Elizabeth 09: Legacy

Gregory, as noted, was my great grandfather. So they did indeed reunite, although the date of that letter was nearly a year after my grandfather was born, meaning their separation (which I'd never heard of before) had occurred during their marriage rather than before.

Whatever he had been up to with Agnes and Great Grandma, Benjamin never mentioned it again. His remaining letters consisted only of tales from the front and fond reminiscences of Great Grandma alone. The very last one had him entertaining thoughts of migrating to America when the war was over, thanks to the wonderful tales of the place he'd heard from their Yankee allies. When I finished reading it, I couldn't help hoping perhaps he had survived and gone to America, and simply hadn't kept in touch. But I couldn't even begin to convince myself that such a diligent correspondence would come to such a sudden stop due to anything other than death.

A less salacious, but bigger riddle for me was just how Elizabeth and Jonathan fit into their saga. While Great Grandma was a local legend and Agnes Marlston was a national hero, their mutual best friend seemed to have faded into relative obscurity...and yet in their own time, Elizabeth was clearly the leader of the gang. That much I could gather just by how frequently her name popped up in correspondence that was mostly about other topics entirely.

There were letters from Elizabeth as well, and of course from Agnes - decades worth of them - but I had done nothing on my thesis all day, and forced myself to put off solving the mystery for the moment. Carefully I bundled all Benjamin's letters back together as I had found them and went out for a walk to clear my head. Far less carefully, I let that walk stray to the centre of Westfordshire City's revitalized downtown, home of Marlston Square and the City Baths across the street. The tour guide had mentioned that Agnes and Great Grandma and their friend Elizabeth had been frequent visitors there, and so I found my imagination once again running wild with wonder about their era as I admired the statue of Ms. Marlston in the dying summer sunlight. There she stood, towering above the high street she had adored, in a sensible blazer and skirt with a pad in one hand and a pen in the other, looking quizzically across the street as if she were getting ready to interview people on their way in or out of the bathhouse. I followed her gaze across the street and did my best to imagine her and my great grandmother on their way through the heavy, ornate doors that had no doubt stood where the glass revolving door was now, with the equally bulky modest swimsuits of the era packed away discreetly somewhere.

On that amusing note, I reminded myself to redouble my efforts to find a photograph of the baths in that era; there must have been at least one somewhere. When I got back to my room, I allowed myself a quick look through the box to see if I could find one. But there were none. How odd that none of Great Grandma's friends had ever thought to snap a single photograph of what seemed to be the centre of their social life!

The next day dawned to grey skies and the threat of rain, so I had no trouble convincing myself to get back to my research at the historical society. (The fact that I now knew I was shuffling about the same building where so many of those wonderful photographs had been taken did make it a lot easier, I must admit.) My curiosity about the city's famous baths being hopelessly piqued, though, I wrapped up my research early that afternoon and took the bus down to Marlston Square. After pausing on the grass to admire the statue once again, I went across the street and paid my non-member fee, and found the men's locker room. As it was a weekday afternoon, there were few guys there and no waiting for the mandatory shower. With that out of the way, I put on my swimming trunks and stepped out into the steamy room where the warm water greeted me in a shallow, immaculate blue tiled pool. There were two older men chatting in one corner and a mother with three little kids in another, and the glass windows revealed that the storm had finally begun. I rather suspected there would be many more newcomers shortly; but for the moment I had a corner of the huge bath to myself. I lowered myself into the hot water and sat back to indulge.

And I wondered. About my great grandmother, and her friends, and just what the baths might have looked like back in the day, and whether these silly rumours had any truth to them, and many other questions I was only just forming as I combed through those letters. At some point I closed my eyes, the better to imagine all the scenes that were playing out in my mind. I was very much awake, but lost in thought, and so I don't know how much time had gone by before I heard the splash just to my left.

I opened my eyes to see a pleasantly plump young woman in a lime green swimsuit smiling apologetically at me. "I'm sorry, sir," she said. "I do need to work on my entrance, don't I?"

"That's quite all right," I told her. "I wasn't asleep, just daydreaming."

