Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  The studio was the entire north wing of the house. Its outside wall was a bank of tall windows with iron grillwork guards. The other long wall was faced with cork for pinning up papers. One end of the room held a slop-sink and a small bathroom; the other was fitted with racks for canvasses (more canvasses than she remembered). The pale oak floor was randomly stained with faded splashes of pigment. Two easels leaned in a corner.

  She had not been in this big, bare room, with its fullness of light, for months. The air smelled of sunny staleness and turpentine. Ricky sat down in the big green velvet armchair in which Nathan had more than once, in the other house down in town, sat for his portrait. Ghosts, she thought; I’ve got my share, and more to come. Ricky, eventually.

  Swiftly she whipped through the contents of her portfolios, feeling detached from the work. Some of the drawings were worse than she remembered, but some were better. A few might even do for George.

  Then she turned up a pen-and-ink piece, a man’s head seen full-face, a coarse and even brutal visage with wild hair and some sort of neck-cloth and odd, standing-up collar, on a background of rough cross-hatching. The picture jolted her. She said hastily, “This doesn’t belong here,” and skimmed it onto a heap of discards.

  She had forgotten those, that last series, the set that had brought her to a dead stop. They were not what George was looking for or what she had wished to find.

  Ricky leaned down and picked up the drawing.

  “I didn’t know you did this sort of work,” he said.

  “I’d forgotten it myself,” she said, truthfully. She stood up, straightening her back with effort and wiping her dusty palms on her pants. “This was something else that — happened when we got out here. I was trying to be spontaneous — looking for what was really mine. The drawings we’ve been looking at were only exercises. I started producing images of faces, people I’d never seen. Yet they were as detailed as portraits from life, and they brought with them a sort of charge, a negative charge. Anxiety. That’s when I stopped, almost three years ago now.”

  “The picture of this man is full of power and poignancy,” he said in an accusing tone.

  “I knew that at the time,” she said, “but I didn’t know why, and I had a feeling that I didn’t want to know why. So I stopped.” Her heart was pounding. Leave it alone, Ricky, why pursue it?

  “You do know who this is, don’t you?”

  Reluctantly she stepped nearer to look again. The portrait showed the face of the head in her dream, the one that was thrust on its pole up outside the judge’s window.

  “From my dream,” she said, dry-mouthed. “A severed head.”

  “He’s from reality. This is a recognizable likeness of Danton, one of the architects and leaders of the Revolution and later one of its most illustrious victims. He was guillotined during the Reign of Terror.”

  Dorothea stood hugging her crossed arms to her body. She did not doubt him for a moment. But how could she have made this picture? How long had this intrusion from the past been brewing within her, scarcely noticed? Funny; now she remembered that she had nearly flunked out at the end of her sophomore year because she’d been reading all about Danton and Robespierre and the rest instead of doing her course assignments.

  “You said there was a series?” Ricky said. “Where are the rest?”

  “Destroyed,” she said forcefully, glad that this was so.

  He made an angry, impatient sound.

  “They scared me, Ricky. I produced these disturbing images, I didn’t understand where they came from then any more than I do now, and I quit. I threw out most of the work.”

  “They ought to have been taken away from you,” he snapped. “Someone ought to have been posted to snatch each piece from you as you completed it. What disturbed you might enlighten others; didn’t you think of that? If you’re lucky enough to have visions to set down, you shouldn’t complain that they aren’t pretty or soothing or entertaining enough for you! You should have the courage of your gifts, but instead you’ve denied your own creative impulse. I’d give a great deal to see the rest of this group, do you know that? And I’m sure others with educated eyes would agree with me. You had no right, you know. You had no right, in this world that tears down so much, buries and drowns so much, to obliterate your own work.”

  He set the drawing on the seat of the velvet chair and stalked out of the studio, leaving her open-mouthed.

  What the hell had just happened?

