The Swan Thieves

I've loved Virginia since my days at UVA, passed through it many times on my way to other places, gone out into its blue and green for rests and painting excursions and sometimes even a hike. I like the long reach of I-66 that puts the sprawl of the city behind you-- although, as I write this, Washington has extended its tentacles clear to Front Royal; there are clusters of bedroom communities springing up like fungus all along the interstate and adjacent roads. On this trip, with the highways full of a midmorning quiet, I found myself forgetting about work before I had passed Manassas.

Sometimes when I've driven this way, in fact, I've stopped at Manassas National Battlefield, alone or once recently with my wife, swinging spontaneously onto the exit ramp. One ghostly September morning long before I met her, I paid my fee at the visitor center and walked across the field to stand where some of the worst fighting took place; the landscape that sloped away from me, down to an old stone farmhouse, was filled with mist. There was a single tree in the middle distance that seemed to cry out for me to walk out to it and take up a vigil beneath its branches, or to paint it from where I'd positioned myself. I stood there watching the mist thin out and wondering why people kill each other. There wasn't another living soul in sight. That is the sort of moment I both miss and shudder to think about, now that I'm married.

I pulled off the road near Roanoke and had breakfast in a diner. I'd glimpsed the sign for it on the highway, but when I reached its dreary facade, with four or five pickup trucks parked around it, I found I'd been there before on some previous excursion, perhaps a long-ago painting trip; I simply hadn't recognized the name. The waitress, unapologetically tired, gave me my coffee in silence, but she smiled when she brought the eggs and she pointed out the hot sauce on my table. Two big-armed men were talking in a corner about jobs--jobs they didn't have or hadn't been able to get--and two women who were all dressed up, not well, were just paying their bill. "I don't know what he thinks he wants," one of them concluded loudly to the other.

For a moment of near-hallucination in the midst of the steaming coffee, the reek of cigarette smoke, the dirty sunlight coming through the window at my elbow, I thought she meant me. I remembered my slow roll out of bed before dawn for this trip, the sense that I was breaking not only with my schedule but also with my professional code, the twinge of desire as I awoke and remembered the woman on Robert Oliver's canvases.

I hadn't been to Greenhill before, but it was easy enough to find once I'd made my way up to a long mountain pass--there was a city nestled in the valley below. Spring here was indeed somewhat behind what we had in Washington; the trees along the roads were freshly green, and there were dogwoods and azaleas still in bloom in the front yards I passed on the way into town, rhododendron with conical thick buds that had yet to burst. I skirted the edge of downtown--a hilltop studded with red tile roofs and miniature Gothic skyscrapers--and headed up a winding street that my friends had described to me on the phone: Rick Mountain Road, residential but hiding its small houses behind a screen of hemlocks, firs, and rhododendron, and of dogwoods in floating, meditative bloom. When I rolled down my window, I could smell mossy darkness, deeper than the approaching twilight.

Jan and Walter's house was just off a dirt drive, marked by one wooden sign: hadley cottage . The Hadleys themselves were conveniently in Arizona, tending to their allergies; I was glad I wouldn't have to explain my errand in Greenhill to them in person. I got out of the car and stretched my legs, stiff. I certainly needed to spend more time running, but when and how to fit it in? Then I walked around to the backyard because it seemed to promise a view, and it delivered: there was a bench at the edge of the steep drop, an enormous vista--the distant buildings, a miniature of the town. I sat down, breathing in cool air and a sense that spring was rising up to me out of the pines. Why, I wondered, did the Hadleys live anywhere else even part of the year?

I thought of my harried commutes at home, the long drive out to Goldengrove through grueling suburban traffic. I could hear wind in pine boughs, a distant hushing sound that might be the interstate below, a sudden interruption of birdsong--what birds, I didn't know, although a cardinal flew out of the trees in the bluff just below the Hadleys' yard. Somewhere down in that town--I wasn't sure where, but I'd check the map this evening--was a woman with two children, a soft-voiced woman with her hands full, her heart broken. She lived down there in a house I couldn't yet picture, in a solitude that Robert Oliver had at least partly caused. I wondered if she would have anything to say to me. It would be a long way to drive just to have her change her mind about talking with her ex-husband's psychiatrist.

The house key was in its promised place, under a planter full of dirt, but the front door gave me some trouble until I pushed it hard with my hip. I brought in a couple of flyers for pizza that were lying on the porch, wiped my feet on the mat inside, and propped open the door to let out the smell of musty winter that greeted me. The living room was small and crowded--rag rugs and outdated furniture, rows of paperback novels and a gilded set of Dickens on the built-in shelves, the TV apparently locked away in a closet somewhere, the sofa lined with needlepoint cushions that felt faintly damp to the touch. I opened some windows and then the back door as well, and carried my suitcase upstairs.

There were two small bedrooms, one obviously the Hadleys' own; I took the second, which had twin beds with navy bedspreads and watercolors of mountain scenes on the walls, originals, not too bad. I opened the plaid curtains--they were slightly damp, too, uncomfortably alive under my fingertips--and propped up the windows. The whole house was shaded by spruces and other evergreens, but at least I could get it aired out before I had to sleep there. Walter had told me a fire might help, and I found logs already arranged in the fireplace downstairs. I saved them for evening. There was nothing in the elderly refrigerator except a few jars of olives and packages of yeast. I wasn't hungry yet; I would drive down later for some groceries, a newspaper, a local map. Tomorrow afternoon I might have time to explore the city itself.

I changed and went for a run up the mountain road, glad to shake off my car trip--glad, also, to shed my thoughts of Robert Oliver and the woman I would meet the next day. On my return I showered, grateful to find that hot water was available at the Hadleys' after all, then got out my easel and set it up in the backyard. There were similar houses on each side, screened by more spruces; those, too, seemed still deserted at this season. I hadn't expected a vacation, exactly, but as I rolled up my shirtsleeves and opened my watercolor box, I felt for a moment a sudden languid release from all the rest of my life. The evening light was beautiful, and I thought I would outdo those faded paintings in the guest room, perhaps leave a gift for Jan and Walter, a view of spring, their city down below, a small payment of rent.

In my twin guest bed that evening, I began to read the letters Zoe had sent.

Cher Monsieur:

Your note from Blois arrived this morning and brought pleasure, especially to your brother, In fact, I read it to Papa myself and described the sketch to him as fully as I could. Your sketch is lovely, although about that I dare to say very little, or you will understand what a beginner I am. I have also read him your recent article on the work of M. Courbet. He says he can see some of Courbet's paintings quite clearly in his mind's eye, and that your words recall them to him better than ever. Bless you for your kind attentions to us all. Yves sends fond greetings.

With regards,

Beatrice de Clerval Vignot