The Heart Remembers©2009

Prologue

August 10, 1999

Today is Kathleen’s birthday. It was 1935 when I first heard someone say that Kathleen Preston was insane. I was ten years old. As I grew older and began to understand more about life, personalities, and human nature, I would hear other stories about Kathleen, most of them untrue, a wild distorted series of tales that fed even more rumors of mental illness. Most of these stories were based on ignorance and boredom. I was one of the very few that would come to actually know Kathleen Preston as I entered my teens and then adulthood. I spoke with her often. I worked for her father. I visited her home. I fell in love with her sister, Elise. Kathleen was an enigma. Her mood could change from one minute to the next. When she was six years old, Kathleen had been thrown from a horse during a jumping competition, hitting her head on a standard. She didn’t wake up for 3 days and when she did it took weeks before she was able to even get out of bed or speak. Elise told me that the injury changed Kathleen. Inexplicable mood swings and temper tantrums became commonplace and as she grew older she began to exhibit a rebellious nature, sometimes shocking her conservative family with behavior unfit for a lady. The details of these “behaviors were sketchy since Mrs. Preston deemed such past incidents “family secrets”. Elise told me that Kathleen was even sent away for a time to a hospital in New England and upon her return, she was basically isolated to supervised family activities. I’m not sure why I begin this tale with Kathleen. I could easily have started the tale with Nat, or Elise, or even Harvey. All of them have touched my life and made me into who I am today. All of them have suffered because of my decisions. All of them would want to know about the events of last week.

Harvey called me early this morning. I knew he would because it was Kathleen’s birthday. I haven’t seen him in 54 years, but he unfailingly calls me every year on birthdays, whether it’s Kathleen’s, Nat’s, Elise’s, mine, or even the kids. The hurt in his voice is still there after all this time. When we were children, Harvey and I were inseparable.

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The Heart Remembers

But I’ve come to dread these calls because they bring back memories, open old wounds. I begin to rehash my past mistakes. Harvey doesn’t bring up the past much in the phone calls. He’ll usually stick to talking about whoever’s birthday it is. Even though we’re all linked from the events of that time long ago, Harvey tends to steer the conversation away from those subjects when I try. Some things are best left in the past.

Today was different. I had to tell him about the incredible events that had happened to me a week ago at the grocery store. I had no choice. By the time we hung up, I could tell he was stunned. As for me, I’m trying to understand and deal with it. There’s nothing else I can do.

Some days I’m filled with sadness. Today has been one of those days.

I’ve had a good life, a loving wife, good children that grew into successful and caring adults. But I’ve always been a bit too sensitive. Like a lost traveler trying to find his way back to something familiar, I tend to go back to that time so long ago, seeking answers. Harvey, with his phone calls, furnishes the map. And I never doubt that Harvey’s memories are as painful as mine, but whereas I punish myself by revisiting those wounds occasionally in my thoughts, Harvey prefers to keep them locked up in a safe place inside of him. Just hearing his voice today in our conversation stirred up more of the ghosts of my past, most of them already awakened, troubling my soul, after what I saw in the grocery store that day.

I walk into my study and open the closet door. There at the top lies the old cigar tin, the one from my childhood. I reach up and retrieve it. Inside are some scattered remnants of my childhood and a few photographs. The photographs are stacked in no particular order. They are not taped in a photo album alongside other pictures of my wife, and our children. My wife knows that these photos are different, to be kept separate, almost hidden if you will, because looking at them awakens the old memories. But they are a part of my past and she knows that something inside me calls out once in a blue moon to revisit these scattered pieces of my youth, remnants of another time, another place. My wife knows the stories behind the photographs, most of them anyways.

I sift through the tin box’s contents and find the photo of my two best childhood friends standing beside me, Nat and Harvey. We are standing beside the raft we built when we were 12 or 13. Harvey is wearing a battered straw hat. I can remember it as if it was yesterday. Harvey, chubby, sunburned, asking Nat and I if the hat made him look like Huck Finn.

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The Heart Remembers

Natalie is lean and tanned, a fierce proud expression on her face, always the tomboy, her personality so alive it almost seems as if she could leap off the photograph. She was so vibrant…so beautiful. How could I have failed to see it back then?

I feel emotions so strong, it’s as if it was yesterday, not years ago. I dig deeper into the precious treasure, a blessing and a curse to me. It all comes back to me; the love, the friendships the betrayals, the death.

I feel the sadness sneaking up on me like an unwelcome relative, familiar, disliked, but always there, when I open the old tin box. I glance up and notice that I have left the door to my study ajar. Rising from my chair I shuffle over to close it.

Although my wife understands my history and my occasional need to revisit it, the knowing look she gives me after I’ve pored through the old photographs still bothers me. She senses my sadness at such moments, and although she knows in her heart that I adore her, that I can’t possibly live without her, I sometimes think that it makes her sad that events from so long ago can still effect me to this day. I go to sit back down and clumsily knock the tin box over, scattering pictures all over the floor. As I stoop to gather them up I find another one of Kathleen. She is riding Sloan, the Arabian filly, the same mare that threw her when she was seven and changed her life. I took the picture. Kathleen was forbidden to ride the horse after the accident, but of course, as always, she found a willing accomplice in myself to defy her parents. I snuck the horse out of the stable for her. I risked my job and her father’s friendship sneaking into his study to borrow the camera so that she could have her picture taken. I did whatever she asked. I loved Kathleen Preston. I love her still. I love the memories of the mysterious girl who seemed to bewitch me and make me do things I would never have thought myself capable of.

Kathleen was not insane back then. I don’t care what anyone thought or said. Her actions, as strange as they might seem to most, somehow made sense to me.

I spy another photo and my heart begins to pound. The photograph is of two beautiful girls, both so stunning that it takes my breath away. Kathleen and Elise. Sisters.

I loved them both. Elise’s smile is dazzling, sun freckles caressing her nose, her hair in a

golden ponytail of pure silk. She is wearing a sleeveless pink button up blouse with her arm wrapped around Kathleen.

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Kathleen appears to be deep in thought, her dark hair the color of burnished mahogany, bangs covering her face so that only one eye is exposed, mischievous and alluring, as if she has a dark secret just waiting to be told. She is in one of her usual white dresses, and deeply tanned.

The last photograph that I pick up is my favorite, but also one that really tugs at my heartstrings. All five of us are together standing by the river; Harvey, Nat, Elise, Kathleen, and myself.

Three girls that I met at the age of twelve, that I watched grow into young women. Each changed my life and taught me about love in their own way.

Some say that it’s impossible to love two or even three people at once, but I loved them all, each girl as different as the petals of assorted wild flowers picked from a spring field, each claiming a spot in my heart that exists to this day more than 60 years later.

Kathleen loved me in her own way…the only way she knew how. Her love was mysterious, deep, and I was never sure of where it was going.

Elise gave me unconditional love, I always knew no matter how bad things got that she would be there for me, sweet, open, like a fresh summer breeze, and beautiful beyond words.

Nat gave me everything, even when I didn’t want it, she was there in the wings, always waiting, always hoping. Her love was tempestuous, like her personality. She kept it hidden inside, revealing an occasional glimpse, when she chose to. Brief moments, like falling stars, beautiful to see, but so evanescent. I never understood until she was gone.

In the innocence of my youth, I learned about love. I hurt each of these young women badly, one irreparably. There’s an old French saying that goes like this:

“Tout s’en va, tout passe, l’eau coule, et le coeur oublie.”

“Everything leaves, everything passes, water flows, and the heart forgets.”

I place the photograph over my heart and the tears come. They always do. I don’t agree with the saying. The heart remembers.

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