The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque (8 page)

should not be witnessing it. I was about to turn and go back to my room when my mother suddenly opened her eyes and saw me. She did not stop, nor did she say a word, but just stared at me with a look of great hatred. I ran back to my room and climbed into bed, shut-ting tight my eyes and putting my hands over my ears.

"The next morning I awoke worried that I would be in trouble, but nothing was said when I set to helping my mother in the kitchen. As my father and Mr. Amory ate breakfast, the Twins spoke to me again. I saw their words as a picture in my mind, and what they showed me this time was horrible—a man, stiff as a statue, covered in frost. His mouth was gaping, a round dark hole, and his eyes staring so fiercely I knew he must be dead. It was the corpse of the man from the supply team, and I saw where he was. He lay in a meadow off the main trail about a quarter of the way down the mountain. I knew the spot because we stopped there each year for a picnic at our end-of-summer ascent.

"This vision, again, only lasted moments, but as I came to, I saw that my father and Amory were making ready to leave. I was torn between revealing my knowledge and keeping it and the power of the

Twins a secret. When they opened the door to take their leave, I sprang forward and begged my father for a kiss. When he leaned down, I whis-pered in his ear, 'In the picnic meadow.' I wasn't sure if he had heard me. He simply patted me on the head and said, 'Yes, Lu.' Then they were gone.

"The second they were out of sight, my mother was at me, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me.

'What did you tell your father?' she yelled. 'What did you whisper in his ear?' I told her I had said nothing, but she knew that was a lie, for she had seen me. She shook me again, and her face was red with anger. I relented and said, 'I told him where to find the dead man.' 'What kind of nonsense is that?'

she screamed. 'It's the truth,’ I said, and began to cry. 'You'd do well to keep your mouth shut if you don't want me to take you away from him,’ she said. Then she brought the back of her hand around and smacked me across the face with such force I fell to the floor. When the blow struck me, I saw in my mind the shooting star."

"Mrs. Charbuque," I said, closing my notebook, "I must say—" Here she interrupted me again.

"One more thing, Mr. Piambo," she said, and her voice fluttered nervously. "One more thing."

"Yes," I said.

"My father informed me upon his return that they had found the body at the spot I had described.

My mother overheard him say this and was delighted, not by my unusual premonition but with relief that I

hadn't divulged her tryst."

"But, Mrs. Charbuque," I said, this time determined not to be put off, "this story you are building, it is rather fantastical, wouldn't you say? I am having a hard time believing that this is all real. Please don't take this as an accusation, but please, explain to me how I am supposed to take all this."

"What piece of it disturbs you?" she asked.

"I can follow all of it, but the fact that these two iden-tical snowflakes are communicating with you in some psychic way seems, well, if I may be so bold, a good deal of rubbish."

"The story is true, I swear, but as you say, the idea that the Twins conferred supernatural abilities was rubbish. It was the worst, most destructive rubbish, because I believed with all my heart that they did. So did my father. That childhood delusion would shape and eventually poison the rest of my life, Mr.

Piambo."

"So you agree with me?" I asked.

"Even God is fallible," she said. Her laughter was prolonged and piercing, and that dim shadow I

had been trying to capture on paper now moved wildly, changing shape, calling into question whether there had ever been anything there to draw at all.

The Sibyl

"Imagine," she said, "a friendless child with a mother I who does not love her or her father and a father who spends his time reading the will of God in the formations of snowflakes. How could I possibly have been anything else but a believer? I needed power and importance, and I desperately wanted to be noticed for more than my abil-ity to spray the specimens as my father held them up on toothpicks. He was my hero, and I wanted to be, like him, a conduit of the divine message."

"So you fantasized the voice of the Twins," I said.

"Not consciously, Mr. Piambo, but yes, I swear to you, I could hear them. Loneliness can make magicians of us, not to mention prophets."

"What of the shooting star, though?" I asked. "What of the corpse of the man from the supply team?

You actu-ally did know where he was."

