In the Kerala backwaters he’d lived in a thatched hut, and near Udaipur, he’d been delighted by the monkeys who came right up to the train as it stopped at the platform — little beggars, paws out, requesting the attentions of the passengers.
In one of his postcards to Lily, he listed his supplies for his latest trip: We took twenty-four mules loaded with bedrolls, two yaks, tinned milk, ten bamboo tents, and four llamas (who did not get on well with the mules at all).
There were parts of his trip, though, that he did not share with Rose and Lily.
These were the increasingly frequent instances in which he now encountered places that were no longer isolated, no longer separated and protected from modernity. Of these experiences, Randolph kept only a mental list:
The Coca-Cola sign in front of the camel breeder’s modest home.
The Tiwi elders dressed half in traditional costume, half in what looked to Randolph like secondhand university t-shirts.
And worst of all, the tent he’d been invited into, in which he’d found the tribal leader and his wizened council watching a football match on a small television powered by a noisy generator.
As he added to this growing mental list of the ways in which modernity now seemed to encroach upon these places, he had begun to wonder if he was searching for a kind of untouched culture that no longer actually existed.
Randolph sat cross-legged with Lily on the soft carpet in the master bedroom, his trunk laid open in front of the closet. He had returned from his most recent trip just that morning and now smiled up at Rose, who watched from the hallway as Lily dug happily through the open trunk on the floor between them, pulling out treasure after treasure, certain that with each one would come a new story from her father. This was their ritual each time Randolph returned home. Rose joined them only to pluck Randolph’s more malodorous articles of clothing from the trunk and transfer them to a laundry basket destined for her immediate and thorough attentions.
Each time he returned from an expedition, Rose labeled his travel journal with the dates and destinations of his trip, adding it to the long row of journals that lined the mahogany bookshelves in his study. There, among his record of daily activities could be found sketches of native art, notes on travel routes and supplies, lists of objects acquired and of animals observed, handwritten receipts, well-worn maps gone soft at the folds and threatening to tear, official-looking permits bearing indecipherable stamps, foreign banknotes, customs forms issued by stern and harried clerks, now folded into small squares — all of these tucked, like bookmarks, into his journals. The mementos she catalogued and arranged in the display cases in his study, tucking a tribal mask in next to a clay sculpture or a tiny hand-woven basket, closing the case carefully and stepping back to admire each new addition.
In a small tin box on the bookshelf, Rose saved all of their letters. Sorting through his trunk after Lily had unearthed all of the treasures with which he’d returned, what delighted Rose most was to come upon the letters she had sent him, bound and bundled together, and which he had carried with him throughout his travels. These she added to the collection each time he returned, so that the tin box contained within it both the original correspondence and the response, a record of their extraordinary marriage, of what Rose thought of, always, as their great love story.
When it was again time for Randolph to pack, it was Randolph and Lily’s ritual to do that together also, Lily sometimes slipping in a drawing, a note, or some small treasure. These, Randolph discovered well into his trip, smiling to think of Lily doing this on the sly as he tucked his belongings into the trunk.
Lily prided herself on maintaining a stiff upper lip when it was time for her father to depart. She had never cried, not once. She felt it would have been disloyal. Her mother had taught her to be proud of their unconventional life — that there were many different ways to be a family, and that though it was different from what most people chose, this was the way of being a family that worked best for them. This was what she reminded herself firmly, emphatically, on the days when her father left.
In kindergarten, Lily came home from school one day distressed to have learned from a classmate that parents who didn’t live together no longer loved each other. Rose had gently corrected her. Certainly sometimes parents stopped loving one another, she explained, but that would never be the case with Lily’s mother and father, who loved each other so strongly that even Lily had to admit to never having seen her parents argue.
“Our family is different, yes,” Rose said, taking her daughter’s small hands in hers, “but that is something we should be proud of. It makes us unique.”
Rose had read all of the great political biographies — Churchill, Kennedy, Truman, Roosevelt. As a girl growing up in a small farm town in the shadow of the great city of the Midwest, she had cried with her classmates over Kennedy’s death, but unlike her girlfriends, she was crying not because their handsome young president was dead, leaving behind a widow and small children who, even in mourning, looked like they had just stepped out of a catalog, but because she had had such great hopes for his political career.
As a teenager, she had not imagined herself in any role other than that of a diligent helpmate to a spouse with his own promising political future. “Politics is men’s work, like plowing, or fixing a tractor,” her father, a stout farmer, said when Rose revealed her interest in the subject. Her mother, more sympathetic, pointed out the many ways in which Rose might fulfill her interests from behind the scenes, cutting out for her daughter photos from magazines and newspapers of a perfectly groomed Jackie Kennedy meeting Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru or being presented to the president and first lady of Mexico.
But when Rose surprised everyone, including herself, by eloping with Randolph at eighteen, she had come to realize that he would be an unlikely political candidate for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the infrequency with which he stayed put in a given location. And so, after Lily’s birth, Rose signed up for a correspondence course in political science at the state university, and, excelling in that class, had continued on until she had graduated with honors, with a deep sense of personal pride and accomplishment, and with a new plan for her life.
When Lily began school, Rose began her political career in earnest, first campaigning for and winning a seat on the local school board. At her first election, Randolph had been full of pride. Rose, uncertain about her chances, had worried that she might not win. But who better to represent the citizenry, Randolph encouraged her, than a daughter of Nicolet, now returned?
It was, perhaps, the frequency and unapologetic nosiness of the questions Rose received about the whereabouts of her husband (or, more often, of “Lily’s father,” as they tended to refer to him, unable to imagine that a man so infrequently present might still be a spouse, a partner, a helpmate) that had steeled Rose for a career in local politics. She’d been elected Alderman of Nicolet’s twelfth ward and had thrown herself into the work with zeal and dedication. Already she had overseen the installation of speed bumps in the Lost Colony neighborhood, spearheaded an ordinance fining citizens who failed to clear snow from their sidewalks, and initiated the implementation of a hotline for residents to report suspected rabid wildlife (mainly squirrels).