  Mortality, she thought grimly. The man is dying, what do you expect? He would leave nothing like this work behind him. She remembered once urging him to make a book of the best of his essays, but he had protested that his pieces weren’t worth republishing. His writing gift was not great, she had to admit, and she had admired him for recognizing his own limitations.

  She was an artist; he was not. The feeling behind this outburst had had to come out somehow: the fury of the dying at the continued existence of those around them who were dying much more slowly, or, worse, wasting the ability to leave something behind them that was valuable enough to be “undying.”

  Well, what did you expect, she asked herself bitterly. Good cheer and roses all the way?

  The Danton portrait compelled her eye. God, it gave her the shivers to look at that blunt and passionate face, risen from some inexplicable depths of her consciousness years before the damn dreams ever began.

  His regular evening coughing fit was past, but he was feeling faintly nauseous and could not sleep. His unpardonable behavior in the studio weighed on his mind. He was ashamed, and afraid of what his outburst might have done to their friendship.

  Much of her attraction for him now, he realized, was that she needed help. At first he had resented this — he was the one who was dying, after all — but now he was beginning to find vastly liberating the idea that he was here not so much to take as to give. He felt retrieved from the rubbish tip, infused with alertness that had nothing to do with his earlier frantic grasping after each moment in anticipation of the end of all moments. One had not yet become one’s own complaining, lingering ghost. One had the trust of a friend materially beneath one’s hands, there in her dream-pages, just as if one were still a companion in life, fit for consultation over the puzzles of living.

  Perhaps today he had thrown all that away. This unbearable thought circled in his mind.

  At some point he surfaced, listening in the quiet of the night and the uncomforting confines of his bed. He heard her in the kitchen moving softly about, the muted clink of a spoon on china; 4:15 am, read the illuminated clock on his bedside table.

  He got up, shrugged into his robe, and went to join her. She was standing at the stove stirring something in a small saucepan with a long-handled wooden spoon.

  “Dreams wake you?” he said awkwardly. Was he forgiven?

  “Yup. Wait till you read my notes.”

  “I’m sorry,” he began, “about my outburst —”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know. Want some hot milk? It always helps me to get back to sleep.”

  He was distressed to see the smudges under her eyes, the hollows in her cheeks. He accepted a cup of milk knowing he would not drink it and thinking how she had ankles lean as a whippet’s under the hem of her robe.

  “You know,” she said, “you mustn’t feel apologetic about this afternoon.”

  “Having cancer does not excuse one from basic, ordinary decency,” he said.

  “Having bad dreams doesn’t justify grabbing up all of somebody else’s time and energy, either. I feel guilty when I see you working so hard on my damn dreams.”

  “I work hard,” he said, “because I think the matter is urgent.”

  She looked down at the pot of milk. “I’m very grateful, Ricky. Have I said so? Grateful, and bowled over by what you’ve gotten out of that mass of scribbles. I couldn’t do a damn thing with any of it, and here you are wrestling it all into submission.”

  He was painfully conscious of the inadequacy of hi
s labors. After all, nothing he had done so far had alleviated the problem of the dreams in the slightest: they still came.

  She poured herself a mugful of the hot, spiced milk and padded over to join him at the table.

  “This may sound peculiar,” she said slowly, “but do you think the dreams might have something to do with you rather than with me?”

  His head was clearing of some of the hazier mists of his medication. Trying to get rid of the dream stuff, was she, the closer it got to herself? Trying to fob it off on him? He could well understand the impulse, but he was not going to make it easy for her. Frank never helped him slough off what was properly his own.

  “I don’t think I see how that could be,” he said cautiously.

  “Maybe my interest in the Revolutionary period, the interest I’ve had in it on and off since I was a kid, makes me receptive to something you’re carrying around from your own background, do you see?”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “Well, to begin with, maybe there’s a hidden connection with France and the French language through you. Is ‘Maulders’ a French name, for instance?”

