by Dean Koontz
“Utter all you want, you still won’t make sense.”
“Right there is a hint of her stormy mood,” he told me. “She must have a flask she’s been nipping from.”
“What I said to Malcolm that day, Jonah, is that there’s a lot to learn about art. You need to train your eye. But when it comes to what it means, no stuffy expert in the world has a right to tell you what you should think about a painting. Art is subjective. Whatever comfort or delight you get from a painting is your business. What it says, it says to you. Too many experts make art political, ’cause they believe great artists have always held the same convictions as they themselves do. But the last thing art should be is political. Yuck. Double yuck. Keep your mind free. Trust your eye and heart.”
Malcolm said, “That’s what I told her, word for word. Amazing she could memorize it, considering how pickled she was that day.”
In his ungainly manner, he went to the velvet restraining rope that looped through the gallery from stanchion to stanchion, and he stood before a painting titled Wheatfields by Jacob van Ruisdael. Amalia and I joined him.
Sky filled two-thirds of the big canvas, some blue but most of it covered in masses of dark-gray clouds. The bottom third offered a vast landscape, deep shadows in the foreground, dark woods in the background, and in the middle a sunny patch of meadow through which a dirt road curved. A lone man and a woman with child walked the road. Beyond the trees, all but invisible, a shepherd herded sheep.
I said, “It makes me feel sad and happy at the same time. The people are so tiny and the world’s so big.”
“The people in Ruisdael’s landscapes are always tiny,” Amalia said. “Why do you think you feel both sad and happy?”
“Well, I don’t know. It’s like … they’re so tiny, they could be crushed like bugs. By lightning, you know, or anything. That’s sad.”
“Unless they’re bastards,” Malcolm said, “then good riddance.”
“My lovely brother, shut up,” Amalia said sweetly.
I continued, “But then all around them, it’s so beautiful, see, the sky and the woods and the meadow and everything. I feel happy for them being in such a beautiful place.” I looked up at Amalia, and she smiled, and I said, “Did that sound stupid?”
“Not at all, Jonah. We both know who’s king of stupid today.”
Malcolm said, “I will utter something in a minute or two, and it’ll be so clever, you’ll be devastated.”
We came next to a painting almost as beautiful as Girl with the Red Hat, but as I studied it, disquiet crept into me and soon evolved into fear that made me tremble.
63
When Dr. Jubal Mace-Maskil apparently escaped into the day without broadsiding another vehicle, Mrs. Nozawa returned to her office at the back of the dry-cleaning shop. After considering the friends to whom she might go for information, she put in a call to Irinka Vavilov. Irinka and her husband, Andrei, had been musicians with the Moscow symphony when, in late 1939, they had defected while on tour in Norway and within a year had made their way to the United States. Andrei had died a year earlier, but Irinka, now fifty-five, still taught music history at the university.
Irinka had learned origami from Setsuko Nozawa and was always happy to hear from her. She knew Jubal Mace-Maskil, and she thought he was a swine. When she had first come to the university, he had made bold passes at her at faculty parties, even when Andrei was in the same room, even when Jubal’s wife, Noreen, stood mere feet away.
He’d become more aggressive after his wife died in 1962, and then in just the last two years, he had taken on a whole new persona, fancying himself the Che Guevara of Charleston, Illinois, obviously indulging in recreational drugs that would eventually get him fired or, more likely, forced into early retirement. Some people said he’d started to come apart after Noreen died, haunted by the cruel nature of her death, but Irinka didn’t believe Jubal had a capacity for deep empathy, not even regarding his wife.
How did Noreen die? Quite horribly. She’d gone to Arizona to visit her brother and his family. One evening, after everyone else had gone to bed, she sat outside alone by the pool, enjoying the warm desert evening. The next morning, she couldn’t be found. Her rental car no longer stood in the driveway. Police located it in a shopping-center parking lot and discovered Noreen’s body in the trunk. She’d been tied hand and foot and then been beaten to death with a hammer. No one was ever charged with the crime.
