The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

by Jeffrey Ford

  I lay there swinging rapidly back and forth between specific memories of my days with Samantha and moments of clouded uncertainty when her sleeping figure mocked my belief that I knew anything about her at all. In an attempt to circumvent the troublesome half of this equation, I concentrated on the kindness she had shown the previous day by bringing Emma to my studio. I smiled when considering how poor a job I had done in rendering the girl’s looks, and then, suddenly, miraculously, I had a thought that was not centered upon myself.

  I dressed and left the house in such haste that I did not remember an umbrella, and by the time I reached Broadway, I was soaked to the skin. As happens during such torrential rains, the thoroughfares had been turned to mud. When I had to leave the safety of the sidewalk and cross the street, I sank in to my ankles. I nearly lost a shoe to the suction but, in all, fared better than a deeply mired automobile I saw another block down, uselessly spinning its wheels and sending up a geyser of brown muck. The horses showed up their mechanical competitors, but even they moved at only a plodding pace.

  Upon reaching the address of W. & J. Sloane, I ducked in under the stone overhang of a doorway to find a moment’s relief from the downpour. The wind felt brutally cold, and I was surprised the precipitation had not turned to snow. The gloves I wore had no lining, and my hands were freezing. I took off my hat and tipped it to let the water roll off the brim. Then, standing still, I surveyed the Sunday-morning desolation of the street, trying to remember if Samantha’s friend Emma had mentioned whether she headed south or north from the fabric merchant’s on her way home. I had already passed a number of alleys on Broadway, but I thought I would head downtown a few more blocks and then inspect each one on my way back home.

  Only then did I consider that it might have been a good idea to check the newspaper to see if there had been any women who had gone missing in the last few days. It was possible that the woman whom Emma had seen crying blood was one of the poor victims that Sills and his men had already discovered. Since Emma had not given an exact date in mentioning the incident, but, as far as I could remember, had just said “the other day,” I was unsure about how long ago her brief glimpse of the weeping woman had taken place.

  Next door to Sloane’s, heading downtown, was a church whose doors stood open but which seemed as empty as the stores. I passed apartment buildings and shops, but the structures here were built with walls butting up against each other, leaving no room for alleyways. The same held true for the next few southerly blocks, so I turned around and began working my way back toward my home.

  I was every bit the undaunted investigator while walking along Broadway, but when I came to the first alleyway and looked into its grimy darkness, my courage quailed. It struck me that the very last thing I wanted was to discover a body with the eyes leaking blood. As I mentioned before, the eyes hold a sacred position in my personal psychology. Being that the crux of my profession and my art is the manipulation of light on canvas, to say that sight is essential is an understatement. The mere thought of a sty makes me queasy, and now, as I inched into the dripping shadows to find what I might, my hands shook and sweat mixed with the rain on my face.

  This alley was a miniature throwback to old New York when people would toss their refuse into the streets for the pigs to root through. A few yards into the canyon of brick, I was walking on all manner of offal and discarded newsprint. There were some staved-in barrels, a few empty crates, but I reached the end, a tall wooden fence, and breathed a sigh to have discovered no corpses. I went mincingly down two more of these grim passageways and, in the last, discovered only a starving old mongrel hiding in an overturned barrel. The creature barely stirred when I went scuttling past it through the debris.

  Emerging once again onto the sidewalk from the last of the three alleys, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief as well as a twinge of righteousness for having taken the trouble to brave the weather and make my search. As I turned to head toward Twenty-first Street and home, my gaze happened to scan the other side of the avenue, and I noticed an entrance to yet another alley. “Is it possible that Emma crossed the avenue on her way home?” I wondered. I shook my head and took a few steps before turning and looking back at the opening. I cursed roundly and stepped down into the muck of Broadway.

  The wall of one of the buildings that defined this particular alley belonged to a tobacconist’s shop, so there were quite a few casks stacked high, giving off the rich scent of their recent contents, and a good deal of rotted whole leaf, both tied in bunches and loose on the ground. The aroma made me desire a cigarette, and I stopped halfway to the end of the alley to light one. This bolstered me a bit, and I continued. I neared the end and was about to turn back when I saw a shoe; a woman’s laced ankle boot. Then there was movement, as if the ground were shifting. I finally heard squeals above the sound of wind and rain echoing down the passage. I peered closer and made out no fewer than a hundred rats like a slick, living blanket of shadow covering something. The cigarette dropped out of my mouth as I groaned. At this sharp sound the filthy creatures scattered to reveal her. The blood had coagulated, and the face held two huge, erupted scabs instead of eyes. It was difficult to tell that the dress had once been white, so drenched it was in the brick color of dried gore. It was all I could do not to retch. I turned, fighting an overwhelming paralysis, and forced myself to move forward one step at a time.

  When I reached the street end of the alley and finally stepped out onto the sidewalk, a passerby nearly walked into me. I was slow in my movements, and the other individual brought himself up short at the last instant.

  “Please excuse me,” the gentleman said, and then stepped around me.

