The Beach at Painter's Cove

by Shelley Noble

But the rooms that once had a function now pretty much served as homage to a past that would soon be gone. The furniture was fading, the wooden floors were dull, and Issy bet the whole place needed dusting and cleaning.

  Maybe George was right. He’d been trying to move Leo and Fae into an adult community since Wes’s death. They both adamantly refused to go. And Issy selfishly agreed with them.

  But tonight she wasn’t sure. And maybe they wouldn’t even have a choice.

  She turned away and traced her way through a warren of silver cabinets and larders until she came to the small apartment where Mrs. Norcroft had resided for as long as Issy could remember. She immediately knew Leo would refuse to stay in the servants’ quarters. It would have to be the music room.

  The music room, like all the other rooms she’d inspected, was crammed with the past. If the contents hadn’t been so interesting, so old, so artistic, the family might be called hoarders. As it was, a lot should be cleared out. You couldn’t even see what was there in the haphazard way things were placed around the room.

  She picked up a green Arts and Crafts–style vase. Turned it over looking for an artist’s mark, but the light was too poor to see. They needed to make an inventory.

  She picked up another piece, an ashtray. And smiled. She remembered making it in the third grade. Her teacher had been upset that she would make an ashtray. Smoking had fallen out of favor by then—except at the Muses.

  Definitely needed to catalog the good pieces, put aside the sentimental ones, and discard the rest. A giant yard sale, hopefully after she’d returned to her life in Manhattan.

  At the door she turned and looked back into the room. Actually they weren’t destitute yet. At least monetarily. They could always sell a painting or two. Some would bring small fortunes. If she could convince Leo to part with any of them. Then they could afford some repairs and to hire someone to care for the two old ladies.

  Until that money ran out and they had to sell another painting, then another. She covered her face with her hands as the image of disappearing artwork took over. She didn’t want them to become one of those families that had to sell things to stay alive. First a piece or two, leaving only an unfaded rectangle of wallpaper where they had hung. Until more and more empty places appeared and the walls became a patchwork quilt of loss.

  She didn’t want that for her family. Well, not for Leo and Fae. The rest of the family be damned. They’d all turned their backs. Walked away. Even the distant relatives didn’t bother to stay in touch. Herself included.

  Issy walked out of the main house to the conservatory, a massive glass structure that stretched across the back of the mansion and overlooked the sound. In its day it had provided light and southern exposure for visiting artists. Warmth for comfort while reading a book or having tea. Today the panes were dingy and covered with debris and leaves, their transparency dimmed by a layer of salt and sand and pollution.

  Beyond it the lawn and gazebo had once been the scene of afternoon teas and town fetes and badminton. Sometimes impromptu dances would form, many of the ballroom variety with an orchestra and punch. Other times they devolved into the Isadora Duncan kind that invariably ended with nudity and a romp down to the beach to frolic in the waves.

  Everything was just depressing and unkempt now. She unlocked a set of French doors and pushed them open. They creaked on their hinges and Issy stepped outside.

  The night was dark and the waves were gentle, and for once she didn’t feel the magic of the past or the present, just the cool night air. But as she walked down the lawn toward the beach, some of the tension gripping her began to ease. For a second she was a little girl, her head in Grammy’s lap, drowsy before the large beach bonfire while Wes read from The Diary of Frida Kahlo, which had just been published.

  Occasionally Grammy would cover Issy’s ears with her hands, but Issy didn’t understand the words. She just liked the way they floated around and around in her head until her eyelids grew heavy and the next thing she would know it was morning and she was in her own bedroom upstairs overlooking the sea.

  And she’d wonder who had carried her upstairs like a sleeping princess, and she’d dress and run down to the kitchen for Mrs. Norcroft to make her breakfast, because she knew better than to wake any of the others because they would have “heads.” Which Issy learned had more to do with brandy and champagne than anatomy.

