“Let me understand this. In all the hours that we’ve spent discussing my storied love life, you never thought to mention your dalliance with the famous artist?”
Jorie’s disgust showed clearly on her face.
“In my defense, he wasn’t famous when I knew him. And, until yesterday, I wasn’t even aware that he was famous now.”
On the word “famous” the waitress glanced down at her momentarily as she deposited their porcelain cups on the small, round marble-topped table. They were sitting by the back window in the small French café on Thackeray Street in Kensington. The air inside smelled like strong coffee and warm butter.
“Merci,” Jorie said, dismissing the waitress with a little wave.
Jorie spoke French to anyone who was not immediately identifiable as English. As it turned out, this was a great many people, including anyone who had not yet spoken to her.
Kat had acquired Jorie at a party during her first year in London. At the time, Jorie had been married to one of Jonathan’s clients. Jorie had approached her early in the evening, confiding that she had forgotten how dishy her husband was. She had then asked Kat what besides his good looks she found appealing about Jonathan, wondering aloud what was behind his “robot-like exterior.” After a few glasses of champagne, they had ended up talking in the kitchen until long after most of the guests, and indeed the caterers, had gone. Jorie perched on the edge of a countertop, whippet thin, her delicate legs like two matchsticks tipped in Louboutin red. When they parted, Jorie had told her that although she liked her, she simply didn’t have women friends, as she found little use for them and disliked the competition.
On the cab ride home, Jonathan had inquired about their conversation, expressing surprise that they had found so much to talk about and suggesting, half teasingly, that Jorie was a bad influence. She had asked him what he knew about her, what she was like.
He had frowned, considering for a moment before answering. “Sharp.”
“She didn’t strike me as the particularly brainy type.”
“Not clever sharp. Actual sharp. Pointy. Spiky.”
They had continued to run into each other at social events over the next few months and always enjoyed each other’s company. And so, despite intentions, they had become friends.
Jorie leaned forward, hands cradling her cup. “I’m picturing it now.… Young, provincial American girl. Brooding French artist type. Tell me more.”
“Not to mess with what you’ve got going on there, but actually he’s British.”
“I can work with that. Did you love him?”
“Yes,” she answered immediately. And then, “As much as you can at that age.”
“But that’s the only age when you can truly love someone. After that is when it gets complicated.”
“I don’t believe that. I wasn’t even sure of who I was then. I wasn’t fully formed.”
“Ah, first love.…” Jorie looked wistful for a moment, an emotion that seemed incongruous on her sharp features. “Doomed by definition to fail. And you haven’t seen him since?”
“No. I haven’t thought about him in years.”
It was a lie, of course. Not that she thought about him often, and it was never really a fully formed thought. But sometimes, maybe twice a year, she was blindsided by a memory. Mostly, it was the silences that reminded her of him. The absences.
There weren’t even the usual artifacts of a love affair to trigger her recollection. She had no photos of him. No letters. No gifts or souvenirs. Just his drawing in the back of the book. Unsigned. Undated. Scant and accidental evidence of a significant passion.
Because of the lack of any real relics—with the exception of the drawing—she relied solely on memory to take her back to that time. She indulged in it very sparingly, though, aware of the delicate nature of memories and of how every time we take them off the shelf to examine them, we change them. We take something away with us or we add a little of whatever is on our hands or in our heart at that moment.
Jorie leaned forward again.
“And the sex?”
Kat looked down at the worn floorboards, blushing at the sudden memories. “We were nineteen.”
“I remember nineteen.” Jorie hesitated for a moment. “Just last Friday I was on the Eurostar and this buttoned-up banker type was seated across from me. The kind you want to unbutton.” She licked her lips. “And he looked right through me. No reaction whatsoever.”
She paused to consider this, frowning without the aid of the muscles in her forehead. “I think that might have been it for me.”
“Might have been what for you?”
“You know.” She looked pointedly at Kat, licking the froth off her spoon before setting it down beside her cup. “Every woman has that moment. When you suddenly realize that men no longer look at you with longing or desire.”
Kat chose a polite smile, rather than responding to the deliberate slight.
Jorie’s face grew thoughtful. “And then, of course, once you realize what has happened, you desperately try to recall that last time. The tragedy of it is that you never know when it’s happening that this will be the last kiss, the last touch, the last whispered indiscretion. You don’t have the chance to savor it.”
