by Mary Simses
“Okay, Molly. We’ll let the fine go…again. Just promise me you’ll try to bring these back on time, all right?” A dozen books on bird-watching lay on the counter in a tall stack. The librarian put them in a shopping bag and the woman ambled off. Then he turned to me.
“And how can I help you?” He gave me a weary smile. “Do you have an overdue book fine you want to negotiate, too?”
“No,” I assured him. “I’m looking for some old issues of The Beacon Bugle.”
“How old?”
“Summer of 1950,” I said. “I’m not sure which month.”
The man’s black-rimmed glasses slid down his nose and he pushed them back up. “Oh, that old.”
I was afraid he was going to tell me they didn’t have them. “Do your archives go back that far?” I asked.
He hesitated and gave me a quick up-and-down glance. Then he said, “Yes, sure, but they’re upstairs. I’ll have to take you.” He opened a drawer and removed a ring of keys.
“Marge,” he called to a woman attempting to squeeze a manila folder into an already overstuffed drawer. “I’m going to the archives. Be back in a minute.”
He signaled for me to follow him, and we walked through rooms filled with books and a reading area with comfy-looking sofas and chairs. We walked up a flight of stairs bordered by a gleaming mahogany banister. On the second floor, he unlocked the door to a small room. Sunlight poured through a mullioned window and dust motes floated in the air like tiny dancers.
“All the old periodicals are here,” the librarian said, pointing to the wooden bookcases around the perimeter of the room. He ran his hand down the shelves, stopping at a series of large books bound in maroon cloth. Pulling out a volume that had the dates June 1, 1950–June 15, 1950 embossed on its spine, he placed the book on a table in the center of the room.
“I’d start here,” he said. “And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can move on to these.” He indicated the five other books that housed the remainder of the summer issues. “These are all original newspapers,” he said, his voice quiet now, as though just speaking of them gave him pause. “And they’re very fragile.”
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ll be careful.”
He stared at me for a moment and then, appearing to be satisfied, left the room.
I opened the first of the two June volumes and was startled at how yellow and brittle the paper was. I ran my hand up and down the first page, amazed at the smooth feel of it. I began to turn the pages slowly, carefully, worried that I might damage or destroy them. This was Beacon’s history I was staring at. I couldn’t believe I was looking at an issue of The Beacon Bugle printed more than sixty years ago.
As I pored over the papers from that summer, I didn’t expect there would be so many interesting things I’d want to read. I kept getting sidetracked. There was an article about the first kidney transplant, which took place in Chicago. The Korean War had just begun and President Truman ordered the air force and the navy into the conflict. The television show Your Hit Parade premiered on NBC and the movie Annie Get Your Gun was in theaters.
The ads and photos were amazing, too. There were pictures of women in tailored suits with cinched-waist jackets and pencil-slim skirts that fell well below the knee. Gray flannel suits seemed to be the big thing for men, and every man wore a hat. You could buy a house for eight thousand dollars and a car for seventeen hundred.
I finally found what I was looking for in the August 15, 1950, issue. The headline read, HIGH SCHOOL GIRL WINS TOWN ART CONTEST. There was a picture of Gran in a sweater, a long pleated skirt, and a pearl necklace. She stood next to an easel that held the painting. On the other side of the easel stood a man dressed in a suit and tie. He was holding a plaque. The picture looked as though it had been taken on Paget Street, right in the middle of town. I could see the seawall and ocean in the background, and part of the statue of the lady carrying the bucket of grapes.
Ruth Goddard, 18, of Beacon, smiles as she accepts the award for first place at the annual Beacon Festival of the Arts. Miss Goddard’s painting, Blueberry Café, won the prize for best in show. Miss Goddard, who has been awarded a full scholarship from the Art Institute of Chicago, will begin college there next month. Congratulations to our winner!
Art Institute of Chicago. I stared at the yellowed page. It was exactly what the man at Brewster’s Camera World told me. That Gran had gotten a scholarship. But it didn’t make sense. She talked about Stanford and she graduated from Stanford. She never said anything about the Art Institute of Chicago. Not a word. Still, there it was, right in front of me.
