by James Short
“That’s not our purpose,” Philip said.
“But if it got out that we’re the descendants of this Tom and Penelope, people would come around asking questions,” Alice interjected frowning anxiously.
“It’s not our intention to put you out,” Philip tried to reassure. “We thought you might be interested.”
“We are, but it’s just that the story is not quite what we expected. To be honest, I’d need more proof before I’d believe, excuse me, such a stretcher.”
“I’m also skeptical,” said Alice. “Yet it does explain why granny never spoke much about her past.”
Doris seemed to be one of those people who couldn’t stand tension more than a minute before making efforts to resolve it. Speaking in a fluty tone, she broke the brief silence, “I do want to say one more thing about Granny Abigail. This, I’ll never forget. When she got older, she got a bit frail. She used to love to hug her grandchildren, all at the same time, but once we knocked her over when we crowded around her. So, after that, what we used to do was for three of us to run behind her and support her from the back so the rest of us could run to her and hug her without tipping her over.”
Doris then commented that the ring on April’s finger appeared new. When April confessed that they had been married seven days before, and Philip rather lamely added that his ring didn’t fit right, Doris offered them a room for the night.
When they refused, she added, “But it is a guesthouse. I understand a young couple needs their privacy. Besides you might find it interesting because that’s where I put my grandparents’ things. I sometimes think I should throw the stuff away. What is it worth, really? But I’ve never had the heart.”
Intrigued and tired and after much sideways glancing, they agreed.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” Philip whispered into April’s ear as they walked across the long lawn to a bungalow.
“What if there isn’t one?” She asked with some agitation.
Another awkward moment followed once they were inside. The bungalow consisted of a small living room, a larger bedroom, and a bathroom. Obviously, this was a nearly perfect opportunity to throw themselves into each other’s arms and madly make love. The window showed a flower garden partially shaded by pear and peach trees in bloom. Beyond was a hill covered with pines underneath a sky with a parade of clouds. Philip gazed at April and then glanced to either side as if considering an escape. April also avoided eye contact. Then a photo on the wall seemed to make her forget the awkwardness.
It showed a gentleman with glasses who could only have been Penelope’s father standing by a huge redwood. April walked up to the wall to study the other photos. Next to Herman Boller was a blurry photo of Tom Deering standing by a horse wearing a cowboy hat and chaps. She remembered the middle-aged man in the other photo. You might call him more proud than handsome. And then in the gold frame, she recognized the man she had imagined as Franklin.
Prouder if possible than Tom Deering, the force of his personality leaped the chasm of the century. April could almost believe he was speaking. So many barriers he had overcome in his life, a hundred years plus perhaps was no big deal. He had saved Penelope, and the photos of her children and dozens of grandchildren on the living room wall were the result of his effort.
April recalled a phrase Aquino had told her when she was shivering on the beach, and he was trying to explain the origins of Solvidado. She was too angry then to give it credence, however now it seemed almost prophetic in its implication: “Remembered history is merely the surface of the water, forgotten history is the ocean underneath,” he had said. She would endure another night with Aquino if that would enable her to go underneath the surface of the water again and glimpse a little more of Tom and Penny’s love.
The tiny bit of hope that had begun to germinate in Philip’s heart died when he realized she wasn’t interested in him. Without explanation, she suddenly left the guesthouse and returned two minutes later with Doris in tow.
“These photos must have come from your grandmother. If she was blind, why did she keep them?” April demanded.
“It’s true they are hers, although I don’t know how you figured that out.” Doris paused, appearing uncertain whether to explain further. “Well, it’s another story. Granny received a whole crate of them fifty years ago. When Uncle Franklin opened the crate, he mistakenly destroyed the address, much to Alice’s outrage. Anyway, I thought they were my grandfather’s, of course, until I saw her, Granny Abigail, touching them on the wall. She was old then and sort of forgetful. She was mumbling, and I thought was talking to herself. Then I saw her fingers running across the embossed plates, and I realized she was reading the names of the people in the pictures. She seemed to be talking to them. When Granny realized she was being observed, she stopped.
“I asked her about the photos, and she told me that she loved the idea of a photo, of others becoming familiar with the people who had given so much to her. When I asked granny how could we be familiar with people she never spoke about, she fell silent, then said, ‘Dear, to give you their stories just isn’t the right thing to do yet. Believe me, everything I have, everything I am, I owe to those whose faces you see in the photos.’
“I begged her, ‘Granny, tell me.’
“She thought a while, then said, ‘No, dear, there are still a few who may be harmed.’ She then promised to tell me later. Well, Granny never planned on dying, so later became too late.”
During this conversation, Philip was also drawn to a photo on the wall. There he was, Jacinto, too much like his ghostly companion for comfort. The only reasonable explanation Philip could conjure up was that he must have seen the photo before, and the image registered in his subconscious. Also, as if to tease him, just below an old photo of Solvidado which could have been taken from the window of their bridal suite, there was a framed ten dollar gold piece. Underneath was written, “What I earned the first day running my store.”
After Doris had left, April went up to Philip and took both of his hands and said, “I’m so sorry.”
