Gates of Paradise (Casteel 4)

"Tony?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Daydreaming a bit.

Remembering my brother," he added and smiled again.

"You must tell me about him. Will you?"

"Of course."

"I'm depending on you to tell me everything, Tony," I said, feeling it was finally the time to do so. "I want to know all about my family--my greatgrandmother, my grandmother, and what you remember of my mother when she lived here."

"If I do all that, you'll get tired of me."

"No. I want to know it all. And Tony," I added, my eyes as determined as they could be, "I want finally to know what it was that caused you and my mother to stop seeing and talking to one another. Promise to tell me all that, no matter how painful it might seem?"

"I promise, and you know by now I keep my promises. But please, for a while, let's avoid anything unpleasant so that you can get well on the way toward a full recovery."

"I'll wait, as long as you've promised."

"Good. Now," he said cheerfully, "onward and upward."

Mrs. Broadfield had gone upstairs ahead of us to prepare my room. Miles was waiting patiently behind us. Tony signaled to him and he came to lift me in the chair. Then, wi

th careful steps, making me feel like some dowager queen returning to her palace quarters, they carried me up the magnificent marble stairway.

"I'm such a trouble," I said, seeing the strain in both their faces as we started the final third of the stairway.

"Nonsense. Miles and I need the exercise, eh, Miles?"

"No trouble, Miss Annie. Glad to do it anytime."

They set me on the floor and I looked down the long corridors that seemed to extend for miles in either direction. Tony turned me to the left.

"I have a wonderful surprise for you. The room you will be in," he said as he continued wheeling me down the corridor, "was your grandmother's room and then your mother's, And now," he said, turning me into a double doorway, "it is yours!"

He put his hand over mine. "As I always knew in my heart it would be someday."

I turned quickly to look at him. His eyes held my own and seemed to send silent messages. He looked so determined, so self-satisfied, that for a moment I felt afraid. Sometimes I got the feeling that Tony had long ago planned out my whole life for me.

My heart fluttered like the wings of a confused canary unsure whether it should enter the golden cage. Truly it would be taken care of, pampered, fed, loved; but it knew also that once it entered the cage, the tiny door would be closed and it would look at the world forever through those golden bars.

What should it do; what should I have done?

As if he sensed my fears, Tony hurriedly wheeled me forward.

TEN My Mother's Room

. Tony wheeled me through two wide, double doors into the first room of the two-room suite. The sunlight through the pale ivory sheers was misted and frail and gave the sitting room an unused, unreal quality. Just like the living room below, this room seemed more like a museum than a room to live in. The walls were covered in a delicate ivory silk fabric, subtly woven through with faint Oriental designs of green, violet, and blue.

A maid in a mint-green uniform with a laceedged white apron was removing plastic covers from the two small sofas, both upholstered in the same fabric as the fabric that covered the walls. She fluffed the soft blue accent pillows which matched the Chinese rug. After having had Mrs. Avery as our maid for so many years, I thought of maids as elderly women, and so I was surprised to see so young a woman working at Farthy. She looked no more than thirty. Tony introduced her.

"This is Millie Thomas, your personal maid." She turned and gave me a warm smile. She was a plain-faced woman with dull brown eyes, a rather round chin, and puffy cheeks. I imagined that because she was cursed with a dumpy body, a small bosom, and hips so wide they made her look like a church bell, she was doomed to be a domestic servant, always cleaning and polishing in someone else's house.

"Please to meet you, miss." She made a small curtsy and turned to Tony. "I've finished up in the bedroom and just had these covers to remove and store."

"Very good. Thank you, Millie. Let's go see your bedroom," Tony said, pushing me on through the sitting room. We stopped just inside the doorway so I could take it all in. I could hear Mrs. Broadfield in the bathroom washing out basins and preparing things.

As I slowly scanned the room, I kept trying to imagine the first time my mother had seen it. She had been living with Cal and Kitty Dennison, the couple who had paid five hundred dollars to her father for her.