Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

Author:Elizabeth McCracken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

She got a letter back, from Minna, Parisian Minna. Dear Margaret, she wrote. How extraordinary to hear from you!

It was a short letter, well spelled, unsentimental. No blue wax seal. It explained that she had moved from Oromocto with her aunt a few weeks after her arrival; her aunt could teach her the cello—of course Minna should play the cello—but Minna’s voice required training and of that Almira Sprague was ignorant. Her father was dead, had Margaret heard, of course she must have heard, being back in Salford. She signed herself as ever.

Margaret read the letter five times. Then she was out of words and she allowed herself to read Minna’s letters to her father.

She could tell the difference. Minna’s letters to her father were strange casseroles, made of language, yes, but only sometimes in English: words of such foreignness they felt like cold spots in the warm lines of Minna’s sentences. (Latin, French, Italian, probably, even little prickly lines of what Margaret assumed was Greek.) Also sudden bars of music, pencil drawings, watercolors. Was it that Minna and her father didn’t understand each other, so she wrote in as many languages as possible, hoping to find the one in which they were both fluent? Or was it that they understood each other so utterly that this was how they communicated? She wrote in rebuses and code. One letter began, My own Papa! This is a lipogram. It’s lacking. Do you know what it lacks, my darling Papa? Hint: a small thing, but without it you & I cannot sign our patronym, nor you your first.

Minna’s letter to Margaret was in ordinary English. Dear Margaret, she wrote. How extraordinary to hear from you! You say you would recognize me anywhere. I wonder. I am quite made over. In answer to your question: no, I don’t think I will ever come back to Salford. Not ever. You must understand that it is a place of terrible memories for me, worse than you know. Not ever, she wrote again, and here she underlined it, and underneath the word ever—silly to think so, and yet it was true—Margaret could see a hint of the child she’d known. The paper was torn. So not ever and yet in a way here she was. Not ever and as ever.

For every five letters she sent to Minna she got one back. They were matter-of-fact, as though to a distant friend, enough, the way you might send pennies to the electric company when you owed hundreds of dollars: not square, but you wouldn’t be cut off. Margaret tied her letters, her paltry archive, with blue ribbon, too.

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