Pinky

On a wall in my spare room is a painting. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I have so many rooms that I have one to spare; it's just that room that has no name. I have a tiny eat-in kitchen; its two-person table is tucked into the corner under one of the windows. Under the other window is a sofa table, but it's nowhere near the sofa; I delegated it to the job of plant stand. It has an aged cracked walnut surface, which at one time most likely shone in a rich wooden tone but now has water stains from the twelve plants that live on its surface.

The plants are in varying stages of both life and death. The spider plant looks the most lively, its celery green leaves still spiky and bright; the Chinese money plant the worst. Its coin-shaped leaves are brown and crisp rather than green and lush. From there, you go through a six-foot opening to the living room which has two windows, one looks out to the german-shmeared brick wall of the apartments next door, the other to the east, a clear unfettered view of the bay, even if it is miles away. My sofa, a brown secondhand store find, fits my butt perfectly, albeit only on one end. My TV sits on top of a long four shelf bookcase, housed on the shelves are titles from finance to history to travel to romance. I stay away from horror and mainstream mysteries.

Beyond the living room is my bedroom. A king-size bed takes up most of the space, my heavy down comforter, pale blue with pink cabbage roses is neatly made. It's a place where I spend too little time and, sadly, have no one to share it with each night. My bathroom is across the hall. I painted it myself, hoping that butter-yellow walls would make the space feel bigger. I failed. The shower is the size of a phone booth (fot those that remember what those were like) but the amazing water pressure cures even my worst days.

And then finally (I say finally, but it takes less than two minutes to walk the entirety of my apartment), to the left of the bathroom is the spare room. It's not big enough to be a bedroom, but it's not a closet either; it has a closet. One on wall is a four square window that looks out to the same german-shmeer wall as the kitchen. In this 'spare' room I have a collection of things.

I have an English brass clock that doesn't work, but someday, when I own one of the circa eighteen hundred Victorians that line the streets of Dover, that clock will sit on one of the fireplace mantels. Against the wall by the window is a hoe, a pitchfork, and a shovel. Odd things for an apartment in the city, but when I have that Victorian, I'll also have a backyard with a garden where I grow tomatoes and cucumbers and I'll make my own pickles, just like my grandmother did. Speaking of which, pickles, not my grandmother (although I'll get to her in a minute), there are two or three crates of pickle jars, a water-bath canning pot, seals, lids, and, as another throwback to Gran, canning wax. There's a suitcase with seven destination stickers on it-London, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Bermuda, Montreal, Cadillac Mountain, Maine, and Fortuna, North Dakota. The last two in that list are where the sun first rises and last sets in the continental US. There's a massive crate of Christmas decorations because I love Christmas, and there are boxes of pictures from all the lives that were lived before mine. Some of those people are gone now but are still alive here in this room. On the wall above the suitcase, the jars, the Christmas décor and the gardening tools is the painting. Its heavy wood frame is a piece of art in itself. Something of the baroque period, it has carved oak leaves and acorns gilded in gold leaf. But the painting—oh, that beautiful painting—is my inspiration.

The boxes, the ones that hold the lives of all those before mine, are filled with pictures of my mom, my grandmother and then deeper, under the layers of snapshots and polaroid's and old black and whites, are three tintypes. They're kept in boxes to prevent them from being ruined. The pictures, black and gray on a thin sheet of iron, are of my great-great-grandmother, Honora Hayder. A woman I never met but a woman who is as alive to me as the people I see every day.

In two of them, she is unsmiling, somber-looking in the mouth, and she has a look of forced patience. But in the third one, my favorite, she is holding a painting. Her mouth is quirked up in an obvious smile, although I think she was trying hard not to show it. Her eyes shine bright; there's something beautiful about her, even if she wasn't considered classically beautiful. Her ears were too large (a trait I did not inherit), her nose a bit too long and narrow (a trait I did inherit), and her eyes were set rather wide apart and not quite even giving her an oddly impish look. That same painting and its gilded frame hang in my spare little room with all the other odds and ends of a life I am pursuing with the same relentless persistence of the woman in the tintype.

