The Cassette Tapes Labeled Only With Dates

When I cleared out my father's attic in Fredericksburg last spring, I found a shoebox of cassette tapes, forty-one of them, each one labeled with nothing but a date in his small engineer's handwriting — and the earliest date on the earliest tape was almost seven years before I was born. I am an only child. I bought a used tape player at a thrift store on Caroline Street just to hear them, and the first one I played was my father, decades younger than I ever knew him, talking gently to someone he called "my dear girl" on a date when I did not yet exist.

I'll tell you who she was, because I spent a bad week not knowing and I wouldn't put that on anybody. "My dear girl" was Ellen — Ellie — my father's first daughter, born in 1955 and dead of leukemia in 1961 at the age of six, in a life my father lived and lost completely before he ever met my mother. I had a sister. She was gone eleven years before I arrived. And my father, who never once said her name to me in thirty-nine years, sat down alone with a tape recorder on her birthday and her anniversary and ordinary Tuesdays for the rest of his life and talked to her, out loud, into a machine, so that the talking would have somewhere to go.

But I have to start with the shoebox, because the finding of it was its own small haunting.

The shoebox with no label

My father was Walter Prately, a quiet man, a surveyor by trade, precise about everything — his tools, his taxes, the way he backed the car into the garage on the same two inches every time. He died at eighty-eight, and my mother had been gone six years before him, and so it fell to me, the only child, to empty the house on the hill above the Rappahannock where I'd grown up. The attic was the last of it. It was organized the way he organized everything, labeled boxes in rows, and near the back, under a box marked TAX 1990–1994, was a shoebox with no label at all, which is the thing that made me open it, because nothing in my father's life went unlabeled. Inside were the cassettes, standing on their edges like files, and every one had a date and nothing else. Some were forty, fifty years old, the paper labels gone amber.

Four dollars on Caroline Street

I didn't have anything to play them on. Nobody does anymore. I drove down to a thrift shop on Caroline Street and paid four dollars for a scuffed tape player, and I sat in my father's empty kitchen that night with the box in front of me, and I did the thing you're not supposed to be able to resist and I couldn't: I found the oldest date, and I put it in, and I pressed play.

It was my father's voice, but young — I'd never heard him young — warm and unhurried in a way the man I knew rarely was. And he said, near the start, "Well, my dear girl. It's your daddy." And my whole body went cold, because the date on that tape was 1962, and I was born in 1968, and my mother did not marry my father until 1966, and so whoever "my dear girl" was, she was not me, and she was not my mother, and she belonged to a chapter of my father's life I did not know had any pages in it at all.

The week I got it wrong

I am going to be honest about the week that followed, because I think the honesty is the only thing that makes a story like this worth telling. Before I understood, my mind went straight to the worst and smallest place. I decided my father had loved another woman. A "dear girl" from before, or worse, during — a secret my precise, faithful-seeming father had kept in a shoebox in the attic all my life. I lay awake re-sorting my entire childhood through that lens; I looked at the photograph of my parents on their anniversary trip and felt betrayed on my dead mother's behalf; I got angry at a man I'd just buried and could not ask. For a week I let a whole box of tapes be evidence of a crime I'd invented, because grief and suspicion use the same wiring. Whatever your fear tells you it means, wait. Listen to the second tape before you convict them on the first.

I did listen to the second tape, and the third, and eventually all forty-one, over about a month, a few at a time because more than that was more than I could hold. And here is what they were.

What the tapes were

The 1962 tape was my father, one year a widower — because by then he'd lost not only Ellie but the marriage; he and Ellie's mother, a woman named Frances Dwyer, had come apart under the grief the way so many couples did in that era, when a child's death was a thing you were expected to simply get over and never mention, and neither of them could get over it and so they couldn't look at each other. On that first tape my father tells "his dear girl" that he's moved to a smaller place, that her mother has gone back to her people in Pennsylvania, that he thinks about her every day. He tells her the weather. He tells her a joke she used to like, about a duck, and then his voice stops for a while and you can hear the reels turning in the quiet.

