The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque (11 page)

Shenz was somewhat older than I, his age in the middle ground between those of Sabott and myself.

It was becoming increasingly obvious to me that the opium was beginning to erode his health.

His skin tone had become more sallow in recent months, and he had lost a good deal of weight.

When he was younger he had been quite muscular and had always exuded a great sense of energy. His exuberance now, though, had a frantic edge to it, more like the nervous excess resulting from the consumption of too much coffee. Also, his work had begun to decline in its precision and freshness, and the commissions he now drew were less than choice—the Hatstells'

children were a good example.

I wondered if I was looking at a portrait of myself in another few years. I also wondered if perhaps

Shenz, when looking at me, was seeing a portrait of himself a few years younger when he still had an opportunity to mar-shal his powers and, as my father had entreated me, "create something beautiful." It came to me that perhaps that was the reason for his resolute insistence that I suc-ceed in my bid to portray Mrs. Charbuque precisely.

When the cab stopped at Shenz's address, I woke him. He came to with a start and then smiled, his eyelids open-ing to mere slits. "I had a dream, Piambo," he said.

"Was it of that model of Hunt's again, the girl sitting on that wag's lap in The Awakening

Conscience?"

I asked.

"No," he said, and slowly shook his head. "I was trapped in a glass jar, and Borne was peering in at me. I tapped the glass with my walking stick, desiring to be let out. He paid no attention, though. I saw he was at work making a label. On it he wrote in large black letters LUNCH."

I saw my friend to his door. Before he passed over the threshold, I said to him, "Listen, Shenz, I do truly appre-ciate your help. I'll consider going to the warehouse. But first let me see what else I can learn from Mrs. Charbuque."

He fixed me with a look of grave weariness. "I never told you this," he said, "but before Sabott died, I had a conversation with him one day when he turned up at the Player's Club. No one
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would

acknowledge his presence, and they were watching him closely, prepared to eject him if he should get out of hand, but I went over and sat with him out of due respect. Luckily he was having a rare lucid moment. He bought me a drink and spoke brilliantly about the painting by Waterhouse of the Sirens depicted as birds of prey with women's heads, surrounding Ulysses, who is bound to the mast of his ship.

Before he left, he mentioned you, and said to me, 'Shenz, keep an eye on that boy for me. I haven't had the chance to tell him everything.' Then he left. Two weeks later he was dead."

Sunday Morning

I woke very early Sunday morning to a suffused gray light and the patter of a driving rain against the window. Although it was cold out beyond the blankets and the counterpane, Samantha lay next to me, enveloping me in her warmth. There, on our intimate island of calm, I felt temporarily safe from the concerns that presently plagued me. Swarming just beyond the confines of the bed, I knew, was that flock of female images waiting to descend and peck at my consciousness, tear apart my reason. I thought

I would remain where I was, lashed to the mast, so to speak, for a little while longer.

I turned away from the world and watched Samantha breathe, wondering what dreams she moved through behind the screen of sleep. Her long dark hair swept over and around the pillow, wild in its configurations. There were curious minute angles at the corners of her closed lips—either a smile or a sign of consternation. Her eyelids fluttered slightly, and I could read her pulse by concen-trating on her neck. Evident now also were the creases around her eyes and mouth, betraying her age. The blan-kets lay at a slant across her body exposing her right breast, and seeing her at that moment made me think what a perfect subject she would be for a portrait.

I had to wonder whether in all the portraits I had done of her, most when we were younger, I had ever really captured her essence, or if what I had painted was, expanding upon Sabott's dictum, only something of myself.

I lay there swinging rapidly back and forth between specific memories of my days with Samantha and moments of clouded uncertainty when her sleeping figure mocked my belief that I knew anything about her at all. In an attempt to circumvent the troublesome half of this equation, I concentrated on the kindness she had shown the previous day by bringing Emma to my studio. I smiled when considering how poor a job I had done in rendering the girl's looks, and then, suddenly, miraculously, I had a thought that was not centered upon myself.

