He seemed to sleep decently, when he didn’t suffer from the spells of small dry coughs that she hated to hear. Look at him dozing now, his head pillowed on his arm. She noted with tenderness the slackness, the vulnerability of sleep.
Thank God the wall was good, worth giving him. Thank God she had saved it up, not squandered it on anyone else. Now it was Ricky’s and hers and would remain so for a while. He said it was time for her to make its existence public, but for now she preferred to share it only with him, not with the greedy world.
At lunch time, as they sat over apples, cheese, and bread, Ricky said calmly, “Well, I’ve thought it all over again in the light of your identification of your protagonist as a legal gentleman. I think you’ve got a ghost.”
“A ghost!” she said, charmed. “Really? Of all things. But where do you see a ghost in all this?”
“In your accounts. This fellow you watch in the dreams, the judge at the window — he’s always the same person, he has a continuous existence.”
“Yes,” she said slowly, trying to think herself back into the dreams. “Though I don’t know much about him. I’ve never seen his face of course, but he’s not very big, and he’s older, I think — his hair’s gray — and under his gown he has his street clothes and these neat, small, very shiny black shoes. He’s vain, I think. Those shoes.”
“Citizen X,” Ricky mused, “of the Revolutionary Republic. Afterward, perhaps, Magistrate X under Napoleon? A man of substance, of influence: the crowd in the street seems aware of and interested in his actions, however ominously. Someone who lived through interesting times.”
She had a curious sensation of dropping through a hole in the bright afternoon.
“A ghost from the Revolution,” she said, “haunting my dreams… You believe in such things?” How would it feel to be dying and to believe in ghosts? Had Ricky only begun to believe as death drew nearer?
He said cautiously, “I’ve seen enough not to disbelieve automatically.”
Who was she to question whatever comforts he might find for himself? He can believe what he damn well pleases, and if he wants to chase a “ghost” through my dreams, let him! I’m not going to tell him how to spend his last days. Let’s hope I can do as well with my own, when the time comes.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s say, for the sake of argument, a ghost. But why in my dreams?”
“Why not, if the ghost feels it can get through in dreams?”
“Seems an awfully roundabout route to me. And what would he be trying to get through with?”
“He has a story to tell, a lesson to teach, I should think. Perhaps even a warning to give, in traditional ghostly style. Nothing as simple as knocking on the walls or drifting across the patio of an evening. A complex haunt, Dorothea, to go with a complex hauntee.”
“But Ricky, you’ve been in my house for nearly two weeks now. It’s hardly anyone’s idea of a haunted house. No one’s ever been afflicted by a ghost there that I know of, least of all a French ghost from the ‘best of times and the worst of times.’ Now, if we had an Indian ghost chanting its grief over the Spanish Conquest, that might fit. Or some eager Conquistador searching for gold. But French —” She shook her head. “I just don’t see how it works.”
He looked modestly victorious. “I never said the house was haunted, Dorothea. I am proposing that it is you who are haunted; personally.”
“Oy,” she said. “Vey. Is Mir.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She began to laugh. “Ricky, love, look: I’ve never been to France in my life. There’s nothing French in my background. My mother came from Vienna in 1915, and my father was a Jewish confidence man from Poland. Nobody knows when he came. He traveled on his mysterious affairs, showing up now and again with money or worn-out shoes, depending. Mama raised me on the upper West Side of New York and supported herself making clothes for other immigrant women from Mitteleuropa. How do I get this French ghost, this specter of the Revolution, from a background like that?”
“That,” said Ricky with relish, “is the puzzle.”
She cut a bruise out of an apple with her painting-knife, reflecting wryly that in all probability the wall was a great deal less important to Ricky than the more mysterious artistry of her dreams.
She would never have expected him to be so imaginative. He had always been, after all, a man of surfaces, a traveler crossing and re-crossing the rumpled skin of the world; an observer and reporter of the exotic, not an interpreter of the mind’s fantasies. Yet she had had hints of interior complexities. There had been stories about him even when she had first met him years ago in New York: of a beautiful heiress who had followed him into the wild bushland, to no avail, her own sorrow, and the disapproval of his two matchmaking aunts; and of a young cousin, a girl who sent him a sheaf of poems and then perished in a terrible fire at a country house. Afterward Ricky had retreated to some modest mews apartment in a comfortable backwater of London from which he had eventually emerged to sail without explanation for South America. All long ago, but it is our past that makes us.
“You know,” she said, “I think I’ve underestimated you.”
“Oh,” he scoffed, “we English are wonderful at ghosts, it’s part of our heritage. I’m just interpreting the phenomenon in terms I feel at home with, that’s all.” He turned to gaze at the wall. “Call it my own poor sort of creativity, roused up to meet your own.”
“I’m very glad you’ve come,” she said.
“This must be treated in absolute confidence,” Ricky said. “It concerns some one else’s secrets. Silence.”
“Agreed,” Frank said.
Ricky, stretched out in an old lawn chair behind the hospice building, looked not at Frank Sanford but at his own steepled fingers. He knew from experience that he could learn little of the trustworthiness of someone from a culture other than his own through visual inspection. But an aura was often to be felt, if one attended to it. As one might expect of a hospice volunteer, Frank radiated reliability.
