The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Probably woulda shot you through the heart.”

  Chapter 14

  “Oh my God, Maggie.” With delicate hands, my cousin Susan took the dragonfly brooch out of its red leather box and held it up to the light. The gems sent streamers of bright color across the room. “I had no idea this still existed. There’s a portrait of our great-grandmother on the wall at home. In it she’s wearing this brooch. Dad told me it was a very special anniversary gift. I can’t believe I’m holding it.”

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I said, feeling just a pang of regret seeing the brooch for probably the last time. “Mom always wore it on special occasions. I hope you enjoy it as much as she did.”

  “Me?” Susan seemed taken aback. “Thank you for showing it to me, but it’s your mother’s.”

  “Mom says it’s time for the next generation to wear it.”

  “But it should pass to you and Casey, not me.”

  I shook my head. The brooch had passed from mother to daughter in Mom’s family for three generations. But I was not part of Mom’s bloodline. As much as I cherished my memories of evenings when Mom dressed up, and last thing and with some ceremony, pinned the brooch to her dress, I felt that the jewel could not rightfully come to me. I was, however, keeping the black dress I wore on Friday night, and that was memory enough.

  I said, “The brooch should go to you and your daughter, Maddie.”

  “What does your mom say about that?”

  “I told her what I think, and she left the decision to me.”

  “Oh my.” Susan held the brooch against her shoulder and looked at it in the mirror over Mom’s dressing table before she put it back in its box. “I’ll have to think about that.”

  Standing beside her, I looked at Susan’s reflection in the mirror. She was still as pretty as I remembered her, blue-eyed, with dark blond hair, and tall like the women in Mom’s family. Indeed, she closely resembled Mom and my deceased older sister, Emily. Growing up, people often said I was Daddy’s girl, though I had no clue until last fall how literally true that was. My sister and brother and I all had Dad’s long nose, and looked enough like each other that if it ever occurred to me that I hadn’t inherited Mom’s height or her hair, it also never occurred to me that I might not be biologically connected to her. That revelation struck me the very first time I met Isabelle’s mother, Élodie Martin, and saw how closely I resemble her.

  “Susan,” I said, “the brooch is a Robnett family heirloom. It needs to remain within your family.”

  She met my eyes in the mirror. “Maggie, I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t absolutely shocked when I found out that Aunt Betsy isn’t your birth mother.”

  “You and me both,” I said, laughing a bit, surprised by her frankness. The topic was awkward for me, but I had brought it up.

  “No one in the family ever said one word to me about it,” she said. “You know why?”

  “Too scandalous for words?” I asked.

  “No, not that at all,” she said, turning to face me. “Truthfully, I think everyone just put it out of their minds, a non-issue, if you will. You were a fully enfranchised member of the family, and how that came about, well, so what?

  “Last fall, when Aunt Betsy called Dad and warned him that you had found out about your relationship to the Martin woman—”

  “Isabelle.”

  “Isabelle,” she repeated. “And because you are who you are, the whole story would be on TV. Dad summoned us for a family meeting so that he could tell us about you and her before it went public. He said that there are some secrets that are just too big to be kept forever. They always knew that the truth would come out someday. He said they had only hoped it wouldn’t happen before you were old enough to understand.”

  I laughed. “I’m not sure I’ll ever understand, and I’m even less sure that I want to. Maybe some secrets should just stay secrets.”

  “Maybe so.” She put an arm around me and bent her head close to mine. “Maggie, to my parents—to me—you are family. Period.”

  We went downstairs to drag Uncle Max out to dinner. He and ­Kevin had been holed up together in Dad’s den for a couple of hours, supposedly talking through Kevin’s legal issues, though I thought they had wandered far afield by now and it was time to extricate Max.

  On the stairs, Susan leaned toward me and spoke in a very soft voice. “The man with Max looks so familiar. I know I’ve seen him before. Who is he?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t take care of introductions earlier, but the poor guy’s in a bit of a legal pickle at the moment and I didn’t want to interrupt them,” I said. “You have seen him before, though. That’s Kevin, my high school boyfriend.”

