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The Carter women aged particularly well. Grandmother Carter touted the advantages of her laborious skincare routine- she bought her daughter Peggy cold cream for her sixteenth birthday and insisted on a hat for the sun. Peggy improved upon these ideas with her own daughter, providing sunscreen and moisturizer for a beauty routine in the carefree sixties.
Sharon watched her friends grow into crows feet and watched them earn their laugh lines. Their skin dimpled and slackened, relaxing as they inched through their thirties. In the mirror Sharon’s own skin remained unchanged. Frown lines were impermanent, her neck stayed unlined, and a deep scar from a kitchen mishap faded into even nothingness in mere weeks. These were things she attributed to good genetics. It was what her mother always quipped, anyway.
Mother was approaching sixty with the grace that vain women envied. Grey had crept from her temples, and she left it untouched, unembarrassed and as glamorous as ever. Currently, it was tied back in a headscarf to protect it from the unsettled dust of moving.
Together they were packing up Sharon’s childhood home. It had felt overlarge and empty since Pop died, and Mother picked out a practical little condo closer to the city that she said suited her just fine. Sharon volunteered to sort out the attic, braving the stairs that groaned and protested every step.
Boxes and boxes quietly molded in disorderly rows, badly labeled, if at all. It was evidence of Pop’s idea of organization, what Mother would exasperatedly call ‘categorical chaos’, all filed according to some tenuous relation in his mind. Sharon swept her eyes across the attic, unsure where to begin sorting through decades of her father’s things when his memory still felt like pressing a new bruise.
Away from the solitary swinging lightbulb sat a squat bookshelf stuffed with old readers digest condensed books. A ladies shoe box propped up one end of a sloping shelf, her mother’s name written in her own delicate script. The only box that belonged to Mother in a sea of her father’s things.
Mother had always been unromantic. She declared that memories were more important than souvenirs, that she couldn’t abide the loose clutter that gathers through years. She neatly disposed of any item with the potential for sentiment and shied away from cameras with a confusing intensity. In the sitting room there was a single photo album with pictures carefully selected and organized. It held birthdays, pubescent sulking on family trips, Halloween costumes, and holiday parties, and only of Sharon and her father. The only evidence of her mother was an occasional manicured finger partially blocking the shutter, and one black and white of her and Pop on their wedding day. Mother was utilitarian, a background figure in her own life.
The crumbling shoebox was blazoned with the image of what must have been a stylish shoe three decades past. Sharon fished it out and used her nail to break the tape that sealed it with the guilty thrill of discovering a secret.
Inside there was an empty bottle of perfume and a loosely bound stack of yellowing envelopes and postcards. Sharon untied the letters, all addressed to her mother in England, care of the war department, and all sent by a Steve Rogers. Tucked neatly at the back of the bundle was a small black and white of a skinny boy in dog tags, squinting at something beyond the camera.
Mother didn’t speak often of the war and had never mentioned anyone named Steve. She worked for a scientific research division, was handy with a gun, but beyond that she revealed nothing concrete. A curiosity burned in her, compelled her to flip through the stack of private letters, all filed with her mother’s chronological precision. They began during the summer of 1943, and Sharon plucked one at random from the middle of the lot. It was three handwritten pages and concluded,
“You know where I am as I write these letters, but I wonder where you are when you read them. Are you in that miserable excuse of an office Phillips gave you? Are you at lunch with your milky tea and whatever crumbling bread they’re serving this week? Are you at your apartment (flat, you’d say if you were here) sitting by the window before dark? I hope you read these before turning on lights. I wouldn’t want you to waste any rationing on my rambling letters.
I should be waiting until I’m off duty to lay in the dark and wonder where you are, but you’ve always been the practical one. The truth is I think about you all the time- where you are, what you’re doing, whether you’re carrying this little piece of me with you. Write me so I can stop being so distracted. It’s the practical thing to do.
Yours,
Steve”
As a child Sharon once opened her mother’s bedroom door early in the morning and found her dressed only in a slip, taking out her rollers. Sharon now felt the same sense of intrusion but slid another letter from its envelope. It was photocopied— v-mail— and the writing small to fit on the page.
