Vaguely consulted wikipedia for some 1880s/1890s fashion bits, as well as a University of Vermont site, that had some nice summarized blurbs with photos.
The photographs Kimber's been looking at, I've been making up as I go. (Though that one yesterday about the old hotel is vaguely based off a photo of a place in Laona, NY - I'm pretty sure a Fredonia history book I have has a photo of a hotel that's now abandoned. The description of it in its derelict state, I drew from my own bikeride one afternoon - I'm not positive it was the old hotel, but something in that photo always reminds me of that afternoon.)
But Evelyn's outfit is loosely based on this one - though I'm sure she'd be wearing different colors. :)
In other news - I'm only like 800 words behind! I'd catch up more, but dinner ran a little late, and the husband is now sleepy. So am I, come to think of it, it's been a ridiculous couple of days.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Part 21
She hands the photo back to me, and I study it a little longer, drinking in every detail. Then I gently tuck it back into the folder, setting it inside the front, so it's on top of the rest of the photos. I flip through the rest of the pictures in the folder, which are of varying degrees of interest. There's another one of the Mason house – the same one, I think, that I saw in the book. This isn't actually much clearer than that one was (I'm going to guess that the first one I found hadn't come to light yet when the book was researched), but I set it on top of the pile anyway, to get a fresh copy made.
“Got it!” Susan holds a folder aloft victoriously, then passes it over to me. “The photo of the daughter – I can't think of her name,”
“Evelyn.”
“That's right! Evelyn. The photo of her should be in there, but flip through the rest anyway, in case you spot more.” She turns back to her cabinets, starting a fresh dig in another drawer. “Have you seen any photos of the family before, would you recognize them? Everything in there should be labeled, but...”
I grin inwardly, but repress the smile, and answer as calmly and prosaically as I can. “Yeah, I've seen a few reprinted photos and things, I'm pretty sure I'd recognize them. Especially if the pictures were taken on the grounds of the estate.” I open the folder, and find a slim portfolio inside. These photos have been carefully slid into plastic sleeves – which means I can flip through them a little more quickly, not having to worry about leaving fingerprints or making small tears on their delicate edges. So many somber faces! I know it was the style, and kind of a necessary thing, given that poses had to be held for several minutes for the photo to be taken, but still. Luckily, after the first few pages – mostly adults, I'm guessing prominent figures in local history, or maybe just the photographer's first customers? – the style of the images begins to change. There are scenic backdrops of stylized forests, and different kinds of props begin to appear. A young woman with a totally absurd hat looks into a birdcage, half a smile quirking the corner of her lips. (I'm assuming the bird was a fake one, since I doubt one could have been trained to sit still so long!) A young man – a really, strikingly handsome young man, actually. I pause a moment longer to study the image. I can't actually say I like the slicked-back oiled hair of that age, but, I have to admit it's classy looking. I'm awful at ages, but I'd guess he's in his late twenties or so. His suit seems to be extremely well tailored to him, accentuating his tall, slim form. There are white Grecian pillars in the background behind him (probably just a painted image, though it's hard to tell). He stands to the right of the frame, off-center, facing an elaborately tall bouquet in an ornate vase set on a low table with geometric details. He holds a rose in one hand – but, no, it's such an incredibly graceful gesture that to say he held the rose is no description of it at all. His fingers, surprisingly long, wrap elegantly around the stem of the flower, with one finger resting so gently against a lower petal. His face is turned toward the camera, with a look that... Oh, but his eyes! They're so arresting, even through the hundred years or so separating him from me. It feels like I've just stepped into the room, distracting him from his contemplation of the flower, and he's looked up in amused surprise.
Those eyes. I know those eyes. They're the Mason eyes – just like Mr. Mason, and Meres, and---
Meres. Is it him? I only saw him from a distance, that one time, but... I lift the portfolio up closer to my eyes, as though if I bring it close enough, the old photograph will whisper its name to me. Its name – Susan said most of these were labeled.
“Susan? Is it---” I force a cough, and take a deep breath to steady my voice, which had sounded very shaky all of the sudden. My hands are shaking, too. “Sorry, must have been a bit of dust in my throat. Is it alright if I take a photo out of the sleeve? I just want a closer look.”
“Oh, no problem,” she replies without lifting her head, flipping through a few folders. “I know you'll probably handle them more carefully than I do myself!”
I force myself to take another deep breath, and will my hands to calm down. Why am I so nervous? It's only an old photo... however it might feel to me, he's not really looking back at me, it's an image taken over a century ago. Just a photo.
I carefully slip the photo out of its sleeve. It's printed on a heavyweight paper, and in really good shape for being so old. While I could rattle off the names of old photographic print processes, I'm not familiar enough with them that I could identify them on sight. But the blacks in this are very black for that time, the whites a warm cream. It's a much higher contrast image than I usually see, with a clarity to the details that almost makes me shiver, it seems so surreal that something so clear could be so far in the past. Finally, I let myself look again at his face.
Describing faces is always a tricky business, it's so hard to be specific, but, he really does have strong features. His cheekbones are sharply angled, but not in a ghoulish skull sort of way, like... kind of like Nefertiti, that's what it reminds me of. Strong, but delicate somehow, very refined. His hair isn't as short as the men in the photos around him, and it almost seems there's a bit of a wave to it, though it's hard to tell; it's so, so black, easily the darkest thing in the entire image. He seems so confident, so poised, such a strong, dominant male presence, and yet, there's so much grace and beauty in the details of his poise, that I'd expect to find in the pose of a young woman dancer.
And his eyes... it's dangerous to look at them, because it's so hard to look away again. I know how magnetic they were in real life, but I'm still amazed at how much of that was able to be captured in a photograph – run through light waves, traveling through the air and the glass eye of the camera, engraved into silver nitrate on a glass plate, and printed onto paper... and all of that, a hundred years ago. And still, there seems so little distance between his gaze and mine. I remember what Anna said, about a strong male spirit hovering near me. And I wonder what color those eyes were...
Finally, I break myself away, and carefully turn over the photograph, looking to see if it's been labeled – though now, I hardly need the verification. But there's nothing marked on the back, except a very faint pencil marking, “? 1870?” Turning the image over again, I realize there's a dark signature in the lower-right corner, and I see that it matches up to some of the other photos. Derick Reese's signature, I suppose.
I let my gaze linger a few minutes longer, looking for any family resemblance in the features. There's nothing similar between him and Evelyn or Calvin, though I haven't had a very close look at Avery yet. And there's... it's hard to say, if he looks similar to his brother or not. There's nothing that stands out to me – they don't really have the same nose, or same set of features, or shape of the eyes. But there's no mistaking that sense of authority, of confidence without bound. And from both of them, I've felt a sense of a very old soul – for all their apparent youth (and Mr. Mason seemed to age far less than Cora did), even in this young image of Meres, there's a depth that belies his youth. I don't know if it's some great sorrow they experienced when young, or just a precocious awareness of the world around them, or even just the maturity that comes with truly knowing yourself. But there's something... something a shade beyond a normal personality, in both of them.
Alright. I need to get through these, I could stare at that man forever. I set the photo carefully in the front of the folder – part of me wants to get an enlargement of the image, not just a copy, but I think he's dangerous enough on a small scale. I continue on through the portfolio, and while there are still the occasional somber faces in stiff poses, the images gradually get more and more artistic, almost like paintings rather than photographs. While most people at the time wanted a formal portrait done, representative images of what their family members' faces looked like, it seems Mr. Reese was able to convince some of them to let themselves be figures in his artwork. And I actually don't think he dressed them all up into different people than they were in real life – there are no little cherubs with bows and arrows, or women in Grecian robes and laurel wreaths. But he managed to capture the feeling of their personality, I think. At least, that's the impression I'm getting, looking at the images long after their subjects have passed out of this world.
There! Evelyn! I grin broadly, seeing her friendly face. And oh, it really is a lovely image of her. I don't know how, with such long exposure times, he managed to capture a photo that looks so spontaneous and sweet. She's probably eight or so in this photo, and wears the most perfect little doll-like dress, full of ruffles and lace, with a bow about half the size of her little body tied at the back of her waist. It seems she was wearing a hat – but it's on the ground nearby, and her curls catch the sunlight beautifully, glistening as they spill around her face. She's standing on one of the benches built into the base of the big fountain in the garden, leaning slightly forward. Her fingers are stretched out, and are just able to brush against the stone form of a lily, which stands out a little ways from the main structure of the central sculpture. Water tumbles around the intricate forms of the fountain, and though it's a still image, again the mastery of the sculpture makes it seem as though I can see the water actually flowing over it. While the camera didn't have the response time necessary to catch any droplets in midair, the air closest to the fountain is lighter, almost glowing, presumably from the light reflected by a misty spray.
Evelyn's face is bright, her lips slightly parted, and her eyes open wide, as she brushes her fingertips against the stone flower, with that wonderful childish blend of curiosity and delicate tenderness. Her face is so sweet, her expression so innocent... the contrast between this and the other photograph of a Mason is mind-boggling. And yet... yet there was something of that wonder, of that inherent ability to see incredible beauty in the world, that I think I see in Meres' gentle grasp of that rose. So maybe there's a family similarity after all.
I jump in my seat, startled, and Susan laughs lightly, patting my shoulder. I hadn't heard her approach, and suddenly she was right in front of me.
“Aren't Derick's photos something special? So different from most photos of the time. Not that there weren't artsy things going on in photography – there certainly were, but not in this town, out in the middle of nowhere. No other photo studio around here, before or since, has produced such lovely things.”
I smile up at her, nodding. “I have to agree... these are so, so beautiful.”
“There are reprints available of some of these – I think there may even be one of your Evelyn. I can run off whatever copies you'd like of course, but sometime before I started working here, someone was able to get really nice quality reproductions of some of these done up, and I know there are a few still floating around.”
“That would be fantastic, thank you! Have you turned up anything else? ...not that I've even finished this folder yet,” I finish with a wry smile.
“Got it!” Susan holds a folder aloft victoriously, then passes it over to me. “The photo of the daughter – I can't think of her name,”
“Evelyn.”
“That's right! Evelyn. The photo of her should be in there, but flip through the rest anyway, in case you spot more.” She turns back to her cabinets, starting a fresh dig in another drawer. “Have you seen any photos of the family before, would you recognize them? Everything in there should be labeled, but...”
I grin inwardly, but repress the smile, and answer as calmly and prosaically as I can. “Yeah, I've seen a few reprinted photos and things, I'm pretty sure I'd recognize them. Especially if the pictures were taken on the grounds of the estate.” I open the folder, and find a slim portfolio inside. These photos have been carefully slid into plastic sleeves – which means I can flip through them a little more quickly, not having to worry about leaving fingerprints or making small tears on their delicate edges. So many somber faces! I know it was the style, and kind of a necessary thing, given that poses had to be held for several minutes for the photo to be taken, but still. Luckily, after the first few pages – mostly adults, I'm guessing prominent figures in local history, or maybe just the photographer's first customers? – the style of the images begins to change. There are scenic backdrops of stylized forests, and different kinds of props begin to appear. A young woman with a totally absurd hat looks into a birdcage, half a smile quirking the corner of her lips. (I'm assuming the bird was a fake one, since I doubt one could have been trained to sit still so long!) A young man – a really, strikingly handsome young man, actually. I pause a moment longer to study the image. I can't actually say I like the slicked-back oiled hair of that age, but, I have to admit it's classy looking. I'm awful at ages, but I'd guess he's in his late twenties or so. His suit seems to be extremely well tailored to him, accentuating his tall, slim form. There are white Grecian pillars in the background behind him (probably just a painted image, though it's hard to tell). He stands to the right of the frame, off-center, facing an elaborately tall bouquet in an ornate vase set on a low table with geometric details. He holds a rose in one hand – but, no, it's such an incredibly graceful gesture that to say he held the rose is no description of it at all. His fingers, surprisingly long, wrap elegantly around the stem of the flower, with one finger resting so gently against a lower petal. His face is turned toward the camera, with a look that... Oh, but his eyes! They're so arresting, even through the hundred years or so separating him from me. It feels like I've just stepped into the room, distracting him from his contemplation of the flower, and he's looked up in amused surprise.
