The Hatbox Letters

by Beth Powning

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In this beautiful and deeply moving novel, a young widow struggles to come to terms with her solitary life in the rambling Victorian house she shared until recently with her husband and children in semi-rural New Brunswick.

It is in this house, surrounded by heirloom gardens and the gentle sounds of a river, that Kate Harding, 52, faces her second winter since the untimely death of her husband. Her children, now grown, are living away, and Kate is truly on her own. In her living room are several hatboxes filled with letters and other ghostly ephemera, recently brought by her sister from the attic of their grandparents’ 18th-century Connecticut house. Their sweet mustiness tinges the air and makes Kate dream of her childhood and of her beloved grandparents. She remembers the sense of permanence and refuge that she felt in their apple-scented world, as well as, more recently, with her husband. As she begins to read the hatbox letters, she discovers that what to a child seemed a serene and blissful marriage was in fact founded on a tragic event. As Kate’s eyes clear to the truth of the past, a new tragedy unfolds, and her own house, filled with the shared detritus of marriage and motherhood, becomes the refuge where Kate can connect the strands of her unravelled life.

In The Hatbox Letters — which is both sad and exhilarating, touching and illuminating — Beth Powning offers readers an unforgettable story of love, grief and renewal, both past and present, as well as her extraordinary perceptions of the natural world.

Excerpt from The Hatbox Letters
The birds rise with a muted thunder, their wings serrate the light. For an instant, a peregrine falcon zigzags through the flock. Then it drops from the belly of the rising bird-cloud. In its talons is a sandpiper, crumpled like a ball of paper. It is hard to decide which drama to observe, the escape of the falcon with its prey or the flock’s display as the birds rush seaward like a single entity, a ballooning flame that rises and falls, expands and implodes, one instant silver and the next black. The flock speeds back towards the beach, passes close to the watchers, makes a dazzling turn, fast as thought. Then, with a diminishing roar, the birds waver, their legs drop, stretch. They touch down. They fluff their feathers, Kate observes, the way humans pull coats up around necks after a shock. Trying to put ourselves back as we were.

Release date: March 21, 2006

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

Part One
1. Kate
KATE LEANS IN THE DOORWAY OF THE LIVING ROOM, arms crossed, the sleeves of a cotton sweater shoved to her elbows. Her forearms are sinewy—brown, dry-skinned, thorn-scratched. She wears two silver bracelets and a thick gold wedding band. Some women, she realizes, remove their rings.
In the corner is a stack of nine antique hatboxes. She has not touched them since they were set down a week ago, delivered by her sister, who drove them up from Hartford. They are oval or round, some tied with string, some decorated with maroon-and-silver stripes, others printed with gothic landscapes—willows, mountains, ruined castles. Their smell has begun to permeate the room even though the windows are open. It is the smell of her grandparents' attic, a smell she has not forgotten but thought had vanished, like the past itself. That it has not and is still here, this aroma of horsehair and leather, of apples and musty quilts, of old dresses and satin ribbons—that this smell still exists here in this Canadian river valley, six hundred miles north of her grandparents' house, is disquieting. It awakens a feeling in Kate that she remembers from childhood, composed of odd emotional strands: love, sorrow, pain, contentment.
The arrival of the hatboxes is untimely, since dispossession, like grief, is an act of which Kate has had her fill since Tom's death a year and three months ago, from a heart attack at age fifty-two. She's hauled garbage bags of clothes, like lumpy corpses, down to the washing machine, unable to give away anything that might bear his painty, sawdusty smell. Sorting through the clothes, she was relieved whenever she came across T-shirts like Swiss cheese or underpants held by threads to waistbands no longer elastic. Choices made easy: Okay, throw this away. No one in her family has wanted to face making such decisions about the papers in these hatboxes. They have been lugged from place to place, from barn to basement to closet, ever since the big house in whose attic they'd accumulated for five generations was sold.
