“You understand what, Harry?” the Gorgon asked so gently that he knew, beneath her raucous ways, she understood a great deal more than he had realized.
“I understand that I must go to the country again soon.”
“Good idea. Take Jo with you.”
“Should I? Really? She might be uncomfortable. And Grainger will try to seduce her away from me. He tries to steal everyone’s models.”
“That will happen sooner or later in any case, unless you are planning to cast her back into the streets once you’ve finished with her.”
“No. I don’t want to do that. I hadn’t really thought ahead. About sharing her. Or painting her as someone else. Until now she was just my inspiration.” He paced a step or two, stopped again in front of the paintings. Jo then. Jo now. “She’s changed again,” he realized. “There’s yet another face. I wonder if that one will inspire another painting.”
“Something,” the Medusa murmured.
“Something,” Harry agreed absently. “But you’re right. I certainly can’t put her back on the streets just so that she stays my secret. If she can get other work, she should. If I decide I don’t—”
“Harry,” the Gorgon interrupted. “One thing at a time. Why don’t you just ask her if she’d like to come to the country with you and be introduced to other painters? She’ll either say yes or she’ll say no. In either case, you can take it from there.”
Harry smiled. “That seems too simple.”
“And find her something nice to wear. She looks like a bedpost in that old dress. Went out of style forty years ago, at least. I may not have a clue about what to do with my hair, but I always did have an eye for fashion. Though of course, things were incredibly boring in my day, comparatively speaking. Especially the shoes! You wouldn’t believe—”
“Good night,” Harry said, yawning, and draped the black silk over her. “See you in the morning.”
Jo sat in the McAlisters’ garden, sipping tea. She felt very strange, as though she had wandered into a painting of a bright, sunny world strewn with windblown petals, where everyone laughed easily, plump children ran in and out of the ancient cottage, and a woman, still as a statue at the other side of the garden, was being painted into yet another painting. Some guests had gathered, Harry among them, to watch Alex McAlister work. Jo heard the harsh, eager voice of the painter, talking about mosaics in some foreign country, while he spun a dark, rippling thundercloud of his wife’s hair with his brush. Aurora McAlister, a windblown Venus, it looked like, her head bowed slightly under long, heavy hair, seemed to be absorbed in her own thoughts; her husband and guests might have been speaking the language of another world.
Someone rustled into the wicker chair next to Jo. She looked up. People had wandered up to her and spoken and wandered off again all afternoon; she was struggling hopelessly with all the names.
“Holly,” this one said helpfully, “Holly Millidge.” She was a pretty, frothy young woman with very shrewd eyes. She waved a plate of little sandwiches under Jo’s nose; Jo took one hesitantly. “They’re all right. Just cucumber, nothing nasty.” She set the plate back on the table. “So you’re Harry’s secret model. We’ve all been wondering.”
“I didn’t know I was a secret,” Jo said, surprised.
“I can see why.”
“Why what?”
“Why he tried to keep you secret. Tommy Buck said he’d been twice to Harry’s studio trying to see you, and Harry locked the door on him.”
Jo remembered the clamoring voices, the thunder up the stairs. “Why,” she asked warily, “did he want to see me that badly?”
“To see if he should paint you, of course.” Holly was silent a little, still smiling, studying Jo. “They’re noisy, that lot. But they’re good-hearted. You don’t have to be afraid of them.”
“I’m used to being afraid,” Jo said helplessly. “I’m not used to this.”
“It’s not entirely what you think,” Holly said obscurely, and laughed at herself. “What am I trying to say? You’re not seeing what you think you see.”
“Painters don’t, do they?”
“Not always, no.” She bit into a strawberry, watching the scene on the other side of the garden. “They’d see how pretty you are and how wonderful and mysterious the expression is in your eyes. But they wouldn’t have any idea how that expression got there. Or the expression, for instance, in Aurora’s eyes.”
Jo looked at the still, dreaming face. “She’s very beautiful.”
“She is.” Holly bit into another strawberry. “Her father worked in the stables at an inn on Crowdy Street. Aurora was cleaning rooms for the establishment when Alex met her. Barefoot, with her hair full of lice—”
A sudden bubble of laughter escaped Jo; she put her hands over her mouth. “Her, too?”
