The Swan Thieves

Chapter 54 Marlow

Our house is only a few miles from the station, set back in the historic part of town and a short walk from the water. This time, for some reason, I felt a pang when I saw the front door at the end of its short but melancholy row of arborvitae. It had been decades since I'd last watched my mother open that door; I don't know why that hit me harder than usual this time.
I covered for myself--nothing would have pained my father more than for me to mention such a twinge aloud--by noting how good the yard looked and letting my father point out the hedges he'd trimmed the week before, the grass he kept neatly cut with his push mower. There was the familiar smell of boxwood, pots of impatiens around the small front door. It wasn't a large yard, in front at least, because the seventeenth-century merchant who'd built the house had wanted it close to the street. The backyard stretched farther, into the ragged remains of an orchard, as well as into a kitchen garden that my mother had somehow maintained in her spare hours. My father still put in tomatoes every summer, and a few gnarled parsley roots burgeoned out among them, but he wasn't the gardener she'd been.
My father unlocked the house and ushered me in, and as always I was assailed by objects and scents with which I'd grown up, the threadbare Turkish rug in the front hall, the corner shelf that housed a ceramic cat I'd made in art class once and glazed to look like those in my mother's book on ancient Egyptian art--she'd been so proud of my initiative, my eye. I suppose every child makes a few lumpy things of this sort, but not every mother keeps them forever. The radiator clanged and slurped in the front hall; it was distinctly not eighteenth century, but it kept the downstairs warm and gave off a smell I'd always loved, like scorched cloth. "I turned it on just this morning," my father apologized. "It's been darn cold for summer."
"Good idea." I set my bag beside it and went into the kitchen bathroom to wash my hands. The house was neat, clean, pleasant, and the floors glowed--my father had succumbed in the last year to my insistence on a housekeeper, a Polish lady from Deep River who came every other week. My father said she scrubbed even the pipes under the kitchen sink. That would have pleased Mother, I pointed out, and he had to agree.
When we'd both washed up, he reported that he had some soup to give me for a late lunch and began to pour it into a pan on the stove. His hands shook a little, I noticed, and this time I prevailed on him to let me fix our meal, heating the soup and putting out the pickles and pumpernickel bread and English tea he loved, warming the milk so that it wouldn't cool his tea. He sat in the wicker chair my mother had bought for the corner of the kitchen, telling me about his parishioners without mentioning their names, although I knew who most of them were anyway because they or their grown children had lingered with him for years: one had lost her husband in a car accident, another had retired after teaching at the high school for forty years and celebrated by having a very private but despairing crisis of faith. "I told him that we couldn't be sure of anything except the power of love," he said, "and that he was under no requirement to believe in a particular source of that love, as long as he could keep giving and receiving some in his own life."
"Did he go back to believing in God?" I asked, squeezing out the tea bags.
"Oh, no." My father sat with his hands tucked serenely between his knees, his watery eyes fixed on me. "I didn't expect him to. In fact, he probably hadn't believed in years, and his teaching just kept him too busy to worry about the matter. Now he comes to see me once a week and we play chess. I make sure I beat him."
And you make sure he's loved, I added in silent admiration. My father had never shown the slightest disrespect for my natural atheism, even when I'd wanted to argue with him in high school and again in college, wanted to provoke him. "Faith is simply whatever is real to us," he always told me in response, and then he'd quote Saint Augustine or a Sufi mystic and slice a pear for me, or set up the chessboard.
As we made our way through the lunch and later some pieces of dark chocolate, my father's thrifty pleasure, he asked me how my work was going. I'd intended not to mention Robert Oliver to him--I felt vaguely that my concern for the man might sound unbalanced, unjust to my other patients, among other things, or, worse, that I might not be able to justify to him the actions I'd taken on Robert's behalf. But in the deep quiet of the dining room, I found myself telling him nearly the whole story. Like my father, I didn't mention the name of my parishioner. My father listened with what I could tell was genuine interest, buttering his pumpernickel; like me, he loved nothing better than a human portrait. I told him about my conversations with Kate; I left out the fact that I'd gone back in the evening to Kate's house and had invited Mary to dinner. Perhaps he would have forgiven even those things, assuming as he naturally would that I had Robert's best interests at heart.
