Part 22

     “Well, when you do, there should be a few goodies in this folder as well. Images of the house, and a few even of the gardens.”
     “Fantastic, thank you!”
     “Oh, no trouble at all. Let me check one other spot, and see if there are any other photographs of the family.”
     I continue flipping through the portfolio of Derek Reese's photos, and while I don't spot any more of the Mason family, I'm happy to have looked through the rest, they really are beautiful. The photos make it look as though each person in them has some particularly unique quality, something that makes you stop and give them a moment's more consideration than you otherwise would have. There's one of an old man, face and hands severely weather-worn, who looks quite out of place in an ill-fitting suit. But he's sitting on a stool, leaning one arm against a table, and looks off to one side – and there's a glint in his eyes, a hint of a smile around his crevassed face, and instead of an awkward portrait shot of a man in his Sunday suit, it's a really sweet photo of someone's father, someone's grandfather.
     I move on to the next folder, and find, like the first one, a loose stack of old photographs. There are sheets of looseleaf paper set in between some, marking off different areas of the town. I flip through the first few, and see an assortment of photos of the town as it looked fifty, a hundred years ago. They're vaguely in order, with the oldest images in front of the newer ones, but the locations and subjects jump around quite a bit. Most are of storefronts, and photos taken along the length of a street in town, though some are of more ephemeral things – a hot dog stand in the park, a woman hanging clothes out on a line between two old brick buildings, school science fairs, festivals in the square, kids in parades and kids holding ice cream cones.
     I skip over several sections in this folder, until I reach the section marked “town outskirts”. These skip around even more with their locations, some as far away as what's now the next town over. But the photo I want is fairly old, so it's not long before I've found it – no, found them! There are several images, and I smile fondly as I flip through them.
     The first image is another general shot of the house – the trees out front are smaller, so it must have been taken relatively early on. The next seems to focus on the pattern of the brickwork, though it's framed nicely by daylilies blooming on each side of the image.
     The next photo surprises me – it's a room I haven't seen before, though the back of the photo has a light pencil notation reading “Mason house – music room. Pre-1900.” The walls of the room alternate between sections of smooth pale stone (marble? granite?) and sections that have been either painted or carved, with elaborate graceful swirls and floral designs. Almost art nouveau, really, though a little less stylized. The ceiling seems to be wood, intricately carved, though the area is too much in shadow for me to make out the details. The wood-paneled floor is a striking pattern of varied lines radiating from a star at the center of the room. Low couches curl around two sides of the room, their dark cushions looking very deep and comfortable. Several sconces are set into the walls, though I can't tell if they would have been lit from within by candles or gaslight. There is a tall window behind one of the couches, and though it's partly covered by diaphanous curtains, I can see a small section of the frame – and oh, it's gorgeous! Instead of the usual grid pattern of iron frame with glass set in rectangles, the ironwork again echoes the swirls of the fence outside. There is a small grand piano set on the opposite side of the room, and several ornate music stands are set against the wall nearby. Just at the edge of the frame, I can make out some kind of stand with several shelves, and there is the glint of light reflecting off of metal tubing – other musical instruments, I'd guess. It would have been expected, of Evelyn at least, to learn the piano. I wonder what the other instruments are, and if they were all brought in by Mr. Mason and Cora, or if they were left by Meres and Celestine? I could see them having a real love of music, while the later pair of adults would have seen it more as a social status thing.
     I know I shouldn't just assume the best of Meres and the worst of Mr. Mason, but it's hard for me not to. I've seen nothing but harshness and cold cruelty from Mr. Mason, and while I had only a short glimpse of Meres... I still hold to my idea that someone really mean and detached couldn't have created a place so beautiful to live in. I could see Mr. Mason filling the place with expensive things, sure, but the artistic eye that arranged everything there – that, he couldn't have done.
     I still wonder that Evelyn is Mr. Mason's child, she seems so little like him. As for Evelyn's mother... the jury's still out on that front. There ought to be more information about her - probably in these archives I'm surrounded by, come to think of it! I'll have to come back another day though, I've forgotten my watch but I'm sure it's getting on in the afternoon.
     I move on to the next photo, and smile as I recognize the tall, elaborate main fountain in the gardens. There's water moving over the intricate twining flowers and figures, and I think I can just make out the fish swimming in the basin. The next photograph is of the bridge I crossed one day, spanning the creek. Obviously, there's no color in the photo, but from the shade of gray, I suspect I was right in guessing that the bridge had once been a vivid red. The willow tree, just visible in the background, is so little! Its leaves are nowhere near touching the water below. The last photo is a hand-colored one, showing the rose garden – and I shiver a little, remembering the confrontation with Mr. Mason that Evelyn and I had there. But the roses themselves are lovely, and the photo shows the formal arrangement of the garden nicely. Though I think the colors chosen to paint the image aren't quite right, I remember there were white ones, right at the start of that path--- oh, they could have planted different roses at different times, I know, but I like the thought that my memories of the garden a hundred years gone have more detail than the photo taken at the time!
