29 Inquiries

Churches

Syracuse.

James Street Methodist

3027 James Street, Syracuse, N.Y.

*Plymouth Congregational Church

232 East Onondaga Street, Syracuse

Records for September 14, 1922, show membership for George and Letty Dalton 224 W. Yates St., Syracuse.

George and Letty Dalton. Charlotte’s grandparents, whom her mother hated.

No membership what so ever, for an Edward G. Dalton (OR John Edward)

No Mrs. Mildred Fischer Dalton, either!

Her mother had written twenty-nine letters to churches in the Syracuse area. The cigarette dropped from Charlotte’s lips and she blew a low whistle and pulled her legs back under her as she rocked forward on her knees, her head brushing the bottoms of her dad’s shirts. Her eyes were starting to hurt from all the squinting at the notebook, but she couldn’t stop.

The notes weren’t only research and family history, although there was a section labeled “Geneology,” which Charlotte noted was misspelled. Beyond the Dalton family vital statistics, and beyond the addresses of churches and transcribed legal notifications and details about life insurance, there were a handful of quotes, such as:

Love is the emblem of eternity;

it confounds all notion of time;

effaces all memory of a beginning,

all fear of an end.

MADAME DE STAËL

Then there were pages and pages where her mother had written titles of popular songs from earlier times.

1924

“Yes Sir, That’s My Baby”

“It’s Three O’Clock in the Morning”

“No One but You”

“Margie”

There were more. And there was a page for 1925, and one for 1926, all the way through 1934 (although for that year there was only one song, “Stars Fell on Alabama”). Scribbled in the corners of some of those pages were bizarre random facts.

“Slang: ‘So’s your old man,’” “Portable radios introduced,” “also ‘Car heaters!’”

Charlotte barked out an involuntary laugh at “Car heaters!” because it just sounded so absurd. Why the exclamation point? And, speaking of points, what was the point of all this? Was her mother reliving her own youth? The good old days, before she met Dad? Was she bemoaning the loss of her love affair with Dad? Was she trying to reconstruct the love affair between him and his first wife? If there had even been one?

Charlotte felt a wave of nausea wash over her, as if she had just eaten a whole pan of Nestlé Tollhouse Congo Squares in one sitting. She briefly gagged at the memory of the seven-layer bars in the toilet bowl after her mother had told her the news. She placed the notebook on the carpeted floor of the closet. She felt ill. She worried that her mother was ill. She looked tired all the time, like she hadn’t slept in a year, and now she was smoking and keeping a secret crazy little brown notebook.

Why can’t my family be normal? Like “Ozzie & Harriet”? Or “My Little Margie”?

The little brown notebook was like a window into her mother’s mind, and the more Charlotte read it, the more she wanted to pull the curtains closed on that window. Pull them closed and sew them up with a zipper that she could lock. She could see the change in her mother’s temperament from page to page. The handwriting betrayed her frame of mind. When her mother wrote in cursive script, it was really quite pretty. She had beautiful, flowing penmanship, even if not everything was spelled correctly. But Charlotte could see, in the transition from cursive to print, the anger pouring out into the book. The more inflammatory passages were highlighted by aggressive pen marks that almost ripped the page. Exclamation points and underlined words filled the lines in front of her as she read through details that seemed to be nothing at first, but obviously weren’t “nothing” to her mother.