A “walk-in” is what they called artists like that who just showed up at a gallery to say, “Here I am and here are pictures of my stuff and wouldn’t you love to represent me?” Dealers and gallery owners joked about them. The ratio of walk-ins that actually had something worth seeing to those who needed to find some other way to support themselves was probably about one to five thousand, but, amazingly, Macon Mahoney had been that one.
She would never forget it. It had been the first day of April last year when he had sauntered in and bowled her over with his art. She had almost asked him if it wasn’t some kind of April Fool’s joke, especially given the fact that he said such off-the-wall things. She thought surely he must be some famous rising artist from New York already represented by some big name like Castelli or Janis, but then it didn’t make sense that somebody would go to the trouble to pull a prank like this.
It turned out that he was one of those rare undiscovered talents who had quietly matured in relative obscurity while he held down a part-time job at a health food store. Celia could tell from looking at his slides that he could only be expected to keep getting better. His studio was above a mattress store in Derby, one big room where he had both lived and worked until he married a music teacher in Berea the year before and moved into her house with her. Celia had known beyond a doubt that Craig, Ollie, and Tara would all vote to do a show of his work and then invite him to join the gallery, and she had been right.
Celia had gone to his studio a few days after his first visit, along with Tara, to see some of the works firsthand, and she had been astounded to think he had been living within twenty miles of the Trio for close to ten years and had never shown any of his work at a gallery. His new wife had been the one to first encourage him to visit some of the regional galleries and talk to some dealers about his work. He had never thought he was ready for that, had given most of his work away as gifts. And, in one of those odd connections you sometimes discover between two people you know, Celia had later learned that Elizabeth Landis had actually been the one to specifically suggest the Trio Gallery to him. It just happened that Elizabeth lived across the street from the woman Macon married.
He was out of the van now and walking toward the door with a rather large painting. Celia met him and opened the door for him.
“Hi, Macon. Got something new for us?”
“‘Ever reaping something new,’” he said, stepping sideways through the door. He turned the painting around and set it on the floor against the plate-glass window. “That was Tennyson,” he said. “Could be Lady of Shalott, but I’m thinking not. Maybe Locksley Hall or In Memoriam. That’s memoriam, you know, not memorial. Some people get those words mixed up.” He stepped back a few paces and scowled at the painting. “‘Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere.’” He glanced up at Celia. “That’s William C-o-w-p-e-r. Rhymes with blooper. Cowper—lots of people pronounce his name wrong. Great poet. Wrote a lot of hymn texts. Old guy—died over two hundred years ago.”
After her first few confusing conversations with Macon Mahoney, Celia had finally asked him one day if there was a trick to interpreting what he was saying. Thereafter he had started identifying the sources of his quotations for her. Sometimes she still didn’t see how it all tied together, but it did help some. She had wondered more than once how his wife ever carried on a conversation with him. She would love to ask him someday how he had proposed to her.
Right now the thought flitted through Celia’s mind that she had seen William Cowper’s name somewhere, but she didn’t take time to try to place it. She was too busy looking at Macon’s new painting. He generally favored representational art over abstract, but he liked to manipulate his subjects in unusual ways. She knew that to understand this painting fully, if such a thing were possible, she would have to study it a long time.
The entire background was dark gray, but the painting as a whole was anything but dark. The focal image was low and off-center: a large royal blue sphere representing the planet Earth with bright green land masses, not cartographically exact but easily recognizable as the continents in spite of their angular contours. All around the planet were silver-white splotches, streaks, and swirls, and several glowing orange and yellow spheres of various sizes—obviously other celestial bodies.
Above the planet, at the top of the painting, were the very large tips of a man’s thumb and forefinger pinched together grasping a long, slender silvery thread attached to the planet. The thread wasn’t exactly vertical, however, which gave the effect that the planet was being swung back and forth like a pendulum by the giant hand. There was a little bright red bow right above the planet, affixed to the thread, as if the whole thing were a Christmas ornament about to be hung.
But most curious of all were the tiny objects floating in space around the planet. They were recognizable shapes, some of them, such as a car, a house, a kite, a shoe, a bottle, but they weren’t colored in. They were just empty outlines against the background, some of them laid right over the silver swirls and other heavenly bodies. The outline of a miniature skyscraper, upside down, appeared against one of the orange balls.
“Well,” Celia said at last. Clearly Macon Mahoney believed some greater power was holding the world in space. That much she could see for herself.
“’Tis not so deep as a well,’” Macon said. “Shakespeare—you probably already know that. Romeo and Juliet.”
“Okay, tell me about these little things floating around,” she said.
“‘Great princes have great playthings’” came the reply. “That’s Cowper again. I’ve been reading him a lot.”
“So they represent all our toys?”
“‘Men misuse their toys first, then cast them away.’ I might have missed a word or two of that one, but it’s close. More Cowper.”
“Does it have a title—the painting?” Celia was always intrigued by the titles Macon gave his pieces.
“Fade, Fade, Each Earthly Joy,” he said.