Did Jubal have an ironclad alibi? What an odd question. Most people thought of him as an intellectual faker and a hopeless pig, but no one would ever think him capable of murder. He was too much of a wimp, utterly gutless. As it happened, the week Noreen went to Arizona, Jubal had been chairing a three-day conference titled “The Cold War: Necessity or Contrivance?” There were ninety-two attendees from universities in sixteen states. He had put the whole thing together; and he was present throughout. Even his late-night hours were no doubt accounted for, considering that there were many women at the conference, all familiar with Jubal’s carefully crafted image, but none familiar with his reality. In fact, Noreen was killed on the final night of the event, which concluded with a party that lasted until after one in the morning—by which time she had been snatched and dispatched in faraway Scottsdale.
By Mrs. Nozawa’s calculation, Lucas Drackman, he of exceptional integrity and brilliance, had been a member of the junior class when Dr. Mace-Maskil had become a widower. It would be interesting to know if Noreen’s life had been covered by a large insurance policy or if she had possessed substantial assets, separate from her husband’s, that had passed to him through her will.
Mrs. Nozawa hoped Mr. Tamazaki of the Daily News would not ask her to investigate those two intriguing questions. Although she had enjoyed this little adventure, she harbored no desire to give up her entrepreneurial endeavors to become a gumshoe, which could be a most depressing occupation.
When Mrs. Nozawa said good-bye to Irinka and hung up the phone, Toshiro Mifune put his enormous head in her lap, and she stroked behind his ears. She told him that he was a good boy, the best boy ever, and that the world would be an immeasurably better place if people were more like dogs. As Labrador retrievers went, Toshiro was on the large size, but when properly motivated, he could purr.
64
The painting that chilled me to the marrow was beautiful, and all these years later I regard it as a masterpiece. The artist, Carel Fabritius, a Dutchman, might have been a pupil of Rembrandt’s. At thirty-two, he was blown to bits, along with all but a few of his paintings, when the gunpowder plant at Delft exploded in 1654 and leveled a third of the city.
This painting, quite small, was called The Goldfinch. It is said to be the greatest painting of an avian subject in that entire century. The backdrop is a sunlit wall, and on the wall hangs a feeding box, perhaps ten inches by six, on which the little bird perches. The finch is restricted to the box by a fine-link chain attached to one of its feet, a chain at most two feet in length, allowing it to test its wings and fly only to change its position on the box, condemning it to a markedly more limited and miserable existence than that of a parakeet in a large cage.
The cruelty of the finch’s captivity, its keeper’s thoughtless denial of its winged nature, tortures your heart if you have a heart capable of being tortured. But the bird’s circumstances were only one reason that the painting chilled me. The attitude of the bird—alert, its head raised and turned toward the viewer (in the world of the painting, toward its keeper), something in its posture that said it could be restrained but never broken by restraint—suggested stoic suffering that, if I dwelt on it too long, would reduce me to tears.
The bird’s circumstances and attitude were still not entirely what so affected me. What started me trembling was its right eye. In the painting, the left eye was shaded, but in the right glimmered a liquid drop of light, a simple bit of mastery that convinced me that this painted bird could indeed see. Its stare was direct but more than merely direct. Ther
e was a depth to the eye, as if not only the bird looked through that eye at its keeper, but as if all of nature looked and saw and knew the extreme cruelty of this imprisonment.
No, not just that.
Suddenly I knew what the painting meant to me, and I thought I knew what it had meant to the painter. Many who believe in God also believe that He is not merely the creator of all nature but is in all of nature, that He is everywhere with us, in some way beyond our easy comprehension, that He is acutely aware and caring. In the right eye of the goldfinch, I saw the bird gazing at his keeper, all of nature gazing, too, but also through that moist and feeling eye, the Maker of the keeper watched. Watched and saw and loved the keeper for his potential, but mourned his cruelty. Love and sorrow informed that eye, and it regarded me as surely as it regarded the keeper of the bird, saw me and knew the good and bad of me, knew my courage but also my cowardice, knew the lies I had told. I might not have been able to put all this into words then, as a confused boy of ten, but I understood: Like the bird, I was chained, and the links in the chain were my lies, so that I was both bird and keeper, chained and endangered by my own actions.
