“People look at photographs,” she said enigmatically, and I sensed that being looked at might bring the outside world too close.
“People look at your paintings too. Your last show in New York must have brought pleasure to a great many.”
“I didn’t want that display. But at least they can’t see me in the paintings.”
I wasn’t sure she was right about that. All artists betrayed something of themselves in their work—whether their medium was paint or the written word, clay or music—whatever. But I meant to seek no argument with Judith Rhodes until I knew her better, and I felt in her a slight resistance to me this morning.
“Do you mind if I look around?” I asked.
“As you please. I’ll work a little while longer, and then we’ll talk.”
The heart and focus of the room was the woman, but now I looked about to find her frame. Overhead, the studio roof rose in the high, beamed peak of a cathedral ceiling, and it must have been well insulated to let her work up here the year-round. At the northern exposure a large glass window had been set into the slanting roof, throwing full daylight into the room—an artist’s necessity, and evidence that this room had been remodeled in its every detail for the woman at the easel.
Because the roof swept down on each side from the central ridgepole to the floor, there was little space, and no standing room at the far edges. However, room dividers had been set about here and there, to bring the vast spaces in a bit closer, and on these, framed canvases had been hung, while other paintings were stacked in distant corners—the result of a good many years of continuous production. Now I would have the opportunity to taste my fill of Judith Rhodes’ creative talent.
But as I started toward the nearest partition, there was movement beyond Judith’s easel, and I saw Tudor ease himself to his feet and curl one black lip in an expression that was less than inviting. When he growled, Judith turned her head.
“Be quiet, Tudor. This is a friend.”
The dog sat back on his great haunches, his look fixed upon me, but he was quiet now, accepting his mistress’s command, even though he might not accept me.
Following the side of the room farthest from the dog, I stood before the first buff-colored partition and gazed at the four paintings mounted upon it. One looked out on a stormy sea, with waves crashing high over wet black rocks and a small round face floating on the stormy surface—as though cast adrift in that unlikely spot. Two were beach scenes, with gulls flying over misty water, only one of which carried that strange signature of a disembodied doll’s face. The fourth was again a beach scene, on a calm day, and along the sand at the water’s edge pranced a golden unicorn. All carried that unsettling air of fantasy imposed upon reality which seemed characteristic of Judith’s painting.
“Your husband was telling me about the unicorn legend,” I said. “It must appeal to you.”
She slipped down from her stool with a smooth, quick movement, and began to clean her brushes. The odor of turpentine reached me as her answer came over her shoulder.
“I’m not sure that ‘appeal’ is the word. Perhaps a better word would be ‘haunt.’”
“Do you think there’s anything to the legend?”
“I don’t know.” The words seemed a little flat. “There have been Rhodes who claimed to have seen the unicorn moon before they died. Sara, Lawrence’s wife, was one of them. And of course Hesther, who started it all.”
“What about Lawrence Rhodes?” I asked. “Did he see it too?”
It was not a question I would have put to her as an interviewer—but one that came unbidden out of my own search for answers that lay in the past. I had not rid myself of that inner drive to know, after all.
She gave me a startled look as she put her brushes aside to come toward me.
“Yes, he saw it. There was a moon that night. As if I could ever forget. It was shining full into the living room downstairs, and he told me he had seen the unicorn—that he was going to die.”
I waited in silence, hoping she would go on, but that was all she meant to tell me. Her serenity was worn like a protective garment, so that she rested secure behind its covering.
“Let’s sit down,” she said, “where we can be comfortable.”
At a short distance down the attic, East Indian prayer rugs made an island, with a sofa, chairs, and central coffee table arranged upon them. She led the way across the otherwise bare floor to this oasis, and now that I had moved past her easel I turned to look at the picture she was working on. Again there was a stormy sea, this time with a small boat, and vague figures in the mist, still unfinished. Once more a doll’s face floated in the sky, the eyes closed this time, like those of the sleeping head in my dressing-table drawer downstairs.
She waited for me to take my place on the flowered couch, and then seated herself in a plain brown chair that set off her rust color to good effect. Settling back comfortably, she seemed completely poised and untroubled.
“There’s fruit juice,” she said, indicating a frosty pitcher on the table. “Please help yourself.”
I poured juice into ruby glass and sipped the tangy mixture, taking time to formulate my next question. It must be an easy one for her to answer, something reassuring, in case she might be on guard against me. Instead, however, some inner prompting brought out a question I had not meant to ask so soon.
“Why do you paint dolls’ heads into so many of your pictures, Mrs. Rhodes?”
“I can answer that!” The voice came from the door to the stairs that I had left open, and I looked toward it to see Stacia Faulkner walk into the studio. She still wore the jeans and pink pullover she’d had on at breakfast, and her fluff of fair hair was tousled, as though she might have come in from a run on the beach.
“Hello, Mother,” she said, her hands set jauntily in jeans pockets as she sauntered into the room. The words were a simple enough greeting, yet I sensed something more in the way she spoke them—some sort of defiance, some flouting she was directing at her mother.