She goes into the living room and squats by the boxes. Their papered cardboard is dry as old plaster. How strange, she thinks, that they are here, now. And she finds herself wishing they could have remained forever under the attic's cobwebbed window, their contents spilled, letters stuffed by children's hands back into envelopes embroidered by the teeth of mice. Like leaves in a mulch pile. Forgotten, skeletal, slowly reverting to dirt. So it might have been if the house had not been sold, if time had not stalked on relentless legs, like a heron, and bent its long neck.
She slides her fingers over a lid, remembering the excitement she and her cousins had felt about these boxes and the disappointment of finding only papers whose half-read sentences were like windborne music or distant surf, faint hints of a larger sound. The box is so desiccated that its lid is loose and lifts easily, releasing the concentrated mustiness within, so familiar that tears spring to Kate's eyes. It takes her to the closets, bedrooms, pantries and cupboards of her grandparents' enormous, white-clapboarded house on the tree-lined street of the village where Kate grew up. She and her sister could leave their own home, walk past the tiny general store, with its wooden porch and post office, past the library and the church, and be on Shepton's lawn in ten minutes. Shepton House had been named by her great-grandmother for the English town where some branch of the family originated. Shepton, they called the place after awhile, dropping the pretentious "House." The word, spoken and accompanied by memory, is what a spell might be to a shaman: an evocation, a tumult of associations. She stirs the papers. Like the snow-flattened leaves of early spring, they are brown and soft, overlapping, their corners fanned. Some are in bundles, tied with faded cotton string. Most lie in a dismaying confusion. Kate pauses, looks out the window. River light quivers in trees at the bottom of her lawn. She is still squatting, irresolute. Why did I agree to take on this responsibility? Now—of all times.
She slips into a sitting position, crosses her legs. The house is so quiet. No one will be coming to visit until Thanksgiving. Her daughter, Christy, is in Halifax, her son, Liam, in Ireland. She listens to the sound of an empty house, thinking, Am I still a wife? She sees her future not the way it is now but the way it was supposed to be; this, unlike the bald fact of Tom's death, is a loss she can't share, a grief she can't reveal. She is allowed to mourn the past, Tom as he was, the sound of his voice, the body that once cradled hers; but the future that was theirs—its loss has become like a new death, the death of someone no one else knows. A hidden corpse. It ebbs away, her memory of how it felt to slide her hand into the back pocket of Tom's shorts, to relate a rambling dream and not care whether he listened, to casually wipe mustard from his chin. This loss of intimacy is the hardest, for with it goes her sense of self. She cannot bear to be with long-married couples: she's watched a husband lift a strand of windblown hair from his wife's mouth, has seen a wife peel a hard-boiled egg and hand it to her husband. It is dangerous, as well, to be in places—dinner parties, picnics—where conversational lures may attract memories, or feelings. She feels stripped of some sleek texture, as if she has lost her favourite silk scarf, orange-pink and luminous as sun-filled tulips, that carried in its folds the wife she once was, the wife she would still be.
She leans forward and rummages in the hatbox, knowing that she is being hooked by its sweet smell. She tips reading glasses from her head, settles them on her nose, unfolds a paper and presses it to her face. She breathes deeply. What is it? Lately she finds herself in a peculiar state, slowed, as if floating without impulsion, in which she examines her own feelings. There's a familiar, disturbing stab in her heart that she remembers from when, as a child, she laid her head on Shepton's prickly pillows, or lifted the lids of stoneware crocks or opened the games cupboard under the stairs. It's a small ache, a presage of grief, evoked by the distilled smell of age. It's a reminder, she thinks, of joy's sorrow-edge. Of how every moment tilts on the brink of its own decline. There's something else, though. Responsibility to the past. And flight from its demands. The feelings she's come to recognize, holding in her hand, say, a small pin that Tom was once given at a ceremony in Ottawa "for service to the arts." How, she chastises herself, during her process of dispossession, could she think of parting with this piece of silver? Doesn't she have the responsibility of memorializing Tom?
