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Overview
April 3, 1912. "Is this life, to grasp joy only to fear its escape? The price of happiness is the risk of losing it."
So reads one of the many wise entries in David Parkin's diary in Timepiece, which traces the miraculous lives of David and his wife MaryAnne as they discover the power of love, loyalty, forgiveness—and a long-forgotten keepsake that will change the fate of their family for eternity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780743236454 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2002 |
| Series: | The Christmas Box Trilogy |
| Edition description: | Large Print |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 378,389 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Salt Lake City, UtahDate of Birth:
October 11, 1962Place of Birth:
Salt Lake City, UtahEducation:
B.A., University of Utah, 1984Read an Excerpt
Timepiece
By Richard Paul Evans
Pocket Books
Copyright © 1997 Richard Paul EvansAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0671008978
Chapter One
"Of all, clockmakers and morticians should bear the keenest sense of Priority-their lives daily spent in observance of the unflagging procession of time ... and the end thereof. "DAVID PARKIN'S DIARY. JANUARY 3, 1901
When I was a boy, I lived in horror of a clock-a dark and foreboding specter that towered twice my height in the hardwood hallway of my childhood home and even larger in my imagination.
It was a mahogany clock, its hood rising in two wooden cues that curled like horns on a devil's head. It had a brass-embossed face, black, serpentine hands, and a flat, saucer-sized pendulum.
To this day, I can recall the simple and proud incantations of its metallic chime. At my youthful insistence, and to my father's dismay, the strike silent was never employed, which meant the clock chimed every fifteen minutes, night and day.
I believed then that this clock had a soul-a belief not much diminished through age or accumulated experience. This species of clock was properly called a longcase clock, until a popular music hall song of the nineteenth century immortalized one of its ilk and forever changed the name. The song was titled "My Grandfather's Clock," and during my childhood, more than a half century after the song was written, it was still a popular children'stune. By the age of five, I had memorized the song's lyrics.
My grandfatber's clock was too large for the shelf, so it stood ninety years on the floor, It was taller by half than the old man himself, tho' it weighed not a pennyweight more. It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born, and was always his treasure and pride, But it stopp'd short never to go again when the old man died.
My fear of the hallway clock had its roots in the song's final refrain.
But it stopp'd short never to go again when the old man died.
When I was young, my mother was sickly and often bedridden with ailments I could neither pronounce nor comprehend. With the reasoning and imagination of childhood, I came to believe that if the clock stopped, my mother would die.
Often, as I played alone in our quiet house after my brothers had left for school, I would suddenly feel my heart grasped by the hand of panic and I would run to my mother's darkened bedroom. Peering through the doorway, I would wait for the rise and fall of her chest, or the first audible gasp of her breath. Sometimes, if she had had an especially bad day, I would lie awake at night listening for the clock's quarter-hour chime. Twice I ventured downstairs to the feared oracle to see if its pendulum was still alive.
To my young mind, the clock's most demonic feature was the hand-painted moon wheel set above its face in the clock's arch. Mystically, the wheel turned with the waning moon, giving the clock a wizardry that, as a child, transfixed and mystified me as if it somehow knew the mysterious workings of the universe. And the mind of God.
It is my experience that all childhoods have ghosts.
Tonight, just outside my den stands a similar grandfather's clock-one of the few antiques my wife and I received from MaryAnne Parkin, a kind widow we shared a home for a short while before her death nearly nineteen years ago. The clock had been a gift to her on her wedding day from her husband, David, and during our stay in the mansion it occupied the west wall of the marble-floored foyer.
David Parkin had been a wealthy Salt Lake City businessman and a collector of rare antiquities. Before his death, in 1934, he had accumulated an immense collection of rare furniture, Bibles, and , most of all, clocks. Time-marking devices of all kinds-from porcelain-encased pocket watches to hewn-stone sundials filled the Parkin home. Of his vast collection of timekeepers, the grandfather's clock, which now stands outside my doorway, was the most valuables marvel of nineteenth-century art and engineering and the trophy of David's collection. Even still, there was one timepiece that he held in greater esteem. One that he, and MaryAnne, cherished above all: a beautiful rose-gold wristwatch.
Only eleven days before her death, MaryAnne Parkin had bequeathed the timepiece to my keeping.
"The day before you give Jenna away," she had said, her hands and voice trembling as she handed me the heirloom, "give this to her for the gift."
I was puzzled by her choice of words.
"Her wedding gift?" I asked.
She shook her head and I recognized her characteristic vagueness. She looked at me sadly, then forced a fragile smile."You will know what I mean."
I wondered if she really believed that I would or had merely given the assurance for her own consolation.
It had been nineteen winters since Keri, Jenna, and I had shared the mansion with the kindly widow, and though I had often considered her words, their meaning eluded me still. It haunted me that I had missed something that she, who understood life so well, regarded with such gravity.
Tonight, upstairs in her bedroom, my daughter Jenna, now a young woman of twenty-two, is engaged in the last-minute chores of a bride-to-be. In the morning, I will give her hand to another man. A wave of melancholy washed over me as I thought of the place she would leave vacant in our home and in my heart.
The gift? What in the curriculum of fatherhood had I failed to learn?
I leaned back in my chair and admired the exquisite heirloom. MaryAnne had received the watch in 1918 and, even then, it was already old: crafted in a time when craftsmanship was akin to religion-before the soulless reproductions of today's mass-market assembly.
The timepiece was set in a finely polished rose-gold encasement. It had a perfectly round face with tiny numerals etched beneath a delicate, raised crystal. On each side of the face, intricately carved in gold, were scallopshell-shaped clasps connecting the casing to a matching rose-gold scissor watchband. I have never before, or since, seen a timepiece so beautiful.
From the dark hallway outside my den, the quarter-hour chime of the grandfather's clock disrupted my thoughts-as if beckoning for equal attention.
The massive clock had always been a curiosity to me. When we had first moved into the Parkin mansion, it sat idle in the upstairs parlor. On one occasion, I asked MaryAnne why she didn't have the clock repaired.
"Because," she replied, "it isn't broken."
Treasured as it is, the clock has always seemed out of place in our home, like a relic of another age-a prop left behind after the players had finished their lines and taken their exits. In one of those exits is the tale of David and MaryAnne Parkin. And so, too, the riddle of the timepiece.
Continues...
Excerpted from Timepiece by Richard Paul Evans Copyright © 1997 by Richard Paul Evans. Excerpted by permission.
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