Read The Roots of the Olive Tree Online
Authors: Courtney Miller Santo
W
hen Dr. Hashmi and Callie entered the living room, there was silence for an uncomfortably long time. Then a flurry of activity erupted; cookies were brought from the kitchen, tea offered, and the women settled themselves around the doctor, who’d brought a large bag and a computer with him.
“I’m going to make you all famous,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Do you know what makes us old?”
“Time,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes, but no,” the doctor said.
Callie jumped in with the answer he wanted. “Deterioration.”
He smiled at her, and Elizabeth could see that his interest in her daughter went beyond scientific curiosity. When Dr. Hashmi had first come to talk with them, he’d spent many hours describing the different effects of aging. His interest was in longevity genes. Or rather, he believed that aging was controlled by genetics. He now unfolded an easel and then pulled several large poster boards out of his bag.
He set the first one on the stand with a flourish. Bobo charged the tripod, and as the doctor reached to steady his poster board and Anna called the dog to her lap, Elizabeth wondered if he knew that the picture, with its row upon row of colored bars, meant nothing to them. He pointed to a small section near the last third of the board. “This is the Anna mutation.” He circled it repeatedly with his pointer. “You all have it.”
Callie clapped. Elizabeth, along with the rest of her family, was silent. Callie was the first to venture a question. “What does it mean? This mutation?”
“Everything,” he said. “You are aging environmentally, but not genetically.”
“But what does it mean?” Anna asked. She was shaking a bit and Elizabeth reached across the table to hold her hand.
“Stay out of the sun, eat right, keep exercising, and you could be the first to make it to a hundred and fifty,” said the doctor.
“I don’t want to live forever,” Elizabeth said.
“Well you probably won’t,” said Dr. Hashmi. Elizabeth imagined that the weight of their earlier conversation settled into his shoulder, and he shook his head as he spoke. “I was just trying to say that in ideal circumstances someone with this genetic mutation, who avoided all environmentally degrading substances, could potentially not age. You”—he looked at everyone in the room—“have all been exposed to—”
“—the world,” Erin said, finishing his sentence. She held her baby close, almost shielding him from Dr. Hashmi.
“The remarkable thing about this mutation is that it is only present in women, and a daughter can only inherit the mutation if her mother has it. So little baby Keller will have a normal life span, but any daughters you have could claim immortality. Especially now, because we know.”
He reached for a cookie and took a long drink of his tea. Low conversations started and then stopped just as suddenly as each of the women thought about Dr. Hashmi’s pronouncement. Elizabeth clenched her fists. She couldn’t look at her daughter or her mother, who she knew felt differently than she did. Erin grinned like one of those contests on the reality shows she watched.
Anna was first to address the group, the first to open up the discussion with question after question about the mutation, where it had come from and what Dr. Hashmi and his team wanted to study.
“It would have come from Anna’s mother, and quite possibly from her mother’s mother and so on. We know this is not a recent mutation, but one that happened hundreds of years earlier,” Dr. Hashmi said, pulling out more posters to point at. Elizabeth realized, listening to them talk, that Anna hadn’t owned up to knowing Mims wasn’t her mother.
Elizabeth cleared her throat. “The mutation didn’t come from Mims.”
“Of course it did,” Callie said. “Mom, you just have to follow the logic. I got it from you, you got it from Anna, and Anna got it from her mother, Mims.”
“No,” Elizabeth said.
The dog pawed at Anna’s chest and licked her cheek. She pushed him down and looked at her daughter. “It doesn’t matter, does it? We can’t know for sure.”
Dr. Hashmi had no trouble following the conversation. It was almost as if he’d anticipated this turn. “There are some unusual markers in your DNA, for someone of western European descent,” he said.
“What about aborigines?” Elizabeth asked. “Would our DNA make more sense if Anna weren’t Irish?”
“Papa was Irish,” Anna said.