“And whatever her name was then, it was most certainly not Aurora. Most of us have a skewed past. As well as a skewed present.” She gave a sigh, leaned back in her chair. “Except for me; I have no secrets. No interesting ones, at any rate. When they put me in their paintings, I’m the one carrying the heartless bride’s train, or one of the shocked guests who finds the thwarted lover’s body in the fishpond.”
Jo, feeling less estranged from her surroundings, took another glance around the garden. Seen that way, if the goddess had been a chambermaid, then everyone might be anyone, and no telling what anybody knew or didn’t know about life. Except for Harry, she thought. And then she glimpsed the expression on his face and had to amend even that notion.
Nothing, apparently, was plain as day, not even Harry. While the other guests were laughing and chatting, Alex’s voice running cheerfully over them all, Harry was standing very quietly among them, his eyes on the tall, dark goddess. Jo drew a breath, feeling an odd little hollow where her certainty had been.
“Harry,” she said, hardly realizing she’d spoken aloud.
Holly nodded. “Oh, yes, Harry. And John Grainger, and half the painters in the McAlister constellation, including one or two of the women. Dreamers, all of them, in love with what they think they see instead of what they see.”
“John Grainger. The one with the wild hair and rumbly voice and the black, black eyes?”
“Yes, that’s him.”
“He talked to me earlier.”
“Everyone talked to you earlier,” Holly said lightly. “I was watching. They’re making their plans for you, don’t you fret.”
“I didn’t like him,” Jo said. “He has a way of putting his hand on you as though it’s supposed to mean something to you. It made me uncomfortable.”
Holly laughed. “Then he’ll have to watch his manners with you. He’s a fine painter, though, and very generous; if you let him paint you, you’ll be noticed. Others will find you, if you want.” She lifted her bright face to greet a lovely, red-haired woman with somber green eyes. “Nan! Have you met Harry’s painting yet? Jo Byrd. Nan Grainger.”
“Jo Byrd. Why do I know that name?” Nan eased herself into a chair, gazing at Jo. “Harry must have talked about you. But that was some time ago. Oh!” She gave a little start, her pale skin flushing slightly. “I remember now.”
“I ran away.”
“Yes. In the middle of his Persephone. He was bereft.”
“Yes, well,” Jo said, her mouth quirked, for everyone seemed to know everything anyway. “So was I.”
Nan was silent, gazing at her without smiling. What have I said? Jo wondered, and then saw what lay beneath Nan’s hands clasped gently over her belly.
Holly interrupted Nan’s silence adroitly, with some droll story about her husband. Jo sighed noiselessly, her eyes going back to the group around the goddess. John Grainger stood closest to Aurora, she saw. They did not look at one another. But now and then the trailing green silk around her bare feet, raised by a teasing wind, flowed toward him to touch his shoe. He would glance down at that flickering green touching him, and his laugh would ring across the garden.
Secret
s, she thought. If you look at this one way, there’s a group of cheerful people standing together on a sunny afternoon in a garden. That’s one painting. If you look at them with a different eye, there’s the story within the painting. . . . She looked at Harry again, wanting the uncomplicated friend she thought she knew, who got excited over the golden snakes in the reptile house, and who made her go shopping with Mrs. Grommet for a dress, he said, that didn’t look as if his grandmother had slept in it.
Unexpectedly, as though he’d felt her thoughts flow in his direction, against the wind, he was looking back at her.
“What beautiful hair you have,” Nan said, watching the white-gold ripple over Jo’s shoulders. “I’d love to paint it.” Her green eyes were gathering warmth, despite the silk fluttering over her husband’s shoe, despite her fears and private sorrows; for a moment she was just a woman smiling in the light. “Jo, have you ever tried to draw? You might try it sometime. I forget myself when I do; it makes me very tranquil.”
I might try it, Jo thought, after I lose this feeling that I’ve just fallen off the moon.
But she didn’t say that, she said something else, and then there was another cup of tea in her hand, and a willowy young man with wayward locks the color of honeycomb kneeling in the grass at her feet, who introduced himself as Tommy Buck. . . .