“Good morning, Stacia.” Judith Rhodes spoke quietly.
“What do you think of this?” Stacia asked, displaying her bruised cheek to the light. “What do you think, Mother dear, of a man who beats his wife?”
Her mother glanced at me. It was not a look of apology, but merely noted my presence as a captive audience to Stacia’s scene. Stacia saw and threw a bright stare in my direction. I wondered if it indicated her knowledge of the unicorn, but I said nothing.
“We don’t have to be proper with Courtney,” Stacia went on. “She knows. Nan and everyone else knows by now that Evan struck me.”
Though her daughter’s words and behavior were outrageous, Judith still said nothing. Wide green eyes regarded her daughter without expression, and yet I caught a faint tightening of those full lips, and sensed that Judith was resisting a deliberate baiting by her daughter.
Their exchange of held glances lasted only a moment, and Stacia was the first to turn away, looking again at me, and so intently that I could almost feel the thought of my golden unicorn burning between us. I was suddenly sure that Stacia had it, and I wondered what it meant to her. Then she flicked a hand in the air as though she dismissed something she did not welcome and spoke to me.
“As I was saying, I can answer your question about the dolls’ heads. Come and look.”
She ran down the long room past display partitions to where a cabinet of drawers stood just under the slant of the roof. Not wanting to take sides, I followed her reluctantly. I would try to give Stacia the benefit of my doubts because she appeared to be the injured party when it came to Evan, and yet, more and more, I felt that I did not like this girl, and I hoped that she was neither my sister nor my cousin.
Kneeling before the cabinet, Stacia pulled out a bottom drawer and I stood behind her looking into it with a horrid fascination. Tumbled into the drawer helte
r-skelter lay what must have been two or three dozen dolls’ heads. They were from every type of doll possible—bisque and wax, china and wood and plastic, some with hair, some without, some with ridged black hair painted on china skulls, some with cracks across pink cheeks, or a chipped nose, some innocently perfect, staring up at me with blue eyes and brown eyes, or in some cases no eyes at all in empty sockets.
Stacia jumped to her feet, leaving the drawer open, and waved a proud hand at the collection, as if at some accomplishment. “They’re all mine. Or they used to be. When I decapitated them, Mother brought the heads up here. There’s a doll graveyard out in the woods where all the bodies and arms and legs are buried.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “You mean that as a child you broke every one of those dolls?”
“Right! There were more interesting things I could do with my life. Uncle John taught me to pitch a ball and sail a boat and climb trees. He rescued me from all that feminine nonsense girls are doomed to. The trouble was people kept on giving me dolls.”
“Couldn’t you have given them away to children who would have liked them?” I asked.
“It was more fun to smash them up. It upset people more. Even Uncle John didn’t care for that.”
With an inner revulsion I walked back to the sofa and sat down opposite Judith.
She had not moved. Her long hands, one of them showing a smear of chrome yellow on the back, lay quietly in her lap. Her head was slightly bent and her eyes seemed fixed upon her hands. I could not see their expression.
“At least you’ve put those broken dolls to good use,” I said to her. “They seem to have become a sort of signature for your paintings, like the unicorns, and they lend a haunting quality that people remember.”
Judith said nothing. She raised one hand absently and examined the yellow smear on its back. Stacia closed the drawer with a vigor that set the heads to rolling and clattering for a moment, and then they were all quiet again, shut away in the dark, staring at nothing.
“Go ahead with your interview,” Stacia said sociably, coming to drop down on the sofa beside me. “I’d like to listen.”
She made my hackles rise. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. This is something between your mother and me. I never like to work with an audience.”
“Let her stay if she wants to,” Judith said, raising neither her voice nor her eyes.
Stacia settled back with an air of triumphant expectancy and stared at me. There was nothing more I could do.
“Have you always liked to paint?” I asked Judith.
“Not always,” she said and left it there.
“Not until all those people began to die,” Stacia put in.
This time Judith looked at her daughter—a long, quiet look that carried an intensity which made the younger woman drop her own gaze.
“I was unhappy,” Judith told me. “I was trying to escape from much that was tormenting me. So I began painting when I was in my early twenties. It helped me, satisfied me.”
“And you could hide in it when other people needed you,” Stacia put in. “Dad always said you mustn’t be disturbed—to let you alone. So I did—I did! And I took to breaking up my dolls. Maybe because I couldn’t get through to you. If it hadn’t been for Uncle John—”
Judith’s composure showed no crack. “I expect I was not always a good mother,” she agreed. “But I don’t think any of this can be interesting to Miss Marsh.”
“I’d rather use what you tell me,” I said, feeling increasingly outraged by Stacia and wishing she would go away. “Without any fanfare, working quietly on your own, you appear to have developed an enormous talent. Nan Kemble calls it genius. Did you know that?”
“Genius?” Judith repeated the word as though she sounded something in a foreign tongue. “Who knows what genius is?”
“Talent, at least. You can accept that. Exceptional talent. Did you work with a teacher in the beginning?”
“No, never. I only painted for my own amusement. But I wanted to do it well. I read books, and I used to go to museums.”
