She was at her most sociable on our porch around the time the pelicans were flying home in their straight line from their day’s fishing. She seemed to enjoy whatever I had to say.
“Well, Marcus, what do you have to report?” She would ask this while gazing at the ocean, not turning her head to look at me. This freed me to talk more easily. I remembered how, in my old life, after Mom and I had moved to the mountains and we didn’t know anybody, I had wished for someone to “report to.” Mom mostly came home too exhausted to make more than a dutiful inquiry into my day. Aunt Charlotte, facing out to sea as if she could accept whatever arose in my mind, was the ideal listener. Like the ghost-boy, and like Wheezer before him, she harkened to a good “true.” As with them, I could feel her interest quicken when I was on the right track. She liked hearing about my first trip to the library with Lachicotte.
“I’m sorry you didn’t have better luck,” she said when I complained about the slim pickings on the microfiche and in the fiftieth anniversary magazine. “I know you were hoping to find something about that family, the boy in particular. I can see why he would capture your imagination.”
That’s when I came close to telling her about the ghost-boy. Not dangerously close, but closer than I had ever come to telling Mom about showing Wheezer the forbidden photograph and about why I beat him up the next day. I had learned during my sessions with the psychiatrist that certain experiences must be kept to myself—perhaps forever. So all I finally said to Aunt Charlotte was that it made me mad that a whole family could be wiped out of human memory as though they’d never existed. Her reply was that billions of people had suffered that fate and billions more were destined to be forgotten as though they never existed. (“That is, if we don’t all destroy this planet first.”) She sounded satisfied with the prospect.
The finger-painting part of the library story made her snort with laughter. She wanted to hear again how I had first thought Lachicotte had been painting a white mountain and then a white beast, and didn’t know till he told me later that it had been a farewell portrait of his Bentley. Then she wanted my assessment of the niece’s painting of the yellow roses. I told her she would have judged it a competent little painting, “like you said about that woman’s painting of Grief Cottage that started you painting.”
“Really?”
“Well, I never saw that woman’s painting, but the niece’s roses were something you might want to frame, or at least tape up on a wall, especially if you knew the artist. The roses in a jar had a nice—I don’t know the art word for it, but the way the paint sticks up from the paper sort of imitates the way the artist painted it.”
“I think you mean impasto, if it was thick. Was it thick?”
“Yeah, it stuck up in little whorls. Of course, she was pinching it up with her fingers.”
“Or you could say ‘brushwork.’ ‘Fingerwork’ in this case. You describe paintings very well, Marcus.”
“She told Lachicotte she hadn’t enjoyed herself so much in years. She said adults forgot how to play. That’s why he bought her that paint set while you were having your surgery.”
“What kind of paints did he get?”
“I think he said water-based. But they weren’t just kids’ finger paints.”
“ ‘Water-based’ covers a large choice. And they all wore gloves?”
“Those thin latex gloves. The kids had little kid-size gloves.”
“I can see the advantage of gloves when you’ve got a roomful of pre-kindergarteners, but I would think gloves would deaden your tactile advantages. I don’t know. I’ve never finger-painted.”
During our afternoon porch talks, Aunt Charlotte extracted more of my history. Some information I volunteered; other disclosures escaped as a sort of overflow. Since I had already spilled the beans to Lachicotte about my secret father, I figured I might as well admit to my only living relative that I had no idea who he was. I had been unpacking more boxes from the old apartment life. It made me increasingly sad that so many of the contents, things Mom and I had formerly liked or needed—or were even proud of—went straight into the black bags. I showed Aunt Charlotte the small photo in the silver frame that had ended my friendship with Wheezer. Like Wheezer, she turned the picture sideways and shook it.
“Could we open this frame?” she asked, making me wonder why I had never thought of this myself. She handed it over to me and as I was folding back the four metal clips that held it in place, I let myself imagine there would be a name of somebody on the back of the picture. But it turned out to be a glossy photo cut out of a book, most likely a yearbook Aunt Charlotte said, because there was a photo of another man, posed the same way, on the back.
“Well, that’s that,” I said angrily.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s that’?”
“I’ll never know who my father was because there’s nobody left to tell me.”
“Well, he’s a nice-looking man,” she said. “He has your wide-apart eyes and quizzical eyebrows, and I definitely see a likeness in the set of the mouth when something annoys you.”
“You know the actor Alec Guinness?”
“Not personally, but I know who he is,” said Aunt Charlotte with a welcome return to her old dryness.
“His mother never told him who his father was, either. She died without telling him and he never found out. He wrote about it in his autobiography. Mom said this photo was taken before she knew my father, when he was a lot younger.”
“So you did talk about him.”
“Not much. She said he would have been proud of me if he had lived to know me and that I would be proud of him. But she wanted to wait until I was a little older before she said any more. The reason I have Mr. Harshaw’s name is because people at the factory remembered him, though he had moved away by then. So Mom could get away with saying that they had tried for a reconciliation and it hadn’t worked and I was the result. Mr. Forster, the factory owner, was one of those—what’s the word for someone who owns the business but wants it to seem like everybody’s just one big family?”
“Feudal? Paternalistic? I know what you mean.”
“Somebody once told Mom Mr. Forster was a patriarch in socialist’s clothing. I think the person meant it as a joke, but I’m not sure.”
“It’s a provocative remark, however it was meant.”
“But Mom liked the way Forster’s factory took care of its workers. They even had a free nursery so the workers could visit their babies at lunchtime. She said long before I was thought of she used to pass the nursery and think how nice it would be to have a little somebody she could pop in and see.”