Those eyes. I know those eyes. They're the Mason eyes – just like Mr. Mason, and Meres, and---
Meres. Is it him? I only saw him from a distance, that one time, but... I lift the portfolio up closer to my eyes, as though if I bring it close enough, the old photograph will whisper its name to me. Its name – Susan said most of these were labeled.
“Susan? Is it---” I force a cough, and take a deep breath to steady my voice, which had sounded very shaky all of the sudden. My hands are shaking, too. “Sorry, must have been a bit of dust in my throat. Is it alright if I take a photo out of the sleeve? I just want a closer look.”
“Oh, no problem,” she replies without lifting her head, flipping through a few folders. “I know you'll probably handle them more carefully than I do myself!”
I force myself to take another deep breath, and will my hands to calm down. Why am I so nervous? It's only an old photo... however it might feel to me, he's not really looking back at me, it's an image taken over a century ago. Just a photo.
I carefully slip the photo out of its sleeve. It's printed on a heavyweight paper, and in really good shape for being so old. While I could rattle off the names of old photographic print processes, I'm not familiar enough with them that I could identify them on sight. But the blacks in this are very black for that time, the whites a warm cream. It's a much higher contrast image than I usually see, with a clarity to the details that almost makes me shiver, it seems so surreal that something so clear could be so far in the past. Finally, I let myself look again at his face.
Describing faces is always a tricky business, it's so hard to be specific, but, he really does have strong features. His cheekbones are sharply angled, but not in a ghoulish skull sort of way, like... kind of like Nefertiti, that's what it reminds me of. Strong, but delicate somehow, very refined. His hair isn't as short as the men in the photos around him, and it almost seems there's a bit of a wave to it, though it's hard to tell; it's so, so black, easily the darkest thing in the entire image. He seems so confident, so poised, such a strong, dominant male presence, and yet, there's so much grace and beauty in the details of his poise, that I'd expect to find in the pose of a young woman dancer.
And his eyes... it's dangerous to look at them, because it's so hard to look away again. I know how magnetic they were in real life, but I'm still amazed at how much of that was able to be captured in a photograph – run through light waves, traveling through the air and the glass eye of the camera, engraved into silver nitrate on a glass plate, and printed onto paper... and all of that, a hundred years ago. And still, there seems so little distance between his gaze and mine. I remember what Anna said, about a strong male spirit hovering near me. And I wonder what color those eyes were...
Finally, I break myself away, and carefully turn over the photograph, looking to see if it's been labeled – though now, I hardly need the verification. But there's nothing marked on the back, except a very faint pencil marking, “? 1870?” Turning the image over again, I realize there's a dark signature in the lower-right corner, and I see that it matches up to some of the other photos. Derick Reese's signature, I suppose.
I let my gaze linger a few minutes longer, looking for any family resemblance in the features. There's nothing similar between him and Evelyn or Calvin, though I haven't had a very close look at Avery yet. And there's... it's hard to say, if he looks similar to his brother or not. There's nothing that stands out to me – they don't really have the same nose, or same set of features, or shape of the eyes. But there's no mistaking that sense of authority, of confidence without bound. And from both of them, I've felt a sense of a very old soul – for all their apparent youth (and Mr. Mason seemed to age far less than Cora did), even in this young image of Meres, there's a depth that belies his youth. I don't know if it's some great sorrow they experienced when young, or just a precocious awareness of the world around them, or even just the maturity that comes with truly knowing yourself. But there's something... something a shade beyond a normal personality, in both of them.
Alright. I need to get through these, I could stare at that man forever. I set the photo carefully in the front of the folder – part of me wants to get an enlargement of the image, not just a copy, but I think he's dangerous enough on a small scale. I continue on through the portfolio, and while there are still the occasional somber faces in stiff poses, the images gradually get more and more artistic, almost like paintings rather than photographs. While most people at the time wanted a formal portrait done, representative images of what their family members' faces looked like, it seems Mr. Reese was able to convince some of them to let themselves be figures in his artwork. And I actually don't think he dressed them all up into different people than they were in real life – there are no little cherubs with bows and arrows, or women in Grecian robes and laurel wreaths. But he managed to capture the feeling of their personality, I think. At least, that's the impression I'm getting, looking at the images long after their subjects have passed out of this world.
There! Evelyn! I grin broadly, seeing her friendly face. And oh, it really is a lovely image of her. I don't know how, with such long exposure times, he managed to capture a photo that looks so spontaneous and sweet. She's probably eight or so in this photo, and wears the most perfect little doll-like dress, full of ruffles and lace, with a bow about half the size of her little body tied at the back of her waist. It seems she was wearing a hat – but it's on the ground nearby, and her curls catch the sunlight beautifully, glistening as they spill around her face. She's standing on one of the benches built into the base of the big fountain in the garden, leaning slightly forward. Her fingers are stretched out, and are just able to brush against the stone form of a lily, which stands out a little ways from the main structure of the central sculpture. Water tumbles around the intricate forms of the fountain, and though it's a still image, again the mastery of the sculpture makes it seem as though I can see the water actually flowing over it. While the camera didn't have the response time necessary to catch any droplets in midair, the air closest to the fountain is lighter, almost glowing, presumably from the light reflected by a misty spray.
Evelyn's face is bright, her lips slightly parted, and her eyes open wide, as she brushes her fingertips against the stone flower, with that wonderful childish blend of curiosity and delicate tenderness. Her face is so sweet, her expression so innocent... the contrast between this and the other photograph of a Mason is mind-boggling. And yet... yet there was something of that wonder, of that inherent ability to see incredible beauty in the world, that I think I see in Meres' gentle grasp of that rose. So maybe there's a family similarity after all.
I jump in my seat, startled, and Susan laughs lightly, patting my shoulder. I hadn't heard her approach, and suddenly she was right in front of me.
“Aren't Derick's photos something special? So different from most photos of the time. Not that there weren't artsy things going on in photography – there certainly were, but not in this town, out in the middle of nowhere. No other photo studio around here, before or since, has produced such lovely things.”
I smile up at her, nodding. “I have to agree... these are so, so beautiful.”
“There are reprints available of some of these – I think there may even be one of your Evelyn. I can run off whatever copies you'd like of course, but sometime before I started working here, someone was able to get really nice quality reproductions of some of these done up, and I know there are a few still floating around.”
“That would be fantastic, thank you! Have you turned up anything else? ...not that I've even finished this folder yet,” I finish with a wry smile.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
notes
So, a full day of furniture shopping + evening of furniture building, followed by a full day of furniture building + evening of drinking and movie, followed by a day of furniture building + wifi crankiness...
Today was the first in three days I've come anywhere near the novel. aarg. x_x [note: The NaNo wordcounter widget has been broken for several days - there should only be like three angry red boxes so far!]
On the bright side, tonight's giant installment was written while sitting on MY NEW COUCH WOOOO! In my now-painted living room. With some new cabinets sort-of attached to the wall. (They still haven't fallen! woo!!!)
Somehow, I'm now only 1300ish words behind. I threw out an extra thousand or so tonight, without too much trouble, and the next few chunks will also involve Kimber chatting with townspeople, which always makes the wordcount climb without too much pain. Thank freaking goodness.
I should also get her back to nosing around the garden at some point, which will up wordcount if I can get my head far enough into the story to get some reasonable description going.
If.
Why does November ALWAYS bring some kind of giant unexpected/unplanned stressful thing? Furniture should not have been so stressful, but... a) spending BIG $$. probably the most the husband and I have spent at one go yet. b) decisions on things we knew very little about. c) trying to do things we've never done before, and both getting frustrated at how little the other knows as well as how little the self knows. d) if I'd had enough upper-body strength to hold a cabinet above my head for more than a minute at a time, things would have been much smoother. maybe.
Done ranting. Feeling better, now that I bashed my laptop into connecting to the wifi which got reset today.
It's so bedtime. I have no idea what I even need to do tomorrow, I refuse to think about it now!
Today was the first in three days I've come anywhere near the novel. aarg. x_x [note: The NaNo wordcounter widget has been broken for several days - there should only be like three angry red boxes so far!]
On the bright side, tonight's giant installment was written while sitting on MY NEW COUCH WOOOO! In my now-painted living room. With some new cabinets sort-of attached to the wall. (They still haven't fallen! woo!!!)
Somehow, I'm now only 1300ish words behind. I threw out an extra thousand or so tonight, without too much trouble, and the next few chunks will also involve Kimber chatting with townspeople, which always makes the wordcount climb without too much pain. Thank freaking goodness.
I should also get her back to nosing around the garden at some point, which will up wordcount if I can get my head far enough into the story to get some reasonable description going.
If.
Why does November ALWAYS bring some kind of giant unexpected/unplanned stressful thing? Furniture should not have been so stressful, but... a) spending BIG $$. probably the most the husband and I have spent at one go yet. b) decisions on things we knew very little about. c) trying to do things we've never done before, and both getting frustrated at how little the other knows as well as how little the self knows. d) if I'd had enough upper-body strength to hold a cabinet above my head for more than a minute at a time, things would have been much smoother. maybe.
Done ranting. Feeling better, now that I bashed my laptop into connecting to the wifi which got reset today.
It's so bedtime. I have no idea what I even need to do tomorrow, I refuse to think about it now!
Parts 18-20
“At the meeting I crashed awhile ago---”
“Oh hush, you're more than welcome anytime!”
I grin and continue. “Thanks. But, you guys mentioned there were a few photos of the Masons and their house?”
“Oh! Of course! You were doing drawings, and wanted to take a look. Well, the first one is easy to find, I had a student in here a few weeks ago doing research on local architecture, so I have a folder of old building photographs handy.”
“Susan, that was at the end of last semester – a little more than a few weeks ago, and you haven't put those away yet?!”
“Well, it's a good thing I didn't, because Kimber wants them. Don't you go second-guessing my subconscious intuition.” Susan grins at me, and continues in a stage-whisper. “Claire thinks I'm disorganized.”
“Because you are.” I note that Claire is still engrossed with whatever cabinet she's organizing things in. Looking around the uncluttered, neatly-labeled office, I suspect anyone would seen disorganized to her eyes.
“I'm perfectly organized, to my mind. If I hid everything away in drawers and files like you, I'd never know where a thing was.”
“...and exactly how is that different from the current state of things?”
Susan has been gathering up some loose papers from the desk she was sitting at, and now stands, clutching the papers to her chest. “We're leaving now! You just enjoy your little bubble of negativity.”
Claire waves, nothing but her hand visible from behind the cabinet. Susan giggles, and ushers me out into the hallway. “As you can probably tell, she and I have worked together far too long. There's rarely anything that needs done with any urgency around here, so we've had plenty of time to hone our bickering abilities. Passes the time, especially on these long summer days. Here we are! Someone really should have known better than to put me into an office this close to Claire's. Actually, maybe somebody did – the bulk of the archival stores used to be in the basement, until I saw what horrors the damp was doing to the old paper, and brought them up here for safekeeping. So when they hired me, I was usually digging around in the basement, until I invaded the land of the living up here.”
