I placed the dining room photo beside the two taken in the parlor-cum-workroom. To this group, I added a fourth photo, taken in a large bedroom, in the space that I recognized as our current tearoom. There was a Victorian double bed with an elaborate gold-colored spindled headboard and footboard. The bed itself was dressed in a white crocheted spread, flounced white skirt, and ruffled white pillow shams. There was a mirrored dressing table, a rocking chair, and a tall chest of drawers. On the chest was a framed photograph—a wedding photo, the magnifying glass told me. A stove stood against one wall and there was a white-painted commode in a corner. A commode? Of course. The bathroom under the stairs would not be installed for several more decades.
I stared at the photos for a long time. Of course, I had known that my building had a long history. These photographs, though, gave me the sense that it had a personal history, that it had once been a home where people lived, loved, worked, played, and died. In the pictures, the past and the present lay one on top of the other. It was an eerie feeling, as if I were peering through one of those old-fashioned stereoscopes into a long-distant past—but a three-dimensional past in which real people were still living and moving and talking and working, just as they had lived then, when the photographs were taken.
There were also exterior scenes, and these included children. One was taken behind the house, where an old-fashioned rope swing hung from a large oak tree, now gone. There were four girls in the photograph, all with long hair and big hair bows, all dressed in white pinafores over cotton dresses, a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland look. A girl of nine or ten was pushing the two younger girls—twins, I thought, maybe four or five—in the swing, while the oldest one watched, clapping her hands. She might be eighteen. In another, the older two girls were hoeing weeds in a large vegetable garden, in the area where I now had my zodiac garden. And in a third, the twins were feeding carrots to a fat pony, beside the stable—which was now Thyme Cottage, my bed-and-breakfast. In the background, tall summer sunflowers grew up beside the stone walls.
The rest of the photographs were of the same couple I had seen sitting with the baby and the little girl on the veranda. One, a studio portrait, was clearly a wedding photo—Mr. and Mrs. Duncan? Yes, I thought, because it was the same photograph I had just seen (with the magnifying glass) on the chest in the bedroom of the Duncan house. The groom, seated, wore his Sunday-best suit with a stiff collar and tie and white rose boutonniere. The bride stood behind him, her hand on his shoulder, wearing a pale silk dress banded with embroidered lace. It was hard to tell colors in the sepia-tinted photo, but the dress might be taffy-colored. The woman’s hair, dark brown or auburn, was partly covered by a lacy bridal veil caught under a floral crown. On a small table beside them lay her wedding bouquet of roses and ferns, tied with a cluster of ribbons. The groom—fair haired and clean shaven—wore a satisfied look, as if he had achieved something he had aimed for. The bride was attractive but not conventionally pretty. She had a firm chin, a full mouth, and large, dark eyes, deep-set and quite remarkable. As I moved from that photograph to the next, I had the uncanny feeling that her eyes were following me. She seemed to be actually watching me, and I shivered.
In another studio portrait, the same pair, in the same wedding garb, were posed with a young girl—the girl with banana curls from the picture on the veranda. She was wearing a flounced white dress, with white stockings and shoes and holding a small flowery nosegay. I turned it over and saw a penciled date on the back: August 3, 1889.
I held the photograph for a moment, studying it. Both the bride and groom looked to be past thirty, and the bride wasn’t wearing a white dress. Was this a second marriage? Was the girl with the pretty curls the bride’s daughter? And the baby, in the later photograph taken on the veranda, their child? The child of this second husband? Were the girls pictured around the swing in the oak tree their children, too? If so, then perhaps what I was looking at was a history of the Duncan family. Their story might not have been so different from many others: the bride, with a daughter from a previous marriage, marrying again in her thirties and giving birth to three more children.
But there was one other photo—also a wedding photo—which didn’t seem to belong in this group at all. I regarded it, puzzled. The groom was clearly the same man in the other two wedding photos in front of me, although he seemed to be younger, perhaps by ten years. But the woman was different: quite young, in her late teens or early twenties, I guessed. She was blond and very pretty, smiling and with a flirtatious tilt of her head—the sort of girl who might be very much at home in a Miss Texas Teen beauty pageant today. The long satin train of her white lace-encrusted wedding dress was carefully arranged around her feet, and she wore a tulle veil and a tiara-like crown. A half dozen young bridesmaids, all beautifully gowned, stood beside the bride and groom, with tall candelabras and vases of flowers behind them. It had obviously been a lavish formal wedding. I turned the photo over. It was stamped
