by Ken Springer
The Vintage Lady ~ A tale of love, loss and time
Prologue: Nearly everyone is familiar with the term déjà vu and many of us have experienced this cognitive phenomenon. I only remember one incident of déjà vu that was so compelling and prescient that I often think of it to this very day.
It was 1985, and I was returning from Alaska to Ohio in my truck. I was traveling through a small community in northern New Mexico, which I had never visited before. As I drove through this charming village, it eerily started to look very familiar to me, so much so that I began silently predicting what I would see around each bend in the road.
I remember thinking things like, “There will be a small park on the right with picnic tables up ahead,” And there was, but many small towns have city parks, so no big deal. My next pronouncement, though, was quite specific and said aloud: “A green and yellow caboose with the words ‘Burlington Northern Railroad’ emblazoned on its side would be on the right.” Sure enough, about a mile down the road sat the caboose on a short section of rail, just as I’d seen it in my mind.
The scientific explanation for déjà vu is simply that it is a “cognitive glitch.” However, science can be, and occasionally is, dead wrong. For several centuries, scientists believed that light traveling through space required a physical medium called the Luminiferous Aether. This belief was eventually debunked.
So, is déjà vu just a pure coincidence or something else? What lies ahead in this story suggests that there is much more to reality than we humans are aware of, until it happens to us.
An intelligent and skeptical acquaintance of mine, who prefers to stay anonymous, shared a story with me some years ago. He spoke of a recurring dream that lasted until he was an adult, in which he was a youngster being led by his mother and another older woman, assumed to be his grandmother, down a set of marble stairs into the warm, salty waters of a magnificent pool connected to the sea.
He described the three of them as wearing white cotton tunics. He said the structure had a beautiful mosaic floor and columned porticos, and that they sat on the steps with just their feet in the water.
My friend went on to say that when he was in his fifties, he came across a later issue of the “National Geographic” magazine in which archaeologists uncovered an ancient Greek pool. He knew instantly that this was the location of his childhood dreams, describing his emotions as déjà vu on steroids.
Another friend, equally as skeptical as the previous one, shared her recurring dreams of being a young girl out on a prairie, with the tall grass waving like an undulating sea, swaying and rippling. To this day, she feels connected to this scene as if she were remembering a previous life, perhaps a Native American one.
This deep emotional connection to the Prairie vision led her to appreciate and collect Native American art and jewelry.
Are these phenomena just a glitch in the brain, wishful thinking, or a real memory from another life? We are about to meet a woman who fulfilled her mission in life by leaving the present for the past.
The Vintage Lady
Susie Hardesty is an attractive, petite woman with large blue eyes and chestnut-brown hair, a showstopper for sure. Her sense of humor is unrivaled, and the same can be said about her stubbornness. Saying “no” to her was just a starting point for negotiating. Suffice it to say, she generally got her way.
Susie is also an entrepreneur, having started a string of successful businesses. Back in the 1980s, she got the idea to purchase vintage clothing for resale, a business built on her passion for the fashions of the 1920s, the “Roaring Twenties.”
When I interviewed Susie several years ago after her anomalous experience, yet to be divulged, she told me that as a child, she saw a picture of a flapper in “Life Magazine,” and felt an immediate connection to the clothing, but it turned out to be far more than mere fascination.
To be sure, the twenties were a decade of great prosperity for America. And as we all know, it culminated in the stock market crash, leading to the Great Depression.
The decade began with the granting of women’s hard-won right to vote. The strict social mores of the Victorian Era were abandoned for more freedom for women. Ushered in by the newfound rights of women were radical changes in fashion during the twenties, for the first time, skirts rose ever more above the knee.
The 1920s were the age of the flappers, speakeasies, Jazz and Prohibition. Women were smoking cigarettes and drinking openly. As if to erase the constraints of earlier years, women were no longer tied to the kitchen nor physically bound by the fashions of the past. It was a prosperous and giddy time, particularly for women after decades of struggle by the Suffragettes to gain new rights and freedoms.
Helen Reddy’s 1972 hit song that begins with, “I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore,” pretty well sums up the zeitgeist of the 1920s for many women.
In 1993, Hardesty’s business buying and selling vintage clothing was at its zenith, largely due to the movie industry’s interest in musicals like Chicago and the public’s penchant for gangster movies. Her business acumen was right on target for selling her 1920s-era fashion to Hollywood for costume patterns. Susie Hardesty sensed the public appetite for anything about the Roaring Twenties.
In May of that year, she received a response to an advertisement she placed in the “Chicago Tribune” seeking vintage clothing and jewelry. A 92-year-old woman named Helen Galloway responded, saying she had several large trunks full of clothing and other items from the 1920s in her attic and she was willing to part with them.
Susie was really excited about this find because the address was in the Oak Park district of Chicago, where many of the homes were designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright, another of Hardesty’s passions.