Amalia realized that I was trembling violently. “Jonah, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. Nothing. I’m okay.”
“You’re shaking like a leaf.”
Earlier I had realized that we’d been so enthralled by the show that we hadn’t gone to lunch. Now I looked at my watch and said, “We didn’t eat. It’s two o’clock. I’m starving, I guess. That’s what it is. I’m way hungry. Let’s go find a street vendor. I need a hot dog.”
“What does the painting mean to you?” Malcolm asked as I turned away from The Goldfinch.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to see it again. Figure it out when I’m not starving like this. Aren’t you guys starving?”
Room after room of white marble floors, down wide white marble steps, across more glossy floors … I didn’t think we’d come this far, and I wondered if Amalia truly remembered the way out or whether we were in a maze, going around and around in some episode of The Twilight Zone. But then we came to the cashier windows, where we’d bought our tickets, and the doors were beyond.
I was sweating before we left the air-conditioned Pinakotheke, and though the day was warm, it wasn’t blazing hot enough to explain the perspiration on my face.
As we walked in search of food vendors with street carts, Amalia said, “Are you sure it’s just hunger, Jonah? I’m not sure it is.”
“No, it is. It really is. I just need to eat.”
Malcolm said, “Our tickets are date-stamped. We can go back in after we’ve grabbed some lunch.”
I’d had enough art for the day, but I didn’t say as much.
We found a hot-dog vendor and got two each, and Pepsi. By then we were close to the courthouse, beside which lay a pocket park. We sat side by side on a bench in the park and ate lunch. Hoping for dropped crumbs, pigeons strutted back and forth, eyeing us with less intensity than the goldfinch had studied me.
My shakes and sweats went away, as if hunger really had been the only cause of them, and that made Amalia happy.
I pretended to be fascinated by the courthouse and asked if it was like those on TV. She said it was huge and worth seeing for its splendid architecture. By the time we explored all the public spaces, we had to run to catch the 3:20 bus at the corner of National Avenue and 52nd Street.
All the way home, I worried and wondered when the axe would fall, by which I didn’t mean Malcolm’s saxophone.
65
Mrs. Nozawa called Mr. Yabu Tamazaki at the Daily News morgue, but he had gone for the day. She didn’t leave a message, because he had suggested that his investigation was sensitive. He’d said that when she called, if she got someone other than him, she should leave no message. She called him at his apartment, letting it ring and ring, but he didn’t pick up and evidently had no answering machine there.
Just then she received a call about a boiler failure at the apartment house that she and her husband owned, and when she phoned Mr. Nozawa at the car wash, she discovered he was already dealing with a major problem involving the drain in Bay 2. The boiler would have to be her baby.
Mr. Nozawa got home at 9:10, bringing with him a medium-size pepperoni-and-cheese and a family-size salad pack from a pizza joint. When Mrs. Nozawa arrived twenty minutes later, she first gave the most patient dog his late dinner and took him into the backyard to toilet. By the time she had wiped Toshiro Mifune’s paws with a wet cloth before letting him back in the house, she felt it had gotten too late to ring Mr. Tamazaki. Besides, she desperately wanted some pizza—and good red wine.
As they ate at the kitchen table, they told each other about their day. Mr. Nozawa agreed with his wife when she said that the following evening she would telephone their younger daughter at Northwestern, their older daughter at Yale, and their son at UCLA to insist that if they had professors who wore rumpled khakis with patch-pocket jackets and T-shirts emblazoned with inscrutable groups of letters, they should drop those classes and find alternatives.
