Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  “Maybe he’s started to see you as a rival,” Sarah said, and Jamie felt a righteous gratitude to her for articulating a suspicion he had long tried to suppress. But all he could say, without getting into the drinking and gambling or acknowledging the resentment that had saturated Wallace along with the liquor, was, “I don’t see why he should be. He’s a very good painter.”

  He told her about the evening he’d decided to leave, how he’d sat on the kitchen floor with the dogs milling around him, saying goodbye to each in turn before he slipped out the kitchen door and walked in the dark to the tracks. He’d run alongside the first westbound train and grabbed onto the irons, feeling the fearsome heaviness of the train, the irresistible pull of it. For a while he’d lain on the coal-blacked bottom of an empty gondola car, his rucksack serving as a pillow, looking at the stars and shivering with exhilaration and terror. Periodically a tunnel enveloped him with a smoky whoosh, as though he’d been inhaled by a dragon.

  “Weren’t you afraid?” said Sarah.

  “Very.”

  At dawn, somewhere in Idaho, he’d been woken by a sharp pain across his shins, the thwack of the rail-yard bull’s billy stick. “You’re lucky,” the bull said. “Sometimes they don’t look before they dump in the coal.” He’d gone through Jamie’s rucksack, taken five dollars from his paltry roll of bills, sent him walking along the tracks out of town, told him he should be grateful, and he was. Jamie had hidden in the bushes until nightfall, hopped a train that took him to Spokane. The tramps had pointed out a Seattle train, advised him about the tunnel, about tapping the cinders.

  “Did you know someone here?” Sarah asked. “Is that why you came?”

  They had already circled the lake and were back sitting in the shade on his apple crates. Embarrassed, he told her about his vague plan of haunting the dock in search of his father.

  “What would you do if you found him?”

  “That’s a good question. I don’t actually know.”

  “Are you sure you want to find him?”

  “I think so. It must mean something that I keep thinking about it.” Though he’s never sure what to imagine after the first flash of recognition.

  “Even though he’s given no sign he wants to be found?” Her voice was friendly, curious, firm, a bit teacherly.

  He said, “I think he owes me…” He couldn’t think how to finish the sentence. “A conversation.”

  “What if he’s awful? Or insane?”

  “I’d try to help him, I think.”

  “Maybe it’s less that you want to know where he is and more that you don’t want to not know.”

  Mulishly, he said, “I don’t see how those are so different.”

  She smiled, a trace of pity on her long face. He wanted to draw her again. Not a Madonna this time but someone disguised as a Madonna. “Then I hope you find him. I can’t imagine life without my father. He looms large. Gloria and Hazel and I think we’re so wild, going around the city by ourselves, but we’re just as coddled as anything. The only reason I’m allowed my bit of freedom is that I’m the youngest, so my parents have had to relax some, if only out of exhaustion.”

  “Youngest of how many?”

  “Five.”

  He realized he had been so pleased by her attention, so happy to be known again by someone even in some small way, that he’d failed to learn anything at all about her. “You tricked me into talking about myself this whole time,” he said. “Now you. Start at the beginning, please.”

  “Tricked you?” she repeated. She looked at her delicate silver wristwatch. “Unfortunately, I have to go home. I’ll be in big trouble if I stay to tell you my life’s story, although it will seem very dull after yours.” She stood. “Can we meet again?”

  Trying to conceal his euphoria, he said, “We have to. Otherwise I won’t forgive myself for rambling on.”

  She promised she would come again the next day.

  * * *

  —

  He spent the night in a fever. He ached to kiss Sarah, to feel her slender torso against his. He thought he might actually trade his life to see her naked. He wanted, with an uneasy undertow of shame, to do to her what he had seen that unknown man do to Gilda so long ago, to press her under his weight, to dredge and rut and dig at her. Most of all, he wanted her to want him to do this.

  As muddy dawn lightened the window, he took up his drawing pad and started sketching in a frenzy. Sarah from the waist up, bare-breasted. Sarah lying naked with her arms behind her head, her legs demurely crossed. Then Sarah with her legs apart, a shadow between them to disguise his uncertainty.

