She shook her head for answer and then there erupted from her such a violent laugh, such a whip crack of harsh sound that I stepped back, frightened, only causing her to laugh again, harder this time, and higher, until the sound kicked free into the air of the room like a girl at the top of a swing. And then down she came, my poor mother, down again, and she covered her mouth as the terrible laugh turned to a thin wail and then a sob, though through her tears there still seemed to be a jagged smile upon her face as she held her hand out to me to come near. I went to her again, and held her against my waist, awkwardly patting her shoulders and hair.

“Look, Maisie. These are all my poor letters, returned.”

I glanced down and recognized her handwriting upon the envelopes, though she did not move her arm. Were these the letters she had written this winter?

“Go along, my girl,” Mama said sadly, lifting her arm from off the stack, “just see to whom your poor mama has been writing all this time.”

Still frightened, I leaned over her and read the name scrawled upon the top envelope: Mr. Ludlow Thomas.

Without looking at Mama, I pried up the corner of that first envelope to see if the second was also addressed to Papa. It was, and the third, and the fourth, and the last. There were fifty or sixty letters in front of me, and all were directed in Mama’s bold round script—to my dead father—in care of the postmaster of Middle Haven.

Was she mad? I turned over the many pictures I had of her silent form moving through our house, but too quickly these gave way to the more indelible one of her at her desk, her head bent as she wrote. I shuddered with the realization that all through the lowering darkness of the winter, she had been writing to Papa.

Mama held up the letter she had been reading, and I took it nervously, unable to look at her, and read:

My dear Mrs. Thomas,

Postmaster McGovern arrived yesterday with your letters and begged that I return them to you, wanting them to arrive, he said, with a friendly, rather than official, hand. I have taken the liberty of tying them up in a ribbon I wore after my own Fredrick passed away. My dear lady, do not think I am insensible to the sorrow these letters bespeak—and, I pray, do not think me forward if I say this sorrow, madame, never vanishes. I pray for your sake that it lessens. Mr. Thomas’s grave is well tended in the churchyard—I have seen that your directions were carried out exactly. Though he is gone to our God, he remains in some way up here, and perhaps instead, of resting in Brooklyn this summer, as you had indicated last year, you might pass it here. Come and stay for the full season rather than the two months you have been used to. Come and see that the nearness of his grave will ease, rather than heighten, your grief. Yours very truly—