The Number 7 Read online

  What would those girls be like? What would we do together? Picnics with our favorite books? Brontë sister tea parties? Thoreau-inspired walks through the woods? Would we live deliberately? Would we suck the marrow out of life? Or am I the only teenager who thinks of stuff like that?

  As I took in the panoramic view of my new cafeteria, I saw Chris sitting at a table with other kids that looked like him: hippies, Dead Heads, nouveau-Rastafarians. Chris whispered something in the ear of an attractive girl with dyed black hair and pale skin. From the look on her face, he wasn’t delivering Whitman lines. She grabbed his shoulders and fell against him, laughing. Take note, Louisa, I thought. Try to avoid seductive voice and deep brown eyes.

  In Photography, I was lucky to be sitting in on the first day of a new lesson and a new assignment. I was half-listening to Mr. Franz explain the criteria of the project, staring at my 35mm camera, and wondering why Dad couldn’t have signed me up for Digital Photography, when something Mr. Franz said perked my ears.

  “You’ll want to investigate old family photographs. Ask relatives about the context of the photos, who’s in them, how the pictures came to be.”

  As he paced back and forth at the front of the room, all the girls in class followed him in dreamy doe-eyed stupors. He was young with a lean build, and he dressed smart. A Ramones T-shirt under a corduroy blazer. Occasionally, he’d wink at the class, making us feel like we were close, personal friends rather than students. I could see how he’d captured the fancy of some of my classmates.

  “This project is about digging deep into your family history, looking at grandparents, aunts, and uncles differently.” He paused, giving us time to process the assignment. “The photos need to be a timeline of the person’s life. Think of it as a retroactive Facebook timeline, but I don’t want anything electronic. This is Film Photography. We’re going old school, so ideally, the oldest picture should be more than twenty years old.

  “Assemble the photographs in chronological order and display them in an album. This is a photographic essay. I want to see art, creativity, thought. I don’t want to see misspellings or Scotch tape. These essays need to look professional; we’ll be showcasing them at the Wyeth Spring Art Show. And guys? Make sure you don’t use any priceless family heirloom photographs. I don’t want any angry phone calls from Mom, chewing me out about how you retouched Aunt Mildred with watercolor.”

  Someone raised her hand. Mr. Franz acknowledged it by lifting his eyebrows.

  “When’s it due?”

  Franz rubbed his hands together. “In a month. End of December, due the week before holiday break. That’s why I’m giving it to you now. Spend Thanksgiving talking to your family and searching through albums. Now, take the rest of class to start brainstorming.” Mr. Franz retreated back to his desk in the front corner of the room.

  Who could I showcase? I didn’t have an extensive family; I didn’t really know either set of grandparents. Not even those in whose house I was now living. God knows I couldn’t ask Dad about them. He was a regular Fort Knox. So while other students sat constructing lofty branches on family trees, I spent the remaining ten minutes doodling sketches of the old, black telephone.

  Greta had had a fantastic day. People had flocked to meet her, and she’d already received two invitations to the next football game. So much for worrying about being a social pariah, I thought. I listened to her relay the day’s activities on the car ride back to the house, watching as she drove with the same gracelessness with which she’d handled the mail that morning. Hadn’t Allison said something about an injury? What’d happened? Something was wrong, but I was too afraid to ask. She’d angrily accuse me of prying—as she had done countless times before—and then I’d feel even further isolated from her. This was the fortress Greta had built around herself. She was on one side of the moat, and I on the other. So I did what she’d trained me to do: I looked away.

  That evening, after answering all of Dad’s incessant questions about our day and the school—Did we learn anything new? Did the teachers seem qualified? Were there healthy lunch options?—we sat down to a salmon dinner. Dad was usually a lousy cook, when he cooked at all, but he did have one or two good signature dishes and this was one of them. He said he’d learned the recipe from his father, who would drive the hour or so to Philadelphia to buy fresh salmon from the fish market. It was one of the few stories Dad had ever told us about the man, so I had committed the details of the story to memory. Grandpa would bake the fish whole: skin on, head intact, and the body stuffed with dill and garlic butter. And then he’d fillet it tableside: delicately removing the head and tail, carefully slicing the large fish in two, and removing the bones as he made his way from top to bottom. Dad talked about the process as if it were an art form and Grandpa, the artist. Grandpa served his salmon with new potatoes and homemade crème fraîche, dyed orange with red caviar. The ritual had been passed down to my father, one of the few family traditions bestowed. It seemed that any others had worn down with time.

