Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Oh, a great deal,” the painting answered vaguely, and gave a sudden, crude snort of a laugh. “She’s far too beautiful for the likes of me, of course. But I see your point in her.”

  “Do you?”

  “Beauty that can kill. But Harry, she’s bone-thin and she’s not much use to you dead. She might sleep in an alley for all you know. Anything could happen to her, and you’d never know what.”

  Harry was silent, blinking. He took another scalding sip. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Well, think of it. What would you do if tomorrow she didn’t appear?”

  The thought brought him out of his chair to pace a little, suddenly edgy. “Surely I pay her enough for decent lodgings. Don’t I?”

  “How much is enough?”

  “I don’t—”

  “And suppose she has others dependent on her? Who need every coin she brings to them?”

  “Well, maybe—” He paused, still tramping across the room; then he dropped into his chair again. “I’ll ask Mrs. Grommet.”

  “You could ask your model.”

  Harry rolled his head to gaze up at the painting. “How?” he pleaded. “She is my Medusa. She exists only in this little world, only to be painted. I dare not make her real. She might lose all her power, become just another woman in my eyes.”

  The Medusa snorted again, this time without amusement. “She’d still be there for you to paint her. Your brush knows how to lie. If she vanishes into the streets out there, where will you go to look for her? You might at least ask her that.”

  Harry tried, at least three times, the next morning, before he got a question out. His model, whose name he kept forgetting, sat silently gazing as he had requested, at the back of his easel. What she saw, he could not begin to guess. Her wide, eerily pale eyes seemed to glimpse enormities in his peaceful studio. Until now, he had absently confused her expression with the Gorgon seeing herself for the first time and the last. Now he wondered, despite his better judgment, what those eyes had truly seen to make them so stricken.

  He cleared his throat yet again. Her eyelids trembled, startled, at the sound of his voice. “Tell me, er—Jo?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Do you have a decent place to stay at night? I mean, I do pay you enough for that, don’t I?”

  She kept her face very still, answered simply, “Yes, Mr. Waterman. I go to a lodging house on Carvery Street.”

  “Alone?”

  Her eyes flicked up, widening; he caught the full force of the Gorgon’s stare. “Sir?”

  “I mean—I only meant—do you have other people to care for? Others dependent on you?”

  “Oh.” The fierce gaze lowered once again to the middle distance. “No, sir. They’re dead.”

  “Oh,” he said inanely. He painted in silence a while, aware, though he told himself he imagined it, of eyes boring into his head from above the bookshelves. He glanced up finally, was appalled to see the full red lips moving wildly in a grotesque parody of speech.

  He cleared his throat again hastily. “Do you get enough to eat? I mean, you’re very thin.”

  “I’m eating better now,” she answered.

  The question sent a faint, unwelcome patina of color into her white face that at first alarmed him. Then he thought, Why not? Medusa, seeing her own beauty for the first time, may well flush with pleasure and astonishment before she turns herself into stone.

  “Do you know,” he asked aimlessly, trying to make conversation, “the story of Medusa?”

  “Something of it,” she said hesitantly. “Some sort of monster who turned people into stone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ugly, wasn’t she?”

  “Hideous,” he answered, “by all accounts.”

  He heard her take a breath or two then, as if to speak. Then she grew still again, so still that he wondered if he had somehow turned her into stone.

  He let his model rest a day or two later and spent a tranquil afternoon in the country, watching others work. Arthur Millidge was there, putting a honeysuckle background to what would be his Nymph Dying for Love of a Shepherd. He kept knocking his easel over swatting at bees. John Grainger was there as well, to Harry’s surprise, back on his indy knoll painting the distant village. McAlister had finished his wife’s windblown sleeve; now he was engrossed in her bare feet and ankles, around which green silk swirled and eddied. Harry, after his first glimpse of those long marble toes and exquisite anklebones, took the first chair he found and tried not to think about them.

  Arthur Millidge’s wife, Holly, handed him a cup of tea and sat down beside him. She was a pretty, good-natured, giddy-headed thing, who could pull out an arrow and hit an astute social bull’s-eye just when she seemed at her most frivolous. She was watching her suffering husband with a great deal of amusement.

