The Drowning Girl (42 page)
Authors: Caitlin R. Kiernan
J
ANUARY
27, 2011
I stumbled across this on the internet this morning. I wasn’t looking for it. No, maybe I was. I still have my files, and I’ll put the printout with everything else about Perrault. This much I will type:
[C]ertainly, far stranger things have been suggested regarding both his life and his works. And given the particulars of his short career, his involvement in the occult, and his penchant for cryptic affectations, it does not seem—to this author—so outlandish to ascribe to Albert Perrault a morbid sort of prescience or to believe that his presentation of
Last Drink Bird Head
upon the eve of his fatal motorcycle accident on the rue Cuvier was a carefully orchestrated move, designed to preserve his mystique
ad finem
. Indeed, it almost seems outlandish to believe otherwise.As to the painting itself (currently on loan to the Musée national d’art moderne),
Last Drink Bird Head
is one of Perrault’s largest and most thematically oblique canvases. After his disappointing experiments with sculpture and multimedia, it harks back to the paintings that heralded his ascent almost a decade ago. Here we have, once again, his “retro-expressionist-impressionist” vision and also a clear return to his earlier obsession with mythology.A lone figure stands on a barren hilltop, silhouetted against a writhing night sky. However, this sky does not writhe with stars or moonlight, as in Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
, but rather here the very
fabric
of the sky writhes. The
canvas itself seems to convulse. The blackness of a firmament which might well reflect Perrault’s conception of an antipathetic cosmos, and might also be read as the projection of the painting’s central figure and, by extension, the artist’s own psyche. There is but a single crimson dab of light in all that black, contorted sky (recalling his earlier
Fecunda ratis
), and it seems more like a baleful eye than any ordinary celestial body. The distinctive shape and thickness of the brushstrokes have rendered this sky a violent thing, and I have found that it’s difficult not to view the brushstrokes as the corridors of a sort of madman’s maze, leading round and round and, ultimately, nowhere at all.And if the sky of
Last Drink Bird Head
could be said to form a labyrinth, then the figure dominating the foreground might fairly be construed as its inevitable “minotaur”—that is, a malformed chimera trapped forever within its looping confines. The figure has previously been described by one prominent reviewer as representing the falcon-headed Egyptian sky god Horus (or Nekheny). Yet it seems clear to me that Perrault’s Bird Head avatar cannot accurately be described as “falcon-headed.” Rather, the profile presented—a small skull and long, slender, decurved bill—is more strongly reminiscent of an ibis. This, then, brings to mind a different Egyptian deity entirely—Thoth, scribe of the gods and intermediator between forces of good and evil.In its left hand, the figure clutches a book, and on the book’s spine we may clearly discern three letters, presumably a portion of the title—LEV. I cannot help but note reports which surfaced shortly after Perrault’s death that he’d recently begun correspondence with a surviving member of the late Jacova Angevine’s Open Door of Night “suicide cult,” a woman referred to in his correspondence simply as
EMC. Since Angevine’s infamous book,
Waking Leviathan
, is known to have been present in Albert Perrault’s library…Excerpt from
Gilded Thomas Art Review(Vol. 31, No. 7, Fall 2006; Minneapolis, MN)
This painting was not included in the exhibition at the Bell Gallery in 2008. I thought maybe I left before I saw it, as I left in such a state. But I consulted the gallery, and a catalog of the exhibition. The painting wasn’t there. I assume it’s still in France. But EMC, supposedly a survivor of the mass drownings off Moss Landing? Can there be any doubt who this correspondent was? He didn’t know, did he? He didn’t know.
F
EBRUARY
7, 2011
And am I born to die
To lay this body down
And as my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown
A land of deepest shade
Unpierced by human thought
The dreary regions of the dead
Where all things are forgot
“IDUMEA,” CHARLES WESLEY, 1793
F
EBRUARY
10, 2011
Yesterday, at the Athenaeum, I was asked, “Are you still interested in Phillip Saltonstall?” By the librarian, I mean. The one who asked me two years ago if I knew some of his letters were at the John Hay Library.
“No,” I said. But then I said, “Yes, I am,” which made her look at me
that way
. But the expression passed quickly. She leaned close and whispered. It seemed conspiratorial, the whisper.
“Then you’re not gonna believe this,” she said. “You were especially interested in that one painting, right?”
