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“Grandma, has anyone ever told you that you’re crazy?”
“Yep, but I ain’t ended up in a rubber room yet, so I guess they can’t prove it.” She winked. “I like who I was.”
“I think you would have scared me, but I’d have loved every minute of it,” I nodded, not afraid to tell her the truth. She was my best friend.
“I think that was the issue Arthur’s mother had with me. Well, one of them.” She glanced down at the small collection of photos she held in her hand. “I haven’t looked at these myself in a very long time. I haven’t shown them to anyone since they were taken, either. These were my secrets. Now they’re our secrets.” She held up the first one. “This is Arthur.”
Gingerly, I took the photo from her hand and held it in my palm. It was a wallet size photo with trimmed edges and a black border. There were some minor scratches on its surface, but I could see the kind face of a young man clearly enough. His hair was parted on the right, and slight curls were smoothed over his forehead on the left. He was looking straight into the camera and he had so much life in his eyes. The photo was a pale sepia tone, but even I could tell he had the bluest eyes even without color. They were almost iridescent, even in sepia. The corners of his mouth were turned up in a slight smile; his nose was straight and perfect. He wore a wool suit with tiny, thin stripes down its length, a striped tie, and a stiff collared white shirt with plenty of starch. He was a handsome young man with features becoming of any young man of every era. I could see why my grandmother was instantly attracted to him in her youth.
“Oh, Grandma, he was so handsome,” I breathed.
“Wasn’t he just?” She gently picked up the photo from my hand, careful not to touch the printed surface. She replaced it with another. Grandma was unmistakable in photos. From the portrait with her sisters to sitting on the car she bought in 1940, I always knew it was her. The next photo she handed me was nothing short of shocking, but I had no doubt it was her still.
“I worked in a riveting factory during World War II, and this was my friend Martha Bolton.” She stopped as though that was the only explanation I needed at the moment. There she was, hanging completely out of the back seat of a car. Her feet jammed between the edge of the car and back seat, and her butt was sticking out as far toward the camera as her legs would allow. Inside the car, Martha held onto my grandmother’s arm so that she didn’t fall out of the car. Both women were in work uniform overalls and boots with their hair pinned up on their heads and tied back with scarves. Both were laughing hysterically, my grandmother reaching toward the camera, trying to snatch it from whoever was taking the photo. I had learned enough about my grandmother by then to not ask any more questions about this shot. What a wild woman, I thought to myself.
“Here’s a fun one,” she handed me the next photo. “Arthur and I did competitive ballroom dancing together. We weren’t professionals at it or anything, but we had a whole lot of fun and even won a few local contests.” The photo had my grandmother in a stunning ball gown from the 1930s, her hair in finger waves, a modest fur over her shoulders. Arthur was beside her with her arm woven through his. He was wearing a stunning tuxedo with a stately top hat and sporting a walking stick. The two looked like movie stars together. I imagined they would turn heads wherever they went.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I always loved this one. I’m sure you can understand why I never showed it to anyone,” she explained as she hesitated to hand me the next photo. Arthur was sitting on a park bench in a dark suit, smiling ear to ear in the photo. My grandmother was sitting beside him with her legs over his lap. He had one arm around her shoulders, his other hand on her knees, helping to keep her modesty intact. The two looked so in love that my heart melted. He gazed longingly into her eyes while she smiled back with all her heart on display. The more I looked at it, the more my heart broke that they didn’t get the happily ever after they wanted so badly. The photo, for a moment, made me believe in love again.
“Grandma, this is so beautiful. I love this photo. I wish you could put it out on display so you could see it once in a while.”
“It would break my heart into a million pieces every time I looked at it,” she admitted, sadness creeping over her face. “I loved him so much.”
“What did you love most about him, though?”
“Oh, what wasn’t there to love? He was kind and gentle and funny and sweet and everything in the world to me. He was everything I thought I’d never have. I told you my mama didn’t like me very much. Daddy died when I was so little. I never had grandparents. I didn’t know what it was to be loved. When Arthur came along, I saw it all as an adventure, and I figured that’s what love was - an adventure. But somewhere along the way, he taught me what it really did mean. He showed me what I’d never seen. I guess that’s what I loved most about him. His ability to show me what love actually was.”
