Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  McAlister was painting his wife. Or rather, he was painting her windblown sleeve. She stood patiently against the backdrop of climbing red roses, all of which, Harry noticed, were the exact shade of her mouth. He tried not to think of that. Thinking of her mouth made him think of the monstrous creation in his cupboard. In the sweet light of day, there in the country, he was willing to attribute his Gorgon to the morbid churning of his frustrated romantic urges. But she had inspired him, no doubt about that. Here he was in McAlister’s garden, looking at every passing female, even the young girl from the kitchen who kept the teapot filled for his Medusa.

  McAlister was unusually reticent about his own subject matter. Whatever figure from myth or romance he was portraying, he needed her windblown. He had captured the graceful curves of his wife’s wristbone, her long, pliant fingers. The flow of her silky sleeve in the contrary wind proved challenging, but he persevered, carrying on three discussions at once with his onlookers as he painted. Aurora, her brooding eyes fixed on some distant horizon, scarcely seemed to breathe; she might have been a piece of garden statuary.

  Harry drifted, trying not to watch.

  He sat down finally next to John Grainger’s mistress, Nan Stewart. She had modeled many times for John’s drawings and paintings, as well as for other artists who needed her frail, ethereal beauty for their visions. Grainger had discovered her sitting in the cheaper seats of a theater one evening. A well-brought-up young girl despite her class, she refused to speak to an artist. Undaunted, he found out who she was and implored her mother’s permission to let her model for him. Her mother, a fussy lump of a bed mattress, as Grainger described her, accompanied Nan a few times, until she realized that the girl could make as much in an hour modeling for artists as she could sewing for a week in a dressmaker’s shop. Eventually Nan came to live with the brilliant, volatile Grainger, which explained, Harry thought, her pallor and her melancholy eyes.

  She had fine red-gold hair and arresting green eyes. With marriage in view at one point in their relationship, Grainger had hired someone to teach her to move and speak properly. She smiled at Harry dutifully as he filled the empty chair beside her.

  “More tea?” he asked.

  A vigorous, incoherent shouting from the knoll beyond made them both glance up. Grainger, hands on his easel, seemed to be wrestling with the wind.

  Nan shook her head. She had a bound sketchbook on her lap, as well as a pencil or two. Grainger encouraged her to draw. She had talent, he declared to the world, and he was right, from what Harry had seen. But that day her sketchbook was shut.

  “Not inspired?” he ventured.

  “Not today.” She turned her attention from the painter on the knoll finally. “How are you, Harry?”

  “Flourishing.”

  “Are you painting?”

  “I have a subject in mind. I’m prowling about for a face.”

  “What subject?”

  “It’s a secret,” he said lightly. “I’m not sure I can pull it off. I don’t want to embarrass myself among you artists.”

  Her smile touched her eyes finally. “You’re a sweet man, Harry. I’m still such a novice myself.”

  “John praises your work to the skies. He thinks very highly—”

  “I know.” Her face was suddenly angled away. “I know. I only wish he still thought so highly of me.”

  “He does!” Harry said, shocked. “He’s loved you for years. You live together, you work together, you are twin souls—”

  “Yes.” She looked at him again, her expression a polite mask. “Yes.”

  He was silent, wondering what was troubling her. His eyes strayed to the group beside the rose vines. Children ran out of the cottage door; he recognized Andrew Peel’s gray-eyed little beauty, and her baby brother trundling unsteadily after. Nan sighed absently, her eyes on the children. Harry’s own eyes strayed. Across the garden, the statue came to life; the dark, unfathomable eyes seemed to gaze straight at him.

  He started, his cup clattering, feeling that regard like a bolt from the blue, striking silently, deeply. He became aware of Nan’s eyes on him, too, in wide, unblinking scrutiny. Then she set her cup down on a table; it, too, rattled sharply in its saucer.

  “She’s pregnant, you know,” Nan said. Harry felt as though he had missed a step, plunged into sudden space. He started again, this time not so noisily. Nan added, “So am I.”

