The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 568
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
FICTION 58: Colors of the Past 33
Colors of the Past
a novel
W.D. Haverstock
Part Two
Chapter Nine
At the bottom of the stairs, Susan was breathing hard. As she held to the railing to catch her breath, a girl’s laughter caught her attention. The couple who had been sitting at the machine upstairs were standing near the front entrance. Susan watched as the girl kissed the young man and then hurried out the door ahead of him. He looked after her for a moment and then went out himself. They went in opposite directions. Susan had forgotten about the man who had replaced them.
She walked to the main desk. A clock she had not seen before was at the end of the wide foyer beside the elevators. It was two-thirty.
“Excuse me,” she said when the woman behind the desk again did not look up. “Someone is going to ask for me at three o’clock and I would like to leave a message. Would you see that he gets it for me?”
The woman set a pencil and paper on the desk and Susan hastily scribbled a note.
Randal,
I finished early. I’m taking a taxi home. Tell Uncle James that I’ll be home when he gets there.
Susan
She folded the paper in half and wrote Randal’s name on the front.
“He’s a tall man with a reddish mustache,” Susan said. She slid the note across the desk. “He’ll be here at three o’clock and will ask for Susan Heins. Would you give this to him, please?”
“If he comes in, Miss, I’ll see that he gets it,” she replied in a tone more friendly than her manner.
“Thank you.”
She stood at the stairs inside the entrance and listened again to the silence of the stairwell. No one was walking up or down. The girl she had met a short time before was walking silently somewhere above or might never have existed. The couple beside her upstairs had passed into history just as everyone did. Her mother had walked these very stairs and then had come and gone leaving only a mystery in the form of a little girl destined never to know more than the look on her face as it appeared in a few faded photographs. Her father had left even less. It was as if it had all bubbled under her innocent life for twenty years, building toward the explosion that had occurred with the birth of a child. Now it was both too far past to ever be put into order and too present to be ignored.
On the steps in front of the building the air was noticeably cooler. A breeze rushed along Michigan Avenue from the north and seemed to announce that the winter was not yet gone. Susan started walking south along the avenue with no particular destination. The wind at her back seemed to sweep her along the street.
A car passed headed north and stopped at the intersection behind. The driver had turned his face of hard, pale lines away when she looked up and she thought of George. In four days her life with him had drifted into another era, a time as remote as the old newspapers she had just seen. She could think of him now but would never look at George’s face again without seeing the terrible expression that his own child had drawn. She would never be able to look into the face of her child without seeing the hatred in her father’s eyes. A curse had been put upon her life like a random shot fired into a crowded room.
But the shot had been fired by Clara. It had left three innocent people to suffer. She would never again see in her mother’s eyes the tragic innocence she had always imagined was there. Instead there would be a laughter that had only now begun to ring in her ears at a joke too dark to deny.
The car moved on to the north with a roar and Susan realized that she had stopped at the corner across from the museum. The chill wind in her face was refreshing as she looked back up the avenue in the direction she had come. She did not remember walking as far as she had. How long it had taken she couldn’t guess.
Another car passed and this one was driven by a different kind of man. He was old and his hair was gray and he held to the steering wheel with both hands as if it was all he could do to control the automobile. The skin on his face and on the backs of his hands was the color of pine wood. But his profile was similar, in spite of his age, to that of the young man who had sat down beside her in the library and Susan realized that she could not begin to imagine her father. She did not know the color of his eyes or the color of his hair and could not even guess at the color of his skin. She didn’t know how tall he was or how his face changed when he smiled or if he even smiled at all. She did not know the sound of his voice or the way his body moved when he walked or when he picked something up and held it in his hands. She did not know what his father had been like or what his mother had looked like or even if he had ever known his father. She watched this car until it disappeared to the south, toward a part of the city as unfamiliar as her own past. The avenue disappeared into the southern horizon.
She hailed a cab and instructed the cabby to drive to the south slowly along Michigan Avenue and then along State Street. At first she searched the traffic for the car she had seen, though she knew it was gone. When she saw a similar car parked at the curb, she told the cabby to stop beside it but the car was as empty as the stairwell in the library.
