Kathy had been angry when Izzy finally showed up at the apartment at four o’clock in the morning.
“You should have called me or Alan,” she’d told Izzy. “God, you could have been raped or killed.
Anybody could have picked you up.”
“I couldn’t stay,” Izzy explained, “and I was damned if I’d accept a ride from either of them.”
“But—”
“There’s no phone out by the highway,” Izzy had said. “And I didn’t think of calling before I left the farmhouse.”
Kathy looked as though she was going to say something more, but she must have realized how miserable Izzy was feeling because all she did was say, “Well, thank god you’re okay,” and give her a hug.
Her mother had called her the next day to try to apologize for her father, but this time Izzy wouldn’t accept any excuses for him. If he loved her, he had yet to show it and she was tired of waiting. All she’d said that day to her mother was “How can you live with him?”
She’d kept in contact with her mother, but they never spoke of her father again until the day he died.
Izzy went out to the island to stay with her mother and she attended the funeral for her mother’s sake, but she still felt nothing—not at the funeral home, not in the church, not as she watched the coffin being lowered into the grave. It was only later that night, after she and her mother returned to the island, that she felt anything. With her father three days dead, she lay in her old bedroom in the farmhouse and stared up at the familiar cracks in the ceiling. And then the tears came.
But they weren’t for the father who had just died. They were for the father she’d never had.
XXII
April 1979
“It’s not like it’d be forever,” Izzy said.
Izzy and Kathy sat on the front stoop of their apartment building, enjoying the mild spring evening.
From where they sat they could watch the traffic pass on Lee Street. Their own street was quiet tonight.
Over the years since they’d first moved to their Waterhouse Street apartment, the area had undergone a slow but steady change. The boutique and cafes were outnumbered now by convenience stores and pizza parlors, the bohemian residents by young couples and single working men and women on the rise, looking for an investment rather than a home.
“One day,” Alan had told them morosely, “all that’ll be left is ghosts and memories of us.”
And Alan, Kathy had told Izzy later, because she doubted that he’d ever move away. But the others did, and now Izzy had been put in the position to consider doing the same.
Her mother had decided to move to Florida to live with her sister. She wanted to put the island in Izzy’s name, but only if Izzy lived there. She didn’t want Izzy to sell it and then have strangers living there—at least not in her own lifetime. “Once I’m dead, you can do what you want with it,” she’d said when she called up to discuss it with Izzy. But Izzy had told her that she could never sell the island. She might have bad memories of her father, but the island itself retained its magic for her. She thought it always would.
“It’ll just be for a while,” Izzy went on to tell Kathy. “To see how it goes.”
“I know,” Kathy said. “You don’t have to explain. It makes perfect sense.”
“I love that land and it’d really be a great place to work.”
Kathy nodded. “And safe, too—for your numena.”
“Not that I’d ever know,” Izzy said.
She knew many of her numena had taken up residence on the island, but they didn’t communicate with her any more than the ones in the city did. She understood why. She’d let them down. She’d let them die. But that didn’t make the pain any easier to bear.
“I meant for both of us,” she went on. “The farmhouse is huge, Kathy. I’d be rattling around in it on my own.”
After having shared living space with Kathy for so many years, the idea of living without her seemed unimaginable. Izzy had any number of friends, and she knew she’d miss seeing them on a regular basis, but she wasn’t all that sure she could live without Kathy. They were more than best friends. Sometimes it seemed to her that they were two halves of some magical alliance that would be greatly diminished if they ever went their separate ways.
“I can’t live that far away from the city,” Kathy said. “It’s not just because of my writing, either. I know I get my inspiration from being here, but I suppose I could write anywhere.”
“It’s the Foundation.”
“Exactly. There’s still so much to do and I feel I have to stay involved until I can be sure it’ll run on its own.”
“I’m going to miss you terribly,” Izzy said.
Then why are you going? she asked herself. Wren Island held the best memories of her childhood, but also the worst. There was no question but that the years she’d lived in Newford far outweighed them.
Still, she felt as though she were in the grip of some old-fashioned covenant, like a knight under the spell of a geas in one of the Arthurian romances Kathy liked to read. She was called back to the island, not by her mother, but to fulfill some older, more binding contract that she couldn’t even remember having made. The only thing that could keep her from going was if Kathy asked her to stay.
But all Kathy said was “I’ll miss you, too, ma belle Izzy.”
XXIII
Wren Island, June 1979
Names, Izzy had realized a long time ago, before she even moved from the island to attend Butler U., had potency. They pulled their owners in their wakes, the way that dreams can, the way you can wake up from sleep and believe that what you dreamed actually occurred. And even later, even when you realized the mistake, it was difficult to readjust your thinking. You knew your boyfriend didn’t cheat on you, but you looked at him with suspicion all the same. You understood that you hadn’t really done the painting, but you found yourself looking for it all the same.
But if dreams were potent, names were more so, especially the ones people chose for themselves.
