The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 574
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
FICTION 59: Colors of the Past 34
Colors of the Past
a novel
W.D. Haverstock
Part Two
Chapter Nine
“… Pull over,” Susan said suddenly at the sight.
The cabby stopped the car with a suspicious glance into the mirror.
“Wait for me.”
Susan got out of the cab. The young woman was walking toward her. She was walking very slowly as if there were nowhere else she had to be. Susan waited near the cab and saw as the girl approached that she was no more than sixteen years old. She seemed to be staring ahead, unaware of Susan’s presence.
“Excuse me,” Susan said. “Would you like a ride?”
The girl stared into the distance.
“Excuse me,” Susan said again more loudly. The girl was beside her now and looked around as if she did not know where the words had come from. “I saw you walking in the cold by yourself and was wondering if you would like to ride with me. I’ll drop you off wherever you like.”
Her skin was black. She wore a handkerchief over her head but short braids hung down onto her forehead and the back of her neck. Her eyes were small and close together, her nose short and wide, and her forehead low. Her lips hung open, exposing the hole where one of her front teeth was missing. The sweater came only half way down her skinny forearms. Underneath was a t-shirt and a long, green dress.
The girl’s eyes finally lighted on Susan as if by accident and a puzzled look came over her.
“I’m sorry,” Susan continued, “I didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s just that . . . . “
“What do you want?” the girl said harshly. The puzzlement had changed to suspicion. “Who are you?” She spoke with a heavy southern accent.
“I don’t want anything. I was just trying to offer you a ride.”
“Keep away from me,” the girl screamed in a child-like voice. She had stopped but now started walking faster than before. “I don’t got nothin’. Keep away.”
Susan stepped toward her but a look of terror came over the girl’s face. As she started to run the carriage nearly toppled over. The girl leaned forward to right it and her long skirt kicked up behind her ankles. Susan noticed then that the girl was pregnant.
“Hey! What’s goin’ on down there?”
Susan turned at the sound of the voice. The men at the other end of the block were looking toward her.
Susan turned back to the girl but she was already crossing the street ahead. One of the men shouted something that Susan didn’t understand.
The car horn sounded. The cabby was motioning for Susan to get into the car. She looked back and forth one last time between the girl and the two men and then hurried into the cab. The driver pulled away from the curb before the door had closed.
“Lady,” he said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re trying to pull, but you can’t do that. Not around here.”
“Take me to Evanston,” she said as she watched the girl recede into the distance behind. She was walking absentmindedly again. The sweater had fallen open across her belly.
“What?”
“I want to go to Evanston.”
“Ma’am, we been goin’ the other way.”
“I know that.”
The cabby laughed. “It’s your money.” He looked into the mirror. “You got the money, don’t you?”
Susan pushed a twenty dollar bill through the window. It fell onto the seat beside the driver.
The cab rolled back onto the highway and Susan thought about the young man who may have been her father. James said that he had grown up in the Heins household and that he had been a favorite of Susan’s grandmother. His mother had worked for her grandmother for more than twenty years but she and her child had gone away. It seemed strange that they would have left so abruptly after so many years.
She wondered if this man had heard that a daughter had been born. Had he heard about Clara’s death and could it be that he was still alive? He might have lived a few miles from her all her life, a distance both short and too great to be crossed. He might have known the men on the street back there or might have passed in a car without her noticing. She wondered if she would be able to imagine that from him she had come and that from his blood had come her own. She wondered if he would be able to accept her as his own and as someone whose life was intimately tied to his or if he would see in her only someone he could never know.
In quick succession the faces of the man in the car, the young man in the library and the boy mowing the lawn flashed through Susan’s mind, as if one led somehow to the other and the other somehow to her. She wondered if it would be easier for her father to believe what they shared than it was for her to believe it. Why was it so hard to believe herself?
A dark blue sedan sat empty in the driveway when the cab stopped in front of the house. Susan had never seen the car before. She paid the cabby the balance and hurried toward the front door. The air had become cold in the late afternoon and bit through her thin sweater as if she were wearing nothing. The sun had already fallen below the trees behind the house.
As soon as she closed the door, she heard the voices. They were coming from the sitting room where the door had be left open a few inches. One of them belonged to her uncle, the other to her husband. Susan stood, rubbing her arms, at the foot of the stairs. Through the crack in the doorway she could see only a corner of the lamp shade. The lamp was not lit.