Anticipating a larger load than usual, Susie rented a utility van for the six-hour drive from her home in Akron, Ohio, to Chicago. She left for Chicago at the crack of dawn, arriving in Oak Park shortly before noon. GPS in cars was rare in the early nineties, so she was navigating “old school” via map.
It took a good hour for Susie to arrive at Helen Galloway’s three-story Queen Anne home, because the number of beautiful Prairie, Tudor, and other Frank Lloyd Wright homes she drove by intrigued her. She frequently stopped to examine the homes as one might study a work of art in a museum.
Susie was familiar with Wright’s cantilevered homes from her many visits to the Fallingwater home in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. The many styles of the Oak Park homes demonstrated Wright’s broad and signature approach to architecture.
When Susie arrived at Helen Galloway’s door, she pressed the Art Deco ivory button doorbell. While waiting for a response, Susie glanced around the spacious front yard planted with a variety of roses and vibrant Japanese Maples, a curving stone walk meandered through the flowers and trees.
Finally, she saw the doorknob turn and the door opened. A very fragile-looking woman immediately apologized for the delay in getting to the door. Before Susie could introduce herself, Mrs. Galloway stared at her for several seconds, saying nothing. She appeared to be losing her balance, so Susie stepped over the threshold, grasping Mrs. Galloway by her shoulders to steady her, and asked if she was O.K.
The aging woman looked deep into Susie’s eyes and said, “My dear, you look exactly like someone I knew many, many years ago.”
“Oh, my, how interesting, Mrs. Galloway, you’ll have to tell me more. I’m Susie Hardesty. You answered my ad in the “Chicago Tribune” about your vintage clothing,” replied Susie.
“Oh, yes, are you in a hurry? May I put the tea kettle on? Surely, you’ve had a long drive from, was it Akron, dear?” Susie shook her head in the affirmative, and Mrs. Galloway took her left hand, leading her down the long hallway.
At the end of the hall, they entered a large parlor replete with Queen Anne-era furniture. Chairs and divans with brocaded seats and cabriole legs with ball-and-claw feet, a symphony of scalloped walnut and mahogany. Susie felt she had stepped back in time when she entered the most ornate room she had ever seen. “Oh, to live in such grand surroundings,” She thought.
Mrs. Galloway returned shortly with tea and scones and a small bowl of clotted cream, very gently setting it on a large lace doily. Her hands trembled ever so slightly as she poured tea into the ornate bone china cups with gold trim and sculpted handles. Susie could not have been more impressed; she nearly forgot why she was here in this remarkable house, having tea with such a charming and gentle woman.
“How long have you lived in this wonderful house, Mrs. Galloway?” asked Susie.
“Please, dear, call me Helen. I moved here shortly after my twin sister and her son were killed in 1927,” Helen replied. Susie noticed a small tear running down her face, which Helen wiped away with a lace handkerchief.
“I’m so sorry to hear that, Helen. You must have loved them both very much,” Susie said.
“Indeed, Alice and young Charlie were the light of my life. My sister married a man in the early 1920s. Unbeknownst to her at the time they met, her husband, Ralph Nash, was a bootlegger and a violent man. He often came home drunk and would invariably end up taking out his aggression on my sister, often while young Charlie was looking on,” said Helen.
Helen looked away for a few moments, trying to maintain her composure. Susie placed her hand on Helen’s ever so gently to calm her.
After a pregnant pause, Helen went on to say, “Ralph came home one day, drunk as usual, and when she asked him to stop screaming at her because he was upsetting young Charlie, he pushed her so hard that she fell onto the marble floor with a thud. She lay still, blood was pooling around her head, and Charlie witnessed it all. The terrified child turned and ran out of their brownstone and into the street, where he was run over by an ice truck.”
Helen explained to Susie that her whole life revolved around her dear sister and Charlie. She told Susie that she never married and tried to make the most of her life, but it always seemed empty.
Helen paused again, then said to Susie, “Well, my dear, you did not drive all the way up here just to hear an old lady lament her life. So, why don’t we go up to the attic and get your clothes?”
When they entered the attic, Helen led Susie to a row of three large trunks and told her she could take whatever clothing and items she wanted, and that there would be no charge, saying, “I haven’t opened these trunks for over a half-century. I have several health problems, and my time is quite limited. It makes me happy to know that these treasured items are in your hands, rather than being carted off to the dump.”
The two of them went through the first trunk, pulling out all manner of vintage clothing, most from the 1920s. When they got to the bottom of the chest, Susie fished out a beautiful gilded half-moon mirror.
Susie stood up and looked into the mirror. At first, she thought she was looking at her own image, but something felt off. Susie had a scar on her forehead just above her right brow, a result of a skiing accident. The image in the mirror looked exactly like her, except there was no scar. She nearly dropped the mirror; what was going on?
To be continued in the next For Your Consideration
Ken Springer
ken1949bongo@gmail.com
