A Fair Maiden (11 page)

"Dear Katya! No one will hurt you again."

16

"E
YES HERE, KATYA
! Your beautiful eyes."

It was early August. Following an overnight squall, the Jersey coast was littered with seaweed, sea kelp, rotting fish, and hundreds—thousands?—of jellyfish washed ashore half-alive, transparent tendrils quivering with venom. In Mr. Kidder's studio, Katya posed for the artist, seated in a straight-backed stool facing him at the easel a few feet away. It was then Mr. Kidder would tell her in the calmest, most matter-of-fact voice that he was a perfectionist in his art, if not in his life; he sought Katya's "perfect likeness," for it was a likeness he'd glimpsed many years ago, before he had seen Katya on Ocean Avenue.

Katya laughed uneasily. Was Mr. Kidder joking? Or was Mr. Kidder serious? He'd seated her so that she faced a sliver of light that seemed to pierce her very brain. She couldn't see the expression on Mr. Kidder's face.

Soul mates. At once you know. Born at the wrong times. One so old, the other so young
...

What would her Vineland friends think of this? Katya wondered. Wanting to laugh—how they'd have reacted.
Some old guy hitting on Katya, disgusting old granddaddy, should be ashamed of himself.

And then, maybe Katya loved him. Maybe.

For Marcus Kidder was so kind to her! Giving her so much money and never even asking if her mother had called her to thank her. (No. Essie Spivak had not called. Hadn't even acknowledged receiving the check, let alone expressed any curiosity about it. Their mother was "taking long weekends" in Atlantic City, Katya learned from her sister Lisle. At which casinos, and with whom: don't ask.)

How distant Katya felt from her family. The Spivaks were scattered like sea creatures washed ashore in the wake of a terrible storm, dazed and quivering with life, and some of this was a stinging, venomous life but the only life they knew. Katya thought,
I am not one of them! Not in Mr. Kidder's house.

He would love her as her family could not, he seemed to promise. He would love her enough for two.

"Damn! Goddamn."

Sometimes he surprised her, losing his temper. While he was sketching Katya in pastel chalks, a sudden misstroke of the chalk and Mr. Kidder cursed, tore the paper in two, flung the chalk down so that it shattered on the floor.

Katya cringed, hoping he wasn't angry at her. Accustomed to men, boys and men, turning mean suddenly, blaming who's nearby.

"How elusive you are, Katya! A gossamer soul, like a butterfly's wings."

These pastel sketches were preliminary to paintings, Mr. Kidder told her. It was his intention to paint a sequence of oil portraits of her that would be "autonomous" artworks he'd envisioned long ago, before he'd actually seen her on Ocean Avenue.

"Before, even, you were born. I know this."

Marcus Kidder spoke quietly, forcefully. As his deft fingers moved, wielding chalk.

Skeptically, Katya asked how he knew this.

"Because, Katya, when I saw you there with those children, it was as if I remembered you. Except you'd been dressed differently that other time. Your hair had been loose, curlier. But it was you, Katya. You recognized me, too."

Katya tried to think: could this be so? A stranger, an older man with the most beautiful head of white hair, close beside her saying,
And what would you choose, if you had your wish?

Mr. Kidder smiled at her from behind the easel. "Think back, dear! We both felt that we'd already met, in another lifetime perhaps. Somewhere."

Katya thought,
No! never.
This had to be a joke. Like Funny Bunny, who said such silly things, such far-fetched things, and expected you to believe them; and you had to love him, because he made you laugh.

Katya objected: if Mr. Kidder was going to tear up the sketches of her, why couldn't she have them? No one had ever drawn her likeness before—it didn't have to be perfect ... But Mr. Kidder said, "No. When I achieve what I see, I will show you, and I will provide you with a copy. But it would pain me, Katya, for you to see anything less than perfection."

These other girls you've drawn, were they perfect?
Katya wanted to ask but knew that Mr. Kidder would be offended by so personal a question.

And who was Naomi? And how did Naomi die?

No one had ever asked Katya Spivak what she planned to do with her life, but Marcus Kidder asked.