  “Oh, poor Arthur,” she cried, when he batted at a wasp with his brush and actually hit it; it stuck, struggling, to the yellow-daubed bristles. “At least it’s the right color.”

  Her husband smiled at her wanly.

  “I thought,” Harry said blankly, “that Grainger and Nan would still be at the south coast.”

  “Oh, no,” Holly answered briskly. “They only spent a few days there.”

  “But they are—they did get married?”

  “So it seems. She’s wearing a ring.”

  “Is she here?”

  “No, poor thing, the traveling exhausted her in her condition, so she let John come alone.”

  Harry’s eyes crept back to Aurora. Her condition, as well, he remembered; he could not, for a prolonged moment, stop studying her. The flowing, voluminous silk hid everything. Her face seemed a trifle plumper, but then he had been gazing at his emaciated model for days, he reminded himself. Aurora’s face seemed exquisitely serene, he realized, ivory, full and tranquil, like a midsummer moon.

  “The condition suits Aurora,” Holly said, reading Harry’s thoughts in her uncanny way. “I think poor Nan will have a great deal of difficulty with it. She’s frail anyway and suffers from imagination.”

  Harry pulled his eyes away from McAlister’s wife, dipped his hand into a bowl full of cherries. “Which of us doesn’t?” he asked lightly.

  “I’m sure I don’t.” Holly laughed and helped herself to a cherry or two from Harry’s hand. “I heard you’re painting something mysterious, Harry. Tommy Buck said that he and some friends came to visit you, and you refused to let them into your studio.”

  “They frightened my model,” Harry said, remembering the shouts, Mrs. Grommet’s flurried protest, the stampede up the stairs. “I thought she might faint, she was trembling so badly.”

  Holly maneuvered a cherry pit daintily from lips to palm and tipped it into the grass. “But who is she? Someone we know?”

  “No. I found her in the street.”

  “How exciting! And what are you making of her?”

  “Oh, I’m experimenting with this and that,” he answered airily. “Nothing much, yet.”

  “She must be very pretty.”

  “In a wild kind of way. She’s very shy. Not used to company.”

  “Everyone,” Holly sighed, “is full of secrets. Alex won’t tell what he’s working on, either. You should bring her here, Harry.”

  “I should?”

  “It might calm her, knowing others like her who model. Besides, if you decide you can’t make anything of her, someone else might, and then she wouldn’t have to go back into the streets.”

  “True,” he said absently, flinging a cherry pit at a bee buzzing in the honeysuckle. “Oh, sorry, Arthur. I was aiming for the bee.”

  “Don’t try to be helpful, Waterman.”

  “I won’t, then.”

  “Will you bring her, Harry?”

  “I might,” he answered vaguely and changed the subject. “What do you think McAlister is making out of his wife?”

  “Oh, who knows?” Holly said, waving midges away from her face. “Blind Justice? Aphrodite? Mayb
e even he doesn’t know. The point is to keep her here, don’t you think?”

  “Here?” Harry repeated, mystified. Holly turned her head, regarded him blithely a moment, chin on her fist. Abruptly she laughed and got to her feet.

  “Oh, Harry. You are so unbearably sweet. Arthur, come into the shade with us and have something to drink before you melt in all that light. I’m trying to worm secrets out of Harry.”

  “Harry has secrets?” John Grainger’s deep, vigorous voice intoned incredulously behind them. “Mirabile dictu!” He dropped into a chair, dipped into the cherries with cerulean blue fingertips, and demanded of the hapless Harry, “Tell all.”

  Jo sat in Harry’s kitchen, eating her supper after he had returned from the country and began to paint her again. At his request, she had given Mrs. Grommet explicit instructions about where to find her if Harry needed her. Mrs. Grommet dutifully wrote the address down. Then, to Jo’s surprise, she poured herself a cup of tea and pulled out a chair at the end of the table near Jo, where she sat close to the fire.

  Mrs. Grommet said, “I know Mrs. Atkins, the woman who owns the lodging house on Carvery Street. She’s a good, honest woman. Or at least she was when we worked together, in a great house over on Bellingham Road.”