An uncomfortable feeling began to settle in my stomach, the feeling that there was much more to my grandmother than any of us knew. I read the article again and stared at the picture. Then I brought the book downstairs, put the page on the glass plate of the copy machine, and deposited my coins. The copier groaned and whined, and after a moment a piece of paper slid out and floated to the floor. I picked it up, gazed at the photo, and wondered, Who was this girl?
Chapter 11
Lila
By the time I finally left the library and headed north on the highway toward Kittuck, it was noon. I turned on some music, Sarah Vaughan singing “My Funny Valentine,” but it didn’t have its usual calming effect. It didn’t dispel the bewildered feeling I had about the Bugle article.
The highway was a ribbon cutting through the Maine forest. A blur of green pine trees whizzed by my windows, and by the time I put some old Oscar Peterson music on I’d passed the exit for Lewisboro and the camera store. True to the prediction of the man at Brewster’s, I made it from Lewisboro to Kittuck in an hour.
Just after two o’clock I walked into the Saint Agnes Care Center, a small, three-story brick building that would have been modern in 1990. The inside had an antiseptic, doctor’s-office smell, combined with something that reminded me of old blankets and mothballs. The receptionist gave me a visitor’s badge and instructed me to take the elevator to the third floor.
I stepped out in front of a nurses’ station, where two women in white uniforms were working behind a counter, one studying a blinking computer monitor; the other writing on an erasable whiteboard mounted to the wall. A large clock high above ticked away the time. The woman at the monitor turned and asked if I needed help. Her plastic badge said NOREEN.
“I’m here to see Lila Falk,” I said. “My name is Ellen Branford. I called yesterday.”
Noreen nodded and gestured for me to follow her. “Are you a friend?”
“She knew my grandmother,” I said. “When they were children.”
“Your timing is good,” she said, leading me down the hall. “Her daughter, Sugar, usually comes on Saturdays, but she called and said she’s coming tomorrow instead.”
Sounds from television shows drifted into the hall as we passed open doorways. Some of the residents sat in wheelchairs outside their rooms. A man with a few strands of white hair ambled toward us on a cane. Noreen turned to me. “Lila is almost eighty, you know.”
I did know. “Yes, my grandmother was eighty when she…” I paused and took a little breath. “She was eighty.”
We walked on, toward the end of the hall. “Lila also suffers from dementia,” Noreen said. “It’s pretty serious.”
Dementia. I hoped I hadn’t made the trip for nothing. After what the man in the camera store said, I had built up hope that Lila Falk would be able to tell me about Gran’s childhood.
“It’s up and down with her,” Noreen explained as we moved to let a man in a walker pass by. “Sometimes she’s fine. Other times, not so good. Doesn’t know who she is or where she is.” We stopped in front of an open doorway. “I just want you to be prepared.”
I nodded as Noreen knocked and we stepped into the room. The walls were pale blue, and I caught the faint smell of bleach. A tiny woman with hair like a puff of gray cotton sat in the first of two hospital-style beds. She was watching reruns of an old television s
how called The Match Game, in which contestants tried to match celebrities’ answers to fill-in-the-blank questions.
“Hi, Dorrie,” Noreen said, waving to the woman. Dorrie looked up, a smile spreading over her face like the gradual opening of a flower.
“Hello, Noreen,” she half whispered, and I caught the trace of an English accent.
We walked toward a petite woman seated in a large chair next to the other bed. Her blue eyes seemed to have captured light from the sky. She wore ivory pants that matched the color of her wavy hair and a blouse adorned with a pattern of small pink rosebuds. A pink crocheted blanket covered her lap and, on top of it, lay an open copy of Glamour magazine.
“Lila, you have a visitor,” Noreen said. Lila raised her head and looked at Noreen and then at me. “This is Miss Branford. She would like to talk to you about someone you know.”
Lila picked up the magazine and turned it around for a moment to view the pages upside down.
“Well, I’ll leave you two,” Noreen said.