Harry watched Tommy kneel beside Jo’s chair. Their two faces seemed to reflect one another’s wild beauty, and he thought dispassionately: I would like to paint them both together. Then, he felt a sharp flash of annoyance at Tommy, who could barely paint his feet, dreaming of capturing that barely human face of Jo’s with his brush.
His attention drifted. He watched the green silk touch Grainger’s shoe, withdraw, flutter toward him again. Seemingly oblivious, Aurora watched the distant horizon; seemingly oblivious, her husband orated in his hoarse, exuberant crow’s voice about the architectural history of the arch. Harry thought about Aurora’s long, graceful hands, about her mouth. So silent, it looked now; he had gotten used to it speaking. He wondered if he could ever make this mouth speak.
And then she moved. The little group was breaking up around McAlister. “Too sober,” he proclaimed them all. “Much too sober.” Lightly he touched his wife, to draw her with him toward the cottage. As lightly, she slipped from his fingers, stayed behind to find her shoes under the rose vines. Grainger glanced at his wife across the garden, then at Aurora, then at his wife again. In that moment of his indecision, Aurora put her hand out to steady herself on Harry’s arm as she put on her shoes.
“She’s lovely, Harry,” he heard her say through the blood drumming in his ears. “I like her. Where did you find her?”
“In the street,” he stammered. “Both times. She—she has been through hard times.”
“I know.” She straightened, shod, but didn’t drop her hand. Behind her, Grainger drifted away. Her voice, deep and slow and sweet, riveted Harry. “I know those times. I hear them in her speech, I see them in her eyes. I know those streets.”
“Surely not—”
She smiled very faintly. “Harry, I grew up helping my father shovel out the stables until I was old enough to clean up after humans. Didn’t you know that? I thought everybody did.”
“But the way you speak,” Harry said bewilderedly. “Your poise and manners—”
“A retired governess. Alex hired her to teach me. Beyond that I have my own good sense and some skills that Alex finds interesting. He likes my company.”
“He adores you.”
“He thinks he does. He adores the woman he paints. Not the Livvie that I am.”
“Livvie?”
Her mouth crooked wryly; he saw her rare, brief smile. “Olive. That’s my real name. Livvie, they called me until I was seventeen and Alex looked at me and saw painting after painting. . . . He said I was the dawn of his inspiration. So Olive became Aurora.”
“Why,” he asked her, his voice finally steady, “are you telling me this?”
“Because I’ve often thought I’d like to talk to you. That I might like having you as a friend, to tell things to. But for the longest time you could only see me the way Alex sees me. But then I saw how you looked at Jo today, knowing all you know about her. So I thought maybe, if I explained a thing or two to you, you might look at me as a friend.”
She waited, the dark-eyed goddess who had pitched horseshit out of stables and whose name was Livvie. Mute with wonder, he could only stare at her. Then his face spoke, breaking into a rueful smile.
“I hope you can forgive my foolishness,” he said softly. “It can’t have been very helpful.”
“I do get lonely,” she confessed, “on my pedestal. Come, let’s have some tea with Jo, and rescue her from Tommy Buck. He’s not good enough for her.”
“Will you come some day and see if I’m good enough to paint her? I would value your opinion very much.”
“Yes, I will,” she promised and tucked her long sylph’s hand into the crook of his arm, making him reel dizzily for a step. He found his balance somewhere in Jo’s eyes as she watched them come to her.
Much later, he reeled back into his studio, stupefied with impressions. Jo had promised, sometime before he left her at her door, to sit for the unfinished Persephone as well. So he would see her daily until—until he dreamed up something else. Or maybe, he thought, he would do what Odysseus’s Penelope had done to get what she wanted: weave by day, unweave by night. He pulled the black silk off Persephone’s head, saw the lovely, wine-red mouth and smiled, remembering the real one speaking, smiling its faint sphinx’s smile, saying things he never dreamed would come out of it. But he no longer needed to dream, and he did not want Jo to see that mouth on her own face and wonder.
He was wiping it away carefully with cloth and turpentine when he remembered the Gorgon.
