“Here is proof, although I was sure the minute I saw it. What you found is Elizabeth’s ring.” Her voice was heavy with an emotion Claire couldn’t name. Was it loss? The photo showed a young man with his arm around a young woman. Her left hand was extended to the camera, carefully manicured fingers spread to show the ring at best advantage. Claire picked up the ring she had found and held it next to the photo. There could be no doubt. It was the same ring, with the same delicately etched flowers and leaves, with the same three diamonds set directly into the wide band.
Next, Claire looked at the couple’s faces. From Claire’s perspective, fifty years later, they both looked very young to be getting married. Elizabeth Ellsworth hadn’t been traditionally pretty, there were too many angles and planes in her face for that, but she was striking, with high cheekbones and large, light-colored eyes. Her pale hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail.
Charlie looked at the photo over Claire’s shoulder, her face soft with remembering. “Elizabeth was tall, taller even than you. Back in those days, fewer women were tall. I guess we did not have the kind of nutrition girls have nowadays. She told me people used to tease her about it in school, and she did not like all the attention it brought her. She said they called her giraffe. When I first moved here I would see her walking home from school with her shoulders curled over. Then when she started dating Allen, she straightened up and you saw that she had a long, white neck. Like a swan’s.”
With their two heads close together, Allen Lisac made quite a contrast to Elizabeth. He was as dark as Elizabeth had been fair, with jet-black hair cropped close to his head – Claire thought the style might have been called a flattop - and dark eyes. Sunglasses had been pushed to the top of his head.
“We had been talking about the wedding that day. They were to be married in six months. His mother spent her days planning it. It was going to be a real society event.”
“If they were talking about getting married, then why do they both look so sad?” Claire asked. “Do you think that even then she was thinking of killing herself?”
“What do you mean?” Charlie looked more closely at the photo.
It was hard for Claire to pinpoint exactly what she saw. The ring dominated the picture and was the only thing truly in focus, leaving Allen and Elizabeth’s features slightly blurred, as if to underscore how young they were. While they both wore smiles, they didn’t look at each other. Elizabeth’s eyes looked at the camera, but there was something about her face that looked frozen, as if at any minute the expression could crack and fall away. Allen’s head was turned slightly away from Elizabeth, his gaze fastened on something the camera couldn’t see. His smile seemed forced, his lips tightly closed, bracketed by lines too deep for his years.
Slowly, Charlie said, “Of course the war had changed Allen. He was only in Korea for a few months before he was injured. He nearly lost his leg, and spent more time in a military hospital than he did in Korea. He still walks with a cane. And Elizabeth must have been very unhappy to do what she did. I do not think she was prepared to deal with how he had changed, both mentally and physically. But she knew that if she did not marry Allen, she would have been ostracized for rejecting a war hero.”
Claire realized what had been nagging at her. “Allen Lisac. I’ve heard that name before,” she said slowly. “And not just from those construction site billboards.”
Charlie nodded. “Of course you have. He and Mary never had any children, but he is determined to leave behind in this world a legacy. He has his name on that new theatre space downtown. He puts up the money for Swingtime, that tennis tournament that benefits children’s charities. And he –”she hesitated.
Claire finished the sentence for her. “And he’s the one who’s promised the Oregon Art Museum a new wing and the Old Master paintings and drawings to hang on the walls.” A new wing that would require a new head curator. The three candidates for the position were Vicki Guinn from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Laurel Williams from the Chicago Art Museum, and Dante Bonner, currently with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. And Claire’s long-distance boyfriend.
Claire didn’t have much chance to think about what this might mean before Charlie handed her another photo. “This is from the same day. We were all down at the river having a picnic to celebrate Allen’s coming home. Ten days later, Elizabeth was dead.”