They sat in silence for a moment. The walls glowed pale yellow with reflected light. It was late morning and the café was nearly empty. Just a few Parisian expats in search of the smells and sounds of home. The two women behind the counter maintained a constant, lively conversation in French as they arranged new pastries in the display case. Kat half listened, catching bits of it. Her French was not what it had once been.
Kat considered the possibility that perhaps she had had her moment as well. It had been in her forties that her mother had lost her looks. At least her more obvious looks. She was always beautiful, with her singular, regal grace, not to mention the flame-colored hair that Kat had inherited. But the kind of raw, undeniable beauty that catches the eye of strangers the way a nail catches a thread—that had waned. Kat was coming up on forty herself. She could see it most around her eyes—the beginnings of a vaguely tired look. She wasn’t being dramatic. She knew she was still pretty. But for the first time, she truly understood that she wouldn’t be pretty forever.
She saw it in her friends as well. And, inevitably, the drastic measures had begun. The peels and the lasers and the injections, the nips and the tucks. Better living through science. But what science could not erase was the knowledge that the process had begun. And once begun, although its progress might be slowed, it could not be arrested.
Jorie sighed. “And so then I suppose the question becomes, what do you do now that no one is looking?”
* * *
LEAVING JORIE LINGERING over a second café au lait, Kat stepped outside and dialed Jonathan’s parents, hoping to catch Will. She did. Breathless, he told her of the plans to build a dam across the small stream at the bottom of the garden. She listened to his voice, thin and slightly distant due to his tendency to hold the phone far away from his face. The last time she had heard him over the phone was when she had told him of her mother’s death. He had cried. Small wet sobs she heard on the other side of the Atlantic.
In the days since her return from New York she had been witness to him disseminating the news of his grandmother’s death several times. He had earnestly informed their housekeeper, who already knew; the elderly gentleman who walked his springer spaniels along the path just inside the park, who likely did not know; and most recently, the pretty woman they bought meringues from yesterday at Ottolenghi. After pronouncing the words with deliberate solemnity, eyes grave, he had accepted their condolences.
But even in his careful tellings of it, she saw her mother diminishing for him. He was so young. She wondered what of her he would retain. Kat thought of all her mother’s trips to London. All their time spent together. Countless hours feeding the ducks at the Round Pond, riding the double-decker buses, stalking the fat koi in the Kyoto Garden, catching tadpoles in the pond behind Lord Holland’s statue. What would he even remember of his first real loss?
Kat headed to High Street Kensington Station to catch the Circle line into the City. She came out of Bank tube station and made her way through the imposing shadow cast by the Bank of England and down Throgmorton Street. The morning commuter rush had ended some time ago and all who remained were decidedly late, although they seemed sharply divided between the concerned majority, who flowed along at a quick pace, and the unconcerned minority, who moved more slowly—small solids within the larger sea.
A rabbit warren of small winding streets, the area northeast of the Bank of England was populated with small brokerage houses, boutique investment banks, barristers’ chambers, and smaller law firms. It seemed to her to be an unusual place for an architect’s office.
She had worked a few streets away years ago in one of the older buildings, in a small office that seemed to smell perpetually of tea. In those days, she awoke in darkness, commuted in darkness, worked under the glare of overhead fluorescents, and then returned home in darkness. Any sunshine that might have occurred during the day was obscured behind the silhouettes of the taller buildings in the narrow streets.
It was there that she and Jonathan had first met, while working for the European office of an American investment bank. She remembered a particularly lengthy meeting about six months after she had joined the firm. The negotiation had been tense from the beginning. The bankers were clashing on the terms of the deal and the tempers of the management team of the target company were rising and falling in reverse proportion to the purchase price. Despite that, Jonathan maintained a firm hand on the meeting.
As negotiations escalated, he had jotted something down on a sheet of paper and folded it in half. Still addressing the room, he stood and walked around the table to where she was sitting and placed it in front of her. He frequently did this in meetings to consult with others on the finer points—the regulatory or tax ramifications—of something he was considering. She pulled the note into her lap discreetly and opened it. She read it once and then again. She could hear his voice as he continued to negotiate, calmly walking the target company back point by point. Without looking up, she wrote the word “yes” on the paper and refolded it. She stood and walked around the table to return it to his outstretched hand.