I am the youngest of the Hayder women. The last, if I don't have a daughter, of my great-great grandmothers' bloodline. Honora was born in 1883 and lived to be one hundred and three years old, my great-grandmother was one hundred and one, and I was lucky enough to know her. Gran is still alive, a spry and sassy eighty-six. My mother, who I have no memory of, died when I was one; she was thirty-two. At twenty-seven, I'm at the point where I can hear the ole' biological clock ticking, but it's faint and distant, and the other noise of life still drowns it out, but I do hope to have a baby girl someday.

Dad remarried when I was five. I have two younger sisters and a brother, but they have different blood than me. I call my stepmother mom because she's the only mother I've ever known, and she's wonderful. But in the boxes are pictures of my mom and Gran, as well as the greats. My blood. My people.

From those women I get most of the parts of who I am. Independent and strong-willed to a fault, which seems to be part of the reason I have no one to share my king-size bed; I frighten most men. I know what I want, and I have a plan to achieve it. I have the long nose of my great-great grandmother and my mother's long walnut brown hair and I have her eyes. Amber-brown that look almost mahogany in the sun. I wish I could see what color Honora's eyes were. There's no mention of their color in any of the letters she kept.

Oh! That's another thing in the spare room. A Crocket and Jones women's Oxford shoe box filled with correspondence between her and the man who first owned the painting. In there too, are newspaper clippings of his business ventures and his rather shocking divorce. One such letter states, In that I know I should feel saddened at the loss of my marriage, I find I can not. Rather, I am light of heart, knowing that my future holds no restraints or confines. Thank you for that Honora. I am free. Most of the letters are filled with promises of love and marriage, but as Sir Walter Raleigh so aptly put it, if all the world and love were young.

The love letters end abruptly in May of 1913, the same time as his second scandalous marriage was announced. There are however, two letters from him after his wedding. My dear Honora, I am heavy of heart at the thought of your eyes (If he'd just added a bit of flourish and told me what color her eyes were!) filled with tears. I am sorry, my dear woman, but as you once said, a heart knows who it loves. Ouch, using her own words against her to tell her he'd fallen for another woman. He goes on to thank her for returning the ring he'd purchased for her when he was not free to do so and finishes with a question: I wonder if you might be so inclined to return the painting I gifted to you at Christmas? I have enclosed a note for Mr. J. H. Fisher; he shall see it safely shipped back to me.

The letter was torn in half, but then, at some point, put back into the envelope, minus the note to J. H. I can only assume she kept it to remind herself of her foolishness, although she had other reminders: the baby she was carrying for one and the painting for another.

That painting, of a girl in a white dress, with a pink ribbon cinched around her waist, a bonnet looking as if it may blow in the wind at any moment, standing at the top of a rocky hill, a valley behind her, gold glinting clouds framing her sweet face, hangs on my spare room wall. Eventually, when I get my Victorian, it will hang as it was meant to, on a wall in a grand room, perhaps above the mantel with my brass clock keeping time below.

That the painting survived the trip east and the hundreds of stops and changeovers on the transcontinental railroad, was a wonder in itself. The first thing Honora did, upon disembarking the train, was run to the shipping car and wait anxiously for her beloved painting; then, painting in hand, she insisted the driver stop at the Imperial Photo studio on the way home. The photo they took that day shows a deliriously happy woman who feels loved, unashamed, and unaware of the baby inside her.

Months later, when her father could no longer deny the growing belly of his beloved daughter, she was sent, along with her mother, to live with their cousin in Portland. Honora took the painting with her. Her cousin, Ms. Shelby Hayder, introduced Honora's mother to several of the families in town, and she enjoyed a busy social life, while Honora was left at the family estate, secluded and hidden. She was to stay there until the baby was born, then the child would be sent away for adoption. If I were her, I would have been miserable and frightened. My great-great grandmother was neither.

She would go on to marry, have her baby girl and eventually another son.

