by Susann Cokal
Viggo, meanwhile, kept the promise to Myrtice that Heber had first made three years earlier: After a small wedding in Hygeia Springs, he fathered the first of what would prove to be many offspring. Myrtice loved her husband very much, and to secure his affections she agreed to give up the eating of arsenic and to remain in Hygiene as housekeeper of the massive new residence Edouard was erecting of native stone.
To build this new house and the gallery-fortress nearby, Edouard filled in a horrible fissure that the fire had opened in the red earth. Very few were privileged to know exactly what the new house concealed, and the men told the widow about it in whispers while Edouard made feeble demurrals. Where one huge steel rib of the old palace had thrust into the earth, a spring gushed forth; and in those bubbling waters gleamed a golden dust that suggested there must be a mother lode in the rocks of Hygeia Springs. Edouard confessed that the very thought of this still caused him to wake at many a midnight, heart pounding, fearful of what it might portend for the future. The Dynamite Gang could easily find Hygeia’s mountain; what might they do if they discovered the riches it contained?
The butler, Wong, hired a team of his countrymen good with shovels and pipe, and they cleverly converted the spring to a steady source of household water, with a filter to catch the gold dust. That dust was his to dispose of as he pleased. He used it to fund the fulfillment of a longtime aspiration, a wood-frame hotel he designed and named the Celestial, and he settled into a life of prosperous hostelery. Viggo was the manager-in-name who gave a respectable front to the business. The stone walls pressed the gold back into the ground, and it lay there unsuspected even by the three singsong sisters who helped direct the hotel.
Albert lived a long while in the Celestial, where he had a special suite of rooms designed along the lines of the old house, with plate glass walls for abundant light. In that airy studio he experienced a bout of intense inspiration and painted the six canvases that were to earn him Edouard’s lasting affection and, in the dark years to come, his protection: Immaculate Heart, Pearl of Great Price, Slim Princess, Angel in the House, Belle Dame Sans Merci, Winged Victory. The paintings were based, naturally, on what Albert knew of Famke and what he could learn from the others who had known her. The series of masterworks was completed in one frenetic year by virtue of frequent visits to the glass coffin then housed in the Celestial’s Royal Suite. These paintings might have pleased Edouard but would not, Albert came to know, win him much fame in the world beyond Hygeia. Even the most narcissistic of artists must realize eventually when his talents are on the wane; and Albert’s waned very quickly. His renewed passion for precise detail and observation could not be satisfied, and his lines grew sloppy as he lost control of what an artist must value most: his vision. For Albert had begun to see things that were not there—faces, fingers, fish tails; mouths that laughed at him, snakes that hissed forth sparks. These images intruded on the careful painterly compositions in his mind and on his canvas. Most people thought he was going mad.
Edouard, however, called in a raft of specialists from Chicago, New York, and Paris. These learned men theorized that in the explosion, tiny splinters of glass—invisible, impalpable, insensible—had wormed into Albert’s brain and infected those parts directly concerned with vision, or perhaps with inspiration. Maybe they flew up his nose or swam down his ears; more likely they pierced his skin and entered his bloodstream, forced through veins and arteries by the implacable pump of his heart, until they found harbor in his skull.
“Imagine your head as a cave,” suggested one surgeon. “The glass shards have stuck to your bones and may even be growing there in the manner of stalactites . . .”
“Or ice,” said Albert.
“Yes, or ice.”
In the end, everywhere Albert looked, he saw nothing but Famke’s face. The greatest torture was that no single image would stay before his eyes long enough to be painted; and so, since he could not have his mind’s eyes removed, he took up the dark glasses and shut out exterior images. He moved to a smaller and more manageable room in the Celestial, paid for by Edouard; and although he could no longer see the paintings amid the crowd of pictures in his mind, he visited the new gallery-castle on every month’s first Monday. Occasionally he climbed up to the house to share a beer with Edouard and exchange tales of the past, or to enter the Taj Mahal, cup the urn of Famke’s blood in his hands, and know what it was to hold the outpourings of another person’s whole heart.