66
Since we had moved in with Grandpa Teddy, I had kept the Lucite heart, with its captive feather, in the La Florentine box instead of carrying it everywhere in a pants pocket. I suppose for a while I had felt safer in my grandfather’s house than in the apartment. I’d had the same experience before: When all threats seemed to recede at least somewhat, I tended to regard the pendant as merely a curiosity, jewelry that a boy would never wear and that cluttered my pocket, but when I felt myself in great jeopardy, the pendant appeared magical once more, offering ultimate protection against the many kinds of darkness that can overcome us in this world.
That Thursday night, with the experience of the Pinakotheke so fresh in mind, and considering all that had happened since the anti-war demonstration and bombings at City College on Monday, including the visit by Miss Pearl and her warning to me on Wednesday, I thought of Albert Solomon Gluck, the taxi driver and would-be comedian, and of the pendant that he had given to my mother, that she had given to me. I got the La Florentine box from my nightstand, opened it, and fished the pendant from among the other items.
As I dangled it by the silver chain, I thought my eyes deceived me. The tiny white feather had turned golden brown, the very shade of the bird in the painting that had so powerfully affected me. Holding the Lucite heart in the palm of my hand, I thrust it under the shade of the bedside lamp, but the greater light revealed a feather of an even brighter gold than it had first appeared. Indeed, when I took it out of the direct light and held it before my eyes, it retained the more intense color that it had acquired under the lamp, and it even seemed to glow.
Wondering, I put the chain around my neck, whether it might be girl’s jewelry or not. The heart hung low on my chest, heavy but not uncomfortable. I tucked it under my pajama top, half expecting a faint golden light to penetrate the fabric, though none did.
I didn’t know what to make of this development, but I knew that it must be of enormous significance.
I never gave more than a passing thought to the possibility that the glue cementing the two halves of Lucite into a single heart had darkened with age. For one thing, if that had been the case, not only the feather but the entire plane between the two half hearts would have yellowed; but it had not. Furthermore, the vanes of the feather, fanning out from both sides of the shaft, were as soft-looking as before, as though they had not ever been glued there but existed in a shallow void at the center of the heart, where the glue hadn’t been applied.
The taxi driver’s gift had seemed magical on the day that I received it, also on certain occasions since, including in the moment when I first saw that the white feather had been transformed to gold. Now, however, but two minutes later, listening to my heart beating under the still and clearer heart on the chain, I sensed that the word magical, although it evoked myriad thoughts of things wondrous and mysterious, might be inadequate or even
wrong. I felt that this pendant must be something more than magical, though what else it might be, I couldn’t say. I was quick for a boy of ten, agile of mind, but some things eluded me. The jewelry, Miss Pearl, so much that had happened during the past two years, the experience of The Goldfinch that very day, and even to a lesser extent Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat and Jacob van Ruisdael’s Wheatfields, all of it had something akin to magic in it, but something immeasurably deeper and stranger than magic: even the mundane moments like breakfast with Mom at The Royal and a game of cards with her at the kitchen table, the immense room of busy tailors at Metropolitan Suits, Mr. Yoshioka and the security chain that in memory shone like gold instead of brass, the ivory carving of the court lady in her nineteen-layer ceremonial kimono, Grandpa Teddy with the pack of Juicy Fruit gum as the crows danced on the sidewalk.…
Although I felt safer with the pendant around my neck, though I knew in my bones that it wasn’t just useless juju, I didn’t feel entirely secure. I couldn’t help but think that the transformation of the feather from white to gold signified the approach of a moment, an event, a crisis toward which I had been moving since the day I’d been given eight names—not including Kirk—that I could never live up to even if I grew as old as Methuselah.
Although the warm room wanted ventilation on that July evening, though the pale face I’d thought I’d seen at the window the previous night had most likely been imaginary, I got out of bed and pulled shut the lower sash. Locked it. Drew shut the draperies.
67
Shortly before two o’clock the following afternoon, when Mr. Yoshioka arrived on foot from the bus stop three blocks away, dressed in a three-piece pin-striped summer-weight suit, he brought two paper plates taped together to form a container. He presented it to me when I rose from the chair on the front porch, where I had been waiting for him.