October 7, 2007
Ruth opened her door before I rang a second time. She wore a cardigan with one elbow darned in a thread that did not quite match. Behind her, the apartment smelled of oranges and furniture polish.
“If that's a collection box, take it somewhere else,” she said.
I was holding the paper Leah had left.
“It's yours if you can use it.”
Ruth took the packet and examined the edge. “Good stock.”
She had been able to judge paper by touch while the rest of us were still searching for the label. At sixty-six, she had stopped doing production work, but her hands continued to measure things before her eyes had finished looking.
I brought out photographs of the pieces we hoped to display. Ruth sat across from me at her kitchen table and sorted them without comment. The winter poster went to one side. A church supper card went to the other. She kept an unsigned design of birds above a strip of water in front of her.
“That one I can't tell you.”
“It looks like yours.”
“Many things do.”
She tapped the supper card. “This was mine. Not the lettering. Your mother did that, didn't she?”
My mother had died before Leah was grown. In the photograph, the lettering had been reduced to shapes too small for certainty. I said I would check whether a larger copy existed.
Ruth nodded, satisfied with an answer that did not pretend to be complete.
I showed her the winter poster. “Leah made the drawing.”
“I know. I cut the separations.”
I had forgotten. Or, more accurately, I had remembered the late nights as Dad's late nights because he talked about them the most. Ruth had made the image printable: cutting, adjusting, testing how one layer of color met another. The work disappeared into the finished picture unless something went wrong.
“Would you help us describe that?” I asked.
“For your display?”
“If you want to.”
“What happened to Arthur's hand behind every page?”
My face grew hot. Peter had already sent her the invitation proof.
“I'm changing it.”
Ruth pushed her teacup away. “I worked there twenty-one years. I don't want to spend an afternoon being explained as a discovery.”
“I didn't mean—”
“I know what you meant. I'm telling you what I don't want.”
I took out my notebook. She watched me without smiling.
“What would you want?”
She named the jobs she remembered, the ones she could speak about confidently, and the ones that would require more than memory. She did not ask to be made the hidden genius of the shop. Some days, she said, everyone had been tired and the work had merely been good enough to send out. She wanted those days left ordinary.
Then she mentioned the letters.
In a folder of old shop correspondence were notes she had sent Dad during a stretch when her husband had been ill. She had asked for different hours, explained absences, offered to bring work home. They had arrived at the business, but they were not business exhibits.
“Have you found them?”
“Not yet.”
“When you do, set them aside for me. Don't read them to make the labels warmer.”
The precision of her request made me ashamed of an idea I had not quite admitted having. Personal letters would have made the display feel intimate. Visitors liked that: a glimpse behind the counter, evidence that the people in old photographs had been people.
“I won't use them.”
“Or ask Leah to make copies.”
“I won't.”
Ruth gave me three dates to check and a description of the separation process in words a visitor could understand. She crossed out a phrase when it sounded grander than the work had felt.
At the door, she returned the photograph of the birds.
“Leave the name off that one until you know.”
“Would that look careless?”
“Less careless than putting the wrong one on.”
On the bus home, I rewrote my list of possible exhibits. It had become shorter. Beside two pieces I could now put a name I trusted. Beside another, I left a space that I was beginning to understand was part of the work.