"I come here to do that all the time," she said. "Especially at a time like this when it's not too crowded. I'm lucky, I work from home. After five o'clock this place is jampacked."

"So you live here?"

She nodded. "About four years now, and I've been a member here since my first month in town. Nothing like it, although I'm told it used to be much better back in the old days, before the war."

"That's just why I'm here," I told her. "I'm in town to do some research for my thesis, and while I'm here I'm also trying to learn some things about my great grandmother. Apparently she was a close friend of Agnes Marlston's and they used to come here a lot."

"Really!" She looked delighted. "Agnes Marlston, she was such a wonderful writer, wasn't she? And her days here, they say that was the golden age of the baths - and of Westfordshire City in general. Such a wonderful time to be young here, they say. And your great grandmother was a friend of hers?"

"Yes. You might have heard of her, too, actually: Irene Wright?"

"You're joking!" my new friend exclaimed. "I'm an old girl from Yarmouth myself, where half the campus is named after her, as you know. I spent so much time gazing at her portrait in morning assembly I could probably draw a replica now." Pausing for breath, she smiled. "I suppose you've heard the stories of your great grandmother and Ms. Marlston?"

"Only just heard them for the first time," I said. "I had no idea."

"It's one of those things we all heard about constantly at school. No one seemed quite sure if it was true, of course, but you heard it all the time. Of course it is plausible when you recall they both spent an awful lot of time here at the baths."

"Why would that make any difference?" I asked. "You probably know, women's swimsuits back then were basically dresses, extremely modest. They might just as well have been fully clothed."

She shook her head. "No, there's something you obviously haven't been told about the baths back then. In those days they had separate baths for women and men, and you bathed naked!"

"Really!" That explained the lack of pictures all right!

She nodded with a grin that told me all I needed to know about how my reaction appeared to her.

"You're right, I had no idea. The more I learn about those days..."

"We do tend to think they were a lot more innocent than they really were, don't we?" she said.

"Couldn't have said it better myself."

My new friend eventually introduced herself as Darla, and we talked for some time about all she knew about Great Grandma. Which really wasn't all that much, but I welcomed every bit I could get. "Amazingly tolerant of children being children, is what they always said. Yarmouth had a reputation for being a lot less of a stickler for the rules than most schools like it, yet we still stacked up really well in the rankings, and everyone said it was because of Ms. Wright's philosophy and the way she had always run the place," Darla recalled. "Teach them and help them grow, but always remember they are still children and that shouldn't be wasted. The one hard rule she always had was no bullying, ever. That was a godsend for me, Ben, since I was a little plump - still am, as you can see - and anyone who gave me a hard time about it was very sorry!"

We talked until well past the end of the storm, and finally I had to tear myself away and get back to the historical society and at least get an hour or two of work in. Darla followed my lead and we shook hands and parted ways at the locker room doors. She had proven to be as pleasant to talk to as to look at in her elegant green swimsuit, and I was sorely tempted to ask for her phone number. But I'd heard my female friends complain hundreds of times about guys who will chat you up only as a pretence to hitting on you, and I had vowed every time to never be That Guy. So I only smiled politely as I turned and took my leave.

After drying off, in the marginal privacy of a toilet stall, I took a fond moment to imagine Darla peeling off her swimsuit next door and enjoying a shower before putting her clothes back on!

I hit a very lucky break the next day, when my thesis research steered me in a direction that absolutely required I delve into Agnes Marlston's wartime writings. Recalling what the curator at the Marlston home had told me about Ms. Marlston's papers, I was delighted to cope with every last bit of red tape that it took to gain access to her archives, which had their own tiny room dedicated to their preservation. It was a dry, dusty room in a far corner of the building, but to me it was heaven. As I set about my research under the watchful eye of the guard who made damn sure I only took one file box off the cart at a time and never uncapped a pen, I didn't even bother to pretend I wasn't really looking for more clues about Great Grandma and Elizabeth.