“It kind of does look like an invasion,” I reply, looking around the jam-packed little office. “An attack of some kind anyway. Like the room got t.p.'d, only with precious old documents instead of toilet paper?”
She giggles at this, cheerfully dropping her new pile of papers on top of the current piles on the desk. She leans closer to the new pile, frowns, and shuffles through the top few pages. Picks them up, and drops them onto a different pile on the floor. “That is the 'totally not important but I'll be in trouble if I don't keep' pile,” she explains. “But here, let me hand you the folder with the old house photos, and I'll go digging for the next ones you'll want to see. There's the photo of the daughter I think I mentioned to you – that'll be in the Derick Reese collection, that's in here as well. And then there are some others of the house, I think they may be in the main dated files – that will take me a little longer, since we didn't have exact dates for them, they're filed in by approximate decade I think. There may be some others of the Masons in with the people photos, I'll check there too, in case there are some that are slipping my mind just now.”
As she's telling me all this, I stand clear as a miniature whirlwind forms in front of me. Susan lifts one stack and sets it on another, balances a third and fourth in one hand as she lifts a fifth from below them, which she maneuvers open only to frown and close back up again, putting everything back in the completely arcane positions they were in at the start. But by the time she's finished outlining her plan of attack, she's found the first of her targets. “Ah-ha!” She holds a manila file folder aloft triumphantly, then spins around to grin at me as she reaches over a particularly precarious pile to hand me the folder. “You just... well, here, you can move the pile on that chair onto the floor next to it, there's nothing fragile in there. And then you just sit down and look through there while I continue the hunt. If you find anything you'd like copied, just pull it out and set it aside. We'll just keep the individual folders out until we've made the copies, and re-filing will be no trouble.”
“Thank you – I really appreciate all the effort.”
“Oh please! I've been dying for a project all week. It's my pleasure.”
I lay the folder on my lap, and open it. Inside is a large stack of photographs, some new, some old, of most of the notable landmarks around town, as well as a large number of really pretty houses. Some of them I recognize, since they're on the main streets of the town and I've walked by them a hundred times, but others I don't – I suppose they're either on side streets, or, like the Mason place, are no longer here. Some of them have been changed quite a bit as well it seems: I pause to look at one house I recognize, it's right near the college, but it looks like the house was originally only about half the size it is now. A wide, sweeping porch originally wrapped around the front and one side of the house, with a really pretty ironwork fence running along it. But that's all enclosed now, and the back of the house has been added onto, and that little balcony upstairs isn't there anymore either... It used to be so pretty, and now it's just another generic house that's rented out to students. Fortunately, most of the houses in here have suffered only slight changes – different railings and trim, different colors, porches added or removed. It's a town with a good amount of pride in its own history, and I think most of the nicer houses have all been bought up by people wealthy enough to keep them maintained. While part of me is always slightly frustrated by this – seeing perfectly manicured lawns around glorious old brick houses with turrets always makes me realize just how hopeless it is for me to want to live in one – at the end of the day, I'm still glad the houses are being taken care of. A few photos farther in, and I pause again, not recognizing it at first. Checking for information on the back, my eyes widen. No wonder I didn't recognize it! The brownish black-and-white photo shows a somewhat large house, wood-paneled, lace curtains just visible behind eight-paned windows. A man and woman stand on the front porch, which has a peaked roof above it, held up by slim but elegant pillars. Not the most extravagant building, but pretty and neat. Written in light pencil on the back of the photo are a few dates with questions marks – mostly in the early 1900s. “Clarkson Hotel, Milltown. John and Mable Clarkson?” And when I flip back to look at the photo again, a sudden flash of recognition and dismay hits me.
I was riding my bike around one day, out exploring the edges of town. I went out farther than usual, and only realized later that I'd ended up in Milltown, the next town over. If you can call it a town anymore. I don't think there was even a stoplight, just a crossroads and maybe a dozen buildings clustered around it, every one of them in really heartbreaking disrepair. A few buildings had signs on them indicating there were businesses inside, but the paint was so faded and the windows in such rough shape, I couldn't be sure they were really still in existence. It was such a haunted and sad little town. I wanted to think of it as a ghost town, but it didn't even have that romantic distinction – there were still people living in it, too old and attached to their birthplace to leave, or too poor to be able to afford to move away.
I stopped to look around one of the buildings a little ways out from the center of town – it stood largely on its own, probably a quarter-mile away from anything but a tiny half-collapsed shack on the other side of the street. It looked like it had been painted white originally, though it was hard to tell: Virginia creeper and kudzu were doing battle on the peeling paint of its decaying wooden walls. Though the windows were mostly boarded up, even the boards were falling off now, and I could see most of the windows were shattered. It looked like there had been a porch, I could see a few bits of wood vaguely attached to the main house, but most of it had been torn away. As I walked around the lonely old house, picking my way through the tall field grass and scrub weeds, I kept checking to see if there were any windows I'd be able to look through, to get a glimpse of what remnants might be left inside. (I'm always tempted to sneak into houses like this, but I always chicken out. Admittedly, a big part of it is just that I'm afraid of getting in trouble for it. But common sense also raises its obnoxious head; if the outside is so run-down, the floors inside are likely to be just as rotted, and even more full of snakes and God-knows-what else.)
Though I couldn't get near enough to any of the windows to look in, there was one on the upper floor that some of the boards had fallen away from. And there was a wispy ragged bit of a curtain that had worked its way free from behind the broken glass, which caught on a breeze as it came into my view. That tiny little moment, with the ghost-like curtain waving in seeming slow-motion on the summer breeze, has always stayed with me, and the melancholy of the air around that house still makes me shiver a little.
...and that house was once the Clarkson Hotel, a perfectly respectable little establishment. I can see, so clearly, the woman in the picture leaning over a washboard, smiling as she hangs the crisp white curtains to dry before hanging them in the windows of the newly-opened business, just waiting for the first guests to arrive.
I am such a goddamned sucker for melancholy history. No wonder I can't leave the Masons alone!
I shake my head to clear it, and look up and around the office, trying to bring myself back to the present. Susan catches my eye, and smiles sympathetically at me, knowing without a word how far away I'd just been. “You should be careful with those old photos, honey. They're worse than quicksand, sucking you right down into the past without warning, and without much hope of coming up for air anytime soon!”
“Man, you're not kidding... I'd be in so much trouble, working in a place like this.”
“And so you see why I go down the hall and harass Claire all the time! If I didn't go and do that, I'd have long ago become one with this old desk chair – and I don't mean that in a Zen kind of way, I mean literally.” We both chuckle at this, and she points viciously at the filing cabinet she's plunged into. “I'll have the next ones for you soon, I promise. But someone put the Reese photos away, and I've had them on my desk for so long – because it seems someone is always dropping by to see them – that I'm not entirely sure where they're actually supposed to be filed. But I think I'm close now!”
I can't help but giggle at her extreme enthusiasm over file-drawing-digging. “Not a problem – I haven't even gotten to the photo of the Mason house yet!”
I continue on through the pile, trying to keep myself from thinking too hard about the images I'm looking at. I don't want to get sucked in again on any of these, not when the Mason place is---
The Mason place. There it is. And though I've seen it probably a dozen times now, my heart still thumps a few loud beats as my fingers tenderly trace the edge of the photo. It's real... It was really there, and what I saw was really it. The photo was taken almost directly center in front of the house, probably in early spring, as there are no leaves on the trees, but I can faintly make out some plants just starting to sprout from the ground along the pathway. The tower on the left, the stained glass windows evident though the details aren't visible here. The pretty little arch over the front entryway. The crisp white outline of the trim against the rich brick of the walls, the geometric pattern in the bricks near the ground just discernible where the light hits it right. The apple tree in the very corner of the image – smaller than I've seen it yet – just putting out its first leaves of the season. The larger trees only just creep into the edges of the photo, their branches lacing lightly over the bolder lines of the ironwork of the front gate.
And I can see what I couldn't make out, the night of the fire. The ironwork is indeed similar to the pattern of the fence outlining the property – with one addition. In the center, near the peak of the gate, is the outline of a fleur-de-lis, enclosing letters. It's hard to make them out, the light isn't quite right, there's a glare on part of them, but I think...
“Longa est vita, amor aeternus est.”
That's my best guess, anyway – I can't actually make out one group of letters, but we sang enough things in Latin in my high school choir that I can piece together the “amor” and guess at the “aeternus”. I'm not sure what the rest means. Is vita like vida, which is “life” in Spanish?
“You don't happen to know any Latin, do you?”
Susan pauses in her rifling, and looks over at me, puzzled. “Does Pig Latin count?”
I hold up the photo of the Mason place, and point at the gate. “There's something in Latin. Something is eternal, that's all I can figure.”
She comes around the desk, and gently takes the photo from me, squinting down at the letters. Then she holds the photo at a distance, and squints again. “You kids and your young eyes – I can't make out more than a few letters!”
“I think it's something like “Longa est vita, amor aeternus est”, though I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation.”
“I'd never know if you were! But we'll see if the lettering comes out when we run a copy of this for you – if not, you just write it down, and you can go look it up in those Internets you kids are so fond of.” She gives me a sly grin, and I know she says this facetiously – I'm sure she's played her fair share of Bejeweled and...whatever that Mayan-themed game is, I can't remember the name.
“Oh hush, you're more than welcome anytime!”
I grin and continue. “Thanks. But, you guys mentioned there were a few photos of the Masons and their house?”
“Oh! Of course! You were doing drawings, and wanted to take a look. Well, the first one is easy to find, I had a student in here a few weeks ago doing research on local architecture, so I have a folder of old building photographs handy.”
“Susan, that was at the end of last semester – a little more than a few weeks ago, and you haven't put those away yet?!”
“Well, it's a good thing I didn't, because Kimber wants them. Don't you go second-guessing my subconscious intuition.” Susan grins at me, and continues in a stage-whisper. “Claire thinks I'm disorganized.”
“Because you are.” I note that Claire is still engrossed with whatever cabinet she's organizing things in. Looking around the uncluttered, neatly-labeled office, I suspect anyone would seen disorganized to her eyes.
“I'm perfectly organized, to my mind. If I hid everything away in drawers and files like you, I'd never know where a thing was.”
“...and exactly how is that different from the current state of things?”
Susan has been gathering up some loose papers from the desk she was sitting at, and now stands, clutching the papers to her chest. “We're leaving now! You just enjoy your little bubble of negativity.”
Claire waves, nothing but her hand visible from behind the cabinet. Susan giggles, and ushers me out into the hallway. “As you can probably tell, she and I have worked together far too long. There's rarely anything that needs done with any urgency around here, so we've had plenty of time to hone our bickering abilities. Passes the time, especially on these long summer days. Here we are! Someone really should have known better than to put me into an office this close to Claire's. Actually, maybe somebody did – the bulk of the archival stores used to be in the basement, until I saw what horrors the damp was doing to the old paper, and brought them up here for safekeeping. So when they hired me, I was usually digging around in the basement, until I invaded the land of the living up here.”
“It kind of does look like an invasion,” I reply, looking around the jam-packed little office. “An attack of some kind anyway. Like the room got t.p.'d, only with precious old documents instead of toilet paper?”
