The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 559
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
FICTION 56: Colors of the Past 31
Colors of the Past
a novel
W.D. Haverstock
Part Two
Chapter Eight
“… I don’t know. The point is that none of this would have mattered. Nothing would have altered the fact that Clara and Richard were your mother and father. If not for that awful accident, they would have raised you as their child and you would have been their child. You would have been Richard’s child and nothing could ever have changed that. Don’t you see what I’m saying, Susan? Your mother is Clara Heins and your father is Richard Smith. That’s the way it has always been and that’s the way it will always be.”
“But you told me . . . .”
“It doesn’t matter. This is the way your mother wanted it. This is the way Richard wanted it. Why not just leave it at that? Isn’t that really all that matters?”
Susan turned back to the window. The stately homes were gone, replaced by the wall and expanse of the cemetery in the southeast part of town.
“Susan, I just want you to think about this. That’s all I ask and all I can ask. You are all I’ve got and I’m only trying to decide myself what is best. This is new ground for both of us, but if you’ve been happy with the way things are, why not leave them that way?”
She stared through the glass and thought of Katie and the baby at home on the porch. When she heard him open the newspaper, she spoke. “I’ve decided what to name the baby?”
James did not look out from behind the newspaper. “I thought you’d already decided on that.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“Without consulting George?”
“As you said, Uncle James, he’s left these things up to me for now.”
James said nothing.
“I’m going to name her after Katie. I’m going to name her Katherine.”
Again James did not reply.
She leaned her forehead against the car window as the taller Chicago buildings began to appear. “Katie has always been like a mother to me,” she said out loud. “When I saw her on the porch just now, holding the baby, Kathy, I could almost remember when I was a baby. She must have held me the same way, but I had the feeling at the same time that she was something else to me. It’s hard to explain but it felt like we were sisters and my baby somehow belonged to both of us. I wonder if my mother ever felt that way about Katie and me.”
James stared silently at the hazy newspaper print with the name ringing in his ears. He struggled against the images evoked by the name and at the circumstances which had oddly conspired against him. There was nothing for him to say.
The car turned off Michigan Avenue and stopped in front of the library. Randal got out and opened the door for Susan.
“I don’t want you to exhaust yourself,” James said. “You still need to take it easy.” He looked at his watch. “It’s one o’clock now. I’ll send Randal back at three to drive you home. Is that all right?”
Susan kissed her uncle, got out of the car and walked quickly up the gray, stone steps. She turned back as the car disappeared around the corner onto Wabash and felt a rush of energy as she realized that she was alone.
Inside, the silence echoed between the stairwells to the recesses in the ceiling and into the basement. From somewhere above came the clap of ascending footsteps. She had been here before but now could not tell how long ago it had been. It could have been five years and it could have been ten. In her memory the building was dark and as big as the lawn behind the house had once seemed. She looked up toward the ceiling and felt as if the stairs and passages might each lead to another world. The railing wound around and around and she could not tell how far there was to go.
To the right and through a high arch was a long desk. The woman behind it was reading something intently. “Can I help you?” she asked without looking up.
“I was wondering,” Susan said, “if I would be able to look through some old newspaper reports.”
“Fourth floor,” the woman said, still looking down through the glasses that rested at the tip of her nose.
As Susan went up the steps, she felt as if she were walking into the past. The tiny click of her heel on the stair sounded unnaturally loud and seemed to linger in the air indefinitely, as if undiminished by the passing seconds. Almost palpable in the silence were the footsteps of all the others who had ascended and descended this path. She wondered how often her mother had passed this way.
At the third floor she stopped to catch her breath and was surprised by a voice from behind. “Can I help you, Miss?” The words were the same but this voice was younger.
Susan turned and found a girl. She was short and thin and wore a t-shirt and dungarees. Her skin was near-black and her hair short and clipped away from her face. She wore white sneakers and walked silently on the stone slab steps.
“Oh, I didn’t hear you come up,” Susan said, “and I was listening to how quiet it is here.”
“Like everybody’s dead. That’s how I feel about this place sometimes, too. Were you goin’ on up?”
“I was on my way to the fourth floor.”
“Well, that’s where I’m goin’.” They started up together. “There’s an elevator in the back. You could take that next time.”
“I’m all right. I was just a little tired. The woman downstairs didn’t say anything about an elevator.”
“She don’t mention nothin’ unless she have to,” the girl giggled. “She act like it’s a nuisance just to say hello.”
“She looks pleasant enough.”
“That’s so nobody’ll guess how nasty she really is.”
