NEWS

As I approach my ninety-first birthday in a few weeks, I’m rejoicing and counting the blessings of growing older, but I’m also experiencing some sad moments I hadn’t anticipated. Typically these moments come when something happens and I get an urge to talk with someone about it. I reach for my phone to share this moment with a beloved friend, or my brothers, or my sister, and realize that I’ve had all the chats I’m ever going to have with them. At those moments, the memories come back with piercing clarity, and even though these precious people have been gone for years, I still see their faces and hear their voices.

My sister Jane would have been ninety-five on December 5. For the first twenty years of my life, she and I shared just about everything – a bedroom, the one small closet, clothes, schoolbooks, phonograph records, her dog, secrets, even her boyfriends (more on that in a moment). We played paper dolls, designing dresses for them. We listened to our favorite radio shows together, weeping when “the great horse Silver” inexplicably ran away from the Lone Ranger. Spoiler alert: Silver eventually came back… with a colt. We had always assumed Silver was a male.

Jane and Emmie Hay

We played endless games of “pretend” in the playhouse our father built for us in the back yard. (Jane would say, “’Tend like you’re the student and I’m the teacher.”) During the summer of the 1939 polio epidemic, our parents quarantined all four of us to our own back yard, and our only playmates were each other. I don’t remember being bored for a minute. Through our teen years and into adulthood, Jane and I shared a love of making Toll House cookies. We always ate so much of the raw dough that our baking produced only a small batch.

To judge by the three advice columns in the Charlotte Observer, most of the problems of the world can be attributed to siblings who can’t get along, especially sisters. Not us. I was only mildly envious of Jane because our grandmother and aunts used to remark all the time about how “sweet” Jane was. It was hard to disagree. She lit up a room when she smiled, and she laughed and smiled a lot, showing her perfect teeth. Her green eyes sparkled. Her thick, curly hair was light brown streaked with natural gold highlights, and she could wear it short or long, pinned up in a 1940s style, or loose and hanging below her shoulders.

From age 13, boys were smitten when they saw her. They would drive through our neighborhood in their hot rods, hoping for a sight of her. They telephoned her in the afternoons, tying up the only phone in the house for hours. She always took their calls, whether she was really interested in them or not, because she was too kind (“sweet”) to disappoint them. Instead, when she became tired of the conversation she handed the phone to me, her four-years-younger little sister, and because our voices sounded almost exactly the same, the boys never knew the difference.

During Jane’s teen years, her photograph appeared in the Charleston News and Courier numerous times. Our cousin, Ed Holcombe, was the staff photographer charged with producing photos for all the feature stories in the paper. He loved using Jane, and the camera loved her 1000-watt smile. For Easter, he would ask her to dress in her finest Easter outfit, and he would pose her walking on the Battery with some photogenic young man, looking like a happy couple. One photo shoot that I especially remember was the year the female lion in Charleston’s Hampton Park Zoo had babies – a pair of adorable cubs. Ed posed 15-year-old Jane sitting on the grass at the park, a lion cub cradled in each arm. I still have that photo. Oddly, I still remember the dress she was wearing, and the fact that one of the cubs caught and pulled a thread from the front of her dress with his sharp little claw, and Mom had to repair it.

In addition to her other attributes, Jane had an angelic soprano voice. She studied under the Conductor of the Charleston Symphony and sang in all our high school performances, our church choir in Charleston, her college choir, and throughout her life at her family church in Greenville, South Carolina. Hearing her sing a solo always brought tears to my eyes.

I got married a few months after Jane did, and over the next twenty years we continued to stay close, through long distance calls, family gatherings in Charleston for the holidays, and summer visits together in Montreat. Every time I had a baby, she kept my older ones while I tended to the new one. When my husband won business trips to exotic places for the two of us, she kept all four of my children. A talented seamstress, she designed and made heirloom-quality clothes for her children and passed them down to mine.

It was the day before Thanksgiving in 1968 that I learned that Jane, a non-smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Surgery and treatments gave her a cancer-free hiatus of seven years, and she died in 1975 at the age of forty-four, leaving a husband and two teenagers. I had been to see her just a few days before she died. Jane and her family had moved into my parents’ home so that they could help care for her. When I left that last time, I turned to look at her and we held each other’s gaze, neither of us able to say “goodbye.”  I wanted to play pretend… to ‘tend like it wasn’t happening.

About five years ago, a cousin who had inherited our grandparents’ home on Wadmalaw Island emailed that he had something for me. In cleaning out decades of detritus from the attic, he had discovered a business school textbook that had my signature on the fly leaf. I don’t know how this book wound up at my grandmother’s house, or why it stayed there so long, or why my cousin happened to discover it when he did. He said there was something else that he thought I might want. When he handed me the book, I verified the signature, and as I flipped the pages, a folded paper dropped out. I immediately recognized the paper as a page torn from a 6 by 9 inch steno pad. I remembered that in the summer of 1954 Jane was preparing for her wedding in late August and I was engaged to be married the next June and was taking business courses to shore up my ability to earn some money after I married. I unfolded the paper, which had been untouched for over 60 years, and saw… Jane’s handwriting. A note to me from my sister.

More than forty years after her death, I unfolded the paper. Although the message itself was not remarkable, seeing her handwriting again was a shock. I remembered that she and Mom had been shopping in downtown Charleston that summer day, and apparently she had stopped by the business school to leave me a message. This was long before cell phones, so she was given a steno pad to write on. After my class, the note was delivered to me and I stuck it in my textbook and forgot about it. For sixty-three years.

The words at first seemed unremarkable, yet somehow, as I read them, I couldn’t breathe.

Emmie,

Mom and I are going to stay downtown to shop. Get yourself something to eat before you go home.

• Jane

A mundane note about trivial matters? Or a coded message from a big sister from beyond the grave? She would have been ninety-five this week, another nonagenarian. We always called each other on the phone on birthdays.

Happy birthday, Jane!

Can’t wait to see you when I go “home.”​