  So salmon dinner is what Dad prepared in celebration of our new school. He’d cooked it perfectly.

  “I have news,” Dad began, nervously clearing his throat. “The house in North Carolina sold.”

  Neither Greta nor I spoke. What was there to say? There was no turning back now.

  “I guess that’s that,” Greta finally whispered before taking a sip of water.

  “Let’s toast this new beginning!” Dad held up his glass encouragingly. “To Chadds Ford Community College for creating an English position for me midsemester, to Andrew Wyeth High School for making a home for you both on such short notice, and to Gerhard Magnusson’s salmon dinner for being the one meal I can do justice!”

  My jaw froze in place. My mouth went dry.

  “What?” I choked.

  Dad gave me a blank stare and blinked twice. Greta looked at me as if my entire existence made her life more difficult.

  “Gerhard Magnusson?” I repeated, disoriented.

  “My dad’s name was Gerhard Gustav Magnusson. I’ve told you that before.”

  Of course. Eloise and Gerhard Magnusson. How had I missed it? For weeks, I’d thought about the call. And now I knew. It wasn’t a dream—it was my grandmother. My dead grandmother had called me.

  Dad held up his glass, but Greta only raised her eyebrows acrimoniously. She folded her arms as I sat in agony, unable to talk about my discovery. I was onto something.

  “Tell us something about him,” I said finally. I was tired of being in the dark, tired of the secrecy.

  Dad paused and stared across the table at both Greta and me and realized he couldn’t deflect. We were waiting for him to answer.

  “He used to, uh, keep model trains.” He scratched his brow with a bony knuckle. He looked a bit uneasy, but did he also look relieved? I couldn’t tell. Maybe it was good to exorcise these stories slowly. After all, we couldn’t live in this house without knowing them. Dad would have to confess sooner or later.

  “He ran them all through the house. There are a couple little cutouts in the bookshelves in the parlor. You might have seen them.” He gestured with his fork. “That’s where he ran the tracks. Ran them through the walls, down to the cellar. Sometimes when he was working, he’d put a smooth stone or pinecone on one of the cars and send it up. Little deliveries just for me. I felt special when he did that. I kept them all, but I’m sure they’re lost now.”

  Something Dad said reminded me of my Photography project.

  “Dad, we kept all those picture albums from the attic, right?” I flaked off a piece of the pink flesh and held it to my mouth.

  “I think so.” He wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin. (Memory 11: she only used cloth napkins. She said they were better for the environment and “très chic.”)

  “I have this photography project . . . I need to find four photos of the same person from different stages in his or her life. I was thinking about using Mom, but I just wanted to look at all our old photos to be su
re.”

  Dad smiled thoughtfully at the mention of Mom. It was a knee-jerk reaction for all of us.

  “Do you think you could identify old photographs of Grandma and Grandpa?” I coyly took another dollop of crème fraîche and plopped it on my potatoes. I didn’t want to give anything away by showing too much interest in the old photographs. I didn’t want anyone to suspect anything abnormal, like my sudden dying interest to know more information about Grandpa.

  “Mmm,” Dad stalled, obviously distressed by my request. “I could try,” he sighed with resignation.

  At ten-thirty, I retired to my room. I hadn’t yet unpacked all my stuff, so I put off the night’s homework and decided it was time to truly move in. I spilled the first box’s contents onto the bed: hairbrushes, barrettes, a stack of old magazines I planned to one day read, past honor roll certificates, and a few cards my grandmother had sent me when I was younger. I had kept them hidden in a shoebox in my bedroom with other mementos from childhood: ribbons from swim team, notes from teachers, and pictures of Mom. When Dad got the call Grandma had died, I pulled the cards out to reread them. There were only five. All birthday cards, but I never received them on my birthday. Always at Christmas. They were plain—nothing overly sentimental or too personal. She’d never written anything inside, just a scribbled “Grandma and Grandpa M.” A $10 bill accompanied the cards twice, and once I discovered a pressed clover. I don’t know why I kept the cards. It would probably bother Dad to know I had. I was unloading the second box when I heard a trembling sound above me. The sharp shrill noise sent a shock through my nervous system.

