“That was the last one he did,” she says again.
It’s hard to take my eyes off the painting, and I’m already wondering if she will permit me to get a few shots of it before I leave.
“It’s not in any of the catalogs,” I say. “It’s not mentioned anywhere in his papers or the literature.”
“No, it wouldn’t be. It was our secret,” she replies. “After all those years working together, he wanted to give me something special, and so he did this last one and then never showed it to anyone else. I had it framed when I came back from Europe in forty-six, after the war. For years, it was rolled up in a cardboard tube, rolled up and swaddled in muslin, kept on the top shelf of a friend’s closet. A mutual friend, actually, who admired him greatly, though I never showed her this painting.”
I finally manage to look away from the canvas, turning back towards the woman sitting up straight in her wheelchair. She looks very pleased at my surprise, and I ask her the first question that comes to mind.
“Has anyone else ever seen it? Besides that friend, and besides me?”
“Certainly,” she says. “It’s been hanging right there for the past twenty years, and I do occasionally have visitors, every now and then. I’m not a complete recluse. Not quite yet.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you were.”
And she’s still staring up at the painting, and the impression I have is that she hasn’t paused to look at it closely for a long time. It’s as though she’s suddenly noticing it, and probably couldn’t recall the last time that she did. Sure, it’s a fact of her everyday landscape, another component of the crowded reliquary of her apartment. But, like the Tiffany dragonfly lamp given her by that forgotten playwright, I suspect she rarely ever pauses to consider it.
Watching her as she peers so intently at the painting looming up behind me and the threadbare brocade chair where I sit, I’m struck once more by those green eyes of hers. They’re the same green eyes the artist gave to every incarnation of his mermaid, and they seem to me even brighter than they did before, and not the least bit dimmed by age. They are like some subtle marriage of emerald and jade and shallow saltwater, brought to life by unknown alchemies. They give me a greater appreciation of the painter, that he so perfectly conveyed her eyes, deftly communicating the complexities of iris and sclera, cornea and retina and pupil. That anyone could have the talent required to transfer these precise and complex hues into mere oils and acrylics.
“How did it begin?” I ask, predictably enough. Of course, the artist wrote repeatedly of the mermaids’ genesis. I even found a 1967 dissertation on the subject hidden away in the stacks at Harvard. But I’m pretty sure no one has ever bothered to ask the model. Gradually, and, I think, reluctantly, her green eyes drift away from the canvas and back to me.
“It’s not as if that’s a secret,” she says. “I believe he even told a couple of the magazine reporters about the dreams. One in Paris, and maybe one here in New York, too. He often spoke with me about his dreams. They were always so vivid, and he wrote them down. He painted them, whenever he could. Just as he painted the mermaids.”
I glance over at the recorder lying on the table and wish that I’d waited until later on to ask that particular question. It should have been placed somewhere towards the end, not right at the front. I’m definitely off my game today, and it’s not only the heat from the radiators making me sweat. I’ve been disarmed, unbalanced, first by Regarding the Shore from Whale Rock, and then by having looked so deeply into her eyes. I clear my throat, and she asks if I’d like a glass of water or maybe a cold A&W Cream Soda. I thank her, but shake my head no.
“I’m fine,” I say, “but thank you.”
“It can get awfully stuffy in here,” she says and glances down at the dingy Persian rug that covers almost the entire floor. This is the first time since she let me through the door that I’ve seen her frown.
“Honestly, it’s not so bad,” I insist, failing to sound the least bit honest.
“Why, there are days,” she says, “it’s like being in a sauna. Or a damned tropical jungle, Tahiti or Brazil or someplace like that, and it’s a wonder I don’t start hearing parrots and monkeys. But it helps with the pain, usually more than the pills do.”
And here’s the one thing she was adamant that we not discuss, the childhood injury that left her crippled. She’s told me how she has always loathed writers and critics who tried to draw a parallel between the mermaids and her paralysis. “Don’t even bring it up,” she warned on the phone, almost a week ago, and I assured her that I wouldn’t. Only, now she’s brought it up. I sit very still in the broken-down armchair, there beneath the last painting, waiting to see what she’ll say next. I try hard to clear my head and focus, and to decide what question on the short list scribbled in my steno pad might steer the interview back on course.
“There was more than his dreams,” she admits, almost a full minute later. The statement has the slightly abashed quality of a confession. And I have no idea how to respond, so I don’t. She blinks, and looks up at me again, the pale ghost of that previous smile returning to her lips. “Would it bother you if I smoke?” she asks.
“No,” I reply. “Not at all. Please, whatever makes you comfortable.”
“These days, well, it bothers so many people. As though the Pope had added smoking to the list of venial sins. I get the most awful glares, sometimes, so I thought I’d best ask first.”
“It’s your home,” I tell her, and she nods and reaches into a pocket of her skirt, retrieving a pack of Marlboro Reds and a disposable lighter.
