Downstairs, she sat down on the sofa beside Anita. That metal box was on the coffee table now, waiting.
Elizabeth stared at it. For a blessed few seconds, she forgot about the debacle at the gallery.
She imagined a letter to a daughter, or better yet, a journal of precious memories. Photographs. Mementos. She turned to Anita.
Anita looked pale in the lamplight. Fragile. She’d chewed on her lower lip until it was raw. “I brought this with me. I knew I’d know if the time was right to open it.” She tried to smile, but the transparent falsity of it only underscored her nervousness. “Your daddy loved you. More than anything on this earth.”
“I know that.”
“He was a man of his time and place, and he believed that men protected their women from anything … unpleasant.”
“Come on. I know that.”
Anita reached for the box, flipped the latch, and opened it. Elizabeth noticed that her stepmother’s fingers were shaking as she handed the box over.
Elizabeth took it onto her lap.
Inside, a rubber-banded pile of scallop-edged photographs were piled in one corner. A long cardboard tube lay diagonally from end to end.
She withdrew the pictures first. There, on the top of the heap, was Mama. She was sitting on the porch swing, wearing pink pants and a flowery chiffon blouse with small cap sleeves and a Peter Pan collar. Her legs were tucked up underneath her; only a bit of bare feet stuck out. Her toenails were polished.
She was laughing.
Not smiling, not posing. Laughing.
A cigarette dangled from her right hand and a half-finished cocktail was at her feet. She looked marvelously, wonderfully alive.
For the first time, she saw her mother as a real woman. Someone who laughed, who smoked cigarettes and wore pedal pushers, who polished her toenails.
“She’s beautiful,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes.”
The next picture was of a different woman. Someone with intense, flashing eyes and curly black hair that hung in a tangled curtain to her heavy hips. She looked like an Italian peasant, earthy and hot-tempered. In every way the opposite of her delicate, aristocratic mother.
All of the remaining pictures were of the other woman. At the beach … on a white-painted porch … at a county fair … flying kites.
Elizabeth frowned in disappointment.
At last, she picked up the cardboard tube, uncapped it. Inside was a rolled-up canvas. She eased it out, spread it on the coffee table.
It was a painting of the dark-haired woman, done in vibrant acrylics. She was reclined on a mound of red pillows, with her black hair artlessly arranged around her. Except for a pale pink shawl that was draped across her ample hips, she was nude. Her breasts were full, with half-dollar-sized brown nipples.
The detail was exquisite. It reminded her of an early Modigliani. Elizabeth could almost feel the angora of the shawl and the velvet softness of the woman’s tanned skin. There were hundreds of pink and yellow rose petals scattered across the pillows and on the woman’s flesh.
There was a sadness to the work. The woman’s black eyes were filled with a desperate longing. As if, perhaps, she were looking at a lover who’d already begun to leave her.
Elizabeth glanced at the signature. Marguerite Rhodes.
Time seemed to slow down. She could hear the thudding of her own heart. “Mama was an artist?”
“Yes.”
There it was, after all these years, the link between them, the thing that had been handed down from mother to daughter, a talent carried in the blood. Elizabeth looked up. “Why didn’t Daddy tell me?”
“That’s the only painting there is.”
“So? He knew I dreamed of being a painter. He had to know what this would have meant to me.”
Anita looked terribly sad. For a frightening moment, Elizabeth thought her stepmother was going to draw back now, too afraid of what she’d revealed to go forward. “Remember when I told you that your mother had run away from Edward? That was in 1955.”
Elizabeth noticed the date on the painting: 1955.
Anita sighed heavily. “The world was different then. Not as open and accepting of things … as we are now.”
Elizabeth looked at the painting again; this time she saw the passion in it. The falling-snow softness of the brushstrokes, the poignant sorrow in the woman’s eyes. And she understood the secret that had been withheld from her all these years. “My mother fell in love with this woman,” she said softly.
“Her name was Missy Esteban. And, yes, she was your mother’s lover.”