I thanked her and pulled up a chair. “Miss Falk,” I said. “I know we’ve never met but I believe you knew my grandmother, Ruth Goddard.” I pronounced the name slowly. “You two grew up together in Beacon.”
“Beacon,” she said, not looking up from the magazine. “Who is Beacon?”
“Beacon, the town.” I said. “Where you grew up. Here in Maine.”
Lila rearranged the blanket on her lap, moving it around carefully, as though she were following some master plan.
“Do you remember Ruth?” I asked. “You were close friends when you were young.”
Lila looked back at her magazine and began turning the pages.
“You two must have gone to school together,” I added. “She went to the Littleton School.” I thought about the gnarled tree on the lawn. “I drove by there a few days ago, and do you know what?”
I waited for a response, but Lila just tugged at the bottom of her sleeve, which someone had folded back into a cuff. She pulled at the rosebud fabric.
“The school is still there,” I said. “A redbrick building. Do you remember it?”
Lila kept tugging, as if she were trying to unfold the sleeve.
“Here, let me help you.” I began to straighten out the fabric. She studied my hands as I unraveled the material. “This just needs to be undone…like that.”
Lila looked at me, her blue eyes a spark in an otherwise placid face. “Ruth?”
Ruth? I smiled. “No, I’m not Ruth, Miss Falk. I’m her granddaughter Ellen.”
She cocked her head. Then she reached over and touched the clasp on the front of my grandmother’s pearl necklace, running her finger over the silver shell. “It’s good to see you, Ruth.” She let out a sigh and gave me a little smile.
I started to correct her again, and then I stopped. Her frail hand hovered above the clasp. “It’s good to see you, too,” I said.
She stared at me with her piercing blue eyes. “Littleton?” The hairline cracks in her face angled away in every direction.
I pulled my chair a little closer. “Yes, Littleton Grammar School.”
She looked down at the magazine, pointing to an ad for a perfume called Seven Secrets. It had a scratch-and-sniff card, which she pulled out and proceeded to scuff with her fingernail. She pushed the card in front of my nose.
“Smell that, Ruth.” She waved the card.
I took a little sniff, expecting something potent, but the card smelled like gardenias, and I thought about the sunroom my grandmother had in San Francisco, with its gardenias in big clay pots, their white petals bursting like snow against deep green leaves.
“It’s lovely.”
Lila tilted her head and stared at me. “Your hair looks different.”
“Excuse me?” I touched the ends of my hair.
She shrugged and smiled. “Pretty,” she said. “But then, you were always pretty.” She laid the gardenia card against her face, as if it were something she wanted to hold tenderly. “Do you remember the man in the flower shop…who used to give us flowers?”
I looked at Lila, the scented card pressed against her cheek, her eyes focused on something over my shoulder, beyond me. “Yes,” I said.
She placed the card in my hand. “Daisies and carnations.” She sighed. “But sometimes he gave us gardenias.”
I glanced down at the fragile skin on her gnarled fingers, the faint blue of the veins running underneath. “And we’d put them in vases,” I said.
“Oh, I’d put mine in a vase,” Lila said. She looked toward the window, as though she might find a gardenia bush growing out there. Then she turned to me. “You’d paint yours.”
It was as if she had opened a window into a long-darkened room. You’d paint yours. Of course there were more paintings. Just as I thought. I wanted to ask Lila a million questions—about the paintings, about her friendship with Gran, and about Chet Cummings. I wanted to let loose the bits of information I knew were dancing in her mind. But I sat patiently, one hand gripping the other, waiting for her to go on.
“What did you like best about the paintings?” I said.
“You could almost…” She closed her eyes and lifted her hand in the air. “You could almost touch them.” She stroked the fabric of her blouse, and I wondered what she was seeing, what images of my grandmother she recalled.
Lila looked away, and I watched her fingers as they began to work the corner of the magazine cover, folding the edge down, then smoothing it back up, down and up, down and up.
Finally, with a little tremble in her voice, she said, “It was awful for him, you know…when you left.”
I waited a moment, and when she didn’t go on, I asked, “Awful for whom?”