“To some, that doesn’t seem to matter,” she says. “There’s a woman comes around twice a week to attend to the dusting and trash and whatnot, a Cuban woman, and if I smoke when she’s here, she always complains and tries to open the window, even though I’ve told her time and time again it’s been painted shut for ages. It’s not like I don’t pay her.”
Considering the thick and plainly undisturbed strata of dust, and the odors, I wonder if she’s making this up, or if perhaps the Cuban woman might have stopped coming around a long time ago.
“I promised him, when he told me, I would never tell anyone else this,” she says, and here she pauses to light her cigarette, then return the rest of the pack and her lighter to their place in her skirt pocket. She blows a gray cloud of smoke away from me. “Not another living soul. It was a sort of pact between us, you understand. But, lately, it’s been weighing on me. I wake up in the night, sometimes, and it’s like a stone around my neck. I don’t think it’s something I want to take with me to the grave. He told me the day we started work on the second painting.”
“That would have been in May 1939, yes?”
And here she laughs again and shakes her head. “Hell if I know. Maybe you have it written down somewhere in that pad of yours, but I don’t remember the date. Not anymore. But . . . I do know it was the same year the World’s Fair opened here in New York, and I know it was after Amelia Earhart disappeared. He knew her, Amelia Earhart. He knew so many interesting people. But I’m rambling, aren’t I?”
“I’m in no hurry,” I answer. “Take your time.” But she frowns again and stares at the smoldering tip of her cigarette for a moment.
“I like to think, sir, that I am a practical woman,” she says, looking directly at me and raising her chin an inch or so. “I have always wanted to be able to consider myself a practical woman. And now I’m very old. Very, very old, yes, and a practical woman must acknowledge the fact that women who are this old will not live much longer. I know I’ll die soon, and the truth about the mermaids, it isn’t something I want to take with me to my grave. So, I’ll tell you, and betray his confidence. If you’ll listen, of course.”
“Certainly,” I reply, struggling not let my excitement show through, but feeling like a vulture, anyway. “If you’d prefer, I can shut off the recorder,” I offer.
“No, no . . . I want you to put this in your artic
le. I want them to print it in that magazine you write for, because it seems to me that people ought to know. If they’re still so infatuated with the mermaids after all this time, it doesn’t seem fitting that they don’t know. It seems almost indecent.”
I don’t remind her that I’m a freelance and the article’s being done on spec, so there’s no guarantee anyone’s going to buy it, or that it will ever be printed and read. And that feels indecent, too, but I keep my mouth shut and listen while she talks. I can always nurse my guilty conscience later on.
“The summer before I met him, before we started working together,” she begins, and then pauses to take another drag on her cigarette. Her eyes return to the painting behind me. “I suppose that would have been the summer of 1937. The Depression was still on, but his family, out on Long Island, they’d come through it better than most. He had money. Sometimes he’d take commissions from magazines, if the pay was decent. The New Yorker, that was one he did some work for, and Harper’s Bazaar, and Collier’s, but I guess you know this sort of thing, having done so much research on his life.”
The ash on her Marlboro is growing perilously long, though she seems not to have noticed. I glance about and spot an empty ashtray, heavy lead glass, perched on the edge of a nearby coffee table. It doesn’t look as though it’s been emptied in days or weeks, another argument against the reality of the Cuban maid. My armchair squeaks and pops angrily when I lean forward to retrieve it. I offer it to her, and she takes her eyes off the painting just long enough to accept it and to thank me.
“Anyway,” she continues, “mostly he was able to paint what he wanted. That was a freedom that he never took for granted. He was staying in Atlantic City that summer, because he said he liked watching the people on the boardwalk. Sometimes, he’d sit and sketch them for hours, in charcoal and pastels. He showed quite a lot of the boardwalk sketches to me, and I think he always meant to do paintings from them, but, to my knowledge, he ever did.
“That summer, he was staying at the Traymore, which I never saw, but he said was wonderful. Many of his friends and acquaintances would go to Atlantic City in the summer, so he never lacked for company if he wanted it. There were the most wonderful parties, he told me. Sometimes, in the evenings, he’d go down onto the beach alone, onto the sand, I mean, because he said the waves and the gulls and the smell of the sea comforted him. In his studio, the one he kept on the Upper West Side, there was a quart mayonnaise jar filled with seashells and sand dollars and the like. He’d picked them all up at Atlantic City, over the years. Some of them we used as props in the paintings, and he also had a cabinet with shells from Florida and Nassau and the Cape and I don’t know where else. He showed me conchs and starfish from the Mediterranean and Japan, I remember. Seashells from all over the world, easily. He loved them, and driftwood, too.”
She taps her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray and stares at the painting of the mermaid and the lighthouse, and I have the distinct feeling that she’s drawing some sort of courage from it, the requisite courage needed to break a promise she’s kept for seventy years. A promise she made three decades before my own birth. And I know now how to sum up the smell of her apartment. It smells like time.