When great-grand was eighteen, she learned the truth about how that came to be, and that her father, was not really her father. It seems Honora would sneak out of the house using the back stairs. She'd slip out the garden gate into the alley along High Street. She spent the first weeks of her forced solitude taking walks while her mother thought she was napping. Honora would walk to the harbor and let the fresh ocean air clear her mind. On one such walk, she met a man named Franklin Poole. He was tall, with dark brown hair and blue eyes. He was leaning against a piling watching a ship head out when she stopped and asked for the time. She needed to be home before three and she'd lost track of time. He was instantly beguiled, so he walked her home. It became his habit then to watch for her from his office window, when she'd pass by, he'd join her. He walked her home seven times. By the eighth, he asked her to marry him. Feeling honor bond, Honora told him she was pregnant. She didn't see him again for two weeks.

In the end, he showed up at Cousin Violet's house with a preacher in tow, and they were married there and then. That their baby was born several weeks early and looked to be a strong, healthy thing may or may not have been a matter of discussion among their peers, but since she was born after the 'I do's' it all settled down. A little over a year later their son Frank Jr was born. Their life was happy. The painting hung in their parlor and reminded Honora to hold her head high no matter what storm passed.

In 1917 their worlds would be torn in half. World War I left no home unscathed. Franklin died at the front. It made sense then for her to move back to Boston to be with her family. Honora was left with the task of deciding what to sell and what to keep. She sold several paintings to the Portland Museum of Art, and three to a collector in Booth Bay. The Cadillac they'd purchased just after their marriage brought in a nice sum, as did several pieces of furniture. Lastly, she sold the house on Summer Street. She returned to Boston a war-widow, but not without the means to support herself or her two children.  

At the wars end, the painting hung in the turret room on the first floor of her childhood home. Her father passed away in 1922, and when the great depression sank its teeth into nearly every home in the world. Honora sold the house in Boston and moved to a modest home in Portsmouth where her son worked.

The second letter from Honora's California lover is dated 1938.

Honora, I know times must be hard for you during this economic uncertainty; as we can not be sure of the future, I am writing to you with a business proposition. I would pay a good sum to have my painting returned to me. You can see Mr. J. H. Fisher for a quote.

The next day, she gifted the painting to my great-grandmother as a baby shower gift. It hung in her living room for the next fifty years. When I was ten (just a year younger than the girl in the painting), I asked Great Gran to make me a white dress with a pink ribbon so I could be the girl in the painting for Halloween. I didn't care that no one knew who I was or why I dressed the way I did. I was that girl on the hill, and I would be as independent and strong as her. When great-Gran died, Gran brought the painting to her house and hung it in her living room.

When I was in college, Gran's house caught fire. I drove home the next day to help, to see, to grieve. The site of her home, a dignified cape with an attached garage and huge double dormer windows, reduced to half its size; was shocking. The left side, where the garage once stood, was now a pile of smoldering beams, seeing the naked pipes pushed up where the bathroom once stood, reduced me to tears. The smell of all her worldly treasures, burnt and charred stung my nose. Great Gran showed up minutes later, shaking her head, "They're just things darling," she'd said. "Just things."

We picked our way into the part of the house still standing; the bright yellow curtains above the kitchen sink were black with soot, the refrigerator was melted and grotesque. The cupboards were charred, one door hung open, smashed, and broken teacups were scattered across the counter, which was still soaked with water. We gingerly made our way to the living room; the walls looked as if they'd been licked by some smoky monster with a forked tongue. The sofa on the far wall was burned on one end; its beige fabric melted to dark umber. Above the sofa, hanging just a smidge left of center, was the painting. I felt a sob catch in my throat and covered my mouth to keep from crying out. It had survived. Unscathed.

"Take her," said Gran, "get her out of this mess." I did so gladly.

I took her back to school and hung her in my dorm. After I received my bachelor of architecture degree, I packed her up and we moved to my little apartment. She's in the spare room because she doesn't fit in the living room. She belongs here, in the room where the memories of the women who loved her are housed. The women who kept her through heartache and loss, war and hope and fire. She is for me as she was for my great-great-grandmother, a symbol of spirit and independence. A symbol of life.