  This time there was no denying the legitimacy of the ringing. Since the last call, my rational brain fought to believe that it had all been a dream; I earnestly wanted to think that I had imagined the entire endeavor. But deep down I knew that the ringing, the voice, and the message had happened.

  I rose from my place at my bed and quickly stepped out into the hallway. I looked to the right where shadows pranced along the walls like waves of tall grasses. They moved erratically, a tempest of light. Greta’s bedroom door was closed. Where was everyone? Could they hear the phone too? I walked against the shadows toward the attic stairs, but the darkness seemed to pull me back. The shadows weren’t grasses at all; they’d transformed into wild brambles, and I had to fight my way through them. Inside the attic stairwell, the strain ebbed and I suddenly felt propelled forward. A gust of damp air pushed me up the stairs to where the telephone rested on the desk. I carefully placed the receiver next to my ear and waited for my grandmother’s voice.

  VII.

  When I turned seventeen in 1950, Mother decided to ship me off to live with her sister, Aunt Joan. No young daughter of hers was going to marry an old angler like she had, oh no. So, seemingly overnight, she uprooted me from Marblehead, Massachusetts, to Philadelphia.

  I remember waiting in the central station for Aunt Joanie to come fetch me. I had never seen so many people! Flocks of single girls boarding trains together; young city slickers in pressed pinstriped suits and polished two-toned Oxfords; old, tired-looking men with cigarettes dangling from bottom lips and creased newspapers folded gently under their arms. Everyone was in a hurry to get somewhere.

  A young black porter whistled to me. “Hey, girl, you comin’ or you goin’?”

  “I’m looking for my aunt, thank you very much.” I was searching for her, glancing over the heads of people walking around me.

  “’Cause it looks like you lost.” His smile was wide and white.

  At that moment, the steam engine’s whistle screamed, and I turned to watch the train slowly leave the station. When I went to answer the porter again, he was gone. His smile was my first welcome to the big city, and he was right. I was lost.

  Aunt Joanie hadn’t been entirely honest with Mother when she told her there were loads of young GIs looking to get married in Philadelphia and why didn’t she send me down for the summer? Aunt Joan didn’t mention Uncle Buck had drunk himself straight out of a job again and they needed someone to help pay the rent. So the first thing Aunt Joan did after she met me at the station was take me to Sears Roebuck and buy me a clean dress and high heel shoes on store credit. The day after, she marched me back into Sears in their dress, on their credit, and she demanded they give me a job. They did. I was soon the new face of their Estée Lauder counter right in the middle of the store. I had never worn makeup a day in my life.

  Aunt Joan couldn’t find work as easily as I could, but eventually she got a job working the late shift at Old Blockley, Philadelphia’s General Hospital. Mainly, her job involved fetching coffee and cigarettes for the doctors, and magazines and cigarettes for the patients. Every once in a while she would complain of an acute nervous condition, and would send me in her stead. The hospital didn’t seem to mind very much as long as someone showed up. I’d sometimes take samples of nail lacquer from the makeup counter to the geriatric ward and paint the old ladies’ fingernails. They seemed to like me all right.

  One late night, when the hospital wing was dark and silent, I found Mrs. Maudelle, an eccentric old woman with a mane of wild, white hair, pacing the halls looking for her prized mare. The doctors used to say Mrs. Maudelle was 50 percent insane, 50 percent ornery, and 100 percent Southern, but I liked her. She was from Lexington, Kentucky, and she’d walk around telling everyone about the days when she was best in show. She said when she’d crossed the Mason-Dixon Line to marry her husband her life went to hell. She was probably right.

