The Swan Thieves

Chapter 44 Marlow

Yes," I said, balanced there with my keys hanging limp in my fingers, my other hand uncertain in hers. I was struck by the muted ferocity in her manner, and again, inevitably, by her looks. She was as tall as I was, somewhere in her thirties, lovely and yet not in any conventional way; she was a presence. The light shone on her hair, her bangs cut too straight and too short across her white forehead, the long, smooth purple-red wave of the rest of it falling far past her shoulders. Her grip on my hand was strong, and I instinctively tightened mine to meet it.
She smiled a little, as if seeing things from my point of view. "I'm sorry I startled you. I'm Mary Bertison."
I couldn't stop staring at her. "But you were at the museum. The National Gallery." And then a moment of disappointment washing over even my confusion: she was not the curly-haired muse of Robert's dream life. Another wash of wonder: I had also seen her recently in a painting, dressed in her blue jeans and a loose silk shirt.
Now she frowned, clearly confused in turn, and dropped my hand.
"I mean," I repeated, "we've met once already, more or less. In front of Leda, and that Manet still life, you know, with the glasses and the fruit." I felt foolish. Why had I thought she would remember me? "I see--you--yes, you must have gone to see Robert's painting. That is, Gilbert Thomas's painting."
"I do remember you now," she said slowly, and it was clear that she wasn't a woman to lie about this, to flatter. She stood straight, unabashed at having invaded my very home, gazing at me. "You smiled, and then outside--"
"Did you go there to see Robert's painting?" I repeated.
"Yes, the one he tried to stab." She nodded. "I had just found out about it, because someone gave me the article a few weeks late--a friend happened on it. I don't usually read the papers." Then she laughed, not bitterly but with a kind of amusement at the strangeness of the situation, as if she found it fitting. "How funny. If you'd known or I'd known--who the other was--we could have talked right there instead."
I collected myself and unlocked the door. It was without question unorthodox for me to have a discussion about a patient in my own apartment--in fact, I knew it wasn't a good idea, letting in this attractive stranger--but hospitality and curiosity were getting the better of me already. I had called her, after all, and she had appeared almost at once, as if magically summoned. "How did you find my apartment?" Unlike her, I wasn't listed in the phone directory.
"The Internet--it wasn't difficult, once I had your name and number."
I ushered her in ahead of me. "Please. Now that you're here, we might as well talk."
"Yes, otherwise we'd be throwing away a second opportunity." Her teeth were creamy and bright. I remembered now that jaunty poise, her balance in boots and jeans, the delicate blouse under her jacket, as if she were part cowboy and part fine lady.
"Please sit down and give me a minute to organize myself. Can I get you some tea? Juice?" I decided to ameliorate my having invited her in by at least not pouring her any alcohol, although I was beginning to long uncharacteristically for a drink myself.
"Thank you," she said with great politeness, and sat as gracefully as a guest in a Victorian drawing room, arranging herself with a single neat motion in one of my linen chairs, her boots crossed, feet tucked to one side, hands thin and elegant in her lap.
She was a puzzle. I noticed the educated sound of her speech, as I had noticed it in her answering machine message, her deliberate, refined way of speaking. Her voice was soft but also firm and carrying. A teacher, I thought again. She followed me with her eyes. "Yes, some juice, please, if it's no trouble."
I went into the kitchen and poured two glasses of orange juice, all I had on hand, and put a few crackers on a plate. As I returned with the tray balanced before me, I remembered Kate serving me in her living room in Greenhill, letting me carry the salmon in to the lunch table. And later giving me this strange, graceful girl's last name, the key to finding her.
"I wasn't a hundred percent certain I had the right Mary Bertison," I said, handing her a glass. "But if you hang around in front of paintings Robert Oliver has tried to slash, that can't be coincidence."
"Of course not." She sipped her juice, set down the glass, faced me with pleading in her eyes for the first time, the bravado gone. "I'm sorry I'm intruding on you like this. I haven't had firsthand news of Robert in almost three months, and I was worried--" She did not add "brokenhearted," but I wondered, from the sudden control she seemed to be exercising over her mobile face, if this might be a better adjective. "I certainly wasn't going to get in touch with him myself. We'd had a big fight, you see. I thought he'd just shut himself away somewhere to work, to ignore me, and that I'd hear from him eventually. I was worried for weeks and then very surprised when I got your message, and since it was already the end of the workday I realized I wouldn't catch you at Goldengrove and wouldn't sleep all night if I couldn't get some news from you."
"Why didn't you try my pager?" I asked. "Not that I'm sorry to have this chance to speak with you--I'm very glad you showed up."