Horrified, he dropped the cloth. He had erased her entirely, without even thinking. What she must be trying to say, he could not imagine. And then he realized that the voluble Gorgon, who had talked her way out of his cupboard and into his life, had said not a word, nothing at all, to rescue herself.
Perhaps, he thought, she had nothing left to say. Perhaps she had already gone. . . .
He picked up the cloth, gazing at the clean, empty bit of canvas where Persephone’s mouth would finally appear. He heard the Gorgon’s voice in his head, having the last word as usual.
If you need me, Harry, you know how to find me.
He left them side by side, his unfinished faces, and went to bed, where he would have finished them, except that he could not keep Persephone from smiling in his dreams.
Which Witch
liesl, that grinch, stole my G string. “Borrowed,” she said. Ha! So I had to limp along on a Spinreel G so old it was liable to snap at any moment with a twang in pure Country, while she wailed along like she was summoning the devil to dance, with her long black hair tangling in her bow until it seemed she was pulling the song out of her hair instead of her fiddle.
Maybe she did. Summon up the devil, I mean, since that night was when Trouble joined the band.
I know Cawley warned me. I know that. But it had to have been while I was on the floor slithering like the snake in the Garden into my tightest black jeans, or trying to bend over after that to buckle the Mary Jane strap on one seven-inch lollipop red heel, and then zip a black ankle boot on the other foot, or surrounding myself with puddles of sequins, satin, leather, and lace, trying to find just the right top for my mood. Pirate Queen, or Good Fairy/Bad Fairy, or maybe I’d just wear my glasses and my crazy-quilt jacket and Cawley on my shoulder and be Scholar Gypsy.
Cawley hates being used as an accessory, unless I’m in Dire Need. Which I wasn’t then. Or at least I didn’t know it, then. Though I would have if I’d listened to him. But I was on the floor, etc., while he was fluttering on his wooden perch trying to take my attention off my clothes. Translating crow requires concentration. I thought he was asking me to open the window so that he could fly out, an
d I finally did give it a shove up, in the middle of putting on a shirt covered with roses and skulls.
“There,” I said. “Bye. You know where I’ll be.”
But he didn’t leave, just kept squawking. Since he had hopped from his perch to the sill, I thought he was talking to his clan, which had covered the tree outside like very dead leaves. They were all chattering, too. Where to go to dinner, or the sun about to go down, or somebody spilled a ginormous order of french fries in the middle of B Street. Something like that.
So you can’t say I wasn’t warned. I pulled off the shirt, which wasn’t right, and limped in one-shoe-on, one-boot-on mode to the window, and pushed it shut behind Cawley. I nearly caught his tail feathers. He whirled in a black blur and could have cracked glass with the word that ripped out of his open beak.
I yelled back, “Sorry!”
But what I thought he squawked wasn’t what he said at all.
I hadn’t really had him that long. Some witches find their familiars; some familiars find their witches. Liesl’s smoke-colored cat with golden eyes had been put in an animal shelter along with her seven siblings. Liesl had a dream about her, and went searching. They recognized each other instantly. Liesl smiled; the cat started a coffee grinder purr that rattled her tiny body. Of course Liesl named her Graymalkin. Why not? Who’d guess that names among familiars are remembered through vast webs of families and histories, way back into antiquity? Naming a cat Graymalkin is like adding yet another Josh or Elizabeth to the human list.
As for Cawley, yes, that too is pretty much obvious. At the time, I thought it was clever of me. To name a crow Cawley. Duh.
Cawley found me.
Liesl had it easy in the sense that she didn’t have to learn to understand Cat. They just read each other’s minds. If Graymalkin presents herself with her back arched and every hair standing up on end, that pretty much says it all. But Cawley doesn’t have a stance for: be afraid, very afraid. When I first saw him, he was pacing on a rain gutter next door and imitating the endless barking of an obnoxious dog in a neighboring yard. The noise had crept into the background of a dream I was having, and finally woke me up way too soon after a long night. I stumbled to the window and pushed it open to find out what exactly was the dog’s problem. Then I saw the crow waddling to and fro on the gutter and barking back at it. I laughed, and the crow flew over to me like he’d just been waiting for me to get up.
Dreams of Distant Shores Page 10