Heartwood (13 page)

“M
om, you’re not listening!” Katie stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing Laura to stop too. “I was talking to you,” Katie scolded. “And you ignored me. That’s rude!” At the age of twelve Katie had strong beliefs about what was and was not acceptable behavior, and rudeness topped her list of the unacceptable. It was a code she had picked up from her grandmother. Iris would have cut off an arm before she ignored something that was said to her, and Katie adored Iris.

It had been that way from the beginning. When Katie, Robby and Laura had moved east three years ago, Laura had hoped her daughter would grow close to both Theo and Iris, and Katie did love them very much. But there was something special between Katie and Iris. Robby and Theo had both seen it when Katie was still a baby in her crib, and now most of Katie’s conversations were peppered with the phrase, “Grandma says.”

Laura looked at the small figure standing in front of her.
I’m
a throwback to my grandmother and Katie is a throwback to hers. But Katie is stronger than Mom, I see that already. And it’s as it should be. The new generation stands on the shoulders of the old—that’s how it is in families
.

But now her daughter was standing in the middle of the sidewalk on Madison Avenue and frowning at her.

“I’m sorry. You’re quite right,” Laura said. “I was thinking about something else, and I was rude to you. Forgive me?”

Katie considered it carefully. “Yes, I will,” she said finally. Harmony restored, she and Laura began to walk together again. “Grandma Iris says you’re always rushing,” she told Laura. “I think she’s afraid that Daddy doesn’t like it when you’re not home for dinner and things … well, he doesn’t … but I explained to Grandma that Daddy doesn’t like to work and you do.”

“Katie, that’s not fair. Your dad goes to his job every day.”

“But he doesn’t like doing it. And he doesn’t understand why you like yours so much.”

She was so smart. “What did Grandma Iris say when you told her all of this?”

“Just that I must always respect my father. And I do, Mom.”

“Of course you do. And you know, maybe I do rush around a little too much.”

“Maybe. But you won’t stop.”

My child knows me
.

The truth was, Laura loved being busy because after three short years her catering company was booming, and she still couldn’t get over it. It had taken months to do the necessary renovations on the house, so she’d stayed in New York to work on it, while Katie and Robby finished out the school year in California. By the time they’d come east with Molly, Laura had
been halfway through the project. She’d fixed and decorated Katie’s room first, before anything else. Then she’d concentrated on the areas she would need for her business. For six weeks she and a couple of workmen had worked on the kitchen and fitted it out with the professional equipment the law required her to have if she was going to prepare and sell food to the public. She’d planted her gardens full of the herbs she would need in her cooking and the flowers she would use to make the bouquets that would accompany the freshly prepared family dinners and food baskets she’d be delivering to clients. She’d painted the kitchen, the pantry, the laundry room and the back entrance where she kept her gardening tools, a cheery yellow, and she’d run up blue and white curtains for the windows. The hideous wallpaper in the dining room and the living room was stripped off, and the walls were painted a warm and inviting taupe. The old chandeliers and sconces were back where they belonged and the bay windows were swagged with creamy draperies made from a bolt of silk she’d purchased at a discount on the Lower East Side in the city. She’d set up a corner of the living room as her office, where she could man her phones and take orders. Then she’d opened her doors for business and the rest of the renovations had been on hold. The ballroom remained unfinished, as did all the bedrooms except Katie’s. Robby complained regularly about the peeling paint and crumbling plaster in theirs, but somehow Laura never seemed to get around to fixing it up. Later, she would realize that it was significant that the room that was the heart of a good marriage had not been a priority for her, and she would want to weep for Robby and herself. But at the time she just told herself she’d get around to it when she didn’t have something more important to do.

Her company, which was simply named Laura’s Catering, had been a success almost from the beginning. As she’d predicted, she’d started turning a small profit in the first six months, and by the time she’d been open for two-and-a-half years, she was doing well enough to pay her brother back and next year she’d be giving him a return on his investment. (Phil said he was going to set up a college fund for Katie with the money.) It seemed that in addition to Laura’s domestic skills, she had a head for business.

Of course, she had made mistakes. In the beginning, she’d been thinking as if she were still in California and she hadn’t grasped the full difference between a busy suburb on the outskirts of the world’s biggest city and a sleepy little college town. She’d tried giving out free samples of her wares in the local mall, and it had taken her several weekends to realize that this was not the way to break into a market that moved at lightning speed and was crowded with products and services vying for the consumer’s attention. On Phil’s advice she had gritted her teeth and spent some of her precious capital to hire an advertising agency. But once they managed to get the word out, Laura’s Catering had taken off. She’d been right about the busy workingwomen who needed a wife.

–—

“Mom, did you see that?” Katie had stopped again. She pointed to a store window they had just passed. The words “Hospital Services Thrift Shop” were painted across the window in big black letters, and in slightly smaller print was the information that all items in the store were donated and the proceeds of sales would benefit two hospitals that were located in the area.

“What is it?”

“There’s a picture in that window. It’s really weird.” Katie grabbed her hand, and pulled her toward the shop. “Come on.”

They didn’t have time to look at weird pictures, if they were going to catch the train back to Westchester. Laura and Katie had come into the city so Katie could attend her cousin Rebecca Ruth’s birthday—the two little girls really didn’t like each other much, but family was family—and Laura still had work to do when she got home. But she had already been reprimanded once by her daughter today.

