by John Farris
"Dal's home," Mrs. Aldrich said when Barry walked into the kitchen.
"He is! When did he get here?"
"Half hour ago—right after you left. I hope I can stretch the green beans."
Dal came into the kitchen through the laundry room, walking gimpily, wearing unpressed clothing and a Greek fisherman's cap. He had a straggly beard along the jawline. His eyes looked as if they were about to bleed. His lips were white, the end of his nose raw from the Med sun. His hands trembled. She ran to him, but he stopped her with the forbidding intensity of his stare before she could embrace him.
"Hey, how'd you get here?" she asked joyously. "Olympic from Athens. Barry, I need to talk to you. Right now."
"Sure! What's the matter? You look—is Dad—" Dal jerked his head toward the studio."He's inside."
"He's okay, isn't he?"
"See what you think. My God, kid—why didn't you call me sooner?
Scared, the skin of her face shrinking tight, Barry ran by him to the studio.
"Dad!"
He was standing by the window wall, some sketches in one hanging hand, when she burst in. The intensity of light in the studio blanched and dwarfed him. Barry ran to her father and Dal followed.
Tom moved only after she touched him pleadingly, but it was a scant erratic sort of action, the residue of momentum in a discarded windup toy. There was a muscular twitch in one desiccated cheek, giving him a jumpy unmeant smile. He held up the batch of sketches.
"This was my idea," he said in a voice without shading or emphasis; yet it built up a mountain of apprehension in her breast.
"I don't understand either of you! What's going on?"
Dal steered her away, in the direction of the easels on which Mark had left various pieces of work unfinished. He pointed to the full figure of Barry in oil.
"Is Mark painting that?"
"Yes. Isn't he good? Dal, you have no idea how hard he's been—"
"You posed nude for him?"
"What does it look like? Is there anything wrong with life studies?"
Dal laughed derisively and said, "What else are you doing with him?"
"Don't you dare ask me a question like that!" Then, hands on hips, she answered it. "What do I do with Mark? Anything I want, Dal. I'm not a child. And I don't meddle in your life."
"This isn't meddling, Barry. Something very serious is happening here. What about the landscape?"
"It's marvelous! I'd like to see you do something that good." She didn't care by then what kind of wounds she left in Dal.
Tom, behind them, said, "The landscape isn't Mark's."
Barry whirled, astonished. "Dad! I've watched him working on."
"That's not the point," Dal said with a hissing intake of breath. "Just listen to what Dad is saying."
Barry backed away from both of them. Tom followed her with the sketches, holding them out, his eyes tired and dull.
"The painting, the idea of the painting, is mine. I conceived it almost two years ago. He stole it from me."
Barry glared in disbelief, then took the sketches from her father.
Most of them had been rendered in watercolor, and they were, as he had said, ideas, austere jottings, the shorthand that preserved a glimpse, insight, or emotion that might someday evolve into a major painting. Barry had looked at these dashings of her father's all of her life; she knew his methods well. She looked up now at the landscape that Mark had made. Yes, there were common elements, a certain elegance of line, although one could not have guessed from the sketches how the finished painting might have looked. That was always a result of experience, intuition, exploration, the illuminating flash of genius that sometimes occurred and sometimes didn't.
"But—what if he did see these? If I saw them I couldn't make a painting from them—any more than I could make a cow from a cow's udder. Mark's done a fantastic—"
"Barry," Tom said, "the painting on that easel is exactly what flashed through my mind when I first saw that cracked jar in a field; I saw it whole for an instant and then I put it out of my mind—deliberately, after drawing just a few lines the way I always do, as a reference. Then I tossed the idea into that cupboard in the back of my mind and purposely didn't look at it again for a long time. Mark couldn't have seen those later sketches because they'd been locked in a cabinet drawer. For months. But there's the painting, the exact painting I would have done!"
This rush of explanation seemed to leave him ill and faint. He sat down, mouth ajar, and leaned back in a low collapsible deck chair, slanting out of the light and into the shadow of a cabinet, turning as black as if he were charred: a consumed, dead thing.
