Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (7 page)

They looked fine to Sigrid. When she’d flown down to North Carolina for a cousin’s funeral back in October, she’d found these two wallet-size pictures among her grandmother’s albums and had asked to borrow them. “I don’t have any pictures of Dad,” she said. “Photographers’ spouses must be like shoemakers’ children.”

“You may have them to keep,” Grandmother Lattimore had said.

She seemed puzzled though. “There should be
boxes
of pictures. Anne was always taking Leif. I suppose it’s all those moves. They say seven moves are equal to one fire. If that’s true, it’s a wonder your mother hasn’t lost everything she ever owned.”

Anne gave her a stiff protective envelope and gathered up her own things while Sigrid slid the photographs inside and tucked the envelope into her pocket.

“Ready?”

Anne nodded and they said goodnight to the Bensingers, then plunged out into the icy wind and hurried down the crowded sidewalk to Sigrid’s car.

Inside, Anne shivered on the front seat beside her. “This is as cold as the night you were born. At least it’s not snowing, though.”

“Supposed to before morning,” Sigrid warned, edging the car into the stream of heavy traffic.

“Really? I’ve been too busy to read a paper or listen to a weather report.” She lapsed into silence.

The stop-and-go traffic had brought them only a short way west on Forty-third when Sigrid drew a momentary blank.

Most people didn’t have to stop and think where their mothers lived, especially if it were in the same borough. But Anne Harald had lived in every Manhattan neighborhood from Inwood to the Battery and seldom stayed in one place more than six months. (Her record was a Tuesday-to-Friday sojourn in Connecticut and she’d have been back in Manhattan on Thursday if any of her photography students had been free then to help her reload the U-Haul-It.) These frequent moves had been so much a part of Sigrid’s childhood that she’d never really questioned Anne’s reasons; but for a split second, Sigrid couldn’t remember if she still had that basement apartment in a Chelsea row house or had actually moved back to the Columbus Circle area as she’d threatened at Christmas. Then Anne said sharply, “If you’re going to turn on Ninth, shouldn’t you get over?” and Sigrid stopped feeling disoriented because Ninth Avenue was a one-way street heading south, which meant Chelsea and that pleasant residential block in the West Twenties.

Traffic was snarled around the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but once past that, it was only the usual rush hour anarchy: buses pulled in and out of stops in total disregard of smaller vehicles, no one paid attention to lane markings, and double-parkers and jaywalkers added the usual impediments to a smooth flow. Yet Sigrid could feel Anne getting tenser by the minute. Normally her mother was a relaxed passenger who chattered constantly, undistracted by near misses, not even when three lanes of cars and cabs were suddenly squeezed into one. Tonight she seemed edgy and short-tempered and she cut off every conversational gambit Sigrid offered.

Sigrid often felt like the older and staider of the two, but as tension mounted, she reacted like any guilty daughter and hastily examined her recent past to see if she’d done something to annoy her mother.

Nothing sprung to mind, unless . . . could it be their birthdays? Today was Sigrid’s; Anne’s was still two weeks away, on the twenty-second. This wasn’t one of those benchmarks that ended in a zero or five. Those usually elicited a rueful melancholy, an awareness of fugitive time. Tonight’s edginess was something different.

“You’re not coming down with something, are you?” she asked as she turned into Anne’s block.

“Of course not. I never get sick. You know that. There! Is that a parking space?”

“Where?” Sigrid asked, distracted.

“Never mind. There’s a motorcycle parked in it.”

Sigrid drew up in front of the brownstone that contained Anne’s basement apartment. “I’ll let you out here and go park the car.”

In that part of town, it was a statement easier made than accomplished, but eventually she found a legal space a block and a half away. Anne had left the door unlocked and was pouring boiling water into a large silver teapot when Sigrid returned.

Over the years, Anne Harald’s furniture had reduced itself to a few easily packed basic pieces—bed, table and chairs, three chests, two trunks that doubled as occasional tables, some lamps, two new futons to replace a couch that had finally fallen apart during the last move, a bookcase, and the five indispensable file cabinets which held all her papers and photographs. There were also a half-dozen or more cardboard packing boxes full of odds and ends that often never got unpacked between moves. These were usually stacked two high along a bare wall. Covered with exotic fabrics picked up in one of the world’s bazaars and topped with thin sheets of clear plexiglass, the large square cartons served where needed as sideboard or lamp tables.

Anne had an eye for color and design, and her collection of tablecloths, throws, quilts, and cushions complemented two very fine Persian rugs. These pulled her apartments together and created a sense of careless, comfortable luxury far above their actual monetary value.

The current apartment was a spacious floor-through. To counteract the basement’s natural darkness, Anne had hung on the front wall a sunburst-patterned patchwork quilt inherited from her grandmother. On the opposite wall was a large blowup of one of her award-winning photographs. Three women whose strong features proclaimed them mother, daughter, and granddaughter stood with linked hands. All three were dressed in dazzling white slacks and sweaters. Spring sunlight glanced off the gleaming white Washington Monument behind them and turned the yellow sashes they wore into gold. The granddaughter’s sash bulged over a baby carrier on her chest. Only the back of the baby’s fuzzy dark head could be seen but a bright purple balloon tied to its carrier read “I’m a choice!”

