The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 563
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
FICTION 57: Colors of the Past 32
Colors of the Past
a novel
W.D. Haverstock
Part Two
Chapter Eight
… According to police, Mr. Smith was driving on Chicago Avenue at approximately 11:00 p.m. when his car veered off the road and crashed into a brick retaining wall. Mr. Smith was pronounced dead at the scene. Witnesses said that the automobile was traveling at a high rate of speed at the time of the accident. There were no initial signs of mechanical failure.
Mr. Smith was the eldest son of Richard M. Smith, Jr., and Eleanor Weil and is survived by his wife, Clara Heins Smith, their daughter, Susan, two brothers, Wilson W. and Charles K. Smith, a sister, Bernice Smith Rollis, as well as his mother. Funeral arrangements have not been announced.
There were no photographs.
She felt her heart drop as she read the first two paragraphs and then reread them without finishing, hoping each time to find something that she had missed, a misread word that would have changed everything before her eyes and changed the course of the last twenty years. But the words seemed to shout back at her the death of the man she had always known as her father more loudly each time, a fact that her new doubts and knowledge could not alter. The description of the event was painfully clear and brief.
Finally she let her eyes drop over the final paragraph but with the image of the mangled wreckage of an automobile in her mind. She saw her own name first without immediately realizing that it referred to herself. The time seemed too remote to be part of her own life and yet, as she looked back at the name of her mother, linked to her now in the death of her father, she heard the voice in the dream, speaking more clearly now. As she stared at her mother’s name, she knew without understanding the words that the voice had been saying, “I love you,” and saying it over and over again, a chant sent out into the universe in the hope that the universe would somehow respond. Unable to take her eyes off her mother's name, Susan began to cry.
As she read the words through her tears for the third time, she realized what they were saying. For an instant she was paralyzed by a shock greater than the first sight of her child and more terrifying than the possibility that her true father was a man who had disappeared from history without a trace. The thin, black lines of the letters seemed to twinkle on the screen as if the energy that put them there was too weak to maintain them. But the words themselves did not change. Her mother had survived the accident that had killed her father, survived as well as she herself had survived.
Susan wiped her eyes and read the words again and again. There was no mention of her mother’s death. Her mother had survived and if she did, she might still be alive. If her biological father had not died in the accident, then perhaps neither had her mother. If a single fact of her past could change, then all of them could be as malleable as a tin mask, pounded to fit any physique she chose.
She fell back into the chair and stared up at the blank wall, her eyes dry now. In the dim, gray space above she tried to imagine her mother as she had never before imagined her, as the forty-five year old woman she might have become. The fresh, young face that Susan knew would have aged slowly and gracefully and her eyes would have lost none of their glitter. Perhaps she would have recognized something of Clara in her own child’s face.
But it was impossible to consider what her mother might have been without imagining that she had spent the second half of her life with her daughter and perhaps with other children that Susan had never known. If her mother were alive, then Susan might have a brother and a sister. Her mother’s life could only have continued in connection with her own and with the lives of the others she would have brought into the world. For a strange instant it seemed possible that her mother was waiting for her and would be sitting in the chair beside the grandfather’s clock when she got home. She would be holding the book and bathed in red and blue and green from the table lamp. There would be no photograph at the side of the bed.
The couple at the other machine laughed again. Susan looked at them. They were sitting shoulder to shoulder and leaning against each other. The young man glanced in Susan's direction and a faint smile fluttered across his lips before he looked away.
She looked back at the words on the screen. The possibilities that had existed a moment before were gone and she felt foolish for imagining them. Her mother was not at home and there was nothing left to know. At this moment it seemed more likely that Clara had never existed at all than that Susan might glimpse a new detail of her life. There could be no brothers or sisters because the end of her mother and father’s lives had come with the beginning of her own. This she had known with certainty her whole life. The words in the flickering electric light reminded her now of James.
She scrolled quickly to the next day’s paper, July 18th. There on the front page was the affirmation she both feared and expected. The photograph she knew so well stared out at her, the faces dark and the expressions obscure. It was the photograph she had once imagined might answer her prayers.
Below was the headline, in larger type this time: “Industrialist Richard M. Smith, Wife, Killed in Auto Accident”. The middle-aged face she had tried to conjure disappeared into the inky shadow.
Richard M. Smith, III, eldest son of prominent Chicago industrialist Richard M. Smith, Jr. and heir to the Smith Steel and Bearing Co. fortune was killed in an automobile accident in Evanston late Saturday night. Also fatally injured in the accident was Mr. Smith’s wife, Clara Heins Smith, daughter of Frederick Garner Heins.
