The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque (7 page)

"Sabott had gone mad," I said in my defense.

"Mad or merely in search of what you yourself are searching for now? Don't forget, I was with you that day at Madison Square when those fine gentlemen were offering you impressive sums of money to execute their portraits. Then who should wander along but old Sabott, ranting at the sky. Do you remember, he worked himself into such a lather that he fell over in the gutter? I did not know you then, but I thought you had been or were his student, and I said, 'Piambo, is that not an acquaintance of

yours?' You denied you knew him, and we walked on and left him there."

"All right, Shenz, all right," I said. "You've made your point."

"I make it not to distress you but to show you that this is a debt that still needs to be settled. Not for

Sabott—it's not going to do him any good—but for you. Your betrayal still weighs heavily upon you."

"And what is the connection between that and Mrs. Charbuque?" I asked.

"The other side of the sword. Piambo, you are the finest painter I know. You are wasting your talent on rendering the features of the banal, trading opportunity for status and wealth."

"The finest?" I said with a short sharp chuckle.

"This is not a joke," said Shenz. "You have seen my work. What do you think of the brush strokes?"

"Varied and effective," I said.

"Yes, all well and good, but the other night, after you left Reed's, I took a moment to step up close to the portrait of his wife and study your brushwork. Do you know what I saw?"

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing. I saw nothing. Now there are ways to disguise brushwork, but these methods, you know yourself, are as evident as if the direction of the application were obvious. After staring for some time, I

realized that each time you touched the canvas, the effect was like a small explosion of color. I've seen you paint, and you approach the work with great energy, great vitality. It comes from inside you, in here,"

he said, and brought his clenched fist slowly to his chest. "All this truth put in the service of lying about what you see and feel." I said nothing. Where I had at first been irritated with him for mentioning the incident with Sabott, I was now feeling nothing but gratitude. He had just cor-roborated everything I

knew to be true in my heart.

"If I were you," said Shenz, "I would paint this Mrs. Charbuque with a mind toward getting as much money out of her as possible. If this is how you feel you can free yourself, then take all you can get from her."

"All I need do is come up with a competent portrait," I said.

"No, you must capture her likeness precisely," he said.

"How, though?" I asked. "I'm in doubt about whether her words are meant to help or lead me astray."

"Yes," said Shenz, laughing, "that business with the science of reading snowflakes is rather preposterous. But there are methods of finding your way through that squall."

"Such as?"

"Cheat," he said. "I'm sure we can find out what she looks like. There is no woman I know of with that much money who does not have a past. If there are no photo-graphs, she must exist in someone's memory. A little research should undoubtedly reveal her."

"I never thought of that," I said. "It seems dishonest."

"Unlike the portrait of Mrs. Reed?" said Shenz. "I will even help you."

"I don't know," I said.

"Think of the time free of worry or constraint the ulti-mate sum will buy you," he said.

After our discussion he brought me into his studio and showed me the first rounded sketches he had made of the Hatstell children. "These are not youngsters," he told me, "they are doughnuts on legs." By the time I took my leave, he had me in stitches, describing his feckless attempts to have his new subjects remain still for more than five minutes at a time. "Tomorrow I will bring either a whip or a bag of chocolates," he said. As we parted at the door, he shook my hand and said, as a reminder of his ear-lier offer, "She is out there somewhere. We can find her."

I breathed a sigh of relief once I crossed Seventh Avenue and was heading back toward civilization.

It was very close to midnight, and the streets were uncharacter-istically empty owing to the cold.

My head was in a bit of a fog from having imbibed, secondhand from Shenz, the blue opium mist, which had calmed me but also made me exceedingly weary.