“Okay, show me your weird picture,” she said.

–—

It was an oil painting with an ornate gilt frame, and it had been placed in the center of the somewhat jumbled window display so that it dominated the space. It was a portrait of a woman. She was dressed in the style of the early part of the century in a cream-colored gown with ruffled lace trim, and a long string of pearls falling over the lace. But it was the woman’s face that made Laura gasp out loud. She would have known those huge dark eyes, that high narrow nose, that mouth and that hairline anywhere.

“See Mom?” Katie demanded. “Why do they have a picture of Grandma Iris in this window?”

T
he woman in the portrait couldn’t be Iris. Obviously not. And yet … those distinctive dark eyes … and that mouth … and that nose …

“It has to be Grandma,” Katie said at Laura’s side. “She’s not one of those people who look like lots of other people. She’s special. So it has to be her.”

“It certainly does look like her … very much … but it can’t be, Katie …”

“Let’s go inside and ask about it.”

Laura glanced at her watch. Tomorrow morning she had to deliver seven breakfast baskets to a new inn that had just started using her services. If she missed the train she would have to work late that night to make up the time. But the portrait did look so much like Iris … She took Katie’s hand.

“Come on,” she said, and they went inside the shop.

–—

“Yes, isn’t that picture fabulous?” said the gray-haired woman who was tending the shop. She was wearing a name tag that said V
OLUNTEER
in red letters. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about it. The man who manages this store knows the history of all of our donations, but you just missed him.”

She lifted the portrait out of the window and propped it on a table so Laura and Katie could see it better. Iris’s face—well, not Iris’s face but the face of someone close enough to be her double—stared out at the dusty shop with a remote, haughty expression.

That isn’t like Mom, at least. Mom never looked haughty a day in her life
.

Still, the resemblance was eerie. Laura was starting to wish they hadn’t come into the store—the picture was making her uncomfortable.

“I don’t think the artist was anyone famous,” the woman went on. “I’m sure he wasn’t, because we would have saved this for our fine arts auction at the end of the year if he was. But I can tell you who donated it.”

“That’s okay,” Laura started to say, but the woman was already bustling around the counter.

She pulled out a large black notebook. “All right, here we are,” she said after a couple of seconds. “Oh, this is interesting. The donor was a woman named Leah Sherman; she used to own a boutique right here on Madison Avenue. It was a very elegant place. She sold real European couture, the kind of thing you don’t see anymore.” The woman smiled at Laura. “I remember it because my mother bought my first grown-up gown there. The store was called Lea, or something …”

“Chez Lea,” Laura said, and now the uncomfortable feeling turned into a shiver. “My mother used to shop there. And so did my grandmother.”

“What a coincidence. Although, perhaps it isn’t. Most fashionable women who lived around New York did shop at Chez Lea back in the day.”

“I guess,” Laura said, only half listening. She was staring at the portrait again; now she didn’t seem to be able to take her eyes off it.

“Mom, could we buy it?” Katie broke into her thoughts. “It’s for sale, isn’t it?” she asked the saleswoman.

“Yes, I can look up the price for you.”

“We could give it to Grandma,” Katie said. “I bet she’d like to see it.”

A shadowy memory came back to Laura: she was in her teens and she and her mother were spending a Saturday together, when out of the blue, Iris had said, “When I was a child I always felt like an outsider.”

At the time, Laura hadn’t really thought about it. Her shy mother had always been resentful of her own beautiful and charming mother, and this had seemed like one more complaint about her childhood. But now, as Laura looked at the portrait in front of her and remembered her mother’s words, she decided for reasons she couldn’t begin to articulate that her mother wouldn’t want to see this painting of the woman whose dark eyes looked so much like her own. And furthermore, Laura didn’t want to show it to her.

“We can’t carry that thing around the city, Katie,” she said. “The frame is so old, I’m sure it would chip.” She turned to the saleswoman. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Well, perhaps I could interest you in something else. We have a couple of lovely watercolor sketches …”

“Not today, I’m afraid.”

“Would you like to sign our guest book? We can put you on our mailing list.”

It was the last thing Laura wanted to do, but the woman was clearly disappointed at not having made a sale. Laura signed the book.

“Now, are you absolutely sure—” the woman began, but Laura cut her off.

“I’m afraid we have to run,” she said. She opened the shop door quickly, and ushered Katie through it. “Good luck selling that painting,” she said over her shoulder to the saleswoman.

–—

Theo hadn’t gone to Rebecca Ruth’s birthday party in Manhattan. He’d been planning to, but at the last moment, he’d felt a little tired so Iris had gone without him. Now he was sitting on the front porch—something he had never done before he got sick, certainly not in the middle of the day—watching three little girls play hopscotch on the sidewalk in front of him, and letting his thoughts wander where they would. As they did so often these days, they went to his late mother-in-law, Anna. And Anna’s secret that she had carried to her grave—the secret that Theo would now carry to his. He had sworn he would never reveal it, and he wasn’t a man to break his word. But he was finding that knowing it was a bigger burden than he’d thought it would be. He hadn’t felt that way when he’d first learned about it, but perhaps your perspective on such things changed when you’d had a close brush with your own mortality.