And she knew why. It was the fact of their obvious friendship that bothered her. She stopped to let them get far ahead of her on the stairs. While she waited she suddenly remembered an afternoon three winters before her mother’s death. Bonnie and Ben had gone to visit a gallery in Connecticut that was planning to mount a show of Bonnie’s work. By the time they got back to the Karr house snow and temperatures had been falling for hours and no amount of salt was going to render the pavement safe going. Iris remembered standing at the living room window, watching her mother and her boyfriend laughingly negotiate their way up the icy driveway, arm in arm.
Ben and her mother had been friends. That was a fact. Why, Iris wondered, continuing her climb, had she never, until now, until it was too late, considered how much Ben had lost when Bonnie died?
Yes, in the depths of her grief she had failed to understand the loss of others who had loved her mother—Ben, her father, her mother’s fellow artists, those who had continued to visit Bonnie and to love her until the bitter end.
When Iris finally reached the tenth floor, her knees were burning and her head was spinning. She walked shakily down the hall to her studio and unlocked the door. The moment she stepped inside a heavy pall of sadness descended upon her. She had a strong urge to crouch low to the wooden floor of her studio like the sculpture in the yard of the museum was crouched low to the frozen ground.
Only a supreme effort of will sent her back to work.
Chapter 13
“Make yourself at home,” Bess suggested. “I’ll get the wine.”
It was Saturday, the tenth of December, around three in the afternoon. Iris hung her coat on a trim, steel rack in Bess’s front hall and went into the living room. The infamous didgeridoo was propped against a wall. Three tall and wide bookcases were filled to capacity, with books stacked horizontally on top of those stacked vertically. More stacks of books climbed the sides of furniture. To sit in any chair required moving several volumes from the seat cushion and relocating them onto the floor.
Though the majority of Bess’s collection was old, the room was miraculously breathable. Dust had a habit of settling and old books had a habit of crumbling. The care and maintenance alone must be exhausting, let alone the cataloging of each volume. And Bess was serious about cataloging.
“My mother would have looked at this room and seen a kinetic sculpture of sorts, a work of art in perpetual progress,” Iris said, turning to accept a glass of wine from Bess.
“I often think of it that way as well,” Bess said. “I have no idea how this room will look next year, or even next month.”
“I do. More crowded.”
Bess laughed. “Well, yeah.”
Most of the apartment’s decor was utilitarian and ordinary. Marilyn’s presence was found mostly in the bedroom, where she had indulged her love of pillows. The bed was piled high with them, red and green at Christmas time, heart-shaped for Valentine’s Day, pastels and flowery patterns in summer. “I tried to draw the line at turkey-shaped pillows,” Bess had once told Iris, “but darn it if she didn’t sneak them in somehow.”
And, of course, the kitchen was also Marilyn’s domain. She had given Bess careful instructions about how to wash the cast-iron pots and the expensive, perfectly balanced knives, and had told her to never, ever throw out any liquid in any pot before checking with Marilyn to be sure it wasn’t a broth or a sauce in the making. For the resulting meals, Bess was willing to follow any and all instructions.
Bess settled in a chair across from Iris and looked at her closely. “What’s on your mind?” she asked.
“Actually,” Iris admitted, “I’m kind of surprised I said that about my mother before. I mean, about how she would have regarded this room.”
“Why are you surprised?”
“I don’t know. I don’t talk about her very much. You know that.”
Bess nodded. “Yes. I have noticed.”
“It’s not because she was a bad person, in any way,” Iris said, hurriedly.
“Of course not. She was just a sick person. Or, a better way to put it would be, she was a person who was often sick. And that certainly wasn’t her fault.”
No, Iris thought. It wasn’t her fault. “And your mother was?”
Bess laughed. “A harridan. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love her. I still do, I guess, odd as that might be, given the fact that she’s been dead for almost ten years.”
“The cord that can never be entirely cut. Speaking of which, have you talked with Jason and Michael lately?” Iris asked.
Bess uncrossed her legs and then crossed them the other way. “With Jason,” she said, “no. He’s bad about returning e-mails or phone calls. At least, he’s bad about returning my e-mails and phone calls. And you know I don’t text. I can’t participate in that sort of butchering of the language.”
“And Michael?” Iris asked.
“We talked the other night, in fact.” Bess smiled. “He’s been going head to head with his father again. You should have heard the fights those two had when Michael was in high school. Anyway, he thinks he might want to train to be a chef. I had no idea he was interested in food. To be honest, my culinary skills are not the best. I doubt the meals I cooked for him ever made much of an impression.”
“Maybe he wants to learn to cook well because his mother wasn’t a good cook,” Iris suggested. “Maybe it’s a reaction against you in some way. Maybe he’s trying to comfort himself with food in a way you never could. Maybe—”
“ ‘The terrible but inevitable sorrow that every woman must acknowledge as her right . . .’ ”
“Who?”
“Throckmorton again.”
“I should have known. And how does that relate to what I was saying?” Iris asked with a smile.
“I looked up your mother’s work online, you know,” Bess countered. “I see it’s still in one of the best galleries in Boston.”
