The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

by Jeffrey Ford

  “And the higher-ups think it better if no one knows about it?” I asked, horrified.

  “For now. It’s not like a plague that passes rapidly from one person to the next. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any connection among the three victims. As far as we can tell, they’re isolated incidents. But if word of this reaches the Times or the World, all hell will break loose. Mayor Grant wants it kept quiet for now until we can discover the source of the parasite.”

  “I will keep it close, John. You can trust me,” I said. “But if you’ve come in contact with this woman, what is it that has kept you safe?”

  “It appears that once it has fed, the bug becomes dormant. For how long, no one knows, because they have cremated the bodies immediately after studying them.”

  “Let’s hope they can stop it,” I said.

  “If they can’t, we’ll all be crying in our beer,” he said, and gave a grim smile.

  I could tell from this ill-conceived joke that he had finished speaking about the incident. Truly wanting to know, I asked him how his painting was coming along. He had a great deal of natural talent, and over the years, stealing time from his job and his wife and children, he had become a very creditable miniaturist. Some of his works were no bigger than a cigarette case, and many of the images in them were rendered with a brush that held only two very fine hairs. He informed me that he had just finished a series of portraits of criminals and that a few of them would be included in a group show at the Academy of Design.

  “It opens next week,” he said, and moved forward to shake my hand. “Tell Shenz to come along also.”

  “I will,” I said, and clasped hands with him.

  Before leaving, he said in a low voice, “Remember, Piambo, the less we know, the better.”

  “My memory is a blank canvas,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said, and walked away up the street.

  Once inside my home, I went immediately to the bedroom and shrugged off my coat and clothes, letting them lie in a pile where they fell. I felt as if I could have fallen asleep standing up, but there was one more thing I had to do. There was the matter of the notebook, and an assessment of the sketches I had made at Mrs. Charbuque’s. I took the tablet to bed with me, and when I was comfortable, with my head propped up on the pillows, I set about reviewing what I had done.

  I flipped the pages, past sketches of a neighborhood cat, Samantha in a kimono, one of a telephone pole on East Broadway, outside the Children’s Aid Society, Reed’s goldfish, a portrait of a young writer sitting at a corner table at Billy Mould’s Delicatessen. Then I came to the first of the sketches done in Mrs. Charbuque’s drawing room. Staring for a moment, I then turned the sketchbook to see if I had not had it positioned differently while drawing. What I saw before me was an amorphous blob made up of scratchy lines. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t make out the figure of a woman at all. To tell the truth, I couldn’t even make out the figure of a person.

  Irritated, I turned to the next. Again I beheld the mere shadow of a cloud. The next, another charcoal puddle. None of them exhibited any recognizable trace. I lay there wondering what it was I thought I had witnessed projected on that screen. At one point, I remembered thinking I had actually captured the outline of a facial profile, but what was transmitted to the sketchbook now made me wonder if I was not, weakened by my sleepless condition, doing a bit of projecting myself. While Mrs. Charbuque was relating to me her tale of allowing fancy to infect reality, I had been going her one better and putting it into practice. An indistinct movement of shadow had become a woman.

  I cursed and threw the sketchbook across the room. It slammed against the top corner of the dresser, twirled in the air, bounced off the arm of a chair, and landed, no lie, directly in a trash can I kept in the corner. As Mrs. Charbuque had said, there was no such thing as an accident. My eyes closed, and I fell into a dream of snow.

  DREAM WOMAN

  SATURDAY BROUGHT with it the urge to paint. I rose early, well refreshed, and went out for breakfast to Crenshaw’s on Seventh Avenue. After a greasy repast of steak and eggs, two cups of coffee, three cigarettes, and the perusal of a story in the Times concerning a land grab ensuing in Cherokee Creek, Oklahoma, where people were shooting one another over parcels of dirt, I returned home to my ethereal pursuit of the ineffable Mrs. Charbuque.

