The Swan Thieves

Kate rose from the sofa in her quiet living room and actually paced a little, as if I'd caught her in a cage. She walked to the windows and back, and I watched, feeling a sort of pity for her, for the position in which I'd placed her. She hadn't gotten close, in her story, to the things I most needed to know, but I didn't feel like pressing her at that moment.

It struck me what a good wife she would have made--must have been--a woman not unlike my mother in her uprightness, her organization and neat gestures of hospitality (it wasn't the first time I'd thought it), although she lacked my mother's good-natured confidence, her ironic sense of humor. Or perhaps whatever Kate's sense of humor was, it had been erased by her separation from her husband. A temporary lapse of happiness, I hoped. I had seen so many women emotionally knocked off their feet by a divorce. There were a few who did not recover, in the sense that they sank into permanent chronic bitterness or depression, especially if the divorce became linked to some previous trauma or to an underlying condition. But most women were remarkably strong, I'd always thought; those who healed themselves were full of a deeper life afterward. Intelligent Kate, with the light from the windows catching her smooth hair, would go on to something or someone else better and be content, and wise.

As I was thinking this, she turned to me. "You believe it really couldn't have been so bad," she said accusingly.

I felt myself gaping. "Not exactly," I told her. "But you're almost right. I'm sure it was bad, but I was thinking how strong a person you seem."

"So I'll get over it."

"I believe so."

She looked as if she might be about to reproach me, but then she said only "Well, you've seen a lot of patients, I guess, and you must know."

"I never feel I know anything about human beings, ultimately, but it's true that I've observed a lot of people." It was an admission I wouldn't have made to a patient.

She turned, her little collarbones catching the light. "And do you like people, Dr. Marlow, after observing so many?"

"Do you? You seem extremely observant yourself."

She broke into a laugh, the first I'd heard since I'd walked into her living room. "Let's not play games with each other. I'll show you Robert's office."

This surprised me considerably, on two counts: first, that he'd had an office, and second, that she was that generous in the midst of her grief. Perhaps it had doubled as a home studio. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," she said. "It's not much of a room, and I've started cleaning it out because I want to use the desk for a place to pay bills and organize my own papers. I still have to clean out his studio, too."

In this house with Robert, she had had neither an office nor a studio of her own, while he'd had both. Robert Oliver had taken up considerable space in her life, literally. I hoped she would show me the studio as well. "Thank you," I said.

"Oh, don't be too grateful," she rejoined. "His office is a mess. It's taken me a long time even to open the door to that room, but I feel better now that I've started sorting through it. You can look at anything you like. I'm saying that because I don't care about anything in there now. I really don't."

Kate stood and collected our cups, glancing back over her shoulder. "Come with me," she said. I followed her into a dining area as neat and restful as the living room--high-backed chairs grouped around a gleaming table. Again, the pictures were water-colors, this time of the mountains, and a couple of old bird prints, cardinals and blue jays, in the Audubon manner. No Robert Oliver paintings in here either. She led me momentarily into a sunny kitchen, where she deposited our cups in the sink, and then past the kitchen into a room not much bigger than a large closet. It was furnished, or rather completely crammed, with a desk and shelves and a chair. The desk was an antique, like most of Kate's furniture, a huge rolltop open to show pigeonholes stuffed with papers--a mess, as she'd promised.

Here, much more than in the living room, I felt Robert Oliver's presence, imagined his big hand shoving bills and receipts and unread articles into the desk sections. There were a couple of plastic bins on the floor, neatly labeled to receive various kinds of files, as if Kate had been sorting. There was no file cabinet in sight--nothing else would have fit in the room--although perhaps Kate had one tucked away somewhere else. "I hate this job," she said, again without further explanation. The bookshelves contained a dictionary, a movie guide, crime novels -- some of them in French--and many works on art. Picasso and His World, Corot, Boudin, Manet, Mondrian, the Postimpressionists, Rembrandt's portraits, and a surprising number of works on Monet, Pissarro, Seurat, Degas, Sisley--nineteenth-century-France dominated. "Did Robert like the Impressionists best?" I asked.

"I guess." She shrugged. "He liked everything best at one time or another. I couldn't keep up with all his enthusiasms." Her voice held a nasty note, and I turned to the desk. "You're welcome to look through it, as long as you keep things in order. Order--" She rolled her eyes, an afterthought. "Anyway, just keep things together because I'm trying to get all the financial information straight, in case I'm ever audited."

"This is very kind of you." I wanted to be certain I had her permission; I pressed down my distinct thought that looking through a living patient's papers without his own consent was a serious step, even if his ex-wife was encouraging me, bitterly, to do it. Especially if she was encouraging me. But Robert had told me I could talk with anyone I wanted to. "Do you expect there's anything here that would help me?"

"I doubt it," she said. "Maybe that's why I'm feeling so generous. Robert didn't really have personal papers--he didn't write about his emotions or keep a journal or anything like that. I like to write myself, but he said he couldn't really understand the world through words--he had to look at it and get the colors down, paint it. I haven't found much of anything here except his colossal disorganization."

She laughed, or snorted, as if she liked her own description: colossal. "I guess it's not quite true that he didn't write things down--he made all these little notes to himself, and lists, and lost them in the mess." She pulled a scrap out of an open box. " 'Rope for scenery,' she read aloud. 'Back gate lock, buy alizarin and board, check to Tony, Thursday.' He was always forgetting everything anyway. Or how about this one: 'Think about turning forty.' Can you believe that? Having to remind yourself to think about something so basic? When I see all this junk, I'm glad not to have to deal with the rest of it--I mean, not to deal with him anymore. But help yourself." She smiled up at me. "I'm going to make us some lunch so we can eat in peace before I go get the children. There's tomorrow, too, of course." She left the room without waiting for my response.