I dressed and left the house in such haste that I did not remember an umbrella, and by the time I reached Broadway, I was soaked to the skin. As happens during such torrential rains, the thoroughfares had been turned to mud. When I had to leave the safety of the sidewalk and cross the street, I sank in to my ankles. I nearly lost a shoe to the suction but, in all, fared better than a deeply mired automobile I saw another block down, uselessly spinning its wheels and sending up a geyser of brown muck. The horses showed up their mechanical competitors, but even they moved at only a plodding pace.

Upon reaching the address of W.&J.Sloane, I ducked in under the stone overhang of a doorway to find a moment's relief from the downpour. The wind felt bru-tally cold, and I was surprised the precipitation had not turned to snow. The gloves I wore had no lining, and my hands were freezing. I

took off my hat and tipped it to let the water roll off the brim. Then, standing still, I surveyed the

Sunday-morning desolation of the street, trying to remember if Samantha's friend Emma had mentioned whether she headed south or north from the fabric mer-chant's on her way home. I had already passed a number of alleys on Broadway, but I thought I would head down-town a few more blocks and then inspect each one on my way back home.

Only then did I consider that it might have been a good idea to check the newspaper to see if there had been any women who had gone missing in the last few days. It was possible that the woman whom

Emma had seen cry-ing blood was one of the poor victims that Sills and his men had already discovered.

Since Emma had not given an exact date in mentioning the incident, but, as far as I could remember, had just said "the other day," I was unsure about how long ago her brief glimpse of the weep-ing woman had taken place.

Next door to Sloane's, heading downtown, was a church whose doors stood open but which seemed as empty as the stores. I passed apartment buildings and shops, but the structures here were built with walls butting up against each other, leaving no room for alley-ways. The same held true for the next few southerly blocks, so I turned around and began working my way back toward my home.

I was every bit the undaunted investigator while walk-ing along Broadway, but when I came to the first alleyway and looked into its grimy darkness, my courage quailed. It struck me that the very last thing

I wanted was to discover a body with the eyes leaking blood. As I mentioned before, the eyes hold a sacred position in my personal psychology. Being that the crux of my profession and my art is the manipulation of light on canvas, to say that sight is essen-tial is an understatement. The mere thought of a sty makes me queasy, and now, as I inched into the dripping shadows to find what I might, my hands shook and sweat mixed with the rain on my face.

This alley was a miniature throwback to old New York when people would toss their refuse into the streets for the pigs to root through. A few yards into the canyon of brick, I was walking on all manner of offal and discarded newsprint. There were some staved-in barrels, a few empty crates, but I reached the end, a tall wooden fence, and breathed a sigh to have discovered no corpses. I went mincingly down two more of these grim passageways and, in the last, discovered only a starving old mongrel hiding in an overturned barrel. The creature barely stirred when I went scuttling past it through the debris.

Emerging once again onto the sidewalk from the last of the three alleys, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief as well as a twinge of righteousness for having taken the trouble to brave the weather and make my search. As I turned to head toward Twenty-first Street and home, my gaze happened to scan the other side of the avenue, and I noticed an entrance to yet another alley. "Is it possible that Emma crossed the avenue on her way home?" I won-dered. I shook my head and took a few steps before turn-ing and looking back at the opening. I cursed roundly and stepped down into the muck of Broadway.

The wall of one of the buildings that defined this par-ticular alley belonged to a tobacconist's shop, so there were quite a few casks stacked high, giving off the rich scent of their recent contents, and a good deal of rotted whole leaf, both tied in bunches and loose on the ground.

The aroma made me desire a cigarette, and I stopped halfway to the end of the alley to light one.

This bolstered me a bit, and I

continued. I neared the end and was about to turn back when I saw a shoe; a woman's laced ankle boot.

Then there was movement, as if the ground were shifting. I finally heard squeals above the sound of wind and rain echoing down the passage. I peered closer and made out no fewer than a hundred rats like a slick, living blanket of shadow covering something. The cigarette dropped out of my mouth as I groaned.