"It's uncanny, all right," Barry said with a worried look at her father. "But just what is everybody accusing him of? Where is Mark?"
"I told him it would be a good idea if he fed the chickens," Dal said.
"Well, I want him here! This isn't fair. Mark and I know how hard he worked to do that landscape! A couple of hundred hours to get it right! And he didn't steal a damn thing—I watched him work it up from scratch. He happens to be a tremendously gifted—"
"But where is the talent coming from, Barry?" her brother demanded.
"How should I know? If I did I'd go get myself some."
"He couldn't paint a lick when I left here two and a half months ago."
"He learns very fast."
"Barry, it's just impossible! I started formal training when I was fourteen years old! Dad worked for twenty years to be able to do a painting as accomplished as that landscape."
"Mozart—"
"Musical prodigies and freaks are irrelevant—it's another discipline entirely. There aren't any teenage geniuses in the art biz. That landscape isn't just technically good, it's phenomenal! It's Thomas Brennan at the top of his form, painted with all of his talent—"
"A talent I don't have anymore," Tom said, his voice sliding high from emotion. "He's taken it, all away from me."
"This is ridiculous! You two killed a bottle before I got home. Admit it, now."
"No, Barry," Dal said. "We're sober and we're scared. Because we're artists, and neither of us understands how a painting like that can exist, out of nowhere."
Barry looked at the father and brother whom she loved and felt a surge of contempt. And she also felt a real paddy whack coming on, the falling-down, foamingat-the-mouth kind that had so terrified them all when she was younger. It would serve them right. But it would also have been a negation of the maturity she had proclaimed to Dal, and it wouldn't help make right a ludicrous, evil situation. She knew what to do. What to say. Barry banned all emotion. She smiled.
"Well, I can explain,"
"Can you?" Dal asked wearily.
"These paintings didn't come out of nowhere. Mark is an artist, and he's always been an artist. He's always had enormous talent. His parents were artists. They saw his potential, so they made him work very hard. He—he never went to school. He wasn't allowed to have friends. He hated the discipline, but he was afraid to fail. His father—would beat him,"
Tom's head came up slowly.
"How do you know this, Barry?"
"Mark remembers more about himself than he wants to tell anybody. That's his privilege, isn't it?"
"His parents are artists?" Dal said."Draven? I never heard of—"
"Were artists. They were killed in an accident, in Europe. An avalanche in the Swiss Alps. A whole village was buried. Terrible. And Draven isn't his family name—it was his grandmother's maiden name. Mark adored his grandmother. But she's dead now too. His past is really painful. He trusts me not to talk about it. I just can't say any more."
Tom looked at the splendid landscape, his sense of outrage dimmed.
Dal said reluctantly, "Barry—it doesn't explain enough. How could he have changed so much in just a few—"
"I don't want to hear any more! I've told you the truth!"
Then the emotions she had so resolutely placed under control burst through her facade of calm and rea
son.
"You two are going to ruin everything!" she said, sobbing bitterly. And she stalked out of the studio.
She found Mark in the barn hunkered down in a long reach of sunlight, sketching a bantam cock. He put down his materials and the cock went crazy-stepping away at Barry's stony approach.
She wiped one eye with the heel of her hand and threw herself down in a pile of fragrant straw near Mark.
"They don't want me here," he said.
"I don't care! They have no right to act this way. I know my dad hasn't been feeling so hot, but this afternoon he was carrying on like he'd lost his marbles." She rolled toward him. "Mark, I told them a story about you getting some of your memory back."
"Why?"
"I had to. They forced me. And it was the right thing to do. They feel just a little better about you now, believe me."
"What did you say?" he asked with a slight perplexed smile.
Barry told him about his abusive parents, his instinctive desire to adopt his grandmother's maiden name as his own.
