Keeping Hannah Waiting - About the Book

With her mother's passing, Kate McBride discovers a masterpiece in the attic of her childhood home--a never-before-seen Chagall painting dubbed simply, "Girl with Flowers."

When the painting sells at auction for $50 million, Kate decides to explore the world beyond the Brooklyn bakeshop where she's worked since high school, beginning with Europe.

Soon after she arrives on the continent, during a chance visit to the Holocaust memorial at Dachau, Kate stumbles onto a clue about this enchanting portrait, and, with the help of a survivor she finds back home, travels back in time to learn of the epic romance that inspired it. Keeping Hannah Waiting is a story that transcends time, distance, two World Wars, and a holocaust. In the end, it is a story that makes a poignant plea for tolerance, forgiveness of the past, hope for the future, and above all else, for the power of everlasting love.

Buy the Book (paperback) $13.95
Buy the Book (Kindle) $5.99

Read Chapter 1

 

One

 

 

he late afternoon sunlight filtering through the attic panes that day was, as always at this time of year, soft. Bright, yet pale. Serene, yet crisp. This was the light master painters see in their dreams; the light composers bathe in while they write their greatest symphonies. This was the light Kate McBride liked to remember her mother in. Here, where the good times were, the best times.

            Sitting cross-legged on the attic floor, motes of dust danced like tiny snowflakes on the warm air currents in the broad shaft of light spilling in the window. Kate’s fingers tooled along the binding of a book she had plucked from one of the hundred or more boxes bursting with volumes on every topic imaginable.  Mama, she thought looking at the sea of books surrounding her, now that you’ve rescued all your other children, what am I supposed to do with them? The libraries don’t want them, I’ve asked. The poor? she continued, plucking another one at random. Apparently even they don’t need another copy of Vacuum Tubes, Radios of Tomorrow. No matter what Charles R. Shively or Spectrum Publishing thought in 1927. Then she tossed the thin, technical thesis back onto the pile.

Kate—Kathleen Anne Quinlan McBride when she had gotten her mother’s Irish up, Katie-dearest, to a father who had passed on too long ago and far too soon—took in the savory, sweet smell of papyrus that hung in the air up here as if it were her mother’s own perfume, and, for the first time in her thirty-two years, she realized that, in a very real way, it was.

            “There’s no room for them in my tiny place. It’s time they moved on too. I’m sorry, Mama… I’m sorry.” Kate McBride stood up and swiped at the tears. She smoothed her sweater down, then bent down to twist her pant leg straight. As she tugged at the denim, her elbow caught another literary brick, knocking it down, first along the narrow flight of stairs from the attic, then in two giant leaps, down the second flight, finally landing in the alcove in the front hallway. Kate sighed and followed down the stairs after it, the last pinkish-yellow rays of sunlight drifting in through the attic window and lighting a path for her.

A burgundy, leather-bound book, about the size of a ledger, something about it felt good. Engraved on the front, in a fanciful gothic font, a pair of gilded letters: H.B. Nothing else. Initials perhaps, she thought.

Its pages held together by the gluey potion of time and dust, Kate gently pried the cover loose from its yellowed pages, and read the title leaf stylishly hand-lettered in an old-school cursive with the crisp nib of a black fountain pen. Die Zu-las-sung. “Die Zulassung,” she whispered. “1940. Die Zulassung, 1940…” I give up, she thought. Why this one, Mom? she asked, then shut the volume.

As the cover closed, Kate caught sight of a tiny, frayed bit of cream-colored canvas thread sticking out of the worn spine. Reopening the book, she gently pressed the thread back, triggering a short stream of brightly colored specks that spilled out of the spine, landing on the wooden floorboards in front of her.

Holding the old edition up to the first rays of moonlight beaming down now from the attic, Kate pulled the covers away and let the pages inside dangle beneath in loose clumps. Ohh… she thought peeking inside the spine, there’s something in there.

Kate worked the contents—a roll of canvas—inch by inch, until she had freed a scroll from the snug vellum sanctuary where it appeared to have resided for half a century or more. Slowly, she unrolled the cloth until a painted image revealed itself fully in the shaft of bluish-white light now streaming down in giant waves through the attic window. “Sweet Jesus,” she gasped.

Frozen, Kate stared at what she held in her now-trembling hands: a portrait, a work in oil of a young woman lying in a field of lavender. The face so pure, so perfect in form and proportion, that the hand of God, woven so inextricably into the whole of humanity, was revealed there instantly. Someone had come upon an angel and captured her for eternity in a brilliant flurry of brushstrokes.

            Even muted in the layers of dust, the colors danced across the canvas. Kate lightly blew away the powder and the woman’s eyes—two cornflower blue blossoms glistening in the noonday summer sun—glittered with life. Sandy, blonde wisps of hair clung loosely around the slender frame of her high, tanned cheekbones, and, poised beneath a perfect nose—lips so pink, so full of life, they seemed to draw breath between them even now.

. . . . .