She giggles at this, cheerfully dropping her new pile of papers on top of the current piles on the desk. She leans closer to the new pile, frowns, and shuffles through the top few pages. Picks them up, and drops them onto a different pile on the floor. “That is the 'totally not important but I'll be in trouble if I don't keep' pile,” she explains. “But here, let me hand you the folder with the old house photos, and I'll go digging for the next ones you'll want to see. There's the photo of the daughter I think I mentioned to you – that'll be in the Derick Reese collection, that's in here as well. And then there are some others of the house, I think they may be in the main dated files – that will take me a little longer, since we didn't have exact dates for them, they're filed in by approximate decade I think. There may be some others of the Masons in with the people photos, I'll check there too, in case there are some that are slipping my mind just now.”
As she's telling me all this, I stand clear as a miniature whirlwind forms in front of me. Susan lifts one stack and sets it on another, balances a third and fourth in one hand as she lifts a fifth from below them, which she maneuvers open only to frown and close back up again, putting everything back in the completely arcane positions they were in at the start. But by the time she's finished outlining her plan of attack, she's found the first of her targets. “Ah-ha!” She holds a manila file folder aloft triumphantly, then spins around to grin at me as she reaches over a particularly precarious pile to hand me the folder. “You just... well, here, you can move the pile on that chair onto the floor next to it, there's nothing fragile in there. And then you just sit down and look through there while I continue the hunt. If you find anything you'd like copied, just pull it out and set it aside. We'll just keep the individual folders out until we've made the copies, and re-filing will be no trouble.”
“Thank you – I really appreciate all the effort.”
“Oh please! I've been dying for a project all week. It's my pleasure.”
I lay the folder on my lap, and open it. Inside is a large stack of photographs, some new, some old, of most of the notable landmarks around town, as well as a large number of really pretty houses. Some of them I recognize, since they're on the main streets of the town and I've walked by them a hundred times, but others I don't – I suppose they're either on side streets, or, like the Mason place, are no longer here. Some of them have been changed quite a bit as well it seems: I pause to look at one house I recognize, it's right near the college, but it looks like the house was originally only about half the size it is now. A wide, sweeping porch originally wrapped around the front and one side of the house, with a really pretty ironwork fence running along it. But that's all enclosed now, and the back of the house has been added onto, and that little balcony upstairs isn't there anymore either... It used to be so pretty, and now it's just another generic house that's rented out to students. Fortunately, most of the houses in here have suffered only slight changes – different railings and trim, different colors, porches added or removed. It's a town with a good amount of pride in its own history, and I think most of the nicer houses have all been bought up by people wealthy enough to keep them maintained. While part of me is always slightly frustrated by this – seeing perfectly manicured lawns around glorious old brick houses with turrets always makes me realize just how hopeless it is for me to want to live in one – at the end of the day, I'm still glad the houses are being taken care of. A few photos farther in, and I pause again, not recognizing it at first. Checking for information on the back, my eyes widen. No wonder I didn't recognize it! The brownish black-and-white photo shows a somewhat large house, wood-paneled, lace curtains just visible behind eight-paned windows. A man and woman stand on the front porch, which has a peaked roof above it, held up by slim but elegant pillars. Not the most extravagant building, but pretty and neat. Written in light pencil on the back of the photo are a few dates with questions marks – mostly in the early 1900s. “Clarkson Hotel, Milltown. John and Mable Clarkson?” And when I flip back to look at the photo again, a sudden flash of recognition and dismay hits me.
I was riding my bike around one day, out exploring the edges of town. I went out farther than usual, and only realized later that I'd ended up in Milltown, the next town over. If you can call it a town anymore. I don't think there was even a stoplight, just a crossroads and maybe a dozen buildings clustered around it, every one of them in really heartbreaking disrepair. A few buildings had signs on them indicating there were businesses inside, but the paint was so faded and the windows in such rough shape, I couldn't be sure they were really still in existence. It was such a haunted and sad little town. I wanted to think of it as a ghost town, but it didn't even have that romantic distinction – there were still people living in it, too old and attached to their birthplace to leave, or too poor to be able to afford to move away.
I stopped to look around one of the buildings a little ways out from the center of town – it stood largely on its own, probably a quarter-mile away from anything but a tiny half-collapsed shack on the other side of the street. It looked like it had been painted white originally, though it was hard to tell: Virginia creeper and kudzu were doing battle on the peeling paint of its decaying wooden walls. Though the windows were mostly boarded up, even the boards were falling off now, and I could see most of the windows were shattered. It looked like there had been a porch, I could see a few bits of wood vaguely attached to the main house, but most of it had been torn away. As I walked around the lonely old house, picking my way through the tall field grass and scrub weeds, I kept checking to see if there were any windows I'd be able to look through, to get a glimpse of what remnants might be left inside. (I'm always tempted to sneak into houses like this, but I always chicken out. Admittedly, a big part of it is just that I'm afraid of getting in trouble for it. But common sense also raises its obnoxious head; if the outside is so run-down, the floors inside are likely to be just as rotted, and even more full of snakes and God-knows-what else.)
Though I couldn't get near enough to any of the windows to look in, there was one on the upper floor that some of the boards had fallen away from. And there was a wispy ragged bit of a curtain that had worked its way free from behind the broken glass, which caught on a breeze as it came into my view. That tiny little moment, with the ghost-like curtain waving in seeming slow-motion on the summer breeze, has always stayed with me, and the melancholy of the air around that house still makes me shiver a little.
...and that house was once the Clarkson Hotel, a perfectly respectable little establishment. I can see, so clearly, the woman in the picture leaning over a washboard, smiling as she hangs the crisp white curtains to dry before hanging them in the windows of the newly-opened business, just waiting for the first guests to arrive.
I am such a goddamned sucker for melancholy history. No wonder I can't leave the Masons alone!
I shake my head to clear it, and look up and around the office, trying to bring myself back to the present. Susan catches my eye, and smiles sympathetically at me, knowing without a word how far away I'd just been. “You should be careful with those old photos, honey. They're worse than quicksand, sucking you right down into the past without warning, and without much hope of coming up for air anytime soon!”
“Man, you're not kidding... I'd be in so much trouble, working in a place like this.”
“And so you see why I go down the hall and harass Claire all the time! If I didn't go and do that, I'd have long ago become one with this old desk chair – and I don't mean that in a Zen kind of way, I mean literally.” We both chuckle at this, and she points viciously at the filing cabinet she's plunged into. “I'll have the next ones for you soon, I promise. But someone put the Reese photos away, and I've had them on my desk for so long – because it seems someone is always dropping by to see them – that I'm not entirely sure where they're actually supposed to be filed. But I think I'm close now!”
I can't help but giggle at her extreme enthusiasm over file-drawing-digging. “Not a problem – I haven't even gotten to the photo of the Mason house yet!”
I continue on through the pile, trying to keep myself from thinking too hard about the images I'm looking at. I don't want to get sucked in again on any of these, not when the Mason place is---
The Mason place. There it is. And though I've seen it probably a dozen times now, my heart still thumps a few loud beats as my fingers tenderly trace the edge of the photo. It's real... It was really there, and what I saw was really it. The photo was taken almost directly center in front of the house, probably in early spring, as there are no leaves on the trees, but I can faintly make out some plants just starting to sprout from the ground along the pathway. The tower on the left, the stained glass windows evident though the details aren't visible here. The pretty little arch over the front entryway. The crisp white outline of the trim against the rich brick of the walls, the geometric pattern in the bricks near the ground just discernible where the light hits it right. The apple tree in the very corner of the image – smaller than I've seen it yet – just putting out its first leaves of the season. The larger trees only just creep into the edges of the photo, their branches lacing lightly over the bolder lines of the ironwork of the front gate.
And I can see what I couldn't make out, the night of the fire. The ironwork is indeed similar to the pattern of the fence outlining the property – with one addition. In the center, near the peak of the gate, is the outline of a fleur-de-lis, enclosing letters. It's hard to make them out, the light isn't quite right, there's a glare on part of them, but I think...
“Longa est vita, amor aeternus est.”
That's my best guess, anyway – I can't actually make out one group of letters, but we sang enough things in Latin in my high school choir that I can piece together the “amor” and guess at the “aeternus”. I'm not sure what the rest means. Is vita like vida, which is “life” in Spanish?
“You don't happen to know any Latin, do you?”
Susan pauses in her rifling, and looks over at me, puzzled. “Does Pig Latin count?”
I hold up the photo of the Mason place, and point at the gate. “There's something in Latin. Something is eternal, that's all I can figure.”
She comes around the desk, and gently takes the photo from me, squinting down at the letters. Then she holds the photo at a distance, and squints again. “You kids and your young eyes – I can't make out more than a few letters!”
“I think it's something like “Longa est vita, amor aeternus est”, though I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation.”
“I'd never know if you were! But we'll see if the lettering comes out when we run a copy of this for you – if not, you just write it down, and you can go look it up in those Internets you kids are so fond of.” She gives me a sly grin, and I know she says this facetiously – I'm sure she's played her fair share of Bejeweled and...whatever that Mayan-themed game is, I can't remember the name.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Part 17
I meander around the odd assortment of old kids' clothes and beat-up coffee tables, look over some of the old books – mostly paperback romance novels of the last few decades, as usual. As I finish flipping through a pile of old records, I see another table of books closer to the actual garage. There must be a couple of families doing the sale together, this second pile of books looks much more varied than the first. Intrigued, I move over to look through them, and grin brightly, seeing there are some old books among them. Well, older, anyway, they're fabric-bound hardcovers. Nothing as elaborate as in Mr. Mason's library, but there are some with kitschy 1950s-style outline drawings on them. I spot a vintage original Nancy Drew book in pretty reasonable shape – they're always so cute to read, “spunky” Miss Drew always being independent and intelligent, with impeccable hair and nails. I hang onto that one, while sifting through the rest.
“If you're interested in old books, you should take a look at Rick's Antiques, over on Main Street. I took him some of my better ones a few weeks ago.”
I look up to see an older man, probably in his sixties, with neatly-groomed perfectly white hair. He smiles amiably as he tells me this, and I smile back, pulling the second headphone from my ear.
“The nicer books, he offered to try selling for me, since he has customers that regularly check in for that sort of thing. The ones he didn't think he could sell, I have here.”
I grin, holding up the Nancy Drew book. “Well, he didn't take everything that would sell. And some of these have really pretty covers to them.”
He nods, reaching down to pick up one I hadn't looked at yet. “This one has really pretty pictures to it, though it's missing a few pages at the back.” He opens it up, and flips to an illustrated page – they're easy to find, being color prints on a thicker, glossier paper than the rest of the pages in the book.
“Oh! Those are lovely!” I extend a hand, and he hands it over to me. The book has to be almost a hundred years old, I recognize the style of the prints from a few other books I have. It's a pretty generic handful of fairy tales and probably other moral stories, but the drawings have such stunning detail to them, and the use of color is really masterful. Heck, even a drawing of Little Red Riding Hood is striking – the woods are a dark brown, almost but not quite black in the shadows, even the color of the grass muted to a dull sage, the whole scene feeling so ominous. The red of her cape, though, is bright as a cardinal against the snow. I flip to the back, to check out the missing pages – but none of the actual book text is missing, the last page is a listing of other books available from the publisher, so the missing pages could only have been more ads, or blank endpapers. I smile gratefully at the man. “Thanks for pointing this out – it's gorgeous.”
He beams, nodding. “Happy to have it go to someone who'll appreciate it. My kids have no interest in anything so old and dusty as these, and the grandkids are too young to do anything except use the black and white pictures as a coloring book.”
