The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  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

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  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

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  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."

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  "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

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  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.

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  1878

  Ma chère:

  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 fai
l 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.

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  CHAPTER 45 Mary

  There are some things about my time with Robert Oliver that I have never been able to set straight even for myself, and that I would still like to set straight if such an act is possible. Robert said during one of our final arguments that our relationship had been twisted from the beginning because I had taken him away from another woman. This was terribly, patently untrue, but it was certainly true that he was already married when I fell in love with him the first time, and still married when I fell in love with him the second.

  This morning I told my sister, Martha, that a doctor had asked me to tell him everything I could think of about Robert, and she said, "Well, Mary, here's your chance to talk about him for twenty-five hours without annoying anybody." I said, "You of all people won't have to read it." I don't blame her for this caustic, loving remark--at the worst point, her shoulder caught most of my tears over Robert Oliver. She's an excellent sister, a long-suffering one. Maybe Robert would have done me more harm than he did if she hadn't helped me get away from him. On the other hand, if I'd followed her advice, I might not have experienced a lot of things that I can't quite bring myself to regret now. Although my sister is a practical woman, she occasionally regrets things; I usually don't. Robert Oliver almost qualifies as an exception.

  I'd like to be thorough about this story, so I'll begin with myself. I was born in Philadelphia, and so was Martha. Our parents

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  divorced when I was five and Martha was four, and my father was a receding figure after that: in fact, he left our neighborhood in Chestnut Hill and receded into Center City, into his suits and his handsome, bare apartment, where we visited once every week, then once every two weeks, and mostly watched cartoons while he read stacks of paper he called "briefs." He called his underwear by this name, too, and once I found a pair of his briefs tangled under his bed with another pair of underwear. The other pair was made of beige lace. We weren't sure what to do with either pair, and it didn't seem right to leave them there, so when Daddy went to the corner for the Sunday Inquirer and our bagels, which usually took him three or four hours, we carried the two pairs of underwear into the back garden of his brownstone apartment building in a soup pot and buried them together between the wrought-iron railing and an ivy-covered tree trunk.

  When I was nine, Daddy left Philadelphia for San Francisco, where we visited him once a year. San Francisco was more fun; Daddy's apartment there sat high above a fog-blanketed ocean, and we could feed seagulls right on the balcony. Muzzy, our mother, sent us there on the plane alone as soon as she thought we were old enough. Then our San Francisco visits faded to once every two years, or every three years, then now and then when we felt like it and Muzzy was willing to pay, and finally Daddy faded away into a job in Tokyo and sent us a photo of himself with his arm around a Japanese woman.

  I think Muzzy was pleased when Daddy disappeared to San Francisco. It left her completely free to attend to Martha and me, and she did this with so much vigor and energy that neither of us has ever wanted children. Martha says she knows she would feel obliged to do everything our mother did for us and more, and it would bore her, but I think we both secretly know we couldn't measure up. Using her parents' excellent old Quaker bank account-- we were never sure whether it was filled with oil, oats, railroad stock, or actual money--Muzzy put us through twelve years of a

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  fine Friends' school, a place where soft-voiced teachers with perfectly cut gray hair got down on their knees to see if you were all right when someone hit you with a block. We studied the writings of George Fox and attended meeting and planted sunflowers in a bad neighborhood in North Philly.

  My first experience of love occurred while I was in middle school among the Friends. One of the school's buildings was a house that had been a stop on the Underground Railroad; there was a trapdoor blended with the floor of an old cupboard in the attic. That building held the seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms, and when I moved up to those years, I liked to stay inside for a few minutes after everyone left for lunch recess, to listen for the spirits of men and women escaping to freedom. In February 1980 (I was thirteen), Edward Roan-Tillinger stayed in at lunchtime, too, and kissed me in the seventh-grade reading niche. I had been hoping for this for a couple of years, and as a first kiss it was not bad, although the edge of his tongue felt like a tough cut of meat, and I could see George Fox staring down at us from his portrait at the other end of the room. By the next week, Edward had turned his attention to Paige Hennessy, who had smooth red hair and lived out in the country. It took me a few weeks, not more, to stop hating her.