Digging through the soft papers, her fingers encounter something thick, stiff, unyielding. She feels the thrill of discovery, slides it loose. It's a large black-and-white studio portrait of a family. She sits back, touched. People, with their expressive eyes—it's as if she's rescued them. She turns the picture over. On the back, someone has written, in pencil: "On the occasion of Ellen's eighth birthday." She pushes herself to her feet, lifts the hatbox and sets it on Tom's drawing table. She puts the photograph on the table and studies it. Father, mother and four children. The oldest child is a girl. There are two boys in knickerbockers, and on the mother's lap sits a younger child with corkscrew curls. She passes her hand over the portrait the way she has caressed, with a finger, Tom's handwriting. Her grandfather must be the older of the two boys. This is my grandfather. Here are his parents, his brother and sisters.
She slides into the chair at the oak table, which is pushed against a window overlooking the porch and the river. In its sliding drawer are Tom's Conté crayons, charcoals, oil sticks. Next to the table, on the lower shelves of a built-in bookcase, are Tom's working journals, which Kate has not touched since the day of his death. She has not sat at this table, either. This was Tom's place, and she has kept it dusted but uncluttered, like a shrine. Yet here she sits. It is the first thing she has done since his death that seems more than a divestment. It is a willed action that blunders clumsily but definitely against the obdurate past. She lays her hands on the light-paled wood and spreads her fingers, thinking that she does not inhabit Tom's spirit as she sits in his chair, nor does her mind glance towards his reaction. He did not know of the existence of these papers, never saw these hatboxes. Perusing her family's past, she is leaning towards a future he will not share.
She scoops a handful of papers from the box and shuffles through them, peering at the headings of bills and receipts. They are dated 1902, and are addressed to Mr. Charles Thomas, Roselawn Street, Hartford, Connecticut. Charles Thomas. Must be Grampa Giles' father. My great-grandfather. They must have been comfortably well off, she thinks. Here are receipts from a livery stable, indicating that they didn't own a horse and carriage, yet she finds receipts for dancing and music lessons, for the Philharmonic and Harper's Magazine, for Italian sherry, French brandy, ale, rum, rye, for white roses and chrysanthemums bought by the dozen. The faded handwriting is elaborate, written with broad-nibbed ink pens. The invoices are decorated with etchings: a cow in grass beneath the heading "C.J. Anderson, Pure Milk," and beside "Brown, Thompson and Co., Dry Goods," a brick building towering over tiny trolley cars and women in long skirts. There are receipts for a Barzoni violin (twenty-five dollars); for portrait photographs, with a list of names.
She looks from the list to the photograph, matching names to faces. Charles and Lilian, the parents. Children: Katherine, the oldest daughter, with hair piled like a Gibson girl; Giles (my grandfather) behind his father's chair; Daniel, the younger son, one hand on his little sister's shoulder; and Ellen, the birthday child, in a middy blouse, on her mother's lap.
Her fingers tiptoe through the papers, seeking more photographs. She pauses over a small brown pamphlet—"Intermedial penmanship, Giles Thomas." This was Grampa Giles'! Eight lines per page, written in a ten-year-old's careful cursive, with blotches: "Two tarts too sweet to eat"; "Join the joiner's plane"; "Some swans new moon." She digs deeper, caught by a peculiar heading, scraps of paper with pencilled scrawls, one-cent postcards. Ah. She lifts out another photograph. Her great-grandparents—Charles and Lilian. She places this picture next to the other. They are older. The man's face is marked by disappointment. His eyes, Kate thinks, stare out at a bleak prospect. Lilian is not so much despairing as resigned. Kate studies the collar of her great-grandmother's dress. It is made of lace, is as wide as her shoulders and extends to her ample bosom, framing a locket that lies at the precise centre of her chest. Kate touches it, wondering whose picture it contains.
She half-turns on her chair and looks at the hatboxes in the corner. Maybe, she thinks, this is not a bad time for them to have arrived in her life. I could easily spend the entire day rummaging through them.
No, remember what you decided.
Lying in bed this morning, watching sunlight travel over the plaster walls, hearing the garbling honk of southbound geese, she'd decided to go down to the Bay of Fundy. Her friend Caroline had invited her to go with a group of friends, and she had said no. This morning, though, she'd determined to go anyway, by herself, and not to the beach where her friends would be gathering. She's been reminding herself that she has to make an effort to get out of her house, exercise, go places. She often finds herself sitting with a book in her lap, staring out the window, lost in memory. Aloneness has become a place of safety and confinement, like a windowless room that is both sanctuary and cell. She's aware of its attraction but knows that it gives her no nourishment.