As Katya posed for him, so Katya spoke to him, shyly at first, for it seemed to her strange that Marcus Kidder should actually be interested in Katya Spivak's future; and then more openly, since he seemed sincere. So wonderfully sincere! Katya confided in the artist as she'd never confided in anyone: that she wanted to leave Vineland after high school, if she could; wanted to attend a good university, like Rutgers in New Brunswick, not the local community college. Mr. Kidder asked Katya what she'd like to study and Katya told him maybe psychology, linguistics—she'd seen a TV documentary about a team of psychologists who worked with chimpanzees, experimenting to determine if chimps could use language as human beings did. And more recently, since
Funny Bunny,
Katya was thinking she might study art and children's literature and become a children's book author/illustrator like Marcus Kidder...

"Really! But not 'like Marcus Kidder,' dear—there was only one of him."

Was this a rebuke? Was Mr. Kidder laughing at her? Yet next time Katya went to the studio, Mr. Kidder had a present for her: an artist's sketchpad and a box of colored pencils.

"Begin by sketching what you see. And don't get discouraged."

"Eyes here, Katya! That's my girl."

By the end of the forty-minute session Katya felt lightheaded. Her brain was fatigued as if she'd been high on ecstasy, sleepless through a night. Eyes aching from the effort of keeping them open and widened in the childlike way Mr. Kidder insisted on.
He is sucking my life from me,
came the warning thought, but too fleeting for Katya to grasp.

At the end of each session Mr. Kidder insisted upon walking Katya to the front gate. Speaking quietly to her as they made their way along the flagstone path in the semidark, his hand on her elbow gently guiding her, who needed no guiding, thanking her for her patience, and asking when she could come back again. At the front gate it was Mr. Kidder's custom to remove from his pocket, as if he'd only just thought of it, a clip of neatly folded bills, which he pressed into Katya's hand, provoking Katya to murmur, embarrassed, "Mr. Kidder, no—you don't have to pay me," though of course Katya expected to be paid, and was excited by the prospect of being paid; and Mr. Kidder laughed at her as you might laugh at a small child caught in a small lie. "Katya, of course I have to—you are precious to me, you know."

Truly she was embarrassed. Taking money like this, from Marcus Kidder. She shut her fingers over the bills without seeming to see what they were, or to acknowledge them, and kept her fingers shut tight until she was several blocks from
17
Proxmire Street, when she opened her hand and counted the money.

The first time he'd given her forty dollars. The second time fifty-five. The third time sixty-five dollars. So much money, for so little effort!
This money no one knows about. This money that is my secret. No taxes, and no deductions. Mrs. Engelhardt won't know. Momma won't know. All mine.

17

I
N HER SWIMSUIT
with a loose T-shirt over it and the wind whipping her hair, she was running—trying to run—on the beach at the yacht club in the wake of Tricia Engelhardt's waddling trot as the frothy, foamy, lead-colored surf washed up onto the beach, tickling and teasing the little girl's feet. Katya felt her bare feet begin to sink in the sand, soft dry sand that slowed her like a nightmare dream in which you run—try to run—but can't, cry for help—try to call for help—but can't. That day, humid-hot even at the shore, Katya felt rivulets of sweat trickling down her sides. She was reliving Marcus Kidder's embrace. Oh God, she'd embraced Mr. Kidder without knowing what she'd done and a moment later stepped away, breathless and frightened, subtly revulsed and eager to escape him as he assured her,
Katya dear! I will pay you, of course.

Underfoot, the fine white sand of the private beach was strewn with small broken shells, as if someone had deliberately tossed them there for another person to cut her bare feet on; overhead were shrieking herring gulls; on a desolate stretch of beach Katya suddenly saw her own body, naked, the swimsuit and the T-shirt torn from her, Katya Spivak's arms and legs outstretched in the coarse sand and her glassy eyes open to the sky as the hungry herring gulls swooped down...

There came a man's impatient voice: "Katya! For Christ's sake, watch where Tricia is headed, will you?"

Rudely wakened from her trance. Oh God, where was she? She'd allowed little Tricia Engelhardt to trot along the beach yards ahead of her—there was giggling little Tricia, about to stumble into a sinkhole. Katya screamed, "Tricia! Come here!" and managed to catch up with the child and swoop her into her arms just in time.