“Peg,
It’s been just over two months since I saw you last, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve been counting the days. (64). I looked at the time when after I couldn’t see you anymore out the window of the plane, and every day at 13:47 it feels like the flick of a desk calendar inside me. One more day that I didn’t see you. If you were here you’d say I was being dramatic, but the camp feels too quiet without you. Yes, even with Buck and Dum Dum and the boys. Maybe it’s because my heart isn’t constantly banging in my ears.
Yours,
Steve”
Sharon read automatically, unable to stop herself. With each letter she felt the secrets her mother had kept to herself for decades begin to peel at the edges, revealing a stranger named Peggy that seemed unrecognizable from Mother, the cool, distant woman who was downstairs tagging furniture for a rummage sale.
Growing up, Sharon learned not to expect much of a presence from Mother. Her Business was the most pressing concern, and she could be swept away for days at a time with one phone call, missing recitals and lessons and birthdays. At home, she was cool with her affection, which Pop once explained away as just “stuffy British reserve”.
Steve Rogers painted a different picture of her. The Peggy he wrote to had soft edges, smoothed by good humor and vulnerability. He wrote candidly about missing home, about how home would be different on the other side of the war, and prompted her to tell him stories about her own childhood to accompany his. Without her mother’s replies they read like monologues, asking questions into the same void Sharon had faced. But his Peggy must have acquiesced because he stalwartly kept writing and writing with ever growing familiarity.
The letters were spread over two years, some postmarked en masse on the same day. The last letter had no stamp, didn’t have the blazoned tape from the censorship office. The envelope had never even been sealed. The pages were soft and nearly fell apart at the folds, creased and creased again by rereading.
“My practical Peg,
I can’t wait to hear how you’ll scold me for this letter. You’ll say it’s too short for the cost of the stamp but the truth is I’d pay anything to say this to you in person. The way I should have last night, or this morning. I should have said it the second I saw you punch Hodge into the dirt. I’ve felt it every day since, and I’ll say it every day starting with the moment I’m with you again. I love you, Margaret Carter.
Yours always,
Steve”
Sharon looked at the date of the last letter. February 10, 1945. A weight sunk in Sharon’s stomach, an uncomfortable knot that grew as she searched for to find the picture again. She suddenly felt very keenly of her own blonde hair and blue eyes, the child of two brown eyed brunettes. Steve Rogers squinted past her in the grainy photo, his hair and eyes both light. The mental math worked itself in her head, counting backward from her own birthday, November 18, 1945.
The stuffy attic came into blinding focus, boxes with Pop’s winter clothes neatly stored away for him the spring before his heart attack, his messy scrawl so unlike Steve Rogers’ careful writing. Sharon wondered if he knew about the little shoebox, about the letters inside. About the last letter dated nine months before his daughter’s birth. The thought struck her like lightning, and with stiff legs she stood and shoved the letters in the box, an anger growing inside her, pushing her down the rickety stairs and down to the kitchen where Mother washed a crock pot meant for sale.
As a child, her father told Sharon the story of how he and his mother met with the art of a practiced storyteller. He was trapped behind enemy lines during the war when he and his whole squadron were saved by Captain America— the real Captain America, not the silly goon they showed on kids television programs. Peggy Carter was waiting there with a smile, and it was love at first sight. He said he had Captain America to thank for bringing her into his life, and Mother always rolled her eyes and said he was exaggerating.
Sharon tossed the box on the table without preamble and crossed her arms. “Steve Rogers. Who is he.”
Her mother paused, but Sharon spoke again. “I thought you had already met Pop, but you wrote to this guy for years. Did Pop even know, or did you just trick him into thinking I was his kid?”
Her mother turned slowly from the sink, letting the water run, letting her hands drip onto the linoleum. Her face was closed and hard, and Sharon felt an echo of childhood fear shiver in her. It was the same face Mother wore after late night phone calls that prompted disappearances to her mysterious office, that she wore when she returned from the hospital empty handed after nine months of expectations, that she wore to receive the flag from Pop’s casket.
She took a step forward and Sharon flinched instinctively but didn’t back down.