He chuckles, and I cringe in mock-horror as I laugh with him. “Oh, I can imagine! But I guess growing up in a world where every book is full of so much vivid color, a line drawing would seem like it just hadn't been finished. Even when I was little, I wasn't big on old illustrations. My mom would point them out, and I'd just be like, 'ew, those colors are boring.'”
“There weren't even cartoons in color when I was a kid, let alone whole channels of the boob tube just for toddlers.”
“Well, we can only hope they grow out of thinking Dora the Explorer has the best-looking clothes! Neon pink and orange, good lord...”
He laughs at this, and I grin. I give Mary a ton of credit for me realizing that I can be my own normal self around older people. It's so freeing, and just nice, to be able to have random conversations like this.
“Well, you just look around all you like, I'll be over in the garage minding the money box. Let me know if you have any questions about any of this stuff, anything on the tables on the driveway is mine I'm cleaning out.”
“Sure thing – thanks!”
I continue browsing awhile, and pick up a small old book of poetry with a particularly pretty cover, red linework art nouveau flowers on a tan-gold background. I poke through some old jewelry, and pick up a chunky wood bangle bracelet. Then I spot some almost gaudily-bold plastic bangles, some square, some with raised geometric patterns, and pick up a few to send to my sister. She's always been able to pull off bright colors better than me, and these are just kitschy enough to be in fashion.
Eventually, I make my way over to the garage, and set my findings down on the small card table with a metal cashbox sitting on it. (I wonder – is this something people actually go out and buy for this purpose? Every garage sale I've ever been to, they've had one, but I've never seen one in a store. Do these things just get passed around neighborhoods, one garage sale to the next?) The friendly old man breaks off his chat with another older man, and turns to smile at me. “Well! Thanks for taking some of this junk off my hands, young lady.”
“Oh, no problem! My sister will love these bracelets. The books, of course, are mine,” I say with a grin.
“She wouldn't try coloring in them, would she?”
I laugh. “No, she's not that much younger than me. But she'd probably just stare at them and wonder why there weren't any buttons to push to turn it on and read it to her.”
He chuckles at this, and finishes tabulating my purchases in one of two small notebooks on the table. I start digging my wallet out of my bag. “Well, that'll be eight dollars if you please, miss.”
I raise an eyebrow, and he nods, smiling. My little pile should have cost me twelve, the way things were marked. I smile back as I hand him the cash. “Thank you.”
“You just be sure to check out Rick's, and tell him Charlie Mack sent him a customer – someone who's a little more discerning about book quality than he is.” I chuckle, and he raises a hand to wave as I tuck my purchases into my bag. “You have yourself a good day, young lady.”
“Thanks again – you do the same! Hope your sale goes well for you.” Lame, but, it's the first nice thing that pops into my head, and I suppose the sincerity with which I say it will make up for the lameness.
I crank my headphones back up as I continue my walk into town, very, very happy with my purchases. I'm such a sucker for old books, especially ones with illustrations. I'm a little scared to go into the antique store, because I know I'll probably drop twenty bucks on a book of fairy tales – but, maybe I'll be able to resist, with the one I bought today already in my hands. Still, I'd like to at least take a look at what “the nicer books” are, if these were in the outcast pile!
But not today – I already have a mission to accomplish, and there's not a whole lot more room in my bag for extra purchases. Luckily, it's not much farther to town hall, I shouldn't run into any more distractions along the way. With it being this gray outside today, I'm surprised I bumped into even the one garage sale.
“Baby don't take too long, 'cause I feel just like let-ting go...” I do a double-take every time I listen to this song, there are samples of ambulance sirens in the middle, and they're so clear and my headphones are always so loud, I have to look around to make sure there's no flashing lights rushing up behind me. “Save... me...” Oh, but I forgot how much I love the closing instrumental! Normally I hate songs that make me think my cd is skipping or the file is corrupted, but somehow the jagged “skipping” guitar solo here actually works, and turns a simple line of a few notes into something really heart-rending.
And suddenly, I realize I've totally just walked past town hall. I stifle a laugh at my own absurdity, and turn off my iPod, pulling the headphones from my ears. Clearly, I should pay more attention to my surroundings. I climb the steps up to the old brick building, and double-check the hours posted on the front door. Oh good – they're here until five, and it's barely two now. I knock lightly at the door as I enter the little office I asked for directions at last time – and am happily surprised to see Susan there, manning the desk.
She looks up, and grins brightly. “Kimberly! So you've decided to come spend some time with us dusty old historians after all.”
“Speak for yourself, Susan!” calls a voice from a back corner of the room. A head pokes out from around a cabinet. “Some of us get up from out desks to shake off the dust once in awhile.”
“And so do I, Claire – I've taken a break from my desk to sit behind yours! But, Kimberly, you didn't come here to listen to our bickering. What can we do for you?”
“If you're interested in old books, you should take a look at Rick's Antiques, over on Main Street. I took him some of my better ones a few weeks ago.”
I look up to see an older man, probably in his sixties, with neatly-groomed perfectly white hair. He smiles amiably as he tells me this, and I smile back, pulling the second headphone from my ear.
“The nicer books, he offered to try selling for me, since he has customers that regularly check in for that sort of thing. The ones he didn't think he could sell, I have here.”
I grin, holding up the Nancy Drew book. “Well, he didn't take everything that would sell. And some of these have really pretty covers to them.”
He nods, reaching down to pick up one I hadn't looked at yet. “This one has really pretty pictures to it, though it's missing a few pages at the back.” He opens it up, and flips to an illustrated page – they're easy to find, being color prints on a thicker, glossier paper than the rest of the pages in the book.
“Oh! Those are lovely!” I extend a hand, and he hands it over to me. The book has to be almost a hundred years old, I recognize the style of the prints from a few other books I have. It's a pretty generic handful of fairy tales and probably other moral stories, but the drawings have such stunning detail to them, and the use of color is really masterful. Heck, even a drawing of Little Red Riding Hood is striking – the woods are a dark brown, almost but not quite black in the shadows, even the color of the grass muted to a dull sage, the whole scene feeling so ominous. The red of her cape, though, is bright as a cardinal against the snow. I flip to the back, to check out the missing pages – but none of the actual book text is missing, the last page is a listing of other books available from the publisher, so the missing pages could only have been more ads, or blank endpapers. I smile gratefully at the man. “Thanks for pointing this out – it's gorgeous.”
He beams, nodding. “Happy to have it go to someone who'll appreciate it. My kids have no interest in anything so old and dusty as these, and the grandkids are too young to do anything except use the black and white pictures as a coloring book.”
He chuckles, and I cringe in mock-horror as I laugh with him. “Oh, I can imagine! But I guess growing up in a world where every book is full of so much vivid color, a line drawing would seem like it just hadn't been finished. Even when I was little, I wasn't big on old illustrations. My mom would point them out, and I'd just be like, 'ew, those colors are boring.'”
“There weren't even cartoons in color when I was a kid, let alone whole channels of the boob tube just for toddlers.”
“Well, we can only hope they grow out of thinking Dora the Explorer has the best-looking clothes! Neon pink and orange, good lord...”
He laughs at this, and I grin. I give Mary a ton of credit for me realizing that I can be my own normal self around older people. It's so freeing, and just nice, to be able to have random conversations like this.
“Well, you just look around all you like, I'll be over in the garage minding the money box. Let me know if you have any questions about any of this stuff, anything on the tables on the driveway is mine I'm cleaning out.”
“Sure thing – thanks!”
I continue browsing awhile, and pick up a small old book of poetry with a particularly pretty cover, red linework art nouveau flowers on a tan-gold background. I poke through some old jewelry, and pick up a chunky wood bangle bracelet. Then I spot some almost gaudily-bold plastic bangles, some square, some with raised geometric patterns, and pick up a few to send to my sister. She's always been able to pull off bright colors better than me, and these are just kitschy enough to be in fashion.
Eventually, I make my way over to the garage, and set my findings down on the small card table with a metal cashbox sitting on it. (I wonder – is this something people actually go out and buy for this purpose? Every garage sale I've ever been to, they've had one, but I've never seen one in a store. Do these things just get passed around neighborhoods, one garage sale to the next?) The friendly old man breaks off his chat with another older man, and turns to smile at me. “Well! Thanks for taking some of this junk off my hands, young lady.”
“Oh, no problem! My sister will love these bracelets. The books, of course, are mine,” I say with a grin.
“She wouldn't try coloring in them, would she?”
I laugh. “No, she's not that much younger than me. But she'd probably just stare at them and wonder why there weren't any buttons to push to turn it on and read it to her.”
He chuckles at this, and finishes tabulating my purchases in one of two small notebooks on the table. I start digging my wallet out of my bag. “Well, that'll be eight dollars if you please, miss.”
I raise an eyebrow, and he nods, smiling. My little pile should have cost me twelve, the way things were marked. I smile back as I hand him the cash. “Thank you.”
“You just be sure to check out Rick's, and tell him Charlie Mack sent him a customer – someone who's a little more discerning about book quality than he is.” I chuckle, and he raises a hand to wave as I tuck my purchases into my bag. “You have yourself a good day, young lady.”
“Thanks again – you do the same! Hope your sale goes well for you.” Lame, but, it's the first nice thing that pops into my head, and I suppose the sincerity with which I say it will make up for the lameness.
I crank my headphones back up as I continue my walk into town, very, very happy with my purchases. I'm such a sucker for old books, especially ones with illustrations. I'm a little scared to go into the antique store, because I know I'll probably drop twenty bucks on a book of fairy tales – but, maybe I'll be able to resist, with the one I bought today already in my hands. Still, I'd like to at least take a look at what “the nicer books” are, if these were in the outcast pile!
But not today – I already have a mission to accomplish, and there's not a whole lot more room in my bag for extra purchases. Luckily, it's not much farther to town hall, I shouldn't run into any more distractions along the way. With it being this gray outside today, I'm surprised I bumped into even the one garage sale.
“Baby don't take too long, 'cause I feel just like let-ting go...” I do a double-take every time I listen to this song, there are samples of ambulance sirens in the middle, and they're so clear and my headphones are always so loud, I have to look around to make sure there's no flashing lights rushing up behind me. “Save... me...” Oh, but I forgot how much I love the closing instrumental! Normally I hate songs that make me think my cd is skipping or the file is corrupted, but somehow the jagged “skipping” guitar solo here actually works, and turns a simple line of a few notes into something really heart-rending.
And suddenly, I realize I've totally just walked past town hall. I stifle a laugh at my own absurdity, and turn off my iPod, pulling the headphones from my ears. Clearly, I should pay more attention to my surroundings. I climb the steps up to the old brick building, and double-check the hours posted on the front door. Oh good – they're here until five, and it's barely two now. I knock lightly at the door as I enter the little office I asked for directions at last time – and am happily surprised to see Susan there, manning the desk.
She looks up, and grins brightly. “Kimberly! So you've decided to come spend some time with us dusty old historians after all.”
“Speak for yourself, Susan!” calls a voice from a back corner of the room. A head pokes out from around a cabinet. “Some of us get up from out desks to shake off the dust once in awhile.”
“And so do I, Claire – I've taken a break from my desk to sit behind yours! But, Kimberly, you didn't come here to listen to our bickering. What can we do for you?”
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Part 16
For the next few days, my coworkers keep asking me what's on my mind, telling me I seem distracted. And I am, but, it's not something I can talk to them about. We're all comfortable enough around each other that normally, we'll chat about things going on in our lives, compare irritated notes about husbands or boyfriends, gripe about classes and family, laugh over ridiculous text messages from a friend's night out on the town. Occasionally, I've gotten into deeper discussions with a few of the girls – but nothing that would make me feel comfortable telling them about my trips into the past, where I hang out with members of the Mason family.
