Don’t take it to heart, lass,” Shelley said as I resumed my chair in the kitchen.
I felt as if I’d just been taken on a roller coaster blindfolded. “Your mother’s not herself these days,” the cook continued.
“Seems her usual self to me. As inconsiderate and uncaring as always.”
As I brought my mug to my lips for a healing sip of tea, I watched Hannah slip through the door with my mother’s tray.
“Here, give me that.” Shelley took the mug from my hand. “It’ll be stone cold.” She dumped the contents into the sink and poured a steaming stream of tea into the mug, but she didn’t offer a wee dram. I’d never known her to top up her tea until after her day’s work was done. “Something’s worrying her. That much I can tell,” she added.
“Yeah. You’re right. I’ve noticed it too. Still, it’s no excuse to ignore the fact that this latest business with Father concerns me and Jean just as much as it does her.”
I placed my hands around the warm mug and slowly sucked in the hot liquid, feeling its soothing warmth spread through my body. A wee dram, however, would’ve made it that much more comforting.
“I remember how she handled herself, and you kids for that matter, when your father went missing. She was a rock. Didn’t break down once. Not that I saw. ’Course, she had your uncle to lean on.”
Shelley placed a ball of chilled pastry on a marble pastry board sprinkled liberally with flour and began flattening it out with a marble rolling pin. “Still, she was a brave woman and strong, ’specially when all them newspaper folk kept botherin’ her. Handled them like the lady she is. Nope, this time, she’s actin’ differently. Like she’s afraid. All the years I’ve been working for her, and I’ve never seen her like this.”
She flipped the paper-thin pastry into a greased pie plate with a finesse that only comes through a lifetime of pie making and began trimming the excess.
“Making another favourite of yours, rhubarb pie,” she said.
“Terrific. Here, let me help.” I got up and started chopping the rhubarb lying on the inset chopping block. “I’m sure Mother’s bad mood has to do with these pictures of Father’s plane crash.”
“Perhaps you’re right, lass. And speaking of pictures, I had a thought. Remember the Eskimo picture I told you about, the one your stepdad didn’t tell your mother about. I think I might know where it is.”
“But wouldn’t it have been thrown out long ago?”
“Maybe not. After our talk the other day, I got to thinking and remembered seeing a picture like that when Caroline and I packed up your stepdad’s things after he died.”
“Do you know what happened to his stuff?”
“Surely do. Akbar carried the cartons up to attic. As far as I know, they’re still there.” Shelley pricked the bottom of the pie shell and stuck it into the oven. Then, brushing me aside, she said, “I can continue with the rhubarb. You go on upstairs and have a look.”
After thanking her with a hug, I ran upstairs, but not before dropping by my mother’s room to make sure I had her agreement to search through her second husband’s belongings. I didn’t want her pouncing on me for going where I didn’t belong. But she was slumped in her chair sound asleep, an empty teacup on the table beside her and a half-eaten cookie on the saucer. I watched her for a few minutes and wondered if she was indeed troubled by the resurrection of Father’s death or could it be, as Shelley suggested, that she was afraid of something. But her porcelain-like face spoke only of a peaceful sleep.
I draped a pale mauve mohair throw over her and continued my journey to the attic. I’d have to deal with her anger when it came, but chances were, she’d never find out.
Like my attic at Three Deer Point, the Harris family attic was filled with the accumulations of generations of Harrises, in fact more so. The mansard roof provided more height to stack the many boxes and trunks, while the larger footprint of the house provided a greater storage area. Fortunately someone, maybe even Mother, had the wherewithal to label everything, so within a relatively short time, I discovered the boxes and trunks belonging to Harold Harris. They were right beside those marked Sutton, which seemed only fitting.
I sarcastically wondered why Mother hadn’t identified them as husband numbers one and two. But that was mean. Harold had been there at a time when she needed him. Jean and I had been more than a little upset when it became obvious to us that the relationship between the two was more than that of brother and sister-in-law. In fact, we’d felt Mother was betraying Father’s memory by marrying someone else, but as Jean always said, he had ultimately proved to be a good stepfather, and a good husband.
The air in the attic was musty and close, a sign that it had been some time since anyone had trodden on these dusty wooden floors. I opened one of the narrow windows and filled my lungs with the clean air. Since Shelley had used the word “carton”, I ignored the two trunks marked “Harold” and pulled the first of his four labelled cardboard boxes into the centre of the room.