The man knew Dorothea, although not well. Taos was socially as neatly structured and interlocked as any village anywhere. Villagers gossip. That was the crux of the problem.
Nevertheless. Frank was a skilled counselor, a sort of priest-manqué, and for the first time since his illness had begun Ricky felt in need of good counsel.
“I am very worried about Dorothea,” he said finally, taking the plunge. “Something strange is happening to her, or rather something is not happening.”
He stopped while an enormous truck trundled past with a sound like a dragon clearing its throat. The hospice had established itself in an old motel on the edge of town, which had, unfortunately, a major trucking route along its frontage. But dyers can’t be choosers.
“Listen,” Ricky went on, “do you believe in magic at all?”
“What kind of magic?” Frank said, not with the cautious hedging of the clever but with honest interest. He had a quick mind. Ricky liked him and would have enjoyed spending more time playing chess with him and talking about other things. But not today.
“I don’t know what kind of magic,” he admitted. “I hope you can tell me. I’ve seen some odd things here and there, but I’ve not come across this before.
“She says she’s quit painting, and by my observation, she has. She says she’s content, and seems to be, but not because she’s doing nothing, not because she’s ‘retired,’ as I’ve heard her put it. That’s an evasion, if not an outright lie. Although in a sense — well, you’ll see when I tell you the rest.
“There’s this great — great thing she’s been working on for upwards of two years. It’s absolutely splendid, Frank, a great achievement, I think. And it has her enchanted.”
Frank leaned down and picked up a stick and fiddled with it in his neat, small fingers. He was a pipe-smoker, Ricky knew, and a faint odor of tobacco clung to his clothes, but he refrained in company. He refrained now also from answering. If he’d had his pipe lit, no doubt he’d be sipping s
moke and gazing slit-eyed into the middle-distance.
“Mind you,” Ricky said, “the paintings alone have finally begun to bring her the recognition she deserves. And that’s part of it, you see. Letters come from galleries begging her for material to show. She refuses them. She hides out here with this great, secret piece of work. She hides in it, I think.”
“You mean she spends all her time closeted with this — this project?”
“No, but when she’s away from it, she often thinks of it.” He pictured her bending to retrieve some bit of scrap from the ground, the thoughtful expression he saw whenever she looked at any set of objects arranged in series or in a group — even silverware laid out for polishing. “It’s as if it rides silently on her shoulder and whispers in her ear. And when she’s working on the thing —”
Yesterday at the wall he had observed her with growing concern. He hardly knew how to describe his feelings and their cause without sounding foolish, over-sensitive, a prying old busybody.
“The fact is, she barely works on it at all. I mean, she may add a bit here or there, but most of the time she just moons about, admiring the damned thing.”
Frank looked puzzled. This was not getting across. Ricky tried again.
“I think she’s still looking for more work to do on it, but there isn’t any more. It’s finished. I told her so and she disagreed, but the work itself rejects further alteration. And she can’t fiddle about with it and ruin it by overworking it, her own artistic judgment won’t let her. Her eye knows I’m right, you see? But she denies it. She won’t let anyone see the thing. She won’t let it go, she won’t let it be done.”
“Maybe she keeps looking because she sees things you don’t,” Frank ventured. “Some loose ends only the artist could catch.”
“Naturally she sees things I don’t,” Ricky said impatiently. The hospice cat lumped itself into his lap. He stroked it absently. “But if you could see her, wandering entranced in front of that damned, beautiful thing, you’d know. She’s be-spelled.”
“It’s that powerful?”
Ricky nodded. His feelings about the wall had progressed to a point where he suspected that it was in some way the focusing agent that had drawn him to Dorothea in the first place. This was not something he chose to say to Frank. It was too personal, and it had to do with, oh, say, the spirit-mazes he had seen drawn on the sands of certain deserts. He didn’t want to go off on that kind of thing. Besides, he wasn’t sure he really believed it. Only sometimes, looking at the wall, he would think that its completion included him in a way that had compelled his presence. As if I were part of the spell, he thought. One doesn’t presume on Frank’s cheerful, patient, acceptance with that type of prattle. What I’ve said so far is quite enough.
The cat drooled on his hand. He left off stroking it and sat holding its vibrating warmth.
“‘And I awoke and found me on the cold hill’s side,’” Frank murmured unexpectedly. “You think an awakening like that is crucial for Dorothea?”
“Exactly. I think she’s trying to be in some sort of artists’ Heaven without having died, and she can’t. There’s got to be more for her to be and to do beyond this single great accomplishment, she can’t let it just stop her life! Might as well be dead then, eh? Rapt in some golden stasis of completion. You can’t have that, no one can, not without going rotten or petrifying where you stand.”
Was that what he thought? Yes, hearing his own words, he recognized the rightness of them.
“Does it help, do you think, to worry about her future?” Frank said gently. Meaning, does it help you, thinking about her future instead of your own?
Ricky snapped, “It distracts me, yes, you clever bastard.” For God’s sake, the man’s doing his sweet, decent best. “It’s true that I may be avoiding some — some work of my own by concentrating on her, if that’s what you’re thinking. But that doesn’t alter the facts of her situation.”