I have to wonder though... it's still focused on them, there's always some member of the family near when I travel back. But unlike my initial assumption, I guess I don't have to be on the property of the house to be pulled back there. Technically, I wasn't quite on their property when I had that first glimpse – I still have no idea who that boy is. I guess it could have been Avery when he was young? Or maybe Meres and Celestine had children I haven't found out about yet? It could even be a servant's kid, dressed up for some special event. But I saw him while I was still in the woods... and this time, I landed in what were woods, again outside the fence.
Outside the fence... but not necessarily outside their property! With Mr. Mason having been so hung up on his privacy, I'm sure he would have bought up the land around the house and gardens, just to keep anyone else from building on it. I bet I could check with Mr. Map Man in town, I'm sure he'll have the old property lines notated somewhere. His office was in town hall – maybe I'll swing by and see if he's in, when I head over there to take a look at the records office, and see what old photos they have stashed away.
Due to weird flukes in scheduling, I end up working six days straight, which is exhausting. When I get home each night, usually with some take-out Chinese food in hand, it's all I can do to drag myself over to my drawings, and work on them awhile. But once I start in... I don't end up quitting until I happen to look at a clock, and realize it's anywhere from one to four hours past the time I'd planned to go to bed. It's a very, very long streak of days at work, but the time I spend on the drawings, wrapped up in the world of a hundred years ago, the lives of the Masons, the meanings of the flowers Meres and Celestine planted and the details of the house they built.
Not every drawing I do exactly matches up to things I've seen, but somehow... I feel like it's alright to go with my instincts, about what color flower should go into that corner I didn't get a good look at, about whether its meaning would fit in with the rest in that particular area. That's another thing I've realized, while drawing – I feel like they must have had a list just like this one, and they planted things accordingly, because every little corner, every section, every little scene that could be seen from a bench, in every one of these, the meanings of the plants compliment each other so well. The meanings don't always build to something pleasant, but they always have something to say, adding another layer beyond the mere sensory beauty of the flowers themselves. I still don't feel like I know much at all about Meres and Celestine, but, taking a closer look at the place they built for themselves, the flowers they planted, I feel like I understand them at least a little bit. Not in any way that I could put into words, but on a more intuitive level.
I still wonder... how much older than Mr. A. E. Mason was his brother Meres? If the garden was in place at least a decade before the Mason family moved in... but then, say, Mr. Mason could have been near thirty when they moved in. Meres could have built the place when he was twenty, and that would still let him only be a couple of years the elder brother. There could easily be ten years between siblings, so I guess it all works out.
Sighing, I lean back – and then realize just how stiff I've gotten, leaning over another large drawing. I lean as far back as I can, then give in and just flop back completely on my back on the wooden floor of the living room, stretching out my poor arms and shoulders and back. I should really set an alarm or something, to force myself to stop every half hour or so to stretch, and look off into the distance, and get a drink of water. But when I'm in “the zone”, just totally lost in the world caught within the boundaries of the paper in front of me... there's no place or time that I'm happier with my life.
And, sitting back and surveying the world I've created in miniature, I'm pretty darn happy. There's... well, at least ten full-sized drawings in the set now, all nearly finished. It occurs to me suddenly that, if I get enough of them that I'm really happy with, these would make ideal subject matter for a show at a local gallery. The story of the Mason place seems familiar enough among the local legends, I'm sure a series of drawings set in the abandoned gardens would go over pretty well. I hadn't even thought about doing this before – it's not a bad idea. Now if I can just get over my aversion to plunging into new social situations, it'd be great.
But, again... in my determination to find out more about the Masons, I've put myself in all kinds of new situations. I've been to a historical society meeting, chatted with a librarian, the map man, hell, I've been to a psychic! (I've gotten over some of my fear of the reading she gave me - though I worry about whichever Mr. Mason it is that was so malevolent to her eyes, I know Evelyn's near to keep me safe, or at least give me warning if needed.)
Figures. I grow into normal social adulthood by chatting with ghosts in the ruins of a burned-down house.
The next morning, I oversleep, again. I guess morning would be the wrong word, it's definitely early afternoon by the time I'm conscious and showered and had breakfast. But no work today, so I can schedule my day however I'd like. I'm thinking a walk in to town, to nose around town hall a bit, and maybe treat myself to dinner someplace while I'm there. It's so hard to motivate myself to do any real cooking when it's only me that'll be eating it, and I've had way too much take-out and fast food this past week. There are a few little cafés and things in town, and I think my coworkers said the new vegetarian place is open now, maybe I'll check that out.
I grab my headphones, and make sure my sketchbook and camera are in my bag, along with my wallet. I check my bag for loose change in case I need to make copies somewhere – and there's not much, so I raid my piggy bank before heading out the door. (It really is a little pig-shaped bank – freebie gift from some bank my parents opened an account for me at when I was little. I re-painted it years ago, so whatever logo was originally on it is now covered in rainbow-colored flowers and other ridiculous vestiges of my tastes in middle school.)
It's not exactly the nicest day for a walk, overcast and damp, but at least it will be a good day for holing up indoors with old photos and books and things. I crank up a Kill Hannah album, and start on down the road. It's only about a fifteen or twenty minute walk from my apartment into the main part of town, that's only like five or six songs, not bad at all. Now that I think about it... the town's really grown up since the Masons moved away, from everything I read about the fire, their house was really pretty far out of the way. While the building the town hall's in is old enough to have been there at that time, I don't think it was always the town hall – whatever it was, it must have been on the outskirts. Then too, all the space in between the center of town and the Mason place would have been all old-growth forests, not filled with residential streets like it is now.
“You say the world is a place full of thunderous love for everyone, but I just can't see it. I just want you to know I think you're beautiful...” I grin to myself as I silently sing along. It's so emo-y, but I refuse to care, the music has that intense kind of yearning to it that I'm an absolute sucker for.
But as the song winds down, I lower the volume a bit, and pull one headphone out, letting it hang free. There's a yard sale a few houses up – I think I'll poke around a little, just to see if there's anything interesting. (I used to keep an eye out for records and things for Dad, but I've long since given that one up, it's just not possible for me to remember what he has and doesn't have.) It's an old enough town that I sometimes find really pretty old books at garage sales – which is awesome, because while I can also find them at the local antique shop, the garage sales charge like ten cents instead of twenty bucks. Much better for a just-out-of-college-sized budget.
I have to wonder though... it's still focused on them, there's always some member of the family near when I travel back. But unlike my initial assumption, I guess I don't have to be on the property of the house to be pulled back there. Technically, I wasn't quite on their property when I had that first glimpse – I still have no idea who that boy is. I guess it could have been Avery when he was young? Or maybe Meres and Celestine had children I haven't found out about yet? It could even be a servant's kid, dressed up for some special event. But I saw him while I was still in the woods... and this time, I landed in what were woods, again outside the fence.
Outside the fence... but not necessarily outside their property! With Mr. Mason having been so hung up on his privacy, I'm sure he would have bought up the land around the house and gardens, just to keep anyone else from building on it. I bet I could check with Mr. Map Man in town, I'm sure he'll have the old property lines notated somewhere. His office was in town hall – maybe I'll swing by and see if he's in, when I head over there to take a look at the records office, and see what old photos they have stashed away.
Due to weird flukes in scheduling, I end up working six days straight, which is exhausting. When I get home each night, usually with some take-out Chinese food in hand, it's all I can do to drag myself over to my drawings, and work on them awhile. But once I start in... I don't end up quitting until I happen to look at a clock, and realize it's anywhere from one to four hours past the time I'd planned to go to bed. It's a very, very long streak of days at work, but the time I spend on the drawings, wrapped up in the world of a hundred years ago, the lives of the Masons, the meanings of the flowers Meres and Celestine planted and the details of the house they built.
Not every drawing I do exactly matches up to things I've seen, but somehow... I feel like it's alright to go with my instincts, about what color flower should go into that corner I didn't get a good look at, about whether its meaning would fit in with the rest in that particular area. That's another thing I've realized, while drawing – I feel like they must have had a list just like this one, and they planted things accordingly, because every little corner, every section, every little scene that could be seen from a bench, in every one of these, the meanings of the plants compliment each other so well. The meanings don't always build to something pleasant, but they always have something to say, adding another layer beyond the mere sensory beauty of the flowers themselves. I still don't feel like I know much at all about Meres and Celestine, but, taking a closer look at the place they built for themselves, the flowers they planted, I feel like I understand them at least a little bit. Not in any way that I could put into words, but on a more intuitive level.
I still wonder... how much older than Mr. A. E. Mason was his brother Meres? If the garden was in place at least a decade before the Mason family moved in... but then, say, Mr. Mason could have been near thirty when they moved in. Meres could have built the place when he was twenty, and that would still let him only be a couple of years the elder brother. There could easily be ten years between siblings, so I guess it all works out.
Sighing, I lean back – and then realize just how stiff I've gotten, leaning over another large drawing. I lean as far back as I can, then give in and just flop back completely on my back on the wooden floor of the living room, stretching out my poor arms and shoulders and back. I should really set an alarm or something, to force myself to stop every half hour or so to stretch, and look off into the distance, and get a drink of water. But when I'm in “the zone”, just totally lost in the world caught within the boundaries of the paper in front of me... there's no place or time that I'm happier with my life.
And, sitting back and surveying the world I've created in miniature, I'm pretty darn happy. There's... well, at least ten full-sized drawings in the set now, all nearly finished. It occurs to me suddenly that, if I get enough of them that I'm really happy with, these would make ideal subject matter for a show at a local gallery. The story of the Mason place seems familiar enough among the local legends, I'm sure a series of drawings set in the abandoned gardens would go over pretty well. I hadn't even thought about doing this before – it's not a bad idea. Now if I can just get over my aversion to plunging into new social situations, it'd be great.
But, again... in my determination to find out more about the Masons, I've put myself in all kinds of new situations. I've been to a historical society meeting, chatted with a librarian, the map man, hell, I've been to a psychic! (I've gotten over some of my fear of the reading she gave me - though I worry about whichever Mr. Mason it is that was so malevolent to her eyes, I know Evelyn's near to keep me safe, or at least give me warning if needed.)
Figures. I grow into normal social adulthood by chatting with ghosts in the ruins of a burned-down house.
The next morning, I oversleep, again. I guess morning would be the wrong word, it's definitely early afternoon by the time I'm conscious and showered and had breakfast. But no work today, so I can schedule my day however I'd like. I'm thinking a walk in to town, to nose around town hall a bit, and maybe treat myself to dinner someplace while I'm there. It's so hard to motivate myself to do any real cooking when it's only me that'll be eating it, and I've had way too much take-out and fast food this past week. There are a few little cafés and things in town, and I think my coworkers said the new vegetarian place is open now, maybe I'll check that out.
I grab my headphones, and make sure my sketchbook and camera are in my bag, along with my wallet. I check my bag for loose change in case I need to make copies somewhere – and there's not much, so I raid my piggy bank before heading out the door. (It really is a little pig-shaped bank – freebie gift from some bank my parents opened an account for me at when I was little. I re-painted it years ago, so whatever logo was originally on it is now covered in rainbow-colored flowers and other ridiculous vestiges of my tastes in middle school.)
