The House Girl

by Tara Conklin

  Josephine lowered her hand. It was Missus’ face, stricken even in sleep, sallow even by lamplight, the scabbed gash like a bristling insect on her cheek, that stopped Josephine. Her face no longer young or beautiful, her wasted face. And it seemed Josephine’s heart pulsed with the skittering movement of Missus’ eyes, that the two of them lay prostrate together before the same cruel God. The two of them not so different after all, Josephine realized. All this time, these long, hungry years, each of them alone beside the other.

  Lina

  MONDAY

  The run-in with Garrison earlier that day had left Lina feeling scoured clean, lighter, and somehow more self-assured. This, Lina thought, was what she needed, a blanket thrown off, a curtain lifted. Something truthful and necessary had happened that gave her this sense of simple resolve, clarified purpose, as she walked the Clifton halls, rode the Clifton elevators, made bland and proper chitchat with Meredith at the shared copy machine, told Sherri to book a hotel for her Richmond trip. The woman who performed these tasks seemed a simplified version of the old Lina. Lina improved, Lina redacted.

  And it was this Lina who looked forward to tonight, the opening of Oscar’s show, Pictures of Grace. Her fears and suspicions had receded, and she was left with a straightforward wish to see the pictures and be done with them. Oscar’s lie about Marie, those random, contextless notes written by her mother, had muddled her thinking, confused and upset her. Oscar’s pictures of Grace were nothing more than pigment, canvas, wood. That was all. No magic, no mystery. Her father was an artist, and he drew inspiration from his life, as all artists did. I want to show you some things about your mother, Oscar had said that first night in the studio, and now Lina felt ready to look, with calm reason, with dignified reserve. The visceral reaction she had experienced at home, when she saw the Enough portrait and those first raw images of Grace, would not happen again. Of this, Lina felt sure.

  Outside Natalie’s gallery, people crowded the sidewalk and leaned against the front windows. They held small paper plates loaded with cheese cubes and little salamis, glasses of wine, cigarettes. Festivities had been going for an hour already and the mood was celebratory, voices loud and off-key. Lina edged through the door, holding her bag sideways, and wove her way through the bodies. Everyone towered tall, outfitted in high heels and attitude.

  The first picture Lina saw stopped her cold; she felt a flip in her belly, a stumble in her gait, a faltering of her new resolve. It was not a picture Oscar had shown her. It was Grace, naked from the waist up. Her breasts were beautiful, the nipples dark, hair falling to her shoulders, her mouth open. Lina looked away.

  Her eyes fell next on a triptych, and in each panel Grace seemed a different woman. From this painting, Lina did not turn away. In the left-hand panel, Grace stared straight out, realistically rendered in a simple blue dress, the skirt just grazing her knees, her face flat and composed, hands hanging loose at her sides. The right panel portrayed the same woman, but her mouth was opened wide, wider than a mouth should open, her eyes looming large and wild as though she sought to devour everything before her. In the large central panel, Grace appeared in profile, and the side view filled the frame, just half a nose, a sliver of lip curled cruelly, one black eye staring out, trapped and enraged.

  I’m trying to explore some things. Tell the truth, Oscar had said, and Lina wondered with a precarious detachment what truth was represented here. She thought of her own memories, Grace vague and smiling, a smell of pepper and sugar. That tune, hummed in moments of lazy quiet. The toy train in a dimpled hand. A feeling of contentment, soft and complete, a warmth that wrapped around Lina, swaddled her limbs, covered her toes.

  But here, this angry woman, her wary gaze. Lina realized it was this woman (these women) who had written the notes Lina found in Oscar’s studio:

  What gives meaning? Who is free?

  O does not understand, he cannot.

  Nothing is as I see it.

  A new image of her mother, different from the one in which Lina had always believed, was coming to her, and Lina did not shy away. She looked into the trapped woman’s eyes, their whites veined with fine spidery red. How could a new mother find time to paint? How could Oscar Sparrow’s wife carve a space for herself? What did Grace need?

