Free The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century by Harry Turtledove Page B

darkness so I went up to it. That’s all I was going to do—peek and go away—until I saw Uncle Teddy crying. I’d never seen Uncle Teddy cry before. He was in bed. He had a large, green book on his lap, and every so often he would turn a page and cry some more.
    I watched him for a while, waiting for him to be all right, but he didn’t stop crying and I couldn’t stand to watch him any longer, so I did a foolish thing and I entered his room through the closet.
    “Sonny Boy,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
    I thought he might be angry with me so I wanted to say that I saw him crying, and that I only wanted to help him and be a friend, but before I could say anything he said, “So you know about the passages,” and he didn’t seem to be upset at all.
    “Come over here, Sonny,” he said.
    I went and sat on the edge of his bed. He was looking at a photo album. Mother had shown me some photo albums years ago, and I thought they were interesting and we had a lot of fun even though I didn’t recognize any of the faces. I don’t ever remember crying over them. But Uncle Teddy’s album was different. There were newspaper pictures, and headlines, and articles.
    Uncle Teddy was looking at a picture of a man and a woman. The man seemed very serious-looking, and his right hand was raised like an Indian chief’s, but he had on a suit and tie and no headdress. The man’s eyes were closed.
    The woman had short black hair with long bangs, and she was looking down.
    And then all of a sudden I just about screamed. I knew that woman. I remembered her from... from somewhere.
    Uncle Teddy said, “You know her, don’t you? Think, Sonny Boy, think very hard. What do you remember?”
    I did think very hard, and then I remembered where I had seen her. She was the beautiful black-haired woman I had seen at Christmastime in the main entrance of the house years ago.
    But then there was more. As I looked at the woman in the picture something very strange came into my head. I had a passing thought of this same woman in a pretty white gown, with a white veil over her face. It was just a piece of a thought that I could not keep in my mind for very long, but I’ll never forget it. I reached out and touched the picture.
    “Always grand,” Uncle Teddy said. “She was wearing a very dignified, raspberry-colored suit that day.”
    But that’s not what I had seen. I had seen the white gown. I had seen something that happened before my room and my house and my passageways and Mother and Uncle Teddy. Was there anything before them? Yes, I think there was. It was more than a passing thought—it was a memory .
    “Was I married, Uncle Teddy?” I asked him.
    He smiled. “Yes, you were. You proposed to her by telegram, you know, from Paris.”
    I thought this was interesting, but nothing more than that. Uncle Teddy started to cry again.
    “Please, don’t cry,” I said.
    He held my hand then. “I’m sorry we couldn’t tell her you were alive. We couldn’t tell your children, not anyone, not even Father because we couldn’t be sure of his reaction. Mother was adamant about that. No one could know. Just Bobby and Mother and myself—and the doctors, of course. Now there’s just me.
    “It was for the good of the country. Those were critical times. The eyes of the world were watching us. We could not afford hesitancy. We felt you would have wanted it that way. Do you understand?”
    I didn’t, but I nodded anyway to stop Uncle Teddy from crying. He was clutching my arm very hard.
    He traced the newspaper picture with his finger. “She was a strong woman, Sonny Boy. You would have been proud of her. I remember her standing right next to Lyndon, solid as a rock, little more than an hour after you were pronounced dead.”
    I was very confused about Uncle Teddy calling me dead, and about what the woman in the picture had to do with any of it, so I closed the book and placed it on the floor. I remembered what Mother used to do to