“It was late July, and the sun was setting,” she says, speaking very slowly now, as though every word is being chosen with great and deliberate care. “And he told me that he was in a foul temper that evening, having fared poorly at a poker game the night before. He played cards. He said it was one of his only weaknesses.
“At any rate, he went down onto the sand, and he was barefoot, he said. I remember that, him telling me he wasn’t wearing shoes.” And it occurs to me then that possibly none of what I’m hearing is the truth, that she’s spinning a fanciful yarn so I won’t be disappointed, lying for my benefit, or because her days are so filled with monotony and she is determined this unusual guest will be entertained. I push the thoughts away. There’s no evidence of deceit in her voice. Art journalism hasn’t made me rich or well known, but I have gotten pretty good at knowing a lie when I hear one.
“He said to me, ‘The sand was so cool beneath my feet.’ He walked for a while, and then, just before dark, came across a group of young boys, eight or nine years old, and they were crowded around something that had washed up on the beach. The tide was going out, and what the boys had found, it had been stranded by the retreating tide. He recalled thinking it odd that they were all out so late, the boys, that they were not at dinner with their families. The lights were coming on along the boardwalk.”
Now she suddenly averts her eyes from the painting on the wall of her apartment, Regarding the Shore from Whale Rock, as though she’s taken what she needs and it has nothing left to offer. She crushes her cigarette out in the ashtray and doesn’t look at me. She chews at her lower lip, chewing away some of the lipstick. The old woman in the wheelchair does not appear sad nor wistful. I think it’s anger, that expression, and I want to ask her why she’s angry. Instead, I ask what it was the boys found on the beach, what the artist saw that evening. She doesn’t answer right away, but closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly, raggedly.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to press you. If you want to stop—”
“I do not want to stop,” she says, opening her eyes again. “I have not come this far, and said this much, only to stop. It was a woman, a very young woman. He said that she couldn’t have been much more than nineteen or twenty. One of the children was poking at her with a stick, and he took the stick and shooed them all away.”
“She was drowned?” I ask.
“Maybe. Maybe she drowned first. But she was bitten in half. There was nothing much left of her below the ribcage. Just bone and meat and a big hollowed-out place where all her organs had been, her stomach and lungs and everything. Still, there was no blood anywhere. It was like she’d never had a single drop of blood in her. He told me, ‘I never saw anything else even half that horrible.’ And, you know, that wasn’t so long after he’d come back to the States from the war in Spain, fighting against the fascists, the Francoists. He was at the Siege of Madrid and saw awful, awful things there. He said to me, ‘I saw atrocities, but this was worse . . . ’ ”
And then she trails off and glares down at the ashtray in her lap, at a curl of smoke rising lazily from her cigarette butt.
“You don’t have to go on,” I say, almost whispering. “I’ll understand—”
“Oh hell,” she says and shrugs her frail shoulders. “There isn’t that much left to tell. He figured that a shark did it, maybe one big shark or several smaller ones. He took her by the arms, and he hauled what was left of her up onto the dry sand, up towards the boardwalk, so she wouldn’t be swept back out to sea. He sat down beside the body, because at first he didn’t know what to do, and he said he didn’t want to leave her alone. She was dead, but he didn’t want to leave her alone. I don’t know how long he sat there, but he said it was dark when he finally went to find a policeman.
“The body was still there when they got back. No one had disturbed it. The little boys had not returned. But he said the whole affair was hushed up, because the chamber of commerce was afraid that a shark scare would frighten away the tourists and ruin the rest of the season. It had happened before. He said he went straight back to the Traymore and packed his bags, got a ticket on the next train to Manhattan. And he never visited Atlantic City ever again, but he started painting the mermaids, the very next year, right after he found me. Sometimes,” she says, “I think maybe I should have taken it as an insult. But I didn’t, and I still don’t.”
And then she falls silent, the way a storyteller falls silent when a tale is done. She takes another deep breath, rolls her wheelchair back about a foot or so, until it bumps hard against one end of the chaise lounge. She laughs nervously and lights another cigarette. And I ask her other questions, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with Atlantic City or the dead woman. We talk about other painters she’s kn
own, and jazz musicians, and writers, and she talks about how much New York’s changed, how much the whole world has changed around her. As she speaks, I have the peculiar, disquieting sensation that, somehow, she’s passed the weight of that seventy-year-old secret on to me, and I think even if the article sells (and now I don’t doubt that it will) and a million people read it, a hundred million people, the weight will not be diminished.
This is what it’s like to be haunted, I think, and then I try to dismiss the thought as melodramatic, or absurd, or childish. But her jade-and-surf green eyes, the mermaids’ eyes, are there to assure me otherwise.
It’s almost dusk before we’re done. She asks me to stay for dinner, but I make excuses about needing to be back in Boston. I promise to mail her a copy of the article when I’ve finished, and she tells me she’ll watch for it. She tells me how she doesn’t get much mail anymore, a few bills and ads, but nothing she ever wants to read.
Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep Page 26