Iris took a big sip of her wine. “Nice change of subject,” she said then.
“Not really. We’re still talking about mothers and their children. You never told me the Kleinman Museum in Los Angeles owns a piece of Bonnie Karr’s work.”
“Didn’t I? Oh.”
It was strange, Iris thought. Just the other day, when they were sitting in Arabica with coffee and scones, she had so wanted to talk to Bess about her mother, and now that the topic had been introduced, all she felt was skittish, uncomfortable, and ready to bolt.
“You know, Iris, you can’t deny your mother’s existence by ignoring it.”
Iris felt her eyes widen. “Oh, my God, that’s not at all what I’m doing!”
“All right. Then what is it you’re doing?”
Iris hesitated. It was a good question. “Nothing,” she said lamely. “I’m just living my life.”
“Iris, please.”
The silence that followed wasn’t entirely awkward. Iris felt a bit lulled by the wine and what she had always felt to be the strong and comforting presence of old books. And then, there was Bess.
“I said an awful thing to her once,” Iris blurted. “My mother. I was only a kid, but still.”
“What did you say?”
“I think I was about nine or ten, definitely still in grammar school. She was too sick to come to some mother-daughter thing at my school. I’d been so looking forward to it. Anyway, I told her that I hated her. I told her that I wished she was a normal mother.”
Bess sighed, as if feeling the blow herself. “Did you apologize?” she asked after a moment.
“Of course. I felt terrible the moment the words were out of my mouth. I couldn’t stop crying for hours.”
“Did your mother tell you that she forgave you?”
“Yes. She did. But I’m not so sure she wasn’t lying to get me to stop crying. How could she really forgive something so cruel?”
“Iris, I know that she forgave you.”
“How can you know that?” Iris demanded, her voice rising.
�
��Because I’m a mother, twice over,” Bess said. “We have an enormous capacity for forgiving our children. Sometimes that’s a liability. Sometimes it’s a blessing.”
Iris took another sip of her wine and thought she would probably never know the truth of what Bess had told her. She and Ben had talked about having children once they were married. But now . . . No. There would be no further heirs to Bonnie Karr’s legacy.
A key being inserted into the lock on the front door alerted them to Marilyn’s impending presence. A moment later Marilyn came into the front hall, tossed her keys onto the occasional table there, and dropped her coat on the floor.
At six foot tall with curly red hair and piercing blue eyes, Marilyn had a commanding presence. Iris had seen her at the restaurant with her staff. She spoke with a grace and cordiality just short of condescension that made it very clear that she was the queen of her kingdom and would tolerate no rebellion. Her personality when at home with friends was still strong but without a trace of dominance.
“Something the matter?” Bess asked.
“It’s a good thing I have the patience of a saint,” Marilyn said, “because otherwise I’d be behind bars right now for attempted murder.”
Bess arched a brow. “Not full blown murder? I’ve never known you to do things by half.”
“Well, murder, then. I had to let go another waiter today. Completely incompetent, even after a month under wing.”
“I thought it was easy to find people to wait tables,” Iris said. “College kids, actors, people who like their days off.”
“Oh, it’s easy enough to find them. It’s the training and keeping of them that’s a challenge.”
“Well, have a drink with us,” Bess suggested. “We’ve been talking about our mothers.”
Iris got up, her foot accidentally knocking askew a small stack of old novels. “I should get going, actually,” she said, bending to straighten the stack.
“If I were going to talk about my mother,” Marilyn said, “especially with the day I’ve had so far, I would need a lot more than a drink, let me tell you. Anyway, I’ve got to get back to the restaurant. I just came home to change my shoes. These new clogs are killing me.”
Marilyn went off to the bedroom and Iris began the process of bundling up against the weather. When Marilyn returned a moment later she said, “I’ll walk out with you.” Bess hugged them both good-bye and they trudged down to the first floor and out onto the sidewalk. Even though snowfall had been minimal in the past weeks, somehow the old red bricks remained treacherously slippery, the bane of every pedestrian in the city. Sometimes quaintness was a serious liability. The fiber artist who had her studio five floors below Iris’s had cracked three ribs just last winter, falling on one of the cobbled streets in the Old Port.
“She worries about you, you know.”
“Who, Bess?” Iris said, pulling her scarf more tightly around her neck.
“She worries that you’re unhappy deep down.”
Iris attempted a laugh. “But I’m just fine.”
Marilyn shrugged. “You should come by the restaurant more often.”
“Maybe,” Iris said, remembering her halfhearted intentions of the day before.
“I’ll see you around, Iris.”
Iris watched for a moment as Marilyn carefully made her way up the block toward the restaurant. And then, she turned toward her own home, the knowledge of Bess’s worry concerning her.
Chapter 14
“Are you warm enough?” Ben asked. “I could turn up the heat.”
Iris shook her head. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
It was Sunday, December eleventh, and Iris and Ben were on their way back to Portland from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. If that morning anyone had told Iris she would be spending the afternoon alone with Ben she would have rejected the idea as absurd. Or, she would have unplugged her computer, turned off her phone, closed the blinds, and ignored the doorbell.
