William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“I don’t know,” said Caroline.

I turned it over, but there was no description.

The next was another picture she couldn’t identify, a photograph of an unattractive young woman with a dowdy print dress, unruly hair, and a long face with beady eyes. She looked like a young Eleanor Roosevelt with a long thin nose, which was rather sad for her since Eleanor Roosevelt was the ugliest inhabitant ever of the White House, uglier even than Richard Nixon, uglier even than Checkers. The woman in the photograph was just that ugly, and she seemed to know it, looking at the camera with a peculiar passion and intensity that was almost frightening.

“I don’t know who she is,” said Caroline. “I have no idea why my grandmother would save these pictures.”

“Who might know something about them?” I asked.

“These all seem very old, from the time before my father was born, but he might recognize them. Or Nat. They are the only ones who have been around long enough to possibly know.”

There were other photographs, more of the unattractive young woman, more of Christian Shaw, one of which showed him haggard and miserable in a mussed suit. It was taken, Caroline said, shortly before he died. She could tell, she said, because the sleeve of his jacket was loosely pinned to the side. “He lost his arm in the war,” she said. “In France, during the battle in which he won his medal.” There was also a postcard with a picture of Yankee Stadium on its grand opening, a sellout crowd, the Yankees, in pinstripes, at bat. From the distance it was impossible to tell, but maybe it was Ruth at the plate, or Jumping Joe Dugan, or Wally Pipp. There was no message written on the back.

The final picture was more modern, in faded color, a young couple with their arms around each other. The boy was tall and handsome, his hair long, his shirt tie-dyed, his jeans cut into shorts and his shoes sandals. He was laughing at the camera, giddy with life. The girl was wildly young, wearing jeans and a tee shirt, her brown hair as straight and as long as a folk singer’s. She was staring up at the boy with the glow of sated passion on her face. Caroline didn’t say anything and I blinked a bit before I realized who it was: Caroline and Harrington, just a couple of kids crazy in love.

“Who took it?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” she said softly, “but not Grammy. I don’t remember her ever taking a picture.”

When we had finished with the photographs, Caroline reached again into the box and took out a white business envelope with the words “The Letters” written in script on the outside. The handwriting was narrow and tight, the same as the writing on the trust documents. Inside the envelope was a key, an old key, tarnished, with an ornate head and a long shank and a bit that looked like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle.

“Any idea where the lock is?” I asked Caroline.

“None,” she said.

Morris took hold of the key and examined it. “This key is a key to a Barron tumbler lock of some sort. Such a lock I could open in a minute. Maybe three.”

A thin envelope taken from the box contained only one piece of paper, a medical bill from a Dr. Wesley Karpas, dated June 9, 1966, charging, for services rendered, $638.90. The services rendered were not specified, nor was the patient. It was addressed, though, to Mrs. Christian Shaw. I asked Caroline whether she had any idea about the medical services referred to in the bill and she had none.

The final envelope was a thick bundle that felt, from the outside, not unlike a bundle of hundred-dollar bills. Caroline opened the envelope and reached in and pulled out a sheaf of papers separated by clips into four separate sections, the whole bundle bound with twine. The papers were old, each about the size of a small envelope, yellowed, covered with the tight narrow handwriting that was already familiar, the handwriting of Faith Reddman Shaw. One edge of each of the papers was slightly ragged, as if it had been cut from a book of some sort.

Caroline looked at the top page, and then the next, and then the next. “These look to be from my grandmother’s diary, but that can’t be possible.”

“Why not?”

“She burned them all shortly before she died. She kept volumes and volumes of a diary from when she was a little girl, she would scribble constantly, but she never let anyone see them and a few years back she burned them all. We begged her not to, they were such a precious piece of our history, but she said her past was better forgotten.”

“I guess there were some pages,” I said, “she couldn’t bear to incinerate.”

Caroline, who was scanning through the excerpts, said, “This first one is about meeting my grandfather.”

“Maybe there are clues in these diary pages of who these people in the photographs, they are,” said Morris, “and why your grandmother, she kept this box buried like she did. We should maybe be reading these pages, no?”

“It’s up to Caroline,” I said.

She looked up and shrugged.

We all took seats around the table. The rusted and mangled box sat between us. We leaned forward and listened carefully as Caroline read out loud the surviving sections of her grandmother’s diary, one by one, the sections torn from the bound volumes before they were burned, the sections that her grandmother could not suffer to destroy. Halfway through, Caroline’s voice grew hoarse and Beth took over the reading. It grew still in the room, except for the song of the reader’s voice, as strangely foreign to the two women who shared the reading as if channeled from the dead Faith Reddman herself. At one point, while Beth read, Caroline suppressed a sob, and then waved us away when we offered comfort and told Beth to keep reading. The last line was a fervent wish for peace and love and redemption and after it was over we sat in silence for a long time, still under the spell of that voice from long ago.

“I think,” said Morris, “I know now who are these people in the photographs, but the crucial questions I can’t yet figure out.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like why these pictures are in her box, or who it is that killed the woman you found in the ground,” said Morris.

“Don’t you see?” said Caroline. “Isn’t it clear?”

“No,” said Beth. “Not at all.”

Caroline took the Distinguished Service Cross from around her neck and tossed it into the box, where it clanged, steel on steel. “My grandmother only said the kindest things about him. She worshiped him as if he was the most wonderful, most gentle man in the world. A war hero, she said, and so how could we think otherwise. Even in her diary she could barely say ill of him, but it’s all there, beneath her words of love and devotion, it’s all very clear. How could we ever have known it, how could we ever have imagined that our grandfather, Christian Shaw, was an absolute monster?”

May 24, 1911

Three new young men came for tea today, bringing to only twelve the number that have called this month. It would have been more, I am certain, except for those ugly rumors that continue to plague us. Is there no way to halt the lies? I fear if it weren’t for my mother’s wondrous teas, with her sugared almonds and her famous deep-fried crullers, we wouldn’t have any visitors at all, and I don’t understand it, I don’t understand why they insist on being so mean to us, I simply don’t. Of today’s young men one was fat and one was a dwarf, but one was interesting, I must admit. He is a Shaw of the department store Shaws. Their fortunes have declined in the last decades, but what matter is that to me? Why else would my father have given so much and fought so hard to earn his money if not to allow his daughters to be free of such worries, and so I won’t judge him by his lack of wealth, but by his pleasing manner and the way his suit drapes his thick shoulders. I think him even more splendid than Mr. Wister of the other day .