  I had a canvas stretched and prepared in my studio, waiting for me to attack it with color. What with all my recent dithering about—the unveiling of Mrs. Reed’s portrait, sessions before the screen, Samantha’s play, and my visit to Shenz—I had not lifted a brush in over a week. That demon inside me, the one that can only be placated through the application of pigment to canvas, was chafing at the bit. I prepared my palette and, dipping my brush into ochre, moved forward to claim my own parcel of territory. Then the specter of absence that was Mrs. Charbuque rose up in my mind in all her negative glory, the folds of her nonexistent dress spreading outward, the voluminous emptiness of her hair burgeoning. The exquisite lack of her crowded out all else, extinguishing the insistence of the paint demon and stultifying my intention to create. The brush seized an inch from the canvas, and my hand slowly carried it back to my side. I placed the palette and brush on the table and sat down in utter defeat.

  For the longest time I simply stared at that expectant rectangle on the easel before me. As usually happened when I turned my attention toward trying to envision her, she finally cohered out of the miasma of nothingness, and I saw a woman, but as with Proteus in the Odyssey, whose form shifts endlessly from that of one creature to another, this was a woman of many women. I took deep breaths and concentrated, trying to halt the rapid metamorphosis of face into face, blond to brunet to ginger. The process was frustrating, like trying to determine when precisely to step onto a swiftly spinning carousel.

  One thing that struck me for the first time that morning was that every incarnation that passed before my eyes was an instance of classic beauty. But was Mrs. Charbuque beautiful? To tell the truth, it had never struck me that she could be anything but. In all the hundreds of images of her I had conceived since first accepting the commission, I had never once envisioned her as plain. “God forbid,” I thought. “Say she is outright ugly.” Although the women I continued to see in my mind’s eye remained handsome, with another, nonpictorial part of my brain I entertained the notion that she might be heavyset, even obese. Perhaps I had been wrong in my assessment of her age, and her years were not equivalent to mine or less, but instead she was a wrinkled crone. What if she were thin as a rail, with no breasts to speak of, bucktoothed, cross-eyed?

  That is when I realized that my own sexual desire, my own ridiculous male expectation of the female, would never allow Mrs. Charbuque to be herself. I was doomed to end up painting the portrait of some idealized dream woman, more me than her. My God, I was Reed. I remembered M. Sabott speaking to me one day about the nature of portraiture. “Understand this, Piambo. The first lesson is that every portrait is in some sense a self-portrait, as every self-portrait is a portrait.” If my thoughts were in turmoil, my body was completely paralyzed. Had there not been a knocking on my front door to awaken me, my only recourse would eventually have been to drag myself off in search of the bottle.

  Samantha stood before me on the front steps, pulling off her gloves finger by finger. Her dark hair was done up in the back in intricate braids, and her face shone in the Saturday-morning sunlight. She was smiling mischievously, and the instant I laid eyes upon her, all traces of the elusive, evolving Mrs. Charbuque were obliterated from my mind.

  “What do we have here?” I said.

  She laughed aloud, and it was obvious she was up to something.

  I stepped aside and let her in.

  “Are you working, Piambo?” she asked.

  “I was pretending to for a moment but found I couldn’t deceive myself.”

  “Having trouble painting the mystery woman?” she asked.

  For some reason I hated to acknowledge the
fact, as if my admission were one of impotence, but I could not lie to Samantha. I nodded sadly.

  “As I thought,” she said.

  “Did you come to taunt me?” I asked.

  “I’ll save that for this evening,” she said. “I’m here now to help, as always.”

  “You’ve heard something about this woman Charbuque?” I asked.

  “Heavens, no,” she said. “I have a present for you. I have engaged a young actress, an understudy from the production at Palmer’s, to sit for you. My idea was to keep you from seeing her. Perhaps you could sit with your back to her and ask her questions. You could practice capturing her likeness through her words.”

  “Where is she,” I asked, “hiding under your skirts?”