  I said nothing, but did take in his countenance. Only later, after I had walked to Crenshaw’s in a daze and used their telephone to call police headquarters, did I realize that the man I had nearly collided with was of all people Albert Pinkham Ryder. I was beginning to sense that condition Mrs. Charbuque had alluded to when speaking of the first time she believed the Twins had whispered to her—as if she were being singled out by God.

  Samantha was still asleep when I arrived home. I did not wake her but changed out of my wet clothing and went directly to my studio. Taking up my palette and brush, I set to filling the canvas I had prepared the previous morning. I worked furiously and had only a vague idea that I was painting a woman. I let the paint and the sensation of its application dictate the attributes of the figure, taking my cues from the colors I chose with no lengthy deliberation—the picture itself directed my creation of it.

  Sometime in the late afternoon I felt Samantha’s arms close around me from behind. Only then did I become fully aware of what I had rendered: a portrait, definitely of a woman I did not know, seated, with long light hair, dressed in a robe of phthalocia-nine green sporting a paisley design in cadmium yellow. Her smile was as mischievous and mysterious as that of Leonardo’s Giaconda, but her eyes were fountains of red, red everywhere, in a million droplets, more copious than the downpour outside.

  “Tell me, Piambo,” Samantha whispered to me. “Speak to me.”

  My own eyes filled with tears as I related to her what had occurred on the way home from Shenz’s place, my promise to John Sills, my discovery that morning. I lifted the palette knife as I spoke, and scraped the canvas clean.

  THE WOLF

  NEAR THE end of winter, one night when I was with my father out in the frozen laboratory, he questioned me about how I had known where to find the corpse. In all things save the self-delusion generated by the pursuit of his profession, he was an honest man, and I could not lie to him. All he need do was squint his right eye and smile with the left side of his mouth, and the truth would out. I confessed that the identical snowflakes had bestowed some strange power upon me, an ability to know things I should not be able to. With so much time now passed, I can’t recall the words I used to describe the phenomenon to him, but I was an intelligent child and made myself understood. I knew he would not laugh
derisively as any sane parent would, but I was fearful he might be angry with me for calling attention to the Twins. What he actually did was nod gravely and touch me lightly on the forehead.

  “He called it the second sight and said that, although I was always to keep the existence of the Twins a secret, I should develop this ability in order to help others and myself. Then he told me, ‘Ossiak will not be able to support my work before too long, and it will be necessary that you begin preparing to make your way in the world.’ I nodded, although I had no idea what he was alluding to.

  “He told me to fetch the lamps that sat at the perimeter of the laboratory. ‘Bring them and put them on the viewing stage, Lu,’ he said. As I ran to fulfill his request, he started up the ladder to his seat on the optical magnifier. I returned with the two lamps and placed them one on each side. ‘Now lie down, faceup, so that I can focus upon your eyes,’ he said. ‘I want to get a look inside you.’

  “I did as I was told. The stage was frigid. Once my head was beneath the huge lens, he called, ‘When I bring down the barrel, try as best you can to hold your breath for as long as possible. Otherwise it will fog the lens.’ I heard the machine begin to descend, one gear tooth at a time, and for a moment feared that my father would absentmindedly crush my face, forgetting that today’s specimen was my head and not a flat board full of snowflakes. He halted it only an inch or two from my face, or that is how I remember it. ‘Stop breathing,’ he called, and I took a deep breath. ‘Open your eyes as wide as they will allow,’ he said. I did this too.

  “In my attempt to ignore the discomfort of not breathing, I listened to the wind outside. Suddenly I saw something move in the lens above me, an image that eventually settled into a horizontal line, like a pair of giant lips displaying a monumental lack of emotion—a magnification of my mother’s usual expression. A moment later those lips finally parted, revealing themselves as eyelids, and I beheld an eye of immense proportions. I felt its gaze penetrating me, scratching my very soul, and knew that it could see all my secrets. There was no doubting now that I would forever be scrutinized from above by an omniscient judge. I desperately wanted to scream with the fear of being so completely exposed but would not allow even a murmur to leave my mouth.

  “I tell you, my face was probably blue by the time I noticed the lens above me beginning to ascend. ‘Take air,’ yelled my father as I heard his feet hitting the rungs of the ladder. I did, and I felt his hand on mine, pulling me up away from the machine. He knelt on the frozen floor and hugged me to him. ‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘I saw everything.’ I began to cry, and he patted my back. I tried to clasp my arms around his neck, but he pulled me gently from him and held me by the shoulders so as to look directly at me. ‘Within you,’ he said, ‘I saw the universe. A million stars, and at their center a star composed of stars that shone with a clear brilliance—the imprint of the Almighty.’

  “Believing himself to be a scientist, of course he had to double-check his findings. So he asked me to try to concentrate upon the voice of the Twins and remember whatever it was they next showed me. All I could do was nod. I was stunned by the idea that now not only was God watching me, especially me, but He was also inside me in the form of a swirling universe of stars. I did little more for the rest of the day than sit on the broken-down couch at the back of his study and stare out the window. Later on, when my mother called us to dinner, I felt the locket’s heat against my breast, felt its chain tingle around my neck, and heard the faint stirrings of identical voices, one in each ear. Those words became a picture in my mind. I saw, moving through the trees on the shore of the lake, a large dark wolf, saliva dripping from his tongue, his eyes bright yellow.

