Who Paid for the Cellar

Who Paid for the Cellar

Deakins let me get my name out and then coughed for most of a minute. I stood in my father's study with the phone against my ear and listened to it work through him, and when it stopped he asked where I had gotten the number.

"Out of a desk drawer," I said. "It's been in there 31 years."

"Sounds about right." He took a breath through something that hissed. "What have you got?"

"A tape."

"A tape is a woman talking, and a woman can go back on it in a hallway outside a courtroom," Deakins said. "Bring paper. Ferris Lane, the end of it, and come out when you've got paper."

The line clicked off. Emily's car was gone out of the yard by then, and upstairs her side of the closet held 14 bare hangers and a dry cleaning ticket from August. She had left the glass bottle standing on the bathroom shelf in its own ring of dust.

* * *

Poughkeepsie is 25 minutes south of Milton on the road that runs with the river. I parked in the municipal garage on Market Street at 9:20 on a Tuesday and paid $3 for four hours.

The county record room sits in the basement of the building across from the post office, down a stairwell painted the green they used on schools. A woman at the counter gave me a request slip and a pencil with no eraser and told me copies ran 65 cents a page. The town of Milton had handed its old building department files to the county after water came into the town hall basement in 1997, and they had been on the third aisle in gray boxes ever since.

Box 14 held 1979. The folders went by permit number, and the numbers ran in the order the fees had been taken.

Permit No. 79-0411, Town of Milton, issued April 3, 1979. The nature of the work was typed on one line: INTERIOR ALTERATION, CELLAR. Estimated cost of the job, $900. The contractor's line was blank.

The fee was $12, and somebody had rolled a purple rubber stamp across it, PAID, with the word CASH written under the stamp in pencil. The applicant's signature was two initials run together, no clearer on the paper than it had been on the screen at home. On the back, the inspection block had three ruled lines for footing, framing, and final, and all three were empty.

Behind the permit, stapled at the corner and folded once so the scanner had never picked it up, was the carbon of the fee receipt. No. 4471. Received of Hudson Valley Cognitive Foundation, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., twelve dollars and no cents. The clerk had initialed it and pressed hard enough to come through onto the sheet underneath.

I had the woman pull the assessment roll for the town while she was up. Parcel 33.-2-14.1, six-tenths of an acre, white frame dwelling, two stories. Owner of record, Miller, W. and M., estate of. Taxpayer of record, and the line was the same on every roll through all the years the house stood empty, Hudson Valley Cognitive Foundation, Poughkeepsie.

Two copies came to $1.30. I put them in a folder and walked back up to the street.

* * *

The public library is four blocks north on Market Street. The local history room is on the second floor, and you sign the register at the desk before they bring you anything out of the stacks.

The register is a ruled book with three columns for the date, the name, and the material requested. The librarian went back for my reel and I turned the pages the wrong way to see how far the book ran. Nine years ago, on a Thursday in March, the third column read HV Cognitive Fdn, annual returns. The name in the second column was mine, written in my handwriting.

I turned the register forward to the current page and squared it on the desk.

The Poughkeepsie Journal runs on microfilm from 1900 forward and the reader-printer takes a quarter a page. The foundation came up 11 times in 20 years, and 10 of those were nothing.

Two column inches in 1984 for a $5,000 gift to the county school district. A row of six people at a hospital wing dedication in 1991, with the caption naming the foundation's secretary, Carol Pryor. Four lines in 1998 when the foundation's first director died, with no photograph and no survivors listed.

The eleventh sent me to the shelf at the back of the room. Proceedings of the Hudson Valley Symposium on Memory and Development, June 1981, printed for the sponsors, 214 pages in green cloth with the title stamped in gold that had mostly worn off the spine.

The plates sat between pages 96 and 97 on heavier paper. Plate three was a reception photograph, four inches by five, three adults standing in front of a table with a coffee urn on it.

My mother was on the left in a dark jacket with her hand flat on the tablecloth. My father stood on the right with his head turned a few degrees off the camera, the way he is in every photograph I have of him. Between them was a man a head shorter than either of them, dark hair combed flat, one hand resting on the back of an empty chair.