  She turned back to look at the house. Well over a hundred years old, large and rambling and filled with the history of an entire art movement, as well as the lives of friends, colleagues, and strangers who just stopped in.

  It had withstood fire and storms, no easy feat being situated so close to the sound and the cove. But Mother Nature had spared it so far. Issy just hoped it wouldn’t be her generation of Whitakers who oversaw its downfall.

  She had no illusions about being able to do her job for the museum while taking care of the situation with the Muses and her family. The buck had stopped with her. She could let George take over. Put Leo and Fae into some assisted living place where they really would go crazy. Sell off the Muses to someone who would raze it and put up a luxury condominium. Cut down the woods and roll out golf course sod. Add an infinity pool that flowed into the cove, where the town would no longer be welcome, and skinny-dipping would only be allowed to members of the association, if it was allowed at all.

  The cove would be congested with Jet Skis and boogie boards crammed together at the deep end near the boulders where the epic beginning of Leo and Wes’s great love story had unfolded. Drive their ATVs through the meadow where, according to Leo—with much blushing by her children and grandchildren—Max had been conceived.

  And the knoll where Max and Wes were buried?

  Issy couldn’t let it happen.

  Not to the family, or the art or the memories. There was over a hundred years of artwork adorning the walls, the shelves, the tables, the closets of the old house. Masterpieces and mistakes, the poorly executed and the heights of the craft, all nestled together higgledy-piggledy. The architecture itself was a historical example of American neo-Gothic.

  If they lost the house, some pieces would be sold at an estate sale; others carted away. The better pieces would end up in museums or private collections, where the only context would be the typed information plaques by each work.

  Moonlight on Painter’s Cove by Adam Ellis. 1968, donated by Mr. and Mrs. whoever bought it at auction.

  The viewer would never know that on the nights of the full moon, whoever was staying at the house went down to the cove beach and danced until the moon rose high in the sky. Nor that if you could see beyond the frame, just off to the right, they would be there, iridescent in the night, spinning and laughing and celebrating life. Nor that Moonlight was the last painting Ellis had finished before he drove his automobile off the bridge and into the sea.

  Every work there had its own story, no matter how small, and each deserved more than a small cardboard tag.

  How could George even think of selling?

  Issy shivered and started back toward the house, rubbing her arms and walking a little faster on the dew-slippery grass.

  A light on the second floor went dark. Steph’s room, she thought. Worried about her mother and father. Or maybe just tired of texting her friends.

  Issy knew what she had to do.

  Muses by the Sea was her family’s heritage. Not just financially, but artistically and civically, and most of all, historically. It was an icon. The place where many young artists got their start, where tired ones found rest and rejuvenation. Where those in despair were healed and sent out to carry on. Where her grandfather and her uncle Max were buried on the knoll and the Coastal Art style was born.

  The Whitakers had a responsibility to preserve that past, perhaps to promote its future. Besides, Leo would never leave the Muses and Fae would never leave her.

  And Issy? That was the big question she’d have to answer in the next two weeks.

  When Issy rolle
d out of bed the next morning, it was too early to Skype Paolo and Deirdre at the installation. Too early for the kids to be up. Too early even for Chloe to be in the kitchen making breakfast as she insisted on doing until Monday when she had to go back to work.

  Issy made coffee and carried it into the library, where she set up her laptop and spent the next couple of hours alternating between double-checking the layout of the Washington installation and wondering how she could save her family.

  Her first cup grew cold and she went back to replenish it. Still too early to call Paolo and no new ideas about what to do about the Muses. She drank her coffee standing at the kitchen window, her mind as blank as an empty canvas.

  In the morning light, it was pretty clear that Vivienne and Dan, whether through intent or inefficiency, had lost the money from the estate . . . was it even possible that they’d stolen the money and fled the country?

  It seemed so ridiculous. As much as she and her sister didn’t get along, and as much as Vivienne had resented being abandoned by their mother, Issy couldn’t imagine her cheating her family and abandoning her own children. Though it seemed that’s just what Vivienne—as well as their mother—had done.