“What are you saying?” Callie asked. She turned to the doctor. “Amrit, what are they talking about? Is this the information you wouldn’t tell me? Is this why you told me to ask my mother about her secrets?”
Elizabeth looked at Dr. Hashmi, imploring him not to give away the other secret. Then she turned to Anna, “Do you know this, Mom? Do you know that Mims isn’t your mother?”
Anna smiled. “Sometimes tall tales have a bit of truth to them. Was it your uncle Wealthy who told you? I knew and I didn’t know.” She closed her eyes and leaned back into her chair. Erin and Callie whispered furiously to Dr. Hashmi, asking him for verification and more.
Elizabeth touched Anna’s arm. “It’s your story to tell.”
“Then get me something a bit stronger than tea to drink,” she said, setting Bobo on the ground. The dog sniffed at her feet and then trotted over to his bed and settled into sleep.
Erin went to the linen closet, where they kept a bottle of scotch wrapped in the winter sheets. When she returned, she poured a little in everyone’s tea glass except for the doctor, who refused.
Anna told them her story. She told them how much she’d hated her father for taking her, but how Mims made it hurt less by loving her so much. She described the image she held in her mind of her mother—a tall woman wearing a dust-covered handkerchief over her hair. “I try very hard at night when I fall asleep to see her face, but nothing is there. I think that her eyes must have been brown and that her nose must have been like mine.” Anna reached up and ran her fingers along her own face. She cupped her full cheeks and tapped her finger against her broad triangular nose. Her bottom lip was much larger than her top, and at times, when she relaxed her face, it looked like she was pouting.
During the secret telling, Dr. Hashmi sat on his hands. Elizabeth thought he looked like a man sitting on too narrow of a seat, and at every pause in Anna’s story, he moved his lips, as if he were about to speak. Finally, when Anna had settled back into her chair and Callie and Erin had exhausted their questions, the doctor stood up and paced the room. “There’s a chance that your mother could still be living.”
Anna shook her head. “That would take a miracle.”
“But don’t you want to find out?” Erin came over to Anna and knelt beside her chair. She’d come to the same conclusion as the doctor; Elizabeth could see it in her eyes. She’d always been hopeful, willing to believe that the best was waiting to be found. It was what had driven her to get her mother released, and Elizabeth knew that her great-granddaughter now had a new quest.
“I, I don’t know enough about her,” Anna said.
Elizabeth thought about all that Wealthy had told her more than sixty years earlier. “Your brother said that she wasn’t more than fourteen when she had you. Wealthy said that she was hired to work for your parents from the orphanage and they didn’t keep girls past that age. She was pregnant the next year.”
“Still, she couldn’t be alive. Nobody lives to be older than a hundred and twenty.”
“She’d be a hundred twenty-eight,” said Erin. “Give or take a year.”
“That’s an impossible age,” Elizabeth said, considering what the weight of another thirty years would do to her mind.
“It is not impossible,” said Dr. Hashmi, placing his hand possessively over Anna’s.
“It is,” said Elizabeth, standing and then sitting quickly. For the first time, she’d seen a glimpse of ego in the doctor’s mannerisms.
“I think. No, we think Anna, even with all the environmental aging, still has another thirty years left.” Dr. Hashmi spoke so quickly he missed the nonverbal conversation that was happening among the women.
“What else did my brother tell you?” asked Anna.
Elizabeth looked away from her mother. “Mostly I know what I know from Mims.”
“That’s a long time to keep this to yourself.” Anna’s tone had changed from friendly to parental, and Elizabeth felt as she had as a girl when she’d been caught lying about having done her chores.
Callie came and stood between Anna and Elizabeth, as if in anticipation of refereeing their fight. “We could go to Australia. Try to find out. It might be a goose chase but—”
“We have to go,” said Dr. Hashmi. “Or rather I have to go. If she is alive, or if there are other relatives with the mutation.”
Elizabeth ignored her daughter and the doctor. “She didn’t know how much you remembered and she didn’t want to make you unhappy. Wealthy felt the same way. If you knew, why didn’t you say anything?”