It was Mr. Engelhardt who'd shouted at Katya, from a boardwalk through dune grasses, above the beach. Katya hadn't known that Tricia's father was anywhere close by. And there he stood, glowering at her, in swim trunks, an unbuttoned shirt, with a white yachting cap on his wiry graying hair. When Katya had first come to live in the Engelhardts' house, Mr. Engelhardt had gazed at her with a faint fond smile, and when his wife wasn't close by, he'd flirted openly with her. From time to time he'd tipped her—"No need for Lorraine to know, Katya. Just between you and me." Now Max Engelhardt's eyes moved on Katya crudely and without a trace of affection, and his tone was close to taunting: "Where the hell is your mind, Katya? On your boyfriend?"

Katya was shocked. Katya swallowed hard. Katya shielded her eyes against the sun. Katya was determined not to show this man the rage she felt toward him in that instant.

Saying, in a hurt voice, that she had no boyfriend...

"Good. And whoever he is, don't bring him into our house, ever."

18

"M
RS. BEE
! Here is my young artiste-friend Katya, visiting from Vineland, New Jersey."

Artiste-friend
was Mr. Kidder's way of teasing. But Katya was made to feel flattered, too.

It was a warm, gusty August afternoon. Tea-time on the terrace behind Mr. Kidder's beautiful old shingleboard house. Mrs. Bee had prepared the meal, and Mrs. Bee served the meal. Mrs. Bee was a woman in her mid- or late fifties, in a grim dull gray housekeeper's uniform with white collar and cuffs, like something in a cartoon, exactly as Katya had imagined her: stout, short, puffy-faced, fussy and frowning and in love with gentlemanly Mr. Kidder, her longtime employer. For you never knew—certainly blushing Mrs. Bee never knew—if Mr. Kidder was kidding or serious, and if what he said about her—"busiest and best Mrs. Bee in all of Jersey"—was meant to be flattering or subtly mocking. It was clear to Katya that Mrs. Bee resented her: this blond young girl in such casual clothes, tank top, cutoffs, sandals, no one Mrs. Bee had ever seen before, yet an artiste-friend of Mr. Kidder's. Stiffly Mrs. Bee smiled as she served Katya and Mr. Kidder chilled cucumber soup, lobster and avocado salad, fresh-baked sourdough bread, casting a sidelong glance at Katya from narrowed pebble-colored eyes.
Don't think that I am impressed with you, like Mr. Kidder. I am not.

What had been strange to Katya was how uninterested Mr. Kidder had been in talking about his children's books.
Funny Bunny, Elgar the Flying Elephant, The Little Leopard Who Changed His Spots, Duncan Skunk's First Day at School,
which Tricia had loved, and Katya had loved also, wishing she'd had books like these when she'd been a little girl. But when Katya asked Mr. Kidder whether it was so, as the librarian had said, that he'd stopped writing and illustrating children's books, he'd stiffened and just shrugged; when Katya asked him why he'd stopped, when the books were so wonderful, he'd said coolly, "Children grow up and are gone. And so with adults." What this meant, Katya couldn't guess. She felt rebuffed, hurt. And Mr. Kidder relented, saying, "Katya, I'd done what I could in that vein. Each book was a replica of the preceding book, in an altered form. 'What I have done, I would not do again.'" Speaking wistfully, but in a way to suggest that the topic was closed.

Katya and Mr. Kidder were sitting side by side at the white wrought-iron table, looking toward the ocean, beyond a swelling of dunes, rippled dune grass. Katya could not stare hard enough at the rough, rolling waves of the Atlantic Ocean, froth like spittle, seabirds riding the crests of waves bobbing like white corks. How like vast sprawling nude figures, the sand dunes behind Mr. Kidder's property. Katya was thinking how strange it was that the ocean's waves never stop: Where do waves come from? And why? Something to do with the moon, she thought. Gravitational pull. She felt Mr. Kidder's fingers lightly on her bare forearm and tried not to be startled.

"To you, dear Katya! To your portrait, soon to be executed."

Sly Mr. Kidder had waited for Mrs. Bee to depart before lifting his glass of white wine in a toast, clicking it smartly against Katya's glass, which was in fact an elegant crystal wineglass like Mr. Kidder's, though filled with sparkling water and a twist of lime. Katya smiled her most dazzling smile, and drank.

Wanting to laugh at the prune-faced old bitch Mrs. Bee. What right had the woman to dislike Katya Spivak?

"Are you happy, Katya? I am."

"Yes, Mr. Kidder. I am."

The mouth speaks what the ear is to hear.
What shrewd Old World wisdom, laced with cynicism. It had to have been one of Katya's Spivak grandparents who'd spoken in this way.