  No way was Issy going to take in her sister’s kids. She didn’t have the time or the inclination to be a mother. Certainly not to those spoiled brats.

  Something banged above her head. Issy picked up her coffee and fled to the library.

  At nine o’clock she logged into Skype. “Morning, gang.”

  Deirdre smiled back at her; Paolo, standing beside her, didn’t.

  “So what’s up? How’s it going?”

  “The understructure is mostly in place,” Paolo said. “Here.” He lifted the laptop and panned slowly around the exhibition space.

  The walls were clear and already fitted for the new hangings. Crates of paintings stood around the perimeter of the room, waiting to be hung. Another group were being held at the end of the room along with several display cases that would be put in place once the first series was hung.

  “Looks good,” Issy said when she was once again facing her two assistants.

  Deirdre glanced quickly at Paolo. “We do have one problem.”

  “Hit me with it.”

  “We’re ready to hang numbers one fifty-one, -two, and -three, but there’s a spatial question.”

  Issy consulted her specs. “Where’s the problem?”

  Deirdre shouldered Paolo out of the way. “It’s with number one fifty-three. The old frame went in for repairs and the temporary one is larger, which skews the layout.”

  “Didn’t all this get checked off before we left?” Issy said.

  “It did,” Paolo said, his head moving back into the screen. “Several frames were sent to the fabricators. I just called them and asked them to remeasure the original one. They measured. The original is smaller than the new one, but the new one is the same size as the specs we sent.”

  “So we sent out the wrong measurements?”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Deirdre said. “I just typed what was on the sheet.”

  “Double-checked your figures?”

  “I always do. They were obviously measured wrong.”

  Which Issy had entrusted to Paolo.

  “Well, let’s see what we can do.” Issy pulled her tablet out of her briefcase. Opened to the D.C. Modern file and brought up the schemata of the installation. Zoomed in on paintings 151 to 153.

  They were talking about a couple of inches each way. Even in the smaller space of the D.C. Modern, it wouldn’t be a problem.

  “Thanks for pointing it out, but I think we’ll be okay.”

  “Fine. Just thought you should know.”

  “Yes, thank you. I should. Now, why don’t you two bring me up to speed on the rest of the installation.”

  It was going to be a busy day, Fae thought as she walked up the narrow path toward the Muses. And she also knew it was going to be stressful. She and Leo were in a pickle, no doubt about it. George threatening to put them in a home. Dan letting the place fall to pieces. Issy pulled away from her job in the city.

  That wasn’t what they wanted for her. They wanted her to be able to leave and come back at will, not disappear and never return—and not to be trapped here. Now, if they weren’t careful, she wouldn’t be given the choice.

  And that wasn’t fair to her.

  Fae had known this would happen. Not all of it. Not how or why or when. She didn’t have a crystal ball or ESP or an ability to commune with spirits, though plenty of people thought she had all three.

  Ever since she was a child she’d been able to feel things. She couldn’t predict train wrecks or tornadoes, or who would get into Harvard or be married first. But she knew other kinds of things.

  Most people just didn’t pay attention. And even when they did they very rarely understood. Fae could feel energy aligning itself, right and left, yin and yang, light and dark. She didn’t know how she knew these things. But she did.

  She’d just been a kid when she told their mother that poor Mr. Sheraton needed help to feel better. But she didn’t know that he would soon take his own life.

  “Don’t fret, Fae,” her mother said. “He’s fine.”

  “Hell, he’s the life of the party,” her father said.

  He was still the life of the party a few weeks later when he took his father’s shotgun to his head.

  Some people had blamed Fae, like it was her fault for mentioning that he was unhappy. It was weird the way people reacted when they didn’t understand something. How they would search for someone to blame. Always looking outside themselves.

