Time After Time (31 page)

Nope.

She turned away from her
image, blushing at the vanity of her dissatisfaction. This was
absurd. Until she moved here — until she met him — she had been
perfectly happy with how she looked and what she did. When Liz was
a teenager, her mother had summed her up very well: her legs were
straight, and she'd never robbed a bank. What more, Liz wondered
wryly, could any man ask for?

****

That afternoon Liz asked
her mother why she'd never been encouraged to go to
college.

Patricia Pinhel, happy in
her garden, filled the plastic sprinkling can for Susy, then
adjusted the hose flow to "gentle shower" and hung the nozzle over
a clump of thirsty pink gayfeather. "I don't know," she said,
thinking back. "I suppose because you were the girl. Girls get
married and have babies. Then what happens to all that schooling?
Down the drain. Whereas with your brothers, everyone realized
they'd have to be the breadwinners."

"As opposed to me, of
course."

Her mother shrugged her
shoulders. "Who knew? Besides, look how far you've come without
one. Speaking of which: how was your medieval picnic?"

"Not medieval, Mom.
Renaissance."

"Renaissance,
schmenaissance," said her mother. "Did everyone have a good time is
the important thing."

Liz took a pair of old
barber shears out of her mother's tool basket and began snipping
the tiny faded yellow stars in a mound of threadleaf coreopsis. "It
sure seemed like it," she said. "In fact, Francie — she was the
caterer — called me this morning to ask whether I can do the same
theme for a garden party at Windrise in September."

"Windrise! Is that the one
with the gargoyles? Around the corner from the Breakers? Oh,
Lizzie! Just what you wanted, then: to design parties for those
kind of people!"

"Yeah. Yippee," Liz said,
snipping away.

"Now
what's wrong? Didn't he pay you again?"

"Not at all. His
housekeeper brought over the check with a big fat bonus first thing
today. It's just that ... I don't know ... I thought it would be
more—" She snipped off an entire stem by accident.
"Fun."

"Fun! It's a
job,
Lizzie. It's not
supposed to be fun," said her mother. "Do you think your father had
fun being gardener to Mrs. Drake all those years? And her the type
who wasn't satisfied with anything or anyone a day in her life? But
he stuck it out, and he bit his tongue, and she ended up
remembering him a bit in her will, which is about the best he could
hope for.
He
didn't go into work every day expecting to have fun. And it
helped that he wasn't above walking the dog or doing a dump run
when Mrs. Drake needed it. My point being, it would never have done
for your father to put on airs."

After this sharp little
reprimand, Patricia Pinhel cast a baleful eye on the coreopsis and
said to her daughter, "Just the dead flowers, please; not the whole
plant."

Liz stared in surprise at
the pile of stalks that she was methodically stacking on the
grass.

Her mother added, "The
worst thing you can do, Lizzie, is make the mistake of thinking
you're a guest at one of your own affairs. That's like the chef
sitting down at the table when the meal gets served."

"Okay, okay, I get it
already," Liz said. She went back to deadheading, halfheartedly
now, as she mulled over her mother's dismally practical
advice.

Patricia Pinhel was a
master at lowering expectations. She hated being disappointed, and
she hated even more for those she loved to be disappointed, so she
solved the problem by simply lowering everyone's expectations.
Whether someone was hoping to get into college, qualify for a
mortgage, find a parking space on Thames Street, or be the fifth
caller in a radio contest, Patricia Pinhel's answer was always the
same:

"Don't get your hopes
up."

Her response had become
something of a family joke, amusing to just about everyone except
Liz, who at the moment was less enchanted than ever by it. She
gazed across her parents' jam-packed garden at her mother, short
and sturdy and patient, who was on her knees next to Susy, showing
her granddaughter how to thin her own tiny carrot crop in her own
little special square of dirt.

The woman is so warm
...
so loving,
Liz thought.
How can she be so
defeatist?

With a mother's instinct,
Patricia Pinhel looked up and, over her half-glasses, bestowed a
glowing smile on Liz that was anything but defeatist.

It ‘s because gardens
rarely disappoint,
Liz decided. Her mother
would say it was okay to get your hopes up with a garden: if you
were good at it, it was good right back to you. Where else would an
investment of love and time pay off so predictably? You couldn't
count on people that way.

You couldn't count on
Jack.

"Lizzie?" said her mother,
breaking through her reverie of stinging disappointment. "Don't
forget that lamp for Susy' s room. Get it now, before the attic
heats up much more."

"Oh, right," said Liz,
rising up off her knees. She stretched and looked around
admiringly, stalling a little before the trek into the superheated
attic.

Her parents' garden had
always been pretty, of course. But now that Liz and her two
brothers were grown and gone, most of the grass in the backyard and
all of the grass in the small front yard had been turned under to
make room for flowers and vegetables, berry-bushes for both people
and birds, a strawberry patch that was out of control, and half a
dozen miniature fruit trees that bore life-size apples and
cherries.

The result was a
five-thousand-square-foot riot of charm and surprises, with garlic
rubbing elbows with roses, and seven-foot tomato plants duking it
out with clambering vines of flowering sweet peas. Touches of humor
and tiny treasures were tucked everywhere, from the terra-cotta
saucer filled with century-old shards of crockery uncovered in all
the years of digging, to the tiny intact ceramic frog that Liz, no
older than Susy, had uncovered when they were putting in the
original perennial border.

It was all there, in
whimsical counterpoint to the rigid formality of Mrs. Drake's
estate. "Therapy for me," Liz's father liked to say. "I get so
damned sick and tired of carving conifers into spirals all
day."

