The Swan Thieves

It took me hours, that afternoon, to make up my mind. By the time I reached Kate's door again, it was dark; I'd lost another day and would have to drive to DC starting early in the morning, drive hard to make an evening appointment. Instead of leaving Greenhill, I'd taken a restless walk and eaten dinner in town, then turned my wheels away from the Hadleys' mountain road, at the last moment, and back toward the other side of the valley. The trees loomed around me in Kate's neighborhood, and there were lights in the windows of the Tudor houses; a dog barked. I pulled slowly up her drive. It wasn't late, but it wasn't courteously early either. Why the hell hadn't I called ahead? What was I thinking? By then, however, I couldn't stop myself.

When I reached her porch, the light went on automatically, and I almost expected an alarm to sound. One lamp was lit in the living room. There was no other sign of life, although I could see a glow in the back rooms as well. I raised my hand to ring the bell, then changed my mind with my last bit of sense and knocked firmly instead. A shadow came out of the far interior doorway and approached--Kate, her delicate body passing into and again out of the lamplight, her hair glinting, her movements wary. She peered through the glass with a tense face and then, apparently recognizing me but all the more cautious because of that, came to the door and opened it slowly.

"I'm so sorry," I said. "I'm sorry to disturb you this late, and I haven't lost my mind--" Although I wasn't completely sure about that, and it sounded worse than if I hadn't said it, once it was out.

"I'm leaving in the morning, you know, and--please show me the other paintings."

She let her hand drop from the door handle and turned her head to look fully at me. It was an expression of sorrow, of disdain, a last-straw look but full of an infinite patience as well. I stood my ground, losing hope every second. In a moment she would deny me, tell me I had indeed lost my mind, remark that she didn't know what I was talking about, that I had no real business here, that she wished I would leave. Instead, she moved aside to let me in.

The house was deeply peaceful, and I felt like the worst kind of intruder, clumsy and heavy-footed. At what cost had she created this peace? There was comfort around me, lamplight, perfect order, a gentle breathing of wood and flowers that could have been the breathing of the children themselves; presumably they were asleep upstairs, and their unseen vulnerability made me feel all the guiltier. I dreaded going up those stairs and hearing their actual soft sighs, but to my surprise Kate opened a door in the dining room instead and led me down steps: the basement. It smelled of dust, dry dirt, old dry wood. We went slowly down the stairway; despite one lightbulb overhead, I had the feeling that we were descending into darkness. The smell reminded me of something from my childhood--oddly pleasant, someplace I'd visited or played. Kate's slender shape moved ahead of me; I looked down on the top of her gold-brown head in that bare yet inadequate lighting, and she seemed to slip away from me into a dream. There was a woodpile in one corner, an ancient spinning wheel in another, plastic buckets, empty ceramic flowerpots.

Kate led me without words to a wooden cabinet at the other end of the one room. I opened the door, still as if in a dream, and saw that it had been specially built to hold canvases neatly and separately, like a drying rack in a studio, and that it was full of paintings. She held the door ajar for me, her hand white against the wood. I reached in and carefully took out a painting in the thrumming dimness and set it against the wall nearby, then another, then the next, and another, until the cabinet was empty and eight big framed canvases stood against the walls. Some of these must have been from Robert's shows; I wondered if he'd sold many others there and to what homes and museums they'd gone.

The light was bad, as I mentioned, but that only made them more real. Seven of the paintings showed some version of the scene I'd encountered that afternoon at the Greenhill College gallery-- my lady bent over a beloved corpse, sometimes a close-up of the two faces near each other, huge on the canvas, the still-young, strong-featured face hovering over the older ashen one. Sometimes it was a similar scene, but she had buried her sobs in the dead woman's neck as if drinking her blood or mixing it with her tears--melodramatic, yes, but also wrenchingly moving. In another she stood upright with a handkerchief pressed over her lips, the body at her feet, looking wildly around for help--was this the moment before or after the one depicted in the painting at Greenhill College? Over and over, the curly-haired woman was taken by surprise, horrified, grieving. The story never moved forward or backward; she was caught forever in that one event.

The eighth painting was the largest, and quite different, and Kate had already moved to stand in front of it. It was a full-length view of three women and a man, in a weirdly formal arrangement, breathtaking realism, with none of Robert's usual stamp of the nineteenth century--no, this one was unmistakably contemporary, like the sensuous painting I'd seen in Robert's home studio two floors above us. The man stood in the foreground, two of the women behind him to his right and one to his left, all four figures gravely facing the viewer and dressed in modern clothing. The three women wore jeans and pale silky shirts, the man a ripped sweater and khaki pants. I recognized all but one of them. The smallest of the women was Kate, her old-gold hair longer than she now wore it, her blue eyes wide and sober, every freckle in its place, her body upright. Beside her stood a woman I didn't know, also young, and much taller, long-legged, with straight reddish hair and a sharp face, her hands jammed in the front pockets of her jeans. Or had I seen her somewhere? Who could she be? To the man's left was a familiar figure, womanly under unfamiliar modern gray silk and faded denim, her feet bare, her strong face as I saw it in my dreams, her curly dark hair falling past her shoulders. Seeing her in the clothes of my own era made my heart contract with the possibility of actually finding her.

The man in the painting was Robert Oliver, of course. It was almost like having him present: his rumpled hair and worn clothes, his greenish eyes huge. He seemed only half aware of the women around him; he was his own main subject, the foreground, gazing out with flat resistance, refusing to relinquish anything of himself even to the viewer. Alone, in fact, despite the three Graces around him. It was an embarrassing painting, I thought--blatant, egocentric, puzzling. Kate stood staring at it almost the way she stood looking out of it, her eyes wide, her little body straight as a dancer's. I moved hesitantly over to her and stood against her shoulder, then put my arm around her. I meant only to comfort. She turned to me with something cynical in her expression, almost a smile.

"You didn't destroy them," I said.

She looked steadily up at me, not resisting my arm. She had the shoulders of a bird, hollow little bones. "Robert is a great artist. He was a pretty good father and a pretty bad husband, but I know he is great. It's not my place to destroy these."

There was nothing noble in her voice; it was a matter-of-fact, bald statement. Then she drew back, disengaging herself gracefully from my arm: closed door. She didn't smile. She smoothed her hair, staring at the largest painting.

"What will you do with them?" I said finally.

She understood. "Keep them until I know what to do."

This made so much sense that I didn't ask her further questions. It seemed to me that these disturbing images might one day put her children through college, if she handled them well. She helped me set the paintings back in their tracks, and we shut the door together. Finally I was following her again, up the wooden stairs, across the living room, and onto the porch. There we paused. "I don't mind what you do," she said. "Whatever you think is right." I knew this meant that I had her permission to eventually tell Robert that I had seen his wife, that I had not seen his children except in picture frames, that I had seen the gracious clean house in which he'd once lived, the paintings she was saving for a future she could not look far into.

Neither of us spoke for a moment, and then she stood a little taller--although not the stretch it must have been to Robert Oliver's cheek--and kissed me sedately. "Have a safe trip back," she said. "Drive carefully." She did not send any message.

I nodded, unable to speak, and went down the stairs, hearing her door close behind me for the last time. Once I was out on the road, I turned up my car radio, then switched it off and sang loudly into the silence, more loudly, thwacked my hand against the steering wheel. I could see Robert's paintings shining under the bare bulb, and I knew I might never view them again. But I had broken open my life, or perhaps she had done it for me.