"I know it's all bullshit, but Mark, please, you need a story now. I'm still thinking up parts, but here's what I've got so far. You came to this country last year, you were hitchhiking across the U.S., you fell in with two guys in a van who gave you some kind of drug that had a terrible effect on your system. They stole your clothes, money, passport—everything. The drug wiped out your memory, and you still can't recall very much about your life. Just some of the rough times you've had."
"Why do I need to say this?"'
"For my dad's sake. So Dal will stop being so suspicious."
Barry sat cross-legged and began picking pieces of hay out of her hair, eyeing him lugubriously. There were times when he could be very still and inscrutable, and after a while it never failed to bother her.
"Do you feel better?" Mark asked quietly.
"It doesn't matter to me! I've told you over and over, I don't need to know who you were, I only care about who you are. I love you, Mark. And I love Tuatha de Dannan and my family, and I want us all to be happy here. I want you to be a part of it."
Mark nodded. "That's what I want." But he sighed and picked at chalk beneath his nails. "I'll tell them what you want me to. But it won't help. Dal just doesn't like me. He never has. It was better with him away. I'm sorry he came back."
"Oh, he's crazy jealous. That's his problem. Don't worry. For now I just want to smooth things over. Maybe if we find you another place to paint, they'll calm down. The gristmill has good light."
Mark didn't say anything.
Barry rose and dusted herself off and put her arms around him. "Guess we'd better go face the music. Don't worry."
"I'm not." Mark knew she wanted to be kissed; he pressed his lips against hers. Arm in arm they walked slowly out of the barn and to the house.
Dinner was a tense affair—very nearly unpleasant. Dal was eating when they got there, as if he planned to make short work of his meal. There was a glass of whiskey at his place. Tom sat in his chair at the head of the table looking famished, but food didn't interest him. Neither did conversation.
Barry, on the upbeat, said to her brother, "You didn't tell me. How was Greece?"
"Hot."
"And a wall fell on you."
"Uh-huh."
"'Didn't improve your looks."
Dal's fork scraped his plate unnervingly. "Is that supposed to be funny?"
"Hey, Dal, give us a break?"
Dal gulped some of his whiskey, which made him sweat. He glanced at Mark, who was eating and looking troubled. Their eyes met.
Mark said evenly, "I want to be your friend, Dal."
"You can be."
"How?"
Dal dropped his napkin on the table beside his plate, pushed his chair back.
"Since Dad isn't in a proper frame of mind to make decisions for the family—"
"No, Dal," Barry said warningly, "don't keep this up." Out of the corner-of her eye she saw Mrs. Aldrich just beyond the doorway to the kitchen, raptly attentive.
"I'll have to assume the responsibility," Dal concluded, ignoring his sister. ''Let's just get this over with. Mark, I don't think it's in the best interests of this family that you stay on here."
"Dal, you shit!"
"Shut up, Barry. Or go upstairs to your room while we discuss—"
"Who do you think you're talking—"
"Barry," Mark said, "don't fight with your brother."
"Look," Dal said, sensing cooperation, "I don't want to be unreasonable. You had a tough time for a while, we were accommodating, and I'm not trying to throw you out on your ear. Take a week or so to make plans. We'll help. I can lend you money—"
"If Mark goes I'm going with him!"
Mark turned to Tom Brennan, who had sat listening with his head bowed.
"What do you say, Tom?"
Tom didn't look at him. "I don't want you in my Studio anymore."
Mark accepted the edict with no change of expression. "I love to paint," he said, but his petition met with indifference. "All I want is to be as great as you are."
Then everybody was silent, including Barry, whose eyes brimmed with furious tears. Mark got up slowly from the table. The sunset light that filled the room was as thick as marmalade. The ceiling in the dining room was low and coffered. Its lowness accentuated Mark's size. By contrast Dal seemed slight, carelessly made, in his chair across the trestle table.
"I want to think about what you said," Mark told Dal. "I'll go for a walk now."
Barry started to rise; he put out his hand. "No. Don't come, Barry." Then Mark went quickly out through the kitchen with a slight shrug and a glance at Mrs. Aldrich. She gave him a tight-lipped smile. Barry heard him whistling up Meanness in the backyard.