He stopped on the brink of mentioning the dreams. One could only go so far with another’s secrets. The wall was intended to be public property one day. The dreams were not.
Frank snapped another twig into segments with crisp, tiny sounds. “I think I’d feel a lot better about dying if I thought I could help a good friend to escape or avoid another kind of death, a spiritual death.”
“So would I,” Ricky rejoined with some asperity, “but the problem is, I don’t see any way to do that. I’m a guest, after all; one doesn’t want to presume.”
“On the other hand, she may accept comments from you that she wouldn’t take from anyone else.”
Ricky poured the cat out of his lap and leaned back, shutting his eyes. “Perhaps I have made it all up to divert myself, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
He heard the rustling of the grass as Frank hunted about for another twig to torture.
“Do you know,” Frank said thoughtfully, “some of the Indians out here always include a deliberate imperfection in the design on any of their pots or rugs or whatever. They say it’s to let the maker’s spirit out, so it doesn’t get trapped in the work.”
Ricky shivered.
The miniscule snapping sounds started again.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Frank,” he said, getting up, “go and smoke your pipe, will you?”
She took a bath. She was tired, having spent the morning mending the fence around the pasture of Horace, the fat buckskin gelding she never rode any more. The fence posts were rotting so badly they would hardly hold the staples, and she was going to have to seriously consider either divesting herself of Horace or having those damned ugly metal posts installed.
Grumpily she soaped herself, white body and dark-tanned limbs. Mars was pawing at the door, wanting to come in and lap at the bath water, which made it scummy and smelly since he always dipped most of his face in.
The phone rang. It was perched on the toilet-lid within easy reach, but she wished this time she’d left it in its usual place in the hall, because here came George’s eager voice. She sighed and leaned back in the hot water to listen to his harangue about the picture he wanted.
“…Capitalize on the New York show and make some sales, Dorothea. You don’t have to be working right now to realize the worth of things you did earlier. You could sell old work and give your kids whatever amounts of money are allowed without being hit by a gift tax, which would reduce tax on your estate —”
Tactful George. “I’ve thought about all this. Every artist does.”
“Then you’re not thinking enough! Let me have a signature piece for my concert series. It goes into every program book, every piece of major publicity, nation-wide advertising, the works. We’ll do it in posters, too. The publicity value for other work you’d like to market would be tremendous. And of course there’d be a fee for our use of your work.”
“Are you proposing a bribe now?”
“Sure, if you want to think of it that way. Though I can’t see why anyone should have to bribe you to allow the public access to your work. Go and look at those old pictures again, Dorothea. With the pictures in front of you, see how you feel about a little exposure. I’m getting grant money, I can pay. I never meant you just to hand something over for free.”
Unless maybe I’d lost my marbles and agreed to do that, she thought, exasperated and amused. “Look, George, I told you I’d think about it. I’m still thinking about it. Settle for that, will you?”
“I will,” he said, “for now.”
She did think about it, soaking in the tub. She thought George was a royal pain, as her son Arthur would say. Well-connected, knowledgeable about art, full of good causes with solid commercial potential — and a pain.
What is it about giving George a picture that brings out this stubbornness in me? she thought.
I don’t want the attention. If they really begin taking notice of you, they come mooching around for answers, for judgments about other people’s work, the state of Art today, the whole schmeer. You get distracted, you get
tempted — come and teach here, we want six weeks of your life so we can do a photo-essay or a book, we need you at a conference of women artists — she had lived through some of this already and wanted no more of it, for all the financial advantages.
But at the same time here I am making this unmistakably large and commanding piece of art out in the desert, two years in the making and not done yet — hardly the action of a person who craves only obscurity. What goes on with me?
It can’t be as simple as just not being able to stand the idea of George getting his mitts on my work.
The woman who had the nerve to walk out on Jack and the kids is the same woman who fled from the success of the bridge paintings, which might have led to something better. The woman who came to Taos to start over, living in, um, passionate unwedlock with Nathan and opening a bookstore in a new place, she’s the same one who stopped painting out here because — the work showed too much promise?
Baloney. I like a private life, that’s all. I like it, and I’ve earned it.
But.
Does it count that I’ve said yes to Mary Morgan’s blasted art class coming to visit? Probably not. Small potatoes, evasive action (an image came instantly of a school of pink new potatoes executing a swift evasive underwater maneuver, like spherical fish). Ricky says you’re a hermit. He probably feels guilty, thinks you’re fending off your friends for the sake of his peace and quiet.
“Mars, shut up!” she yelled, and the scratching and whining at the bathroom door subsided. She rinsed her hair, her skin, and climbed out of the bath. “Shit,” she growled.
Dried and dressed, she collected Ricky from his nap to take him to the studio with her. “If there’s a ghost around, that’s where we’ll find him,” she said, digging the key out of her desk drawer. “The ghost of my painting career. Actually, I just want to check and make sure that there really is nothing for George.”
“Since you put it like that,” Ricky said, “I don’t give much for his chances. Love to see the place, though, and any of your work that you’d care to show me.”
Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) Page 8