Celia felt a chill go over her. How had Macon come to choose a hymn title for his painting? Or did he have any idea that it was a hymn title? Nothing he had said before today had given her the idea that he had any interest in anything religious.
She turned and looked at him. “You’ve got to be kidding, right?”
“‘The leopard shall lie down with the kid,’” he said solemnly. “That’s from the Bible. Book called Isaiah.”
9
Silent in the Grave
Celia was very glad to see five o’clock roll around. After she had closed everything up, she left through the back door, noticing as she went that the Madonna picture had disappeared. Evidently Craig had popped in sometime during the past hour and taken it. Thank goodness he hadn’t bothered to say hello.
She knew she should stay and work on the article for the Derby Daily News, but it wasn’t due until Friday, and she already had a good start on it. It could wait another day or two. It wasn’t the most cheerful of assignments—a reprise of an unsolved murder in Derby that had been committed twenty years ago next week—and today she didn’t feel like thinking about somebody killing a local woman in broad daylight as she was running the vacuum cleaner right in her own house while her husband was at work and her four children were at school.
Celia had also planned to stop by the grocery store on her way home, but that could wait, too. She headed home, trying to direct her thoughts to safe objective subjects. She tuned the radio to a station that played old rock and turned it up loud. Unfortunately, she couldn’t sing along because all the songs were before her time, but she listened hard to the words, which, unlike the rock music she had become familiar with during the eighties, could actually be understood. “If you want to know if he loves you so,” someone was singing now, “it’s in his kiss, that’s where it is, oh yeah, it’s in his kiss.” Well, she wasn’t so sure that was a reliable proof of love.
As that one faded and the Beatles took over with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Celia remembered the ti
me her grandmother had sat down at the supper table and proceeded to deliver a speech about the evils of kissing and holding hands. “It leads to bad trouble,” she had said flatly, searching Celia’s face for some response, which she didn’t get since Celia had picked up Ansell’s trick of the blank stare by now. If she had chosen to respond, it would have been with a laugh—to think that Grandmother actually thought she might heed her warning! Of course, she had to admit now that if she had listened to her advice, maybe . . . But it was too late for that kind of thinking. She reached over and switched the radio off.
At last she pulled into the driveway of her landlord’s house and swung around to the back. Finally, after she had lived here all these years, the Stewarts had repaved their driveway and added an extension pad in back so she would have her own place to park instead of up on the street. The Stewarts were nice enough people, but when it came to making improvements in the apartment, they had a bad habit of putting things off, though they were always getting things replaced and remodeled on the main floor where they lived. Back in January Celia had had to endure several days of banging and drilling overhead while Patsy Stewart had new kitchen countertops and cupboards installed.
Fitting her key into the lock, Celia felt a great sense of relief to be home again. She surely couldn’t complain too much about her basement apartment. As a walkout, it had its own access. No need to climb steps and always be running into her landlord. It was nicer than many apartments she had seen and thirty dollars a month less than the average one-bedroom in the area. And it had personality, not like all those boxy cookie-cutter units in apartment buildings. She had it tastefully decorated and filled with nice things she liked, and the Stewarts not only gave her the use of their washer and dryer but also allowed her generous storage space in the unfinished part of the basement, two benefits not always available to apartment renters. Even if she did have to put up with some noise from upstairs, it was much better now that their children were grown and gone.
She swung the door open and stepped inside, tossing her purse and keys on a chair. She took off her shoes and padded over to turn up the heat. Then she walked through each room, which didn’t take long. It wasn’t for the purpose of checking for intruders but rather to admire her art. She did this every morning as she was brushing her teeth and again every evening upon arriving home.
Currently her very favorite piece was a large canvas depicting a chair with odd angles. She had hung it next to the window in her living room. No normally fashioned person could sit comfortably in such a chair as the one pictured, but that was beside the point. Celia loved the painting for its wit and its wacky proportions. The artist, a sixty-year-old black man from Columbia named C. J. Tibbetts, had titled it Perch.
The color wasn’t one Celia was usually drawn to, but as soon as she had seen the painting, which she had owned for almost a year now, she had known she had to have it. It was thirty-six by twenty-four inches, and the chair took up most of the surface area of the canvas. The background, which was a wavy wash of greens, blues, browns, and grays, gave you the impression that you were looking at a lake of shifting colors. The chair itself was a unique color: a peachy sort of tan with a shimmery cast and small speckles of dark red dribbled all over it. It tickled her to think of how much the colors reminded her of a fish, especially set against the waterlike background, and the title Perch was the clincher that C. J. Tibbetts had a sense of humor.
She continued through her apartment, ending up back in the living room in front of her most recent acquisition—a piece of Macon Mahoney’s she had bought only a couple of months earlier. It was eight by twenty-six inches, short but wide. Called Through the Blinds, it depicted a stand of very black trees, but only the tops of the trees, with a slate-blue sky behind them. The whole scene was striped over with slender cream-colored horizontal lines every inch or so, which represented the blinds in the title. “That’s what I used to see out my back window,” Macon had told Celia. He had set up an easel right by that very window and painted the picture there.
