The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 469
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
FICTION 34: Colors of the Past 9
Colors of the Past
a novel
W.D. Haverstock
Part One
Chapter Two
“He must have been a handsome man. Did he look very much like James?”
“No. Uncle James is my mother’s brother.”
“Well, then all of the men in your family must have been good looking.”
Susan thought of the photograph again and of the several old letters that her father had written to her mother in the months before they were married. These were carefully filed away in James’ library, along with the letters written by her mother to various members of the family. The time would come when she would put her own letters to George with them. Along with the letters were shelves of photographs, all neatly bound and cataloged. On those shelves, within the thick, old bindings was all the knowledge she would ever have of her mother and father.
Without knowing why, Susan felt a sudden longing to know more about the two people who had brought her into the world. In her mind she saw the static impressions of their two faces as she had always known them but now she longed to see them move, to see the aging blacks and whites and grays of the photographs flushed with the deep, beautiful hues of the lamp shade and to see the colors of life come into their faces. On this night of all nights her mother would speak to her and tell her how the hopes and dreams of youth appeared from the vantage point of twenty years hence. A lifetime would have passed in companionship rather than in a solitude Susan had never noticed.
“I don’t know why,” she said without wondering if Melissa was listening, “but I wish I could talk to my mother tonight.”
“I’ve put the idea into your head,” Melissa said immediately.
“I wish she could be here with me. I know it sounds strange but I don’t think I’ve ever really wished that before.”
“I would have wished it every night.”
Susan thought of the only grandparent she had ever known, her father’s mother. This kind woman would visit every few months when Susan was a child. She would always take Susan on her knee, although her knee seemed too old and feeble to support the weight of a child, and tell her that one day she would know how wonderful it was to have such a beautiful grandchild.
She didn’t speak often of her son except to say how lucky he had been to find a woman like Susan’s mother. And then she would tell stories about Clara and James and their mother and father as though she knew everything there was to know about them. She spoke of the Heins as though her own family were nothing in comparison.
Together they would go into James’ library to take out an album of musty pictures and the old woman would talk about days twenty and thirty and fifty years past as if the time that separated them meant nothing at all. She would talk about people that Susan had never known and could only imagine through this woman’s memory and her uncle’s photographs. There were all of the important people her mother’s parents knew, all the far-off places they had traveled to, all the great decisions they’d had to make. Then she would clap the albums shut and laugh as if it were all just a fairy tale.
Susan would laugh, too, but she had not noticed when the day came that her grandmother no longer visited. Finally - it must have been fifteen years ago - James had told her that her grandmother had died and that she would not be attending the funeral. Susan had wanted to go but had spent the afternoon instead in her uncle’s library where it was easiest to remember her grandmother, with all of the photographs she could find. She could pretend that she was not alone, that she was sitting on her grandmother’s knee and that the pages were turned by the same old fingers that had turned them all her life.
When Katie came into the room, she had pretended that her grandmother had called her in, as she had often done, in a voice barely loud enough to be heard across the room. But Susan had heard the voice and had stared at the photographs hard enough so that the wooden seat of the chair beneath her might have been her grandmother’s bony knee. After that there were different pictures with another familiar face to imagine. Suddenly the photographs of her grandmother were precious. They were all that was left of someone she missed.
“Something just reminded me of my grandmother’s funeral,” Susan said when her cup of tea was half empty. “I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. I remember sitting in my uncle’s library because that’s where he keeps his photographs and that’s where my grandmother would always take me when she came here to visit. She was my father’s mother.”
Now Melissa was listening carefully.
“I was sitting in there by myself that day, looking at some old pictures, and I started to cry. But Katie came in, just as I was starting to cry, almost as if she knew that I was going to cry. She came in and sat down beside me and held me and I was glad she was there. I remember thinking that she held me almost the way my grandmother used to hold me. I think I pretended that Katie was my grandmother that day.”
Susan leaned forward to set the cup on the table and again the red light danced in her black eyes as she looked across at Melissa.
“It’s funny. I’ve thought of that day often but I don’t think I’ve ever remembered before now that Katie was there. I only remembered my grandmother’s voice calling out to her.” Susan’s eyes glittered like gems in the lamp’s moonlight. “Now that seems the most important part.”
Melissa watched Susan’s face as if noticing it for the first time, fascinated by the strange, ever-shifting concordance of colors. “It doesn’t sound to me as if you’ve been lucky at all.”
A few minutes later Katie returned for the tray.
“Katie,” Susan said this time before she was gone, “do you remember my grandmother’s funeral?” She was surprised that she had never asked before.
Katie stopped with the tray in her hands. “Yes, Miss, I remember that day very well.”
“I was sitting in the library, remember?”
“I was watchin’ pretty close because your uncle had went on and when I heard you startin’ to cry, I come runnin’.”
“You heard me start to cry, Katie?”
“Yes, ma’am, and I picked you up and you acted like it was your dead grandmother come back just the way she always done. You wasn’t but six or seven years old then.”
“I was glad you were there, Katie.”
“But it was your grandma you was missin’.” As she said this, Katie carried the tray out of the room.
“I wonder,” Susan said and looked around at Melissa.
Melissa got up and walked to the windows in the back of the room. Outside, the wide lawn disappeared into the darkness.
“This is such a beautiful house, Susan. You said you grew up here?”
“Yes. Would you like to go out for some air? We could take a walk around.”
“That would be nice.”
They went out through the French doors that opened onto the grounds to the north of the house. A long, empty lawn stretched to the east and west as far as they could see into the darkness. Beyond, to the north, was a wooded area. The cool night breeze swept over the trees and along the grass from the corner of the building, then off to the east toward the lake.
“I always loved this lawn,” Susan said. “When I was little, I’d have my friends over and we would play out there. We could go all the way out to the trees and feel like we were far away from home. It was easy to imagine that the house was a castle.”
“It’s as large as a castle.”
They walked west toward the back of the house.
“My great-grandfather, my mother’s grandfather, came here from Pennsylvania about seventy-five years ago and made a fortune manufacturing steel. My mother’s father did the same thing. He died in an industrial accident in 1925. My mother was only twelve years old then. Uncle James was twenty-one. My grandmother died five years later of tuberculosis and so my mother and uncle inherited the family business. Uncle James never married.”
“And so you’ll inherit it all.”
“I’m the only one left.”
“Poor little rich girl.”
“I’ve always been happy.”
“Happy-go-lucky.”
Behind the house a narrow lane wound beneath a sleepy willow tree and through a wooded garden. From the center, the house was entirely hidden from view.
“This is lovely,” Melissa said.
“I used to be afraid to come back here, even when I was old enough to know better. When I was little, my uncle would tell me scary stories and I would imagine that they all happened right back here ….”