They might grow into the ones that were given to them, through the familiarity of use, if nothing else, but the ones they chose defined who they were like an immediate descriptive shorthand.
When she first moved to Newford from Wren Island seven years ago, she had put Isabelle behind.
Isabelle of the quiet moods and even temperament. Who avoided confrontations and was more comfortable with her sketchbook in the forest than with people. Who had inherited her father’s stubborn streak but never acquired the meanness it had manifested in him. Who didn’t argue, but merely agreed and went ahead and did what she felt she had to do anyway, dealing with the repercussions only if she had to.
Kathy was the first to call her Izzy, making a play on Isabelle with her ma belle Izzy, but she herself was the one who took to the name and wore it into her new life. Izzy wasn’t simply a role she played, a coat she put on to protect her from inclement weather that was easily discarded once more. All those years in Newford she was Izzy. Being Izzy let her fit in with the art crowd at university, her Waterhouse Street cohorts, the bohemian scene in Lower Crowsea. Being Izzy had opened all the doors that shy Isabelle wouldn’t even have paused at before. She only signed Isabelle’s name to her paintings because of Rushkin, because it had been easier to do so than argue with him about what he perceived as the inappropriateness of going by a nickname in the world of fine art.
But Izzy hadn’t been all strength and chutzpah. Names were potent, but changing your name couldn’t entirely discard the baggage you had to carry along from the past to where you were now. Izzy still had her insecurities. Izzy was still capable of being browbeaten by the Rushkins of the world, abandoned by the Johns, mugged by a gang of street punks who didn’t know what her name was and certainly didn’t care. Izzy still preferred to avoid confrontations and to hide her pains deep in the shadowy recesses of her mind, where they wouldn’t be easily stumbled upon.
Names were potent, Izzy under
stood, but in the end they were still only labels, easy tags that could never hope to entirely encompass the complex individuals they were supposed to describe. All they could ever do was reflect some aspect of the face you wanted to turn to the world, not define it. But they helped—in the same way that labels made it easier to choose between one thing and another. Coffee or tea? Smoking or nonsmoking section? Expressionism or Impressionism?
Returning to the island, she realized that Izzy had been left behind by the roadside, somewhere in between Newford and the turnoff to the island, and she was ready to embrace Isabelle once more. Was ready to define herself as Isabelle—at least insofar as she needed a label for herself. The differences between the younger Isabelle and who she was now were few. She was twenty-four now, not seventeen.
She was a moderately successful artist. Her father was dead. She was on the island by choice, not because she had to be.
She spent her first few weeks on the island feeling very much at loose ends. Organizing her living space swallowed some time. She set up a studio in the back bedroom and made a storage space for her numena paintings in the attic. It took her a little while to get used to sleeping in her parents’ bedroom, but once she’d repainted and moved her own furniture in, it seemed more her own. Her old bedroom she converted into the guest room—although privately she already thought of it as Kathy’s room.
Her mother had auctioned off all the farm animals and equipment, including the barge that had been used to transport livestock and crops to the mainland, but left her the old rowboat. A hired boat from one of the marinas down the coast had been all she’d needed to transport her belongings to the island, and the rowboat was enough to get her back and forth from the mainland, where she parked the used VW that she’d bought from Alan.
She found she missed the sound of the city at first—the traffic, the sirens, the constant hubbub of noise that she’d entirely tuned out after a while. But the quiet nights and open skies of the country had been bred into her at an early age and she was soon seduced by them all over again. Initially, it had been hard to work because it was so quiet; within three weeks the difficulty in getting started was because she tended to have her morning coffee out on the porch and then found herself puttering in the garden or going for a long ramble out along the shore or in the forest and the next thing she’d know, the whole morning and half the afternoon was gone.
Still, she was painting, at first more in the evenings than during the day, and was surprised to realize that, by the fall, she’d have enough pieces to hang for a new show without having to give up working on her new series of numena.
The numena. She could feel their presence on the island, but they still re-fused contact with her. All of them—even Rosalind and Cosette. Even Annie Nin, who’d been the one that had really convinced her that she should sell the numena paintings in her show. But if they kept their distance from her, they still went into her studio. Many times she came into it to find that things had been rifled through, and small items were missing. Some pencils and paper, a paint-brush, a tube of paint. Cosette, she’d think, and then feel sad all over again.
But she even grew used to that and where at first she’d looked forward to her trips into the city, by the time June was rolling up on July, it was all she could do to get into her car and make the drive in. She missed Kathy, though, and it was because of her that she nude sure that she went to town at least once every couple of weeks.
XXIV
Newford, September 1979
Isabelle was completely disoriented the first time she visited Kathy in her new apartment on Gracie Street. All the familiar furnishings were there, but they were all in the wrong place. The old floor lamp with its marble stand that they’d picked up at a flea market still provided illumination for Kathy’s favorite reading chair, but both of them stood in an unfamiliar corner by a bay window they’d never had on Waterhouse Street, overlooking a view that belonged to a stranger. Kathy’s collection of antique photos was in the hall, along with some of Isabelle’s own sketches that Kathy’d had framed, but they were all in a different order. Isabelle knew the bookcases, the carpets, the sofa, the drapes, the various knick-knacks, but their new configurations kept surprising her, no matter how often she came to visit.