The stores with their bright display windows disappeared more quickly than she expected and she wondered that she had never noticed this before. Soon the commercial district gave way to wood flats and brick apartment buildings, tiny supermarkets, liquor stores, littered auto shops and long, lonely buildings whose windows had been permanently bricked shut. Though she had lived her entire life here, she had never seen this place before.
“How far you want me to go, ma’am?” the cabby asked as they waited for a light at 38th Street. An obese woman in a cotton coat waddled across the street in front of the cab.
“Turn right here,” Susan said as she followed the slow progress of the woman.
“Right?”
“That’s right.”
“Lady, I thought you might be headed for Hyde Park or somewhere over around there.”
“No.”
“Then do you mind if I ask where you’re goin’?”
“Just turn right here, please.”
The driver turned the car. They crossed the highway and a wide railroad yard where disassembled trains sat still and hollow on rust-colored tracks like the skeletons of prehistoric creatures.
“Stop here,” Susan said and the cabby pulled the car to the curb.
A solitary figure stood along one of the train cars, a man dressed in grimy overalls and a baseball cap. He leaned his elbow on an open box car door, drew slowly on the cigarette and seemed aware of nothing that passed before his eyes. He seemed somehow out of place, Susan thought, as she watched him. He was out of time. There was something obsolete about the way he stood or about the blank expression on his face, an expression that nevertheless seemed to acknowledge that his time had passed. As she looked around, Susan thought she could see the same expression in the ancient industrial buildings and in the steel fence that separated the buildings from the street and in the pavement of the street itself.
“Go on,” she said and the car moved away from the curb. A few blocks beyond, a long semitrailer crept out from a dark garage as if there were no traffic. The cab screeched to a stop. On both sides of the street rose tall, gray-brown factory windows, some of them tilted open so that Susan could see the high, dingy ceilings inside and the limbs of vast machinery. Many times she had passed through the south side of the city and yet she had no idea how it looked. She might have been in another country rather than a few miles from where she had been born and from where her child would grow up.
This was the city that her grandfather had inhabited. In buildings like these her life had been created and yet she’d seldom thought of it. That world had passed out of the family decades before, the family wealth transferred from industry to real estate and finance, and so she had never seen it up close. It was a past that had nothing to do with the present and yet now she could see that there was a direct connection. The connection might be forgotten, might be deliberately buried like someone washing his hands of something he’d rather the world never knew, but it could never be severed. As she thought these things, she was reminded of the expression on her uncle’s face, washed in the shades of the multi-colored lamp.
When the truck had moved into the street and the cab had passed several more blocks of factories, Susan instructed the driver to turn left. This time he said nothing.
They passed two blocks of old Polish signs and storefronts, some of which seemed too old to have survived. The street here was bustling and the stores busy in spite of the air of antiquity that pervaded them. Susan had never seen this place before.
“I’m surprised you knew about this spot, ma’am,” the driver said. He slowed the car to watch the street. “Most people don’t, but there ain’t much of it left anymore. Used to go on like this for blocks before the colored started movin’ in. When I was a kid, this was one of the best spots in the city. Now . . . .” He shook his head.
A few blocks further on, the street was deserted again. Both sides were lined with wooden, three-story buildings. Many of them were windowless and empty.
On the corner stood two elderly men who reminded Susan of the man she had seen in the car. One of them had a light brown, freckled face and a bald head covered only at the very top by a bright green stocking cap. The other had coffee-colored skin, gray hair and a wispy beard thick only at the point of his chin.
“Wait,” she said to the driver and tried to imagine their lives. These men were old enough to be her grandfather. They would have lived when her grandfather had lived and maybe worked where her grandfather had worked. This city, which she had always thought of as her family’s, was equally theirs. It belonged more to these two men than it had ever belonged to her mother or grandfather. They would have had children of their own right here and grandchildren.
“Go on,” she said as she thought of this and hid her face in her hands with the images of these two men in her mind. It was now possible that these two men were more to her than mere strangers on the street. They were her uncles as much as James was her uncle and their children were her cousins and nephews. Perhaps they were her brothers and sisters as well.
As she looked around and watched the men through the rear window, a woman appeared on the sidewalk. She was a young black woman and she was pushing a baby carriage past the men. She held a tight fitting sweater together across her chest with one hand and pushed the carriage with the other. She seemed to have appeared out of nowhere ….