"Undoubtedly coincidence. The picture was in the book that had fallen open, but my father had many books with pictures of the heavens. I know from my extensive travels in Europe that there is an entire theory of the psyche being conceived of in Austria now which makes the case that there are no accidents. We are supposedly sentient on many levels, and those desires we do not choose to be aware of manifest themselves through what we think of as mishaps. The other two instances of my seeing the shooting star, when I closed the door and when my mother struck me, might have been more wishful thinking than anything else. As to the corpse, there were very few places on the mountain trail where it would have been as easy to wander from the beaten track in a storm. The path into that meadow forked off the main trail and then died at our picnic spot.

Maybe somehow I uncon-sciously surmised that that was the most likely place for the poor man to have lost his way."

"But you continued with this notion of the Twins as the years progressed?" I asked.

"I became 'the Sibyl," she said, "and eventually it twisted my heart."

"The Sibyl?"

Upon voicing my question, the door opened and Watkin announced that my time was up. I remembered that it was Friday, so I wished Mrs. Charbuque a pleasant weekend and took my leave. As

Watkin led me to the front door, I said to him, "You have the most uncanny sense of bad timing."

"Thank you, sir. It is my specialty," he said as I passed him and stepped outside.

"I'll be seeing you," I said, and he slammed shut the door.

I was thoroughly exhausted from not having slept at all the previous night. The macabre image of that woman on the street, losing her life through her eyes, had done something to me. It was as if, after witnessing that horror, I had to take in through my eyes all that she was losing through hers, and therefore dared not close them.

As it was, I barely made it to the Sixth Avenue street-car for the trip downtown. Once aboard and seated, I stared out the window at the multiplicity of faces and fig-ures on the street. People came and went, well dressed and ragged, beautiful and homely, no two alike, all existing together as atoms of the monster known as New York, and yet each unique, each alone with his own, her own, secret self and past, isolated within on distant mountaintops. God may have been fallible, but was there ever a painter who worked with a more varied palette, a writer who struck an irony more perfect than the two-headed race-horse of life and death, a musician who could weave the threads of so many diverse tunes into such an all-encompassing symphony?

God was also a raucous vaudevillian, and I was obvi-ously his foil at the moment. The joke had to do with eyes—Watkin's, the bleeding woman's, my own unable to see Mrs. Charbuque, her confabulatory supernatural sight. Were I to read an account of something similar, even in a novel by a writer of arabesques, I could not help but scoff and close the cover.

The ultimate punch line was that my eyes finally closed somewhere in that morass of contemplation, and I passed my stop by two blocks. I woke suddenly when we halted at Twenty-third Street, and I

leaped off just before the car began to move again. My notebook, as light as it was in actuality, seemed as heavy as a rock as I staggered back to my house, half dreaming, thinking only of taking to my bed.

Consider my utter disappointment when I saw a visitor sitting on my steps. I tell you, I nearly wept.

As I drew closer, the person waiting stood, having noticed my approach. From his height and wiry

frame, the drooping handlebar mustache and wave of raven-black hair, I knew it was John Sills, the police detective who had saved me from a beating the previous night. During his off-hours he dressed rather informally—an old army jacket and the flat lid of a day laborer.

"Johnny," I said, "thank you for intervening on my behalf last night. I have a definite aversion to being clubbed."

I knew him to be a very affable fellow, and now he proved it by breaking into a wide smile and laughing. "Merely fulfilling my duty as a public servant," he said.

"I suppose you are here to explain what the hell was going on with that wretched woman last night,"

I said.

"No, Piambo, I'm here to remind you that, for the time being, that incident never happened."

"Come now, John," I said. "You can easily buy my silence with an explanation."

He looked over his shoulder and up and down the length of the block. Then he moved closer to
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me and whis-pered, "You've got to swear that you will tell no one. I'll lose my job if you do."

"You have my word," I said.

