The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  I folded my hands and tried to appear at ease. "Your receptionist may have told you that I'm doing some interviews about the work of Robert Oliver--she thought you might be able to help me." I watched Arnold carefully.

  He seemed to consider this, falling silent, but not with any special awareness. Perhaps he hadn't heard or read about the incident at the National Gallery after all. I felt a small surge of relief.

  "Certainly," he said at last. "Robert was--has been--a colleague of mine for about seven years or so, and I know his work pretty well, I think. I wouldn't say we were friends, exactly-- private kind of guy, you know--but I've always respected him." He didn't seem to know quite where to go after this, and it surprised me that he didn't ask for my credentials or why I wanted to know about Robert Oliver. I wondered what the secretary had told him--whatever it was, he seemed satisfied by it. Had she repeated the Art in America claim? What if the editor had been his art-school roommate?

  "Robert did a lot of good work here, didn't he?" I hazarded.

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  "Well, yes," Arnold admitted. "He was prolific, kind of a superman, always painting. I have to say that I find his paintings a little derivative, but he's quite a draftsman--a great one, actually. He told me once he'd done abstract for a while in school and didn't like it--that didn't last long for him, I guess. While he was here he was working mainly on two or three different series. Let's see--one of them was about windows and doors, kind of a Bon-nard interior, but more realistic, you know. He showed a couple of those in the entry of our center here. One of them was still lifes, brilliant, if you like still lifes--fruit, flowers, goblets, kind of like Manet but always with something odd in them like an electrical outlet or a bottle of aspirin--I don't know what. Anomalies. Very nicely done. He had a big show of them here, and the Greenhill Art Museum picked up at least one. So did some other museums." Arnold was rummaging through a can on his desk; he pulled out a stub of pencil and began to twiddle it between two fingers. "He was working on a new series for a couple of years before he left, and toward the end he had a solo show of them here. That batch was, I'll be frank, bizarre. I saw him working on them in the studio. Mostly he worked at home, I guess."

  I tried not to look too interested; by now I'd managed to get my notepad out and arrange myself in journalistic calm. "Was that series also traditionalist?"

  "Oh yes, but weird. All the paintings showed basically the same scene--pretty gruesome scene--a young woman holding an older woman in her arms. The young woman is staring down at her in shock, and the older woman is--well, shot through the head, shot dead, you can tell. Kind of Victorian melodrama. Clothes and hair and incredible detail, with some soft brushwork and some realism, a mix. I don't know who he got to pose for those--maybe students, although I never saw anyone working with him on it. There's still one painting from that series at the gallery here--he gave it for the lobby when they renovated. I've got a piece there,

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  too--all the current faculty were represented, which means they had to build a lot of pottery cases and all. Do you know Robert Oliver well?" he asked suddenly.

  "I've interviewed him a couple of times in Washington," I said, alarmed. "I wouldn't say I know him that well, but I find him interesting."

  "How is he?" Arnold was looking at me with more keenness than I'd previously noted; how had I missed the intelligence in his pale eyes? He was a disarming person, sort of loose and comfortable, with his skinny legs and arms splayed around the desk; you couldn't help liking him, and I feared him now, too.

  "Well, I understand he's working on some new drawings these days."

  "He won't be coming back, I suppose? I've never heard anything about his coming back."

  "He didn't mention any plans to return to Greenhill," I admitted. "At least, we didn't discuss that, so maybe he's planning to -- I don't know. Do you think he liked teaching? How was he with his students?"

  "Well, he ran off with a student, you know."

  This time I was completely off my guard. "What?"

  He seemed amused. "Didn't he tell you that? Well, she wasn't a student here. Apparently he met her when he was teaching at another college for a term, but we heard after he took a leave of absence all of a sudden that he had gone to live with her in Washington. I don't think he even mailed in an official resignation. I don't know what happened. He just didn't come back. Very bad for his teaching career. I've always wondered how he could afford to do that. He didn't seem like someone who had a lot of extra money stashed away, but I guess you never know. Maybe his paintings were selling well enough--that's a real possibility. Anyway, it was a shame. My wife knew his wife a little, and she said his wife never said a word about it. They had been living in town for

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  a while already, not on campus. She's a lovely woman, his wife. I can't imagine what old Bob was thinking, but--you know. People go crazy."

