The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 472
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
FICTION 37: Colors of the Past 12
Colors of the Past
a novel
W.D. Haverstock
Part One
Chapter Two
“… Thank you. Most of them were taken by my uncle.”
“Then let me compliment you, Mr. Heins, on your work. Have you done this professionally?”
“I’ve had a few of my photographs published, Mrs. Kendall, but I’ve never thought of it as a means for making money. If that qualifies me as a professional, then I suppose I am.”
“Your work qualifies you.” Melissa pointed to a small portrait of a man and a woman. “Is this your mother and father, Susan?” A delicate yellow light fell onto two stern expressions. “I thought I saw a resemblance.”
“No, that is my father’s brother and his wife. Those are my parents.” She pointed to the familiar photograph. The same blue light fell onto her father’s face.
Melissa contemplated the photograph for a moment. Susan and James watched from the opposite end of the room. The pendulum of the clock swept silently in and out of view.
“Your sister was a very beautiful woman, Mr. Heins,” Melissa said when she turned away from the photograph. “I can see that’s where Susan gets her looks, from the Heins side of the family.” She took out another cigarette as she walked to where James and Susan stood.
“I’ve always thought Susan took after her mother,” James said. “I’ve never been able to look at Susan without thinking of my sister at the same age.”
Melissa stopped behind the sofa to light the cigarette. “But neither of them has your beautiful eyes, Susan,” she said as she drew a breath of smoke.
“You can’t see them very well in the picture,” Susan said, “especially in this dark room.”
“Susan’s eyes are darker than her mother’s or her father’s,” James said. “They’re more like her grandfather’s, Richard’s father’s.” James stood very still and held the album close to his chest.
“Oh,” Melissa remarked. “I know they say that genetic traits sometimes skip a generation.”
“Yes, that does seem to be true. I was just telling Susan that I found some other photographs that she has never seen. Perhaps you would like to look at them with us, Mrs. Kendall.”
Melissa came round to the front of the sofa and the two women sat on either side of James. He pulled the lamp to the edge of the table.
“I found these in an old envelope and was just gathering them together,” James said and opened the album beneath the lamp. “I can’t imagine how they could have been misplaced for so long.”
“What are they, Uncle James?”
“November fifth, 1936,” Melissa read, “twenty years ago.”
“Susan’s mother and father were married in a church on Ridge Avenue. It was a beautiful fall morning, a perfect day for a wedding.” James leaned forward so that the white light from under the lamp shade fell onto the page.
In the background of the photograph were wide, stone steps and the granite facade of a church. Sunlight fell unobstructed onto the stairs and the building.
“That church is still there,” Susan said and leaned close to her uncle.
Standing on the step next to the top were the bride and groom. The veil was pulled back over Susan’s mother’s head. On her face was a smile as bright as the sunshine. Even with her eyes squinting narrowly, the joy in her smile spread over her features like the warm light on the stone behind her. With both hands she held up the white folds of her gown in front so that the toes of her shoes were visible and the length of the gown lay on the ground at the top of the steps.
“Is this the same woman that I was just looking at in the picture on the wall?” Melissa asked.
“Yes. This would have been taken about two or three months before the other,” James answered.
“The picture back there was taken after they were married?”
“Yes.”
“I guess it’s too dark to get a good look at your mother. She looks even more beautiful here than in the other photograph.”
“Why have you never shown these to me before, Uncle James?” Susan said without taking her eyes off the album. “Where did you find them?”
“I only just now remembered that they existed,” he said. “I had begun taking pictures a few months before and this was one of the first big events that I tried to photograph. I remember now that most of the pictures either did not come out at all or were so poorly framed that I considered them failures. In those days, remember, taking a picture was not so simple as it is today. Everything had to be carefully arranged.”
“But this picture is wonderful,” Melissa said.
“Yes, this one I was happy with.”
He sat back and closed his eyes. A dark green light fell onto the pink skin of his forehead. The photograph reminded him of how quickly these twenty years had passed. He could recall thinking how distant twenty years had once seemed, how impossible it was to see so far into the future and to imagine what Susan might be like when she was nearly as old as his sister was then.
Now it seemed just as impossible to see back that far into the past. It was easier to see beyond that day, to see his sister as the child of their mother and father. He could remember the day Susan’s mother was born and the day he had first seen her. He could imagine the joyful look on their mother’s face as she held the new baby in her arms. He could see it in the face of his sister in this photograph as he had seen it so often since in Susan’s smile and heard it in Susan’s laugh. The fascination in his mother’s look, that thing which had first caused him to attempt to capture it forever on film, had been passed down from daughter to daughter as if only so could it survive. Now the childhood of his sister was as lost as the adult life she had never lived. The life of the little girl who had made his mother so happy had come and gone, pinched unmercifully between the years of his own, long life.
When he opened his eyes to look again into the face of that little girl, his light green eyes sparkled in the green lamp light like the jewels in a king’s crown.
“Are there any others?” Susan asked.
“Two, but nether as clear as this one.”
He turned the page. Here were two more photographs, both taken at the same time. In one, Susan’s mother was laughing, her face partially hidden behind a bouquet, and her father standing with his back to the camera.
“I don’t know what happened here,” James said. “I don’t remember taking this.”
In the other, Susan’s mother was standing at the bottom of the steps, in the shadow of a tree, and looking wistfully down and to the left. Although darker, the details of expression were clear. There was no hint in her face of the joy she displayed in the first photograph. The brilliant smile was gone and yet neither was this the familiar face that Susan knew from the photograph on the wall. This face was longer and thinner. In the shade, her eyes were open wide and there was a look of sadness in them that Susan had never before associated with her mother. There were no lines at all visible around the mouth, which was slightly down-turned, as if she had been caught off guard, unposed. Suddenly there was doubt in the smile that had first seemed so true.
“Let me see that other one again,” Susan said and turned the page back herself.
Now the smile was almost too brilliant, too joyous to be believed. What had at first appeared genuine now seemed grotesquely exaggerated.
“Does she look happy to you?” Susan asked. “Do you think she was really happy that day?”
She looks perfectly happy to me,” Melissa said. “Any girl with a face and a smile like that would be happy.”
“I know she was happy,” James said. He sat back so that the blue light fell across the photograph. “I remember that day as if it were yesterday. I can remember thinking then that I had never seen her so happy. You can see it there. Why do you ask, Susan?”
She turned again to the third photograph. Now it was this wistful melancholy that seemed exaggerated and unreal, as if each picture was less true than the other.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just thought there was something odd about it, that’s all.”
“There is something about this one,” Melissa said. “This almost looks like someone else. I don’t think I would recognize her like this.”
The figure of her father was an indecipherable blur, as if he had moved quickly at the moment the shudder had opened. Though he was facing the camera and closer to it than Susan’s mother, none of his features were discernible.
“Richard started off to say hello to someone just as I snapped this,” said James. “I remember this one very clearly.”
“Isn’t it strange that you remember some well and others not at all?”
“You can never tell. What is strange, though, is that I forgot completely about these pictures and they are the best ones I took that day. I don’t know why I didn’t take more.”
“Maybe you’ll find some others,” Melissa said.
“I wonder how many others there are that you’ve forgotten about, Uncle James. There may be others of my mother and father that I’ve never seen.”
“My mother and father don’t have any wedding pictures at all,” Melissa said, “not even a simple portrait. They didn’t have a big wedding and say they didn’t think it was important at the time, but I would love to see how they looked that day. You’re lucky to have these, Susan, and lucky to have such a doting uncle.”
“I know,” Susan said and kissed James on the cheek.