  “Kevin? Oh my God,” she said, a little giggly. “Remember that Christmas my family flew out? I think we were maybe juniors in high school.”

  “I remember,” I said. “You were having a blizzard. When Mom told your dad that it was eighty degrees out here, your family was on the first available flight out of Cleveland.”

  “Your parents made you drag me along everywhere you went.”

  “They didn’t make me, Susan. I wanted to. We had fun, didn’t we?”

  “Poor Kevin, though. He was so cute.”

  “He still has his moments.”

  Max looked up when we appeared at the den door. “Ladies?”

  “Ladies are hungry,” I said.

  Kevin lumbered to his feet. “Sorry to hold you up.”

  We went through proper introductions. Kevin did his best to be gracious, but I could see the effort it took.

  “Anyone else need a drink?” Max asked. Sometime during the afternoon, he had decanted a bottle of red wine that he wanted Susan, a newly certificated sommelier, to try. He poured wine into wide-bowled goblets and I handed them around.

  As I gave a glass to Kevin, in the interest of moving us all closer to the front door, I asked, “Join us for dinner?”

  “Thanks, but I can’t.” He held up the wineglass. “This hits the spot, but I need to get home. I’d rather tell the kids myself about what’s going on than have them hear it on the street. Or worse, on Facebook.”

  “Chin up, my boy.” Max clinked his glass against Kevin’s. “I’ll make those calls and get back to you tomorrow.”

  Susan was looking closely at the marquetry table next to Dad’s reading chair. The table had a blue sticky, meaning it was staying.

  “This is pretty,” she said.

  “It’s something Dad dragged home.” And it was.

  Berkeley has a transient population of students. Many of them furnish their residences with cast-offs they find in family attics, garages, and barns. Who knows what treasures might lie buried under their piles of textbooks, laundry, bongs, hookahs, and dirty dishes for the length of their tenure at the university? When they break up housekeeping and move on to the next thing, students frequently dump their furniture on the curb, making it available for anyone to pick up before the trashmen haul it away.

  My dad and Dr. Nussbaum now and then would carry home pieces of furniture that caught their eye. That’s how Dad acquired his big early-twentieth-century desk and the round marquetry table that he put beside his reading chair. Not a skimpy end table, it was big enough and sturdy enough to accommodate a lamp, a decanter of scotch and a tray of glasses, a telephone, and maybe three stacks of books at a time. It was tall enough that everything on top was within Dad’s reach.

  Now the table held only a lamp, a telephone, the wine decanter, and a yellow legal pad covered with Max’s precisely made notes from his conversation with Kevin.

  Susan nodded with appreciation when I told her how Dad had acquired it.

  “He had a good eye; it looks like an exceptional piece,” she said. “Two of my friends who are coming tomorrow, Ann and Angie, are antiques dealers. They’re more interested in jewelry, but they’ll be able to give you a rough idea what its history is. You might change your mind about leaving it.”

  While we were
talking about furniture, Max saw Kevin out. When he came back into the den he poured himself more of the wine. Holding it up to the light, he said, “What do you think about that wine, Susan?”

  “It’s lovely,” she said. She twirled her glass and put her nose into the bowl. “Full-bodied, earthy, a hint of anise, I think.” She took a sip and seemed to chew it before she swallowed. “There’s a nice mineral cleanness. I get hints of pepper and black cherry with a bit of chocolate in the finish. What is it?”

  “It’s a Central Coast blend. The label calls it ‘Red Table Wine’ and I like it,” he said. “Heavy on zinfandel, I think.”

  “The instructor in our course had good things to say about the Central Coast red wines,” she said. “He told us he thinks that Napa Valley has become a sort of Disneyland for wine drinkers, overcrowded and overpriced. The real innovation is happening at small wineries down south.”