“
The Drowning Girl,
” I said, not wanting to say that at all, but what else could I have said?
She produced a very large book, the sort people call “coffee-table books.” It was titled
Masters of Symbolism
. She opened it to pages 156–157, and there, on 156 (the left side), was
The Drowning Girl,
and on page 157, there was another of Saltonstall’s paintings reproduced. Each filled almost an entire glossy page. The second painting is titled
Girl on a River
, and the book says it was painted in 1870, two years after
The Drowning Girl
. In most respects, the two are almost identical. But they are very, very different, and
Girl on a River
, at first I thought it was the more terrible of the two to see. At first, I almost gathered up my things and ran. After seeing it, I mean. The same girl stands in the same pool; more or less they are the same. Except the girl is not looking over her right shoulder, but is shown in left profile. She is gazing down at a black thing, almost like an immense serpent, half in and half out of the water. It’s wrapped itself about her calves and seems to be slithering from the pool into
the grass. She appears not the least bit alarmed. Curious, I think, maybe. Almost bemused. Abalyn would say that’s a word that no one uses anymore, but she sort of looks that way,
bemused
. The thing looks slippery, and is absolutely black.
In 1897, Saltonstall wrote to Mary Farnum:
“It was then that a pitchy shape leapt up from the river. I know that is a vague description, but I can do no better. It was visible only for an instant, and it never coalesced into anything more distinct. Still, it left me with the disquieting impression that I’d beheld not any manner of fish, but possibly a great serpent, thick around as a telegraph pole and greater in size than any serpent I’d imagined lived anywhere outside the African or Amazonian tropics. Not a genuine serpent, but that’s the nearest comparison I can draw, if I attempt to fashion of it anything more substantial than the shadows beneath the maples.”
The man who wrote
Masters of Symbolism
referred to
Girl on a River
as a “lost painting.” If it really
was
ever lost, then it was
found
three years ago, in the collection of the Hartnell College Gallery in Salinas, California. The author also notes that the painting was donated “by the estate of Theodore Angevine.” Father of Jacova. Prophet from Salinas. Her father taught comparative literature, and he wrote mystery novels that I don’t think were ever very popular.
Also, when I wrote of the figure in
The Drowning Girl,
I wrote, “Her long hair is almost the same shade of green as the water.…” That’s not true. I knew it wasn’t, but I said it anyway. The woman’s hair is blonde. Yellow. Bright yellow, like sunflowers.
I’m not going to say anything about this to Abalyn. Lost paintings, daughters of mystery, mysteries and the pieces aren’t ever going to stop falling into place. Or falling, anyway. One Eva, but two paintings.
F
EBRUARY
11, 2011
FROM EDGAR ALLAN POE,
“THE DOOMED CITY (THE CITY IN THE SEA),” 1831:
Lo! Death hath rear’d HERself a throne
In a strange city, all alone,
Far down within the dim west—
And the good, and the bad, and the worst, and the best,
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There, shrines, and palaces, and towers
Are—not like anything of ours—
O! no—O! no—
ours
never loomTo heaven with that ungodly gloom!
Time-eaten towers that tremble not!
“In the mansions of Poseidon, She will prepare halls from coral and glass and the bones of whales. Palaces, shrines in a strange city. She will bring us home.”
Jacova Angevine (1990)
M
ARCH
8, 2011
I saw Dr. Ogilvy today. She’s pleased with my progress. She smiles at me the way that I know she really means the smile, that it isn’t her “obligatory psychiatrist smile,” but sincere and genuine:
“You know now that you’ll never be sure what happened?” she asked.
“Yeah, I know now. I know that.”
“And you can live with that.”
I looked at a big sand dollar on one of her bookshelves, and then I said, “I can. I can live with that.”
And that’s when she smiled for me.
M
ARCH
18, 2011
We weave necessary fictions, and sometimes they save us. Our minds, our bodies. The siren taught me to sing, but she was a deceitful, manipulative ____, and she saw that I all buthelpedheld the knife as she slit her wrists. So, I told myself another story, a pretty one where I helped a lost wolf who was actually a girl find herself and so become a wolf again. I laid one over the other, and made of myself a hero and not a fool. But my brain jangled and clamored, and I should have known it would never work.
A
PRIL
7, 2011
By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea!
Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick
(1851)
A
PRIL
10, 2011
I saw a red woman on the street today. She didn’t turn and look at me.