  This night, her eyes spanned the walls and floor anxiously. She asked me who I was even though we had met countless times before. I tried quietly coaxing her back into her room, promising to bring her samples of her favorite rouge the next time I saw her, but the harder I pleaded, the wilder she got. She started scratching me and pulling at her hair and her robe. Then she screamed after the doctor in the white suit at the end of the hall. I saw him turn slowly toward us, but as he approached I saw he wasn’t the doctor at all. He was the custodian.

  “Good evening, ladies. How can I assist you?” He approached us warmly, but his smile was sad.

  “Please, doctor,” said Maudelle. “I can’t find my beautiful mare; the one with the gold-stitched bridle.”

  “Madam, you can’t expect a horse to be out on a night like this. It’s storming outside. Please, allow me to escort you back to your room and we will look for her in the morning when there’s better light.” He smiled tenderly at me, hoping I would keep up the ruse.

  “Room 480,” I whispered, locking eyes with him.

  He held out his arm, and the old woman took it fearlessly. He gently led her back down the hall to her room. By the time she was back in bed and settled the morning shift had arrived. The young man and I found ourselves punching out together, and then standing in the cold morning rain. We trotted across the street to Gary’s Diner and poured into a booth.

  I fumbled with the buttons on my jacket and tried rubbing out a couple brown stains on my cuff.

  “I’ve got blood on me,” I pointed to where Mrs. Maudelle had scratched me. That old Southern gal had some fight left in her after all.

  “Haven’t we all?” the young man said. His tired eyes penetrated mine deeper than any others had ever before.

  “Gerhard Magnusson,” he introduced himself, his soft, Swedish tongue incapable of producing the hard “G.” Holding out his hand, he smiled tenderly, and in that moment I fell in love for the first time in my life.

  VIII.

  Dad and I pulled into Weaver’s parking lot Wednesday night, and I was eager to see Gabe and share the good news. Two and half weeks later, my mums were looking better than ever. Even with all that snow.

  The shop was understandably busy. Customers bustled about trying free samples of fresh goat cheese and chestnuts while getting lectured on the benefits of buying farm-fresh, never frozen, hormone-free turkeys. Dad and I navigated the crowds in search of our basic Thanksgiving fare. We liked to keep things simple on Than
ksgiving; at least that’s what happened after Mom passed away. As we turned down the dairy aisle, my eyes caught sight of a familiar head of copper hair.

  “Hey there, neighbor,” Dad beamed as he walked up next to Rosemary. She lifted her eyes and gave her big, dental-hygienist smile. I envied her ability to pull off red lipstick.

  “Hi Christian, Louisa,” she nodded to me. I waved while peering behind her, trying to get a glimpse of the produce corner. “Doing your Thanksgiving shopping?”

  “A bit late, I’m afraid. This week’s gotten away from me,” Dad explained.

  “You and me both,” she laughed.

  Truth be told, I hadn’t really seen my dad interact all that much with women other than my mom. Dad hated chitchat. Sure, he’d been forced to make small talk with women at school functions before, but when given the chance, he almost always sat by himself. And people pick up on that kind of thing. But with Rosemary, Dad seemed genuinely interested in talking with her. I processed all of this as I stood there smiling dumbly, my attention focused at the back of the store. I was looking for someone.

  Before I knew it, Dad asked something awful. Truly awful.

  “Are you spending Thanksgiving alone?”

  After that, I walked around glumly gathering nearly everything on our list. I still hadn’t seen Gabe. Not that he would remember you anyway, I told myself. And now Rosemary was coming over for Thanksgiving. Didn’t she have her own family?

  I grabbed a cooking magazine near the checkout while waiting for Dad and began reading an article on “Turkey Gastronomics.”

  As I neared the end of the article, a familiar voice casually asked, “So was I right?”

  I tried to conceal my excitement behind the waxy pages.

  “I mean, I wouldn’t promise something and then not deliver, would I?” Gabe grinned, and I was sure he could tell I was a nervous wreck.

  Would you?

  “They’re perfect,” I smiled and could feel my cheeks grow hot. “Alive and well.”