"That woman is the third we've found like that. The coroner thinks she was suffering from some kind of exotic disease brought in on one of the ships from Arabia or the Caribbean, perhaps China. Listen, I'm just a cop, so don't ask for anything scientific, but I understand that the fel-lows at the Department of

Health have discovered a kind of parasite; something they've never come across before. It eats the soft tissue of the eye and leaves the wound unable to heal. It happens very rapidly. At first the victim weeps blood, and then the eyes are gone, becoming two spigots that cannot be turned off."

"And the higher-ups think it better if no one knows about it?" I asked, horrified.

"For now. It's not like a plague that passes rapidly from one person to the next. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any connection among the three victims. As far as we can tell, they're isolated incidents. But if word of this reaches the

Times or the

World, all hell will break loose. Mayor Grant wants it kept quiet for now until we can discover the source of the parasite."

"I will keep it close, John. You can trust me," I said. "But if you've come in contact with this woman, what is it that has kept you safe?"

"It appears that once it has fed, the bug becomes dormant. For how long, no one knows, because they have cremated the bodies immediately after studying them."

"Let's hope they can stop it," I said.

"If they can't, we'll all be crying in our beer," he said, and gave a grim smile.

I could tell from this ill-conceived joke that he had fin-ished speaking about the incident. Truly wanting to know, I asked him how his painting was coming along. He had a great deal of natural talent, and over the years, stealing time from his job and his wife and children, he had become a very creditable miniaturist. Some of his works were no bigger than a cigarette case, and many of the images in them were rendered with a brush that held only two very fine hairs. He informed me that he had just fin-ished a series of portraits of criminals and that a few of them would be included in a group show at the Academy of Design.

"It opens next week," he said, and moved forward to shake my hand. "Tell Shenz to come along also."

"I will," I said, and clasped hands with him.

Before leaving, he said in a low voice, "Remember, Piambo, the less we know, the better."

"My memory is a blank canvas," I said.

"Thank you," he said, and walked away up the street.

Once inside my home, I went immediately to the bed-room and shrugged off my coat and clothes, letting them lie in a pile where they fell. I felt as if I could have fallen asleep standing up, but there was one more thing I had to do. There was the matter of the notebook, and an assess-ment of the sketches I had made at Mrs. Charbuque's. I took the tablet to bed with me, and when I was comfort-able, with my head propped up on the pillows, I set about reviewing what I had done.

I flipped the pages, past sketches of a neighborhood cat, Samantha in a kimono, one of a telephone pole on East Broadway, outside the Children's Aid Society, Reed's gold-fish, a portrait of a young writer

sitting at a corner table at Billy Mould's Delicatessen. Then I came to the first of the sketches done in

Mrs. Charbuque's drawing room. Staring for a moment, I then turned the sketchbook to see if I had not had it positioned differently while drawing. What I saw before me was an amorphous
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blob made up of scratchy lines. Hard as I tried, I couldn't make out the fig-ure of a woman at all.

To tell the truth, I

couldn't even make out the figure of a person.

Irritated, I turned to the next. Again I beheld the mere shadow of a cloud. The next, another charcoal puddle. None of them exhibited any recognizable trace. I lay there wondering what it was I

thought I had witnessed projected on that screen. At one point, I remembered thinking I had actually captured the outline of a facial pro-file, but what was transmitted to the sketchbook now made me wonder if I was not, weakened by my sleepless condition, doing a bit of projecting myself. While Mrs.

Charbuque was relating to me her tale of allowing fancy to infect reality, I had been going her one better and putting it into practice. An indistinct movement of shadow had become a woman.

I cursed and threw the sketchbook across the room. It slammed against the top corner of the dresser, twirled in the air, bounced off the arm of a chair, and landed, no lie, directly in a trash can I kept in the corner. As Mrs. Charbuque had said, there was no such thing as an acci-dent.

My eyes closed, and I fell into a dream of snow.

Dream Woman

Saturday brought with it the urge to paint. I rose early, well refreshed, and went out for breakfast to

Crenshaw's on Seventh Avenue. After a greasy repast of steak and eggs, two cups of coffee, three cigarettes, and the perusal of a story in the