According to police reports, Mr. Smith was driving his car along Chicago Avenue, several blocks from his home, when he lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a brick retaining wall at about 11:30 p.m., killing Mrs. Smith instantly. Mr. Smith was rushed to St. Anthony’s Hospital where he was pronounced dead after efforts to repair multiple internal injuries failed. Mr. Smith was thirty-four years old. His wife of one year was twenty-four.
Susan stopped reading. Her sense of disjointedness evaporated with these words as quickly as it had struck. She felt a strange jubilation at this news of her mother’s death, though it obliterated possibilities that a moment before had given her an instant of intense exhilaration. The death of her mother did not require that she reinvent the whole of her life.
But now the previous day’s report seemed as hallucinatory as a vision of her mother’s elderly face. She scrolled back to the paper of the seventeenth and reread the article. The words were slightly blurred now. She turned the focus lever below the screen. Her eyes fell immediately onto the words “survived by his wife, Clara Heins Smith”. Her frantic hope was revived.
The pages rolled by in a bright blur as she turned again to the July 18th edition and read on.
Mr. Smith was a lifetime resident of the Chicago area. He was graduated from the University of Chicago in 1927 and, after spending two years abroad in the study of steel industry related business, he assumed the position of Vice President in Charge of Operations with the Smith Steel and Bearing Manufacturing Co., a position which he held at the time of his death. He is survived by his mother, Eleanor Weil Smith, two brothers, Wilson W. and Charles J. Smith, and two sisters, Mildred Elizabeth Smith and Bernice Smith Rollis.
Mr. Smith’s wife, Clara Heins Smith, was a lifelong resident of Evanston. She was the daughter of Frederick Garner Heins and granddaughter of Frederick Welsh Heins, the founder of the Heins Manufacturing Co. of Chicago. The Heins family has been prominent in Chicago society and politics since before the turn of the century.
Mrs. Smith’s father, Frederick G. Heins, was well known for his contributions to educational reform in the state as well as for his philanthropy on behalf of Negro workers who have been migrating north in ever increasing numbers during the past two decades. Mr. Heins was responsible for the establishment of several Y.M.C.A. hotels as well as half-way houses and other charitable institutions. Mrs. Smith attended Northwestern University and is survived by a brother, James Arthur Heins.
The couple were married in a ceremony at St. Anne’s Church in Evanston a year ago. On July 15th of this year, Mrs. Smith gave birth to a daughter, Susan Laura. The infant was at home at the time of the accident. Notice of the death of Mrs. Smith was withheld from initial reports at the request of Mrs. Smith’s brother, James A. Heins, pending notification of relatives.
Funeral arrangements have been made with the Del Rio Funeral Home in Evanston. Calling hours will be from six to eight on Wednesday evening.
Susan turned back to the front page and looked at the photograph with a sense of emptiness she had never before associated with it. The outlines of the faces were so dark and blurred that they could have been anyone but she saw their faces as clearly as she had seen them every morning of her life, as if reconstructing the whole from a tiny part. They were her mother and father, or the impostor who had stepped into the place of her father as if his presence in this photograph could annul the life of another human being.
She hit the knob hard so that the page disappeared and then scanned the newspapers for the next several days. There was no further mention of the accident.
She looked away from the screen and rubbed her eyes. The two voices that had been whispering a conversation were gone and the silence in the room had intensified. The couple beside her had gone and the two people behind the desk had disappeared. She found herself looking for the girl she had met on the stairs but she, too, was gone.
At the machine beside her was a young man. Susan had not noticed when he sat down, though he was not more than four feet away. He was staring intently at a microfilm page filled with unusually small print. He had a high, intelligent forehead and thick, black hair cut very close to the scalp. In profile, the lines of his face were sharp - the jutting bone above the eye; a short, straight nose; large, rounded lips; and a hard, ninety degree angle at the chin that cut back in a sharp line to the neck. His skin was the blue-black color of steel.
When he turned toward her with a disinterested glance, Susan realized that she had been staring at him and averted her eyes, but the image of his face lingered in her mind, as if it had been there a long time before this moment. A shudder curled down her back and caused her to rise from the seat and look around the room as if she had sensed something dangerous.
She walked quickly out of the room without turning off the machine. As she crossed the large room outside, a voice seemed to call to her from somewhere behind. At the stairs she grabbed the railing firmly and went down the steps as fast as she could.