Claire’s first impression was of a lot of people, too many crowded into one photograph to make out individuals. She turned and rummaged around in the junk drawer of the dining room’s built-in sideboard. Charlie’s house, built in 1922, had built-in everything. She found the magnifying glass Charlie used when instructions proved too tiny even for her reading glasses. Seven people stood or sat on a blanket spread in the grass. Behind them lay a jumble of large stones and the dark edge of the water. Now raw sewage spilled into the Willamette any time it rained hard, so you had to be brave, stupid, young or unable to read English - or all four - to be willing to swim in it. Even the blanket was a reminder of times gone by. It was an Indian-patterned Pendleton, the kind of thing that would fetch hundreds on E-bay now, but fifty years ago it had been fine for throwing on the ground and dripping mayonnaise on.
“Is that you, Charlie?” Claire tapped her finger on the couple standing on the left side of the photo. Charlie took the magnifying glass from Claire’s hand, then nodded as she looked at where Claire’s finger pointed, nearly fifty years in the past. For a woman a few months past 81, Charlie was still a looker, petite and elegant and always put together. But the photo revealed her at her peak, all ripe curves, her black hair framing her face in waves. She wore a form-fitting sleeveless polka dot shirt topped by a gored skirt unbuttoned to show off the matching shorts. The effect was more provocative than Claire had imagined being worn in the Fifties. The man who stood next to her had his arm around Charlie’s waist. He was at least a foot taller, but since she was so short, that wasn’t unusual. He wore long pants and a short-sleeve shirt, patterned with palm trees, open to reveal a muscled torso. He had the kind of build that men now spent hours in the gym with personal trainer in a vain search for, but Claire could tell this guy had come by it honestly. Even in the old black and white photo, his skin looked tanned.
“Who is that you’re with?”
“His name was Tom.” As she spoke, Charlie turned away to get a red-and-white checked towel from the linen closet. “He was actually a day laborer whom Allen’s father had hired. He was not really part of our little group, but then for that matter, neither was I. I was thirty, quite a bit older than the other girls. They had just been children during the war. Tom was older, too. He had fought in Italy, and liberated one of the camps. We understood each other.”
“But you broke up?”
Still not meeting Claire’s eyes, Charlie went to the kitchen cupboard. Standing on tiptoe, she took down some shortening. “He wanted to get married.” She rubbed the shortening on the inside of a royal blue ceramic bowl, then carried the bowl back into the dining room, plopped the bread dough in and turned it over. The dough was as round and full of life as a pregnant belly.
Claire had long ago figured out that, for Charlie, there could be no husband to replace the one who had died in a concentration camp, no child to substitute for the son torn from her arms. Charlie had taken many lovers since – and clearly this Tom has been one of them - but Claire guessed that Charlie had not been able to start over, to make a new family for herself as if the first one had never existed. Now she covered the ball of dough with the kitchen towel, then tucked it on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. The secret to Charlie’s bread, nutty and sweet, was the three long, slow risings in the fridge.
Claire looked back down at the photo. “I see Elizabeth and Allen, but who are the other people?”
Charlie came to point over Claire’s shoulder at the three people who stood next to her old self. “That’s Nova and Elizabeth with Howard, the one you talked to about the ring. Howard was
funny. He had a bitter kind of humor. It could make you laugh if you were in the right mood. Sometimes it was too sharp.”
It took a minute for Claire to see the resemblance. Howard was still tall and thin, but fifty years ago he had had all his hair and a fresh, confident look on his face. He stood with his arms hooked around the two women’s waists, clowningly pulling them close. They turned toward him, their lips pursed in an exaggerated fashion, mugging for the camera. The one named Nova, another blond only with shorter hair, had kicked one shapely leg behind her. She wore an off-the-shoulder white peasant blouse over brief shorts, her hair in pin-curled waves. Elizabeth was more modestly dressed in a flowered circle skirt and a sleeveless blouse. Like all the women in the photo, Nova and Elizabeth wore flat, wedge-heeled sandals that wouldn’t have been out of place 50 years later.
Charlie smiled down at the photo. “Nova – now she, I liked. She was a bit of a live wire. She had what they called a reputation.”
“For what?” Claire asked, intrigued.
“Oh, for things no one would look at twice nowadays. She liked a bit of fun. You know the old sayings. Nova smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish and she went through men like a revolving door.”