The tapes go on for decades. He recorded on her birthday, June 3rd, almost every year. He recorded on the anniversary of the day she died. And he recorded on ordinary days when, I think, it simply got to be too much to carry and he needed to set some of it down. On a 1965 tape he tells her he's met a kind woman named Joan — my mother — and he asks his dead six-year-old, very seriously, whether it's all right, and then he laughs at himself for asking, and then, quieter, he says he thinks she'd have liked her.

"You've got a sister now"

On a tape from the autumn of 1968 — and this is the one I've listened to more times than is good for me — my father tells Ellie that she has a sister now. That's the word he used. Not a half-sister. A sister. He says, "You've got a sister now, Ellie. Janet Ellen. I gave her your name in the middle, so you'd both have it." I did not know that was where my middle name came from. Nobody ever told me. And then he says the thing that broke me clean in half, sitting in his kitchen at two in the morning:

"I'm going to love her all the way, my dear girl. I'm not going to make her carry you. That's not a thing to hang on a baby. You're mine to carry, and I've got you, and she gets to just be light. But I wanted you to know about her. I wanted you to know I didn't forget how to do it. I was scared I forgot how."

That was why I never knew. It wasn't shame and it wasn't a secret kept against me. It was the opposite. My father made a deliberate, decades-long decision to carry his first daughter entirely by himself, in an attic, on magnetic tape, so that I could grow up light — so that I would never feel I was living in a dead girl's shadow, never feel I had to be enough for two, never sit at a dinner table under the weight of a sister I could never meet. He took the whole thing and he sealed it in a shoebox with no label and he carried it alone for thirty-nine years of my happy, unhaunted, only-child life.

The last tape

The last tape is dated the year before he died. He's very old on it; the voice is thin. He tells Ellie he's tired. He tells her he's had a good long life, longer than seemed possible back in the bad years, and that "your sister turned out fine — better than fine, she turned out kind, and I got to see it." And at the very end he says, "I expect I'll see you before long now, and I've got a lot to catch you up on. Fifty-some years. You'll want to hear about all of it." And then the soft click of the machine, and that's the last of my father's voice on this earth, talking to a six-year-old across sixty years, catching her up.

Her name back

I found Ellie's grave, after. She's in a small cemetery in Fredericksburg, a stone the size of a book, "Ellen — Our Dear Girl — 1955–1961," and it had been tended recently, mowed close and clean, which meant my father had gone right up to the end and I never knew that either. I go now. And I tracked down her mother's family in Pennsylvania, and I have a half-cousin my age who told me Frances, Ellie's mother, my father's first wife, had died in 2003 still keeping a lock of that child's hair in a locket, the two of them a thousand miles apart tending the same six-year-old for forty years without ever speaking again.

I had the tapes digitized. All forty-one. I listen sometimes, not often, and I've started to think of them less as a secret my father kept from me and more as the great labor of his life — the private, patient, unwitnessed work of a man refusing to let a lost child become nobody, refusing to let her have died for nothing even when "nothing" is exactly what a leukemia in 1961 handed him. He couldn't save her. So he did the only thing left, which was to keep her company for the rest of his life, quietly, on the far side of a wall he built so I'd never have to feel the cold coming off it.

If you find a box in an attic

If you find a box in an attic with no label, or a date that doesn't add up, or a voice you've never heard on your father's tapes, I'll tell you what those forty-one cassettes taught me at two in the morning in an empty kitchen. Before you decide what it means, listen all the way to the end. The people who raised us were carrying things we knew nothing about — whole other lives, whole other loves, whole other children — and sometimes the reason they carried them in silence was not to deceive us but to spare us, to hand us a lightness they never got to feel themselves. My father gave his first daughter his voice for sixty years. He gave his second daughter her name and nothing to carry. I only found out which of us got which when he was gone and I was alone with a four-dollar tape player, and I have decided the fairest thing I can do with what he built is exactly what he did: keep her company, and let her have her name back, and never again let anyone in this family be nobody.