Be Kind, But Tell Them the Truth
Finding the Rovellis, 3: One hour with the woman who had been keeping my family's record for ninety years.
She had been waiting so long that she did not bother with the preliminaries.
I was still holding the frame of the spare bed. And Lilliana Rovelli — ninety-one years old, lying flat, tucked in for sleep, her head turned toward me — went on speaking, in the English she had begun learning at sea, fifteen years running the nursery on passenger ships between Genoa and the Far East, and had kept up afterward for thirty years in Cape Town, as though she were resuming a conversation that had merely been interrupted.
“I have been trying to find you my entire life,” she said. “I am going to tell you about your family, and I am going to tell you the truth. It is a very difficult history.”
Then she said something that I have thought about more than almost anything else she told me that night, because it named the trouble and refused to be softened by it:
“The main trouble maker was your great-grandmother Adelaide. Although two of her children, Alice and Camillo, her favorites, didn’t help.”
I want to record what that did to me, because it was not what I expected and it began something that took years to settle.
I had been in the room ten minutes. I had already felt, toward this woman, something I can only call recognition — an affection that arrived fully formed and became, over the following years, love. And in almost the same breath I heard her name my great-aunt as part of the trouble.
Alice was one of the people who made me. She was among the deepest formative presences of my childhood — the French, the apartment, the long attention of an adult who took a boy seriously — and I loved her as unreservedly as I have loved anyone. I also knew, and had known for years with some anger, that she had spent her life obstructing precisely the search that had put me in this room. I had made my peace with that as a private grievance. What I had not prepared for was hearing it from the other side of the ocean, from someone Alice had actually cost something.
And it was not a passing remark. In the years that followed I do not believe I heard Lilliana say one kind thing about my great-aunt. Her dislike was steady and unmistakable and she never softened it. Alice had kept her from her family — that was how she understood it, and it was not an unreasonable way to understand it — and she did not forgive it. Her father, from what she told me, had not liked Alice either. There was also something that happened later, in the thirties, involving Alfonso and Camillo and a plan to get out of Italy, which Lilliana believed Alice had a hand in ruining. She could not prove it. I am not going to attempt that story here; it needs an essay of its own and it will get one.
So I sat in that room, and in many rooms afterward, holding an affection for a woman the person across from me could not stand.
We talked about it. There was no resolution available and we did not manufacture one. What I found, eventually, was that I could let the two things stand against each other without needing either to give way — my love for Alice, and Lilliana’s anger at her, and my love for Lilliana, all of it true at once and none of it cancelling anything else out. I have not found a way to make those accounts reconcile. I have found that you can carry them.
There was exactly one place the two accounts touched.
Alice spoke of her father with an affection she extended to almost no one else. And Lilliana — who never had a kind word for Alice, and few enough for Adelaide — spoke of Giovanni the same way, and went on doing it every summer we knew each other. He was the one figure in that generation whom both women, separated by an ocean and eighty years of grievance, agreed to love without qualification.
He was the counterweight in that house. Where Adelaide issued rulings, he seems to have argued for letting people decide things for themselves, and to have lost most of those arguments.
I sent Lilliana a photograph of him, later. What that photograph came to mean to her is not something I can fit into this essay, and I will write about it.
What I was hearing, though I would not understand its provenance for another year, was an instruction being carried out. Lilliana had been given a job by her father, decades before, and she was doing it, at last, on the day the job finally became possible.
We spoke for an hour.
I should record where we all were, because the arrangement stayed in my memory with unusual precision. Carla stood at the foot of the bed. Lili was on Lilliana’s right, nearest the chair. I was on her left, with the empty bed behind me — the one I had put my hand on.
And early on, looking at the outline of her under the sheet, I thought she might be missing her right leg, and wasn’t sure. Then I glanced up and saw the artificial leg propped against the chair on Lili’s side of the bed.
I said nothing about it. Not that evening, and not, as it turned out, in the five years that followed. I wanted to know what had happened to her the way I have wanted to know everything in this history — completely, and without asking. It did not once occur to me that this was a strange way to conduct oneself. It was simply how I had been built, by people who had built themselves the same way, and I would not see the shape of it clearly for a long time.
Then she needed to sleep, and I promised to come back.
Gelato in Tortona
We drove back toward Costa in the dark, and stopped in Tortona for gelato, which on a warm July evening after the hour I had just had was one of the best things I have ever eaten.