"Are you?" I saw that she forgave me, in turn, for being glib. Robert Oliver certainly chose interesting women. She smiled. "I did try your pager number, but if you check it, you'll discover it's turned off."
I checked; she was right. "I'm sorry," I said. "I try never to let that happen."
"This is better anyway, that we can talk in person." The quiver was gone, the self-confidence back, the smile breaking forth. "Please tell me Robert's all right. I'm not asking to see him--in fact, I really don't want to. I just want to know he's safe."
"He's safely under our care, and I think he's all right," I reported cautiously. "For now, and as long as he's with us. But he's also been depressed and sometimes agitated. What concerns me most is his lack of cooperation. He won't speak."
She appeared to take this in, biting the inside of her cheek for a few seconds and staring at me. "Not at all?"
"Never. Well, the first day, a little. In fact, one of the few things he said to me that day was 'You can even talk with Mary if you want.' That's why I felt at liberty to call you."
"That's all he's ever said about me?"
"It's more than he's said about almost anyone else. It's almost all he's ever said in my presence. He mentioned his ex-wife as well."
She nodded. "And that's how you found me, because he mentioned me."
"Not exactly." I took the plunge, on instinct. "Kate told me your last name."
It did startle her, and to my astonishment her eyes filled with tears. "That was good of her," she said brokenly. I got up and fetched her a tissue. "Thank you."
"Do you know Kate?"
"In a way. I've seen her only once, briefly. She didn't know who I was, but I knew who she was. You know, Robert told me once that some of Kate's family were Quakers from Philadelphia, like mine. Our grandparents could have known each other, or our great-grandparents. Isn't that strange? I liked her," she added, patting her lashes dry.
"I did, too." I hadn't expected to say this.
"You've met her? Is she here?" She looked around, as if expecting Robert's ex-wife to join us.
"No, not in Washington. In fact, she hasn't come to see Robert at all. No one has been to visit him."
"I always knew he would end up alone." This time her voice was matter-of-fact, a little hard, and she tucked the tissue into the pocket of her jeans, straightening her leg to make room for it. "He can't really love anyone, you know, and in the end such people are always alone, no matter how much other people once loved them."
"You loved him? Or love him?" I asked, matter-of-fact myself, but in as kind a voice as I could manage.
"Oh yes. Of course. He's remarkable." She said this as if it were an identifying characteristic, like brown hair or big ears. "Don't you think so?"
I finished my juice. "I've seldom met anyone so gifted. That's one reason I want to see him make progress, get better. But I'm confused about something--several things. Why didn't you know sooner he'd vanished, or where he'd gone? Didn't he live with you?"
She nodded. "Yes, when he came to Washington. It was wonderful at first, being with him all the time, and then he began to have regrets, to be silent for long periods, to be angry with me about small things. I think he was sorry--in some terrible way he couldn't express--that he'd left his family, and I guess he knew he couldn't go back even if his wife would take him. He wasn't happy with her, you know," she added simply, and I wondered if this were wishful thinking on her part. "We broke up months ago. Now and then he called me, or we tried to have dinner or go to a gallery show or a movie, but it never worked--deep down I just wanted him to come back, and he always figured that out and vanished again. I finally gave up, because that was better for me--it brought me some peace of mind, at least a little. It helped that we had a huge fight just before the last time he left--we fought partly about art, although it was really about us."
She raised one hand, a gesture of resignation. "I believed that if I left him alone, he might eventually call me himself, but he didn't. The problem with someone like Robert is that he's an impossible act to follow. You can't imagine ever wanting anyone else, because everyone begins to seem kind of pale by contrast, kind of dull. I told Robert that once, that he was an unfollowable act, with all his faults, and he laughed. But then it turned out to be true."
She drew a heavy breath. Her sadness, when it surfaced, made her look ten years younger, girlish, not older or more tired--an odd trick. She was young enough, surely, to be my daughter, at least if I'd married and had a daughter at twenty, like some of my high-school classmates. "So you hadn't seen him in--how long, before he was arrested?"
"About three months. I didn't even know where he was living by then--I still don't. Sometimes he borrowed friends' apartments or slept on their sofas, I think, and probably sometimes he stayed in fleabags downtown. He didn't have a cell phone--he hates them -- and I never knew how to reach him. Did he stay in touch with Kate, do you know?"
"I'm not sure," I admitted. "He seems to have called her a few times to talk with the children, but that was all. I think he was having a gradual breakdown, isolating himself, which probably culminated in this idea of attacking a painting. The police contacted her when he was arrested." I noted as if from a distance that I no longer felt I was breaking patient confidentiality when I talked with Robert's women.
"Is he really ill?" She said "ill," I noticed, rather than "sick" or "crazy."
