Mark turned the page. Again familiar faces-those of Louisa and Lavinia, nee Peters, caught for posterity, so long as paper and chemicals would survive. The stilted, simpering smiles seemed unbearably poignant to Pat. Could they have manufactured even a pretense at happiness if they had known what the next few years would bring?
"Mr. Morton must have had this album," she said.
"Or copies of the same photos," Mark said. "Louisa was his grandmother, and Mr. Bates was his grandfather. He didn't go farther back with the Bateses; I guess they weren't distinguished enough. No Revolutionary War heroes, or anything."
They were clustered close around Mark, who had taken upon himself the position of master of ceremonies and official turner of pages. Kathy, too polite to elbow her elders aside, stood on tiptoe to see over Mark's shoulder. Mark lifted his arm and pulled her close to the table, so that she was in front of him instead of behind him. His arm remained draped casually around her shoulders. Pat glanced at Josef. His lips had tightened, but Mark's gesture had been made so smoothly and so naturally that he could hardly complain without sounding foolish.
Mark turned the page.
There were two photographs, one facing the other. The first was that of a young man standing straight and proud in the dark of a Union uniform, his face stiff under the unbecoming short-brimmed forage cap. But the audience paid that photograph little heed. Three pairs of eyes focused, aghast and unbelieving, on the picture on the opposite page.
The girl wore her prettiest party dress, dotted with tiny flowers, ruffles framing her white shoulders, billowing skirts reducing her waist to ridiculous proportions. Ringlets tied with ribbon framed a smiling girlish face… Kathy's face.
Pat's eyes moved from the yellowing photograph to the living features of the girl who stood sheltered by Mark's arm.
Kathy had heard the gasps of surprise, but she alone, of them all, seemed unaware of what she saw. Naturally, Pat thought, her mind reeling; people don't really know how they look to others, they see only a mirror image, reversed…
Kathy let out a yelp of pain. Mark's fingers, which had been resting lightly on her arm, crooked like claws.
"What's the matter?" she demanded shrilly. Her eyes moved from Pat to her father.
"They aren't the same," Pat said. Her own voice sounded strange in her ears.
It was true, though; the pictured face was not identical with Kathy's. It was plumper, fuller of cheek. Kathy's exquisite coloring was not reproduced by the brownish tints of the old daguerreotype. Indeed, as Pat continued to stare, she found less and less to marvel at. The face in the photograph was that of a girl about Kathy's age, her inexperienced charm the same; the clustered curls were obviously blond. But the resemblance ended there.
Mark's taut hand relaxed its hold, but he was still in-capable of speech, an almost unheard-of situation.
"Who is she?" Pat asked. "The pictures aren't labeled. I don't know why people assume their descendants will know Great-Aunt Mabel and Cousin George…"
"That's not Cousin George," Mark said. "That's Susan Bates. Don't deny it, Mom; who else could it be? The costume is right for the period, the age is right… And that must be her brother Edward, opposite. He was a Union officer, we know that."
Now Pat was able to wrench her eyes away from Susan (Mark was right, it had to be Susan) to look at her brother. The cool, direct dark gaze was his father's, but the resemblance between Edward and his sister was just as plain.
"He's so proud of that uniform," Kathy murmured. "You can see it in his face. Actually, he's kind of cute."
Pat realized that the girl was still unaware of the resemblance that had struck the others. Looking up, she saw that Mark and Josef were both staring at her, radiating the same silent, imperative message. As if I would tell the child, she thought indignantly. The whole thing is moonshine anyway; pure imagination and nerves.
"They were a handsome family," she said, in response to Kathy's comment.
"The men were," Kathy said. "I don't know; I think Susan is stupid-looking."
"Oh, yeah?" Mark had recovered himself. "I think she's foxy. Cute figure."
"How can you tell?" Kathy demanded. "All those skirts…"
Mark put on a convincing leer.
"What shows is very nice, very nice indeed. Girls in those days used to brag about having waists so small a man could span it with his two hands. I'll bet yours isn't-"
Kathy giggled and wriggled as he put his hands around her waist. With only a little squeezing, his fingers met. The gesture, meant-in part, at least-as an attempt to amuse and distract, was not such a bright idea. It only reinforced an identity the others were struggling to deny.
"Go on, Mark," Josef snapped. "Turn the page."
Considerably subdued, Mark obeyed.
The next photo was a family group. The father stood, stern in muttonchop whiskers, his hand placed in a proprietary grasp on his wife's shoulder. She was seated- probably, Pat thought, because she was holding a baby. Otherwise she would have stood behind her seated lord and master. Five other children clustered around the mother's skirts. The youngest was a toddler. Held erect by his brother's ruthless grip on his collar, he looked as if he were choking.
"Good heavens," Pat said, half amused, half horrified. "Look at that lot! Six… Considering the infant mortality rate, even among the well-to-do, she must have had several other pregnancies. No wonder the poor woman looks exhausted. I wonder who she is."
"Don't you know?" Mark said. "Look at her again."
Perhaps she caught the truth from Mark's mind. She was almost ready to admit the feasibility of such a relatively sane idea as thought transference. Or perhaps it was some other sense that forced the knowledge into her mind.
"It can't be," she exclaimed.
"The man is Henry Morton," Mark said inexorably. "His picture is in the Morton genealogy, that's how I know. He was Susan's husband."
And the woman was Susan. There was no doubt about it when one looked closely. And yet it was no wonder Pat hadn't recognized her. Kathy had said Susan was stupid -looking. In truth the young girl's face had lacked character; it was unformed, as young faces often are. But instead of gaining distinction or hardness with maturity, Susan's face had lost what little identity it had ever possessed. The very outlines were curiously blurred.
"No," Kathy said. "Oh, no, Mark. She's… old."
The word was an epithet, a condemnation. Pat shivered.
"Not old," Josef said. "Beaten. That is the face of a woman who has given up hope. How old was she when this photograph was taken?"
"She died at the age of thirty," Mark said.
"Six children," Pat muttered. "Depending on when she married… A baby every eighteen months?"
"She died in childbirth," Mark said. "With number nine. Two had died in infancy. That's Henry, Junior, the man who wrote the genealogy."
His finger jabbed at the page, indicating the smug-looking lad in the sailor suit who had a stranglehold on his little brother.
The rest of the photographs were anticlimactic. There were no more pictures of Susan, although her children appeared now and then in pictures of family gatherings, as the century wound down toward 1900. By 1890 the stripling Lieutenant Edward Bates had become a portly patriarch, beaming paternally at his increasing progeny and their offspring. Not only had he survived the war, but he had prospered, if prosperity was measurable in inches of girth and increasing children. Pat felt some sympathy for Kathy's obvious disappointment and disgust; no doubt it was distressing to see slim youth buried in fat and complacency. But she had no difficulty in recognizing Edward Bates. His eyebrows whitened and thickened as time went on, but the eyes below them were his father's eyes-steady, dark, demanding, belying the easy geniality of his plump cheeks.