“Did you even care about my father? Except he wasn’t my father, was he? This Steve guy is. So what, he got shipped out again and you marry someone with money?I guess it makes sense, he kept writing about how he had a terrible apartment in Brooklyn and it’s no secret that Pop’s family was loaded. I knew you were pragmatic but Jesus. Or was it just that Steve Rogers decided he didn’t want any part of me?”
“Enough.” Mother’s voice was a sharp crack, and Sharon was shocked to see her eyes were watery, threatening to spill. “Don’t you dare speak of him that way.”
“Just tell me who he is.”
“He was a soldier, and a friend,” Peggy began, and Sharon could feel her temper flare again.
“He clearly wasn’t just a friend, Mother. For once just tell me the truth about something? Will you just give me a real answer?”
Her steady mother, who could frighten the most hardened nun at Sharon’s Catholic school with a steady gaze, looked away and blinked hard before speaking. “Steve Rogers was the best man that I have ever met. He was kind and smart, and he, he was the love of my life.”
The kitchen was quiet, only the steady hum of the refrigerator and ticking of a clock cut the silence. Sharon’s anger simmered, still ready to rise to the surface for the father she had known all her life buried and replaced by a stranger.
“I was young, and had my mind on advancing my career, and then there came Steve. During the war I headed a project that meant to create an army of enhanced soldiers, but Steve Rogers was the only one to complete the experiment. Our commanding officer earned a fair share of ulcers because of him. When I wasn’t in the field I was left in charge of the mountains of paperwork that came with all his ridiculous missions.” Peggy let out a small laugh, and Sharon stared incredulously, a suspicion dawning upon her. “He was always so reckless, always insisted on the toughest jobs. He could never leave any man behind, no matter how hopeless the situation. He saved your Father in Volgrad, and for that I’m so thankful.”
Sharon looked down at the box on the table, with its pages and pages of censored battlefield stories, of hopeful plans for dancing back in New York City, of details of a life that should have been familiar from the comic books and tv specials and memorials. She could have cursed herself for her stupidity, but how could anyone think to connect their mother’s wartime romance with Captain America. Captain America, the national hero killed in action, who single handedly ended the war with his sacrifice.
“We had tried to keep each other at a distance. The war made everything so uncertain, but after Sergeant Barnes died, his closest friend in the world, we agreed that we didn’t want to wait to let ourselves be in love. When he died I barely knew that I was pregnant. I never had the chance to tell him. There was a bomb headed for New York. He managed to get on the plane, but there wasn’t time for me to guide him down, and Steve could never risk detonating near the city. He had to put the plane in the water.” Mother looked away again, her fingers twitching slightly. “I gave him an order to meet me at the Stork Club the next week. I went of course, and ordered enough gin to drown a fish. It was your father who made sure I got to my apartment safe. We married two weeks later, and I never regretted it.”
“Did Pop know any of this?”
“I think he knew in some way that I was mourning a soldier. After five years of war everyone had lost someone, and he understood that there would always be a piece of my heart buried. And I was afraid. Steve had been pursued relentlessly for the serum in his blood. If anyone knew that he had a child in the world-- so I never told even you. I avoided friends and transferred jobs, and put myself in a position that I could protect you.”
The weight of the day felt heavy on Sharon’s shoulders. She felt exhausted and raw, like an exposed wound. She knew with certainty her mother would never have told her any of the story if the box hadn’t been unearthed. Sharon would have gone through life thinking no more of Captain America than any other memorialized patriot. She never would have known any of her own story. Her mind swam, and cast about for anything to say.
“What about the bottle of perfume?”
Her mother smiled just a little, nostalgia clouding her eyes as she reached into the box for the first time. “He bought that for my birthday. It was very bold of him. He phoned the girl I shared a flat with and asked her to rummage through my room to find out what kind I liked. I couldn’t wear it after he died, but I couldn’t stand to give away that little piece of him.”
Sharon and her mother spent the afternoon in a quiet fog, slowly packing the little house into boxes, each carefully labeling with their identical handwriting. Some were taken for charity, some set aside for a rummage sale, and one small box was carried to her mother’s new home with special care. On the mantle Sharon set up two photographs, her father and her Pop side by side.