“Father told me that if I was sure I didn’t belong to the family that he’d send me back to Australia. He told me it was a dream and that Mims was my mother.”
Erin immediately took Anna’s side. “You didn’t believe him,” she urged.
“How could I? The memory of him ripping me from her arms was too real to be a dream. I could smell her, I tasted her tears.”
“And you never asked Mims?” Erin said softly.
“I was afraid she’d stop loving me. So I let Mims be my mother.”
Dr. Hashmi opened his small laptop computer and began typing furiously. “Where did you say your parents were from? What part of Australia again?”
“You know this,” Elizabeth said, suspicious of how much of this had been staged. She peered over the doctor’s shoulder. “Brisbane.”
He scrolled through page after page of records. “We keep a record of anyone who claims to be older than a hundred ten. There are more than you’d think, but then the world has more than six billion people on it. You get reports like this one from a village in Somali. A pair of women claiming to be mother and daughter, but no one knows which is which and they’re so old no one in the village remembers them as anything but crones. They think they are a hundred twenty and a hundred and six, but we don’t know.”
He highlighted a row of records and then clicked. They all opened quickly, filling up the screen of the tiny machine. “Twenty-one unconfirmed supercentenarians in Australia. And, oh my, eighteen are women.”
“So?” asked Callie.
“That’s much too high,” he said.
“What?” asked Erin.
Dr. Hashmi sat next to her with the computer on his lap. “It’s typical to have more older women than men. Women take better care of themselves; they don’t fight in wars, or take risks at the same rate as men. But this percentage is too high. Makes me think we might find a mutation like Anna’s. One that is only present in women.”
Callie drifted over to them. Elizabeth watched as her daughter put her hand on the doctor’s back. It was a gesture of ownership. Knowing her daughter, Elizabeth was sure that she was proud that he’d discovered this mutation and so quickly connected it to Anna’s past.
Elizabeth went to her mother. “I’m so sorry.”
“Folks have always trusted you,” Anna said, putting her hand on Elizabeth’s head. “Tell me what you know.”
Despite her age, and the discomfort it caused her, Elizabeth put her head in her mother’s lap. She unspun every bit of information she’d tucked away about Anna’s lineage. When she was done, she stayed with her mother and watched Callie, her own daughter. It had been decades since she’d seen her happy. She stood next to Dr. Hashmi, leaning toward him and putting her weight on her good leg. He was talking excitedly about the science of genetics and longevity and his hands, moving as he talked, looked like he was conducting an orchestra. Her eyes were bright, and Elizabeth thought she could see a slight flush that crept from her daughter’s collarbones to her cheeks.
She thought about the other secret she and Dr. Hashmi were keeping from Callie and wondered if she were told that she was Frank’s only biological child whether she’d be able to keep her happiness. She wanted to ask her mother if she thought she should keep quiet about it, especially now that Anna had discovered the whole truth about her mother.
Anna didn’t look happy—for the first time Elizabeth could remember, her mother looked old. She began to think that Dr. Hashmi had been wrong about how much time her mother had left.
“Mom?” Elizabeth said. Her voice seemed to bring Anna back from where she’d been.
“I’m fine,” she said. The color returned to her cheeks and the yellowish cast disappeared from her face. “We’ve got a trip to Australia to plan.”
T
he day Callie left with Dr. Hashmi, it rained. It had not stopped raining in the month since her departure. Wet summers were an abnormality in Kidron, and glee about plump olives had turned to dismay at the signs of blight that began to appear on the drupes in August. Elizabeth liked the grayness and the drizzle. It suited her mood.
“Cheer up, sourpuss,” Erin said, coming into the living room. “Weatherman says it’s supposed to be sunny today.” The baby rested in a fabric sling Erin had tied around one shoulder.
“Bring that baby of yours over here. He’ll cheer me up.” The boy was nearly four months old and Elizabeth couldn’t believe how large he’d gotten. “I think his father was part sumo wrestler.”