"Yes, he's ill," I said, "but I'm optimistic about his getting quite a bit better if he'll only talk and participate more fully in his own treatment. A patient has to want to get well, at some important level, in order for that to happen."
"That's true of everything," she said pensively, which made her seem younger than ever.
"Were you aware while you were living with him that he was suffering from psychological problems?" I handed her the plate of crackers, and she accepted one but held it in both hands instead of eating.
"No. Vaguely. I mean, I didn't think of them as psychological. I knew he took medication from time to time if he got upset or anxious about things, but a lot of people do, and he said that it helped him sleep. He never told me he had any serious problems. He certainly never mentioned having any breakdowns in the past--I don't think he'd had a real one, ever, or he would have said something about it, because we were very close." She made this last assertion a little belligerently, as if I might choose to contradict her statement. "I suppose I just saw certain problems emerge without knowing what they were."
"What did you see?" I took a cracker myself. It had been a long day, with this confusing denouement outside my apartment door. And it wasn't over yet. "Did you notice anything that worried you?"
She mused and brushed a strand of hair back with one hand. "He was unpredictable, most of all. Sometimes he would say he'd be home for dinner and then stay out all night, and sometimes he would say he was going to go to a play or an opening with a friend and then never move from the sofa--he'd just sit there reading a magazine and fall asleep, and I didn't dare ask him what the friend waiting for him would think. I got to the point where I was afraid to ask him any of his plans, because he was always irritable about such questions, and I was also afraid to make plans with him because he might change his mind at the last minute. I thought in the beginning that it was just that we were both used to having a lot of freedom, but I didn't like being left in the lurch. I disliked it even more if we had planned something with other people and he left them in the lurch as well. You see what I mean."
She fell silent, and I nodded encouragement until she went on. "For example, once we made a date for him to meet my sister and her husband, who were in town for a conference, and Robert simply never showed up at the restaurant. I had an entire dinner with them, and every bite of it was worse than the last. My sister is very organized and practical, and I think she was astonished. She didn't act very surprised later when Robert left me and she had to mop me up over the phone. After that dinner, I came home and found Robert asleep on our bed with his clothes on, and I shook him awake, but he didn't remember anything about the dinner plan. He refused to talk about it even the next day, or to admit he'd done anything wrong. He refused to talk about his feelings in general. Or to admit mistakes."
I refrained from repeating her insistence that they'd been very close. She drooped over her cracker and finally ate it, as if the memory made her hungry, then wiped her fingers delicately on the napkin I'd given her. "How could he have been so rude? I invited him to meet my sister and brother-in-law because I thought we were serious--he and I. He'd told me he'd left his wife, that she no longer wanted him to stay anyway, and that he felt we would be together a long time. Later he told me she'd filed for a divorce and he'd complied. It's not that we talked about marriage. I've never wanted to actually get married to anyone--I'm not sure I see the point, since I don't think I want children--but Robert was my soul mate, for want of a better word."
I thought her eyes might fill with tears again; instead she shook her glossy head, defiant, disillusioned, angry. "Why am I telling you all this? I came here to get information about Robert, not give you my private life." Then she was smiling again, but sadly, at her hands. "Dr. Marlow, you could get a stone to talk."
I started; it was my friend John Garcia's line for me, the compliment I most valued, one of the cornerstones of our long friendship. I had never heard it on anyone else's lips. "Thank you. And I wasn't trying to draw out of you anything you don't want to tell me. But what you've shared with me already is very useful."
"Let's see." She gave a real smile, jaunty again, amused in spite of herself. "You now know that Robert was taking some sort of medication before he reached you, if you didn't know that already, and you feel a little better because you know that Robert refused to talk about his feelings even to the woman he lived with, so you haven't really failed."
"Madame, you are frightening," I said. "And correct." I didn't see any reason to mention to her that I'd learned these things from Kate as well.
She laughed aloud. "So tell me now about your Robert, since I've told you about mine."
I told her then, honestly and thoroughly, and with a more tangible sense of breaking patient confidentiality, which I certainly was. I did not tell her, of course, anything Kate had told me, but I described much of Robert's behavior since he'd come to me. The means--telling her all this--would have to justify the ends; I had a great deal more to ask her and ask of her, and with a person so acute, so intense, I would have to pay up front for the privilege. I finished by assuring her that we watched Robert carefully at Goldengrove and that I felt he was safe at the moment, and that he didn't seem inclined to hurt himself or anyone else, even if he had gotten there by trying to stab a painting.
She listened with attention and without interrupting to ask questions. Her eyes were large and clear, candid, a strange color like water, as I remembered from the museum, with a darker rim around them that might be skillful makeup. She could have gotten a stone to talk, too, and I told her so.
