Time After Time (32 page)

Her mother looked
surprised. "Is
that
still around? I thought I got rid of it at a yard sale. I
suppose your father dragged it back upstairs. He's convinced that
an original oil painting — never mind that it's not signed — is
worth something."

"I remember he was going
to get it appraised sometime."

"Oh, sure," said her
mother with a snort. "Right after he glues the old dining-room
chairs together and just as soon as he rewires the toaster. Let's
face it, Lizzie," she added with a resigned shake of her head in
her husband's direction. "If it can't sprout, it doesn't stand a
chance."

"Where did we get this,
anyway? I remember it was considered too risque to actually hang on
a wall. As far as I can tell, it's never even had hardware attached
for hanging," Liz said, turning the frame over for
inspection.

Her mother frowned
thoughtfully and said, "It must have come with all the stuff after
your grandmother died. Your dad's aunt Mary might know more about
it. But I wouldn't get your hopes up. She had first pick over her
sister's things, after all; I suppose if this had any sentimental
value, she'd have kept it."

Liz held the painting at
arm's length. "I'll ask her," she said softly. "Can I have
it?"

"Take it. Just don't let
your father see it."

****

Later that day Liz dragged
Susy, kicking and screaming, for a visit to the child's
great-great-aunt Mary's house. Like all five-year-olds, Susy had an
aversion to spending sunny hours in dark ill-smelling rooms
surrounded by dying house plants. Nothing Liz said could convince
Susy that eight-legged bugs weren't going to drop in her hair from
the spider plants hanging overhead, and that reptiles weren't going
to slither out from under the neglected, forlorn leaves of the
snake plants alongside.

Besides, Mary
O'Neill-O'Reilly was hard of hearing. When Susy spoke in a normal
voice, her great-great-aunt Mary demanded that the child SPEAK UP,
CONFOUND IT! And when Susy got brave and shouted some pleasantry,
the elderly woman silenced her with a warning that little girls
should be seen and not heard. Poor Susy, batted this way and that
by the contradictory demands of good manners, generally ended up
staring at her shoelaces and heaving gently tragic sighs well-timed
to the lulls in the conversation.

Well, it couldn't be
helped. No one was around for babysitting duty, and Liz was beside
herself with curiosity about the painting of the red-haired woman
on the daybed. After an early supper with her parents, she bundled
her daughter and the painting into the minivan and drove three
blocks deeper into the Fifth Ward.

****

Mary O'Neill-O'Reilly had
married and survived two different Irishmen, and at the age of
eighty had begun dating a third: John O'Shaunessy. When Mr.
O'Shaunessy, who'd been a tenant in Aunt Mary's second-floor
apartment, got cold feet and backed down from the altar, the family
breathed a sigh of relief: they had no wish to add another hyphen
on their Christmas cards to Aunt Mary.

But Aunt Mary didn't see
it that way. She never was the same after Mr. O'Shaunessy broke off
the engagement and moved out. Some said Aunt Mary's heart was
broken (which was why she was so cranky and stopped having the
grass cut), while others said she was just bitter over the loss of
the higher social security payments Mr. O'Shaunessy would've left
behind (eventually). Either way, a visit to her was an
ordeal.

"Aunt Mary," Liz said in a
high, clear voice, "I was just over at my mom's house, and she told
me you might remember something about this painting."

She propped it on her
knees facing her great-aunt. The elderly woman's response was odd,
to say the least.

"Oh. Her. At least she's
covered up in that one."

Liz's heart began to beat
faster. "You know who this is?" Aunt Mary bobbed her white-haired
head toward Susy and said in shrill warning, "Little
pitchers!"

The child, who knew the
grown-up warning all too well, stood up and said, "I think I have
to go to the bathroom, don't I, Mommy."

"And make sure you wash
your hands! With soap!" said Aunt Mary. "And don't be throwing the
towel on the floor!"

Susy, wincing under the
weight of all the exclamation marks, went off dutifully, leaving
her mother the privacy she sought. On an impulse, Liz handed the
painting over to her reluctant great-aunt. The spare but feisty
woman took a pair of wire-rimmed glasses out of the pocket of her
smock, hooked them behind her ears, and peered at the work with
nearsighted hostility.

"Foolish, foolish woman,"
Aunty Mary said primly, shaking her head over the portrait that lay
in her lap. "She let her beauty go to her head."

"Who
is
she, Aunt Mary?"

"You don't know?" She
handed the painting back to Liz. "Then maybe I shouldn't tell
you."

"But that's why I'm here!"
said Liz impatiently. "To find out. My mother said you'd tell me
everything," she added in a shameless lie.

Aunt Mary frowned and
said, "It doesn't surprise me. What would your mother care? It's
not
her
side of
the family."

"Family! This woman is
family?"

Mary O'Neill-O'Reilly
sighed. Liz could see that she was resigning herself to holding the
closet door open so that Liz could peek at the skeleton
inside.

The old woman unhooked her
glasses from behind her ears and returned them to their pocket.
Then she folded one blue-veined hand over the other in her lap and
took a deep, purposeful breath.

She said crisply on the
exhale, "This is a painting of Filly Ryan. She got off the boat
from Ireland in 1867, got pregnant without benefit of the
sacrament, and — remember, you wanted to know — was alone and two
steps from the poorhouse when a Newport shoemaker took her in and,
we assume, married her. Well? Are you shocked?"

Liz was more confused than
shocked. "A shoemaker? But that must have been my great-great — or
great-great-great, I don't even know — grandfather. Anton Pinhel?
You're talking about Anton Pinhel?"

"How many shoemakers were
there in our family?" snapped Aunt Mary.

Reeling from the
information, Liz tapped the painting with her forefinger and said
in a daze, "Oh. I thought this was someone
completely
else. So this is — this
is a portrait of Phyllis Pinhel?"