The note had been brief. “Have dinner with me tonight.”
Looking back, she saw how the long hours, the sleep deprivation and travel had created a kind of anticipatory intimacy between them. That overnight flights spent lying side by side, cocooned in semidarkness, separated by three inches of armrest, meant that she was already familiar with his face slack in sleep and the broken rhythm of his dreaming breath. So that she recognized the man who had said to her that night, “I think I could be happy with you for a long time.”
Leaving the wider street, she turned in to the quiet of Angel Court. While the layout of the streets here remained mostly true to their medieval origins, the Blitz had transformed the buildings into a patchwork of old and new. While one side of the curved street belonged undeniably to modern times, on the opposite side, with its low Georgian buildings, fronted by a row of neat black bollards emblazoned with the crest of the City of London, it could easily have been the early 1900s.
Jonathan’s idea for the company, a forum that allowed financial institutions to trade securities off the exchanges, was beautiful in its simplicity. She thought sometimes that ideas like that could occur only when people were somehow disconnected. That there must be some sort of alchemy, some sort of altered perspective, that came from intervals of forced stillness on airplanes, moving above the clouds at speeds approaching that of sound. These intervals also fed a fever to do more. To move. To make. Jonathan always walked very quickly after disembarking from airplanes.
It had been a big risk when he had left the bank to start the company. The principals had not been pleased and had declined to make the hoped-for investment in his new venture. Bridges were burned.
There had been many points, especially during the first year, when they had come close to losing it all. She remembered the early board meeting when the directors had advised them to shut the company down. She had listened in silence as the people whom they trusted the most, whom they respected the most, made the case, methodically, rationally, that they should cut their losses. And then she had listened as Jonathan refused, methodically, irrationally.
Although it had been difficult and risky, she had enough perspective to know that it had also been quick. A few years of undeniable struggle, of hard work and no sleep, of blood, sweat, and takeaway food, had resulted in a viable, international company that was now listed on the LSE. So much had changed in such a short time. What hadn’t changed was the time commitment. Jonathan still worked constantly.
She had left the company about a year before Will was born. The fertility specialist had suggested it as one of a litany of other measures. It wasn’t time to worry yet, he had assured them. They had been trying for less than a year and there was still a good chance that they would be able to conceive naturally. “Conceive” was not the word he had used. “Fall pregnant” was what he had said. As if it were a condition, a malady.
And fall pregnant she had, although it had taken another eight months. And while she had tried to maintain a presence within the company for a time after Will was born, she found that her identity had been compromised. The company had moved to a larger building and the security guard at the front desk insisted on providing her with a visitor badge. The small adhesive rectangle proved prophetic as former coworkers smiled polite, impatient smiles at her and inquired about the baby. She was no longer a colleague, an insider. She was Jonathan’s wife. She was a mother. She was a reflection of someone else.
Entering the newer building through its polished red marble facade, she took the small lift up to the twenty-first floor. After a brief journey in silence, the doors split apart like theater curtains, revealing the city, spread out in all directions. Her immediate impression was that there were no walls around her, such was the completeness of the view. It was only after a moment that she noticed the reception desk and the presence of the offices contained inside the view and judged it wise to step off the lift.
She was led through a maze of low partitions and glass walls that dissolved into an immaculate corner office. Protruding into the sky like the prow of a ship, it offered unobstructed views of the city below, punctuated on one side by the pale, cross-topped catenary dome of Saint Paul’s. In the distance she could see moments of the Thames as it slunk through the City. It was low tide and the tiny shapes of birds were just visible as they moved over its wide banks. Turning from the windows, she laid her handbag gingerly on the large glass conference table, watching to see if it would cause a ripple in the smooth surface. It floated there, a singular spot of color in the room. After a moment, she removed it and placed it in the lap of a chair.
She stood surveying the large monochromatic canvas that anchored the room. Hearing the door to the room click closed, she turned to find a man standing close behind her, small and tidy in his black polo neck and rimless glasses, arms folded and eyes fixed not on her, but on the artwork in front of her.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“I do. What is it?”
“What do you think it is?”