  Jo’s eyes slid uncertainly to her face. She managed an answer, after a moment. “She seems kind.”

  “She married unexpectedly. Lucky for her, her husband had saved a little money. And had a very loving heart. Married they were for thirty years before he died, and never a word passed his lips that their child wasn’t his.”

  Jo coughed on a bit of pickled beet. The kitchen maid was on the far side of the kitchen, banging pots noisily in weltering dishwater. The cook was in the pantry counting spoons, which was her way of saying resting her feet and having a nip. Mrs. Grommet’s green eyes opened meaningfully upon Jo, then lowered again. She sipped tea, half-turned at a splash from the sink.

  “Go easy, girl! You’re washing pots, not the flagstones.”

  Jo put two and two together, cleared her throat. Still, words came out with difficulty. “That’s why—” She drew a breath, met the housekeeper’s eyes. “That’s why you’re kind to me.”

  “Things happen,” Mrs. Grommet said, the corners of her mouth puckering a moment. “They’re not always our fault.”

  “No.” She lifted her cup. It trembled badly; she put it down again quickly before she spilled. She folded her hands tightly, said to them, “It takes a special heart to see it that way, though.”

  Mrs. Grommet patted her hands. “I saw how you were with Mr.

  Waterman the first time you came here. So quiet and nicely behaved.

  Some of his models—well, the less said. Not that he was that way, at least not under his own roof. But I hear the young men talking about the girls they paint, about which would only pose and go, and which might stay around after for their bit of fun.” She became aware of the maid handling the pots as gently as possible, and raised her voice again. “Finish up there, Lizzie, then go and see if Cook needs help in the pantry.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Grommet.”

  Jo said very softly, “You were friends, then, you and Mrs. Atkins, when you worked on Bellingham Road.”

  “Mary. Mary Plum she was, then. We started there very young, you see, and during the same summer. We were there together for five years. What happened to her seemed so unfair to me. It was one of the young friends of the family—”

  “Yes,” Jo whispered.

  “Nothing to him, of course. He told her he loved her and would care for her. He couldn’t even remember her name or her face, next time he came. He looked straight at her, she said, when she was serving dinner, and didn’t even see her. She was at the point then when she had to leave. She had no choice. But then Martin—Mr. Atkins—found her weeping under the privet hedge when he went to trim it. He was a gardener there, then, and very well thought of. He’d saved all his money for years for an investment, he said. He asked Mary to be his investment.” She paused, watching Jo’s struggling face. “I’ve never seen you smile before.”

  “I’ve nearly forgotten how. Did he really put it like that?”

  “She was a pretty thing,” Mrs. Grommet said reminiscently. “He said he’d had his eye on her, but never thought he’d have a chance. Well, chance came, wearing an unexpected face, and he was brave enough to take it. She had a daughter who looked just like her. After some years, he’d worked so hard that—” She stopped abruptly. “Oh, dear.”

  The tears came out of nowhere Jo could name, hot, fierce, and seemingly unstoppable. She put her hands over her mouth, turned her back quickly to face the fire again. She heard Mrs. Grommet say something sharply to Lizzie; all sounds faded in the kitchen. Jo felt a tea towel pushed into her hand.

  She buried her face in it, seeing, feeling, smelling all at once, as though memory, locked so carefully away, had crashed and blundered out of its door. His warm, slight weight in her arms, the smell of milk in his hair, his wide, round eyes catching at hers.

  “Poor Alf,” she whispered into the towel. “Oh, poor Alf. Poor little poppet. Oh, Mrs. Grommet, I did love him despite everything—”

  “Now, then.”

  “He was just too frail to go on.”

  “There now.” Mrs. Grommet patted her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right; Lizzie’s gone. You have a good cry.”

  “I haven’t—I forgot to cry, when—when—” Her voice wailed away from her, incoherent. She shook hair over her face and eyes like a shroud, trying to hide in it while tears came noisily, messily, barely restrained under the wad of tea towel. “Poor mite, he was all my heart. I think we must have gotten buried together, and I have been just a ghost ever since. No wonder Mr. Waterman sees me as that stone-eyed monster—”

  “What?”

