Tell-All

The creamy perfume of absent gardenias. Hanging in the air is the tang of eucalyptus I carry directly to the back door. The trash cans in the alley overflow with crimson bougainvillea and sprays of sweet-smelling daphne.
    Every card signed, Webster Carlton Westward III .
    From an insert shot of one gift card, we cut to a close-up of another card, and another. A series of card after gift card. Then a close-up of yet another paper envelope with
To Miss Katherine
handwritten on one side. The shot pulls back to reveal me holding this last sealed envelope in the steam jetting from a kettle boiling atop the stove. The kitchen setting appears much the same as it did a dog’s lifetime ago, when my Miss Kathie scratched her heart into the window. One new detail, a portable television, sits atop the icebox, flashing the room with scenes from a hospital, the operating room in a surgical suite where an actor’s rubber-gloved hand grasps a surgical mask and pulls it from his own face, revealing the previous “was-band,” Paco Esposito . The seventh and mostrecent Mr. Katherine Kenton . His hair now grows gray at his temples. His upper lip fringed with a pepper-and-salt mustache.
    The teakettle hisses on the stove, centered above the blue spider of a gas flame. Steam rises from the spout, curling the corners of the white envelope I hold. The paper darkens with damp until the glued flap peels along one edge. Picking with a thumbnail, I lift the flap. Pinching with two fingers, I slide out the letter.
    On television, Paco leans over the operating table, dragging a scalpel through the inert body of a patient played by Stephen Boyd. Hope Lange plays the assisting physician. Suzy Parker the anesthesiologist. Fixing his gaze on the attending nurse, Natalie Wood , Paco says, “I’ve never seen anything this bad. This brain has got to come out!”
    The next channel over, a battalion of dancers dash around a soundstage, fighting the Battle of Antietam in some Frank Powell production directed by D. W. Griffith of a musical version of the Civil War . The lead for the Confederate Army , leaping and pirouetting, is featured dancer Terrence Terry . A heartbreakingly young Joan Leslie plays Tallulah Bankhead. H. B. Warner plays Jefferson Davis . Music scored by Max Steiner .
    From the alley outside the kitchen door, a man’s voice says, “Knock, knock.” The windows, fogged with the steam. The kitchen air feels humid and warm as the sauna of the Garden of Allah apartments. My hair hangs lank and plastered to my wet forehead, flat as a Louise Brooks spit curl.
    The shadow of a head falls against the outside of the window, the pane where my Miss Kathie cut the shape of her heart. From behind the fogged glass, the voice says, “Katherine?”His knuckles knocking the glass, a man says, “This is an emergency.”
    Unfolded, the letter reads:
My Most Dear Katherine, True love is NOT out of your reach
. I flatten the letter to the damp window glass, where it sticks, held secure as wallpaper, pasted there by the condensed steam. The sunlight streaming in from the alleyway, the light leaves the paper translucent, glowing white with the handwritten words hung framed by the heart etched in the glass. The letter still pasted to the window, I flip the dead bolt, slip the chain, turn the knob and open the door.
    In the alleyway, a man stands holding a paper tablet fluttering with pages. Each page scribbled with names and arrows, what looks like the diagram for plays in a football game. Among the names one can read Eve Arden … Marlene Dietrich … Sidney Blackmer … In his opposite hand, the man holds a white paper sack. Next to him, the trash cans spill their roses and gardenias onto the paving stones. The gladiolas and orchids tumble out to lie in the fetid puddles of mud and rainwater which run down the center of the alley. The reek of honeysuckle and spoiled meat. Pale mock orange mingles with pink camellias and bloodred peonies.
    “Hurry, quick, where’s Lady Katherine?” the man says, holding the tablet, shaking it so the pages flap. On some, the names radiate in every direction from a large rectangle which fills the center of the page. The names alternating gender: Lena Horne then William Wellman then Esther Williams . The man says, “I’m expecting twenty-four guests for dinner, and I have a placement emergency.…”
    The diagrams are seating charts. The rectangles are the dinner table. The names the guest list. “As added