“It’s a Rorschach, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “One of the ten original inkblots. Number seven, in fact. It reminds me that things are as we perceive them to be. That all meaning is subjective.”
He turned to her. “So what do you see?”
She turned back to the large symmetrical shape. Almost immediately, a figure emerged within the gray.
“It’s a woman.”
“Just one?”
“Yes. She is looking at her reflection in a mirror.”
Kat looked at the figures. They seemed at first to be identical. Two articulated halves of the same whole, fused at the base. She took in the slight white spot behind the heart where the ink had not adhered to the paper, noting that this small emptiness was echoed in the other figure. As she studied the image more closely, she began to notice small differences between the figures. Imperfections in the jagged edges and the subtle shadows where the ink had bled beyond the margins of each figure. There was something about the opaque clouds gathered just below the surface that seemed at once ominous and vaguely familiar.
She turned away from it. “I thought they were meant to be kept secret, so as not to compromise the general population.”
He looked at her sideways and smiled, his eyes bright. “Consider yourself compromised. Mrs. Bowen, I presume…”
“Lind,” Kat responded automatically. “But please call me Kat.”
“Kat. I am Charles.” He shook her hand firmly. “Shall we discuss your home?”
As she settled opposite him at the conference table, she tried to focus on him, and not on the view through the glass behind him. Sir Charles Eliasson was one of the most sought-after architects in London. She and Jonathan both loved his work—minimal and eclectic. A native of Sweden, he fused traditional with modern using practicality and beauty as glue. She had missed the first meeting with him. It had been in the diary for months. Before anything had happened. Jonathan had gone alone because she had been in New York.
The glass tabletop prevented her from slipping her feet out of her shoes, as was her habit.
He perched on the edge of his chair across from her and removed his glasses, placing them gently on the table, where they disappeared into the larger glass surface. His facial features immediately receded without their subtle definition.
“Your house presents an interesting challenge. As a Grade II listed building, there is much that we cannot change. But I suspect that is one of the aspects of it that appealed to you. And sometimes the hardest decision is what to keep, so perhaps this is lucky for you.”
As he spoke, Sir Charles slid a pile of thick, crisp white paper across the surface of the table until it came to rest between them. Kat glanced momentarily at the drawing on top, a massive, sprawling floor plan—precisely rendered and swaddled in detailed annotation. Replete with swatches of wood, marble, wallpaper, and paint arranged around the edges, it resembled a magpie’s nest.
“There’s been a mistake. This is not my house,” Kat said, pulling back slowly from the drawing in front of her.
Plunging his hand into the table to retrieve his glasses, Sir Charles leaned closer to the drawings, peering at them. After a moment he looked back up at her. “This is your house.”
She looked down again at the busy black-on-white drawing. Slowly, a familiar image emerged from the thicket of computer-drawn lines on the page. She hadn’t recognized her own house. Embarrassed, she looked up at him, not knowing what to say. He leveled a knowing glance at her and after a moment pushed the materials to the side, clearing the space between them.
“This is why I do not like the man and woman to be separate.” He sighed. “It cannot work. All this is based on the meeting with your husband.”
He leaned back in his chair. “We start at the beginning, then. Why don’t you tell me what you want.”
What did she want? What were they going to fill the house with? They didn’t need more things. She didn’t want the new textured wallpaper on the walls. She didn’t want to replace the old marble or, even worse, to carpet the timeworn wood floors. She didn’t want to paint it in the latest colors or to stuff it full of furniture—things that would fill up the beautiful space, curtains that would obscure the views. She wondered when they had started to need so much stuff.
Part of it was the money. They had made such a massive leap in the last few years that she was uncomfortable with the amounts of money that the project demanded. But it wasn’t the money alone. She loved the space, the smooth white walls topped with frothy moldings; the enormous windows looking out over the tree-lined street or onto the large, overgrown wisteria-and-rose-filled garden; the vast expanses of distressed wood and worn-smooth marble. The idea of covering it up was anathema to her. She liked it naked. She liked the possibilities.
The feeling was even stronger since she had gone through her mother’s possessions. It all ended and what were you left with?
She looked back at him mutely for a moment. “That’s rather a broad question.”
“It’s often helpful to start with something you love,” he suggested. “Something beautiful that gives you joy. Something that reminds you of things you don’t want to forget. Something of value to you. A piece of art, perhaps?”