     The next photo is one of a bed and breakfast a little ways outside of town – though, of course, it was someone's home at the time of the photos, not a home-based business. I flip lightly through the rest, but there's nothing more of the Mason place. I set the photos I found carefully aside to be copied. Though only the music room is new to me, they're still really pretty pictures, and I don't have any photos yet of the gardens as Evelyn saw them. (Here's hoping that the distortion that happened to the camera files is the same each trip – I feel so lucky to have found the solution this last time, I'm terrified it'll take something even more complicated to fix them on subsequent visits back there!)
     Just as I'm closing the folder, Susan lets out a triumphant cry, and closes a file drawer with a flourish. “Found them! “Miscellaneous People, 1850-1900” and “1900-1920”. Alphabetical by last name inside each folder, with ones we couldn't identify at the back of the folder.”
     “Awesome, thanks!” I reach over to take the folders from her, and as she leans forward, she takes note of the photos I've set aside for copying.
     “Found some you like, I see?”
     “Definitely!”
     “You want me to get started on the copies, while you skim through these last folders? It'll take the machine a little while to warm up if no-one's used it in the past few hours, but it's a fantastic near-photo quality thing, so it's worth the wait.”
     “I'm so glad to hear it – I was worried I'd be getting blotchy old-school xeroxes.”
     “Nope! ...now, if you'd stopped in, say, two years ago? You'd have been lucky to get a blotchy print, or anything at all to come out of that old monster. But we worked over our budget with a fine-tooth comb, and with the help of one of the professors on campus who's obsessed with Derick Reese's work, we managed a lovely new behemoth.”
     I've handed her the folders with the photos I've already picked out, and she flips through them curiously. “Oh! Is this one of the Masons?” She flips the image of the young man over, and notes the blank back. “If you're reasonable sure, I'll label it – it would be fantastic to have an unknown one filled in! Do you think it's the one who died in the fire?”
     I shake my head, my words coming slowly, unsure. “I'm not totally positive, but, I think it's actually the first Mr. Mason, the one who built the house.”
     “Really? That's fantastic! We have so little information on him... oh, and won't Mary Sueter love this photo,” she adds with a grin. “Just her sort of romantic image, with a dark and handsome young man.”
     I grin back – both at the jest, and in relief that she hasn't asked me how I know, or even guess, at the man's identity. I nearly told her I saw some similarity between this man and Mr. A. Mason, but remembered just in time that someone told me there were no known photographs of Mr. Mason. Still, the more I look at the photo, the more I felt sure, it's an image of Meres. Those eyes... they couldn't be anyone else's. I've run that brief scene of him and Celestine at the fountain through my mind a thousand times, and while the images blur a bit with each repeat, I'm almost positive this is him.
     As Susan leaves the room, I open the first of the two folders she handed me. I skip directly to the M's – realizing as I do so, that I have no idea what Cora's maiden name is. I should see if I can find that out. It's not likely that there are many younger photos of her, since the farther back in time, even by only a decade or so, the more rare photographs are. I doubt there's any hope of finding out Celestine's maiden name, but somehow I feel like she wasn't a local girl anyway. The seclusion she and Meres seemed to have sought out wouldn't have been really possible if her parents lived a short drive up the road.
     There! The first image in the M section is the photo of Cora that was in the town history book. And--- oh! The picture behind it is the children! Well, Avery and Evelyn, anyway. Evelyn looks to be about five or six here, Avery probably about ten, so Calvin wouldn't have been born yet. She looks as cute and charming as ever, despite the solemn expression on her round face. She's dressed in a frothy concoction of white lace, with her curls accented by a large white bow that sits behind them. Avery is pretty adorable too, he looks like such a miniature man, dressed in a very sharply-cut suit, which he looks surprisingly comfortable in. He has one hand on Evelyn's shoulder, and looks straight ahead into the camera, with almost a bit of menace in his eyes, as if daring anyone to harm his little sister. His hair is darker than hers, though nowhere near as dark as his father's, I don't think. It's cut short, and carefully combed and slicked back into place. His face is very handsome, having lost some of its childish roundness, the features gaining the first strength of young adulthood.
     Avery's eyes... there's only the faintest hints of their father in either of their faces, but Avery's eyes have by far the strongest of those hints. In place of the coldness, there's a fierce passion lurking there, but there's the same strength, the same intense insistence that the world is going to do what he demands of it. Though in Avery's case, I suppose it's more of a defense mechanism, than his father's sense of entitlement.