Chapter 15 #2
Then the photograph is in the folder. The folder is in the box. There’s a lid on the box, and Mabel Libby’s hand is flat on top of it.
“Now,” she says, “are you going to help me with the hair, or are you going to make me do the hair alone?”
“You love the hair.”
“I do love the hair,” Mabel admits, and pours the tea.
I find the second photograph at about half past eleven, out of the fifth box, and I find it because Mabel has gone to answer the telephone.
I’m not proud of the timing.
It’s a stiff card, gone brown at the corners, with the studio’s name in gold along the bottom edge. Six men and two women stand in front of a brick building that is unmistakably the old reading room, because the reading room still has that window and the same idiotic little iron rail.
On the back, in ink, in a careful nineteenth-century hand:
Opening of the Reading Room, October 1892. J. A. Volkov, Esq. (center), the benefactor.
The benefactor is in the middle of the group with his hands behind his back. Julian.
I sit down.
Nineteen-oh-four was one thing. Nineteen-oh-four was a nameless man at the back of a crowd, and even Monday, some part of me could have made room for coincidence if I’d demanded it hard enough. This is a name.
Volkov.
His name, or one of them, written in ink in 1892 in a town of two thousand people who notice when someone paints a porch.
“That’s the reading room,” says Mabel behind me, and I nearly go through the ceiling.
“Volkov.”
“Mm.”
“Mabel. There’s a Volkov on the back of this.”
“There has been a Volkov up on that hill on and off since before my mother was born.” She takes the card, looks at it about as long as you’d look at a bus timetable, and writes a number on a folder.
“They come and they go. The money never goes anywhere. That road gets graded every spring whether there’s a soul in that house or not. ”
“Who pays for that?”
“The house pays for it,” says Mabel, in exactly the tone you’d use about the tide.
She doesn’t look at me. Mabel Libby has spent fifty years looking at people over the tops of her glasses when they say something interesting, and she doesn’t look at me once.
The third photograph is in the MYSTERY shoebox, which is where it has apparently been since 2004. I go through it at ten past twelve while eating a sandwich I made at six this morning and have entirely lost interest in.
It’s a snapshot rather than a studio portrait. Cheap paper, with a deckled edge and that flat grey of the late thirties. Nine people stand on the steps of the customs house in overcoats, squinting into a March wind, one woman holding her hat on.
Someone has written on the back in pencil:
Customs House, March 1938. Mr. J. Thorne (back, left), has bought it for the town.
I put the sandwich down. He’s at the back on the left. Julian. Again.
He isn’t squinting. No one else in the photograph is standing still. You can see the movement everywhere—a coat blurred at the hem, a hand caught halfway to a hat, the whole line shifting against the wind.
Julian’s face is as sharp as the granite behind him. Dark coat. Hands behind his back. Weight dead center. Thorne. That’s what makes my stomach drop. Not Volkov.
I had already made room for a Volkov in 1892 because a family can be a family.
Families stay. There are four generations of Finches on Blackthorn Road.
Julian could have been Aleksander Volkov and then another Volkov and another after that, each one a son or a nephew or a cousin who inherited the house and happened to have the same face.
But you do not get a Volkov in 1892 and a Thorne in 1938 and a Volkov again now out of one bloodline. You get that out of the same man with a good lawyer and a lot of time.
I take a photograph of the back with my phone. Then the front. My hands aren’t entirely steady, and I have to do the front twice.
Arthur Finch comes in at half past twelve with a cardboard box of hymnals no one asked for, because Arthur has been bringing things no one asked for to this building since 1997. He stands in the doorway looking at the table with the expression of a man who has found the source of a smell.
“You’ve got the Sturgis stuff out.”
“We have.”
“There’ll be nothing in it.”
“Arthur,” says Mabel. “Sit down or go away.”
He does neither, obviously. He comes over and looks down at the customs house snapshot on the table with his coat still buttoned, and I watch a man of ninety go absolutely quiet for two full seconds.
“That’s the handover,” he says. “My father was doing the gardens up there then. Nineteen thirty-eight when he started. Thorne was the one paying him.”
“You remember him?”
“I was two,” says Arthur, with enormous scorn. “I remember the car.”
“But you’ve seen him. In pictures.”
“Seen the lot of them. Cousins, nephews, someone’s someone. You never got told and you never asked. That’s manners.”
Something inside me catches on that. You never got told and you never asked. Arthur looks at the photograph again.
“Never changed, though, the men who owned that house. Every one of them. My grandfather said it, my father said it, and I’ve said it, and there’s not one of you ever wanted to hear it.”
“Said what, exactly?”
“That they don’t change. You’d see one at forty and then you’d see the next one at forty. Different names, same face, generation on generation.” He gives me a sharp look. “My father used to say you could set the tide by them.”
Generation on generation. Except there were no generations.
Mabel puts a hymnal on top of the photograph.
“Thank you, Arthur,” she says. “Do you want tea or do you want to be difficult?”
“I’ve got the gutters.”
“You haven’t done a gutter since 2003.”
“I supervise,” says Arthur, and goes.
Mabel takes the hymnal off the snapshot and squares it on the table with two fingers.
“Mabel.”
“Mm.”
“How many of them were there? Up at that house.”
“Depends who’s counting, dear.”
“You’re counting. You’ve been counting since before I was born.”
She writes a number on a folder in her beautiful upright hand and does not look up.
“There was a Thorne,” she says. “There was a Volkov before him and there’s a Volkov now.
There was a Voss in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, who put up the marine railway, and a Blackthorne before any of them, which is where the house gets its name.
None of them much cared to have their names on anything. ”
She caps the pen.
“It is all in the town book. It’s been in the town book my entire life, and in seventy-five years you are the second person to ask me about it.”
“Who was the first?”
Mabel finally looks at me. Then she pushes the box of mourning jewelry across the table.
“Do the hair, dear.”