Kat thought of her bare walls and smiled.
After a moment, he continued. “I think I may have something you would be interested in seeing. As we have only just found it, I didn’t have it to show your husband when he was in previously.”
He rose and made his way to an oversize credenza at one end of the room. The more time she spent in the office, the more aware she became of its contents. Things that had been invisible at first. It was as if her eyes were becoming accustomed to the view. Adjusting themselves to its brilliance. The room, which had first appeared spare, gradually became populated. She noticed a collection of African masks that hung on one wall, their smooth, mute faces watching her impassively. On his desk were framed photos of two blond children. In front of the sea. Behind birthday cakes. In public-school uniforms.
“Your children?”
He glanced back at her. “As they used to be. They are older now. Klaus is at university. Liff is engaged to be married.” He hesitated. “It is what it is to be a parent. Always looking backwards. You have children, yes? Your husband said.”
“One child, yes.” She smiled.
Opening a drawer, he carefully lifted out a sheet of oversize yellowed paper and carried it gingerly to the table. As he spread it out in front of her its age was immediately obvious. The delicate parchment was nearly translucent under the bright light.
“The original drawing of your house. Courtesy of the National Archives.”
The hand-drawn diagram glowed softly. Its age and imperfections clouded just below the surface. She took in the simplicity and clarity of the lines. With the exception of scale and orientation, there were no annotations on the page. Here was the form, unadorned. This she recognized. She leaned closer, reading the graceful curling lettering within each of the rooms. Drawing room. Dining room. Principal staircase. Servants’ hall.
“Drawings from this period contain much less detail,” Sir Charles explained. “There was a common knowledge of standards and techniques at the time, so less instruction was necessary.”
Kat pointed decisively to the gleaming drawing in between them. “This is what I want.”
She thought he smiled, but it was gone before she could be sure. “It is impossible to raise the dead. Your house will never be exactly as it once was, but it can be beautiful again. Nothing lasts forever, Kat. And you wouldn’t want it to.”
“Then why spend so much time on it?” It came out before she could stop herself. “So much money? Choosing the perfect marble and wallpaper and paint colors. The best furniture and appliances, the most exquisite art … if none of it lasts?”
He frowned. “I think because it’s in our nature to do so. And because perfection is possible—but only for a time. And if you know that one secret…” He held up a pale forefinger, its slender shape hovering among the skyscrapers of the city beyond it. “… that nothing lasts forever. Then it is even sweeter.”
He hesitated for a moment. “It’s interesting that we often think of a home as being a part of our story, when in fact we are a part of its story.”
Leaving the building, Kat crossed back from the present to the past.
Kat had grown up in a New York apartment, its walls covered with artwork. A color-soaked Derain looked down on her from above her bed, its garish hues crowded under the low ceiling. The rest of the collection was tightly arranged in an eclectic mosaic in the drawing room.
The paintings had been lovingly collected by her father’s paternal grandmother. Initially viewed as an indulgence, they had proven to be a shrewd investment over the years. Upon her death, she had bequeathed them to him, her favorite grandchild, a choice that had not sat well with other family members.
Kat had grown up alongside the paintings. She thought sometimes that she could recall them all. Certainly the shimmering Fauvist seascape over her bed, its bright boats floating in a small harbor. The sea and sky separated into vivid particles of pure color. The scene was viewed from above, so that, even as a small child lying below it, she had felt as if she was looking down on it. Suspended somewhere in the dappled sky.
Then there was the sad-eyed woman, placed at the top corner in the drawing room so that she could look upon the other paintings with her downcast eyes, her empty hands clasped together tightly in her lap. And the young soldier, his expression far too grave for his age. Kat had wondered what he knew.
Close to the center of the wall was a quartet of birds, so devoid of detail that she thought that they were already gone. That their silhouettes were all that remained, sculpting the pulsating blue sky around them. The other paintings seemed to orbit around it. Its vivid tones providing an anchor to the surrounding chaos. She imagined what it might look like from the different vantage points of the other paintings. The soldier. The sad-eyed woman. How they saw it.
The collection had been a wedding present from her father to her mother. The beau geste of a besotted groom and the final straw for his disapproving parents, who found beauty without provenance to be suspect. They had disapproved of the marriage, fearing that she was after their money, and the gift of the paintings played into these fears. Worse, she was Catholic, as certain an indication of lower class as they required.