“Can’t be helped,” he replied.
“To have put you through this. You see I stopped…” April didn’t know how to say the words. Philip appeared more handsome with the day’s growth of beard and tired eyes, like a man who had just returned from a long voyage or a war. Then she considered Ravela’s question: had she really and truly loved him? No, not as she understood the words “really” and “truly.” No, but she had loved him, at times. She had laughed with him, at times. She had felt protected by him, at times. Why, her heart had even skipped a beat or two when she heard his car drive up and then his hand knock on her door. More than once, she had gone into a panic over what to wear on a date with him, all the while knowing he couldn’t have cared less. But those were just isolated moments. After walking along the beach during at sunset with him, when the world seemed to conspire at perfection, she had felt drained. If she had really and truly loved him, that wouldn’t have been so, would it?
Yes, Ravela was right: she wasn't cut out for love. And Ravela, although pretending to be worldly wise, was truly ignorant. No human soul was.
Aquino! She suddenly heard his voice explaining how it really was. His voice and her own voice. He was telling her—she was telling herself—that wasn’t how love worked at all. What you do is you take a tiny event of love and another event separated by minutes or hours or days and forge the two links together. Sometimes the links forge easily, sometimes with difficulty. You continue to forge and attach the links, thousands of them, all the days of your lives together. You must not stop the task of forging. Years, forgetfulness, arguments, infidelities large and small are continually eroding and breaking the links. Walking hand and hand on a beach at sunset is merely a link. In the crazy way time and minds work, it may not be as consequential a link as a smile, a blown kiss or a shared tear. April was not certain she had found a link in Penelope’s life and followed it as Aquino had wanted, but it didn’t seem entir
ely impossible to her.
“Hold me, dear,” April said with desire and an effort of will.
Philip thought his heart would break when he took his bride into his arms.
“Until now, I just couldn’t imagine…” Again the words failed her.
They then did make love, more sweetly than passionately. Afterward, they talked and made love again and talked again, planning things, great and small. And as for the voice of the other persona who knew exactly what to say to puncture her hope, well, she had fled at the arrival of a rotund dark man dressed oddly and who spoke with a strange accent. April didn’t think he looked like a guardian angel, but she decided that that was what he had to be.
April Sees Through Time
There are secrets that can be told simply and plainly, and there are secrets which by their very nature can’t be revealed in full because the greater part of the secret lies in the realm outside the spoken word. Those secrets can take the form of daydreams—the obvious sorts are erotic fantasies and love fantasies, but along with those, there are also fantasies of the ego, where through a heroic or a particularly brilliant action, we prove ourselves meriting great admiration. There are also fantasies of pity, where misfortune makes us deserving of the intense feeling that sympathy can become. More rarely there are moments when we experience total empathy and step into another self.
For April, it was almost as if the barrier of individuality was merely a mist on the mirror, the other person being no more than a slightly distorted version of herself—she knew exactly what this other tasted, smelled, felt, and thought. This was what she couldn’t quite communicate to Philip. It would appear too much like madness.
April, however, vividly imagined Penelope and Franklin’s last conversation. Clearly, she heard their voices, yet Penelope’s voice seemed to come from inside her and Franklin’s from the outside. They were in a parlor of the mansion where an open coffin on a bier held the body of Madeleine Boller. April didn’t know how she could be certain of the place because she couldn’t see, but she was. April even sensed the presence of Penelope’s son, her son, hovering in the background, a young man in his late teens or early twenties, solicitous of his mother, yet impatient to get on with life. The truth was April’s imagination wasn’t accurate as to the actual words spoken; but how accurate is memory? Both the event and our memory of the event create the future.
“You mentioned the gold. Do you need money?” Franklin asked.
“No, I just want to make sure it was put to good use,” Penelope and April said.
“To my knowledge, it hasn’t been put to any use yet. I visited Jacinto. He’s married now. He told me he still has the gold, but he doesn’t feel like it belongs to him. He says as long as there are bodies to be buried and fish to fish, he doesn’t think he’ll need it.”
“Dear father—don’t protest when I call you father. Who else can I call by that precious name? Dear father, no one knows your voice better than I do. You can lie to the world, but you can’t to me. You’re hiding something. Where’s the gold?”
Franklin laughed. “You haven’t changed, have you? Once you get an idea lodged in your head not all the dynamite of the army corps of engineers can blow it out. I’ve told you the truth.”
“Not the whole truth. Forgive me; you once told me I really had no natural gifts except obstinacy.”
“I must have been angry. What I meant to say was obstinacy was the best gift to possess. You have many gifts. But it was singularly remarkable that as a child, you’d practice a thing thousands of times until you got it right. The damnedest case of perseverance I’ve ever encountered.”
“You’re going to keep the secret from me?” Penelope ended the question with a sigh.
“Yes, Jacinto and I made some plans. You’ll know in time. Now, tell me about your life before I tell you about mine. How’s Tom?”
“He has been ill lately. The doctor says he has problems with his heart. I told the doctor that such a heart that Tom has must be tired after so much giving.”
“Are you happy?”
“You visited once. You saw for yourself.”