  He stared at her. “That’s wonderful,” he exclaimed finally, leaning to put his cup on the grass. He caught her hands. That’s all it was then: her inner turmoil, her natural uncertainties. “Wonderful,” he repeated.

  “Is it?”

  “Of course! You’ll marry now, won’t you?”

  She gave him an incredulous stare. Then she loosed her hands, answered tonelessly, “Yes, quite soon. Next week, perhaps, and then we’ll go away for a bit to the southern coasts to paint.”

  “I couldn’t be happier,” Harry told her earnestly. “We’ve all been expecting this for—”

  “For years,” she finished. “Yes.” She hesitated; he waited, puzzled without knowing why. Something about the event, he supposed, made women anxious, prone to fear disasters or imagine things that were not true.

  Grainger’s voice, sonorous and vibrant, spilled over the group. He appeared tramping up the knoll, his hat gone, his canvas in one hand, easel in the other, paints in the pockets of his voluminous, stained jacket. He blew a kiss to Nan, leaving a daub of blue on his bushy, autumn-gold mustaches. Then he turned to see how McAlister’s sleeve was coming. Above his broad back, Harry saw the statue’s eyes come alive again; her cheeks had flushed, in the wayward wind, a delicate shade of rose. Ever the consummate professional, she did not move, while Grainger, lingering in the group, expounded with witty astonishment how like a wing that sleeve seemed, straining for its freedom on the wind.

  Harry turned back to Nan, breath indrawn for some pleasantry.

  Her chair was empty. He looked around bewilderedly. She had flown herself, it seemed, but why and on what wayward wind, he could not imagine.

  Jo walked the darkening streets, fingering the broken cobble in her pocket. The day had been dryer than the previous one; that was as much as she could say for it. Sun seemed to linger forever as she trudged through the noisy, stinking streets. She asked everyone for work, even the butcher who had driven her out from under his awning, a shapeless, faceless, unrecognizable bundle he didn’t remember in the light. But he only laughed and offered the usual, smacking with the flat of his hand the quivering haunch of meat he was slicing into steaks.

  “Come back when you get desperate,” he called after her, to the amusement of his customers. “Show me how fine you can grind it.”

  She got much the same at inns and alehouses. When she stopped at crossings to rest her feet and beg for a coin or two, she got threats from sweepers’ brooms, screeches from ancient heaps of rags whose territory she had invaded, shoves from lean, hollow-cheeked, cat-eyed girls with missing teeth who told her they’d cut off her hair with a rusty knife if they saw her twice on their street.

  Toward late afternoon she was too exhausted to feel hungry. She had money for one more night’s lodging, or money for food. Not both. After that—she didn’t think about it. That would be tomorrow, this was not. Now she had her two coppers, her two choices. And she had the stone in her pocket. She drifted, waiting for night.

  When the streetlamps were lit, she made up her mind. Just in that moment. She was sitting in the dark, finally safe because nobody could see her nursing her blistered, aching soles. Nobody threatened, yelled, or made lewd suggestions; for a few precious moments she might have been invisible.

  And then the gas lamps went on, showing the world where she was again. Caught in the light, she didn’t even think. She was on her feet in a breath, hand in her pocket; in the next she had hurled the broken stone furiously at the light. She was startled to hear the satisfying shatter of glass. Someone shouted; the flare, still burning, illumined
a couple of uniformed figures to which, she decided with relief, she would yield herself for her transgression.

  There was a sudden confusion around her: ragged people rushing into the light, all calling out as they surrounded the uniforms. Jo, pushing against them, couldn’t get past to reveal herself to the law.

  “I did it,” a woman shrieked.

  “No, it was me broke the lamp,” somebody else shouted. The crowd lurched; voices rose higher. “Give over, you great cow—it was me!”

  “I did it!” Jo shouted indignantly. “It wasn’t them at all!”

  The crowd heaved against her, picked her off her feet. Then it dropped her a moment later, as it broke apart. She lost her balance, sat on the curb staring as the uniforms escorted the wrong woman entirely out of the light. She went along eagerly enough, Jo noted sourly. She pulled herself up finally, still smarting over the injustice of it all.

  Then she realized that her purple shawl was gone.