  Max and I agreed that Napa Valley is overcrowded with tourists, especially during the summer. We both preferred the Central Coast wine region, in no small part because it is easier for us to get there from LA. I told her about a favorite oceanfront boutique hotel in San Simeon, a short and beautiful drive over the Santa Lucias to some of the wineries her instructor recommended. Before we left for dinner, she had placed a conference call to the friends who were joining her in the morning, and received permission to cancel their hotel reservations in Calistoga and find new accommodations in San Simeon. That mission was accomplished with two more phone calls, and they were set to explore the wine country further south.

  “I have never heard of five women reaching consensus that easily,” Max said as he ushered us out the front door.

  “We’re from Minneapolis, remember,” she said, patting his shoulder as she passed him. “They were sold at ‘oceanfront.’”

  We walked down to a small Indian restaurant across the street from the drugstore where Dad had captured Isabelle on film. All through the meal, I kept looking out the window at the door she had stepped out of, almost expecting her to be there, waiting for us when we left the restaurant.

  Jean-Paul said that ghosts live only in the imaginations of the living. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

  “Worn out, Maggie?” Max asked when he noticed that I had dropped out of the conversation.

  “A bit, yes.” I folded my napkin under the edge of my plate. “It hit me today that once we hand the house keys over to the university, I won’t have a connection to this place anymore.”

  “You still have friends here,” he said.

  I thought about that for a moment before I said, “What I have here is a history. All in the past.”

  He caught the waiter’s eye and signaled for the check. “Susan, it’s time to take our girl home and tuck her in.”

  As we turned up our front walkway, George Loper came out onto his porch.

  “How long is that damn Dumpster going to sit there?” he wanted to know.

  “It’s scheduled for pick-up tomorrow,” I said.

  “Okay then. If it’s out there any longer, it’s going to start smelling.”

  “Good night, Mr. Loper,” I said, pulling out the house keys. There should have been nothing in the Dumpster that smelled worse than old rubber balls or well-worn tennis shoes, but I had to admit that, as I passed it, I caught a whiff of something that had acquired a certain gamey tang. Maybe a neighbor had contributed some household garbage to the mix inside.

  Later, with Max snoring in the room next door to mine and Susan safely tucked in bed in the room at the end of the hall, I slept the sleep of the dead.

  — —

  Monday morning, five trucks were scheduled to come and haul things to various destinations. The first of them arrived early, before we had finished our first cups of coffee. Uncle Max declared that he would be most helpful if he stayed out of the way. He took his telephone and his yellow legal pad to the backyard to make phone calls on Kevin’s behalf and I went out front to make sure that whoever was backing into the driveway did not go off the side into Dad’s beautiful flower borders.

  A staffer and a student assistant from the university library came to pick up the books the science librarian had selected from Dad’s collection. They loaded the boxes quickly and were hardly out of the driveway before the truck from the thrift store arrived. The pile of donations in the garage seemed huge, but the crew worked efficiently and had it loaded in a surprisingly short time; I could again see most of the garage floor. As the driver handed me a receipt for Mom’s tax records, I asked him to please come again on Tuesday for what I hoped would be one last load.

  With space in the garage now cleared away, after I swept the floor I would be able to bring out the things I was taking home so that the house cleaning crew scheduled for Tuesday could do their work unimpeded by extraneous clutter. We were still waiting for the piano movers to pick up Mom’s baby grand and the haulers who would ship Susan’s pieces to her home in Minneapolis. The refuse company promised to pick up the Dumpster and replace it with an empty as soon as a truck was available; as the day grew warmer, the gaminess coming from the Dumpster grew more pungent.

  Susan had looked closely at everything marked with a yellow sticky note, deciding what to keep and what to leave. She knew right away that an armoire in an upstairs bedroom and the long mahogany sideboard in the dining room that had come from the family farm in Ohio, furniture that was oversized for most contemporary houses, belonged in the nearly century-old house in South Minneapolis she and her husband Bob had restored. There were other pieces that she found interesting or were very old, but thought might not be worth the cost and hassle of shipping. With a felt marker, she put question marks on their sticky notes.