  Interesting. Thinking, he rubbed his chin. “In its oldest form it’s probably German, that is, Saxon. It meant something like ‘big mouth,’ related to ‘maw,’ I shouldn’t wonder. Became a French name, normally used as a Christian name, ‘Mauger,’ which was brought over by the Normans in l066. That, at least, is what I recall from the reports of my sister Margaret, who once made a study of our family background. By the time we became ‘Maulders’ we were thoroughly English, and that was well before the l789 revolution.

  “And I did have an ancestor who was particularly interested in those events in France. He stayed closeted in London throughout the Revolution, writing an interminable tome on ancient Roman history. His book was intended to refute the Revolutionaries’ claims to have reconstituted the Roman Republic in France. You realize that in those days of nearly universal monarchism, any sort of Republican sentiment was considered violently radical by solid citizens. This kinsman of mine thought the French Republicans utterly depraved and mad, at the same time that he revered the ancient Romans whose state was the model for the French revolutionary republic. But he’s not our ghost. He was a good-for-nothing gentleman, not a judge, and he spoke no French, never went to France, would not have dreamed of contaminating rational analysis with subjective experience. And I’m afraid that’s the best I can come up with.”

  “But couldn’t we still be dealing with something that’s trying to communicate with you but approaching through me because it can’t reach you directly?”

  “Why bother?” he said. “Anything supernatural that wants to talk to me can do it face to face, or whatever one has in place of a face, if it will be patient for a bit. Unless there’s something it wants done, something only a — well, living person can do.”

  Dorothea sighed. “To hell with that kind of talk, Ricky. If we’re going to converse in the kitchen in the middle of the night, let’s talk about something else: art, for instance. It’s less mysterious. Most of the time, anyway. Claire wrote me, did I tell you? Along with the usual urging to lead the Amazon rebellion, she saw a Turner show in Seattle. Wonderful stuff, she says.”

  “I never cared for old Turner,” Ricky said, “till a few years ago. I’d shuffled past acres of sixth-rate rubbish at the Tate, was feeling very impatient, stepped into the first of the Turner rooms they’ve got there, and burst into tears. All that light.” He shook his head. “There. I’d never thought to tell anyone about that.”

  Don’t yawn and blink, dear friend; don’t amble off to sleep and leave me alone with the rest of the night.

  “Your secret is safe with me,” she said. “You know, once early in my marriage I was fooling around with my older son’s India ink and a couple of water color brushes from his paint box. He was going to be Picasso in those days. I was supposed to take his kid brother to the doctor for some shots that afternoon.

  “I never did, not that day. I made one image after another, used up a whole tablet of paper and most of a bottle of ink. I didn’t stop until Bill came and took his toys away from me, very indignantly.

  “I was glad of it. I looked around me and I thought, in absolute terror and confusion, ‘But if I do this, how can I have any sort of a normal life?’ I wasn’t thinking of the unwashed dishes, the missed appointment, that sort of stuff. It was the awful chill of coming out of that completely absorbed state back into the plain afternoon: home, kids, phone ringing, the whole schmeer. I thought if I had to make that transition very often, eventually I’d refuse to come back at all and I’d end up in the nuthouse — belong there, too.”

  That was how Ricky had always felt returning from his travels: the re-entry into the drearily familiar airport, the end of enchantment. But return he always did. She was still at the wall.

  Do you hear yourself? he thought urgently. Do you hear yourself telling me that you are bewitched by your own work, lost in it? That what you foresaw has in a fashion come about? Do you hear these dreams shouting to you that there are other matters demanding your attention?

  She sipped her milk and began to speak of Turner.

  She came back from taking the dogs for their summer shots. Mars, cheerful and unfazable as usual, went bounding off around the corner of the house on business of his own, but Brillo came inside to lie down and sleep off the effects of the vaccines.

  “Oh, you’re so sensitive,” she chided, smiling into his reproachful amber eyes.

  Ricky came in from the back patio while she was putting away the groceries she had picked up. He watched for a moment without speaking. Then he said, “You had a visitor.”