  Oscar’s voice rose above the din and Lina saw him in a corner, his back to the wall, surrounded by a phalanx of admirers. He wore a sleek black suit jacket over a white T-shirt and dark blue jeans, his beard neatly trimmed, his hair glistening with some sort of product, and the entire effect was of urbane confidence and ease. Natalie stood to his right, her blond hair up, a few stray curls falling loose onto her shoulders. She wore a silver shift dress that sparkled and showed off her lean legs, and her eyes and face seemed to sparkle too, the result of some cosmetic wizadry. Natalie’s hand rested lightly on Oscar’s shoulder and he leaned into her and pressed his lips quickly, carelessly against the bare skin of her neck.

  Lina caught Oscar’s eye from across the room and in one fluid motion he stepped away from Natalie. He began moving toward Lina but was stopped at every step by well-wishers, friends, and finally a spectacled critic. For him, Oscar paused and began speaking earnestly, arms waving, with the occasional apologetic glance across to Lina. As she watched, Oscar’s hand rose up and traced with a finger in the air the line of Grace’s cheek drawn on the canvas, and the gesture was cold and analytical, having nothing to do with Grace, the woman he sought to memorialize, the woman he had loved.

  Lina turned away and blindly stepped farther into the gallery, unsure of where she was going or what she had come here to see. She stopped and raised her eyes. On the wall before her hung a large, vividly colored oil painting, the shapes exaggerated and round. There was a woman viewed from the back, slim, long dark hair, her tight dress revealing soft curves: Grace’s back. She stood upon an old-fashioned stage, a scrolled marquee above her, long dark-red curtains rippling at the outer edges of the painting. On either side of the woman, sharing the stage with her, sat two grotesquely rotund babies, each larger than the woman, each with a man’s face—dark bushy eyebrows on one, a shadow of stubble on the other, both faces lined with fat and age—and these two overgrown babies screamed and reached for the woman, who remained oblivious to them both.

  Was one of these babies Oscar? The shadowy beard, clear blue eyes saddled with flesh. He grabbed at Grace with selfish hunger, ravenous and greedy. And it was this horrible picture that finally toppled Lina’s determination to approach the new Grace with rationality and control. Those shoots of anger Lina had carried when she was younger now returned with a furious blooming. All these years, why had Oscar kept Grace to himself? What had happened?

  Her head down, Lina pushed her way through the crowd and out the door of the gallery, returning to the streets she had walked less than an hour before. The air smelled of cigarettes, garbage, and wine, and Lina’s stomach clutched a tight knot of muscle that fought against her breath.

  Two blocks from the subway, she thought she heard a voice calling her name, but she did not turn around, and then suddenly a hand was on her shoulder. “Carolina Sparrow?” She turned. It was the critic, Porter Scales, the one who years ago had given Oscar an achingly negative review, the one who had delivered the opening lecture at the Art and Artifice exhibit. Lina recognized his thick gray hair; a moneyed, year-round tan; the deep cleft marking his chin.

  “Carolina Sparrow?” he said again. He was struggling to catch his breath, as though he had been running. “Are you Grace Sparrow’s daughter?”

  “Yes,” answered Lina, surprised to be described this way. Always she was Oscar Sparrow’s daughter.

  “I thought so. You look just like her. My name is Porter, Porter Scales. I knew your mother well. I very much admired her art.”

  Lina took in his suit trousers, the impeccable white button-down open at the neck, the black cord around his throat from which hung a small, intricately carved piece of ivory or bone. “I know who you are,” Lina
said.

  “Let me buy you a coffee,” Porter said. “Or a drink if you’d prefer.”

  Lina hesitated. Her heart still pulsed with angry adrenaline but the rest of her felt wounded and raw, a condition that solitude, she sensed, would only aggravate. Her flight to Richmond left early the next morning but that was still hours away. Lina nodded. “A drink,” she said.

  She followed Porter into a small, high-ceilinged restaurant nearby, nearly empty and lit by flickering pillar candles placed on bare wood tables. They ordered cocktails—vodka gimlet for her, a dirty martini for him.

  “So what did you think of the show?” Porter asked, expertly slipping an olive off its toothpick and into his mouth.

  “I hated it,” Lina said, surprising herself with the force in her voice. “What did you think?”

  “Well, I’m afraid I generally don’t talk about shows that I’m reviewing.” Porter spoke quickly, as though to move the conversation along. “But I can tell you that those paintings made me remember your mother.” He gazed at Lina with an intensity that made her shift her eyes away. “It was a shock to see you there, the image of Grace. I just wanted to tell you how much your mother meant to me. We were very good friends, and I missed her terribly for many years. I still do.”