Liz went into the house
through the kitchen door, hanging her straw hat on a big peg-rack
buried under three or four other hats, and passed through the
carpeted hall and up the stairs to the second-floor landing. The
house, a shingled Victorian, was a bigger version of Liz's own,
with three bedrooms instead of two upstairs, and a half bath
squeezed between the kitchen and the dining room downstairs: an
altogether typical Newport cottage.

The hall window, hung with
lace, was open to the afternoon breeze. Liz threw it up the rest of
the way, catching the scent of honeysuckle — now forever associated
with Jack Eastman's kisses — and then pulled down the attic
staircase, steeling herself for the ascent into hell.

It wasn't as bad as she'd
feared. The windows at both ends of the attic were open, allowing a
fresh cross-current of air to pass through. Still, it was hot
enough for Liz to want to retrieve the iron floor lamp and get out.
She found it tucked in a corner alongside her banished bed,
looking, like the bed, sad and embarrassed to be of so little use
to anyone anymore.

Pleased to be giving the
lamp a new lease on life, Liz wrestled it free from the surrounding
clutter and took a good look at it. It was smaller, less heavy than
she remembered from her own childhood; but the Very Special Switch
on the base—installed there by her father when he realized that Liz
couldn't reach the switch at the bulb—was what made her want the
lamp for her own daughter. When Susy was a little bigger, Liz would
be back for the bed as well.

She patted the headboard
affectionately, then began an awkward stagger back toward the
stairs with the lamp in one hand and the shade, with its
sepia-painted scenes of Paris, in the other. The electric cord —
which had instantly come unwrapped from the shaft — dragged behind
her. As cords always do, it found something to hook on: the treadle
of her grandmother's old Singer. With a little curse of annoyance,
Liz backtracked to the sewing machine to free the cord.

That was when she saw the
huddle of prints and paintings wedged between the Singer and an old
blond dresser.

And that was when she
suddenly remembered one particular painting among them, one she
hadn't thought about in twenty years or more.

She remembered it as
vividly as if she'd just finished painting it herself, remembered
everything about it, from the grand gold-leaf frame, chipped and
scratched from a lifetime of being moved from one dusty corner to
another, to the heavily applied brushstrokes, so surprisingly messy
to an untutored child's eye.

Liz put down the lamp and
began hastily shifting the stacked frames, wincing at the sound of
breaking glass on an old print of Niagara Falls, until she was able
to work loose from the others the ornate gold-leaf frame she
sought. She lifted it — filthy, dusty, never once hung — and held
it out in front of her.
Yes.
Without a doubt, a work of Christopher Eastman.
She knew the style. Even more: she knew the subject.

It was a portrait of a
woman reclining on a scroll-end daybed. There was a suggestion of a
sloped roof with a skylight to the left, and a stack of sticks —
framing material? — on the right. It might have been the artist's
studio. The subject's back was to the viewer, but her face, with
its pale complexion, was partly turned and visible. Her hair was
waist-length and flowing, a rich, deep red; it hung down her back
and over a paisley shawl, which seemed to be the only thing she was
wearing. The pose was mildly erotic: the woman's tall, slender body
was arranged to stunning advantage. It might have been a bit racy
for its time, but that time had long passed.

If her hair were moved
just a little to the left, I'd be able to see the dark-green ribbon
around her neck,
Liz thought. There was
absolutely no doubt in her mind that the painting was one of the
series that Christopher Eastman had done of the great love of his
life, the mysterious Ophelia.

So this was the woman
who'd so impressed Victoria St. Onge: the lover who'd scandalized
Newport society, the servant who'd been dismissed from East Gate,
and then — apparently — been forgotten by Christopher Eastman
himself. This was the woman who'd been usurped by the imperious
blue-eyed, blue-gowned Brunhilde. How utterly tragic that Liz
couldn't see more of her face! There was something quintessentially
Irish about the delicate profile; in an intriguing way it reminded
her of Victoria.

Liz blew away a
generation's worth of dust, then walked with the painting over to
the south window for better light. It was no use. The artist wanted
the viewer to see only a hint of Ophelia's beauty and no more.
Maddening!

And eerie. This latest
link in the chain that seemed to bind Liz to the fortunes of the
Eastman family did not surprise her; she had long since stopped
blaming the events on coincidence. As with everything else, there
was nothing serendipitous about this discovery. The cord had gotten
jammed in the treadle because the cord had a job to do: prod Liz
into remembering the exiled painting. Okay, Liz accepted that. But
that didn't make it any less ... eerie.

She wandered back from the
bright light of the window into the dusky shadows of the attic
center. It seemed to her that he was there, somewhere: the shade of
Christopher Eastman, pleased that she had stumbled onto this latest
piece of the jigsaw. Liz held her breath and stood absolutely
still, waiting for some manifestation of him: for the sound of the
chime, or — she desperately wished for it — an actual
reappearance.

But there was no sound,
and there was no sighting.

So why did she feel such
intense ... satisfaction, almost joy, holding the portrait in her
hands? Was the painting itself the manifestation? She peered at the
reclining woman, murky now in the attic's shadows. The tilt of her
head had a sauciness to it, the confidence of a woman loved and in
love. There was much intimacy in the portrait, and it had nothing
to do with Ophelia's state of dress.

The painting made
Christopher Eastman more real than either the chimes or the visions
had done so far.

Leaving the iron floor
lamp behind, Liz took the painting downstairs and out to the
garden. Her father had arrived, direct from the local nursery, with
a pair of tired-looking Korean lilacs, balled and burlapped and
ready to be squeezed God only knew where.

"Planting time!" cried
Susy to Liz from the inside of the wheelbarrow. It was part of the
ritual: a ride all around the garden paths before the latest
acquisitions were loaded into the well-worn barrow from the station
wagon.

While Susy urged her
grandpa to giddyap, Liz sidled up to her mother with the painting.
"Mom? You remember this?"