“I don’t think you’ve thought about all of this carefully,” James was saying when the thoughts that had occupied her during the drive from the city were gone. “It has only been a few days. Why don’t you go home and think about this some more, George. You know that Susan is welcome to stay here until the two of you have worked things out and I don’t doubt for a moment that you can work things out if you are willing to try. This is a shock to us all.”
George laughed loudly, a sound no different from the look in his eyes in the hospital room. “It was a surprise to you, but it was no surprise to her. There is no one in this state that will believe that.”
“They will believe it if the tests prove it.”
“You know as well as I do that there are no conclusive tests.” The laughter disappeared from his voice like the echo of a gunshot. “Do you really think I could spend the rest of my life raising a child that isn’t even my own? Have you seen it, James? Have you looked at it?”
Susan could hear no response.
“It’s colored, James. It’s a Negro.”
Susan closed her eyes.
“It’s brown, James. It’s a brown baby.” The hatred she’d seen in his eyes was in his voice. “Don’t tell me you don’t know exactly what that means.”
“I don’t, George, and neither do you.”
“There is only one explanation, James. You can shut your eyes to it but your niece is no better than they are. If that’s what she wants, that’s what she should have. At first I wanted to find the man. I wanted to see his face. To be honest, I was ready to kill him. But that was before I’d thought about it. Now I’m glad to leave them to each other. That child is not mine and will never be mine. It’ll never have my name and there is nothing that you or Susan can do about it.”
“All right, George,” James said calmly. “If you are determined to go ahead with this, I don’t think Susan will try to stop you. But you tell your father this - every penny that he has seen from me is coming back and coming back with interest. I don’t care what he has to do to repay it, but he will repay it.”
“If that’s a threat, James, you can deliver it yourself. Any business that has transpired has been strictly business. It’s all spelled out.”
“Just be prepared to stick to the letter of those agreements, George. If this is no longer a family matter, then so be it. If that’s how you want it, that’s the way it will be.”
From behind Susan could hear Katie. She was in the kitchen and was humming quietly a sweet, lovely melody that was familiar though Susan couldn’t name it. The song clashed with the two men’s voices.
“You know, you’re right about one thing, James,” George was saying when Susan listened again. His voice was low and sinister and it seemed possible to Susan that she could never have known this man, much less loved him. “I’m a fool, but not in the way you meant it a moment ago. I’m a fool for not seeing sooner that there is something wrong here. My brother warned me but I wouldn’t listen. I was in love.”
There was a grating sound to this last word that sent a shiver through Susan’s body. She was glad that the baby was too far away to hear and that Katie’s voice protected her.
“I should have suspected something wasn’t normal here, a girl living alone with her uncle, an older man who never had a life of his own. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”
A third voice interrupted George, a voice that Susan didn’t recognize. It spoke in a hush so that Susan could not understand the words, but George continued almost immediately.
“I don’t care. These people are perverse. I’m just glad I found out about it sooner than later.” He laughed again. “It’s funny. The Heins family is one of the oldest and most distinguished in the state, in the country even. James Heins,” he sneered, “respected president of the Heins Corporation. Frederick Heins, great industrialist, prominent civic leader, great grandfather of another bastard child.” George spat this out with venom.
“I think you had better listen to your attorney’s advice,” James said, the very calm of his voice menacing, “before you say something that will cost you more than your dignity. I was hoping when you showed up here that you would have realized that we are involved in a delicate situation, like it or not, and that there are simple, rational ways to take care of it. After all, George, you are involved. Your name is involved and there is no way to change that now.”
“I have already changed that.”
“As you said, there are no conclusive tests. Anything that you can prove, I can also prove. It could just as easily lead in your direction, George.”
There was a silence as the idea crept into Susan’s mind as it must have crept into George’s.
“What do you mean?” she heard and now there was something else in George’s voice hidden beneath the anger and arrogance.
“What do we know about you, George?” she heard her uncle say in a voice as calm as George’s was uneasy. “What do we know about the Grange’s?”
“You can’t prove a thing,” George repeated more loudly. The thought had never occurred to him and yet already he was thinking of the night before the wedding. The girl had haunted him ever since and he’d even thought of looking for her again. He’d thought it as soon as he’d realized that he would not be a married man for long but the suggestion was too outrageous to comprehend at once ….