  Their second meeting, he had to keep fighting off erotic reveries as they walked around the lake. Her nearness, her bare forearms, her lavender aroma overwhelmed him, but he made himself try to listen, to repay the attention she’d given him.

  She told him about her sisters and brother, her parents, her English sheepdog, Jasper. Her mother was passionate and political but, in Sarah’s opinion, also too submissive to her father, a businessman, who was alternately jovial and overbearing and tolerated his wife’s causes as long as she didn’t bore him with talk of them. She said she would go to UW like her sisters, though if it were up to her she’d go somewhere farther away, like Wellesley or Radcliffe. (“Isn’t it up to you?” Jamie said, and she laughed and said nothing was up to her.) She mentioned she had shown his portrait of her to her father, who was, as Hazel had said, an art collector.

  “I think Father’s self-conscious about his origins,” she said. “Art is one way for him to show how cultured he’s become. I don’t mean to make him sound superficial. He loves it genuinely and is very knowledgeable. I asked him if he’d heard of your uncle, and he had. He thinks he might even own one of his paintings.”

  “That seems unlikely.” But, after he’d spoken, Jamie realized he had no idea how far Wallace’s paintings might have traveled.

  “He’s fairly certain. He said I should invite you over to see it. He’ll have it brought out of storage. He wants to meet you. ‘The Portraitist,’ he calls you.”

  “All right,” Jamie said. In a fit of daring, he took her hand and squeezed it.

  She squeezed back, said, “My father likes people who make their own way.”

  She wrote directions to Hereford House on a page of his drawing pad and told him to come on Sunday, after lunch, when Mr. Fahey would be home.

  * * *

  —

  The house was bigger than even the grandest residences in Missoula, its equally imposing neighbors kept at a polite distance by walls and wide lawns.

  A brass ring dangled from a brass bull’s nose in the middle of the front door, and, after some hesitation, Jamie lifted it and rapped once. Immediately a girl who resembled (but was not) Sarah flung open the door, and an enormous barking haystack of gray-and-white fur came hurtling out from behind her. “Jasper!” the girl scolded, swatting at the animal’s bearlike haunches. Jamie offered his palm, and when the dog paused to sniff, the girl caught him by his collar and heaved him back. She was tall, though not as tall as Sarah, with the same long neck and a longer, cannier face. “I assume you’re Jamie,” she said. “I’m Alice, the next one up. Come in, please. Sarah is here somewhere. Aren’t you tall, though? You’re really only sixteen? No wonder Sarah likes you. No boys are ever as tall as Sarah.”

  She ushered him into a square entryway paneled in wood with the golden translucence of honey. A tasseled Persian rug was underfoot, and Jasper lolloped around, panting and peering out from under his disheveled white fringe. A wide doorway with a leaded transom window led into a larger space, also paneled, also with a rug. From there a staircase led up to a balustraded gallery. Though dazed by the opulence, Jamie hadn’t missed the import of Alice’s words. Sarah liked him. He longed to interrogate her about how exactly she knew Sarah liked him, and what form, exactly, Sarah
’s liking took.

  From the center of the high, coffered ceiling dangled a cascade of prisms and bulbs. Paintings and drawings of all shapes and sizes crowded the walls, some in elaborate frames. Alice pressed a switch, and the chandelier flared to life. “Daddy likes art,” she said.

  “God,” Jamie said, gazing around. “Seems like it.”

  Alice tittered. “Daddy likes God, too,” she said, “so you’ll want to watch what you say.”

  Jamie, thanks to Wallace and to the public library, knew a good amount about art, enough to recognize, among Mr. Fahey’s eclectic collection, a Remington cavalry scene and an O’Keeffe iris. “You see this one?” Alice tapped the frame of a head-and-shoulders portrait of a woman against a dark background. “That’s Mother. John Singer Sargent painted her. Do you know who that is?”