What had happened was this. Iris had emerged from the women’s clothing section at Renys that morning to come face-to-face with Ben in the crammed central aisle.
“Oh, hey,” he had said brightly. “This place is amazing. I mean, look. I just got a jar of olives, a pair of winter boots, and a bath mat. All under the same roof.”
Iris smiled. “There are some of us people from away who can’t seem to get over the thrill that is Renys. Now, you’re one of them.”
“What are you here for?”
“I have no idea,” Iris admitted. “I like to browse and see what catches my eye.”
Ben nodded toward the display just to his left. “Like a dish towel with a picture of a moose on it?”
Iris laughed. “I think I’m all set with moose-related accessories, thanks.”
There had been a moment of silence as Iris decided how to slip away politely.
“Look,” Ben said then, with the air of someone who had come to a difficult decision, “I want to see the new show at the Bailey Gallery in Portsmouth. I was planning on driving down today. Why not come with me? You mentioned at dinner the other night that you don’t have a car at the moment and frankly, I could use the company.”
Iris’s immediate instinct was to refuse. “Why not ask one of your colleagues at the museum?” she replied.
“I could,” Ben said. “But I’d have to be on my best behavior. With you . . .”
Iris couldn’t help but grin. “With me you can call idiot drivers creatively nasty names.”
Ben laughed. “Exactly.”
For another moment Iris hesitated. There was work to be done at the studio. And what if Ben took the opportunity of a long car ride to delve into their past? She didn’t think she could handle that conversation while trapped in a moving vehicle. Would she lie? Would she tell the truth? Would she create some mix of falsehood and reality to explain away why she had abandoned him?
“Iris?”
“Okay,” she blurted, stunned by her answer.
“Great. Well, how about we head out now?”
Iris nodded.
On the drive down to Portsmouth there was not much talk and most of it was small. Iris was still wondering what perverse impulse had led her to put herself in the path of the potential predator. Well, maybe that was being a bit dramatic....
“So, the old girl is still driving well,” she said after a while.
Ben fondly patted the steering wheel. “I don’t want to think about having to replace her.”
“But everything comes to an end.” The moment the words left her mouth Iris cringed. What an idiotic thing to say, she scolded silently, especially to Ben!
Ben didn’t respond. Iris tried to read his expression in profile, but could see nothing more than his concentration on the road.
They got to Portsmouth without further incident. As they passed through the doors of the Bailey Gallery on Hanover Street, Iris told herself that it was perfectly natural for her to be there with Ben. They were simply two colleagues seeking information and experience. There need not be anything personal about it.
On three of the room’s four walls were hung two large canvases. On each canvas the artist had drawn (in what Iris thought was child’s crayon) a depiction of a house (at least, Iris thought they were houses) with a maximum of five crooked lines. Each house was drawn in a different color. At the bottom right of each canvas was a dark, scrawled signature that Iris defied anyone but a handwriting expert to decipher.
Iris and Ben each made a slow circuit of the room, and then another, before meeting in the middle of the space to share their thoughts. Ben cleared his throat. Iris coughed a bit.
“It’s . . . interesting,” Iris said finally.
Ben clasped his hands behind his back. “Yes,” he said. “You could say that.”
“The artist’s choice to . . .”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if he . . .”
“Me, too.”
Iris glanced around to see if the gallery owner or an employee was in sight.
No one was. “Oh, my God,” she whispered then, “they’re awful, aren’t they?”
“They’re beyond awful,” Ben whispered back. “What was Bailey thinking, mounting this show? His taste is usually pretty good.”
“Come on, let’s get out of here before—”
The voices of two men broke into the space as the gallery owner emerged from the back office with a companion.
“We’re in for it,” Ben breathed, turning his back on them. “That’s the artist. His picture was in the paper the other day.”
Iris glanced at the insanely skinny man in the preposterous feathered hat and paisley cape and stifled a desperate laugh. “If he comes over here, what are we going to say? I don’t think I can lie well enough to—”
Ben turned around again just as the gallery owner was sticking out his hand. “Ben,” he boomed, “good to see you. I hear you’re at the PMA now!”
Ben shook Michael Bailey’s hand. “Yes. Yes I am.”
“Good, good! Well, this is a bit of luck. May I present Melchior von Offenberg du Loire, the creator of the masterpieces you see around you!”
The second man bowed with a flourish of his emaciated hand.
“Nice to meet you,” Ben said. “And this is Iris—”
“So, what do you think of my show?” the man interrupted, turning to block Iris from his line of sight. His voice was affectedly low and booming and seemed bizarre coming from his reedlike physique.
Ben scrunched up his face in an exaggerated expression of contemplation. Iris prayed she could control the laughter threatening to burst from her.
The artist stared boldly up at Ben, as if daring him to criticize. “Well?” he demanded.
Ben’s face relaxed. He sighed and put his hand over his heart. “My good man,” he said with great solemnity, “I stand in the presence of greatness.”
Mr. von Offenberg du Loire smiled smugly and wandered off to contemplate his genius.
Ben made an excuse to Mr. Bailey and somehow he and Iris got out of the gallery without giving themselves away.
A Winter Wonderland Page 14