Gates of Paradise (Casteel 4)

I turned my attention back to the tour of the house. I hadn't noticed much about the upstairs portion of the house when they first brought me in and up to my room, but now I saw how heavily worn and frayed the hallway rug was. Many of the chandeliers that hung from the ceiling had blown bulbs, and there were cobwebs clinging to the fixtures. The drapes over the few windows were closed, so that the corridor was dark, especially the section into which Tony was wheeling me.

"This entire section of the house had been left untouched for years. The rooms were originally my great-grandparents', but in honor of your parents, I had them redecorated and refurbished. I knew what pleased your mother and had it all ready when she arrived. You should have seen the surprise on her face when I opened those double doors."

He laughed, but it was a strange, thin laugh, the laugh of someone who was laughing at things no one else could share, the laugh of someone locked in his own, very private world. When I leaned back and turned my head to look up at him, I saw that he was looking far off into his own memories.

Couldn't he see how worn and frayed the corridor was? Didn't he smell the musty odor?

"No one travels these hallways anymore. I don't permit anyone to go into these rooms," he added, as if he had read my mind and knew I wondered why he hadn't sent the maids in to clean and dust and polish.

When we crossed into the area he said had been reserved, we seemed to move into even darker quarters. Large cobwebs caked with dust draped between the corridor's ceiling and walls. I wondered if even he, himself, had been back. He stopped before two great double doors made of pickled hickory wood. Each had long, thin waterstains down its front. Some of the stains looked fresh.

Tony dug a ring of keys out of his jacket pocket. When he unlocked the doors and turned to me, his face took on a strange brightness, his eyes awash with excitement. He must have looked like this the day he surprised my parents with the suite, I thought. Were his recollections so vivid that he could cast himself back through time and behave as though it were happening for the first time today?

"The suite of Mr. and Mrs. Logan Stonewall," he announced, as if they were alive and standing beside me.

He threw open the doors, which groaned on their hinges, moaning warnings. Unable to wait for him to come back around to push me, I took hold of the wheels myself and moved the chair forward, and to my utter astonishment, my complete surprise, before me was an impeccably maintained suite of rooms: clean and polished and dusted, sparkling behind these deceiving old doors in this apparently deserted section of the great house. It was as if we really had stepped over some invisible border of time and reentered the past.

Tony laughed again, this time at the expression on my face.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

Everywhere I saw my mother's favorite color: wine red. The French Provencial furniture was upholstered in that color fabric, picking up the colors in the large Persian rug. The walls were done in a floral-patterned cloth paper, which picked up on the reds and whites in the upholstery and rug. Over the two large windows hung antique silk drapes, behind which were sheer curtains. But everything looked brand new.

Tony confirmed my thoughts.

"Everything has been replaced and restored to what it was. This is the way the sitting room looked the day your mother and father stepped into it for the first time."

"Brand new?" I asked, puzzled. He nodded. "But . . why?"

"Why? Why . ." He looked around as though the answer were obvious, "Why, maybe someday you and your husband will come to live here. Anyway," he said quickly, "it makes me feel better to bring things back to the way they were when we were all happier. And I can afford to do it, so why not? I told you I was going to bring Farthinggale Manor back to the way it was in its most glorious days."

I shook my head. Someone might say this was the way a very wealthy, elderly man indulged himself. But why bring back a painful memory? Mommy refused to have anything to do with him all these years, and all these years he held on to his memories of her and Daddy, refusing to permit time to erase them. Why?

"I'm afraid I still don't understand, Tony. Why was it so important to keep it . . . as it was?" I pursued. His face hardened.

"I told you. I have the means to do it."

"But you have the means to do many things, new things. Why dwell on the past?"

"The past is more important to me than the future," he replied, almost snapping at me. "When you're my age, you'll realize how precious good memories are."

"But with the rift between Mommy and you, I would have thought this painful for you. She was gone from your life; she was--"

"No!" He looked furious. "No," he repeated, more calmly. Then he smiled. "Don't you see, by doing all this"--he extended his arms--"I've kept Heaven as she was to me . . always. I've cheated Fate." He laughed, a thin, hollow laugh. "That, my dear, is the true power of great wealth."

I simply stared up at him. He looked at me and shook the wild look from his face.

"But now come look at the bedroom. See what I have done here." Tony moved ahead and opened the bedroom doors. More tentative, a little reluctantly, I wheeled myself up to the entrance and gazed within.

Even the huge king-size bed looked lost in this enormous room, the floors of which were covered with a beige carpet so soft and thick, I had trouble wheeling over it. It was like wheeling through marshmallow. It was obvious that this, too, was a brand-new carpet.

All the linen was new. The bedspread matched the apricot canopy, and there were rust-colored throw pillows as well. I turned to the right and looked at the white marble vanity table, resting at the middle of a marble counter that ran nearly the length of the room. Under the counter were drawers framed in wood the shade of the marble counter. Above it was a wall of mirror, the edges of which were trimmed in gold.

Something on the vanity table caught my eye, so I wheeled myself closer. There was a hairbrush there with strands of hair still caught in it, silveryblond strands. I took the brush into my hand and studied it.

"That was Heaven's," Tony whispered beside me. "When she had hair like Leigh's. She had done it herself, as if Leigh had come back through her, don't you see?" he asked, his eyes wide, wild and bright. My heart began to pound. "The hair is . . . it is Leigh's hair. It wasn't just Heaven's hair dyed . . . Leigh was coming back. I. . ."

He saw the look of amazement on my face and shrugged, taking the brush from my hands and gently running the tip of his finger over the strands of hair.