“I would like to see this urn,” the widow said on that winter afternoon, years after the grand explosion. “I would like to hold it in my hands also.” She was imagining it shaped not as a heart but as a face, the face of a little girl who had suckled her life’s sole guardian away and still had the strength to wail and demand; the face of the woman who had held sway on the wall of a room that the widow’s husband, Jørgen Skatkammer, had built especially to house the vast, intricate, ugly painting that she now knew the model had painted herself.
“But first we must look again at the picture,” she said; and thus it was she who led the way into the next room, to see the thing tilted in the gilt frame that her husband had commissioned to bear the inscription:
Himlen sortner, Storme brage!
Visse Time du er kommen.
Hvad de gav de tog tilbage.
Evig bortsvandt Helligdommen.
The sky is darkening, roar the gale! / Fatal hour, you have come. / What they gave they took away. / Forever ruined, sacred thing.
Seeing it here, the widow felt an unexpected surge of relief: The painting had at last been laid to rest, and with it the most painful part of her conscience. While it hung on her own wall, that face, that hair, that figure had reminded her every day of her life how she had failed to protect the most precious soul in her care, how the girl herself had fallen beyond her reach. And yet it was the ugliness in that painted face which, ironically, had inspired Jørgen Skatkammer to give up his foolish dream of spring love and write to a convent in the distant reaches of Norway with an offer of marriage: Hygeia’s coarse features had secured Mother Birgit a kind of life she had never even thought to dream about, a life of comfort and what passed in most circles for love.
Thus each person who was intimate witness to the spectacle of Famke Ursula Summerfield Goodhouse’s life, who felt its beauty and its dangers firsthand, would spin out the remainder of his or her days. From time to time, they would all cough and suffer exaggerated fevers; but these were slight prices to pay for more than the usual measure of happiness.
While those four looked at the painting in its cracked wooden shell, the ash-white corpse slowly settled into stillness in the dark room next door. In repose, she no longer seemed boneless; her hair and her lips even lost their unnatural flame, and she looked like a normal girl—one with broken pearls for eyes and a deep streak of gold in her veins. The widow glanced back at her as she and Viggo, Edouard Versailles and the blind Albert Castle closed the door on the painting that had at last found its home.
Birgit let out a deep breath. “It is terrible, what happens to the body.”
“That is true,” Albert agreed, “but is it not just as wonderful what art can do?”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for the historical and/or medical expertise, sagacious critical opinions, and inventive support of a number of people: Maarj and Buster Darraugh, Robert Alter, John Vernon, Lynne Landwehr, Frederick Aldama, Josh Russell, Jennifer Beachey, Julie Anderson, Sadie Iovino, Paul Keats, Josephine Park, Kathryn Rummell, Mary Armstrong, Joanne Ruggles and her models Doña and Susan, Siouxie Lee, Stanley Walens, Salaam Quintanilla, Brian and Cynthia Donnelly, Lael Gold, Karin Sanders, C. Puff, Grant Mudge, Miriam Cokal, the great spirit of Grendel, my former colleagues at California Polytechnic University, and my new ones at Virginia Commonwealth University. I am especially indebted to my dear friends Leslie Hayes, who read the earliest version, and Tom Fahy, who read the latest (several times); both gave me exactly what I needed, and I would be reduced
to graphite smudges without them. I would be even worse, of course, without the good offices of my agent, Liv Blumer, and her partner, Bill; or of Fred Ramey, Greg Michalson, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, and the rest of Unbridled Books. I thank you all very much.
I extend my gratitude, also, to every reader; and for those who may wonder at my choice of subject matter, I quote again here the words on the title page of Lydia E. Pinkham’s pamphlet on female complaints and ailments:
This little book treats of delicate subjects, and has been sent to you only by request. It is not intended for indiscriminate reading, but for your own private information.