  Hell, Fae didn’t understand most things, but she never lashed out because of it. It got around school that she put curses on people. She couldn’t; there was no magic in her, not that kind anyway. She just felt things.

  And she felt the moment when her friends stopped being her friends. She’d been lonely at first. Then she discovered the hippies. Flower Power. Make love not war. It didn’t matter to them that she was a little odd; they were odd, too. Or a little old: there were plenty of other older dropouts. Dropped out of the wrong job, the wrong life, the wrong mind-set. It was a vibrant, active, thoughtful time of brilliant creativity. Artists of all kinds ready to push the parameters of life and art. Vonnegut, Kesey, Salinger. Ginsberg, Peter Max.

  Psychedelia was in. It had been Fae’s happiest time.

  Happiest until she met Adam. And then it was euphoric or heartbreaking depending on the day, the hour, the year. No one knew about them. Not even after Adam’s death.

  The crunch of gravel snatched her from her thoughts. Ben’s truck came to a stop at the side of the house.

  Fae slipped behind the scrub oak and waited until he went inside. She wasn’t sure why she hid; she was going there, too. She just needed a few more minutes to herself. Time to figure out what to do. Then she would go inside and ask them to call a cab to take her to the hospital.

  She came out from behind the tree and hurried across the circular drive to the front porch. She’d pick up the mail on her way to the kitchen. That would give her a little more time to corral her wandering thoughts. The mailbox sat next to the front door. It had been there since the house had been built. A rectangular brass box heavy with patina.

  She lifted the top, pulled out the mail, pushed it closed. She didn’t much care about the mail. It was mostly circulars and politicians’ promises and ads for hearing aids and burial insurance. She could hear just fine and so could Leo. And as for graves, Leo would be buried up on the knoll with Wes and Max. Fae would be buried in town in the family plot, maybe. Or maybe she wouldn’t be buried at all. She might float away on a funeral pyre.

  She went inside and dumped the mail on the side table. Noticed there was another letter from the power company. She stuffed it in the pocket of her madras tunic and went into the library.

  She already knew what she’d find. She crossed to the desk,
pulled at the top drawer. It was locked. She fished in the cut-glass catchall bowl for a hairpin. Unlocked the drawer with it and tossed it back into the bowl.

  She pulled the drawer open. Just as she thought. She closed the drawer—no reason to lock it now—and made her way to the kitchen.

  “Just in time,” Ben said. “Do you want a lift to the hospital?”

  “Please. If you’re going,” she said, and sat down.

  Chloe set a mug of coffee down on the table in front of Ben. “Fae, would you like some tea?”

  Fae shook her head.

  Ben looked over his mug at her. “Is everything okay?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not worried about Leo, are you?”

  Fae shook her head. She should just show him the letter and ask for his advice. Leo kept saying Dan would take care of it, but it wasn’t looking like Dan was coming back. And she didn’t want to worry Issy with it. She had her life and her work and Leo was adamant about not burdening her with their “problems.” Actually they were really only Leo’s problems, but Fae had promised Wesley to look after her.

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out the crumpled bill. Pushed it across the table. “I think we need your advice.”

  Ben took the letter, opened it, and read. “Fae. You haven’t paid your electric bill in three months.”

  She knew that, Leo knew that. Dan was supposed to take care of it. But Dan hadn’t.

  Ben shook his head, looked at his sister. Fae knew they were thinking, Those poor old women, too old to take care of themselves. Well, she could tell him, she and Leo could take better care of themselves than Dan could do. Or would do. She’d tried to tell Wesley. George had tried to tell him. But you couldn’t tell Wesley anything.

  Dan pandered to him, talked about the importance of family and art and keeping tradition. And Wesley Whitaker, who had held his own with some of the great talents and minds of the century, bought it hook, line, and sinker.

  Even after the bills started to mount up Fae couldn’t get Leo to take action. Because there was no convincing her that her beloved Wesley had made a mistake in whom to trust.