“But what did he do to make you believe that he loved you?”
“I didn't just believe that he did. I knew that he did. Manda, I know you’ve had a pretty hard time, too, not really knowing what love was or what it means. You have me, and you know that I love you, but that’s different. You’re asking about a romantic kind of love, and that’s hard to explain until you’ve got it in your hands. He was it for me. Arthur was my one love. I know there’s a lot of people out there who say you can have more than one great love in our life, but I don’t believe that. I know that he was the one man for me, and I never did get over him. It’s been 70 years this year, and I’m still not over him.
“He used to do this thing where he would bring me a rose from his mother’s garden every time he would come to pick me up in the plane. But he knew it would fall apart if he just let it ride in the seat waiting for me, so he’d have to smash it in a book, so it wouldn’t fall apart, and then I’d have to dry it when I got it home so I could keep it. He promised me that when we got married someday, he’d give me a dozen roses every year on my birthday.”
“That’s where the story came from?” I was catching on to where she got her inspiration.
“Arthur is where all of my inspiration came from. Before he came along, I didn’t have a life worth living. I took care of my sisters, went to school, went home, and made food for the family. That’s it. I never went anywhere or did anything. Arthur brought me out of that and showed me that life existed outside of a dirt yard and an old outhouse. He used to say that the key to any relationship was patience and luck. He said I was patient, and he was lucky. It made me laugh, but he was right in a lot of ways. He was right where it counted, always. Only patience and luck that got your grandfather and me through our marriage sometimes.
“Arthur was funny and always so very smart. He once used an old broom handle to push down on the button to snap our photo.” She pulled up the next photo. “See here? You can see the broom handle sticking straight out toward the camera while he kissed me in the photo. I didn’t even remember my hand was on the back of his head. I haven’t seen this photo in probably 70 years. I didn’t even know what a ‘selfie’ was back then.
“He believed in me, too. He believed in me in a way nobody else ever did. Any time I said I wanted to do something, he was in my corner, fighting to make that happen. After that first night on the trapeze, he told me all the time that there was nothing I couldn’t do and that I was oozing with talent I didn’t even know I had. He’d hold me close and just let me cry when I needed to.. He didn’t try to fix anything or tell me to ‘buck up’ the way everyone else in my life did. The day he found out Willie had smacked my mom around and then turned on me, he was ready to hang Willie by his toes and beat him to a pulp. When I got sick, he wanted to take care of me. When I felt good, he wanted to have fun with me. We did everything together.”
“I know there are some parts of your relationship that you don’t want to talk about,” I prompted, “but do you think there will ever come a time that you’ll want to talk about all of it? Including the hard stuff?”
“Maybe,” she nodded thoughtfully, wiping a wisp of silver hair from her brow. “But if I ever do want to talk about it, I know I can talk to you. I don’t think anyone else would ever want to listen to the ramblings of an old woman.”
“I love your stories, Grandma.”
“I know you do, Sweetheart. Most everyone else doesn’t want to hear it, and they think I’m making things up.”
“How could anyone make up the crazy stories you lived through and have photos to prove it?” I held up the photo of my grandmother high in a tree wrestling with a huge black snake.
“Folks these days are living in too much of a hurry. They don’t want to look at old photos, either.”
“I’ll always want to share your memories with you,” I smiled at her.
“You do for now, but someday you’ll get busy and forget, too.” She looked at me sadly a moment before nodding her head defiantly and looking back at the photos spread across the bed.
“I’ll never be too busy for you, Grandma. You’re my best friend.” I threw one arm around her and began digging through the photos with her once more, asking her to tell me the stories behind the craziest ones I could find. Before long, the distant sadness was gone, and I had my grandmother back to her cheerful self. “Maybe you should think about writing another book,” I suggested after a moment, thinking about how well she had written her story of the hilltop of roses.
“Maybe I should at least think about it,” she pondered. “I still have that old typewriter.”