  She felt her throat swell and burn, for the first time in forever. Even when her mother had died she hadn’t cried. Not even when the baby had died. She had taken the shawl off her mother, and then off the baby. It was all she had left to remember them by. Now that was gone. And she was blinded, tears swelling behind her eyes, because the tattered shawl had borne the burden, within its braided threads, of her memories.

  Now she was left holding them all herself.

  She limped to find some private shred of shadow, refusing to let tears fall. All the shadows seemed occupied; snores and mutterings warned her before she could sit. She wandered on and on through the quieting streets, unable to stop the memories swirling in her head. Her innocent young self, cleaning the ashes out of the fireplace in the fine, peaceful library. The handsome stranger with the light, easy voice, asking her name. Asking about her. Listening to her, while he touched her cuff button with his finger. Shifted a loose strand of her hair off her face. Touched her as no one had, ever before. Then gone, nowhere, not to be seen, he might have been a dream. And she, beginning to wake at nights, feeling the panic gnawing at her until she could bear it no longer, and upped and ran.

  But there was something else. A street name dredged it up as she walked. Or the night smell of a great tree in a line of them along the street. She had run from someone else. Oh, she remembered. Him. The young painter. He had a gentle voice, too, but he only touched her to turn her head, or put her loose hair where he wanted it. He paid well, too, for the random hour or two she could spare him. It was his money she saved to run with, when she knew she could no longer stay. When her skirts grew tight. When the other girls began to whisper, and the housekeeper’s eyes drew up tight in her head like a snail’s eyes at the sight of Jo.

  What was his name?

  She walked under the great, dark boughs that shielded her from the streetlights. She could sleep under them she thought. Curl up in their roots like an animal; no one would see her until dawn. The street was very quiet; a sedate carriage or a cab went by now and then, but she heard no voices. He lived on a street like this; she remembered the trees. She’d walk there from the great house, his housekeeper would let her in, and she would climb the stairs to his—his what was it? His studio. He painted her with that strange fruit in her hand, with all the rows of little seeds in it like baby teeth.

  He told her stories.

  You are in the Underworld, he said. You have been stolen from your loving mother’s house by the King of Hades. You must not eat or drink anything he offers you; if you refuse, he will have no power over you, and he must set you free. But, you grow hungry, so hungry, as you wait. . . .

  “So hungry,” she whispered.

  You eat only a few tiny seeds from this fruit thinking such small things would do no harm. But harm you have done, for now he can claim you as his wife and keep you, during the darkest months of the year, in his desolate and lonely realm. . . .

  What was her name?

  Her eyes were closing. Her bones ached; her feet seemed no longer recognizable. Not feet any longer, just pain. Pain she walked on, and dark her only friend. . . . She didn’t choose; she simply fell, driven to her knees in the damp ground beneath a tree. She crawled close to it, settled herself among its roots, her head reeling, it felt like, about to bounce off her shoulders and roll away without her.

  What was its name?

  She closed her eyes and saw it: that bright, glowing fruit, those sweet, innocent seeds. . . .

  Pomegranate.

  Would he want to finish his painting? she wondered.

  But there was someone guarding her passage out of the Underworld. Someone stood at the gates she must pass through, protecting the serene upper realms from the likes of her. Someone whose word was law on the border between two worlds. . . .

  What was her name?

  Her eyes. Jo could not remember her eyes, only felt them watching as she fled into the ancient, timeless dark. Only her bun, the light, glossy brown of a well-baked dinner roll, and her chins and the watch pinned to her bosom, at one corner of her apron.

  What would her eyes say when she saw Jo?

  She remembered as she felt the strong arms seize her, pull her off the earth into the nether realms of sleep.

  Mrs. Grommet.

  Harry, having returned from the country without his Medusa, avoided his studio. He did not want to open the cupboard door again. He couldn’t decide which might be worse: his painting talking to him or his painting not talking to him. Was expecting a painting to speak to him worse than having it speak to him? Suppose he opened the cupboard door with expectations, and nothing happened? He would be forced to conclusions that, in the cheery light of day, he did not want to think about.