  Lina remembered then the papers she had found in Oscar’s studio, the sketch of a man she realized now was a much younger Porter, his hair darker and shaggier, his face leaner. Porter, my anti-O, Grace had written. And that painting: two overgrown babies clutching at one woman. An understanding came to Lina, fully formed and precisely drawn. Porter, Oscar, Grace. Shock weakened her for a moment and she looked away, aware that Porter was watching her. Perhaps he had assumed she already knew, but he was wrong; she knew nothing. Melted candle wax ran in a sudden spill onto the table and Lina watched it pool and begin to harden. That photograph of her parents at the restaurant—it was the only picture she had of the two of them together. She knew the photo so well it had ceased being an image and had become for her a memory: Grace’s adoring gaze, her father’s proud grin. Back then her parents had been so young, Lina reasoned, of course there had been others. Porter, Marie, who else? It felt childish to be so surprised, childish or prudish or something else she didn’t want to be. And yet this final demise of her parents’ perfect romance made her throat so stiff she feared she couldn’t speak. Lina swallowed hard. She didn’t think she could continue to sit here and maintain polite conversation with Porter, especially not with Porter. Lina almost walked out then, but she stopped herself. She had never known any of Grace’s friends, at least no one who would speak with her about her mother, no one she felt comfortable asking. With a liberating clarity, Lina recognized the opportunity presented here.

  “Where was my mother from?” Lina asked, and she gripped her drink, letting the cold glass push against her palm. Porter seemed surprised by the question and leaned forward in his chair.

  “Your father hasn’t told you much, has he?”

  “No. I don’t know anything about her,” Lina said, straightforward, not inviting his pity; that was the last thing she wanted from him.

  “Well. Oscar was devastated by her death, I can tell you that. And Grace was never very forthcoming about her past. She didn’t talk about it, not much. She had a tough childhood and came to New York when she was young. To escape, I think. Originally she was from—Florida maybe? Someplace warm. I’m sorry, Carolina, I can’t remember.”

  “Please, call me Lina. Everyone does. Everyone except my father, that is,” she said, preserving this one small loyalty to Oscar.

  They talked for 1.6 hours, and this is what Porter told Lina: Grace loved eggs Benedict; she loved Al Pacino; she cooked a mean chili con carne; her eyes were dark brown but in certain light, or as she smiled, they might reveal a deep mossy green; she listened to the Ramones, the Velvet Underground, all the cool New York bands of the seventies and also, unironically, to old country and western singers, Patsy Cline and Gene Autry, whose songs always made her cry. Grace knew how to knit and would make her own sweaters, things for baby Lina, a pair of pink booties, a soft fuzzy blanket. Grace loved Oscar, she did, but their relationship was fraught with worry and moods and jealousy. Grace did not have siblings, Porter believed. She never talked about her family or the place she was born. She was, of course, extraordinarily talented. She painted and drew in a hyperrealistic style, almost photographic, sometimes distorted as a lens might distort—fish-eye or wide angle. The small portraits that hung in Lina’s room were intended as riffs on the nature of family connections: Can you create your own? What is blood and what is decision? Grace had been working on the project when she died, Porter said. She had invented an elaborate family tree stretching back generations, to the Mayflower, to imagined ancestral roots in Ireland, Mexico, Kenya.

  “Do you know anything about the crash?” Lina asked finally, after two rounds of drinks. The restaurant was half-full; the volume around them had increased steadily for the past hour and now hummed within her, along with the vodka. She had been resisting her urge to ask about Grace’s death—it sounded macabre, obsessive—but really this was the subject that nagged at her the most.

  “Crash?” Porter said.

  “That killed her. The car crash.”

  “Oh. I hadn’t realized it was a car crash. I thought she had an aneurysm. A brain aneurysm, totally unexpected.”

  Lina felt a movement in her chest, something plunging heavily into her stomach, pushing her breath away. Porter looked at her with concern as she gulped her drink, a mistake that only made her cough. Finally her breath heaved into gear, and she coughed until her eyes smarted with tears.

  “My dad always said it was a crash.” Lina’s voice was weak.

  “Yes, I’m sure it was a crash,” Porter said with meticulous care. “I can’t even remember where I heard that about the aneurysm. I’m sure I’m wrong.”