  “Was.” Jamie moved to get a better look. The painting was exquisite. “He’s dead. That’s your mother?”

  Again she tittered. “Yes. You’ll meet her.”

  The woman in the painting had the same small chin and long lashes as Sarah. Her eyebrows were raised and her lips parted as though she were about to offer a retort.

  “Father has gobs more in storage, but honestly once you’ve seen this room, you’ve seen the best of it. Patience is not his strong suit. He wants the good stuff to hit you right when you come through the door.”

  “I can’t quite take it all in.”

  “You’re here!” said a voice from above. Sarah came hurrying down the stairs. “Alice, why didn’t you come get me?”

  “I called you,” Alice lied. “You must not have heard. He’s just been here a few minutes. We were talking about portraits. Jamie has promised to draw mine, haven’t you, Jamie?” She looped her arm through his.

  “Don’t let her boss you,” Sarah said to Jamie. “Alice is the bossiest sister.”

  “I’d love to,” he told Alice.

  She released him. “Good. After you finish talking with Father, I’ll sit for you.”

  Jamie nodded, then stopped. “Oh—I don’t have my pencils.”

  “Then you’ll have to come back,” Alice said. “You should do one of Jasper as well.” She seized the dog’s mop of a face and said to him, “Don’t you think so, Jasper? Haven’t you always wanted to be a muse?”

  “Father’s waiting,” said Sarah. She beckoned to Jamie. “Come on.”

  She led him deeper into the house. Everywhere were paintings and drawings, far more than he could take in. He found the house in general to be gloomy, cluttered, and close, with not enough windows. The density of artwork added to the oppressiveness, but Sarah seemed perfectly at ease, keeping up a narration as she walked. “This is the sitting room, and this is a room we only use for parties, that’s the music room, that’s the dining room. This clock is very old.” They came to a dark, heavy door, and Sarah whispered, “Just be confident.” She knocked with the back of one hand. In the dimness, as she listened and knocked again, Jamie saw her face in quarter profile, her jaw set with tension.

  “Come in,” commanded a booming voice.

  Sarah pushed open the door, saying, “Daddy, this is Jamie, the Portraitist.”

  “The Portraitist!” repeated a man standing behind a desk. He was shorter than both Jamie and Sarah and very stout, as pink as a pencil eraser but much shinier, with a prodigious salt-and-pepper mustache. The room, as all the other rooms had been, was crowded with art. “Come in, Portraitist!” Sarah’s father reached across his desk to shake hands. He gestured at the jumbled paper on its surface. “I never mean to work on the Sabbath, and then I always do. Hopefully God will forgive me.”

  “I’m sure he will, sir.”

  “Are you? That’s reassuring.” He looked searchingly up into Jamie’s face. “Who taught you to draw, boy?”

  “No one, really.”

  “But Sarah told me Wallace Graves is your uncle. He must have taught you.”

  Jamie started to say something agreeable, then stopped. Had Wallace taught him? Jamie couldn’t remember any actual instruction, only scattered praise from long ago. All of the puzzling and experimenting, the criticism and despair, the leaps forward and moments of exultation—all of that had come from himself. But of course he had learned from watching Wallace. What would be simplest to say? “I suppose so.”

  “Do you paint?”

  “Watercolors sometimes. I’ve never tried oils.”

  “It’s my opinion that oils prove the artist,” Mr. Fahey said. “You ought to enter the arena sooner rather than later. See what you’re made of.”

  Sarah made a small sighing sound, the faintest of protests.

  “I don’t have anything against oils,” Jamie said. “Just that they’re expensive.”

  “I saw your picture of Sarah,” Mr. Fahey said. “Impressive, although not everyone who can draw can paint.” Getting up from his desk, he gestured to an unframed canvas propped facing the wall. “Let’s have a look at this. I believe it’s one of your uncle’s.” He picked up the painting and turned it around.