“I remember,” Stacia said. “You used to take me with you. I can remember the times we had tea in the restaurant at the Metropolitan. But I hated those pictures you painted, and I don’t need any psychiatrist to know why. They took you away from me.”
“I’m sorry,” Judith said softly. “I’ve always been sorry. But there wasn’t anything else I could do. I had to paint.”
“Real talent is probably compulsive,” I said. “You have this in common with the other women I’ve talked with and written about. You all had to do what you had to do. And families aren’t always happy with that.”
Stacia yawned. “In me you see the sacrificial lamb. And what good does all that talent do—when she hides herself at The Shingles? She’s always been one to hide her candle. I hope you’ll bring her light out into the open, Courtney.”
The words were not as kind as they seemed on the surface, but I ignored their cut.
“Such talent shouldn’t continue to be hidden,” I agreed. “And of course it won’t be in the end. This sort of thing develops a life of its own. Even Emily Dickinson’s poetry came out into the open eventually. But this should happen now. For the work itself. It should be seen. And it can even be an encouragement to other women. So many of us grow up thinking we can’t achieve anything on our own—until we see someone else doing what we thought couldn’t be done.”
“I’m afraid I’m not a feminist, Miss Marsh,” Judith said. “I’ve never suffered from being a woman.”
“Because Dad was such an angel to you!” Stacia cried. “He protected you, gave you anything you wanted. Except the one thing you wanted most.”
Judith did not move, her eyes downcast again, and I thought once more of her composure being worn like a cloak. But this time she reached out from behind her tranquility.
“What do you think I wanted most?” she asked her daughter.
Stacia sprang up from the sofa and circled the small island of furniture set apart in the huge attic, so that I was reminded again of a cat creature stalking.
“What you really wanted all the time was freedom from guilt—wasn’t it, my darling Mother?”
I had heard enough, and I didn’t mean to sit by and listen to Stacia trying to torment this quiet, reserved, gifted woman.
“I’ll go downstairs now,” I said, “and come back another time, when I can see you alone, Mrs. Rhodes.”
“Please don’t go.” Judith’s words surprised me, and I had an uncomfortable feeling that she did not want to be left alone with her daughter. Uncertainly, I hesitated, not sitting down.
“The trouble is,” Stacia told me, “that you aren’t asking my mother the right questions. Ask her what she’s going to do when this house is sold and she has to leave.”
“There’s no need to ask that,” Judith said calmly. “I shall never leave The Shingles.” She looked up at her daughter. “Come here, Stacia. Come here to me.”
But this time Stacia backed away, and I didn’t know what would have happened next if there hadn’t been a tap on the door.
Judith called, “Come in,” and one of the maids from downstairs walked hesitantly into the room, clearly unsure of herself in these upper regions.
She carried an envelope, sans tray, as she came the length of the room to hand it to Judith, and I felt a quick flick of anxiety—since no more anonymous letters were supposed to come to her.
“I found this near the front door just now,” the girl said. “Mr. Asher isn’t about, so I brought it up to you. Your name is on it, Mrs. Rhodes.”
“Another one!” Stacia cried.
“Thank you.” Judith took the envelope and sat staring at it, while the girl went away.
Stacia said, “Do you want me to open it?”
Her mother shook her head and slit the
envelope flap with a forefinger. From where I sat I could see the uneven pasting of cutout letters across the single, lined sheet. Judith read the words silently and leaned back in her chair, letting the envelope and page float to the floor. Stacia pounced upon the letter and held it up, reading the few words aloud.
“‘What did you do to Alice’s baby?’”
I sat very still, watching Judith, my breath quickening with my heartbeat. She seemed so quiet, so frozen, that I wondered if she was going to faint, and I bent toward her.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Rhodes?”
For an instant she did not move, and then she raised her head to look at me blankly, as though she had forgotten who I was. When she spoke, she was not addressing either of us.
“Who is doing this to me? How can it be happening?”
There was anguish in her voice, yet I found myself regarding her sharply. Anguish was understandable enough when she was being tormented, but the thing that made me stare was my sudden suspicion of a false note. I didn’t believe that her anguish was wholly real.
Stacia dropped the letter and moved quickly to the phone on the coffee table—apparently with a house connection, since I heard her speak to Asher.
“Please find Mr. Faulkner,” she said. “Ask him to come upstairs to Mother’s studio at once.”
“You didn’t need to do that,” Judith said, as Stacia set down the phone.
“Yes, I did. You’re looking positively ill. You shouldn’t let some anonymous letter writer get to you like this. You haven’t anything to hide. It really was an accident, wasn’t it—when Alice’s baby drowned?”
I wasn’t sure whether Judith heard her words or not, but they were ringing through my mind. Alice’s baby. Here were those words again. Did they mean John’s baby as well? Had they anything to do with me?
“I don’t think I’ll stay around, Mother,” Stacia said when Judith didn’t speak. “I’ll leave you to Courtney Marsh and Evan. After all, he has a vile temper and he might strike me again, mightn’t he, dear?”
The Golden Unicorn Page 9