When I described how Robert wore the same clothes over and over, changing them only long enough to have them washed; his dogged reading of books below his intellect; and his endless silence, my father nodded. He finished the last of his soup, set down the spoon. It slipped from his hand, clattering on the dish, and he put it straight. "Penance," he said.
"What do you mean?" I took a last square of chocolate.
"This man is doing penance. That's what you're describing, I think. He punishes his flesh and suppresses the longing of his soul to speak about its misery. He mortifies body and mind to atone for something."
"To atone? But for what?"
My father poured another cup of tea, carefully, and I refrained from helping him. "Well, you are more likely to know that than I, aren't you?'
"He left his wife and children," I mused. "Possibly for another woman. But I think it wasn't that simple. His ex-wife doesn't seem to feel he was really ever hers, somehow, and neither does the woman to whom he went. He left the second woman, too, after a short time. And since he won't talk with me, I have no way of guessing how guilty he feels toward either of them."
"It seems to me," said my father, dabbing his lips with a blue paper napkin, "that all those paintings are a part of his penance. Perhaps he is apologizing to her?"
"You mean the lady he paints? She may be a figment of his imagination, remember," I pointed out. "If he based her on a real person, as his wife believed, it was a person he didn't really know. And the woman he most recently left also seems to think he couldn't have known the mysterious lady well, even if she was real, although I'm not sure I agree."
"Isn't it in her interest to think so?" My father was leaning back in his chair, contemplating our empty lunch dishes with the same attention he usually gave to my queen's pawn. "Surely it would be horrifying for her to discover that he'd been painting over and over a live woman he knew intimately, especially given the nature of the portraits you described, the passion in them."
"True," I said. "But whether his model is real or a hallucination, why would he need to do penance for her sake? Could she be someone real he somehow injured? If he's apologizing to a hallucination, he's in worse shape than I've thought up to now."
Oddly, my father said again what he'd always told me in high school, an echo of the line I'd been thinking of just a little while earlier. "Faith is what is real to us."
"Yes," I said. I felt sudden resentment--I couldn't return even to my family home, my shrine, without being pursued by Robert Oliver. "He has his goddess, that's certain."
"Maybe she has him," observed my father. "Here, I'll get these dishes, and probably you'd like a nap after your trip."
I couldn't deny that the house was lulling me, as it always did. The clocks in each room, some of them nearly as old as the mantelpieces they sat on, gave off a sound that seemed to say, "Sleep, sleep, sleep." It was so rare for me, in the outside world, to get quite enough rest from week to week, and I never liked to waste my weekends napping. I helped my father clear up and left him with a soapy sponge in his hand, then climbed the stairs.
My room was reserved for me forever, and in it hung a portrait of my mother that I'd painted (from a photograph; I was not a purist like Robert) a year or so before her death. It struck me that if I'd known what was soon to happen to her I would have painted it from life, no matter how inconvenient that might have been for either of us, arranging sittings--I would have done it not because it could have improved the portrait (I hadn't been much good in those days anyway) but because it might have given us another eight or ten hours together. I could have memorized her face from life, then, measured its small irregularities with a brush held up horizontally or vertically, smiled into her eyes whenever I glanced up from my work. As it was, the portrait showed a neat, nearly pretty, dignified woman with a deep thoughtfulness on her face but none of the life and strength I'd known in my mother in real life, none of that flash of matter-of-fact humor. She wore her black cardigan and her dog collar, a formal smile; the photograph must have been taken for a parish newsletter or office wall.
I wished now, as I often had, that I'd painted her in the deep-red dress my father had bought for her at Christmas with my approval when I was twelve, the only clothing I ever knew him to purchase for her. She had put it on for us, put her hair up, and clasped around her neck the string of pearls she'd worn for their wedding. It was a modest dress of soft wool, fitting for a pastor's wife and for the pastor she'd recently become. When she came down the stairs for Christmas dinner, we had both sat speechless, and my father had taken a photograph of my mother and me, black and white: my mother in her rich dress and me in my first sport jacket, which was already getting short in the sleeves--where had that picture gone? I must remember to ask him if he knew.
My room was wallpapered in a pattern of faded brown-and-green stripes; the small rug looked freshly washed, I thought, a little too fluffy, and the wood floor polished--the Polish housekeeper. I lay down on the narrow bed I still thought of as mine and drifted off, coming to in the silence and realizing that I'd slept only twenty minutes, then plunging into a deeper sleep for another hour.