Unless. Carol Shields

were well separated in those days by ghostly old lilacs and springy untrained stands of spirea.

      When we moved in, the half-finished basement room had a freestanding bar at one end with a dark slate top, and we can only think they left it behind because it was too heavy for them to move, not worth the effort. In the deep drawer behind the bar we found a single large cocoa bean, waxed and beautiful and smelling exotically of oily dust. We kept it for years, though now it seems to have vanished. There was also an ancient cardboard box of Dance Dust. If you sprinkled a little on the floor, it made it slippery, just right for a sliding foxtrot. The McGinns, mum and dad, must have had parties, we think—other couples over to dance to records on the wind-up Victrola, something else they left behind. People have probably been happy in this house.

      The family had several children—teenagers—and I sometimes wonder if these children were affected by the political tumult of the early sixties, if they got themselves into trouble and worried their parents. They would be approaching late middle age now, these children, keeping an eye on their eroding health and their aging marriages and the doings of their grandchildren, and it seems entirely likely to me that their thoughts must turn occasionally to the house where they grew up. Probably they recall the immense built-in gun cupboard (tongue-and-groove) in the upstairs hall, for which we have never had any use. They may, when they get together for family reunions, reminisce about the tiny crawl space under the porch, which is entered by a concealed door on the wall and which, for my children, became a secret clubhouse.

      Someone in the McGinn family left a sealed envelope behind a bathroom radiator, one of those old-fashioned, many-ribbed hot water affairs with ornamental spines. I discovered the envelope when I was painting the room. Reaching down behind the radiator with my paintbrush, I encountered something papery. I had to be careful to dislodge it in one piece. I put down my brush and looked around for a wire coat hanger that I could poke through the grooves of the radiator. The envelope, intact and still sealed after all this time and only lightly smudged with dirt, had the name “Mrs. Lyle McGinn” written across it. Blue ink, faded. It felt crisp in my hands, even after lying hidden all those dateless winters with the furnace clanking off and on and sending heat through the pipes and baking and rebaking it. Should I open it? I wondered. Yes, of course I would open it. I only pretend to have moral scruples about such things. Just touching the envelope brought on a rush of sweet religious melancholy. Yes, I most certainly would open it.

      The thought came to me that it might be a suicide note. Or a child’s admonishing report card. Or a confession of some sort. I am so sorry to tell you that I have fallen in love with… The neighbours in back of us, when we first moved in, had hinted at tragedy in the McGinn family, an event of some kind that precipitated the move, years of happiness overcome by sorrow. (My mother-in-law, who hadn’t liked Mrs. McGinn, had nothing to contribute in the way of information.) I hadn’t paid attention to these rumours, but I also reasoned that any family who surrendered such a house must have had serious cause.

      What I found inside the ancient envelope was a simple, rather cheap invitation. A baby shower to be held March 13, 1961. (I would have been four years old.) Pink and blue flowers dangled on their short stems from a rustic cradle suspended from a tree branch. “Please bring a small toy or article of clothing,” the invitation read in svelte, arched handwriting, the same handwriting as on the envelope, “not exceeding $3. Please also bring a ‘mother’s hint’ for Georgia.”

      What happened to the pregnant Georgia who was to be honoured at the party? What happened to her baby when it was born, and was the shower a happy success? These questions opened up for me like rooms along a dim corridor, and these rooms possess doorways to other rooms. I remembered Danielle Westerman asking me once what a shower was; as a transplanted Frenchwoman, a woman in her mid-eighties, she had trouble understanding the concept. But I’ve been to dozens of such events and find it not at all difficult to imagine an early-sixties living room ringing with high-pitched women’s laughter that never seems to let up, though always, beneath it, there is the deeper sound of one particular woman hooting. This person would be famous among her acquaintances for her much-praised, infectious laugh. She, with her boldly printed home-sewn shift dress—I imagine a geometric design, black against red—would be the sort of person who enlivened any gathering and who was always welcome. Mrs. McGinn, on the other hand, would have a tiny, whispery laugh, and would often draw her hand up against her mouth. Was it Mr. McGinn who owned the rifle collection housed in the specially built cupboard, and did one of those guns go off accidentally? Was it he who attempted to insulate the attic and made a terrible botch of it? How did Mrs. McGinn—I’ve never discovered her first name, and Lois was no help here, but I speculate it might be Lillian or Dorothy or Ruth, something like that—occupy herself, and was it she who decided to install the green steel kitchen sink with its green enamel basin? Today the sink has reached a kind of antique status, too much a curiosity to part with, and, in any case, it still functions perfectly. I can imagine Lillian/ Dorothy/Ruth standing at this sink, cutting wax beans into one-inch pieces and covering them with water, sighing and looking at the clock. Almost suppertime. The clock—postwar plastic—would have been shaped like a teapot or a frog. She is a woman of about my size and age, a medium frame, still slim, but widening at the hips. Middle forties with a lipsticked pout. Some essence has deserted her. A bodily evaporation has left her with nothing but hard, direct questions aimed in the region of her chest, and no one would ever suspect that she might be capable of rising to the upper ether of desire, wanting, wishing.

      I love this house. Tom and I—we’ve been together for twenty-six years, which is the same as being married—moved here in 1980, next door to the red-shingled house he grew up in and where his mother still lives, a seventy-year-old widow, rather gaunt these days, and increasingly silent. Tom, like his father before him, has a family practice in Orangetown, a quick ten minutes away, but he spends at least a third of his time working on trilobite research, his hobby, his avocation, he would tell you in a kind of winking way so that you understand trilobites are his real work.

      What’s confusing to people is that I’ve taken his name. I grew up as Reta Summers and when I was eighteen with long straight brown hair down to my waist and enrolled in French studies, I met a medical student named Tom Winters, and so we had on our hands a “situation.” We could become a standing joke or else one of us could change seasons. At the time this name business seemed an enormous problem, and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to reel off a fast and funny account of the dilemma and how we solved it. I went to court and signed some papers; that was it, but you would have thought at the time that I’d sacrificed body parts. (I grew up, after all, listening to Helen Reddy singing “I Am Woman.”) We are, both of us, soixante-huitards in spirit, and I suppose we will remain so all our lives. In truth, I was only twelve years old in 1968, but the potential of rebellion had spiked me even then, what it could be used for or stored against and how we have to live inside the history we’re given, but must resist, like radicals, being made into mere creatures of a mere era.

      Our house is full of rough corners that seem to me just about to come into their full beauty. I often think of how Vicente Verdú, the Spanish writer, spoke of houses as existing between reality and desire, what we want and what we already have. Probably this old house is not as lovely as I believe. My eyes are curtained over. I used to be able to see the separate rooms with their colours and spaces, but now I can’t. I’ve overvalued its woody, whorled coves and harbours, convincing myself of an architectural spaciousness and, at the same time, coziness, when I really, long ago, should have pursued some professional decorating advice. The word cozy cannot be translated into French; I’ve often had this discussion with Danielle Westerman, not that cozy is a word that crops up frequently in her stern essays. There is no French word for reckless, either, which is curious when you think that the French are, stereotypically at least, a reckless people.

      It’s highly unlikely that Mrs. McGinn went to that 1961 baby shower for her friend Georgia. The envelope was still sealed, after all, when I discovered it. No one in the family would have deliberately hidden the note from her. It simply went astray as small bits tend to do in a busy house, getting separated from the rest of the mail, carried into this unlikely room where it became lost and, curiously, preserved.

      It mattered so little, this 1961 women-only social evening. John