It didn’t take me long to realize it was business-related correspondence and paraphernalia, so I shoved that box aside and pulled out the second. This was filled with books. I wondered why Mother hadn’t kept them in the library, but a quick skim through a couple of coffee table-sized books provided me with the reason; they were filled with glossy photos of naked women, some artistically done, others just plain pornography. There were even some literary works noted more for their taboo subjects than their artistic merits by such authors as Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, Henry Fielding and the like, all of which had garnered their share of infamy and censorship. And there were quite a few lesser, more blatant works by unknown authors with suggestive names such as Linda Lovelace or Vanilla Lips.
I laughed. Uncle Harold had been into erotica. Who would’ve thought? Certainly not his nieces. He’d always seemed the epitome of uptight respectability. But then again, weren’t people like that often the ones with something to hide? No wonder Mother had taken these books to the attic after he died. They would never fit with her own image of uptight respectability.
The third box showed more promise. I carefully sifted through a biscuit tin containing old postcards collected from his various travels, on the off chance the drawing might be amongst them, but no Inuit print slipped out from the faded images of far-flung places.
An artist’s pad of charcoal drawings immediately caught my eye, but a quick flip through its pages revealed no Inuit picture. Still, I was quite impressed with the detailed line drawings, many of which were candid images of my grandparents and my uncle as a child. There was even one of Great-grandpa Joe, who’d died many years before I came on the scene. Amazingly all were signed “Sutton” in the lower right hand corner. Flipping the front cover closed, I now noticed that he’d carefully written his name in calligraphic script with the date 1946, when he would’ve been in his teens.
While I’d known Father liked to draw, (in fact, I had one of his Echo Lake watercolours hanging in my bedroom at Three Deer Point), I’d never realized what a good artist he had been. Too bad he’d never formally taken it up, but then this artistic bent had probably led to his interest in collecting art. I put the drawing pad aside, intending to take it with me.
At last, in a collection of black and white photo portraits of various family members taken over the years, including one of me in Grade Six, I found the print. It had been inserted into a photo folder containing a family portrait of us from a year or two before Father died.
I took the print over to the window for better viewing and felt a satisfying thrill as I realized almost immediately that it had been drawn by Suula. The two Inuit figures, a man and a woman, were drawn in the same style as the man in Mother’s three prints. A couple of the sled dogs were almost exact replicas, and the syllabic chop in the left corner appeared to be the same, although I wouldn’t know for sure until I did a side-by-side comparison. Like the others, it was also a stonecut print, a conclusion I could make now that I knew what to look for. The two adults with the head of a baby peaking out from the hood of the woman’s coat were outlined in black ink, as were the dogs and the igloo behind them. Like the print of the flaming plane, colour had also been added to this drawing, but in a rather curious manner. Unlike the woman, who was drawn entirely in black, the man’s hair was orange. Hardly the colouring of an Inuk, I thought, but then perhaps Suula was toying with artistic license, or she was commenting on a European ancestor in the man’s past.
I slipped the print between the pages of my father’s pad of drawings and continued sifting through the box in case my uncle had intercepted other prints. I didn’t find any in the fourth box. So I carefully repacked all the boxes and stacked them back into place. As I struggled to lift the heavy carton of books onto another box, the carton slipped out of my hands and toppled to the floor with a thud.
Fearing my mother would send Hannah up to investigate, I hastily threw the scattered books back into the box and this time managed to place it on top of the other box. It was only after the last carton was back in its place that I noticed a folded piece of paper on the floor. Before I had a chance to inspect it, I heard footsteps climbing the attic stairs. I jammed the paper into my pocket and walked towards the opening door.
Hannah gingerly poked her head around the door and relaxed when she saw me. “Oh, it’s you, Miss Margaret. Your mother heard a noise. She thought it might be a raccoon. We’ve been having problems with them lately.”
“Sorry, I dropped a box. I was going through my father’s stuff and found some of his early drawings.” I showed her the firmly closed pad with his name boldly written on the front, careful to hold my hand over the jagged white edge of the Inuit print hiding inside. “They’re really good. I might frame some.”
“I was looking for you anyway.” Hannah eyed me suspiciously. I could tell she didn’t quite believe me. “You’ve had a couple of phone calls. The names are on the front hall table.”
“Good. I’m finished for now.” I walked towards her, hoping to block her view of the restacked cartons. I didn’t want her noticing which boxes I’d actually been searching through all afternoon.
Without giving her a chance to step inside the room, I closed the door tightly behind me and followed her down the steep attic stairs to the third floor. We parted on the second floor, with her heading towards my mother’s room, while I continued on downstairs to the front hall. There I discovered the two messages, one from Carter Davis and the other from Jid.