In the car afterward I asked Carla — carefully, in French — about Lilliana’s health. And Carla told me.
In 2011, at eighty-seven, Lilliana had gone out with a group of villagers, most of them decades younger, to pick olives. They rode in a wagon behind a tractor. In one of the fields the tractor turned over, and the wagon went with it, and she was badly hurt. Her right leg was amputated.
When she came out of the hospital she went home. Not to a facility — home, to her own house in Costa Vescovato, on her own, at eighty-seven, with one leg, because she intended to resume her life. She was, Carla said, adamant.
Some time later the village noticed that no one had seen her for a couple of days. Neighbors went to check and heard her calling. She had fallen and had been on the floor, unable to right herself, for the better part of a day. After that it was understood by everyone, including eventually by her, that she would have to move to the Casa di Riposo.
Several things arrived at once in the back of that car.
The first was simple grief for a woman I had met ninety minutes earlier: the loss of the leg, the loss of the house, the loss of moving through the world under her own power.
The second was the timing, which I have never been able to hold casually. Her friends called her La Vagabonda — the wanderer — and it was not a nickname for holidays. She had spent fifteen years working the Genoa–Far East passenger route, and afterward a life in South Africa, and a habit of leaving for the East each June. It also included repeated trips to New York to look for her family, none of which found anything, because she was searching for a name that no longer existed. That was the woman the accident stopped. She would not travel again. Whatever chance remained of her crossing the ocean one more time and finding us ended in an overturned wagon in an olive field.
And roughly eighteen months later I walked into her room.
She could not come. So, without knowing anything about her, I went — and arrived after the only door she had was closed, which is either unbearable or merciful and is probably both.
My father loved the sea. He was a sailor all his adult life, and happiest on the water. I remember noticing, in that room and afterward, that this old woman and my late father had that in common, and thinking it was a pleasant thing to share with someone — the way you note a coincidence with a stranger you have just decided you like.
And I had noticed something else, in the first minutes, before she had finished the names.
Her face was my father’s face. The shape of it, the structure — I saw it immediately.
A person lying in a bed, covered to the chest, presents a face and two hands and nothing else. That was all I had seen of my father for his last weeks: I had stood beside him and looked down at a face, and at a pair of hands on a blanket. He had died in January. Four months later I was standing beside another bed in another country, looking down from the same angle at the same composition — a face turned toward me, two hands on the covers.
The face was his. The hands were nearly identical.
I registered it as family resemblance. Which it was. It amazed me how cousins could look so much alike.
The third thing was the stubbornness. A woman of eighty-seven, one leg gone, insisting on going home alone, and then lying on her own floor for a day rather than the alternative. I recognized it instantly, and not from Italy. I thought of Alice — of another old woman in another country who would not be moved out of her own place for anything, and of how that ended. I am not going to tell that part here; it belongs to a different essay and needs more room than I can give it. But I recognized what I was hearing. It was a family trait, and it was on both sides of the ocean.
The stubbornness became a joke between Lilliana and me over the years, an affectionate one — that the Piemontese are held to be the most stubborn people in Italy, and that among the Piemontese the Rovellis are in a class of their own. “If there were awards for stubbornness,” she would say, “they would have won them.”
I had a piece of evidence for her that I never thought to offer. My mother used to say, repeatedly, and not always fondly, that my father was the most stubborn person she had ever met.
She said it as a joke and it is also, I have come to think, the whole history in a single trait. Adelaide’s disownments were stubbornness. Alice’s ninety-year fiction was stubbornness. So were the silences on my father’s side of the family — the estrangements that ran for years and in some cases for decades, which I have not written about yet and will have to. And so was an old woman holding a family’s entire record intact, for ninety years, against every available piece of evidence that no one was ever coming to collect it.
We never spoke about her accident. Not once.
What she said in the first hour
Everything, essentially. That is the strange part. Not fragments, not hints — the architecture, delivered whole, by someone who had held it in readiness for so long that it came out in order.
That my grandmother, whom I had known all my life as Martha, was known to her as Aunt Lizzy. I had never heard that name in my life. Martha Elisa: Lizzy is a form of Elisa. My grandmother had been living under two names on two continents for the whole of her adult life, and I was learning the second one from a stranger, in Italy, sixty-five years after her death.