It's not exactly the nicest day for a walk, overcast and damp, but at least it will be a good day for holing up indoors with old photos and books and things. I crank up a Kill Hannah album, and start on down the road. It's only about a fifteen or twenty minute walk from my apartment into the main part of town, that's only like five or six songs, not bad at all. Now that I think about it... the town's really grown up since the Masons moved away, from everything I read about the fire, their house was really pretty far out of the way. While the building the town hall's in is old enough to have been there at that time, I don't think it was always the town hall – whatever it was, it must have been on the outskirts. Then too, all the space in between the center of town and the Mason place would have been all old-growth forests, not filled with residential streets like it is now.
“You say the world is a place full of thunderous love for everyone, but I just can't see it. I just want you to know I think you're beautiful...” I grin to myself as I silently sing along. It's so emo-y, but I refuse to care, the music has that intense kind of yearning to it that I'm an absolute sucker for.
But as the song winds down, I lower the volume a bit, and pull one headphone out, letting it hang free. There's a yard sale a few houses up – I think I'll poke around a little, just to see if there's anything interesting. (I used to keep an eye out for records and things for Dad, but I've long since given that one up, it's just not possible for me to remember what he has and doesn't have.) It's an old enough town that I sometimes find really pretty old books at garage sales – which is awesome, because while I can also find them at the local antique shop, the garage sales charge like ten cents instead of twenty bucks. Much better for a just-out-of-college-sized budget.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Part 15
The smoke is incredibly thick as we round the tower, the wind had been carrying it away from where we stood before. It's such a thick, heavy smoke, far darker and strongly scented than the smoke from a campfire (which is really the only kind of fire I've ever been around). Every now and then, I seem to catch the smell of paper, of wool, of cedar – but it disappears so quickly, I can't be sure I'm not imagining it. And the heat – it comes in waves, shifting with the location and strength of the flames, but when it hits, it's intense. I shift my course a little farther from the building, slowing a bit to better judge distances, not wanting to risk getting burned.
Evelyn... where's Evelyn? I peer ahead into the darkness, but my eyes are so dazed from the intensity of the flames, it's difficult to see anything outside the range of their glaring light. “Evelyn?” I call out softly at first, but then, deciding the rest of the family is far enough away not to hear me, I raise my voice louder. “Evelyn! Where are you?”
Nothing but silence for a moment, and I continue on, more slowly. I'm at the side of the house now, moving toward the back corner. The fire is spreading more slowly in this direction than it was across the front of the house, but the windows nearer the front have already been broken, and the eerie amber light glows from all but the last few rooms along this side. I hear a snapping twig behind me, and I jump, crying out.
“Kimberly... it can't be you?”
“Evelyn!” She's behind me somewhere, I turn my back to the house and stare into utter blackness. “I can't see you yet...”
She laughs as she suddenly emerges from the darkness in front of me, but the laugh is not the light one bubbling with joy that I'm so used to hearing from her. It's tinged with hysteria now, with relief and terror tumbling over each other as they try to escape from her lips. “Kimberly... oh, Kimberly, of all the times to be here! Why on earth are you here tonight?”
I return the embrace she wraps me in, and we cling tightly together for a moment. “Evelyn... I'm so glad you're alright. I don't know why I'm here, I never do. But what are you doing way over here, why aren't you with your brother, and your mother?”
She pulls back, and looks into my eyes seriously. “I saw someone. They were sneaking away from the tower. I don't know... I think it was a man, but I don't know if it was Father or not. But, Kimberly... there's no way he could have gotten out in time! The fire must have started there – and I saw the roof of it collapse, long before I saw the person.”
“Could he have jumped from a window before the roof caved in, and just been standing near the house, without you seeing him until later?”
She shakes her head slowly. “I don't... I don't know. I don't think so, I saw him there, and I was standing just over there, so if he'd walked to that spot from somewhere else, I would have seen.” Her brows furrow, and she puts a hand to her forehead, rubbing at it. “But it's so hard to see anything against the fire, I--- Oh!” She lifts her head suddenly, her wide eyes catching the orange of the flames behind me, making her eyes seem to flicker supernaturally. “But Avery, Avery saw him! That's what he was looking at so long, when he first came out of the house, I asked him about it. He told me he saw a person's shadow against the flames of the library windows. It could only have been Father. Mother said he locked himself in – as he often does – and Father's the only one who has the key to the study, which is the only way to get into the library.”
I nod slowly, biting my lip in thought. No other answer, then. Somehow... he survived the room burning and collapsing. “Was there anything he could have hidden in or anything, to protect himself?”
She shakes her head decidedly. “No. Everything in the room was made of wood, and there wasn't any furniture large enough that he would fit inside anyway. The only thing that wouldn't have burned right away was the fireplace, of course, but since a fire would have been burning in it already...”
“Right...”
She looks again over her shoulder, away from the house, toward the gardens. “He moved so quickly once I saw him, I'm not even certain which way he went. But why... why would he run off like that?”
I sigh heavily, shaking my head. “Any answer I can come up with is a really, really unpleasant one.”
She gives me a wry smile. “Well, then, it would certainly suit his nature.” But as her eyes are drawn back to the burning house, her face sobers again, and I can see tears welling in her eyes. “Oh, Kimberly... Kimberly, our lovely house! Our home - I don't remember living in any other place but this. What are we going to do with it gone? And with Father gone... If he disappears, the property will go to Mother I'm sure, but... Oh, Kimberly, I complained so much of the difficulties in my life before, but I'd never had any real hardship! How could I have been so ungrateful?”
My face grows stern at this, and I put my hands firmly on her shoulders. “Evelyn. You've had so much hardship – I don't even know a tenth of it, I'm sure, but even I know you've endured far more than any child should. Emotionally, psychologically, physically; your father has put all of you through absolute hell. And your mother hasn't been a whole lot of help, I don't think. Dear girl, if you and your brothers lived in my world, no-one would have allowed your parents to keep you, if that's how you were treated.”
She blinks back a few of the tears, and swallows hard, nodding cautiously. But her eyes are still on the burning ruins of her entire life – and I throw my arms around her, and let her cry in my arms, and I can't help but cry along with her. “...but you're right, this is a very different kind of hardship. You poor girl... I wish I could tell you everything will be all right.”
“...can't you? Don't you know if it does?”
I hesitate a moment. “I... don't actually know much, after this night. But I don't think you'll stay in town, I think your family will move, but without your father. That at least, I guess will be an improvement.”
She takes a long, shaky breath, and pulls back from my embrace. She wipes her eyes, and tries to get herself back under control. “You're right, of course, we'd be so much happier without him around. Though... for all that he mistreated us, he was still our father. Our lives won't feel the same without him around. And... he wasn't always terrible. He brought us the loveliest books, and gifts when he traveled. It wasn't often, but... he did at least think of us.”
I smile half-heartedly, and wrap an arm around her shoulders, guiding her toward the back of the house, which will be a shorter way to the path her family is on. She leans against my side, clearly worn out from everything that's happened tonight. “Anyway, young as he is, I'm sure Avery will be a good enough older brother to make up for the baby not having a father around.”
She stops in her tracks, and looks up at me, bewildered. “The baby? You mean Molly's baby? Why should---”
I stop too, suddenly remembering the exchange between Evelyn and Cora just a few minutes before. “That's right, Cora said... but, the newspapers I read – will read – say that she made it out of the house with her three children.”
Evelyn's eyes go very, very wide. I quickly amend what I've just said. “But they may have gotten it wrong – maybe they just assumed the baby was hers, without asking her about it.”
Evelyn shakes her head slowly, deep in thought. “No... no, I think they're right. I'm sure Mother will make up some story about Molly being unable to care for the child, and we'll adopt it, but... I think it is her baby.”
“Her baby... but..?” I know where she's going, but I don't want to be the first to say it.
“Her baby, but not entirely my sister. Only my half-sister.” Her voice drops softer as she continues, and we begin walking again. “Mother does not always account for her time away from the house very well. There has been more than one night where she claimed to have stayed with a friend in town, when I knew she could not have – I knew the friend was out of town, that sort of thing. She acts as though we are still children, cheerfully believing everything she says.” This last, she says with a note of bitterness in her voice. “She and Father rarely even speak any more – I don't think I've seen any sign of affection between them in years. They've always fought, but when I was younger, there were days he would be almost sweet to her – teasing and flirting, little kisses and compliments. And she just... she was like a flower bursting into full bloom, when he acknowledged her like that. But as the years went on, that became so rare, and the flower was replaced by more and more thorns.” Her eyes drift back to the house for a moment, and she shakes her head. “I don't know which of them is the more likely suspect for starting this tonight. The house was too full of memories for either of them to bear anymore, I think. Memories of pleasant times that could never return, memories of painful fights and anger... and the constant reminders that the house was built as a place for lovers, that my uncle built it for my aunt all from love of her. Father was always reminding Mother that his brother planned all the gardens – and every time he said that, she must have felt jealous, of that love that my aunt had that my mother could never have.”
I hadn't thought of that before, but as soon as Evelyn says it, I can feel how true a statement it is. Mr. Mason's reminders were more than just a jab to her pride – they were a wound to her heart, as well.
We're nearing the far side of the house now, and as we take the last few steps beyond its immediate vicinity, Evelyn slows to a stop. We turn back, to watch the flames tear away at the place that was once full of such beauty. The black stains of the smoke and fire seem fitting, somehow, as though they were showing what the house had been feeling for years – decay, and rot, and a sickness at heart. Evelyn leans heavily against me, and I squeeze her gently, leaning my head against hers.
“You can start things over, and make them happier for yourself. It was a beautiful place to live, but there was too much sadness at the root of everything. Let it be a fire of renewal – burning away the old, that the new might grow up in its place.”
“But I won't ever really forget this place, you know.”
I smile down into her hair. “No, I know you won't. Neither will I.”
We follow the path to the edge of their property. As I'd guessed, there's a carriage house that we pass along the way – I'll have to see if it's still standing in my own time, now that I know where it is. When we reach the... well, what passes for a main road, I can see her brother and mother not far ahead.
“I should let you go on alone from here – explaining me to your mother might be a bit of a challenge,” I say with a wry smile.
She forces a laugh, but it's short, and her voice is rough from the smoke, and crying, and lack of sleep. “I suppose. I do wish you could stay with me... but I know you never can.” Suddenly, she looks stricken. “Kimberly... if I move away from here, will I ever see you again?”
I blink, startled. I hadn't even thought about that. “Evelyn...”
“Oh!” She throws her arms tightly around me, and sobs into my shoulder. “To leave my home, and the one friend I've had in this place, in the same awful night... Kimber, it's not fair!”
“Oh, Evelyn... I don't know what to tell you, I... Evelyn, you're such a sweet, intelligent, beautiful girl, you'll make friends anywhere you go. I'm sure you won't live so far from other people anymore, you'll be surrounded by friends. And I... I've hardly been here at all for you, I wish... I wish I could have been more...”
She squeezes me tighter at this. “Even when I couldn't see you, I knew you were thinking of me. And that always helped. From the time I was such a little girl, just knowing there was a 'grown-up' that cared, that didn't get angry with me, was such a comfort.”
“Evelyn? Evelyn, don't dawdle so!” Cora's distant voice, calling from down the road.
Evelyn looks into my face for a long, long moment, as if memorizing me. “I won't ever forget your kindnesses, Kimberly. You won't forget me?”
I smile weakly, tears in my eyes as well – though I know I may yet see her again, it's always uncertain, so in a way, I'm saying my goodbye to her as well. “Evelyn, I won't ever forget you. I've been drawing pictures of you, you and your brothers, and the gardens, and---”
“The gardens! Kimberly, I never told you, the canterbury bells, I---”
I smile and hug her. “I know you planted them for me. Thank you... and they're still there, even in my time. I think of you every time I see them.”