  So he left the house at midmorning and dropped in at a gallery where a new painting by Thomas Buck was hung. The gallery, recently opened, had acquired pieces indiscriminately in its desire to become fashionable. It aimed, it declared affably, to encourage the novice as well as to celebrate the artist. Tommy Buck’s work showed promise. It had been showing promise for years. Harry, studying the new painting called Knight Errant, was gratified to see that Buck still could not draw to save his life. The horse was absurdly proportioned; its wide, oblong back could have been set for a dinner party of six. And the knight’s hands, conveniently hidden within bulky gauntlets, gripped the reins awkwardly, as though he were playing tug-of-war. The young woman tied to a tree, toward whom the knight rode, seemed to be chatting amiably with the dragon who menaced her.

  I could do better than that, Harry thought.

  He felt the urge, remembered the anomaly in the cupboard, and was relieved when some friends hailed him. They carried him away eventually to dine, and from there to another friend’s studio where they drank wine and watched the painter struggle with his Venus, a comely enough young woman with something oddly bland about her beauty. She bantered well, though, and stayed to entertain them over a cold supper of beef and salad. Harry got home late, pleasantly tipsy, and, inspired, went immediately up to his studio to view his work within the context of his friend’s

  The Gorgon spoke when he opened the cupboard, causing him to reel back with a startled cry: he had actually forgotten her.

  “Hello, Harry.”

  “Hlmph,” he choked.

  “Have you found me yet?”

  He tugged at his collar, tempted to slam the cupboard shut and go to bed. But he answered, venturing closer, “No. Not yet.”

  “Did you even look for me?”

  “Of course I did! I looked for you in every female face I passed. I didn’t see you anywhere.” Except, he thought, in McAlister’s garden, where Her eyes had immobilized him once again. “You aren’t easy to find,” he added, speaking now into the shadows. “You’re a very complex matter.”

  “Yes, I am, aren’t I?” she murmured complacently. “Harry, why don’t you let me out?”

  “I can’t. What if someone sees?”

  “Well, I don’t intend to pass the time of day with Mrs. Grommet, i
f that’s what worries you.”

  “No, but—”

  “Hang a cloth over my face or something. Pretend I’m a parrot.”

  “I don’t think so,” he sighed, sitting down on the floor because he had been standing much of the day. A lamp on the wall above his head spilled some light into the open cupboard; he could see the edge of the canvas, but not the moving mouth. Less afraid now, lulled by wine and company, he asked her curiously, “Where do you think I should look for you?”

  “Oh, anywhere. You’ll know me when you see me.”

  “But to see you is to be—”

  “Yes,” she said, laughing a little. “You’ll recognize your model when she turns you, for just a tiny human moment, into stone.”

  “Only One can do that,” he said softly.

  “Maybe. You just keep looking.”

  “But for what? Are you—were you, I mean, really that terrible? Or that beautiful? Which should I be searching for?”

  “Oh, we were hideous,” she answered cheerfully, “me and my two Gorgon sisters. Stheno and Euryale, they were called. Even in the Underworld, our looks could kill.”

  “Stheno?”

  “Nobody remembers them, because nothing much ever happened to them. They didn’t even die, being immortal. Do you think anyone would remember me if that obnoxious boy hadn’t figured out a way to chop my head off without looking at me?”

  Harry dredged a name out of the mists of youthful education. “Perseus, was it?”

  “He had help, you know. He couldn’t have been that clever without divine intervention. Long on brawn, short on brains, you know that type of hero.”

  “That’s not what I was taught.”

  “He forced our guardian sisters, the gray-haired Graie, to help him, you must have heard. He stole their only eye and their tooth.”

  “They had one eye?” Harry said fuzzily.

  “They passed it back and forth. And the tooth. Among the three of them.” She gave an unlovely cackle. “What a sight that was, watching them eat. Or squabble over that eyeball. That’s what they were doing when they didn’t see that brat of a boy coming. He grabbed their goods and forced them to give him magic armor and a mirror to see me in, so he wouldn’t have to meet my eyes. Then he lopped my head off and used me to kill his enemies. Even dead, I had an effect on people.”