  “Not George?”

  “No.” Ricky sat down at the table and described a woman from the university in Albuquerque who had stopped by on a return trip there from Denver. She had wanted to discuss with Dorothea the possibility of a teaching position at the university, a studio class or a class in the history of women in art.

  “I told you, people think they have a perfect right to pester the life out of me, ever since that damn New York show,” she said irritably. “She should at least have phoned me first.”

  “Her name is Violet Harding. She said she made an appointment to speak to you this afternoon.”

  “Oh, Lord!” Dorothea checked the calendar by the telephone. “So she did. I completely forgot.”

  “Dorothea,” Ricky said quietly, “what’s going on here?”

  “I don’t know — early senility, you think?” She put away the English Breakfast Tea she’d bought for him.

  “No. I think faint-heartedness. You’re hiding. Why?”

  She turned to look at him, shocked. “Hiding? From what?”

  “From the part of the world that wants you, the people who can use what you have to offer. This woman and this job, among others.”

  “Haven’t you ever forgotten an appointment?” she said.

  His clear blue eyes were fixed steadily on her; inquisitor’s eyes. She resented that unwavering stare.

  “What is it?” he said. “Some kind of shell-shock? If it’s battle fatigue, the only war I know of that you’ve fought lately is your artist’s war with that wall. And you’ve won that. But you act as if you’ve lost. You act as if you’ve been routed, or worse yet, as if the damned wall has fallen on you and buried you out here with it.”

  Her dismay flashed hotly into anger, but she swallowed it. A dying man gets some extra latitude. “I don’t think you understand, Ricky. I have my work to do, and that’s how I want to spend my time. The wall isn’t finished.”

  With a suddenness that made her jump he slapped his palm down on the table top so that the salt shaker jittered. “Yes it is! You can’t stay here with it forever like some stone guardian of a temple lost in a jungle!”

  She tried to turn her rising anger to lightness. “Come on, Ricky, I’m not as petrified as all that. This is ridicu —”

  “It is n
ot. I am deadly serious, and so should you be.”

  Her anger rose on a wave of conviction that he was being unreasonable, he did not understand, he was abusing his situation to intrude suddenly in this overbearing manner on her life. What the hell did he know about art anyway?

  “Look, what is it you’d like to see me doing, would you mind telling me that?”

  “Kiss the wall goodbye, turn your back on it, and walk away into the rest of your life,” he said promptly.

  “Jesus,” she said, glaring. “What is this? I open my dreams to you and you take that as a mandate to run my whole life?”

  “Your dreams!” He stood, catching the back of his chair in time to prevent it from toppling over behind him. “I don’t know who the ghost in your dreams is, but I can tell you this, my girl: you need him! You need a shock, a jar, a revolution of your own to heave you clear of this — this enslavement to your own work!”

  Brillo came whining to her side and thrust his sharp wet nose into her palm. “It’s all right,” she said. “Go lie down.” All right, stop; stop now. “Ricky, I’m sorry. This is crazy. What are we fighting about?”

  “We’re not fighting. I am concerned, that’s all. I’m concerned, and I’m a sick man; I don’t need extra worries.”

  His querulous tone set her off. She could feel herself slip the moorings of control and conciliation, and God damn it, so be it.

  “Christ almighty,” she blazed, “who ever asked you to worry about me? I can worry about myself.”

  “Ah, but you don’t, you see. You don’t. You wander about hypnotized by the wall, in full flight from whatever living impulse it is that sends you these dreams of rebellion and raw feeling. You’re like a little old miser, hoarding yourself out here, saving your talent for a project that’s done.”

  “What?” she said. “What?” She was stuttering with rage.

  “You’re not lived out yet, you understand? You can’t construct yourself a paradise of beauty and then crawl into it and zip it up after you. Christ, look at me, learn from me, if you can’t find it in yourself. I’m spent to the last farthing, but that just leaves me the lighter for leaving.”