She beams at this, and kisses my cheek. “I'm so glad. I---”
“Evelyn! Come along now, please?” Avery this time.
Evelyn gives me one last clinging embrace, and I hug her tightly. “Goodbye, Kimberly... you've been sister and mother to me, when I had neither. I'll always love you.”
“And I'll always love you, Evelyn. You'll always be in my heart.”
She holds my hands in hers as she begins to step away, looking into my eyes all the while. Finally, she squeezes my hands, then pulls hers away. Instantly, tears form again in her eyes, and she balls up one hand to rub at them as she turns away.
She runs up the road, after Avery and Cora and the baby whose name I still don't know. I watch her as long as I can, until things start to blur, and if it's tears or time-shifting that causes the first blurring, I can't tell.
Evelyn... where's Evelyn? I peer ahead into the darkness, but my eyes are so dazed from the intensity of the flames, it's difficult to see anything outside the range of their glaring light. “Evelyn?” I call out softly at first, but then, deciding the rest of the family is far enough away not to hear me, I raise my voice louder. “Evelyn! Where are you?”
Nothing but silence for a moment, and I continue on, more slowly. I'm at the side of the house now, moving toward the back corner. The fire is spreading more slowly in this direction than it was across the front of the house, but the windows nearer the front have already been broken, and the eerie amber light glows from all but the last few rooms along this side. I hear a snapping twig behind me, and I jump, crying out.
“Kimberly... it can't be you?”
“Evelyn!” She's behind me somewhere, I turn my back to the house and stare into utter blackness. “I can't see you yet...”
She laughs as she suddenly emerges from the darkness in front of me, but the laugh is not the light one bubbling with joy that I'm so used to hearing from her. It's tinged with hysteria now, with relief and terror tumbling over each other as they try to escape from her lips. “Kimberly... oh, Kimberly, of all the times to be here! Why on earth are you here tonight?”
I return the embrace she wraps me in, and we cling tightly together for a moment. “Evelyn... I'm so glad you're alright. I don't know why I'm here, I never do. But what are you doing way over here, why aren't you with your brother, and your mother?”
She pulls back, and looks into my eyes seriously. “I saw someone. They were sneaking away from the tower. I don't know... I think it was a man, but I don't know if it was Father or not. But, Kimberly... there's no way he could have gotten out in time! The fire must have started there – and I saw the roof of it collapse, long before I saw the person.”
“Could he have jumped from a window before the roof caved in, and just been standing near the house, without you seeing him until later?”
She shakes her head slowly. “I don't... I don't know. I don't think so, I saw him there, and I was standing just over there, so if he'd walked to that spot from somewhere else, I would have seen.” Her brows furrow, and she puts a hand to her forehead, rubbing at it. “But it's so hard to see anything against the fire, I--- Oh!” She lifts her head suddenly, her wide eyes catching the orange of the flames behind me, making her eyes seem to flicker supernaturally. “But Avery, Avery saw him! That's what he was looking at so long, when he first came out of the house, I asked him about it. He told me he saw a person's shadow against the flames of the library windows. It could only have been Father. Mother said he locked himself in – as he often does – and Father's the only one who has the key to the study, which is the only way to get into the library.”
I nod slowly, biting my lip in thought. No other answer, then. Somehow... he survived the room burning and collapsing. “Was there anything he could have hidden in or anything, to protect himself?”
She shakes her head decidedly. “No. Everything in the room was made of wood, and there wasn't any furniture large enough that he would fit inside anyway. The only thing that wouldn't have burned right away was the fireplace, of course, but since a fire would have been burning in it already...”
“Right...”
She looks again over her shoulder, away from the house, toward the gardens. “He moved so quickly once I saw him, I'm not even certain which way he went. But why... why would he run off like that?”
I sigh heavily, shaking my head. “Any answer I can come up with is a really, really unpleasant one.”
She gives me a wry smile. “Well, then, it would certainly suit his nature.” But as her eyes are drawn back to the burning house, her face sobers again, and I can see tears welling in her eyes. “Oh, Kimberly... Kimberly, our lovely house! Our home - I don't remember living in any other place but this. What are we going to do with it gone? And with Father gone... If he disappears, the property will go to Mother I'm sure, but... Oh, Kimberly, I complained so much of the difficulties in my life before, but I'd never had any real hardship! How could I have been so ungrateful?”
My face grows stern at this, and I put my hands firmly on her shoulders. “Evelyn. You've had so much hardship – I don't even know a tenth of it, I'm sure, but even I know you've endured far more than any child should. Emotionally, psychologically, physically; your father has put all of you through absolute hell. And your mother hasn't been a whole lot of help, I don't think. Dear girl, if you and your brothers lived in my world, no-one would have allowed your parents to keep you, if that's how you were treated.”
She blinks back a few of the tears, and swallows hard, nodding cautiously. But her eyes are still on the burning ruins of her entire life – and I throw my arms around her, and let her cry in my arms, and I can't help but cry along with her. “...but you're right, this is a very different kind of hardship. You poor girl... I wish I could tell you everything will be all right.”
“...can't you? Don't you know if it does?”
I hesitate a moment. “I... don't actually know much, after this night. But I don't think you'll stay in town, I think your family will move, but without your father. That at least, I guess will be an improvement.”
She takes a long, shaky breath, and pulls back from my embrace. She wipes her eyes, and tries to get herself back under control. “You're right, of course, we'd be so much happier without him around. Though... for all that he mistreated us, he was still our father. Our lives won't feel the same without him around. And... he wasn't always terrible. He brought us the loveliest books, and gifts when he traveled. It wasn't often, but... he did at least think of us.”
I smile half-heartedly, and wrap an arm around her shoulders, guiding her toward the back of the house, which will be a shorter way to the path her family is on. She leans against my side, clearly worn out from everything that's happened tonight. “Anyway, young as he is, I'm sure Avery will be a good enough older brother to make up for the baby not having a father around.”
She stops in her tracks, and looks up at me, bewildered. “The baby? You mean Molly's baby? Why should---”
I stop too, suddenly remembering the exchange between Evelyn and Cora just a few minutes before. “That's right, Cora said... but, the newspapers I read – will read – say that she made it out of the house with her three children.”
Evelyn's eyes go very, very wide. I quickly amend what I've just said. “But they may have gotten it wrong – maybe they just assumed the baby was hers, without asking her about it.”
Evelyn shakes her head slowly, deep in thought. “No... no, I think they're right. I'm sure Mother will make up some story about Molly being unable to care for the child, and we'll adopt it, but... I think it is her baby.”
“Her baby... but..?” I know where she's going, but I don't want to be the first to say it.
“Her baby, but not entirely my sister. Only my half-sister.” Her voice drops softer as she continues, and we begin walking again. “Mother does not always account for her time away from the house very well. There has been more than one night where she claimed to have stayed with a friend in town, when I knew she could not have – I knew the friend was out of town, that sort of thing. She acts as though we are still children, cheerfully believing everything she says.” This last, she says with a note of bitterness in her voice. “She and Father rarely even speak any more – I don't think I've seen any sign of affection between them in years. They've always fought, but when I was younger, there were days he would be almost sweet to her – teasing and flirting, little kisses and compliments. And she just... she was like a flower bursting into full bloom, when he acknowledged her like that. But as the years went on, that became so rare, and the flower was replaced by more and more thorns.” Her eyes drift back to the house for a moment, and she shakes her head. “I don't know which of them is the more likely suspect for starting this tonight. The house was too full of memories for either of them to bear anymore, I think. Memories of pleasant times that could never return, memories of painful fights and anger... and the constant reminders that the house was built as a place for lovers, that my uncle built it for my aunt all from love of her. Father was always reminding Mother that his brother planned all the gardens – and every time he said that, she must have felt jealous, of that love that my aunt had that my mother could never have.”
I hadn't thought of that before, but as soon as Evelyn says it, I can feel how true a statement it is. Mr. Mason's reminders were more than just a jab to her pride – they were a wound to her heart, as well.
We're nearing the far side of the house now, and as we take the last few steps beyond its immediate vicinity, Evelyn slows to a stop. We turn back, to watch the flames tear away at the place that was once full of such beauty. The black stains of the smoke and fire seem fitting, somehow, as though they were showing what the house had been feeling for years – decay, and rot, and a sickness at heart. Evelyn leans heavily against me, and I squeeze her gently, leaning my head against hers.
“You can start things over, and make them happier for yourself. It was a beautiful place to live, but there was too much sadness at the root of everything. Let it be a fire of renewal – burning away the old, that the new might grow up in its place.”
“But I won't ever really forget this place, you know.”
I smile down into her hair. “No, I know you won't. Neither will I.”
We follow the path to the edge of their property. As I'd guessed, there's a carriage house that we pass along the way – I'll have to see if it's still standing in my own time, now that I know where it is. When we reach the... well, what passes for a main road, I can see her brother and mother not far ahead.
“I should let you go on alone from here – explaining me to your mother might be a bit of a challenge,” I say with a wry smile.
She forces a laugh, but it's short, and her voice is rough from the smoke, and crying, and lack of sleep. “I suppose. I do wish you could stay with me... but I know you never can.” Suddenly, she looks stricken. “Kimberly... if I move away from here, will I ever see you again?”
I blink, startled. I hadn't even thought about that. “Evelyn...”
“Oh!” She throws her arms tightly around me, and sobs into my shoulder. “To leave my home, and the one friend I've had in this place, in the same awful night... Kimber, it's not fair!”
“Oh, Evelyn... I don't know what to tell you, I... Evelyn, you're such a sweet, intelligent, beautiful girl, you'll make friends anywhere you go. I'm sure you won't live so far from other people anymore, you'll be surrounded by friends. And I... I've hardly been here at all for you, I wish... I wish I could have been more...”
She squeezes me tighter at this. “Even when I couldn't see you, I knew you were thinking of me. And that always helped. From the time I was such a little girl, just knowing there was a 'grown-up' that cared, that didn't get angry with me, was such a comfort.”
“Evelyn? Evelyn, don't dawdle so!” Cora's distant voice, calling from down the road.
Evelyn looks into my face for a long, long moment, as if memorizing me. “I won't ever forget your kindnesses, Kimberly. You won't forget me?”
I smile weakly, tears in my eyes as well – though I know I may yet see her again, it's always uncertain, so in a way, I'm saying my goodbye to her as well. “Evelyn, I won't ever forget you. I've been drawing pictures of you, you and your brothers, and the gardens, and---”
“The gardens! Kimberly, I never told you, the canterbury bells, I---”
I smile and hug her. “I know you planted them for me. Thank you... and they're still there, even in my time. I think of you every time I see them.”
She beams at this, and kisses my cheek. “I'm so glad. I---”
“Evelyn! Come along now, please?” Avery this time.
Evelyn gives me one last clinging embrace, and I hug her tightly. “Goodbye, Kimberly... you've been sister and mother to me, when I had neither. I'll always love you.”
“And I'll always love you, Evelyn. You'll always be in my heart.”
She holds my hands in hers as she begins to step away, looking into my eyes all the while. Finally, she squeezes my hands, then pulls hers away. Instantly, tears form again in her eyes, and she balls up one hand to rub at them as she turns away.
She runs up the road, after Avery and Cora and the baby whose name I still don't know. I watch her as long as I can, until things start to blur, and if it's tears or time-shifting that causes the first blurring, I can't tell.
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