That the great-aunt I had been told about — “Carrie,” the eldest of them, who died young — was Carolina, called Lina in Italy, and that she had not simply died. That her brothers, my great-uncles, were Alfonso and Camillo, exactly as I had guessed off a cemetery wall two days earlier, and that Alfonso was Lilliana’s father.
That Adelaide, my great-grandmother, was — and she used these phrases more than once, over the years, always with the same flat precision — “the Policewoman.” “The Major General.”
And that Adelaide disowned people.
This is the part of the history I had no framework for, because nothing in my family’s transmitted account included the possibility that the family had thrown people out. Adelaide disowned my grandmother. She disowned Alfonso. She disowned Lilliana. And being disowned by Adelaide was not an estrangement or a coolness. It was administrative. It meant no contact, ever. And it meant that Adelaide went through the family photographs — every photograph she could lay hands on — and cut the faces out.
I sat in that room and understood, for the first time, that the erasure I had spent my life investigating was not a New World invention. Alice did not invent the excision of a person from a family. She inherited the technique. And when she cut Byron Richards’s face out of every photograph in her apartment — which my father and I found, in 1997, going through her things — she was doing precisely what her mother had done in this village, with the same scissors, for the same reason: this person is no longer in the record.
I had thought I was investigating a secret. I was investigating a method.
There was a second thing in that first hour I had no framework for, and I handled it badly.
“Your grandmother had four children,” she said. “A girl and three boys.”
“I think she only had three,” I said. “All boys. My father was the youngest.”
“She had four children. The first was a girl.”
“I’m sure she had three.”
“I’m sure she had four.”
And then she looked at me — directly, and steadily, and for slightly too long — and did not elaborate.
I let it go. I need to explain why, because it is not obvious. By that point in my life nearly everything I had been told about my father’s family had come apart. The country was wrong. The name was wrong. My great-uncles’ names were wrong. The great-aunt who died young had died in a way nobody had mentioned. What survived that demolition was a very short list of things I still believed, and one of them — one of the last — was that my grandmother had three sons, of whom my father was the youngest. That was not a detail to me. That was bedrock. It was among the few facts I had never had cause to doubt.
So when a woman of ninety-one, in a rest home, at the end of an hour of astonishing recall, told me there had been four, I did what I imagine anyone would do. I concluded, privately and gently, that she had gotten one thing wrong.
She let me conclude it. We moved on.
Lilliana had a saying she used about Adelaide, and about several others in this history, and she delivered it the way you deliver a measurement.
The devil’s milk is always sour.
She did not mean it as a curse. She meant it as a refusal to expect otherwise. Some people are constituted a certain way, and the error is not in their being so — the error is in going back to the same source expecting something sweet, and being wounded again, and calling it a surprise. It was the least sentimental generosity I have ever encountered. She could describe her grandmother as a policewoman who cut faces out of photographs and disowned her own children, and hold no visible bitterness about it, because she had never required Adelaide to be a different woman in order to go on with her life.
She could not do this about Alice. That was the one place the measurement failed her, and I came to understand why. Adelaide’s damage was done to a child who never knew otherwise, and it was long finished. Alice’s obstruction ran the entire length of Lilliana’s life, and was still running when she was ninety.
I have come to think this is why she was able to keep the history intact. Bitterness edits. Sentiment edits. She did neither.
Rouvelle
Somewhere in that first hour I told her my name.
Not Rovelli. Rouvelle. I explained the spelling, and the census page, and the seventy years of France — Marseille, the vineyards, the relatives who had supposedly gone to South America and could not be traced. I told her Alice had maintained all of it to the end of a hundred and one years, and had been angry with me for doubting it.
And I should admit something small and not creditable. Some fraction of me — a parsec of hope, no more — was waiting for her to say that there was, somewhere back there, a French connection. A branch. A cousin who had gone north and stayed. Something that would let Alice be partly right, and let the language I had been raised in belong to me.
Lilliana looked at me. Then she turned her head away and lay looking at the ceiling for a moment, saying nothing at all.
Then she turned back and told me, emphatically, that there was no French lineage in the Rovelli family. None. Not anywhere.
Four days earlier a room full of Italians had taken Lili and me for French, and I had thought it was funny.