  I found it hard to follow this speech with any coherent comment, but Arnold didn't seem to notice. "Well, I wish Robert all the best anyway. He was a good guy at heart, or I always thought so. He's big-league, I guess, and probably this place couldn't hold him. That's my theory." He mentioned this without bitterness, as if the place that hadn't been able to hold Robert was as comfortable for him--Arnold -- as the chair he was settled in. He ruminated on his pencil stub and then began to draw something on a notepad. "What are you focusing on in your article?"

  I collected myself. Should I ask Arnold that former student's name? I didn't dare. I thought again that she must have been his muse, the woman in the painting Kate so disliked. Mary? "Well, I'm concentrating on Oliver's paintings of women," I said.

  Arnold would have snorted if he'd been that kind of person. "He did plenty of those, I guess. His show in Chicago was mainly women, or all the same woman, kind of curly, black-haired. I saw him painting some of those, too. The catalog's around here somewhere, if his wife didn't haul it away. I asked him once if that was someone he knew and he didn't answer, so I don't know who posed for those either. The same student, maybe, although she didn't live here, as I said. Or--I don't know. Odd bird, Robert-- he had a way of answering you and you realized only afterward that you hadn't gotten any info out of him."

  "Did he seem--did you notice anything out of the ordinary with him before he left the college?"

  Arnold let his sketch fall to the desk. "Out of the ordinary? No, I wouldn't say so, except for that last weird bunch of paintings--I shouldn't say that about a colleague's work, but I'm known for speaking my mind, and I'll be honest--they freaked me out a little. Robert has a great ability to paint in nineteenth-century styles--even if you don't like imitation, you have to admire his

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  skill. Those still lifes were amazing, and I saw a kind of Impressionist landscape he did once, too. You would have thought it was the real thing. He told me once that only nature mattered, that he hated conceptual art--I don't do conceptual either, but I don't hate it--and I thought, Then why on earth paint all that heavy Victorian stuff? I don't know what that is, if not conceptual, these days--you're making a statement just by doing it. But I'm sure he told you all about it."

  I saw that I wasn't going to get much more out of Arnold. He was an observer of paintings, not of people; he seemed to shimmer and fade in front of me, as smart and insubstantial and good-natured as Robert Oliver was deep and substantial and troubled. I would take sullen, subtle Oliver in a minute, I thought, if it were a matter of choosing friends.

  "If you need some more notes, I can walk you over to see Bob's painting," Arnold was telling me. "That's about all of him you'll find here these days, I'm afraid. His wife came out one day and cleaned out his office and took all the paintings he'd left in the faculty studio. I wasn't here when she did it, but someone told me about it. Maybe he just didn't want to do it himself and those paintings would have stayed here forever--who knows? I don't think he was that close to anyone here. Come on--I need a walk anyway."

  He unbent his legs, storkli
ke, and we ambled out together. The sunlight beyond the front door was gorgeously bright, urgent; I wondered how any artist could stand that little concrete office, but perhaps it wasn't up to Arnold, and he seemed to have made the best of it.

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  CHAPTER 39 Marlow

  I followed him into the log-cabin gallery next door, which turned out to be large and sophisticated inside, with a hidden back wing of glass and whitewashed frames, an addition some architect had nurtured toward a local prize. The skylighted entryway was lined with canvases and softly bright glass cases filled with ceramics.

  Arnold indicated a big painting opposite the door, and I saw at once what he meant--it was bizarre, terribly alive and yet over-dramatic, stilted like a Victorian stage piece. It showed a woman in billowing skirts and fitted bodice, her slender body bent over. She was kneeling on a roughly cobbled street; as Arnold had promised, she cradled in her arms an older woman, sickeningly dead. The older woman's face was ashen, her eyes closed, her mouth slack, and through her forehead was a bullet hole, a distinct horrible tunnel drilled there, so that a gush of blood was already drying down one side of her loosened hair and shawl.