“Chet,” she said in a half whisper.
“Yes,” I said. “Chet.”
“He didn’t understand, you know…how you could change your mind.” She pulled the blanket to her neck and wrapped her arms around it. “And so fast. Love him and then…well, then there was Henry.”
The sound of my grandfather’s name startled me, and I tried to picture him as part of this love triangle so long ago. Lila’s roommate stirred in the chair and mumbled in her sleep.
“Chet thought you’d come back, but I knew you wouldn’t. When he got the news…when he found out…” She sighed.
“The news,” I said, trying to nudge her forward.
“That you were engaged. He couldn’t believe it, Ruthie. Best you didn’t see him then. The poor boy was miserable. He had to leave.” She looked down at the blanket.
He had to leave what? I wondered.
She held up her hands. “And then everything fell apart.”
“You mean Chet and me?’”
“No, I mean—”
A high-pitched howl of laughter came from the woman in the other bed, and Lila and I turned to look at her. She had woken up and was watching the television again.
Lila sat up, the blanket slipping back into her lap. Her eyes, deep like glacier ice, studied me.
“You need to go see Sugar, Ruthie. She has some of your things. I just didn’t have room…you understand, don’t you?” She closed her eyes, as though she were glimpsing the objects. “Some photographs, I think. Some letters.”
Photographs and letters. I felt a surge of excitement. “Sugar? You mean your daughter?”
Lila yawned and gave a little nod.
Of course I’d see her. If she had anything to tell me or give me of Gran’s, I’d be overjoyed to see her. “Yes, I’d love to do that,” I said.
Lila sighed and looked at her hands, as though they might have belonged to someone else. An announcement came over a loudspeaker: “Dr. Martin to reception. Dr. Martin to reception.”
Her eyelids began to droop. “A doctor is staying here in the hotel? How convenient.”
She yawned again, and her eyelids fluttered, like hummingbirds’ wings.
“Lila?” I nudged her arm.
Her eyes closed, her head dropped to
her chest, and she was asleep.
The late afternoon sun draped the highway in a molten orange glow as I headed back to the inn. A million pine trees later, I pulled into the parking lot. It was almost six when I stepped into the foyer. The smell of sautéed onions greeted me and reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
I didn’t see Paula at the front desk. A plump young woman, with short curly hair in a shade of red not found in nature, sat behind the counter.
“Hello. May I help you?” She smiled and spoke in a slow, rolling voice.
“I’m Ellen Branford. I’m a guest here,” I said. “In room eight or ten or whatever it is. The Ocean View Suite.” I pointed toward the stairs, my arm feeling heavy. “Third floor, first room on the right.”
The woman wore a little black pin on which the name TOTTY was printed in white letters. “Okay, dear,” she said. “Nice to meet you.” Totty’s voice went up at the end of each phrase, as though she were forever asking questions. Nice to meet you?
“Is Paula off tonight?” I asked, digging around in my purse for the room key.
“Yes, she is.” Totty smiled, exhibiting dimples in her cheeks that gave her face a childish quality. I thanked her and headed toward the stairs, past the lounge and dining room. Almost all the tables were occupied, and a waiter was serving soup and salad to a couple seated near the door. I waved and he came over.
“Is it possible to order something and have it delivered to my room?”
“Sí, sí, of course,” he told me, his words coated in a heavy Italian accent. “You choose, we deliver. I get you a menu.”
He returned a moment later with a menu, which I scanned.
“I think I’ll try the Victory salad,” I said, pointing to the first salad on the list. SPRING GREENS, CRANBERRIES, WALNUTS, AND GOAT CHEESE TOPPED WITH RASPBERRY VINAIGRETTE.
He nodded and scribbled on a pad.
“And the roast chicken,” I added, pointing to the first entrée listed. HALF OF A SUCCULENT FREE-RANGE CHICKEN, ROASTED IN BUTTER AND FRESH HERBS, WITH MASHED POTATOES AND GARDEN-FRESH CARROTS. I had never eaten half a chicken in my life, but I was willing to try.