There had been a larger canvas that had hung just to the left of the birds. Although she suspected that it had not been the first to go, it was the first one whose departure she was conscious of. She could not have been more than five years old at the time that the empty space appeared where it had been. She remembered the feeling of it, more than she did the actual painting. There was a girl before an open window—the light casting her flesh in a soft, shellfish pink. She had thought that there must have been an ocean outside the window, not because she remembered seeing an ocean, but because the light that poured into the room was a kind she had only ever seen reflected off the sea in the early evening.
And while she was too young to understand everything about the paintings, she still felt them. She thought that the great ones were like that in any art form—music, painting, dance. While the technical genius might not be easily visible to the naked eye, that which was beautiful and true needed no explanation. Later, she had also come to know them by the artists who had painted them. But despite this later knowledge, they had always remained for her as she had first known them to be. She thought that it was best this way. To first experience something in its pure state—to feel something before fully understanding it.
Over time, their number continued to diminish. After the initial departure, she took more notice of them. Cataloguing them with her callow child’s eye. Each its own world. Of color and line and style. Of age and time and reason. Each with its own rules, its own borders, its own palette. She had made a story from the pictures. Her story drew them together. United them and changed the rules of each of their worlds, blurring the boundaries that separated them.
The Matisse had been the last to go. For a while it hung oddly off-center on the wall. And then for a while it was only the ghosts, but then they went as well, there being no one there to remember them.
The empty spaces where the paintings had hung were never filled. Instead, the walls held only their shadows. Their varying degrees of darkness on the moss-colored wall, a testament to how long each painting had been there. The last ones to be removed were memorialized by squares of deepest green—deeper even than the surrounding wallpaper.
Sometimes long periods passed between departures, as had been the case following the exodus of the girl before the window and the seascape. When she grew up, she understood that they were more than pretty pictures. That they were important. That they had value. And that her mother had sold them off one by one, as needed. The paintings had sustained them. Perhaps not in the way that her father had intended, but in the way that had been necessary. She saw all that they had given her and she felt that maybe she owed them something in return.
She had seen the Matisse once, years after its departure. Through the window of a small gallery in SoHo. It had seemed to her that they had recognized each other at the same time. Old friends passing on a crowded street. After her initial excitement, an odd sense of shyness and propriety had caused her to keep walking, preventing her from stopping and running her eyes over its familiar curves, allowing her gaze to linger in its expanse of blue, as if she did not have the right. Not anymore. When she had found herself on the same street several weeks later, it was gone from the window.
She wondered about the order in which they had been sold and those that had been the last to go. What did they represent? Were they her mother’s favorites? Each possessing its own special significance? Or were they simply the most likely to sell? Would they have fetched the best prices at auction? She thought about her mother and how she would never know the whole of her story. She thought about the possibility that what had shaped her, what had defined her most markedly, was not what was in her life, but what was not. And how she had built her life around those empty spaces.
When her mother had informed her father’s family of her pregnancy and of her intention to raise the child in her Catholic faith, her father’s family had responded that they had no interest in the child. And so she did not know them.
There had been one time. She could not have been more than five years old. It had been a weekday, but her mother had instructed her to put on one of her Sunday dresses. As she pulled the smocked garment over her head, Kat had wondered expectantly at the occasion. Coaxing the strap of her shoe into its buckle, she had heard the doorman ring up and, minutes after that, the doorbell. When her mother had called her to the drawing room, she had entered shyly. The good tea set sat on the low table, its small delicate white cups embroidered with flowers and rimmed in gold. An older woman perched behind it on the edge of the couch, the frayed edges of her tweed jacket perfectly matching the fringe of the pillows.
As Kat entered the room, the woman turned and rose slowly. Her lips were shiny red and her face wore an alert, almost surprised expression. After a moment she extended her hand stiffly. Her skin felt soft and dry, like crumpled tissue paper. Kat looked at the blue veins visible just under the surface.
“Katherine, this is your grandmother.” Her mother seemed almost as incredulous at the unlikely figure before her as Kat was.
Kat had been amazed. She had a grandmother. She knew of them, of course, from stories and fairy tales. She regarded hers with interest. Her hair rose off her head and was frozen in high waves around her face.