I have thought a great deal about that pause, because I do not believe it was recall. She was not searching her memory for a Frenchman. I think that is the moment she understood why she had never found us — why a lifetime of crossings to New York, and inquiries, and the patience of a woman who kept records had produced exactly nothing. She had been looking for Rovellis.
And I think she understood, in the same moment, why Carlo Raviola had crossed the Atlantic again and again looking for the wife who had left him, and had never once found her either.
One letter added, one letter changed. That was the entire mechanism. Rovelli becomes Rouvelle, and a family becomes unfindable from both sides of an ocean, permanently, by anyone who loves them.
We returned to it once, briefly, on a later visit. There was not much to say.
What it did to me took longer, and has not reversed.
Lili and I speak French together. We always have — at home sometimes, and constantly when we travel. It was ours. It was also, and I knew this perfectly well, Alice’s gift, and I had gone on loving it even after I understood what it had been built to do.
That mostly stopped. Not by any decision, and I never announced it. In the years I was visiting Pontecurone, French simply drained of something. It began to feel fraudulent in my mouth. And it took on a weight it had never carried before: it stopped being the language of my childhood and became the instrument of a separation — the thing that kept an old woman in Piemonte from ever finding her family, and kept a man crossing an ocean from ever finding his wife, and kept me from Lilliana until she was ninety-one and could not leave a bed.
I still speak it. I am glad to have it. But it is not what it was, and it will not be again.
Two absences on a wall
Two days before, in the cemetery at the bottom of the hill, I had walked the walls of plaques and photographs and found Giovanni, Alfonso, Camillo. And I had failed to find two women, and had noted the cold spot, and walked on with no explanation.
Lilliana explained both in a single evening.
Lina — “Carrie” — was not on that wall because of what happened to her, and what happened to her is the reason the marriage of Giovanni and Adelaide never recovered. Lina, in New York, had met a man she meant to marry. Adelaide disapproved. Adelaide had a different man in mind in Costa, a man with inherited land. Giovanni told his wife to let their daughter decide. Adelaide persisted, and mailed her a steamship ticket, and asked only that she meet the other man before she committed herself. Lina did not want to go. She went, because she did not want to anger her mother.
She went walking with the man in Costa. She tripped on the roots of a mulberry tree and a branch caught her in the face, breaking her glasses and opening a deep cut above her eye. It bled the way head wounds bleed. She believed her eye had been taken out. She seized, and fainted, and died the next day.
The story in New York — the one I grew up with — was that she died in the Spanish influenza pandemic.
She was forty-one and she had crossed an ocean to be introduced to a stranger. Giovanni blamed his wife for the rest of his life.
And Adelaide was not on that wall because when she died, in 1930, she was buried in the village’s shared grave. Later a new cemetery was built and families could pay to move their dead into it. Camillo and Alfonso agreed to split the cost for their parents — Alfonso paying for Giovanni, Camillo for Adelaide. Alfonso paid. Camillo, who was Adelaide’s favorite, who had once kept the money meant for her medicine while she was dying and told the family the pharmacy had none, did not pay.
So Giovanni was moved, and Adelaide was not, and she is in the common ground under the village to this day. Alfonso appears to have concluded that this was, on balance, better for everyone.
And Lina was left there with her.
Not by anyone’s decision. That is the part I cannot get past. Lina had died around 1918 and been buried in the old cemetery, and when the transfers were arranged more than a decade later, Alfonso and Camillo made provision for their parents, and no one thought of their sister. She had been dead thirteen years. There was no ruling against her. She was simply not remembered at the moment when remembering would have moved her.
So it stands like this: Adelaide summoned her daughter across an ocean to meet a man she had chosen. The daughter did not want to go and went anyway, because she did not want to anger her mother, and died of it. And the two of them now lie together in the shared ground under the village, permanently, mother and daughter, not by sentence but by inattention — which is, on the evidence, how most of the damage in this family was actually done.
The wall holds the men. Giovanni, Alfonso, Camillo — father and sons, in their cluster, with their photographs.
Not one of the women is on it. Lina forgotten in the old ground. My grandmother in New York under a name nobody in the village would have recognized. Alice likewise, four thousand miles away, insisting to the end that none of these people were anything to her. And Adelaide in the common earth beneath all of them, unmoved and unpaid for — the woman who ran that family like a garrison, who managed the money and bought the land and issued the disownments and cut the faces out of the pictures, absent from its wall not because she was expelled or because she left, but because her favorite son declined to spend the money.