Although my thoughts were slippery, I tried to decide how to proceed with Mrs. Charbuque the next morning. The question I posed to myself was whether I should let her lead me on with her narrative, or force her through a series of rapid inquiries to divulge bits of information she had not intended to part

with. I thought it highly suspi-cious that the first installment of her story had reached a climax at precisely the moment my time had expired. I suppose because I had just visited Shenz, it reminded me of the

Arabian Nights entertainment, with Mrs. Char-buque in the role of Scheherazade. As much as I felt I was being led by the nose, I did very much want to know what had become of the child she had brought to life in my mind. Upon reaching Twenty-first and Broadway, I decided that I must take control and turn the tables on her. I would eschew the story about crystalogogistics for a gro-cery list of simple questions.

I was no more than two blocks from my home when I looked up and saw some commotion beneath a street lamp across the way. From their uniforms and their hats, I could identify two of the three men as officers of the law. Even in the poor light, I recognized the man in civi-lian clothes—a derby and topcoat—as John Sills, a Sunday painter, a miniaturist, whom I had been on friendly terms with for a number of years. In addition to being an artist, he was also a detective on the New York City police force. They were gathered around what appeared to be a body on the sidewalk.

I crossed the street and came up behind the trio. As I drew closer, one of the men moved slightly to the side and I had a brief glimpse of a horrific sight. With the light from the lamp above, I was now able to see that they were all standing in a pool of blood. The young woman was not lying horizontally on the curb but was propped up against the base of the streetlight.

The bodice of her white dress was soaked bright red; crimson red streaked down her even whiter face. It gathered on her lips and dripped off her chin. I thought at first that she must be dead, but then I saw her move her head slightly from side to side.

She was trying to whisper something, and the thick liquid at her mouth bubbled. As the officer who had initially moved aside and given me my view turned and noticed I was there, I realized that the stream of gore was issuing from her eyes as if she were weeping her own blood.

"Mind your business," said the man, and he raised his club with all intention of striking me.

By that time John had turned and, seeing it was me, caught the other fellow's arm in midswing.

"I'll take care of this, Hark," he said. He came forward quickly, put his arm around my shoulders, and turned me away from the scene. Pushing me along, he herded me back across the street.

"Get out of here, Piambo, or we will have to arrest you," he said. "Go and don't tell anyone what you saw." He shoved me on my way. Before turning back to the incredible scene beneath the street lamp, he warned me again, his voice loud, "Not a word."

I said nothing, thought nothing, but broke into a run. When I reached my home, I was winded and nauseated. I drank whiskey until I regained my normal pulse. Then I stumbled into my studio, sat down, and lit a cigarette with shaking hands. All I could picture was that poor woman's bloody eyes, and through some twisted association with the day's events, I thought of them as the Twins.

God is Fallible

“My father put them in an old silver locket that had been his sister's and latched its chain around my neck. He told me I must never open it but always to remember that they were there, hiding.

Then he swore me to secrecy, telling me the Twins were a secret that must never be revealed.

When I asked him why, he shook his head and got down on one knee to face me. 'Because it proves that God is fallible,' he said, 'and the world neither needs nor wants to know that.'

"I was not sure what the word fallible meant, but what I was certain of was a growing sense of pride at being chosen to bear this important talisman. Because he had told me never to mention them, they became an increas-ing obsession for me. I felt as if they were alive inside that tiny silver chamber, like the germ of life inside a seed. There seemed to be a thrum of energy pulsating through my breast at the point where the pendant touched my flesh. The chain tingled against the skin of my neck. Not too long afterward I began to have strange dreams at night, colors and vibrations in my skull, wild images so abundant it was as if I were dreaming for three.

The nights were not long enough to give vent to them, and they began to seep into my waking hours. I did not tell my father, fearing that he would take back the locket.

"Then one day, when the snows had abated for an entire week, and I was out in the forest of tall
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pines play-ing at being an adventurer to the North Pole, I heard them whisper to me. It was an odd communication because, although I knew they were speaking words, I registered their message as an image in my mind. What I saw was a shooting star moving through the heavens, throwing off sparks like a

July Fourth rocket. This vision lasted only seconds, but in the time I beheld it, it was crystal clear.