A
PRIL
10, 2011
It’s a dream-kill-dream world in here.
A
PRIL
20, 2011
Can one’s mind, as I shall call it, affect one’s body, as I shall call it? If so, that is
personal witchcraft
, or
internal witchcraft
. Can one’s mind affect the bodies of other persons and other things outside?
If so, that is what I shall call
external witchcraft
.
Charles Fort,
Lo!
(1931)
Nothing about her is human except that she is
not
a wolf; it is as if the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin and become part of it, although it does not exist.
Angela Carter, “Wolf-Alice” (1978)
J
UNE
2, 2011
I went back to Moonstone Beach today. Abalyn went with me. I laid flowers on the water. I don’t know if Eva liked flowers, but I cast onto the waves a wreath of ferns and primroses I’d woven. In the flower language of the Victorians, primroses meant “eternal love,” though I know it’s inappropriate, because I know that she never
loved
any of them, any more than she loved me. I’ll say it’s irony.
J
UNE
4, 2011
Abalyn finished reading this manuscript yesterday. Well, more last night than yesterday. Afterwards, she stared at it a long time, and then she silently stared at me until I asked her to stop because it was making me nervous.
“It’s sort of an amazing thing,” she finally said.
“I should have written more about my painting,” I replied, which made her stare at me again.
“Imp, what do you think those two short stories are about?” she asked.
“Oh,” I said (or I said something like “oh”). “I was starting to think maybe they aren’t actually part of the story. That maybe I ought take them out. The paintings, I mean.”
Abalyn frowned. “You’re wrong,” she said. “If you tried, you couldn’t be more wrong.”
J
UNE
10, 2011
One of Eva Canning’s cousins, whose name is Jack Bowler, agreed to meet with me at his home in Jamestown. It’s a dingy little sort of place, but he made me tea, and he was a pleasant man with too many cats. He’s in his forties, and all his hair was gray. He collects nautical memorabilia, and his tiny house is filled with lobster pots, odds and ends from boats, framed photographs and paintings (prints) of whaling ships. I told him up front I was crazy, because I thought I should be honest. He peered at me a moment, and then he laughed and said, “Oh, what the hell ever.” He smoked cigarette after cigarette, and didn’t ask me if I minded. I didn’t tell him that I did.
We talked for more than an hour, and many things were said, consequential and inconsequential. But I’m only going to put one part of it down.
I sipped my second cup of tea, and he said, “Yes, she was a child when her mother died. And she wasn’t ever right after that. Maybe she wasn’t ever right to start with. We weren’t close, but my grandmother being her grandmother’s sister, you hear things. She dropped out of school, finally, and wound up in the hospital twice.” (Rhode Island Hospital, where I see Dr. Ogilvy; not Butler Hospital.) “I think she was about twenty, twenty-one, when she changed her name. Did it legal and everything.”
A marmalade tom jumped into my lap and squinted at me, the way cats squint at interlopers whom they expect to at least have the courtesy to pet them or scratch behind their ears, having interloped and all. I petted him and he purred.
“She changed her name?”
“Yes, she did. Legally. She wasn’t born Eva. That’s not what her mother named her. Her mother didn’t stick around long, but she was here long enough to name her. Child was christened Imogene down at the Central Baptist Church. Imogene May Canning. She changed it, like I said, not long after her mother died. She used to talk about going to California, to that place near Monterey where her mother and all those others died. But she never did.”
I petted the marmalade tom in my lap, and didn’t interrupt. I don’t know what I would have said, anyway.
“Last time they put her in the hospital, someone found her naked at the side of the road somewhere up in Massachusetts. She was taken to the police, and they called her grandmother and brought her back to the hospital in Providence. She was sick. I mean, she’d gotten sick swimming in a river that winter. Bad case of pneumonia. They kept her for a few months, then let her out again. After that, I didn’t hear much about her.”
There was more talk, and more tea, and more cats.
He showed me the tooth of a sperm whale with a woman’s portrait carved into it. He said he’d have more scrimshaw, only it’s so expensive. He showed me a lump of ambergris he found at Mackerel Cove. He showed me the skull of a seal.
It was almost dark when I left, and I thanked him, and he said he wished he could have told me more. He asked if I wanted a cat, and I told him yes, but Abalyn’s allergic.