That wall is not a record of a family. It is a record of who stayed. I had walked its length in the low sun two days earlier, reading names, and had understood nothing except that the spelling had never changed.
Three boyfriends
There was one exchange in that first hour that I did not know how to hold, and neither, I think, did she.
I had asked why Adelaide disowned my grandmother. And Lilliana said that Martha — Lizzy, to her — had had three boyfriends. A Russian, a German, and a Jew. That was the offense. That was what got her cut out of the family.
I had something to offer in return, and I offered it, because it seemed to me to explain the violence of Adelaide’s reaction better than a list of nationalities could. I knew by then that the man my grandmother spent her life with — the man who fathered her children, my father’s father — had a second family. I knew that this second family blamed my grandmother for breaking theirs apart.
And I knew about the Plaza.
Sometime in the 1920s, early in the courtship, my grandmother brought him to tea at the Plaza Hotel to meet her sister. It was a blustery winter afternoon. He tried to charm Alice and it failed, miserably. She sensed he was concealing something and began asking questions, and his answers only confirmed what she suspected. Before the afternoon was over she had told her sister to leave with her and never to speak to the man again.
Her sister refused. And then asked Alice to go, so that she could stay with him.
Alice went. But she did not leave. She came out of the hotel and stopped on the sidewalk and stood at the window in the snow, looking in at the two of them at their table, for a long time, before she finally walked away.
“I never liked that man,” she would say, for the next seventy years, whenever the subject came anywhere near him.
Lilliana listened to all of it. She thought about it for a moment.
Then she said, again, that Martha had three boyfriends.
That was the whole exchange, and I have gone back to it many times. Two people had just handed each other a piece of information the other had never had — she gave me a disowning and a list; I gave her a second household in New York — and neither of us had anywhere to put what we’d been given. We were both, in that moment, in exactly the position I had been in my whole life: holding a true thing that did not yet fit anything.
I still do not know what she meant by repeating it. Whether she was correcting my account, or declining to revise hers, or telling me something about my grandmother that I was not yet equipped to hear. Her memory was extraordinary and exact for sixty years of names and dates. On this she simply restated, and let it stand.
It is worth saying plainly: I do not know for certain who my father’s father was. I did not know it then. What I had was a man with two names, a second family, and a wife who called herself Martha Rouvelle. Lilliana had a list of three.
Sandrina
This came later — the second summer, I believe, in the ordinary course of one of our long afternoons, and it is the reason I say the disclosures kept arriving out of order for years.
In 1997, my great-aunt Alice died at home at a hundred and one, having outlived everyone who could contradict her. My mother was with her. And in the last hours, Alice called out a name none of us knew: Sandrina.
We turned it over for years, the whole New York family, and got nowhere, because we did not know a single true thing about her life before New York and therefore had no field in which the name could mean anything. It sat in the account as pure noise. Then, about a year after she died, a genealogist telephoned me — he was researching a family on Long Island named Sandriani and wondered whether I might be connected. I told him my family was French. We agreed there was no connection and hung up.
Lilliana knew immediately.
Sandrina was Adelaide’s business partner in New York. When Adelaide began buying used furnishings at auction, repairing them, and reselling them to Italians who had arrived with nothing — the trade that eventually bought farmland back in Costa — she took on a partner from Costa Vescovato named Sandrina. She was in that household. She was present through Alice’s earliest childhood at 13 Mott Street.
So the last name my great-aunt spoke aloud was not a mystery. It was a memory from the apartment where she was born — the one place, and the one period, in which she had been permitted to be who she was. A hundred years of French, of Marseille, of a family “relocated to South America and impossible to find,” and at the very end the concealment simply ran out of road, and what surfaced was a woman’s name from the front room on Mott Street.
I have written elsewhere in these essays about the stream that still runs under East 22nd Street, buried and paved over and perfectly capable of coming up through the floor when the pressure is right. This is that. Alice’s last word was groundwater.
Be kind, but tell them the truth
Alfonso — Lilliana’s father, my grandmother’s brother, the shrapnel-wounded translator, the man who was disowned by his own mother while continuing to live a few hundred meters from her in a village of five hundred people — spent years telling his daughter the family history in detail. He did it deliberately. He was making a record in the only medium available to him.
And he gave her an instruction to go with it. If she ever found the New York Rovellis, she was to be kind to them — but she was to tell them the truth.