Her mother had excused herself and gone into the kitchen, leaving the two of them alone in the room. Mother and daughter, separated by the one absent person who made each of them so. She was surprisingly tall. For some reason Kat had imagined most older people to be small. She had looked down on Kat, arrayed before her in her Sunday best.
“You are the image of your mother.”
Even to her young ears, it had the ring of accusation.
She had answered solemnly. “I have the red hair like my mommy.”
“So you do.” As she spoke, her gaze slid off Kat, and onto the paintings behind her, where it lingered. Kat had been keen to regain her attention.
“You like Mommy’s pretty pictures?”
Her grandmother wrinkled her nose and pressed her lips together. Kat thought that maybe she had smelled something bad.
“Pretty pictures. Is that what they are?”
After a moment, she refocused on Kat, although her face still retained traces of its prior expression. “Well, now, no need to let the tea go cold, I suppose.”
Her grandmother had leaned toward the table between them and lifted the teapot. Its bulbous shape threatened to be too much for her thin wrists to bear and her hands shook slightly under its weight. Kat closed her eyes and listened to the distinctive sound of the hot liquid being poured, so different from the sound of something cold being poured. The faintly citrus scent of the tea reached her and she opened her eyes in time to see her mother emerging from the kitchen bearing a tiered platter of small, round cakes in varying subtle hues of such delicacy that they seemed like petals from a flower.
“Look at what your grandmother brought.”
In her delight at the sight of the cakes, Kat opened her arms wide to clap. Her right hand made abrupt contact with one of the cups, sending it flying off the table, its contents arcing out behind it like the tail of a comet. The older woman let out a short scream, rising from her chair, a look of abject horror on her face. Kat froze. The back of her hand stung from the momentary contact with the hot porcelain, and tears welled in her eyes. It took her a moment to realize that she was not burned. It took her another moment to realize that her grandmother’s concern was not directed at her. That instead she was looking past her to the trail of tea that traced a path across the rug to the wall, where tiny dark liquid drops had fallen in a fan shape, its far edge interrupted by the lower left corner of the painting of the young soldier. The older woman turned on Kat, her face taut with anger.
“Dear God! What have you done?”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Kat sobbed, looking from the unfamiliar angry face of her grandmother to the familiar concerned face of her mother, who was already kneeling on the floor beside her, reaching for her hand, which she clutched close to her chest.
“Are you okay, darling? Let me see your hand.”
Kat nodded meekly, extending her hand to her mother, who rubbed it gently between her own hands, murmuring, “It’s all right. It’s only an accident.”
After examining her hand to make sure she had not been scalded, her mother stood. Plucking a napkin from the table, she moved to the canvas, blotting gently, working quickly to remove the small traces of tea that had fallen on it. Turning the napkin over, she repeated the process, diligently examining it when she was done to make sure there was nothing on it.
“Is it all right?” her grandmother asked anxiously, edging closer to the wall.
Her mother turned away from the painting and addressed Kat. “Go into the kitchen and get me another cloth from the drawer, would you, darling?”
Taking care to angle herself away from the table, Kat retreated hastily to the other room. She reached up to open the drawer, standing on her toes to find what she sought. Pausing to press the cloth to her damp cheeks, she hesitated at the door, listening to her grandmother’s deep patrician voice in the next room, shaping and polishing her words so that they shone with admonition.
“… irresponsible to have a child in an apartment with something of such value…”
After a brief pause, her mother’s voice.
“You have made no secret of the fact that you find my behavior to be irresponsible. And today you have made it very clear that you value the paintings more than you do your own granddaughter. They are what you really came to see.” Her mother’s voice was ice. Kat froze where she stood, her hand on the doorknob. “Take a moment. Have a last look at what you love. Then see yourself out.”
While the incident had put a stop to any further contact with her father’s family, it had not stopped the discussion of her father.
“What was he like?”
It was almost a refrain in her childhood. There had been many responses, of increasing depth and detail as she grew older. A few she remembered better than others. Some she remembered because they had been repeated, becoming answering choruses to her refrain. “I sometimes think we must have known on some level that we didn’t have much time.” Others she remembered because they had not been repeated. “Maybe I was lucky. It never had a chance to fade.”