And I did find some. Lots and lots of casual mentions in her journals over the years, and even another photograph or two. But these were Ms. Marlston's official papers, and like any professional writer, she had a knack for keeping the public and the private utterly separate. Only one scribbling did anything for my prurient interests, and it only added more pieces to the puzzle: "Finally heard from Edward today; he sold Elizabeth Reclining in France. I wonder how many generations of boys will fiddle about to that sight now!"

Fiddle about? I was quite sure that could only mean one thing! But who was this Edward, and what had he to do with Elizabeth, and why was she reclining?

Whoever Edward was, I gathered he had once been quite a big part of Ms. Marlston's life. The fairly few genuinely personal comments I had found amidst her professional writings had been heavily sprinkled with that name, usually in some wistful manner. "More horrors of war today, tried to remind myself that I could be Edward's lonely, unloved wife and found I preferred even that to all I've seen!" Or, "Another lonely voyage to another beautiful new shore - if I'm lonely, at least I'm lonely on my own and not with Edward!" An arranged marriage gone wrong, perhaps? That would explain why Great Grandma's letters had no mention of him; who would want to have to remember that?

"He sold Elizabeth Reclining..." I couldn't make any sense of that, but at least it meant my hours in that dusty little room weren't a complete loss.

In spite of myself, I managed to get more actual work done than curiosity satisfied. I was ready to leave even before the guard had finished his shift. "Never thought I'd be asked to leave this room instead of the other way around," he told me with the hint of a smile as he locked the door upon our departure. "Usually it's university kids who can't get enough of her old columns and they want to stay here all afternoon. I try telling them they could buy the damn book of her work in our gift shop, but they just have to see the originals."

"Yeah, I'm surprised too," I told him, making a mental note to buy that book. "But it wasn't really her columns I was after. It was the raw materials, the notes. Those are the real first draft of history."

"Ah, well, most of the juicy stuff is in her personal archives," the guard said. "Those are stored elsewhere in the building, and even I can't give you access to those."

Even he...I'd been around enough rent-a-cops to know he was probably vastly overestimating his own importance on that one. But I also knew better than to argue the point, and already as I headed downstairs to the gift shop, I was thinking of strategies to gain access to the real treasure. Surely there was a way!

Agnes Marlston's name leapt out at me from two places in the gift shop. One was the aforementioned book of her columns, which I snapped up without a second thought. The other was on a thin volume of paintings on display on the oversize shelf, which solved the mystery of Edward. The artist's name - Edward Wharton - would have meant nothing to me an hour before; but the handwritten note by some store staffer made my heart leap: "Paintings by Agnes Marlston's lost fiancé, including numerous early works done in Westfordshire City!"

So Edward was an artist. Elizabeth Reclining must have been the title of a painting. A painting of the Elizabeth, Great Grandma and Agnes' friend? It seemed more than likely.

There was no time to dwell on that right then: I had to get back to my room and catalogue and type up all I had found for my thesis before I forgot it. And so I purchased the two books but didn't even browse through them on the bus; that would be my reward for finishing my real work. All through that long afternoon, the paper bag sat on my bed like a treasure just waiting to be unearthed.

Elizabeth Reclining...the title struck a chord with me, something I had heard elsewhere but couldn't recall the context, like a rock group whose name you know but you couldn't name any of their songs.

Initially, though, I was more fascinated with the allusions to this Edward's past with Ms. Marlston...had she tossed this poor fellow overboard in favour of Great Grandma? That was what I was expecting when I finally opened the book that evening in my booth at Westfordshire City's Hard Rock Café. As I stirred my garish blue drink and waited for my Joe Perry Twisted Mac'n'Cheese, I opened the book to the introduction and resisted the temptation to flip straight to Elizabeth Reclining.

The first paragraph set me straight on at least one misperception I'd had: Edward Wharton is a contradiction. A gay man who nevertheless had an eye for unorthodox beauty in women... Then it was far likelier that he had dumped Agnes than the other way around, I mused. ...A painter who preferred chaste nature scenes, but whose most famous painting now hangs in a museum of erotica... What?! That line finally destroyed my resolve to hold off on looking at the paintings, and I was just about to do so when I realized someone was standing by my table.

I looked up to see Darla grinning down at me. "Hi! Ben, isn't it?"