They came up into the fourth floor. The girl seemed to wait for Susan to find her way. “She did tell me that I could find old newspapers up here,” Susan said, “although it only took her two words to tell me.”
“And that was two more than she liked to have said.” The girl laughed. “But at least she sent you to the right place. Just follow me. I work in periodicals. I’m a research assistant. That’s what I’m supposed to call myself anyway. Most of the time I’m just putting back everything everybody take out.”
Susan followed the girl through a large, open room filled with long, wooden tables. Behind this was another room with a row of microfilm machines along one wall. None of these was occupied. Without knowing why, she was glad now that she had come.
“If you would tell me a little bit more about what you’re looking for,” the girl said, “maybe I could help you find it.” She slipped behind the desk where an older woman and a young man were working.
Susan’s eyes were drawn to the girl’s face almost as her fingers had been drawn to the notes of the song. “I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly, but I wanted to look at a newspaper for July 17, 1937.”
“Any particular newspaper?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, the was quite a few. What kind of thing did you want to read about?”
“I just wanted to see what an old newspaper looked like,” Susan said. “I’m curious.”
The girl watched with an amused, quizzical smile as Susan said this. “Then it don’t matter which paper, right?”
“I guess not.”
“All right. I’ll see what we got. What was that date again?”
“July 17, 1937.”
The girl disappeared into a back room.
Susan turned away from the desk. From the vaulted ceiling to the hard wood floor, the room felt as silent as the stairs. The hushed voices of the man and woman behind the desk and of a young couple that had sat down at one of the microfilm machines only made the place seem more empty. And yet, she thought as she looked around the long windows in the side wall and at the large, heavy portrait of a woman in colors too dark to see, the room was filled with the sound of voices. She could look into the air and imagine that all of the words ever spoken within these walls might still be heard by ears sensitive enough to hear them. All the words spoken beneath the glass dome of the roof, on the surrounding streets and in the open fields to the west and south were still here. Amid the clatter of a million voices might be heard the tiny sound of those two she had come to find. The voices of her mother and father were among those that echoed through the years as the clamor of the past reverberated into the immense silence of the present.
She turned back to the desk with a sense of despair. It was futile to attempt to bring back the dead with nothing more than a few faded photographs or a newspaper report as brief as their lives in the words of someone who had never known them. There was much to be known but no way to know it. The attempt seemed almost blasphemous, like robbing a grave. If Clara had wanted her life to be known, she would have left a record of some kind. James was right. Clara would not have wanted this.
She turned toward the doorway with a desire to escape but the girl’s voice called her back. “Miss, you can use this machine over here.”
Susan stopped at the sound with the image of her mother’s face in her mind. When she turned around, the girl was standing at one of the small tables.
“Just let me show you how to work it.”
The young couple laughed out loud, forgetting for a moment where they were, and then quickly hushed themselves. The sound was as friendly as the girl’s voice. Susan went to the machine.
The girl took a roll of film out of the container and held it carefully for Susan to see. “All the old newspapers are on film now. Have you ever used the machine before?”
Susan shook her head.
The girl sat down, inserted the film and demonstrated the operation of the machine. “This is the Tribune,” she said as she stood up. “I figured that would give you the best idea of how things were. If you have any problems, just look for me over there. Or ask one of the other people at the desk. Most of them’ll be happy to help you.” She smiled again, though Susan had the impression that she had never stopped smiling, and walked behind the desk.
Susan stared at the newspaper banner with the strange date just below it as if a crack in time had opened up. The light of the machine illuminated the black print with the clarity of an open casket. The intervening years had disappeared as if the newsboy had tossed this paper onto her porch but she sat with her hands on her lap, afraid to probe any further lest these voices of her past became too loud to bear.
But the front page headline referred to a missing child and her eyes scanned down the column against her will. A child had been kidnapped two weeks earlier. Her mutilated, frozen body had been discovered in a snow bank and the search for the killer had been fruitless. Two people had lost their child as she, a child, had lost her parents. Susan felt a tear wet her cheek as she thought about these lives now near passed and about the child she had left at home.
She scanned the first several pages until a small headline froze her hand on the tiny, black knob and sent a chill through her body: “Industrialist Killed in Auto Accident”. As she began to read, she hoped that somehow the past would change before her eyes but the black letters stood in sharp contrast to the white screen, more static than a universal law.
Richard M. Smith, III, heir to the Smith Steel and Bearing fortune, was killed last night in an automobile accident near his Evanston home. Mr. Smith was thirty-four years old ….