"The experience was both frightening and exciting, and when it was over I stood still among the trees for a long while. Of course, as a child I had no way of defining the feeling this experience gave me, but now, thinking back on it, I believe it can best be described as a sense that Nature and, beyond that, the very cosmos was alive. God was watching me, so I ran back to the house to hide.

"By that afternoon, after playing with my dolls and helping my mother with the laundry, I had forgotten about the incident. When I was finished with my chores, I went to visit my father in his study.

He was at his desk with the magnifying glass, studying a specimen and jot-ting notes in his journal. I sat on the couch, and when he heard the broken springs shift, he turned around and smiled at me. A few minutes later, he asked me to fetch him a book from the bookcase. He turned in his chair and pointed to a large blue-bound volume on the second shelf. 'That one there, Lu,' he said.

'The Crystal Will by

Scarfinati.'

"As I pulled the book off the shelf, the one beside it shifted and fell open on the floor. After carrying the volume he wanted to my father, I returned to pick up the one that had fallen. I saw that the book had opened to a full-page illustration of a shooting star, much like the one the Twins had whispered to me that morning."

"Mrs. Charbuque—" I said, but she interrupted me.

"Please, Mr. Piambo, allow me to finish," she said.

"Very well," I told her, sketching madly. The day was bright, and the sun coming in the windows was projecting a faint but somewhat definable shadow on the screen. I had been filling pages with quick, crude drawings, my hand moving over the paper as I kept my eye trained on the scene of falling leaves.

"I did not mention the remarkable happenstance to my father but kept it inside me and, whenever I

turned my attention to the thought of it, felt a genuine thrill. It was as if God were sending me a secret message, for me alone to see. I was filled with a strange sense of expectation for the remainder of the day. That is why I nearly leaped out of my skin when, that night as we sat by the fire, my mother and father reading in the glow of the gas lamps, there came a pounding on our door.

"Naturally my parents exchanged worried looks, for who would be calling so late at night at the top of a moun-tain ? Warily my father got up and went to see who it was. His look of concern alarmed me, and I followed him to make sure he would be all right. There on the doorstep stood a large man, wearing a fur coat and a broad-brimmed hat, carrying a large pack and a rifle.

My father seemed to know him.

The man also worked for Ossiak as a tracker. He had come to search for the body of one of the fellows from the supply team. On the way down the mountain in the storm, one of the men had lagged behind and apparently lost his way. He was believed to have suc-cumbed to the storm and died of exposure.

My father stepped aside and let him in. As he showed the man to a seat by the fireplace, he called back to me, 'Lu, close the door, please.' The three-quarter moon drew my attention as I swung
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the door, and then something suddenly streaked across the star-filled sky, leaving sparks in its path.

"The visitor's name was Amory, and he told us that he had come up the mountain that day looking for the corpse but had not found it. He asked to stay the night. He planned to leave early in the morning and descend the mountain, giving the dead man one more chance to be found. My father said he felt somewhat responsible for the tragedy, and told Mr. Amory that he would accompany him halfway. Then mother and father questioned Amory about what was going on in the world down the moun-tain. Soon afterward I was sent to bed.

"I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of a whispered gasp. At first I thought it was the Twins trying to tell me something, but then realized that it was coming from the parlor. I don't know what time it was, but it felt very late, like those bleak hours of the very early morn-ing. It was cold, but I crept out of bed and tiptoed down the hall to the parlor entrance. Since the moon was shining that night, there was a very dim glow coming through the parlor window. I heard another gasp like the one that had awoken me, and I saw my mother, sitting astride the tracker with her nightgown pulled up, revealing her

bare legs. His large hands were rubbing her breasts through the thin material.

"I apologize for being so forthright about this, Mr. Piambo, but I am trying to be accurate. My mother was rocking forward and back, her eyes closed, breathing heav-ily. I was astounded at this strange display and had no idea what was happening, but something in the back of my mind told me I