She’d tried to explain it to Kathy once, but her friend had only laughed. “You’re far too set in your ways,” she told Isabelle. “In fact, I almost had a heart attack myself the first time you came back from the island wearing that red-checked flannel shirt of yours. I don’t think I’d ever seen you wear anything but black before that.”
By the time the summer ended, Isabelle was only coming into town when she had to.
“I guess the real news is that I’ve fmally finished my second collection,” Kathy said when Isabelle dropped by the Gracie Street apartment on her latest trip into town. “Alan’s going to publish it in the spring.”
“What’s it called?” Isabelle asked.
Though they still talked on the phone at least once a week, Isabelle was feeling more and more out of touch lately. Her afternoons were spent far from her phone, wandering the island, reacquainting herself with all the haunts of her past; mornings and evenings found her in the studio, working, more often than not ignoring the phone when it did ring. She had yet to buy an answering machine, so when she did speak on the phone it was usually when she made the call.
“I’m calling it Flesh of the Stone,” Kathy said, “after that story that appeared in Redbook last year.”
“Will it have that story about the whistling man in it?”
Kathy smiled. “That and everything I’ve written since Angels, including two new stories that even you haven’t seen yet.”
“Do I have to wait?”
Kathy reached over with her foot and used her big toe to tap a fat manila envelope lying on the coffee table. “I’ve got copies for you to take home right here.”
“With all your work at the Foundation, I’m surprised you found the time.”
“Well, you know what you always told me,” Kathy said, “you have to make the time.”
“Too true.”
“So Alan wanted me to ask you if we could use one of the paintings that’s hanging at the Foundation for the cover of the East Street Press edition. He wants to use La Liseuse. The paperback sale hasn’t gone through yet, and he can’t guarantee anything, but he’ll try to get them to use the cover for it as well.”
Isabelle looked uncomfortable.
“What’s the matter?” Kathy asked. “I thought you’d love the idea.”
“I do—sort of. But it makes me worried.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Those are numena paintings,” Isabelle explained. “I can’t help but be afraid of putting them in the public eye like that.”
“I’m not about to sell them to Rushkin,” Kathy said. “Give me that much credit.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. But Rushkin doesn’t even know they exist. I’m afraid if he did, he’d find a way to get at them.”
“But—”
“One of the things I hate about being away from the island is that I’m always afraid he’s going to sneak into the farmhouse while I’m gone and steal the ones I have there.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Kathy said. “Except for Paddyjack hanging in the kitchen, you’d have to be very determined to find the rest of them.”
There were storage spaces behind the eaves in the attic, between the drywall and the outer walls, and Isabelle had hidden the numena paintings in them, enfolding them in protective wrappings and then covering them over with old insulation and boards. Kathy was the only person Isabelle had ever shown them to.
“I know. But still ...”
“Actually,” Kathy said, “I don’t think you have to worry so much about Rushkin anymore. Didn’t you hear? According to Nora, he’s got himself a new protege.”
“Anybody we know?”
Kathy shook her head. “Her name’s
Barbara Nichols and apparently she’s just a young thing—still in art school.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“You seem pretty blase about it.”
Isabelle laughed. “Why do you say that? Did you think I’d be jealous?”
“No. but I was thinking that maybe she should be warned—you know. About Rushkin and the numena and what he does to them.”
“I don’t think so,” Isabelle said. “If he hasn’t already told her about them, she’d think I was nuts—or at least jealous. And if he has taught her how to bring them over, nothing anyone might have to say would stop her from continuing to paint them. Trust me on this. I know.”
Or at least she hoped she did. She hoped she was saying this for the reasons she was giving to Kathy and not for a more selfish reason. But she had to admit the thought had crossed her mind that if Rushkin had found another artist to provide him with the numena he needed, then it would mean that her own would be safe.
“Have you seen her work yet?” she added.
“No,” Kathy said, “but Jilly has. She says it’s stunning.”
The poor girl, Isabelle thought.
“So anyway,” Kathy went on. “Don’t you think that puts the threat of Rushkin out of the picture?”
Isabelle hated to disappoint Kathy, but she had to shake her head. Unless she could be absolutely sure, she couldn’t take the risk.
“I know you must think I’m paranoid,” she began, but Kathy dismissed her explanation with a wave of her hand.
“Don’t even worry about trying to explain,” she said. “I understand. But you have to promise me one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“That one day you’ll illustrate one of my books.”
“I ...” Isabelle hesitated.
“Oh, come on. One day Rushkin will be dead and gone and you’ll be able to do it with a complete peace of mind.”
Memory and Dream n-5 Page 44