Sit with the shape of that sentence. It concedes, in a single conjunction, that the truth is going to be hard to hear. It does not therefore withhold it. It does not say spare them. It says: this will hurt, and they are entitled to it, and your kindness is the manner, not the substitute.
Now set it beside the only instruction that ever came down the other branch of my family — the line my father repeated to me at his house in March of 2009, the line he said had come from his own father:
If anyone ever learned the truth of the family, the hair on the back of your neck would stand up.
Two men, one generation apart, on two continents, each handing his child a sentence about the same secret. One of them said: find them, and tell them. The other said: do not look.
Alfonso’s instruction had to wait ninety years to be carried out, and Lilliana carried it out in the first hour of the first evening, to a stranger who had walked in unannounced.
Most of the people it was addressed to were dead by then. The ones who are living have, for the most part, declined it. My siblings and my cousins know that I found the family, and that the name was changed, and that there is a village in Piemonte. They rarely ask. Several have gone the other way, and hold their inherited accounts more firmly now than before I went. I do not fully understand it — what I brought back seems to me like an addition, not an injury — but I have stopped trying to persuade anyone, and I have come to think it is not mine to force.
A truth can be told accurately, and kindly, and completely, and still not be received. That is not a failure of the telling.
I have come to think that the difference between those two sentences is the difference between a family that has trouble and a family that has a secret. Alfonso’s family had catastrophes — the disownments, the cut photographs, the mulberry tree, a mother buried in common ground because her favorite son would not pay. He transmitted all of it. He wanted his daughter to be able to find her people, complications and all, and he understood that she could not find them without the truth, because the truth included their real name.
The other sentence was built to end inquiry. And it worked for three generations.
The oak wood
Some years into our visits, Lilliana told me that she had done genealogical research of her own, and that she had been in touch with a researcher in Texas — she could not recall his name — who seemed to know everything about the Rovellis. And what she had learned from him, or with him, was that the family had not started in Italy at all. It had come from Spain, in the late 1700s, with the help of the Church, one of them a priest. And in Spain the name was Robles.
In Spanish the b is sounded so softly that Robles arrives at an Italian ear as Rovles, and from Rovles to Rovelli is a short walk.
That detail alone explained something in my own research: Lilliana said the priest in the family gave the Rovellis “a seat at the table,” and a priest could acquire land in a place like Costa Vescovato far more easily than an ordinary man could. Giovanni’s father bought parcels. The family became one of the larger landholders in a village of five hundred. There is a paper trail somewhere in the Archdiocese of Tortona, and I intend to go looking for it.
And there was corroboration from an unlikely direction, which I will come back to before the end. Some weeks after I first met Lilliana, a genetic test came back on my side of the family: Italian, overwhelmingly — with smaller traces of Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Persia. A claim passed from a researcher in Texas whose name Lilliana could not recall, to a woman of ninety-one in a rest home in Pontecurone, to me — and confirmed by a cheek swab taken in America before any of us had heard of Costa Vescovato.
But that is not why I am telling you about Robles.
Robles means oaks. Oak trees. A stand of them.
And the station where Lili and I stood on a July evening in 2015, watching our train to Tortona resolve into CANCELLATO and then SOPPRESSO — the station where I lost the day, and went to a hotel by the tracks, and sat at a desk in the heat under the strongest pressure I have ever felt to turn around and go home and leave my family’s secrets undisturbed — that station is called Rogoredo.
Rogoredo, from the medieval Latin roburetum: a place planted with oaks. It came down through the Lombard dialect as Rogored. Long before it was an industrial periphery and a concrete rail hub, the whole southeastern edge of Milan was dense oak forest.
I did not learn this until a year or two after Lilliana told me about Robles, and by then the pairing had had time to become something other than a fact. On the last night that the family’s concealment still held — the night I very nearly obeyed it — I sat down inside a grove of oaks that had been paved over a century before, under a sign informing me that my journey was cancelled and suppressed, and I did not know where I was. The name of the ground was the name of my family, in the oldest form anyone can recover. Both of them buried under later construction. Both of them still there.
I don’t offer that as significance. I offer it as description. This is simply what it has been like.
Next: the package I sent her, the eight months of silence that followed, and the sentence she said to me twice in the first hour that I did not understand for a year — “She Had Four Children.”
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