  She took a halfhearted swipe at me with her gloves. “No, imbecile, she is outside, down the street, waiting for me to arrange the situation.”

  At first I was skeptical, afraid of failure, but Samantha told me that the entire reason for the project was to see what I could do, not what I couldn’t. “Like a dress rehearsal,” she said. I acquiesced and went to my studio to arrange the easel and a chair for myself. It was then I realized that painting was out of the question and that it would be more useful to simply sketch. I needed to work quickly so as not to think too much. Contemplation had been nothing but a hindrance to me. I went to my bedroom and retrieved my sketchbook from the trash pail. A few minutes later, after dragging my drawing board around to face the back wall, I heard the front door open and close. Two sets of footsteps approached down the hallway from the parlor.

  “Piambo,” I heard Samantha say, “this is Emma Hernan.”

  “Hello,” I called, having to remind myself not to turn around.

  “Hello, Mr. Piambo,” said the voice of a young woman.

  “Are you ready to have your portrait done?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Emma.

  “Please do not be upset if I miss the mark.”

  “She understands the situation,” said Samantha.

  “It will be somewhat awkward, but if you two will simply engage in a protracted conversation and allow me to eavesdrop, I will try to capture several quick images of both of you,” I said.

  “Do you mean gossip, Mr. Piambo?” asked Emma.

  “We shouldn’t have a problem with that,” said Samantha, and the two laughed.

  They settled themselves on the couch and began to discuss the previous evening’s performance, in which one of the principal actresses had not shown up due to illness and Emma had had to fill in. Even if Samantha had not told me that Emma was young, I would immediately have identified her age by the clarity of her voice and the enthusiasm she exhibited in talking about the craft of acting. I listened intently for a time, moving my hand and the charcoal inches above the page, unable to commit a line. Closing my eyes, I pictured Samantha speaking, and slowly brought into view her respondent. At first there was merely a shadowy form sitting next to her, but then the conversation turned to the inadequacy of the poor Derim Lourde, and Emma’s figure grew in my mind out of the sound of her laughter. I saw long, wispy blond hair with red highlights and smooth skin, devoid of wrinkles. I made a mark, and that first difficult line gave permission for another.

  From the hapless amnesiac ghost, their talk turned to the particulars of a grim story the newspapers of late could not get enough of, namely the trial of Lizzie Borden. There was something vaguely erotic in the way the young woman recited that song all the children were singing about forty whacks. Emma’s lips and perfect nose, her small ears, and the curving lids of her wide eyes came to me through that tune.

  Then for a time they spoke and although I heard what they were saying I did not register it but was lost to my drawing. I saw them clearly, Emma in a long orange-colored skirt and white pleated blouse. It was a certainty that she wore a ribbon in her hair. One of the things I discovered after the second preliminary sketch was that she had a light dappling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her body was thin and athletic with the newly evolving modern look; a contrast to Samantha’s fuller figure. I knew that if I were to paint this young woman she would be situated in a lush green garden in full sunlight, sitting on a marble bench. She would be wearing a summer dress, rendered with a number 4 filbert in a translucent quinacridone red, holding a book and staring off as if rapt in a daydream of herself as one of its characters.

  I was putting the finishing touches to the sketch, now rendering a quick profile of Samantha’s braided hair, when a snippet of the conversation drew me abruptly away from my work.

  “…weeping blood,” Emma had just said.

  “Bizarre,” said Samantha. “That’s dreadful.”

  “Who was weeping blood?” I called out, and nearly turned around.

  “A woman in an alleyway. I had been at W. & J. Sloane on Nineteenth Street buying fabric. On the walk home, I passed an alley on Broadway and happened to look in. There was a woman not too far down the way, leaning against the wall. She seemed to be unwell, so I stopped. She noticed me and looked up. I could be mistaken, but it appeared as if she were crying blood. Her tears were red, staining her white jacket. The second she noticed me she turned away as if in embarrassment.”

