“…humming a hymn,” I could have said, because the person who stepped through the front door of that little house in Palmyra, with a key of her own and a covered dish in both hands, was humming Rock of Ages. She was a tall, white haired woman in a lilac coat, perhaps seventy seven, with a long straight nose and my father eyes. She saw me beside the frame, and the dish nearly slipped from her fingers. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my goodness. You are Carol.”
I could not speak at first. “How do you know my name?” I asked at last. She set the dish down on the old upright piano bench and pointed at the newspaper clipping on the wall. “I have been watching you from a distance for forty six years,” she said. “My name is Diane Marsh. Lloyd Weatherby was my father.” I sat down on the bench, hard. “That is impossible,” I said. “My father had one child.” She smiled, gently, with enormous sadness. “He had two, honey. He just was not allowed to say so.”
She told it sitting beside me on the porch swing, with a quilt over our knees against the October wind. In 1946, Lloyd, nineteen years old, married a girl named Evelyn Marsh, and Diane was born that winter. In 1949 Evelyn became ill in her mind, and the doctor and the pastor and Lloyd father agreed she should go to the state hospital in Fulton. His father insisted on a divorce. The congregation of that time did not forgive such things, and Lloyd was a rising deacon. He married my mother in 1950. Diane was raised by her aunt, here in Palmyra.
A skeleton key on a nail, a house with her own name on the mailbox, and footsteps on the porch.
Diane took a worn envelope from her coat pocket, and unfolded the last page of a letter in my mother familiar slanted hand, and I understood that my mother had known about Diane all along, and had spent twenty five years deciding how to tell me. “In 1979, Evelyn came out of Fulton for the first time in thirty years,” Diane said. “She was frail, and she was frightened of the world. Your father rented this house for her. That summer, those three weeks at the farm conference in Kansas City, he lived here, and helped her learn how to live again.”
“I took that photograph,” she said, “from this porch. He held her hand that way because he had not been allowed to hold it for thirty years.” I put my fingers to my mouth. I thought of the white gloves my mother wore to church. “Dorothy knew,” Diane said. “She drove up in August and sat in the kitchen with my mother and they drank tea. She said, Evelyn, I have been married to your husband for twenty nine years, and I want you to know I never once doubted that he loved you first. She paid for my mother doctor. She was the finest woman I ever met.”
“Your mother wanted you to know,” Diane went on, “so she mailed you the photograph and the key. But Lloyd found the envelope in the mailbox before you did. He could not bear it. He was afraid you would think less of him, or that the church would. So he hid it in the parlor wall, during the window repair that autumn, with the key hanging on a nail, and I think he meant to take it out again someday. He never did. My mother passed that November, in this house, holding my hand. Your father came to see me every Saturday for nineteen years after.”
I will tell you honestly that I was angry. I stayed angry for about an hour, there on the swing, with my face turned toward the road. Seventy five years I had thought I had no family left but a few cousins in Quincy, and I had a sister fourteen miles up Route 61 who had clipped my name out of a newspaper. “I asked him a thousand times to let me meet you,” Diane said. “He said, Carol will not understand. I think he was afraid of the wrong thing.” I looked at her hands, folded on the quilt. They were my father hands.
We went back inside. In the front room, beneath the clipping, the old upright piano stood with its lid closed. “Mother taught me on that,” Diane said. “I am not good.” I lifted the lid and sat down on the bench, and I patted the space beside me. She sat. We played a simple duet from a beginner book, badly, and then we played it again, and then, to my own astonishment, I was laughing with tears running down my face, and she was laughing and crying too, her old fingers finding the keys a half beat behind mine.
That afternoon I drove her to the farmhouse. She stood in the parlor, looked out through the new window, and said, “He told me you looked out of this one for seventy years.” I made tea and we found the photograph albums, and she wept at the picture of me in a flour sack dress on the porch steps, age six. Daddy will, I discovered, had left the little house in Palmyra to Diane, and the farmhouse to me, with a single line: To be shared in spirit. I could not help thinking he had known precisely what he was doing.
Diane spends the winters with me now. On Saturdays she teaches the beginner class at the Palmyra library, and I teach advanced students in the parlor, and every afternoon we play one duet together, badly, with the window open. The photograph is in a silver frame beside the new window. On the back, beneath my mother six words, I have added three of my own, in ink: Forgiven. Both of us. And every Sunday at dusk, a porch light comes on in Palmyra, fourteen miles to the north, for a sister who does not need to wait anymore.