"Thank you--that's an honor," she said. "I thought for a while of becoming a therapist, to tell you the truth, but it was a long time ago."
"Instead you're an artist and a teacher," I hazarded. She sat looking at me. "Oh, that wasn't so difficult to figure out. I saw you studying the surface of Leda at an oblique angle, very close--normally only a painter does that, or possibly an art historian. I don't picture you in the purely academic role--that would bore you--so you must teach painting itself, or do something else visual to support yourself, and you have the confidence of the born teacher. Am I being impertinent yet?"
"Yes," she said, clasping her hands on her jean-clad knee. "And you are an artist, too--you grew up in Connecticut, and that painting over your mantel there is by you, with the church from your small town. It's a good painting, you're serious, and you have talent, as you know perfectly well. Your father was a minister, but a rather progressive one who would have been proud of you even if you hadn't gone to medical school. You have a special interest in the psychology of creativity and the disorders that plague many creative or even brilliant people such as Robert, which is why you've thought about making him the subject of your next article. You're an unusual mix of the scientist and the artist yourself, so you understand such people, although you hang on to your own sanity very efficiently. Exercise helps--you run or work out, and have for years, which is why you look ten years younger than you are. You like order and logic, and they sustain you, so it doesn't matter as much that you live alone and work such long hours."
"Stop!" I said, putting my hands over my ears. "How do you know all that?"
"The Internet, of course. Your apartment, and observing you. And your painting is initialed in the lower right corner, you know. Put the information from those sources together, and that's what you get. Besides, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was my favorite writer when I was a little girl."
"One of mine, too." I thought about holding her hand, with its long ringless fingers.
She hadn't stopped smiling. "Do you remember how Sherlock Holmes once read someone's whole character and profession--his history--from a walking stick the man left in his rooms? And I have an entire apartment to work with, here. Holmes didn't have the Internet either."
"I think you can help me help Robert more than anyone," I said slowly. "Would you be willing to tell me all of your experiences with him?"
"All?" She was not quite looking at me.
"I'm sorry. I meant everything you think would be helpful to someone trying to understand him." I didn't give her time to refuse yet, or accept. "Do you know about the painting he stabbed?"
"Leda} Yes. Well, a little. Some of it is just a guess, but I did look it up."
"What are you doing for dinner, Ms. Bertison?"
She put her head to one side and touched her mouth with her fingertips as if surprised to find a bit of smile still there. When she turned her face, the smudges under her crystalline eyes deepened, gray-blue, shadows on snow, an effet de neige. Her skin was very pale. She sat upright in her blazer, her beautiful hips and legs in faded jeans against my sofa, her slim shoulders raised against a blow. This young woman had grieved for weeks, months even, and she didn't have two children to comfort her. Again, I felt that ugly anger toward Robert Oliver, the sudden extinction of my physician's objective caring.
But she was not angry. "For dinner? Nothing, as usual." She folded her hands. "It's fine as long as we split the bill. But don't ask me to talk about Robert any more for now. I'd rather write some of it down, if that's all right with you, so that I don't end up crying in front of a complete stranger."
"I'm only a stranger," I said, "not a complete stranger--don't forget that we went to the museum together."
She sat facing me across the twilight of my living room--she was right, it was all very orderly, logical, and in a moment I would stand up to turn on another lamp, would ask her if I could get her anything more before we left, would excuse myself to use the bathroom, would wash my hands and find a light coat. At dinner we would surely talk about Robert at least a little, but also about painting and painters, our childhoods with Conan Doyle, our ways of making a living. And we would, I hoped, talk about Robert Oliver anyway, this time and in the future. Her eyes were expressive -- not happy but faintly interested in what they saw across the room, and I had at least two hours at the finest table in walking distance to make her smile.
1878
Ma chere:
Forgive, please, my inexcusable behavior. It came out of no premeditation, no lack of respect, believe me, but rather from a longing that only you have had the power to awaken, in recent years. You may one day understand how a man who faces the end of life can forget himself completely for a moment, can think only of the sudden increase of what he must lose. I have meant no dishonor to you, and you must know already that my motives for inviting you to see the painting were pure. It is an extraordinary work; I know you will do many more, but please do permit me, by way of atonement and apology, to allow the jury to see this first great one. I do not think they will fail to recognize its delicacy, subtlety, and grace, and if they are foolish enough not to accept it, it will still have had a chance to be seen, f only by the jurors. I shall do whatever you command me in the way of using your name or changing it. Indulge me in this so that I may feel I have done your gift--and you--some small service.
For my part, I've decided to submit the painting of my young friend, since you admired it, but that, of course, will be under my own name and has an even greater chance of rejection. We must brace ourselves.
Your humble servant,
O.V.