“His father is all of five foot six,” Erin said, sitting down in the recliner opposite Elizabeth. “He’s going to meet us in Australia.”
“Oh?” The baby grabbed at her nose.
“I guess after his wife was done being mad, she decided she wanted to meet Keller. They never had kids of their own.”
“Be careful,” Elizabeth said.
“I’ll keep an eye on everyone,” Anna said, coming into the living room. “Besides it’ll be good for the child to know who his father is.”
Erin blushed. “I think I just got a little crazy for a while. Now it seems so foolish to have made such a fuss over a man who didn’t love me.”
Anna laughed. “We’ve all been a little crazy about men. Just be glad you’ve got more of us in you than your mother. That was crazy.”
“Grams!” Erin said.
“I’m starting to think that we take our tragedies too seriously,” Anna said. “What’s God going to do? Hand the Keller family a little more smite? He should’ve figured out it doesn’t work so well on us.”
Despite herself, Elizabeth smiled. The news about Anna’s paternity had made everyone less cautious. She bounced Keller on her knee, talking nonsense to him and thinking about what it would feel like to be in Hill House alone this winter. She’d decided not to go to Australia—it would be too much time away from Frank. She hadn’t missed one day of visiting with him since putting him in Golden Sunsets.
“Don’t jostle him so much. He just ate and he tends—”
“Aaaak.” Elizabeth held the baby away from her and let him finish spitting up on the floor. Her pantsuit was stained with sour milk. She handed the baby to Anna, who was laughing.
“You never were good with babies. Don’t get me wrong, once they could walk, you were the best mother I’ve ever seen. But you barely tolerated them as infants.”
“I’m sure you can see why,” Elizabeth said, leaving the room to change. She was supposed to meet Callie’s Realtor that morning to give him the keys to the Pit Stop. Her daughter had ended up keeping an online version of the store and selling the land and the building to an entrepreneur who wanted to open a roadside church for truckers. She changed into her plum pantsuit and gave Keller a kiss on the head before leaving.
“Auntie Bets,” called the Realtor as Elizabeth stepped from the car. The boy was young, and distantly related to the Kellers. His mother was the cousin of one of the girls who’d married a nephew of Elizabeth’s. Relationships in Kidron were complicated. She waved to him, flashing the keys to the store, which were in her hand. The man who was purchasing the store had his back to her and was peering in the windows. Wanted posters with Deb’s face on them were still posted on the doors. The man wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. He had hairy forearms and a tattoo that reminded Elizabeth of Popeye.
“It finally stopped raining,” said the Realtor. “It’s been a hard summer to sell stuff. No one around here wants to go out if their feet are going to get wet.”
“I guess I had an advantage then, not being from around here,” said the man. He extended his hand to Elizabeth. “Name’s Dennis. Well, they said you Keller women look young. I gotta agree you don’t look a day over sixty.”
Elizabeth relaxed. “Thank you. My husband often mistakes me for his nurse, and she’s not even fifty.”
They laughed and Elizabeth offered to unlock the store and show him the fixtures that were part of the sale. The fluorescent lights flickered when she flipped the switch. The air was stale and smelled of burned coffee. The merchandise had been packed and shipped by Callie’s stock boys the week before. She gestured to the shelves and the register. “These are all yours, although I’m not sure what you’ll be needing them for.”
“The Lord doesn’t have anything against me selling a few necessities to my congregation,” Dennis said. “I was a trucker myself for a lotta years. There’s some stuff we’ll buy no matter where we see it.”
“Do you think they’ll stop? I’d think people want to get their religion at home with their families on Sundays,” Elizabeth said. She was concerned about his idea.
“People will stop whenever they need forgiveness,” Dennis said. He bent down to see how the shelving was fastened to the floor. “Gotta get a good drill motor in here.”
“The boys Callie hired, Pete and Robert. They’re good workers. They could help you with this,” Elizabeth said. She worried about them not having work.
