The Correspondent: A Novel by Virginia Evans - 6

Rosalie Van Antwerp

33 Orange Lane

Goshen, CT 06756

August 10, 2012

Dear Rosalie,

I haven’t heard from you. Waiting for your response to my last, but cannot wait forever. I own your life is busier than my quiet one, so I’m humbling myself and writing again. Did Paul’s new wheelchair arrive? And how is Lars holding up?

Listen to the latest from my own thankless offspring. You remember I mentioned I was in a little car accident. Well, it’s all sorted and I was due for an upgraded vehicle, so now I’m driving a modern Volkswagen Beetle (looks like something out of the future, a lovely red) but nearly a month after the fact I receive an e-mail from my daughter. She happens to be not in London but in Sydney, Australia, so the e-mail arrives in my inbox at four in the morning, and the meat of it is that FROM HALFWAY ACROSS THE EARTH she has heard from her brother that I was in a wreck and she has plenty of advice to give me, not the least of which is that I ought to sell my house (which she deems old, out of date) and move into a nursing home. Makes a suggestion about my financial security (and that is PRECISELY why I’ve never told the children what I’m worth, dollars and cents). Apparently it’s something they’ve been discussing behind my back. As a matter of fact, Guy and I heard a case in oh, I don’t know, the late eighties, and it was a woman just a touch older than myself SUING her CHILDREN because they’d duped her into selling her house and installed her into a place that was more like a prison or an insane asylum than a home for old people. Rats in the toilets, that sort of thing. Real hell for this woman. I can still picture her. Elizabeth Franklin was her name, teensy little thing sitting up on the stand and holding up her handbag, which had been chewed by rats at night. Vile. Never in twenty lifetimes would I have thought it would be me, my own children. Now I’m sure you’re wondering how I replied: I did not. She is back from Sydney, rang me last week—I saw her calling and let the thing go straight to the machine. That child is brazen as brass, I’ll give her that. Nerve enough to sink the Titanic. Can you imagine? She has not one single thing to do with my life, might as well live on another planet, sees me once a year if I’m lucky, and thinks it’s time for me to move into a brand new nursing home in Falls Church! Well. I will do no such thing.

Pivoting. I wrote to Ann Patchett when I finished reading State of Wonder , and yesterday morning there was a reply in my mailbox! An adorable little postcard with a dog. I always love to get a note back. I am reading Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (I had to look how to spell that one). It’s very long. What are you reading?

Love,

Sybil