“Did she ever get married?”
“More than once.” Charlie paused to think. “I have been to two weddings for her. Maybe three. Then she had a child, and the girl was retarded. I think that made Nova settle down a little bit. A Mongoloid little girl, although now they say Down Syndrome. The girl had heart problems. Nova cosseted that child. The doctor said if it hadn’t been for her care, the child would never have lived as long as she did.”
“How old was the girl when she died?”
“Eight.” Charlie sighed. “Over time, Nova and I have grown apart, but I still get an occasional Christmas card from her.”
Claire looked down at the photo again. Allen Lisac sat on the blanket on the far side of the trio, his legs straight out in front of him. Even covered with long pants, one leg was noticeably thinner than the other. His eyes were hidden by dark glasses. Next to his leg was something black and straight, about the size of a short broomstick, ending in a silver cuff. Claire realized it was what she thought of as a “professional crutch” a waist-high metal stick.
Charlie tapped one fingernail, manicured in Petal Pink, on the half-hidden crutch. “That’s the reason Allen came home. We heard he had been injured on the battlefield, evacuated to the military hospital. Elizabeth was beside herself. There were skin grafts and surgeries, even after he returned home.” Charlie spoke more slowly. “I had known him from the neighborhood before he left. He mowed my lawn the summer before he went to college. Allen was a beautiful young man. He told me he set a state record in high school for running the mile. Then he came back from Korea with that cane. He had to move like an old man, and somehow his spirit was old, too.”
In the photo, Allen wore civilian clothing, too formal for a picnic at the river’s edge. The long pants presumably hid his crippled leg, but he also wore a dress shirt buttoned up to his neck. To Claire, he was a reminder of another time, when men might spend even their weekends looking as if they were ready to go into the office at any moment. Unsmiling, he looked straight at the camera, ignoring his fiancée clowning with another man, a man who stood easily on well-muscled legs.
There was only one other person in the photo, a horse-faced woman in a full dress who sat next to Allen, her legs curled to one side. Something about her face seemed familiar, but Claire couldn’t place what it was.
Charlie pointed at her. “That is Mary. Elizabeth’s sister. Two years after Liz died, she married Allen.”
Claire was taken aback. “What? Maybe that was the reason Elizabeth broke up with him. Maybe she knew he was fooling around with her sister.”
Charlie shook her head. “I do not believe there was anything between them while her sister was alive.”
Claire studied the woman named Mary. While the two sisters did look quite a bit alike, it was interesting how the same elements, only altered slightly and arranged a little differently, could add up to so much less. Elizabeth’s hair was the palest yellow. Mary’s hair was darker, a drab dishwater blond. Elizabeth’s face had striking angles and planes. Mary’s face was simply bony with a long jaw. Elizabeth’s eyes were large, while Mary’s were too prominent. Why would Allen have chosen her after having loved her much prettier sister? Had Mary offered the closest approximation of Elizabeth he could find? Or had they been drawn together by their grief? In the photo, Mary seemed to be only miming having fun. Her smile seemed too full to be real, her face turned animatedly toward the others as she watched from the sidelines.
“So how did you know all these people, Charlie?”
“I had known most of them by sight. I had been living here five years by then. We saw each other at John’s Market, or the movie theater or the drug store. And, as I said, Allen had mowed my lawn all one summer. But really, I met them all through Tom.”
“Where did you know Tom from?”
Charlie shrugged one shoulder and then looked away. The gesture seemed very European to Claire, revealing and concealing at the same time. “I saw him working on that wall one day when I was out for a walk. He was just beginning to lay the foundation stones. I stopped to talk.” Claire could imagine the rest. Charlie had always been drawn to beauty, inanimate or animate. It didn’t take much imagination to see Tom, stripped to the waist, tanned, sweat outlining the muscles of his chest and arms and abdomen as he lifted those heavy stones into place one by one. And to imagine Charlie beguiling him with a laugh and the elevation of one perfectly shaped eyebrow.
