French Braid(52)

The women were beginning to bestir themselves—reaching for plates, stacking them, collecting silverware. Even Greta had risen to help. “Oh, don’t fuss with those,” Robin told them, but he didn’t mean it. How could he ever have dealt with such a mess on his own? Alice said, “You and Mom just go settle yourselves in the living room,” and so they did, along with David and the sons-in-law. But instead of sitting down with the others, Robin went to the TV and squatted on his haunches.

“What are you doing?” Mercy asked, instantly alert. (She always objected when the men watched a game instead of conversing, although Robin had explained several times that watching a game was conversing, in a way.)

But he said, “You’ll see!” and proceeded to load a tape into the VCR.

“What is that?” she asked.

“A movie,” he said. “Home movie.”

“What?”

“Remember those movies your dad used to make?”

“Yes…”

“I had them converted.”

This caused the sons-in-law to perk up. They were always game for a little tech talk. “Is that so!” Kevin said, and Morris said, “They can do that?”

“Oh, yes,” David told him. “Any place that develops photos can do that, just about.”

Robin said, “Mercy’s dad bought a movie camera back in…what year would you say, hon?”

“Well, sometime in the late forties,” Mercy said. “I know the girls were still small.”

“I do remember Grandpa with a movie camera,” David said, “but I’m not sure I ever got to see the results.”

“No, well, showing a movie was such a production in those days,” Mercy said. “Special screen, special projector, all the shades drawn…”

“And now look,” Robin said happily. “Just a click of a button and we’re rolling.”

The TV stood next to the fireplace, angled slightly away from the wall so as not to reflect the windows. This house—Mercy’s parents’ house, once—had been built before the advent of TV rooms. Ordinarily that was a drawback, or it used to be before the young folks left home. Now, though, Robin was glad, because your average TV room would have been too cramped for this size crowd. The women drifting in from the kitchen, once the dishes were done, the children summoned from the backyard…In fact some of the children, the two little girls, had to sit on the floor. The children were flushed and sweaty but they came without much urging; they could always be lured into watching something on a TV screen. “Now, this is a movie about the olden days,” Alice told Candle in an instructive tone. “About our family when we kids were growing up. Does it go all the way to our teens?” she asked, turning to Mercy. “I don’t remember. I know I must have seen this, but it was so long ago.”

“Well, your teens, at least,” Mercy said. “Your grandpa lived till 1956. You would have been fourteen by then.”

“But once he’d died,” Robin said, “sayonara to the moviemaking. I don’t think we even took the camera out of its case after that.”

“Although I’m sure we still have it somewhere,” Mercy said, because she was always shaking her head about all the old junk this house held.

Robin pressed the Play button and retreated to his recliner. A few random numbers flashed across the screen. Then a too-brightly dressed little group was standing on a lawn, their lawn, under a dogwood tree in full bloom that had died some twenty years ago. A very young man and a very young woman with two little girls, the smaller astride the young woman’s hip. The sight of those children shocked him. They were back! They’d returned! He’d forgotten they’d ever existed, but all at once they’d rematerialized. And Mercy: look at her frilly sleeveless dress, nothing like the kind of thing she would wear nowadays.

Robin himself was an embarrassment—a bony, gawky fellow with a way-too-short haircut that exposed his scrawny neck, his smile so forced and toothy that he cringed to see it. But everyone said “Aww!” Even the little girls: “Aww!” Then flash again, and here was a slightly older Alice in a puffy pink sunsuit. Did they even make such things as sunsuits anymore? She was standing beside a bicycle with a pink bow tied to the handlebar. Then Alice and Lily together, squinting against the sunlight.

It seemed that Grandpa Wellington hadn’t fully grasped what motion pictures were all about, because every one of these scenes was almost motion-free, posed as if for a portrait. But then by 1952 (an infant David in Mercy’s arms, was how Robin could tell the date), Lily at least was a blur of activity, turning cartwheels across the screen and showing her underwear. Wasn’t it surprising how the sight of Lily brought little Candle to Robin’s mind! And yet Candle was Alice’s daughter, not Lily’s. It almost seemed his two granddaughters had been issued to the wrong mothers—impish Candle to staid Alice, docile Serena to Lily, who had always been such a handful. And then Alice’s Eddie, son of Mr. Country Club, as Robin liked to call Kevin, had turned out to be the one grandkid who enjoyed helping Robin with his carpentry projects. So maybe parenthood was meant to be educational, Robin thought—a lesson for the parents on totally other styles of being. And now he smiled to see Alice picking strawberries in some field who-knows-where and depositing them in a Crisco tin. Even without a sound track he could summon up that bossy voice of hers. “One for the bucket, one for me; one for the bucket, one for me,” as she popped every other berry into her mouth.