  Homesickness punctured Jamie. There was the Rattlesnake, well upstream from Wallace’s house but unmistakable, on a day bright with summer haze.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. He cleared his throat. “That’s his.” He leaned closer. Surrounded his whole life by Wallace’s paintings, Jamie had ceased to notice them. He thought Wallace might have chosen a more interesting composition, but he had captured the feeling of the landscape, its balance of harshness and softness.

  “Nice little scene.” Mr. Fahey swung the painting around and held it at arm’s length, studying it. “What’s your uncle doing now?”

  He drinks. He stews in his own grime. He scrapes together a few cents to lose at cards. “He still paints.” A lie. “He teaches drawing and painting at the University of Montana, in Missoula.” Another lie.

  Mr. Fahey set down the canvas. “Stroke of luck to have an artist for an uncle, and one who took an interest in you. Not everyone gets that kind of help.”

  Jamie didn’t know how to explain without appearing to argue or seeming ungrateful. He remembered he was supposed to seem confident. “True,” he said. “Not everyone.”

  “Jamie lives in Missoula, too,” Sarah said. “He’s only here for the summer. He’s staying with relatives.”

  “That so?”

  Jamie stopped himself from glancing at Sarah, surprised at how easily she’d lied. “That’s right. With cousins.”

  Mr. Fahey didn’t appear overly interested in Jamie’s relations. “Here’s the thing. I didn’t want Sarah to say anything until after I’d met you myself, but I have a job that needs doing, if you’d be interested in some extra employment. Are you?”

  Hope strong enough to lift him like a wind. “Yes, sir.”

  “You don’t even know what it is, but you know you’re interested.”

  Jamie dipped his head. “I am, sir.”

  “Fair enough, hard times. Everyone’s got to start somewhere. I started from nothing, myself.” He cleared his throat. “What I need is for someone to help me catalog all this.” He gestured at the walls, the patchwork of art. “Everything on the walls, everything in the attic, everything in the basement. It’s a lot, and there’s another storage room full at my office. Most of it’s not labeled, to be honest. I have boxes of receipts and old auction catalogs and some of those might help you match things up. I’ll warn you, it’s a real mess.” He gestured at his desk. “As you can see, I don’t have a knack for organization. All I want’s a big list, but it’s still a task for Hercules. I just want to know what I have. Take stock. I don’t care how you go about organizing things except someone from UW might come take a look, so keep out anything you come across you think might be worthwhile. Sarah’s sister Nora is studying art history—I would have thought she might be interested in sorting through everything, but she was more int
erested in spending the summer in Europe. I’ll pay you three dollars a day, five days a week. Nine to five. The cook will see you have lunch. How’s that?”

  “Sounds terrific, sir. Thank you.”

  Mr. Fahey waved them toward the door. “Go on, then. Don’t look so happy. It’s an impossible job.”

  “See you tomorrow, sir.”

  “No, you won’t. I’ll be at work. I’m leaving you in the clutches of the women.” When Jamie had pulled open the door for Sarah, Mr. Fahey called, “Portraitist!”

  Jamie turned.

  The man was standing in front of his desk, hands in his pockets. “What do you think of my collection? It’s something, isn’t it?”

  “It’s magnificent,” Jamie said truthfully.

  “Magnificent.” Mr. Fahey nodded. “That’s right. Amazing what a little beef will buy.” He grinned and waved them out again.

  * * *

  —

  Slaughterhouses, Sarah explained as they went back through the house. Half a dozen of them. Cattle and hogs. Processing plants and tanneries, too, or shares of them. Places that made fertilizer and glue and candles and oils and cosmetics. The Depression had hit the business but not as hard as it might have. Her father sold a lot of things people needed, even if they were finding ways to need less of everything.

  At the front door, she smiled more freely than before and told him how glad she was he’d taken the job. Alice came running downstairs to see him off, too, full of reminders to bring his drawing materials when he came back. And he promised and smiled and waved and made his way back past the topiaries to the street and then back to his boardinghouse, downhill and up again, the neighborhoods contracting around him into ordinariness and then squalor.