“It was through Tom that I got to know Elizabeth. Allen’s family had invited her to stay with them when he went overseas. Allen’s mother, Austrid, said she wanted to plan the wedding, but I think she was really trying to mold Elizabeth into a proper wife for her son. And then through Elizabeth, I met her circle of friends. There was the Lisac’s neighbor, Howard. Elizabeth’s sister, Mary. Elizabeth’s best friend, Nova. And Allen when he came back. And he had been home only a few months before Elizabeth killed herself.”
There was a long silence, and Claire thought Charlie was saddened, thinking about the death of her young friend. When Charlie spoke again, Claire was startled by her words.
“I went through that goddamn war where people died terribly. I could not stand to think that this beautiful girl had killed herself over what was only a moment’s unhappiness. She died with her belly full in a warm house filled with beautiful things. With friends who would have done anything for her. Instead, she went to death and embraced him.”
Now Claire identified the emotion that colored her friend’s voice. It was anger.
“She was a foolish girl, to take her life over a man, and such a man.” Claire wondered if Charlie were thinking of her own man and her little son, gone forever and mourned only in private. “When Allen came back from Korea, he was - damaged. He hardly spoke. It would have killed Elizabeth’s spirit to be married to such a one. She would have been like a bird that flies inside a room’s open door - and then the door closes, trapping it. It dies beating its wings against the glass. She was right to break off the engagement. But I think she was ashamed, too, ashamed to face her friends and Allen’s parents and try to explain why she could not marry him. She chose death because she did not understand that she could have chosen life.”
Claire didn’t know what to say. Her friend seldom talked about the past, but then again, it wasn’t every day that a bit of her past made an unexpected reappearance in her dining room. Instead, Claire picked up another snapshot. The next was much like the first, a group photo of the seven of them, only in this one Howard parodied a he-man pose, standing in profile with his wiry arms and legs bent, muscles flexed in imitation of Charles Atlas.
“That Howard,” Charlie said. “He was always joking around. He had a reputation as a playboy, but he never stayed with any one woman for long. One date, two, then he
was on to another. After Elizabeth’s death, he changed. Well, we all did. But Howard seemed more affected than any of us. Perhaps even Allen. Afterward, I wondered if Howard had secretly been in love with her. He wept so hard at the grave that Tom had to steady him.”
“Did you say this was your camera, Charlie?” When the older woman nodded, Claire said, “Then who took these pictures?”
“That is a good question.” Charlie looked up, thinking. “I took most of these, but the photos that show me – I don’t know. Wait – it was Frank. Mary and Elizabeth’s brother. He was a few years older, but he did not really have many of his own friends. He was always tagging along. Here,” she slid over another picture, “here he is with Nova.”
Clad now in a strapless bathing suit, Nova stood with her gleaming lips parted in a smile next to a smoking grill. Her darkly manicured hands rested on her hips, accentuating her hourglass figure. Holding a spatula, a young man stood next to her. Frank’s eyes were even with the suit’s cone-shaped bra. He was pale and skinny and short, and despite how he was looking at Nova, she smiled at the camera as if it alone existed.
“Frank liked women, but he liked them too much. Do you know what I mean? He did not see you, not as a person, not as an individual. He saw only - woman. That is why I took their picture. I saw the way he was looking at her.”
Charlie didn’t hand Claire the last photo, so Claire slipped it from her unresisting hand. It showed no people at all, just of a tumble of stones lapped with water, shot close to the water’s edge so that the stones loomed above. The photo seemed foreboding, and Claire wondered for a moment what had made Charlie choose such a composition on a sunny outing.
Charlie said, “We all drifted apart after Elizabeth died. When we were together, everything we did reminded us of her. We all questioned ourselves. Was there something we could have said or done that would have stopped her? Even when we tried to talk about other things, we would still end up talking about her and crying. Howard just looked ill all the time. Nova – that was the only time in her life that I knew her not to smile. And I think we all worried that Allen might be tempted to follow Elizabeth. How could any man stand two such terrible blows, one right after another? You asked if there had been anything between him and Mary, but I think it was Elizabeth’s death that brought them together. She fussed over him, and he seemed to like it.”