“I’ve already hired them,” Dennis said. “That daughter of yours had the same concern. Practically made hiring them part of the conditions for sale.”
“That’s good of you,” she said. They walked to the back of the store.
“Dennis here is a regular philanthropist,” said the Realtor. “He’s been spreading the money around. Even paid me commission on the deal I brokered for the billboard.”
“I think you mean entrepreneur,” Elizabeth said. “What’s this about a commission?” asked Elizabeth.
“He’s sold the rights to the sign to that business just up the street, across from the motel.”
“You mean Eddie’s convenience store?” Elizabeth asked.
“No. The other store, just next to Eddie’s,” said the Realtor, looking away from Elizabeth.
She thought about the street and could picture only the pornography shop with its XXX above the door and metal shed “Annexxx,” which could be rented by the hour. “Surely not!”
The Realtor looked at the floor, but Dennis smiled wide and Elizabeth saw that he had tobacco-yellow teeth. “The way I figure it, the best way to get men to church is let them sin a little and then feel bad enough to repent. I got Sean over at the emporium to put a little billboard up at the end of his property—one that the truckers will see on their way out. It says, ‘God Loves You Too’ with directions to our church.”
“It’s not God they ought to be thinking about, but their wives back home. You can’t be with a hooker and do a little praying to make up for that,” Elizabeth said. She went to the front of the store and ripped down the wanted posters of Deb. “Forgiveness is a much harder process.”
“God knows that,” Dennis said, following her. “He just wants me to get them to the door. And the best way I know how to do that is let them get an illicit poke in first.”
The Realtor laughed. It was a high, thin sound that reminded Elizabeth of squealing pigs. She pushed the keys into Dennis’s hand and fled to her car.
A
nna sat on the back porch. She’d pulled her rocker into the one bit of sun that the branches of the maples were not able to obscure, and although her eyes were closed, Elizabeth knew she was resting, but not asleep. This was part of her secret; since turning one hundred, she’d started remaining as still as possible unless another person was around. She said that this conservation of energy, this hibernation, gave her extra time, that a minute spent in this suspended state was another minute on the earth.
“Daughter,” Anna said as Elizabeth approached.
Elizabeth said, “One of my grandsons was telling me that we need to stay out of the sun. That it somehow pokes tiny invisible holes in your skin and that’s what causes all of our wrinkles and our age spots.”
“Those grandchildren of yours are know-it-alls,” Anna said. “Besides I’ve had wrinkles since I was thirty—what’s a few more going to hurt?”
“Don’t tell him that. He’s one of those cancer doctors that will yell at you about your skin and cell mutations.”
“No one, especially doctors, tells me what to do anymore,” Anna said. Elizabeth smiled at her mother.
It was true. What could they say to a woman who’d lived to be a hundred and thirteen? Anna was confident that her body was perfect. It was old, but it worked well. Elizabeth wondered when the doctors would stop chiding her.
“How’s Frank?” asked Anna.
Her mother always had been able to do this. Sense the purpose of a visit, drill down to the reason for a person’s arrival on her doorstep. Elizabeth was surprised by the honesty of her answer. “I just couldn’t go see him today. After giving the keys to that Realtor, you know Lucy’s grandson. Well, I just couldn’t face Frank. He’s forgotten so much. He thinks he’s twenty-five.”
“We all think we’re twenty-five. You know it’s only when I glance in the mirror or look at you and see how old you’ve gotten that I remember how much time has passed.”
“It’s different,” Elizabeth said.
“I know.” Her mother gestured for her to join her on the rocker on the porch.
The sun warmed Elizabeth’s skin. The smell and the talk of Frank reminded her of the summer he proposed. It was 1927 and the valley was just coming out of a winter of heavy snows. Shasta, in the distance, seemed smaller, for all the snow that covered the mountain, and by June, when the rush of melting snow usually slowed, there was a second summer melting. The river was wide and it became a place where folks liked to go and watch. The farmers whose land touched its banks began backing up in May. Jerry Sims had even hired a team of horses to move his barn, and Barry James had emptied his grain silo—paid his neighbors to store it for him.