At this sharp sound the filthy creatures scattered to reveal her. The blood had coagulated, and the face held two huge, erupted scabs instead of eyes. It was difficult to tell that the dress had once been white, so drenched it was in the brick color of dried gore. It was all I could do not to
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retch. I turned, fighting an overwhelming paralysis, and forced myself to move forward one step at a time.

When I reached the street end of the alley and finally stepped out onto the sidewalk, a passerby nearly walked into me. I was slow in my movements, and the other indi-vidual brought himself up short at the last instant.

"Please excuse me," the gentleman said, and then stepped around me.

I said nothing, but did take in his countenance. Only later, after I had walked to Crenshaw's in a daze and used their telephone to call police headquarters, did I realize that the man I had nearly collided with was of all people Albert Pinkham Ryder. I was beginning to sense that con-dition Mrs. Charbuque had alluded to when speaking of the first time she believed the Twins had whispered to her—as if she were being singled out by God.

Samantha was still asleep when I arrived home. I did not wake her but changed out of my wet clothing and went directly to my studio. Taking up my palette and brush, I set to filling the canvas I had prepared the previous morning. I worked furiously and had only a vague idea that I was painting a woman. I let the paint and the sensation of its application dictate the attributes of the figure, taking my cues from the colors I chose with no lengthy deliberation— the picture itself directed my creation of it.

Sometime in the late afternoon I felt Samantha's arms close around me from behind. Only then did I

become fully aware of what I had rendered: a portrait, definitely of a woman I did not know, seated, with

long light hair, dressed in a robe of phthalocianine green sporting a paisley design in cadmium yellow. Her smile was as mischievous and mysterious as that of Leonardo's Giaconda, but her eyes were fountains of red, red every-where, in a million droplets, more copious than the down-pour outside.

"Tell me, Piambo," Samantha whispered to me. "Speak to me."

My own eyes filled with tears as I related to her what had occurred on the way home from Shenz's place, my promise to John Sills, my discovery that morning. I lifted the palette knife as I spoke, and scraped the canvas clean.

The Wolf

“Near the end of winter, one night when I was with my I i father out in the frozen laboratory, he questioned me about how I had known where to find the corpse. In all things save the self-delusion generated by the pursuit of his profession, he was an honest man, and I could not lie to him. All he need do was squint his right eye and smile with the left side of his mouth, and the truth would out. I confessed that the identical snowflakes had bestowed some strange power upon me, an ability to know things I

should not be able to. With so much time now passed, I can't recall the words I used to describe the phenomenon to him, but I was an intelligent child and made myself understood. I knew he would not laugh derisively as any sane parent would, but I was fearful he might be angry with me for calling attention to the Twins. What he actually did was nod gravely and touch me lightly on the forehead.

"He called it the second sight and said that, although I was always to keep the existence of the Twins a secret, I should develop this ability in order to help others and myself. Then he told me,

'Ossiak will not be able to support my work before too long, and it will be necessary that you begin preparing to make your way in the world.' I nodded, although I had no idea what he was alluding to.

"He told me to fetch the lamps that sat at the perime-ter of the laboratory. 'Bring them and put them on the viewing stage, Lu,' he said. As I ran to fulfill his request, he started up the ladder to his seat on the optical magni-fier. I returned with the two lamps and placed them one on each
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side. 'Now lie down, faceup, so that I can focus upon your eyes,’ he said. ‘I want to get a look inside you.'

"I did as I was told. The stage was frigid. Once my head was beneath the huge lens, he called,

'When I bring down the barrel, try as best you can to hold your breath for as long as possible.

Otherwise it will fog the lens.' I heard the machine begin to descend, one gear tooth at a time, and for a moment feared that my father would absentmind-edly crush my face, forgetting that today's specimen was my head and not a flat board full of snowflakes. He halted it only an inch or two from my face, or that is how