  “‘A wolf!’ I yelled aloud, and at that moment realized I was looking out the window through the twilight and had actually seen some darker shadow passing into the forest at the edge of our homestead. Father spun around in his chair and said, ‘Where?’ ‘The Twins,’ I told him, ‘they showed it to me. It’s coming.’ Right then my mother came to the door of the study and told us dinner was getting cold. As soon as she left to return to the kitchen, my father nodded, letting me know he understood, and then put his finger to his lips.

  “After that incident in his study, I saw the wolf repeatedly in my thoughts and, if truth be told, still see it lurking from time to time at the edges of my consciousness. I was afraid to go out into the forest to play, as was my custom. Sticking close to the house, I had my games, but with one ear I was always listening for its approach. Two days passed and the wolf had not materialized, but my father kept his rifle loaded as a precaution against an emergency. I thought the plan was not to mention it to my mother, but I suppose my father feared for her safety, and at dinner the second night he told her to be wary of wolves. ‘It’s the season,’ he said. ‘It’s the season.’ My mother gave a mocking laugh and replied, ‘What season? We haven’t seen a wolf up here for four years,’ but still, from that point on, she exhibited a certain nervous agitation.

  “On the third night following the day of my so-called prediction, our small family was in the sitting room, reading by the lamplight. I still remember that through the winter of that year I was reading a collection of fairy tales my father had purchased for me in New York City the previous summer. When it was nearly my bedtime, I heard a noise outside the house; something moving through the crusted snow. I stood up from where I lay on the floor, and as I rose, so did my father from his chair. He went to his study and brought out his rifle. ‘Put that away,’ said my mother. ‘Someone is going to get hurt.’ He ignored her as he slipped his feet into his unlaced boots. She literally leaped out of her chair and placed herself between him and the door. I was as startled by her action and the emotion behind it as I was afraid of what might be outside. He gently moved her aside and pulled back the dead bolt.

  “Tense minutes passed while he was outside. I kept expecting to hear a growl or a gunshot, but neither came. When he finally returned to the house, he was very quiet, much as when he was in his study pondering the mysteries of the snow crystals. ‘Did you see the wolf?’ I asked when he returned from putting the rifle away and again took his seat. ‘Footprints,’ he said. ‘It’s a big one.’ I was then sent to bed. The next day I searched all around the house for the prints of the predator. It hadn’t snowed, and the wind had not been high through the night, so they should still have been there. All I managed to find were boot prints.

  “THE FOLLOWING day I was sitting in my father’s study on the couch, and he turned to me and said, ‘Lu, go see if your mother has any twine. I have to tie these old notes up in order to store them.’ I went on my errand, first searching in the kitchen and then the bedroom. She did not seem to be in the house at all. I put on my boots and coat and went outside to see if she was fetching water or using the outhouse. It was a clear day and somewhat warmer than usual, the first sign that year that spring might actually arrive. I did not find my mother in any of the usual places, so I went to the tin shed that held the optical magnifier. She was not there. Out behind that building, I found the clothesline half hung with the day’s laundry, the other half still heaped in the wicker basket. When I drew closer, I saw the trail of my mother’s footsteps leading away into the forest. The wolf burst into my thoughts then, and I ran screaming back to the house.

  “My father again took his rifle. He told me to stay in the house and bolt the door behind him when he left. I watched from the window in his office as he trudged across the snow beneath the blue sky toward the tree line. The waiting was interminable, and in that time I wanted to rip the locket off my neck and throw it as far from me as possible. It was the first time I realized that the secret of the Twins was much more a curse than a blessing. If only I had followed my impulse. I don’t know how much actual time passed, ten minutes, a half hour, hours. Finally the anxiety became too much for me, and I ran to the door in the sitting room and unbolted it. I stepped outside, and that is when I heard, from a great distance, like the whisper of th
e Twins, my mother’s scream followed by the report of the rifle. I took two steps in the direction of the woods, and the rifle sounded a second time.

  “I met my father a few yards from the tree line. He moved slowly as if in the clutches of a great weariness. ‘Where is Mother?’ I asked. He seemed in a daze, and his complexion was blanched a terrifying white. He shook his head and said, ‘The wolf took her and I shot the wolf.’ I knew this meant she was dead, and I began to cry. My father cried too as we held each other. I can mark his physical and mental decline from that moment. The fact that it matched the decline and eventual destruction of Malcolm Ossiak’s empire is an interesting side issue. Twin tragedies.”

  “Your mother’s body, was it ever recovered?” I asked, and briefly looked down to see that I had sketched not a woman but a wolf.

  “No, Mr. Piambo, nor was the corpse of the wolf. I will tell you, though, that in the spring, when we were packing our things to descend the mountain and return to the city, I discovered in a box kept in the corner of the laboratory a broad-brimmed hat and a fur coat made from the pelt of an animal.”

  I was anxious to ask Mrs. Charbuque a rather obvious question, but she interrupted me as I mouthed the first word.