In early June, after most of the work in the groves had been done, Frank showed up at the house and asked to take her down to watch the river. Elizabeth was not a pretty girl. She’d come to terms with this early. At nineteen, some generous people, who might have been farsighted, described her as handsome. She was taller than most of the men she met and had a hard angular face. She and Frank had grown up together. His family’s orchard, although not one of the original seven that made up Kidron, was purchased and planted shortly after Kidron’s historic move. His family had been Mormon—his mother married to a man with seventeen other wives until it had become illegal.
Frank was courting another young woman at the time. A petite girl named Frances, who was friendly with his younger sisters. He took her to the movie theater that the Rodgerses had built in town and out for sodas at her family’s drugstore. Still, Frank would show up at Elizabeth’s house once a week, and they’d go for walks or ride the horses. His family had never had a stable, but he rode like a man born into the saddle.
That summer that the riverbanks flooded, they rode out in the early afternoons and sat on the trunk of a sequoia that overlooked the river. Elizabeth’s mind didn’t hold all that they talked about, only words that suggested Frank’s thoughts on God or the best way to increase olive production. In August, when the river finally started to recede, revealing logs and boulders pulled down from Shasta itself, he proposed. Those words she remembered clearly. He grabbed her by the shoulders and said, “You’ve got to marry me. I couldn’t stand it being anyone else. Their perfume, their silliness, their petticoats.”
“Do you love me?” Elizabeth asked him.
“You are more than I deserve,” he said.
In that moment, Elizabeth understood. There were no other suitors in her life, and the whole town talked to her like she’d be a spinster, the kind ones giving her Jane Austen to read or Emily Dickinson, and the less kind telling her that they were sure Anna was glad to have a child who would never leave home.
“Will there be children?” she asked.
“I’ll give you what I can,” Frank said. He’d picked up a water-soaked tree branch and poked at the carcass of a possum. It was bloated and much of its hair had floated away.
“I’ll take what I can get,” Elizabeth said.
He confided his secret to her on their wedding night. What he’d said exactly was, “My plumbing doesn’t work right. I might be able to get it turned on when you need it.”
Elizabeth tracked her cycles methodically and let Frank know when she needed it. Still it took them four years to conceive, and watching his grim, determined face as he focused on getting his plumbing to work long enough, soured Elizabeth on sex.
A
cloud passed in front of the sun, and a chill swept across Elizabeth’s body. She turned toward her mother. “You should come see Frank with me today.”
“I go on Sundays. Those nurses of his will yell at us for upsetting his routine. Why risk it?” Anna scooted her chair closer to the railing to be more fully in the sun.
“I want you to tell me if I’m understanding something right. It’s about Frank and our boys and how he really is.” Elizabeth left her chair in the shade. She let her mind drift to the signs she’d been seeing between Frank and Guy at the retirement facility.
The nurses at Golden Sunsets loved Frank. He’d been there longer than any other patient. They were mostly young and as such were progressive about Frank’s crush. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” they tittered when she’d asked them. “Nothing works anymore for either of them and to see them holding hands and kissing, well it is just a sweet thing.” They told her of real problems between some of the younger patients. Confided that some of those in their seventies got their hands on Viagra a while back and then they’d had a real problem. “You wouldn’t believe the outbreak of the clap that went around.”
Elizabeth would believe anything. She told the nurses this. “One advantage of living so long, no surprises left.” Her children would be surprised at Dr. Hashmi’s DNA evidence. And surprise wasn’t good for people; it led to hurt. Elizabeth had let go of expectations earlier than most. She didn’t expect much from the world around her, and it kept her from being disappointed.
Anna pulled her from her thoughts. “You going to tell me?”
Elizabeth opened her eyes and turned toward her mother. “They’re not Frank’s boys.”