midnight or dawn to be read aloud by Rose or Emily who took turns wiping their eyes. Day after day the writer from a far year begged Emily’s pardon, worried on her future, and signed himself with a flourish and an almost audible sigh, William Ross Fielding.
And each day Emily, eyes shut, said, “Read it again. I almost got a face to match the words!”
By week’s end, with six ancient letters stacked and crumbling fast, Emily fell into exhaustion and exclaimed, “Stop! Devil take that sinful blackmailer who won’t show his face! Burn it!”
“Not yet,” said Rose, arriving with no ancient yellowed note, but a spanking bright new envelope, nameless outside, nameless in.
Emily, back from the dead, snatched it and read:
“I am ashamed for assisting all this trouble which now must stop. You can find your mail at 11 South St. James. Forgive.”
And no signature.
“I don’t understand,” Emily said.
“Easy as pie,” said Rose. “Whoever’s sending your letters back is making affectionate approaches with someone else’s notes from when Coolidge was president!”
“My God, Rose, feel my face: red-hot. Why would someone climb a ladder, rob an attic, and run? Why not stand on our lawn and yell?”
“Because,” said Rose, quietly, turning the new letter over, “maybe whoever wrote this is just as shy now as William Ross Fielding was way back where you can’t remember. Now what?”
“I wonder …” Emily stared out the window. “… who lives at 11 South St. James.”
“Here it is.”
They stood in front of it late in the day.
11 South St. James.
“Who’s there looking out at us this very minute?” said Emily.
“Not the gent who sent you the confession,” said Rose. “He just helped carry the ladder but can’t carry the guilt. In there now is the mad fool who’s been sending your notes. And if we don’t move the whole street’ll be a beehive. Shake a leg.”
They crossed the porch and rang the bell. The front door drifted wide. An old man, well into his late seventies, stood there, astonished.
“Why, Emily Bernice Watriss,” he exclaimed. “Hello!”
“What,” said Emily Bernice Watriss, “in hell’s name are you up to?”
“Right now?” he said. “Tea’s ready. Yes?”
They sidled in, perched themselves, ready to run, and watched him pour teakettle water over some orange pekoe leaves.
“Cream or lemon?” he asked.
“Don’t cream and lemon me!” Emily said.
“Please.”
They took their cups but said nothing and drank none, as he sipped his own and said:
“My friend called to admit he had revealed my address. This whole week has made me incredibly sad.”
“How do you think I feel?” Emily exclaimed. “You are the one, then, who stole my mail and sent it back?”
“I am that one, yes.”
“Well then, make your demands!”
“Demands? No, no! Did you fear blackmail? How stupid of me not to guess you might think so. No, no. Are those the letters there?”
“They are!”
“The letter on the top, the first one, dated June fourth, 1921. Would you mind opening it? Just hold it where I can’t read it, and let me speak, yes?”
Emily fumbled the letter out on her lap.
“Well?” she said.
“Just this,” he said, and shut his eyes and began to recite in a voice they could hardly hear:
“My dearest dear Emily—”
Emily sucked in her breath.
The old man waited, eyes shut, and then repeated the words signed across the inside of his eyelids:
“My dearest dear Emily. I know not how to address you or pour out all that is in my heart—”
Emily let her breath out.
The old man whispered:
“—I have admired you for so many months and years, and yet when I have seen you, when we have danced or shared picnics with your friends at the lake, I had found myself unable to speak—but now at last I must speak my tenderest thoughts or find myself mad beyond salvation—”
Rose took out her handkerchief and applied it to her nose. Emily took out hers and applied it to her eyes.
His voice was soft and then loud and then soft again:
“—and the thought of anything more than that, the merest kiss, shakes me that I dare to put it in words—”
He finished, whispering:
“—until that hour and day, I send you my affections and kindest thoughts for your future life and existence. Signed William Ross Fielding. Now. Second letter.”
Emily opened the second letter and held it where he could not see it.
“Dearest dear one,” he said. “You have not answered my first letter which means one or several things: you did not receive it, it was kept from you, or you received, destroyed it, or hid it away. If I have offended you, forgive— Everywhere I go, your name is spoken. Young men speak of you. Young women tell rumors that soon you may travel away by ocean liner …”
“They did that, in those days,” said Emily, almost to herself. “Young women, sometimes young men, sent off for a year to forget.”
“Even if there was nothing to forget?” said the old man, reading his own palms spread out on his knees.
“Even that. I have another letter here. Can you tell me what it says?”
She opened it and her eyes grew wet as she read the lines and heard him, head down, speak them quietly, from remembrance.
“Dearest dear, do I dare say it, love of my life? You are leaving tomorrow and will not return until long after Christmas. Your engagement has been announced to someone already in Paris, waiting. I wish you a grand life and a happy one and many children. Forget my name. Forget it? Why, dear girl, you never knew it. Willie or Will? I think you called me that. But there was no last name, really, so nothing to forget. Remember instead my love. Signed W.R.F.”
Finished, he sat back and opened his eyes as she folded the letter and placed it with the others in her lap, tears running down her cheeks.
“Why,” she asked at last, “did you steal the letters? And use them this way, sixty years later? Who told you where the letters might be? I buried them in that coffin, that trunk, when I sailed to France. I don’t think I have looked at them more than once in the past thirty years. Did William Ross Fielding tell you about them?”
“Why, dear girl, haven’t you guessed?” said the old man. “My Lord, I am William Ross Fielding.”
There was an incredibly long silence.
“Let me look at you.” Emily leaned forward as he raised his head into the light.
“No,” she said. “I wish I could say. Nothing.”
“It’s an old man’s face now,” he said. “No matter. When you sailed around the world one way, I went another. I have lived in many countries and done many things, a bachelor traveling. When I heard that you had no children and that your husband died, many years ago, I drifted back to this, my grandparents’ house. It has