The Gravity of Birds: A Novel

by Tracy Guzeman

  “You estimate he painted the pieces when, thirty-some years ago?”

  “The original panel, yes. The overpainting, some years after that.”

  “Why wait until now to try to find the other panels?”

  “Really, Finch,” Stephen said, rearranging the salt and pepper shakers. “I’m not sure that’s our concern.”

  “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up, Stephen.”

  Finch’s tone of resignation sent him into a panic. “I don’t believe you completely grasp the seriousness of my situation, Professor. You heard what Bayber said. He will only sell the work in its entirety. If we can’t find the panels, what incentive will Cranston possibly have to keep me on?”

  “Your skill? Your knowledge?”

  Stephen shook his head.

  “You’re counting on this one thing to change quite a lot for you.”

  Stephen realized Finch had a great deal in common with his father: never wanting for approval or lacking in accomplishments; a bevy of friends and family; jokes that drew laughter; stories his students clamored to hear time and again, finding them more charming with each retelling. Had Finch ever watched people look uneasily at one another in his presence, or felt the tone of his voice rise unexpectedly until all heads in a room swiveled in his direction? Had he ever made a logical assessment of a situation only to hear people describe him as heartless? How could he possibly explain to Finch that this was the opportunity of a lifetime? Find the missing panels and he might once again be anointed with the gravitational pull of success; people would be drawn to him, whether they liked him or not.

  “In terms of a career path, Finch, I am presently working in the basement. Dropped any lower and I become fodder for Jules Verne.”

  * * *

  Woodridge was a small town at the northern tip of Fairfield County in Connecticut. The Kessler house stood at the end of a long, curving lane bordered by sycamore and hackberry trees, the patchy, mottled bark of the former looking like a contagion the latter had narrowly escaped. It wasn’t until he and Finch were halfway down the lane that Stephen saw the house, a yellow, three-story colonial revival that at one point must have sat like a cheerful ball of sun against the backdrop of evergreens. Now the house had faded to the color of Dijon mustard; the front porch sagged in the middle; the yard was littered with wheeled contraptions appropriate for a variety of ages: a Volvo station wagon, an old Mercedes up on blocks, two motorbikes, bicycles, and a tricycle with muddy streamers hanging from the handgrips. Dogs barked at the rear of the property when they got out of the car.

  Finch appeared unhappy but determined and mounted the front steps with the enthusiasm of a precinct captain. An index card thumbtacked beneath the doorbell stated, “Broken. Please knock loudly.” Finch’s head dropped to his chest, and he waved Stephen forward. Stephen took off his gloves and thumped on the front door with his fist, watching chips of paint drift down onto the bristled welcome mat caked in mud.

  The man who eventually came to the door had lank brown hair hanging to his shoulders, a plaid wool shirt, and glasses with the thickest black rims Stephen had ever seen. Finch offered a brief explanation, but the man seemed unconcerned about having strangers in his home and swept his bangs away from his forehead before shaking Finch’s hand and letting them in.

  “Winslow Edell,” he said. He turned to the dark staircase and yelled, “Esme!” His voice echoed up the stairwell, a musical lilt sticking to the end of it. In spite of the collection of vehicles outside, there was not a sound in the house save for the dogs out back that had begun baying in tandem.

  “She’ll be down before long. Why don’t we wait in the living room?” They followed him down a hall into a large room and waited while Winslow pushed newspapers off every piece of furniture and onto the floor. Stephen couldn’t figure out why the room was so bright until he realized there were no curtains, no drapes, no shutters or blinds. The light streaming into the room was reflected from the snow outside.

  “You’re friends of the Kesslers, then?”

  Finch cleared his throat. For once Stephen had no desire to interject, still absorbed by the overall state of clutter surrounding him. “We are trying to locate Natalie and Alice for a good friend of the family.”

  Winslow frowned. “I doubt we can help you. We only met Natalie Kessler the one time, and that was thirty-five years ago, when we first looked at the place in ’seventy-two.”