Mrs. Aldrich came in with helpings of strawberries and ice cream.
"All I can say is, that is one of the sweetest boys I've ever known in my life."
Dal lighted a cigarette and shot smoke through his nose. Tom took his pipe from a pocket on one sleeve of his cardigan sweater. Barry got up without excusing herself and walked into the kitchen, stood looking out the screen door as Mark, accompanied by the hound, moved briskly downhill in the direction of the pond, flickering through peaceful lighted glades, losing definition among trees already gone dark except where the tips of leaves, stirring mildly in the twilight, exploded like powder flash. The pink dogwood outside the kitchen windows, the last thing the sun glorified as it set, was of a hue and richness that caused her eyes to ache.
"Barry?" Dal called from the dining room.
She shook off the sound of his voice like a horse twitching away a fly.
Chapter 28
"Mean, where would I go?"
By the black pond, where a collapsing bank had thrown a willow half into the water, he had walked up, the supple overarching trunk, barely wider than his foot to begin with, tapering to a wand that dipped almost subsurface at the cautious offering of his weight. It was an act of precision, of exquisite balance that he main-tamed almost effortlessly, the whole of the withering tree a sway at his will, with each slow breath. Bats flew in charmed parabolas from greater heights, fish jumped silkenly from the musty depths, cicadas illuminated the inner ear. The bloodhound had the scent of muskrat in the marshland but found the mud a chore and slunk round again to the sound of Mark's voice, a rising eye as rosy as the moon. Meanness flapped his head and chewed ecstatically at a flea-bitten ear.
"I have to stay," Mark reasoned, looking at the house on the knoll, where a figure appeared now and then at an upstairs window, indistinct but swarming with life, like a fleck of embryo in the warm yolk of an egg. It was Barry, of course.
"I have to paint," Mark said, momentarily forlorn. "But Dal's a shit." He looked up abruptly, risking his balance, filling his eyes with the passage of stars. His body, bent, wavering slightly, seemed fatally crippled then, as if he were suspended from an invisible gallows. The spacious act of breathing revived him. He gathered himself and cam
e in a twinkling, a lanky run down the tree trunk to land with a plop beside the aging hound.
"You're my dog, my dog, my good dog," he crooned, giving Meanness an affectionate drubbing behind the ears. "You want me to stay, don't you? So does Barry. It's my home. So if I stay, Mean—"
He held the dog's face close to his, pinned by the ears, and looked him in the eye. He made, in his throat, a low warlike growl that caused Meanness to twitch and try to back away from him.
Mark laughed and released the hound, laughed at the freedom he felt, luxuriating in the security he had provided himself by arriving at a fair solution to the dilemma.
"If I stay, then they'll have to go."
Chapter 29
Barry would have canceled their Saturday night dinner plans, but Tom woke up the next morning saying he felt better than he had in weeks. He ate some breakfast and showed no inclination to lie abed until noon. He told Barry that he was looking forward to having some company for a change.
He was even conciliatory toward Mark, who obviously didn't hold a grudge and indeed seemed to have forgotten all of the unpleasantness at the table the night before. The two of them worked, before the sun rose too high, in the garden. Barry went over the menu for dinner with Mrs. Aldrich and her cousin, a big husky woman in her seventies with an obscure biblical name from the lengthy roll call of Genesis; everybody just called her Aunt Sparky. She was a swift worker, but gimpy from an arthritic hip.
Dal disappeared early into his studio with a portfolio of watercolors and line drawings he'd done in the Mediterranean and which he wasn't ready to share with anyone, including Tom. Just as well he chose to lie low. Barry felt sore as a boil whenever she caught a glimpse of her brother. But she realized the wisdom of temporarily avoiding a nasty set-to. Mark had been given, rather autocratically, a grace period, and all the nonsense (Barry's interpretation) might well dissipate once Dal settled in and concentrated on his own work. There was peace and quiet again, time to enjoy life—they had another pretty day of dappled clouds and sweet breezes, although rain was forecast by nightfall.