it certainly didn’t say much, did it?

There would have been a police investigation into the suicide as well as into my aunt’s disappearance. I can’t believe my grandparents wouldn’t have launched a massive search for her, paid anything, done anything to find their daughter. I know I would have. Did they? I didn’t know.

I looked at the letters spread out before me, hoping that I could find some answers within them. The first letter was dated September 1955 and referenced my mother’s and Coleville’s recent time together at Alban House. That told me Coleville visited here the summer
before
his suicide. That’s when he and my mother must have met.

I began reading the other letters, one by one. No major bombshells there—they were newsy, romantic letters from a man obviously besotted with my mother. He wrote about his lectures at the university and some of his more outrageous students. He mentioned my father often, outlining in detail their exploits during my father’s last year of college. And he wrote of blossoming love, starlit walks along the shoreline, quiet afternoons in the garden. The letters were funny, tender, literate. The more I read, the more I came to know this man who loved my mother, and I began to feel a crushing sadness at the knowledge of what became of him, that he took his life right here in this house.

What drove him to do it? From these letters, written during the year before his death, it was clear to me that he wasn’t suffering from the kind of depression that plagued so many writers and artists. There was no angst in his words, only hope, humor, and love.

I wondered, did my mother spurn him? She had married my father very soon after that summer. Did Coleville choose to die because she chose my dad?

I didn’t have the benefit of reading her letters to him, but from what he wrote to her (“I miss you, too, darling,” and “I read your wonderful letter over and over again, marveling at the fact that someone like you could love me”), it was pretty clear to me that she did indeed love him. So what happened? How did it all go so wrong?

I was nearly ready to pack up the letters when something in the last one, dated May 1956, caught my eye.

This didn’t sound right to me. He had written this letter shortly before his death. I had studied his work in college and I knew there was talk he was working on a book, but I was sure he didn’t have one published before or after he died. I read on.