"Phyllis? Who's
Phyllis?"

"Filly. Phyllis. That was
the shoemaker's wife's name, wasn't—?"

Later, when she thought
about it, it seemed impossible to Liz that she could've been so
dense. "Filly is for
Ophelia?"
she asked, her mouth agape. Without waiting for
the obvious answer, she added, "I always thought Filly was short
for Phyllis."

"This is what's wrong with
these latest generations," said Aunt Mary with a look of disgust.
"They don't care a tittle about the family history. They're too
lazy to find out and too bored to listen when they're told it. You
wait, young lady; when you're fifty, sixty,
then
you'll want to know about your
ancestors. And then it'll be too late. All the facts will be six
feet under."

"No, I do care — if only
you knew how much," Liz said softly. She was overwhelmed by the
revelation that Christopher Eastman had been the lover of her
great-great-grandmother.
"Ophelia.
I—"

"Hush," said Aunt Mary as
Susy tiptoed timidly back into their presence. "Yes. Ophelia Ryan,
she was. We
hope
she died Ophelia Pinhel. Well, good-bye."

Aunt Mary always ended her
interviews cleanly and quickly; it did not do to linger.
Nonetheless, on their way out the door with Susy, Liz ventured to
say, "You implied that there was another painting of Ophelia
...?"

"Dreadful. Shocking. I
don't know what happened to it. Burned, I expect."

And that was
that.

"Don't cry, Mommy," Susy
warned. "I'll bring you back a Mickey Mouse hat."

"You promise?" said Liz,
smiling at the bribe. "That would be great."

Her daughter's first real
trip without her: Liz tried to act casual about it, but it was a
milestone reached, and Liz — and her parents — knew it.

Her father, vigorous and
purposeful as always, shifted his carry-on bag from one shoulder to
the other and said, "C'mon c'mon c'mon. The overhead storage is
going to be filled up. Susy! Let's go! All aboard for Disney
World!"

Susy's face lit up as only
a child's can at the mention of the Magic Kingdom. She took her
grandfather's outstretched hand and, blowing one last kiss to Liz,
trotted through the boarding tunnel to the waiting
plane.

Liz waved and sighed and
then said to her mother one last time, "You can't afford this, Mom.
Let me at least—"

"Don't be dumb, Lizzie. We
took the other grandchildren at her age; why wouldn't we take
Susy?"

"Because I already owe you
a million dollars in babysitting fees!"

"Stop.
She's our only home-grown seedling. You know how special she
is to us."

It was true; everyone knew
that Susy was the favorite. Liz thought it was at least partly
because Patricia Pinhel had never quite forgiven her two sons for
taking jobs in other parts of New England. She'd never allowed
herself to get her hopes up that they'd stay local — but when the
boys did move on, she was twice as disappointed.

Mother and daughter shared
a quick hug, and then Liz was alone in cozy T. F. Green Airport, a
place as alien to her as the inside of a space shuttle. Almost the
only time she ever went to Green was to pick someone up or drop
someone off. Someday all that would change; someday she and Susy
would take quick little trips here and there and
everywhere.

But not today.

****

That night Liz felt alone
and depressed. Hearing Susy's voice on the phone (and learning that
earlier she'd burst into tears when it finally dawned on her that
Mommy wouldn't be on the plane) had proved little consolation. Liz
had to wonder why.

Her depression had
nothing, nothing,
nothing
to do with Jack Eastman, she insisted to herself.
The other night at East Gate he'd told her exactly what he thought.
That was his prerogative. Liz had then stomped out of his house.
That was her prerogative.

Yes, for a while
she
had
waited
breathlessly to see whether he'd phone, or come by, or — heck, he'd
done it before — climb over the fence. But she wasn't Julia
Roberts, and her life was not a movie.

Liz didn't even have the
luxury of convincing herself that Jack was out of town: she'd seen
him yesterday on the grounds of East Gate, hauling a broken limb
that had fallen not twenty feet from the chain link fence. In her
kitchen, making supper, she was close enough to see the muscles
bulging in his arms as he dragged away the heavy bough. But he
never looked in her direction, and it made Liz wish, suddenly, that
the chain link fence was a wall of bricks.

After that, she decided
that her mother was right after all:

it was dumb ever to get
your hopes up. Liz reminded herself, for the thousandth time, that
a hundred years ago Christopher Eastman had seduced and then
abandoned her great-great-grandmother. She asked herself, for the
thousandth time, why she wanted to see history repeat itself. But
it was no use: her hopes kept bubbling up, like oxygen from the
bottom of a deep, deep lake.

By ten o'clock, when Jack
didn't appear, Liz turned — for comfort? for answers? — to the
shoeboxes. Somewhere there had to be an explanation for the failed
love between Christopher and Ophelia. He loved her, and she loved
him: it should have been enough. Liz wanted desperately for it to
be enough.

She picked up one of the
miscellaneous boxes that were stuffed with scraps of undated
writing and began to read. Three hours later, she found what she
was looking for. An incomplete page, one that began with a recipe
for an herbal compress to relieve headache, was followed by a
critical piece of gossip:

And that younger brother
of whom you were so enamored? My temperamental artist, your mystery
man in black? My dear Mercy, you never will guess: he has come back
to the fold!

It came about in the most
unexpected way. His older brother was killed in a riding accident
not two days after the dinner party — the fête with the sand
buckets of which I wrote. It was a most devastating loss to the
parents. Much as I hate to do it, I am forced to give our young man
his due. He has put his infatuation aside, closed up his studio,
and assumed the family mantle of responsibility. Some say he shuts
himself up every evening to brood and to grieve. Others whisper
that an engagement to an heiress is imminent. All, seemingly,
overnight!