She turns back to the desk, puts the photograph of her great-grandparents back into the hatbox, props the portrait of the family against the lamp. She stands, stretches and goes into the kitchen. Its ceiling is embossed tin, cream-coloured. The north window overlooks the river, and next to it is a screen door that opens onto the porch. There's a wood stove, and the floor is covered with black and red linoleum tiles, some of them buckled and cracked. There's an unfinished wood table with spool legs, a rocking chair, wooden cupboards painted green. Kate uses the wood stove even though there is a small electric range in the corner by the sink; she keeps the windows open until frost, loving the way wind moves through the room, stirring the pull chain of the overhead light, sighing through the screen door.
She should get ready to go. Leave now, or later? Nothing is imperative. Time is flaccid. Tea, a Thermos of tea. Sandwich. Binoculars, all that beach stuff.
She plugs in the kettle, takes a metal tea caddy from the cupboard. It was her granny's. At fifty-one, Kate is pleased to see that she is beginning to resemble her grandmother, whose thinness, narrow nose and anxious eyebrows she has inherited, although Kate is neither humble nor tiny. Rather, she is tall, and her pleasant expression has become strained, her direct gaze intimidating. In groups, she's silent, diffident when probed for opinions. Her smile is tentative, fleeting.
One side of the tea caddy is dented, and the lid, as a consequence, has to be pried. Kate feels defensive as she wrenches it open and then realizes that Tom's irritation about this caddy still lingers and affects the way she takes it down, the way she half-turns as if shielding herself and it from criticism. She wonders if relinquishing this sense of Tom's watching—it has to happen—will bring her freedom or emptiness. Lately, the two seem the same.
From the gauze bags rises the dark spice of tannin and tea dust. Memory rises … mulch pile, bone-dry folded flags, beehive, wood crumble … . She lifts a teabag to her nose, watching a wasp trailing a broken wing, and realizes suddenly that this cluster of memories has been drifting in her mind ever since she awakened, and is the remnant of a dream. She stares sightlessly out the kitchen window at the glinting river water, trying to remember it. Oh yes. Shepton had become a house with two sides. One was filled with clear light. But the other was dark and abandoned, enormous, with room upon room the colour of dust, wallpaper curling from plaster, stairs fragile as papier mâché.
She has been dreaming of her grandparents' house ever since the arrival of the hatboxes, whose odour must be rising up the stairwell, creeping into her bedroom. This is one of those dreams, she thinks, that snags in the mind and becomes as real as memory, so that eventually you're not sure whether it really happened. She runs it by again, trying to dispel its effect, yet she feels as if she's incurred a loss. She feels the unspecific longing of—what does it remind me of? Adolescence. When nothing seems to have been lost, and yet one is filled with grief. When one has no idea that one is in mourning for childhood itself.
She pours water into a teapot, stirs the teabags, lifts a Thermos down from the cupboard. She's imagining the village street of her childhood. She sees a child's view of houses, large as ocean liners, tipping back against the wondrous sky. Shepton was one of them. It had a porch all along the front and a row of trees so enormous she didn't even notice the second storey. Windows, curtains, seen through leaves. Stone steps, so wide she took three or four steps to cross each one, her shoes slippery. Someone's hand, someone high overhead. Step up. Step up. Grampa Giles' hands. If she reached both of hers up at the same time, her dress rose. Sunday, and the church bell was ringing. There they were, walking across the lawn going to church. Grass like green threads sprouted in the damp soil beneath the forsythia bushes. They passed the steps of the chapel where Kate would go to kindergarten and during naptime lie on her back under the piano and pretend she was the person who had carved its legs. And the church bent back against the sky, white clapboards and clear windowpanes. Steeple, a white cloud passing behind it. Now it was Granny's hand that held hers. Granny wore red shoes. Kate leaned to touch one with her finger, and Granny stopped walking and peered down too, pivoting her toes so they were lined up like two red plums.