The caption ran in small type under the plate. Dr. Walter Miller and Dr. Miriam Miller, Milton, with Dr. Kessler of the Hudson Valley Cognitive Foundation, sponsor of the Thursday session.

I read it four times. Then I paid a quarter and photocopied the plate, and the gray of the photograph came out coarse and the caption stayed readable.

The same room keeps a steel cabinet of microfiche, annual returns of private foundations, New York State, filed by year. A public library holds them because somebody decided 40 years ago that anybody should be able to look.

Form 990-PF, Return of Private Foundation. Hudson Valley Cognitive Foundation, employer identification number 14-2618330. Fiscal year ended June 30, 1983.

Part I, line 25, contributions and grants paid: $61,400. Part XV carried the schedule, four grantees, typed with a ribbon going dry at the bottom of the page. The third line named W. and M. Miller of Milton, New York, and gave the purpose in the next column: continuation, longitudinal study of directed recall in pre-adolescent subjects. The amount column read 22,000.

At the foot of the first page, in the block for the signature of an officer or trustee, there was a name in blue ink, a date of 11/14/83, and the typed word Trustee beside it. The capital K dropped below the line and came back up under the rest of the name.

I took the white card out of my wallet and laid it on the glass next to the projected page. He had written the cell number on it himself, in black ink, at his desk, while I watched him do it. He made his capital letters the same way in 1983.

The last time that hand was in front of me it was pouring tea out of a ceramic pot into a porcelain cup and pushing the cup across the oak toward me. He had told me he came into the foundation when its first director died, in 1998.

I ran every year the cabinet held. The Miller line shows up in 13 filings, the first in fiscal 1979 and the last in fiscal 1996. The amounts run from $9,000 to $46,500. The wording in the purpose column changed four times over those years and came back each time to the same phrase.

I printed 41 pages and paid $10.25 at the desk on the way out.

* * *

Carol Pryor was in the book under her husband's name. She would not have me at the house. She said the ShopRite lot on Route 9, Thursday, after 10:00 a.m., and that she would be the one in the green coat.

She was in her seventies and she kept one hand on the cart the whole time. There was a bag of ice riding on top of her groceries and she watched the ice more than she watched me.

"Fifteen minutes," she said. "And you don't use my name anywhere."

"You typed the grant letters," I said.

"I typed everything. A Selectric, then a Wang, then whatever they set on my desk after that." She moved the ice off the eggs. "Twenty-three years."

"Who signed the checks?"

"There were two books. Operating, and the program account. I could write operating up to $500 on my own."

"And the program account?"

"He signed those himself. Every one of them. They had a stamp made for him in 1986 and he never put it on anything."

"Was there anything in the office you weren't allowed to copy?"

She let a car back out of the space beside us before she answered. "The Milton folder went into his office and came out of his office and it never went on the machine. That was in writing, on the wall by the copier, next to the chart for the paper sizes."

"When did he start there?"

"Before me, and I started in 1981."

"He told me he came in in 1998."

Carol Pryor moved the cart forward a few inches and looked at the ice. "Then one of us is wrong," she said.

She pushed the cart to the back of a beige sedan and I helped her get the bags in. She stood with the trunk still open and her keys in her hand.

"He sent a card every Christmas after I retired," she said. "Twenty-two of them. He wrote out the address by hand every year and he never once got my street wrong."

Then she shut the trunk.

* * *

I got back to Milton a little after two. The thermostat in the hall read 61 and I left it there, made coffee, drank half of it, and put the folder on the kitchen table.

I went through the pages in the order I had taken them and squared each one onto the stack when I was done with it.

The permit and the receipt. The assessment roll. The plate from the symposium, three adults and a coffee urn. Then the returns, fiscal 1979 forward, 13 schedules on 13 sheets.

The last line on the last schedule was a grant of $4,000 to W. and M. Miller of Milton, New York, paid October 16, 1995.