“I saw that you still loved each other. Happiness is something else.”
“I didn’t believe it would be so hard! Perhaps happy isn’t the right word to describe our life. There’s so much more that comes in the course of time. I have been content beyond my dreams, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t days and days when I cried in frustration. Every morning I went down on my knees and thanked God first for you and Tom, then for my children. You know, Tom is a restless man. Settling down for him was hard, considering all he had been before. I don’t believe he wavered in his love for me. In twenty-five years, I’ve slept very few nights alone.” Penelope sought Franklin’s hands, found them and held them.
“To our neighbors, he was just a hardworking god-fearing man who had the misfortune of being saddled with a blind woman for a wife. He never gambled except once when we had a hard winter. He won enough to see us through. He swore to me he didn’t cheat. I believed him. Another time, a card sharp started cleaning out the savings of three or four farmers. Tom put an end to it and got the farmers most of their money back.
“Lately, Tom has begun to talk big—expanding the business, buying a lucrative piece of real estate. He excuses his dreams by saying I deserve more. The less a man feels, the more he depends on his dreams. Tom had always been a leader—the Mayor of the Flats. Is he happy? He was happy when he had health. We all have learned that to value loved ones more than our own life causes as much pain as happiness. He became a better man. He has no regrets, I believe.”
“And your children? You had two and were pregnant when I visited you.”
“Frank was four. Lety was two. And little Thomas, what a sweet devil! You can judge Frank for yourself. He’s eighteen. I’m so proud of all of them! It was beyond you to prepare me for children, even if I could have seen through walls and trees instead of seeing nothing. But I learned. People would visit me just to observe how I managed things. I knew the house better than the faces of my children. How could they know that since the age of twelve I was trained to cook, clean, and dress myself in the two rooms where they observed me? Of course, we had to add on when my babies came. Then we had to build a new house. For me, learning the house was like memorizing a book. Luckily, all my children are good children. I allow myself the pride of saying that they were well cared for.”
Suddenly, there was pounding on the door and shouts of angry men outside.
Franklin lowered his voice. “I was recognized in town. Some people apparently still believe that I took the treasure.”
“Are they going to hurt you?”
“They might. They might kill me. Men of my hue don’t fare well with mobs. My end is near anyway, however, I prefer to choose the way I leave this life.”
“Come live with me, be with me, talk to me.”
“As a servant?”
“Of course not!”
“That’s impossible now, Bright Penny. I’ve only loved four people in my life—my mother who gave me life, a ship’s captain who gave me freedom, an old Jewish gentleman who taught me how to gain a fortune but not value it overmuch, and you who taught me how to love as a father—the best gift but not possible without the other gifts. At this moment, I’m prepared to believe in God in order to thank him for being able to see you again. I’ve been comfortable the past several years. I’ve lived in a small house on the beach of a small island. A very dedicated housekeeper has seen to my wants, and I’ve had as much ease as these old bones allow. I’ve discovered a new species of beetle which I very vainly gave my name. That is enough. It’s time for me to die.”
“If you’re sick, I can nurse you! Please allow me to do for you…”
“No, no, no. I’m not sick, just tired. What I’m facing is all of my pleasures being plucked away one by one until the only reason to live is fear of death. It takes as much strength to let go as to hold on to life. I’ve b
een a guest here in this world who has dined well and has engaged in good conversation. The stormy weather outside may obliterate me, however like an appreciative and well-mannered guest, I won’t overstay my welcome.”
“You’re talking more foolishness than I ever did even when you found me!” Penelope squeezed his hands tightly.
“Don’t keep me. Let me leave of my own accord with dignity and courage, not be dragged to the grave by a thousand tiny hooks. What I gave you was the summation of myself, and you have taken that and passed it on. No man can ask for more.”
“When I was a little girl you were the only one who would hold me. Please do it now.”
The embrace only lasted for an instant, but it would be fairer to say she held him. A hundred fists now seemed to be pounding on the door.
“Thank you for spoiling my plan today. I wanted time alone with my memories, instead, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you again. My heart is full. Yes, I’ll die soon. I don’t expect a grave—the last human vanity. I will make a final voyage. I will start to see the world all over again. I can’t conceive of a better way to end a life well lived.”
“Yes, dear father, make your voyage, but not to die. Find another child who needs help like I needed help and send her to me. Do that! Promise to me that you’ll do that! Promise! Promise!”
Franklin said nothing as he kissed her hands. Then he let go and whispered, “Time for another disappearing act. Come. Remember how I use to sneak you out at night?”
“Fire!” yelled Jacinto when he saw the smoke billowing out of a window of the Boller mansion. He quickly separated himself from the men of Solvidado who had stopped trying to break down the door and were now gaping at the flames.
“Fire! Fire!” They all began to shout.
Jacinto ran to the well and began to lower a bucket. The men hurried to join him picking up anything that might hold water. The two families who lived along the road leading to the mansion—a small brigade from the ages of 3 to 35—arrived with more buckets and pitchers. Within fifteen minutes, a teamster brought another ten men in his wagon and within half an hour the whole town, about a hundred citizens, had made the climb up the hill to join the bucket brigade.