good-looking man with bold features and thinning hair, and a child who
could be no one but Jim Ironheart.
Those eyes. One photograph showed Jim with the couple-obviously his ‘,
parents-when he was only an infant swaddled in a blanket, but in the
others he was not much younger than four and never older than about ten.
When he’d been ten, of course, his parents had died.
Some photos showed young Jim with his dad, some with his mom, and Holly
assumed the missing parent had always been the one with the camera.
A handful included all three Ironhearts. Over the years, the mother
only grew more striking; the father’s hair continued to thin, but he
appeared to be happier as time passed; and Jim, taking a lesson from his
mother, became steadily better looking.
Often the backdrop of the picture was a famous landmark or the sign for
one. Jim and both parents in front of Radio City Music Hall when he’d
been about six. Jim and his father on the boardwalk at Atlantic City
when Jim was four or five. Jim and his mother at a sign for Grand
Canyon National Park, with a panoramic vista behind them.
All three Ironhearts in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle in the heart of
Disneyland, when Jim was only seven or eight. Beale Street in Memphis.
The sun-splashed Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. An observation
deck overlooking the faces of Mount Rushmore. Buckingham Palace in
London. The Eiffel Tower. The Tropicana Hotel, Las Vegas.
Niagara Falls. They seemed to have been everywhere.
In every case, no matter who was holding the camera or where they were,
those in the shot looked genuinely happy. Not one face in one print was
frozen in an insincere smile, or caught with one of those
snap-the-damn-picture expressions of impatience that could be found in
abundance in most family photo albums. Often, they were laughing
instead of merely smiling, and in several instances they were caught in
the middle of horseplay of one kind or another. All three were
touchers, too, not simply standing side by side or in brittle poses.
They were usually shown with their arms around one another, sometimes
hugging, occasionally kissing one another on the cheek or casually
expressing affection in some fashion.
The boy in the photographs revealed no hint of the sometimes moody adult
he would become, and Holly could see that the untimely death of his
parents had changed him profoundly. The carefree, grinning boy in the
photographs had been lost forever.
One black-and-white particularly arrested her. It showed Mr.
Ironheart sitting on a straight-backed chair. Jim, maybe seven years
old, was on his father’s lap. They were in tuxedos. Mrs. Ironheart
stood behind her husband, her hand on his shoulder, wearing a slinky
sequined cocktail dress that emphasized her wonderful figure. They faced
the camera directly.
Unlike the other shots, this one was carefully posed, with nothing but a
piece of artfully draped cloth as a backdrop, obviously set up by a
professional photographer.
“They were wonderful,” Jim said from the doorway. She had not heard him
approaching. “No kid ever had better folks than them.”
“You traveled a lot.”
“Yeah. They were always going somewhere. They loved to show me new
places, teach me things firsthand. They would’ve made wonderful
schoolteachers, let me tell you.”
“What work did they do?”
“My dad was an accountant at Warner Brothers.”
“The movie studio?”
“Yeah.” Jim smiled. “We lived in L.A. Mom-she wanted to be an
actress, but she never got a lot of jobs. So mostly she was a hostess
at a restaurant on Melrose Avenue, not far from the Paramount lot.”
“You were happy, weren’t you?”
“Always.”
She pointed to the photo in which the three of them were dressed with
glittery formality. “Special occasion?”
“Times just the two of them should have celebrated, like wedding
anniversaries, they insisted on including me.
They always made me feel special, wanted, loved. I was seven years old
when that photo was taken, and I remember them making big plans that
night. They were going to be married a hundred years, they said, and be
happier each year than the one before, have lots more children, own a