  “What became of her?” I asked, and in my agitation now did turn around, seeking an answer.

  Emma’s eyes widened with my sudden movement, as if I had walked in on her in the middle of dressing, and flustered she said quickly, “I don’t know. I left her alone.”

  I was about to blurt out my own experience on the way home from Shenz’s place but remembered my promise to John. Managing a smile, I said only “Interesting.”

  “Perhaps I should have approached her,” said Emma, rapidly shedding my vision of her to confront me with reality. She was short and somewhat stocky—her dark hair in ringlets, no ribbon, not a freckle in sight, and her outfit was a dowdy dark blue affair.

  “Who would know what to do in that situation?” said Samantha. “Obviously the woman wanted to be alone in her grief.”

  “But the blood,” said Emma. “I’m sure she was crying blood.”

  “What heartbreak,” said Samantha, shaking her head.

  “Indeed,” I said.

  After I thanked the women, and made plans to meet Samantha after her show, they left to prepare for that evening’s performance. I prayed they would not ask to see my sketches and was surprised when they did not. It must have been an arrangement Samantha had made before the session. I doubt there was ever a woman more discreet. Later I tore the drawings from my book and threw them all in the fire. “What heartbreak,” I thought, and went to fix myself a drink.

  THE ASYLUM

  IT SEEMED that the remainder of Saturday was to be given over to pointless maundering. I had just settled down in the studio with my drink, prepared for a first-class stare, when again someone knocked at my door. This time it was Shenz, wearing his velvet derby and matching coat, carrying that walking stick of his with an old man’s head carved into the handle. He had a hansom cab waiting in the street and seemed very excited.

  “Grab your coat, Piambo,” he said. “We’re going for a visit.”

  “Why don’t you just come in and have a few,” I said.

  “Nonsense, this is important.”

  “Whom are we going to see?” I asked, reaching into the closet for my coat. “From the looks of your outfit, I’d guess Whistler is in town.”

  “Close,” said Shenz. “We’re going to meet with a lunatic by the name of Francis Borne.”

  “I’ve had enough madness for one week,” I said.

  “No, you haven’t. This old fellow once worked for Ossiak as a prognosticator like your Mrs. Charbuque’s father.”

  That was all I needed to hear. I threw my coat on, and we were out the door. As we boarded the hansom, I asked Shenz how he had tracked the man down.

  “A little asking about in the right circles,” he said. He shut the cab door and then leaned out the window to tell the driver, �
��Morningside Heights, One Hundred Seventeenth Street and the boulevard.”

  “That’s way up by the Hudson. Where are you taking me?” I asked.

  “Bloomingdale’s asylum for the insane,” he answered.

  “Fitting,” I said, and the horses began to move.

  The day was unseasonably warm; the sky a dab of lead white in a sea of Windsor blue. It was only a little past noon. The streets were crowded with shoppers and the usual bustle of business. In addition to the throng of pedestrians, the streetcars, and the carriages, there were quite a few motorcars maneuvering through the traffic. Together, they conspired to raise a fog of fine brown silt on the major thoroughfares.

  I looked across the compartment at Shenz, who sat facing me with his back to the driver, resting both hands on the head of his cane. He was staring intently out the window, as if the melee on the street might reveal some important secret.

  “And what certain circles were those that identified this Francis Borne as an ex-employee of Ossiak?” I said, breaking the silence.

  “A gentleman I know in the Village who traffics in curatives and elixirs and the like,” he said. “The Man from the Equator.”

  “There’s a singular moniker,” I said.

  “He’s a singular fellow,” said Shenz.

  “Mrs. Charbuque’s father plumbed the mysteries of snowflakes. What of Borne? Astrologer? Dream reader? Divination by analysis of the corns on one’s feet? What was his specialty?”

  “I don’t know the official name for it,” said Shenz. “Some kind of turdologist.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “He predicts the future by way of the past, so to speak,” he said, and smiled.