Preservation

6

When his sister called him out of the blue asking if he was free for the weekend, Kevin wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Michelle had always been extremely career minded, and as such, a slight rift had grown between them over the years. While Kevin's attempt at college life had fizzled out during his junior year, Michelle had done the exact opposite, throwing herself completely into her studies, working tirelessly on her academic goals. Her degree was in archive management, and she was now in charge of material retrieval and restoration for the Library of Congress branch office in Cleveland. A deep-rooted respect for historically significant media, specifically classic film stock, was one of the driving passions in her life.

Though they shared the same background, upbringing, genes; Kevin and his sister were more different than not. Maybe asking him along was her way of trying to bridge that gap, he thought. Or maybe something else had motivated the invitation.

Over the years, they hadn't talked much about their childhood, but Kevin could tell that her memories of that time ran dark and deep. Their parent's divorce had been rough on all of them, but Michelle seemed to take it particularly hard. The reason for the divorce was a particularly bad one: infidelity. Their father was a horrendous womanizer, sneaking around town, bringing strange women home whenever the house was empty. This went on for a while until their mom finally caught him one day. Michelle was fifteen. Kevin was ten.

Though Kevin was young enough not to understand quite everything that was going on, Michelle had to spend her developing years watching her mother suffer the humiliation and betrayal of their father's indiscretions.

Kevin always believed that Michelle's obsession with old films had started during this time in her life. After the divorce, the remaining contact they had with their father usually consisted of monthly court ordered visits to his one-bedroom efficiency on the other side of town. More often than not, their dad would hand Michelle some money and order her and Kevin to go downtown and kill a few hours while he indulged in the same lewd activities that got him kicked to the curb in the first place. They usually ended up at the small independent theater down the street where they would spend the better part of the day watching the classic movie marathons that often played there. Kevin's adolescent attention span didn't often gel with the cinematic subtleties of the bygone era, but Michelle seemed to drink each feature in with a fascinated thirst. While Kevin would wiggle and fidget in his seat, Michelle would sit quietly, mesmerized by the images dancing before them on the silver screen. Kevin would later come to realize that this must have constituted a sort of therapy for her, a way to escape the harsh realities of their newly-imposed familial situation.

Of the numerous films made available to her on that long ago string of endless Saturdays, none fascinated her more than works of Albert Hildebrand.

Part of it had to do with the fact that he was also born in their home state of Ohio. His father, a Prohibition era Deputy Sheriff, was gunned down by bootleggers when he was just a boy, leaving young Albert alone to care for his sickly mother. Dirt poor facing down the barrel of the Great Depression, he managed to keep himself and his mother fed until she finally succumbed of her ailments and died during the winter of 1933. Alone and with no one to turn to, he hopped a train heading west, and the legend was born. What would follow in the coming years and decades was a career spent creating some of the most enduring tales of suspense and crime that the American film going public would ever know.

Michelle practically fell in love with each and every movie the man ever made. Her zeal for the subject would carry her past her teens, through college, and eventually into her career as a film historian and preservationist. This whole situation with Teague and his supposed missing film print must have been big deal for her, Kevin concluded. Albert Hildebrand was probably one of the most famous and recognized figures in movie history. For someone in her profession, finding a print of one of his lost works was like finding the Holy Grail.

And the fact that she invited him along filled Kevin with a weird sort of déjà vu. Here they were; going together to see an old movie, just like when they were kids.