Read Somewhere in Time for Free Online Page B

the people in the next room have gone still again.
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    Reviews of plays she did. I'll read them later.
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    An interesting-no, fascinating item.
    In 1924, she burned her notes, her diaries, her correspondence; everything she'd written. Had a deep pit dug on her Ronkonkoma farm, threw everything inside it, poured kerosene across the pile, and set it all ablaze.
    All that remained was a fragment of page the fire wind had blown away. A handyman found it and kept it, later giving it to Gladys Roberts, who transcribes it here.
    (M)y love, where are you now?
    (F)rom what place did you come to [me]?
    (T)o what place go?
    Was it a poem she liked? A poem she'd written? If the former, why did she like it? If the latter, why did she write it? Either way, it seems to brand as a lie her mother's remark to that man.
    The mystery keeps getting deeper. Each layer removed reveals another layer underneath.
    Where is the core?
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    A review of her Juliet in 1893.
    "Miss McKenna ought to be neither surprised nor hurt to ascertain by this experience that nature never intended her to act the tragic heroines of Shakespeare."
    How that must have hurt her. How I wish I could have socked that damned reviewer in the nose.
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    An interesting quote regarding her trip to Egypt with Gladys Roberts in 1904. Standing, at twilight, on the desert, near the pyramids, she said, "There seems nothing here but time." She must have felt as I do in this hotel.
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    Mention is made of the composers she liked. Grieg, Debussy, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven-
    My God.
    Her favorite composer was Mahler.
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    I'm listening to Mahler's Ninth now: performed by Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic.
    I agree with Alban Berg. He is quoted on the record jacket as saying (when he read the manuscript) that it was "the most heavenly thing Mahler ever wrote." And Walter wrote, "The symphony is inspired by an intense spiritual agitation; the sense of departure." Of this first movement, he wrote, it "floats in an atmosphere of transfiguration."
    How close to her I feel.
    But back to the book.
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    An unexpected bonus section-pages of photographs. I've been looking at a particular one for fifteen minutes now. It conveys, to me, more of her than any photograph I've seen. It was taken in January of 1897. She's sitting in a great, dark chair, wearing a high-necked white blouse with a ruffled front and a jacket with a twill effect. Her hair is held up by combs or pins, her hands are folded on her lap. She is looking straight at the camera. Her expression is a haunted one.
    My God, those eyes! They're lost. Those lips. Will they ever rise in a smile again? I never have seen such sadness in a face, such desolation.
    In a photograph taken two months after she was here at this hotel.
    I can't take my eyes from her face. The face of a woman who has endured some dreadful trial. All the spirit has been drained from her. She's empty.
    If only I could be with her and hold her hand, tell her not to feel such sorrow.
    My heart is pounding.
    As I was staring at her face, someone tried to open the door of my room and, suddenly, I had the wild idea that it was her.
    I'm going mad.
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    Moving on, nerves approximately in sheaths again.
    More photographs of her. In plays she did: Twelfth Night, Joan of Arc, The Legend of Leonora. Accepting an honorary master of arts degree at Union College. In Hollywood in 1908.
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    "Sometimes I think the only real satisfaction in life is failure in your endeavor to do your best." Not the words of a happy woman.
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    Her generosity. Box-office receipts of her plays sent to San Francisco after the earthquake; to Dayton, Ohio, after the flood in 1913. Her free matinees to servicemen during World War I; her performances and hostess work in army camps and hospitals.
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    Another contradiction.
    "The only circumstance under which she failed to make a performance occurred