  I am not much of a decorator. My cousin is. She helped me shove aside the furniture I was taking home with me so that we could see what would be left for the tenants. There were a few pieces with blue sticky notes, designating that they were staying, that she thought I might want to think about keeping, Dad’s chair-side table among them. She put question marks on those notes as well.

  Father John called when I was in the kitchen getting us each a fresh cup of coffee.

  “McGumption,” he said, “My stalwart cook, Larry, is still MIA. I could use some help with lunch today. Sorry for the short notice, and I know you have things to do, but I was hoping you might be able to give me a hand.”

  “I would, Padre,” I said. “But there is just too much going on here this morning for me to leave. Why don’t you call Kevin Halloran? Tell him I said he should help you. It’ll do him good.”

  “Fine idea,” he said. “Fine idea.” He did not, and would never, say a word about why he thought so, but I knew. Kevin could certainly have used some of Father John’s wise counsel, or just a good listener, as long as the price to pay wasn’t a string of Hail Marys and Our Fathers; Kevin had fallen away from the church long before I had.

  With her friends due in from the Oakland Airport at any time, Susan and I retreated to the dining room. She helped me move a stack of boxes someone had set on top of the access hatch to the gravity heater under the house so that the inspector coming Tuesday could get at it. Then we sat on the floor in front of the sideboard she was taking and sorted out its contents. She was interested in the old linens. There were tablecloths, napkins, runners, and doilies variously embellished with crocheted edges, Madeira work, embroidery, ladder-stitched hems, hand-painted or silk-screened flowers and bucolic scenes. Some had come down through Mom’s family, some from Dad’s, and some my parents had acquired during their fifty-eight years together. Neither Susan nor I had any idea what came from where, and it didn’t really matter. As we went through them, taking turns making selections, we got caught up on family and each other.

  “I always loved Max,” she said, setting aside hand-crocheted antimacassars I didn’t remember ever seeing before—too fussy for Mom’s taste, and mine. “But he’s awfully young to be your uncle. Is there a story?”

  “A short o
ne,” I said. “When Dad was in college, his mother died. A year or two later, my grandfather married again, a younger woman, and they had Max. When Max was about ten, his parents died in an accident on an icy road. And Max came to live at our house.”

  “You and I weren’t around yet, were we?”

  “No. Mark and Emily were just toddlers, I think, and they were fourteen years older than me. Max was like their big brother, but he always made them call him Uncle. Me, too, when I finally showed up.”

  Susan folded a linen tablecloth and matching napkins into a box. “I was sorry Bob and I couldn’t come out for Emily’s funeral. I was abroad somewhere, working on a project.”

  “Your mom and dad came,” I said. “It was good to see them. But to tell you the truth, my parents were so numb that I doubt they noticed who was there and who wasn’t. They were burying their second child, and it’s just not supposed to happen that way for parents.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  Odd though, that before I thought about Mom and Dad at Emily’s funeral, an image of Bart Bartolini at his wife’s service flashed behind my eyes.

  My sister lay locked in a coma for several years before she decided to die. I think that all of us who loved her suffered through the worst shockwaves of grief at the beginning, when she was shot, so that by the time of her funeral, though we were all sad because the inevitable had at last occurred, there was more than a little relief that her ordeal, and ours, was at last over.

  It had been very different when Mark died in Vietnam. For weeks, maybe months, after the news of his death came, my parents moved through space and time as if they were deaf and blind tourists from another place floating among us in their own fragile bubble. They didn’t always hear me when I spoke to them, they answered questions I never asked. From moment to moment they forgot where they were and what they had been doing. Dinner burned on the stove. And Max slept on the floor in my room until the worst was over.