  The younger woman had been elegantly dressed, but her pale-green gown was dirty and torn, stained with blood on the front where she clasped the murdered woman's head against her. Her own lustrous, curly hair had come undone, her hat fell by its ribbons onto her shoulder, her face was bent over the dead woman's so that I couldn't see the luminous eyes I was already so used to meeting. The background was hazier, but it seemed to be a wall, a narrow city street, one storefront overhung with words whose letters blurred in the paint, unreadable, figures in red and blue crouching nearby but indistinguishable. There were piles of something at one end--brown, beige--chopped wood? Sandbags? A lumberyard?

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  The whole thing was riveting but also purposely overdone, it seemed to me, appalling as well as moving. It smelled of fear and hopelessness. The pose, the grief in it, made me remember my first glimpse of the Michelangelo Pieta--a work too famous for anyone to look at it clearly anymore, except perhaps when one is young enough. I'd seen it on my trip to Italy after college; at that time it was not yet behind glass, so I was separated from the figures by only a rope and a distance of five feet or so. The daylight coming down on Mary and Jesus touched them with different tones, and it was as if both bodies were alive, the blood pulsing in their veins--not only the grieving mother but also the freshly dead son. The incredibly touching thing was that he wasn't dead. For me, without faith, it was not a prediction of resurrection but a portrayal of Mary's shock, and of the lingering aliveness one sees in the hospital when a young person is wrested out of life by some terrible injury. I learned, in that moment, the difference between genius and everything else.

  What struck me most about Robert's painting, apart from the horror of the scene, was that it was narrative, whereas all the images I'd seen of his lady before this were portraits. But what was the story? Possibly Robert hadn't been using any models at all; I remembered what Kate had said about how he sometimes drew and painted from his imagination. Or perhaps he'd been using models but had invented the story--the nineteenth-century dress would support this idea. Had he dreamed up his lady character holding her murdered mother? Perhaps he'd even been painting his own bright and dark sides, the two parts of his psyche divided by illness. I hadn't expected Robert Oliver to come up with actual stories.

  "You don't like it either?" Arnold looked pleased.

  "It's very skillful," I said. "Which one of these is yours?"

  "Oh, on this wall," Arnold said, gesturing toward a large canvas behind us, next to the door. He folded his arms in front of it. It was abstract, large soft squares of pale blue melting into one another, a

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  silver sheen over it all, as if you could drop a square pebble in water and it would make concentric squares. It was rather appealing, actually. I turned to Arnold and smiled. "I do like this."

  "Thanks," he said cheerfully. "I'm doing yellow now." We stood gazing at the blue, Arnold's child of a couple of years earlier, Arnold with his head fondly to one side; I could see he hadn't really looked at it in a while. "Well," he said.

  "Yes, I should let you get back to office hours," I told him gratefully. "You've been very kind."

  "If you talk with Robert again, tell him I said hello," he prompted. "Tell him he's not forgotten here, no matter what."

  "I'll certainly tell him," I--lied?

  "Send me a copy of that article if you think of it," he added, waving me out the door.

  I nodded and then shook my head and covered my error with some return waving before I got into my car, but he was gone. I sat behind the steering wheel for a moment, trying not to actually put my head in my hands. Then I got out again, slowly, feeling the eyes of the building on me, and went back into the gallery. I walked deliberately past the paintings in the entryway, the platforms of glowing bowls and vases, the linen and wool tapestries. I went into the main hall and viewed one by one the student paintings hung on show there, reading the placards without remembering them, staring at the glaze of red, green, gold--trees, fruit, mountains, flowers, cubes, motorcycles, words, a jumble of work, some of it excellent, some of it surprisingly clumsy. I looked at every item until the colors whirled, and then, slowly, I went back to Robert's painting.