A laminated life-sized cutout of Anne herself stood just inside the door, arms outstretched in welcome. It was a long-ago housewarming gift from a fellow photographer and Anne used it as a coat tree. Sigrid added her coat and scarf as Anne brought in tea and placed the tray on a trunk that served as a coffee table between the two futons.

Without asking how Sigrid wanted hers, Anne filled a chipped mug from the elegant teapot, added a slice of lemon, stirred in a spoonful of honey and handed it over to her daughter.

Sigrid smiled at the mismatched mugs, the silver badly in need of a good polishing, and the chipped pottery platter of wheat rolls and butter. “Grandmother would have a fit if she saw this.”

“She has seen it,” Anne smiled back. “And every time, she threatens to send me a gallon of silver polish and ten place settings of her Royal Doulton.”

Sigrid buttered a roll and bit into it hungrily. “I’d almost forgotten you even had this tea set.”

“Me, too,” Anne admitted. “I came across it when I was hunting for these.” She pushed two picture frames across the trunk top to Sigrid.

Like the ornate tea set, they were sterling silver and badly tarnished.

The tea set had been a wedding present from Anne’s paternal grandmother, a traditional Southerner who had considered silver and crystal as much a prerequisite to marriage as the license; and Sigrid suspected that the frames were also wedding gifts. They were chased with borders of delicate wildflowers and would probably polish up beautifully.

“Who gave you these?”

“Your Aunt Kirsten and Uncle Lars,” Anne said, naming the two who’d been Sigrid’s closest substitute for grandparents on her Harald side. “They were brought from Copenhagen around 1890. I thought you might like to have them.”

“I would,” said Sigrid.

She had never been sentimental about family heirlooms, especially heirlooms that had to be polished or treated gingerly, but these seemed appropriate for her father’s pictures and she immediately slipped one into each frame. A perfect fit. She stood them up side by side on the trunk top. “Thanks, Mother.”

Anne rose abruptly. ‘‘I’ll get the box. Mind, these aren’t your birthday present. You don’t get that till next week.”

With Sigrid’s birthday on the eighth and Anne’s on the twenty-second, the established ritual called for dinner together and an exchange of presents on the fifteenth if Anne were in town.

Sigrid watched her mother swathe the pictures in old Christmas tissue and put them back in a box. She was puzzled by the sudden return of Anne’s edginess. “Are you sure you’re not coming down with something?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?” Anne snapped.

“You just don’t seem yourself tonight. Was it a rough day or something?”

“Or something.” She seemed to hear the waspish tone in her voice and forced a smile. “Sorry. I guess the years are getting to me.” She spooned more honey into her own mug and stirred it purposefully.

“Oh, come on, Mother. What’s really bothering you?”

“I don’t know. A combination of things, I suppose.”

Awkwardly, because they seldom exchanged emotional confidences, Sigrid gestured to the box Anne had laid on the futon beside her. “Is it because of Dad? Does his picture stir up a lot of memories?”

Anne hesitated, then nodded “And Mickey Cluett. Is it true he was shot?”

“How’d you hear that?”

“Wasn’t it in the paper?” Anne answered vaguely. “What happened? Will you be investigating?”

Sigrid shook her head. “It happened in Brooklyn. Probably killed for crack money. All they know right now is that he was shot on his way home from a neighborhood bar, sometime before midnight last night, I think. Did you know him very well?” she asked curiously.

“Not really. In the early days when Leif and I were first married, Mickey used to stop by the apartment occasionally.

“That’s right,” said Sigrid. “I forgot. When Dad first joined the force, he was assigned to the old One-Six and Cluett said he worked there, too.” She started to take a sip of tea and then remembered something else.

“I thought you said you were too busy today to read a paper or even listen to a weather report.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Sigrid! Are you going to cross-examine everything I say?” Her spoon clattered sharply against the silver tray as she patted the pockets of her jeans and looked around the room. “What did I do with my cigarettes?” she muttered.

Sigrid set her mug down firmly. “Okay, Mother. What’s going on?”

“There, you see?” Anne said illogically. “You made me forget that I gave up smoking a year ago. I still dream about cigarettes, did I tell you?”

Words spilled from her lips, becoming subtly more Southern in pacing and inflection the more she chattered. “I dream that I’ve rationed myself to two cigarettes a day and Lordy, Lordy, do they taste good. But at the same time, I’m sort of disappointed at my weakness, you know? Because I
did
take a vow never to light up another and I sort of
know
that in my dreams and yet—”

Her words trailed off as her eyes met Sigrid’s level gaze and she gave a rueful, hands up laugh.
“Oy gevalt!”
she said. In her present mood, the Yiddish phrase sounded more like ‘I give up.’ “I always start babbling when you look at me like that.”

“Mother—”

“It’s okay honey. I know you can’t help it.” She smile brightly and felt Sigrid’s cup. “It’s cold. Want me to heat this up? And what about something to eat? I have cold chicken if you’d like a sandwich or—” She ran a hand through her tangled curls. “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” said Sigrid. She slipped off her boots and tucked her feet beneath her on the futon.

Anne took a deep breath. “Mac called me this afternoon.”

“Mac? Captain McKinnon?”

Her mother nodded.

It was like stepping down on a step that wasn’t there. “I didn’t realize you and he were that connected.”