  “Yes, you must be wrong.”

  “You know, your father wasn’t really talking to anyone at that point. He wasn’t returning phone calls, wouldn’t see anyone. He didn’t say a word about her death for—well, until this show really.”

  “Yes, I know.” Lina shook the cubes at the bottom of her glass, watching them crack into jagged pieces. “Did you go to the funeral?” she asked at last, raising her gaze to Porter.

  “I didn’t,” he said, and Lina heard the regret in his voice. “She and I lost touch in the six months or so before her death. She’d been at home a lot, not working. Looking after you, of course. And then she was just … gone. The funeral was private. I stopped by to see Oscar after I heard, but he just shook my hand on the doorstep. He didn’t want any visitors, he said. It was only later, much later, that we came across each other professionally. He never forgave me, I think, for that first review, and we stopped speaking altogether.”

  Just gone. In those words Lina recognized her own experience, childhood confusion, a shapeless ache.

  “Are you an artist too?” Porter asked.

  “No. A lawyer.”

  “Ah.” Porter smiled. “Wise woman.”

  “I’m working on a case about Josephine Bell, actually.” Lina wanted to change the subject, to hide her disappointment that he could not tell her more about Grace’s death, and to remove the sense of something not being right. A brain aneurysm? She was just gone.

  “You’re not representing the Stanmore Foundation, are you?” Porter’s voice grew suddenly wary.

  “No, no. A corporate client. Something completely unrelated to the authorship question.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. You know, it was the house girl, I can tell you that much.” He sounded now like the Porter she had heard speak at the Calhoun Gallery, self-assured and half-apologetic, the reluctant bearer of difficult truths.

  “But why are the Stanmores threatening to sue Marie Calhoun?”

  “It’s about money, of course, and people’s feelings getting hurt, but mainly about money. The Stanmores have made an industry out of Lu
Anne Bell, and they’re a powerful family—they donate a lot of money to the museums, and they buy a lot of art too. Nobody wants to piss them off. But they can’t hold off the entire art world for very much longer. There’s an army of authenticators waiting to get into the Stanmore archives. They’ll figure it out. I did, just taking a critical look at the works, seeing the two styles, the different subject matters. They’ll find something to conclusively tip it to Josephine. Handwriting, brushstroke. Or fingerprints. Sotheby’s found a da Vinci fingerprint, did you hear that? A fingerprint from the sixteenth century, on some picture a guy bought at a yard sale.” Porter shook his head in amazement, and Lina found that she had warmed to him—he had an innocence that belied the careful tan, the sparkling cuff links.

  “I’m actually looking for Josephine Bell’s descendants,” she said. “Did Marie tell you about Jasper Battle?”

  “Yes, he’s e-mailed me too. Very persistent young man. Be careful, Lina. These kinds of people come out of the woodwork, really they do. As soon as it gets into the news, as soon as there’s any money involved.”

  “You think he’s lying?”

  “I really don’t know. I haven’t seen what he’s got. He says they’re family heirlooms, but of course he’s got no documentation. It’ll be virtually impossible to establish provenance. There is no evidence anywhere of Josephine Bell having any relations, and believe me, people have looked.”

  Porter smiled at her, a tender, kind smile that seemed to contain an intimacy, and Lina welcomed it, off-balance as she was from the alcohol and talk of her mother, and she smiled back.

  Outside the restaurant, Porter placed his hands on Lina’s shoulders. “Good luck to you, Lina Sparrow,” he said, and the glow from the restaurant’s neon sign lit his face and he looked younger than he had before, and rueful, like a man who has behaved badly and now wishes only to be good. A beat passed between them, Lina felt the weight of his hands on her shoulders, and she moved forward to kiss him. The vodka brought an edge of recklessness, and this warm night, her father’s horrendous show, and what Porter had told her about Grace, each fact a gift. In some deep recess too Lina wanted him because Grace had wanted him, or he had wanted Grace; the precise parameters of their relationship were still unclear, but the suggestion of a long-gone love thrilled her. Her mother had been loved by two men. More? Lina’s image of Grace widened to include these other complexities, exciting and scandalous, and Lina longed suddenly for a sliver of what must have been her mother’s allure, and talent, and passion, and willingness to embrace her own complicated life.