"Yes, hi! Darla, hello. Join me?"

"Why not?" She sat down across from me. "Edward Wharton? I know that name from somewhere."

I handed her the book to flip through. "I read about him today while I was doing my research. Apparently he and Agnes Marlston were engaged once, only he was gay."

"Oh, him!" Darla exclaimed. "Yeah, he's a footnote in the history of Agnes and Irene that every kid at Yarmouth hears from the upperclass kids. And just like the rest of the story, we kind of figure it's all made up. But I guess this part wasn't, huh?" She flipped through the book. Looking back up at me, she added, "This is crazy, Ben, I only just met you and you've been the perfect gentleman, but I'm learning more and more about the sauciest part of my town's history thanks to you. You should come to town more often!"

"Is that an invitation?" I couldn't resist asking. She was looking lovely in a ruffly patterned top that flattered her full figure delightfully. I figured there came a point where it was perfectly reasonable to flirt a bit.

"Haven't I already joined you?" she replied with a grin.

"I reckon you have," I allowed. "Can I buy you a drink?"

"Thought you'd never ask."

We had a most pleasant conversation over dinner, which she also let me buy her in the end. Along the way, I nearly forgot about Elizabeth Reclining, but the conversation came full circle as we were clinking glasses with our third round. "Here's to Edward Wharton for the meet-cute," Darla quipped.

"Oh, that reminds me," I said, picking up the book again. "I bought this in the first place because I found in Ms. Marlston's papers, a -"

"Ms. Marlston!" Darla interrupted. "Listen to you!"

"Well, I didn't know her personally, and she was much older than I am, and calling her by her last name only, I don't know, it just didn't fit. Think of it as a note of respect."

"I like that," Darla said after a moment's reflection. "Sorry I interrupted you."

"It's okay. In any event, I found in her papers a mention of Edward here selling a painting called Elizabeth Reclining. Ms...Agnes, if you wish, and my great grandmother had a friend named Elizabeth, and I wondered if the painting was of her."

"Elizabeth," Darla repeated. "She must have been the third one."

"The third one?"

"Ms. Wright and Agnes, when we heard the stories about them at school, there was something about a third friend who was kind of the leader of their gang, but no one seemed to know anything about her. Strange how that happens, isn't it? The bigwig in her own time, and yet she's the only one who didn't become famous. But we always heard whoever she was, she had a really open, big personality that had a way of bringing people together, and she was supposed to be incredibly beautiful, too."

"She was." I said it almost robotically as I found the elusive painting in the book.

"You've seen pictures of her, then?" Darla asked.

"Pictures and now paintings," I said, no less absentmindedly. "That's the same woman I saw in the pictures, all right."

"Aren't you going to let me see?" Darla asked.

Honestly, I wasn't sure if I should. It felt invasive to share the stunning painting I was now poring over. It depicted the same vivacious woman I had seen along with Great Grandma and Agnes Marlston in those pictures, and she was indeed reclining on a couch in a subdued stateroom that might well have been in the Marlston mansion. She was unapologetically naked, gazing serenely out at the viewer without a trace of embarrassment or self-consciousness.

And she presented without apology the answer to the mystery of why Great Grandma's ex, Benjamin, had called her 'the hairy one'. Nestled between her thighs was the biggest pubic hair triangle I had ever seen on any woman, in person or in pictures. A forest than a bush, bigger than any I had ever seen on any woman in person, and more than on many of the men I had seen in locker rooms and the like, it was comical and magnificent and both at the same time. I could only conclude that Edward Wharton was either a hair fetishist or had a very naughty sense of humour. If only I could know what Elizabeth must have thought of his representation of her body! I doubted very much that it would be positive.

For all that, though, it was beautiful. She was beautiful. Her whole presence was magnificent.

"She can't have really looked like that," I said.

"Like what?" Darla asked.

There was, of course, no polite way to answer her question with words, and so I handed her the book.

"Wow!" Darla said. "You're right, that must be this Edward's idea of an erotic joke."

"If it is a joke, it's a beautiful one, isn't it?" I asked. "I mean, isn't she majestic?"