  She drew a raw, ragged breath that was half sob. “Some—Medusa—who turns people into stone with her eyes. That’s what he sees when he looks at me.” Then she felt an odd bubble in her chest; loosed, it sounded strangely like a laugh. “I’d terrify anyone with these eyes now—”

  “Let me see,” Mrs. Grommet said faintly. Jo lifted her face from the towel, pulled wet strands of hair from her cheeks. Her throat ached again at the housekeeper’s expression. But it was not grief so much as relief that she could still cry, she could still laugh. Which she found herself doing again amid her tears, in a damp, inelegant snort. “Look what I’ve done to you. You’re stunned. . . .”

  “You do look a bit fiery around the eyes,” Mrs. Grommet admitted. “But no wonder Mr. Waterman doesn’t remember you, with all that happened to you since.”

  “I was a maid when he began his first painting. Now, I’m Medusa.” She sat again, drew a shuddering breath as she mopped her eyes.

  “Maybe. But you look all the younger now for those tears.” She refilled their cups. “Not that you’re much more than a girl. But you just seemed . . . like you’d seen a Medusa, yourself. And lived to tell about it.”

  Jo wrapped her fingers around the cup, managed to raise it without spilling. “Mrs. Grommet, you’ve been so good to me,” she said huskily. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Well. You reminded me so of Mary, when you disappeared like that. I couldn’t see that you could have found any way to help yourself, except maybe into the river. Mr. Waterman looked for you when you left. He fretted about you. And not only for his painting. He wanted to help.”

  “I know.” She got a sip past the sudden burn in her throat. “I was too frightened to think then. And now, I don’t care if he never recognizes that terrified waif. I don’t want him feeling sorry for me. I’m glad he doesn’t know me.”

  “I did,” Mrs. Grommet said, “the moment I saw you. I don’t see how he can’t. Being a painter as he is. Faces are his business.”

  “He doesn’t see me. He sees the woman he wants to see. And I hope—” She touched her swollen eyes lightly. “I hope she’s still
there, in spite of my tears.”

  “Now he’s got you thinking that way,” Mrs. Grommet said roundly. “As if you’re not yourself.”

  “But I never am, when he paints me. I am always the woman he has in mind. I think that’s why he doesn’t like to talk to me. He only wants to know the woman in his head. The dream he has of me. If I told him too much about”—she swallowed, continued steadily—“about Alf, about the streets, the mill, about my mother’s hands all cracked from taking in laundry, about the purple shawl, the dream would be gone. All he’d have left is me.”

  Harry was gazing at his Medusa, a ham sandwich forgotten in one hand. With the other hand he was pointing out to the Medusa overhead various examples of his brilliance or his clumsiness, which seemed, judging by the Gorgon’s expression, to be running about neck and neck that day.

  “Look there. Putting that fleck of pure white just so, I’ve captured perfectly the suggestion of ice in her gray eyes. Do you see it? Of course the delicate line of the inner eye is a bit blurry, there; I’ll have to rework it.” Raptly, he took a bite of sandwich. “And there . . . ,” he said with his mouth full, overcome. “You see what I did?”

  “Harry. You still don’t know anything about this woman.”

  “I told her to give Mrs. Grommet her address. You made a good point about that. Now, her hair. I shall have to go to the zoological gardens, observe some snakes.” He paused, chewing, added regretfully, “I should have brought a few back with me from the country. I didn’t think of it. Perhaps because I don’t see the point of them. They just begin and go on and keep going on the same way they began, and then they end without any reason whatsoever.” He paused again.

  “Don’t say it,” the Gorgon pleaded.

  Harry glanced at her, took another bite. “All right, I won’t. But it is a bit like life, isn’t it?”

  “Harry!”

  He smiled. “I’d give a lot to see your snakes, though. What color were they?”

  “Ugly.”

  “No color is ugly.”

  “Maybe,” the Medusa sighed, “but you must remember that I was hideous. I never looked at myself, of course, and my snakes were usually twined around my head. But now and then a loop or a head would lose its direction and slide near my eyes. They were fairly drab: brown, black, gray, without any interesting patterns. Big, they were, though. Thick as your wrists.”