  It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men--first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over whenever they occurred. (Our teachers deplored this and added extra units about social history and protest movements, but that was still the message of the books.) I don't know why women so often tell stories that way, but I guess I've just started to do the same thing myself, maybe because you've asked me both to tell who I am and to describe my contact with Robert Oliver.

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  My high-school years, to continue being thorough, were certainly not only about boys; they were also about Emily Bronte and about the Civil War, about botany in the sloping Philadelphia parks, about tombstone rubbings, Paradise Lost, knitting, ice cream, and my wild friend Jenny (whom I drove to the abortion clinic before I took even my shirt off in front of a boy). In those years I learned to fence -- I loved the white clothes and the spongy, damp smell of our undersized Quaker gymnasium, and the moment when the tip of the foil whipped your opponent's vest--and I learned to carry a bedpan without spilling it, in my volunteer job at Chestnut Hill Hospital, and to pour tea for Muzzy's endless charity meetings and to smile, so that her charitable friends said, "What a lovely girl you have, Dorothy. Now, was your own mother blond, too?" Which was what I wanted to hear. I learned to brush on eye shadow and put in a tampon so I couldn't feel it there (from a friend; Muzzy would never have discussed such a thing), and to hit the ball squarely with my field-hockey stick, and to make colored popcorn balls, and to speak French and Spanish not at all like a native, and to feel privately sorry for another girl as I gave her the cold shoulder, if that was necessary, and to reupholster little chairs in needlepoint. At the margins of all this, I first found out about the feel of paint under my brush, but I'll save that for a little later.

  I thought I learned many of these things on my own, or from my teachers, but I understand now that they were always part of Muzzy's comprehensive plan. Just as she scrubbed between our toes and fingers every night in the bathtub when we were toddlers, getting the tender webbed places with a firmly wash-clothed finger, she also made sure her girls knew to tighten their bra straps before each wearing, to hand wash silk blouses in cold water only, to order salad when we ate out. (To be fair, she also wanted us to know the names and centuries of the most important English kings and queens and the geography of Pennsylvania and the way the stock market worked.) She went to our parent-teacher

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  conferences with a little notebook in her hand, she took us shopping for a new party dress every Christmas, she mended our jeans herself but had our hair cut at a special salon in Center City.

  Today, Martha is glamorous and I am passa
ble, although I went through a long stage of wearing only dilapidated old clothes. Muzzy has had a tracheostomy, but when we go to see her--she still lives at home, with a maid on the second floor and a kindergarten teacher renting the top-floor apartment--she gasps, "Oh, you girls have turned out beautifully. I'm so grateful for that." Martha and I know that her gratitude is mainly to herself, but even so we feel larger-than-life in the little antique-filled living room, we feel large and graceful and accomplished, undefeatable, like Amazons.

  But what was all this dressing, polishing, finishing, strap-adjusting for? Which brings me back to men. Muzzy did not discuss men or sex, we had no father at home to threaten our boyfriends or even ask about them, and Muzzy's attempts to protect us from boys were too polite to amount to much. "Boys will want something from you if they pay for a whole date," she would say.

  "Muzzy"--Martha would begin her customary eye-rolling-- "this is the nineteen eighties. It is not nineteen fifty-five anymore. Hello."

  "Hello, yourself. I know what year it is," Muzzy would say mildly, and go to the phone to order pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving dinner, or call her sick aunt in Bryn Mawr, or stroll down to the lamp place to see if they also repaired antique candlesticks. She always said that she would gladly have gone out to get a job, but that as long as she could pay for our education herself ("herself" meant the oil or oats in the bank), she felt she was most useful being home for us.

  For my part, I thought she stayed home mainly to keep track of us, too; but since she never asked about boys, we didn't tell her much, unless the boy was a prom date, in which case he came into