  “And you bought the house right away?”

  “Oh, no. We’re just renting. The Kesslers still own the house.” A woman in frayed jeans with a long chestnut braid entered the room and sat down on the arm of Winslow’s chair. “We fell in love with the house the minute we saw it. I was pregnant with our first then, and Natalie—Miss Kessler—was in a hurry to leave. I heard there was a younger sister, but I think she was ill, or maybe away, when we moved in. We never saw her. I’m Esme, by the way.” She got up and walked over to Finch, giving him a peck on the cheek, then did the same with Stephen. “Can you believe it, Winslow? That we’ve been here for that long?”

  “Through six kids and eleven grandkids. Lots of history here.”

  The house seemed an odd combination of taste and dishevelment. Stuffing poked out of the arms of chairs with nicely carved legs; the coffee table was gouged but sturdy. A piano stood in the corner, buried beneath magazines.

  “You play the piano, Mrs. Edell?” Stephen asked.

  “Mrs. Edell?” Esme twittered. “I thought my mother-in-law might have slipped into the room for a minute. Please, just call me Esme. We prefer informality. It’s how we raised our children, having them use our first names. We wanted them to know that we considered them our equals.”

  Winslow nodded. “From the very beginning. People in their own right. Just smaller.”

  So this was where the counterculture had come to die. Stephen avoided glancing at Finch, sure of his expression. “Do you mind if I look at it?”

  “Not at all.” She moved stacks of magazines off the top of the piano, and Stephen was stunned to see the instrument was a rare macassar ebony Mason & Hamlin.

  “We never play it,” she said. “We’re not a musical sort of family. But it was here, so we thought, why not give it a whirl?” She punched D sharp repeatedly, as if encouraging the key to stay down. Finch’s shoulders shot up toward his ears. “The kids never took to it, though.”

  “It was here?”

  “Oh, it’s not ours. It belongs to the Kesslers. Everything in the house does. We rented the place furnished.”

  Finch appeared as confused as Stephen felt. “Forgive me, Mr. and Mrs. Edell,” Finch began, pointedly using their surname, “but you’ve been renting the house for thirty-five years? And in all that time, never had any contact with Alice or Natalie Kessler?”

  “Well.” Her voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. “We can hardly believe it ourselves. We never took the place with the intention of staying this long. The rent was steep for us for the first few years, but Winslow’s parents left him a little money so we could make it work. The rent increases since we started living here have been very modest. Winslow’s a bit of a handyman, so he keeps the place up.”

  “Yes, I can see,” Finch said, pointedly looking at the raw edge of a windowsill.

  “We just send our checks off every month to the property management company.” Esme stood in back of the chair where her husband was sitting and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I suppose it will have to end, sooner or later. But we’re prepared, aren’t we, honey? We’ve been talking about getting a mobile home and just hitting the road for a few years.”

  “I don’t suppose you get any mail for the Kesslers?” Finch asked.

  “Not anymore. There were the usual things for the first year or so we lived here. Catalogs, some magazines, lots of letters from people who must not have known they’d left. Packages. We were just supposed to send anything that came to the management company, so that’s what we did. We haven’t had any mail c
ome for the Kesslers in at least, oh, twenty-five years, I’d guess.”

  “The name and address of the management company, could you give them to us?”

  Winslow popped out of his chair and walked over to a desk, pulling open a bottom drawer stuffed with files. “It’s in Hartford. Steele and Greene Property Management. Here’s the address.”

  “Anyone in particular that you deal with?” Stephen asked, making cramped notes in the pad he’d taken from his pocket.

  “Deal with? No. We don’t bother them and they don’t bother us. Like Esme said, we keep the place up and send our checks in on the last day of the month. We’re as reliable as the U.S. Postal Service. It’s a sweet arrangement.” For the first time since letting them into the house, Winslow looked alarmed. “You wouldn’t be trying to get them to sell this place, would you?”