It was one of his earlier pieces, he had told her, painted before he was married, when he lived in the apartment above the mattress store. The tree trunks were painted with automobile lacquer, which he discovered later could be dangerous to your health. “So it’s a one and only,” he had said that day when he brought it by the gallery along with a dozen or so of his older works, which he was getting ready to donate to a new dentist over in Spartanburg after checking with Celia to make sure she didn’t want any of them for the gallery. The dentist, a friend of Macon’s, was just starting his practice and didn’t have anything on his walls yet except for two framed diplomas.
Celia had climbed into the back of Macon’s van to look at what he had. They weren’t bad, any of them, and several were quite good, although it was clear that his style had still been in its formative stages when these were done. She had kept two pieces to display at the gallery, feeling sure she could advertise them as Early Mahoney and sell them easily, and she bought Through the Blinds for herself. Macon let her have it for a song, and she didn’t argue with him. Just paid him on the spot and happily took it home.
Unlike the dentist, she didn’t have roomfuls of bare walls. In fact, she was running out of wall space and might soon have to start rotating her art the way she did at the gallery. She had found a place for Through the Blinds, however—she had hung it above a shelf on which she had displayed some smaller pieces of pottery and a sculpture of a very round washerwoman on her hands and knees.
Macon had said he didn’t like the way the blinds ended up working against the effect he was trying to achieve, an effect he never did explain to Celia, who didn’t want to hear it anyway since she loved the blinds and considered them a daring move that succeeded. It had to take courage to paint a picture and then draw lines across it. It was odd how a person was attracted instantly to certain pictures. Any art dealer would tell you that logic flies right out the window when people shop for art. At any rate, Celia liked Through the Blinds more every time she looked at it, could in fact imagine it surpassing the chair picture someday to become her favorite.
As she stood there looking at it, her mind turned again to Macon’s visit to the gallery that afternoon and his new painting titled Fade, Fade, Each Earthly Joy. She thought of what he had told her before he left, and the revelation came rushing at her now with the same surprise and dismay she had felt at the time.
It turned out that he and his wife had recently been visiting a small church in Derby called The Church of the Open Door, which in itself was surprise enough, but furthermore, they had first attended at the invitation of Elizabeth Landis, their neighbor across the street, who attended the church regularly—Elizabeth Landis, the woman who had come into the Trio Gallery for years now, who had recruited Celia for her tennis team, and who, from all outward appearances, looked like a rational, normal human being. To think of her harboring religion inside her like a small but deadly explosive made Celia’s mind reel.
During one of the services Macon and his wife had attended, he had run across the title “Fade, Fade, Each Earthly Joy” in the hymnbook. When he told Celia this, that’s when it clicked in her mind where she had seen the name William Cowper before, the poet Macon had quoted. That was it—she had seen his name in the old brown Tabernacle Hymns they used every Sunday at Bethany Hills in Dunmore, Georgia, back when she used to pay attention not only to the words and music but also to the names of the people who wrote the words and music.
Such colorful names, some of them: Philip Bliss, John Grape, Charles Gabriel, Frances Havergal, Edwin Excell, Ira Sankey, Maltbie Babcock, and Augustus Toplady, to name a few. And William Cowper—she was pretty sure he was the one who had written the hymn that started out with the disturbingly vivid picture of a fountain filled with blood “drawn from Immanuel’s veins.”
How absolutely infuriating that everywhere she turned she kept being reminded of these stupid outdated hymns. As if to mock her now, she heard a v
oice inside her head, her grandmother’s voice no less: “When this poor lisping, stammering tongue lies silent in the grave.” So why can’t you lie silent in the grave like you’re supposed to? Celia thought. Why do you have to keep bugging me?
It further turned out that Macon Mahoney had begun to read the Bible lately and had already made it from Genesis all the way to Jeremiah. “Just checking things out,” he had said to Celia. “Exploring the options.” Celia had felt her heart go heavy. That’s all she needed—an artist as refreshing and vibrant as Macon Mahoney getting religious and quoting the Bible every time he came around. What would make him do such a thing? she wondered.
On the one hand, she felt like shouting at him to ditch the church thing, to start reading ancient Chinese poetry, medical journals, real estate manuals, anything besides the Bible, but on the other hand, she knew if she spoke her mind like that, it would arouse Macon’s curiosity, and he’d want to find out why she felt that way. For all his weirdness and apparent absentmindedness, Macon Mahoney had a deep interest in other people. He wasn’t wrapped up in himself the way some artists seemed to be.
So Celia didn’t dare ask for more information. She merely nodded, hoping he wouldn’t start elaborating on these so-called options he was exploring. She didn’t want to think about Elizabeth Landis inviting him to church. She didn’t want to imagine him flipping through the hymnal and then going home to read his Bible.
“Well, I’m closing up in a few minutes,” she said, then walked over to the desk and turned off the computer. “I need to get home. I’ll find a good spot to hang your painting tomorrow if you’re planning on leaving it here. Or were you just bringing it by to show me?” She pretended to be straightening some things on the desk.
No Dark Valley Page 13