Kate wants to tell these memories to Tom. Her heart feels swollen with the number of things stored up to tell him. On mornings like this, pinioned between late summer and early fall, the air tinged with coolness, they would sit on the porch in wooden rocking chairs wearing baggy sweaters or fleece vests. Kate with one knee bent, heel propped on the chair's rung. Maybe writing a letter to her parents, her pen moving rapidly, sporadically. Tom drawing in his sketchbook with the black, pebbly cover. Short sideways strokes of his pencil. Emphatic, then pausing, considering, like the lingering stillness after a question. Unlike the dream, which she has deliberately summoned, this vision of a late summer's morning in the cool of the front porch—goldenrod, fresh-cut grass—flashes baldly, like lightning, and makes her heart twist. How can it be gone? How can this life possibly be gone? The past stands so close, beckoning her, luring her with its shallow beauty, and she feels both tempted and enraged. She hears the thrum of a motorboat. She sees bits of it through the trees, white, black, a flag, as it powers downriver. She hears the expiring slap of its wash. He's gone. She makes herself think this, as she does many times every day. Here you are, Kate, a widow. An eddy of air comes over the grass, stirs the light chain, carries the sharp scent of chrysanthemums. She listens to the crickets, thinks how they make two sounds at once, a long shrilling from which break separate voices that rise and fall in a pulse both irregular and rhythmic. Summer's requiem.
Decisions have become more difficult to make since she's been alone. She needs to be firm with herself. I'm going to go to Mary's Point, see if the sandpipers are still there. I need to hear the sound of waves. Stare into a boundless shining sky. No, I don't want to go with anyone else. She answers another voice in her head that queries her choice. Because I'm going to visit Tom's cliff, sit with my back pressed against it. See if he's there. Pick out a gull and pretend it's him, as I did when the kids and I flung his ashes off the cliff. She remembers how a gull swooped near, dipped its wing into the air's muscle, reached through Tom's glittering dust and carried him out to sea.
She goes upstairs, makes her bed, collects a wool sweater, wool socks, the bird book from the back of the toilet. As she comes back down the stairs, she stops and looks at the hatboxes piled between the couch and the fireplace. She thinks again about what it is that worries her about exploring their contents. The letters and papers might, her parents told her, go back as far as 1797, when her great-great-great-grandmother arrived at the newly built house with her husband, carrying garden seeds in twists of paper. If she learns the real history of Shepton, will her memory of it be warped, her own place in its history diminished, her love for it compromised?
In the kitchen, she opens the refrigerator, takes out cheese and mustard, makes a sandwich. "Okay," she murmurs. "Do I have—book, binoculars, Thermos?" She stands, considering, the strap of a backpack slung over one shoulder. No one could ever tell her what colour her eyes were. "Hazel," her grampa would say. "Like mine." Neither green nor grey nor blue, their colour is nondescript, like the mouse-brown hair of her childhood that would neither curl nor hold barrettes. Her skin is weathered, and tiny stiff brooms etch the corners of her eyes. A couple of months after Tom's death, on the day of her fiftieth birthday, spent alone, she cut her hair. It's like a cap, hangs straight across her forehead, cups the back of her head. Her pianist fingers are strong, long—slightly longer than Tom's—with baggy knuckles.
She goes to the back door. The garden is shining. Every leaf holds a spear or prism or cup of light. Shadows double the petals of giant zinnias. Yellow leaves spiral down from the apple tree, twirling on the air like tiny coracles. There is a sense of repose in the persistence of flowers that continue to form buds, to hold soft blooms up to the ripening sun: coneflowers, phlox, shrub roses. She steps onto the porch, turns the key in the lock. The air smells of woodsmoke and ripe apples. She walks down the path, remembering the chaos of beach trips with children. Christy, not now, come on honey. Liam, did you remember the kite? And she is thinking how odd it is that in her waking mind the one place in her life that seemed perfect, Shepton, stays that way; yet in her sleep it has two sides, one bright, one dark—one perfect, one imperfect. And in her dream it is the dark side, the place she never knew, that she longs to visit.
THE HATBOX LETTERS. Copyright © 2004 by Powning Designs Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.