  She was still there, of course, bending over her terrible burden, pressing the loosened floppy head with its bullet hole against the green curve of her breast, her own face concentrated with grief rather than slack, her jaw set against tears, her dark eyebrows drawn together in a fine, furious, unbelieving misery, her anger showing also in the line of her shoulder, her skirts still trembling

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  from her swift movement: she had knelt on the dirty street and seized the precious body. She knew and loved the dead woman; this was no abstract mercy. It was an incredible painting. With all my training, I couldn't begin to figure out how Robert had conveyed such emotion, such motion, in paint; I could see some of the strokes he'd used, the blends of color, but the life with which he'd imbued the living woman and the lifelessness with which he portrayed the dead one were beyond my understanding. If it was a work of the imagination, that made it all the more horrifying. How could the college bear to have this image hanging in front of its students day after day?

  I stood gazing at her until she seemed about to start up with a cry of anguish or a call for help, or run, or brace her lovely back and waist to try to raise and carry the heavy body. At any moment something might happen; that was the remarkable thing. He had caught the instant of shock, of total change, of disbelief. I put my hand to my throat and felt my own warmth there. I waited for her to lift her head. Would I--this was the question--would I be able to help her if she looked up? She was inches away from me, breathing and real, in the second of unreal calm before complete distress, and I knew myself powerless. I realized then, for the first time, what Robert had accomplished.

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  CHAPTER 40 Marlow

  It took me hours, that afternoon, to make up my mind. By the time I reached Kate's door again, it was dark; I'd lost another day and would have to drive to DC starting early in the morning, drive hard to make an evening appointment. Instead of leaving Greenhill, I'd taken a restless walk and eaten dinner in town, then turned my wheels away from the Hadleys' mountain road, at the last moment, and back toward the other side of the valley. The trees loomed around me in Kate's neighborhood, and there were lights in the windows of the Tudor houses; a dog barked. I pulled slowly up her drive. It wasn't late, but it wasn't courteously early either. Why the hell hadn't I called ahead? What was I thinking? By then, however, I couldn't stop myself.

  When I reached her porch, the light went on automatically, and I almost expected an alarm to sound. One lamp was lit in the living room. There was no other sign of life, although I could see a glow in the back rooms as well. I raised my hand to ring the bell, then changed my mind with
my last bit of sense and knocked firmly instead. A shadow came out of the far interior doorway and approached--Kate, her delicate body passing into and again out of the lamplight, her hair glinting, her movements wary. She peered through the glass with a tense face and then, apparently recognizing me but all the more cautious because of that, came to the door and opened it slowly.

  "I'm so sorry," I said. "I'm sorry to disturb you this late, and I haven't lost my mind--" Although I wasn't completely sure about that, and it sounded worse than if I hadn't said it, once it was out.

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  "I'm leaving in the morning, you know, and--please show me the other paintings."

  She let her hand drop from the door handle and turned her head to look fully at me. It was an expression of sorrow, of disdain, a last-straw look but full of an infinite patience as well. I stood my ground, losing hope every second. In a moment she would deny me, tell me I had indeed lost my mind, remark that she didn't know what I was talking about, that I had no real business here, that she wished I would leave. Instead, she moved aside to let me in.

  The house was deeply peaceful, and I felt like the worst kind of intruder, clumsy and heavy-footed. At what cost had she created this peace? There was comfort around me, lamplight, perfect order, a gentle breathing of wood and flowers that could have been the breathing of the children themselves; presumably they were asleep upstairs, and their unseen vulnerability made me feel all the guiltier. I dreaded going up those stairs and hearing their actual soft sighs, but to my surprise Kate opened a door in the dining room instead and led me down steps: the basement. It smelled of dust, dry dirt, old dry wood. We went slowly down the stairway; despite one lightbulb overhead, I had the feeling that we were descending into darkness. The smell reminded me of something from my childhood--oddly pleasant, someplace I'd visited or played. Kate's slender shape moved ahead of me; I looked down on the top of her gold-brown head in that bare yet inadequate lighting, and she seemed to slip away from me into a dream. There was a woodpile in one corner, an ancient spinning wheel in another, plastic buckets, empty ceramic flowerpots.