  Finch gave nothing away, sitting perfectly straight in his chair. “I can assure you we are only trying to find Alice and Natalie Kessler to pass a message on to them. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the property. Mrs. Edell, you said you only met Natalie the one time. Did she happen to mention anything about where they were going, or why they were leaving in such a hurry?”

  Esme considered, but shook her head. “Not that I recall. It was after Hurricane Agnes. She talked about the basement flooding, but Winslow never found any real damage to the foundation. Their parents had died about three years earlier. We thought maybe they just wanted a fresh start.”

  “Didn’t it strike you as odd, that they would leave all of their furniture behind?”

  “It was providence,” Winslow said, smiling broadly at Stephen. “Why question good fortune, I say. A man from Steele and Greene came after we signed the papers. Walked through and took an inventory of everything—all the furniture, the kitchen equipment, the artwork. We signed off on it. It’s all still here, every piece of it.”

  After the word artwork, everything was muted by the drumming of Stephen’s heart in his throat. The missing panels were here. Finch, too, appeared dumbstruck that the problem should be so easily solved. “The artwork you’re speaking of, could we see it?”

  Esme motioned for them to follow her. “It’s not really our taste, you understand. So we moved it all to the back hall. It’s only us coming in and out that way.”

  The back hall was dim, but even before entering it Stephen could see the shallow profiles of frames lining the two walls. He walked past several pieces with only a perfunctory assessment—lithographs mostly, some signed posters, and a few photographs. Then two thirds of the way down the hall, he stopped short and took a step back.

  He’d been so focused on what they were looking for that he’d walked right past it. The Edells did not have either of the missing triptych panels; nothing hanging in the hallway was the right size. But what Natalie and Alice had left behind was a color pencil sketch, signed by Bayber and dated August 1963.

  Stephen stood in front of the sketch, oblivious to the chatter of the Edells. This was one of Bayber’s early pieces; he would have been only twenty-eight at the time. The artist’s talent and skill were already apparent, though his style had yet to be defined. Even so, Bayber had conveyed the world of this family in a simple sketch, telegraphing their emotions in his choice of color, the weight and length of his strokes, the pressure applied.

  The Kessler family sat together on a love seat, the same love seat depicted in the main panel of the triptych. Seeing the four of them together, Stephen could pick the pieces of the parents that had migrated to the children. Alice was perched on the left arm, looking younger than she did in the oil, though her personality was very much in evidence. Using only the position of her head and the arch of her brow, Bayber portrayed her as an intelligent and inquisitive young girl. The parents sat close together, closer than was necessary given the generous size of the love seat; Bayber had drawn them with the suggestion that they were leaning slightly into each other, but did so unconsciously, as if each was so used to the other’s presence it would have been awkward for them to sit farther apart.

  Natalie sat on the right arm of the love seat, next to her mother. As opposed to the others, the colors Bayber used to draw her were cool, the strokes short and sharp, her edges more angular. There was the impression of an insurmountable distance between the older daughter and the rest of the family. He’d exposed some fissure, an estrangement so apparent it was difficult to look at the sketch without feeling a degree of discomfort for the four of them. Stephen could understand why it had been left behind.

  “Even then,” Finch whispered to him. “You can see his abilities.”

  The background lacked a richness of detail, but Stephen recognized several things from the cabin: books stacked on a low table in front of the sofa, a large clock in the background, the wide stone mantel of the fireplace. He pulled out his camera and took several pictures of the sketch.

  “What do we do with it?”

  Finch seemed surprised. He said quietly, “You have your notes. You have your photos. That’s all we can do. It’s not ours, Stephen, just because we’ve found it. And it doesn’t belong to Bayber either. He gave it to them, as a gift. It, like everything else, would appear to belong to the Kessler sisters. Wherever they are.”

  Esme’s attitude changed when Stephen started taking pictures. Her nose tilted up, as if she’d caught the scent of something akin to bad news. Stephen pointed at the Bayber and gave her a wide smile. “My mother won’t believe it. She has one just like this.”

