Lake People Read Online Free PDF

aunt’s birthday. It took me a while to find the envelope. I had to pull the drawer out from the table and empty its contents one at a time. There were shoelaces and pens, old photographs, a protractor. Tucked into the first page of the S.S. Pierce & Company catalogis where I found the envelope. It didn’t say March 14. Rather, Signe had written in careful handwriting,
On my 60th birthday
. I brought it to her. She was in her mid-eighties now, her hands shaky and her dark veins showing through her thin, aged skin. I had to help her open the envelope. A newspaper article was tucked inside. The ink smudged on her fingers and when she wiped at her hair she left a black streak on her forehead. The article was about Alexander. On her sixtieth birthday Signe had gone, she told me, down to Boston to see her friend. She had imagined it as a surprise gift, for after he told her his secret, they had made a pact to not speak again. It wasn’t shame, she said, but some sort of horror. Some acceptance of the long, lonely life to come. “We had simply understood,” she said. “It seemed the way it had to be.” Yet after nearly twenty years of honoring that pact, on that birthday Signe gathered her courage. As she walked toward S.S. Pierce she imagined the way they would talk. How they would laugh, eat a long, slow dinner. They would look back upon their lives, the way they had turned out, not so bad at all. It wasn’t until she made her way over to the Pierce building that she looked at the newspaper. Alexander McCaffrey had fallen into the Boston channel, and after a week his body had been found and identified. “He fell,” the witness had insisted. “Sure as day that man fell.”
    “With that secret,” my aunt said now, “you do not fall into the channel.”
    It took me some time to understand what she was telling me. When I finally grasped it I went on. I said, “Can you imagine? Can you imagine knowing, your entire life, that you would fit nowhere? That you had no one to tell your secret to?” For though by this time the troubles of my life had seemed insurmountable, hearing Alex’s story somehow pulled me out. I had given and received love, after all.
    “Why yes,” my aunt said. She sounded both forceful andastonished. “Yes,” she said, “I can understand perfectly well what Alexander McCaffrey went through.” She held out her hand for me to return the newspaper clipping. She was angry. Which, for my dim-wittedness, she had every right to be. She must have thought that I knew—always had known—and respected her own secret. She must have felt as I did—that we two knew each other as well as any two people could. But all those years, I had failed to understand that she herself was a gay woman. “I can understand every last bit of it,” she said sharply.
    I never did find out what exactly my aunt meant to do on that day in the lake. For years I supposed that after her time with Alexander she had simply stood on the pier and allowed her mind to go blank, and that in that state she had been called back to that island she had come from. Though I have never acted upon it, that is what I have felt many times as I look out toward Bear Island, that wild and solitary place.
    For her death, I dressed Signe in an ivory-colored organza gown with sleeves that would flutter. I pinned flowers at her waist. For a ball, tea, maybe a wedding, Signe had said when she sewed that dress. She never completed it; I found it at the back of her closet, and it was I who made the final stitches.
    “She lived a long life,” the librarian said as we stood together outside the small church after Signe’s funeral. She wrapped her arms tightly around me. “Thank God for that,” she said. “Thank God she never did go through with it.”
    Then she told me that Alexander and Signe had eaten a wonderful dinner together when he finally did visit, and together they shared a bottle of brandy. For two nights they slept besideeach other on