  That, he was pleased to note, even impressed Finch.

  They took leave of the Edells, who saw them off with enthusiastic waves from the front porch as they wound their way through the maze of junk in the yard. Esme continued waving as they drove off, and Stephen was forced to respond in kind, counting the seconds until they rounded the curve and were safely out of sight. It was only then that he sat back in the seat, shell-shocked.

  “How can they not realize what they have? What if something happens to it? What if they decide to sell it?”

  “Stephen, it’s been there for thirty-five years. I don’t think we need to worry about it going anywhere in the immediate future. And isn’t it of some satisfaction to you, knowing of its existence? Think of it—in good likelihood, there are only a handful of people in the world who know about that Bayber sketch: Natalie and Alice, Thomas, the person who took inventory of the house’s contents, the Edells. And you and me.”

  “You had no idea?”

  “Evidently, there’s quite a bit I don’t know when it comes to Thomas.”

  “I still feel it was irresponsible to leave it there.”

  “As opposed to doing something responsible like stealing it, for example? Stephen, you’ll just have to have faith it will be there. Add the sketch to our list of reasons,” Finch said.

  “List of reasons?”

  “To find Natalie and Alice as quickly as possible.”

  EIGHT

  August 1972

  How Natalie found the house was anyone’s guess. She might have closed her eyes and laid the tip of her index finger on the map, on Orion, a small town clinging to the western edge of Tennessee on the Gulf Coastal Plain. It was past midnight when they drove up, long before the landscape took on the flat gray of near morning, and the dark was plush and heavy. The house anchored the middle of a block of similar houses, old Victorians with crumbling porches and pillars, and the tidy silhouettes of boxwood hedges. They stumbled as they headed toward the broad porch steps, the front walk cracked and erupting at its seams as though plates of continents converged there. The stairs creaked under their feet, sagging with the weight of suitcases, and while Natalie fumbled for the keys Alice stood stock-still, feeling as odd as a cat burglar; she’d fallen asleep in one life and now woke to find herself breaking into another.

  We can afford it was the explanation Natalie offered, along with the weather will be better for you. She ignored Alice’s hysterics, her pleas to stay in the home where they’d grown up,
where her parents still moved at night from room to room, their breath a cold draft; the house where, Alice prayed, her daughter may have opened her eyes for the briefest of moments, to take everything in before closing them again. Natalie had pried Alice’s hands from the doorframe. We can’t stay here. She’d locked the car doors as she pulled out of the driveway at a speed that sent gravel arcing up in a spray from the back tires. For twenty hours Natalie had driven as though the devil was on their rear bumper, her face set and determined, fueled by coffee and wide-open windows; Alice had sat like a zombie for most of the trip, drifting in and out of oblivion and half-wishing the car would crash, thinking only that then, she could be with her daughter.

  By light of day, the look of the house hadn’t improved. Tendrils of green were knit into the grubby lattice beneath the porch, firmly locking the house to its damp bed of mud. The shutters gaped at their hinges, and strips of paint peeled from the wood siding like streamers. The house had been sold furnished, with furniture that was mismatched and scabby: bites of wood missing from chair legs, permanent depressions in the sofa cushions, indefinable stains. A pungent humidity cloaked everything, making it hard for Alice to breathe. It’s the medicine, Natalie said. It’s making you groggy. But Alice knew better. It wasn’t the gold salts or the penicillamine, which had become necessary again almost immediately once she was no longer pregnant. The baby had cast a spell over her body, fending off her familiar symptoms with a protective charm. What arrived in the aftermath surpassed the worst her arthritis had previously offered up: the physical jabs and volleys it threw, her intimate relationship with exhaustion, the detours her illness took when new drugs set up roadblocks. This pain was different, even from the grief that still hugged her in its arms after her parents’ death. This pain was fresh and searing and made a home for itself in her very core.