The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque Read online

  “What is the scent of that candle?” I wondered aloud.

  “Do you like it?”

  “It seems familiar; very peaceful,” I said. “Is it cinnamon?”

  “No,” she said, drifting off, “it’s nutmeg.”

  CRYSTALOGOGISTICS

  WATKIN CLOSED the door behind him, and I took my seat.

  “Are you there, Mrs. Charbuque?” I asked.

  “I am here, Piambo,” she said, sounding younger, her voice lighter than it had the previous day.

  “I must confess I’ve pictured you as at least a hundred different women since yesterday,” I told her.

  “The imagination is a cornucopia,” she said.

  “Very true,” I agreed. “But for the artist it can at times also seem a vast, frustrating Sahara.”

  “And which is yours today?” she asked.

  “Neither,” I said. “A blank slate, waiting for your words to make the first mark.”

  She laughed, a sound both joyful and demure, the sophisticated nature of which thoroughly enchanted me. I said nothing for a brief time, caught up as I was by the absolute serenity of that high-ceilinged room. Although I had but a few minutes before been out on a thoroughfare where newsboys yelled, streetcars clanged, and humanity surged, drawn on by a million individual desires and pursued by as many tragedies, inside this quiet, cleanly space it was as if I had been transported to a distant mountain retreat. Whereas the day before there had been a distinct urgency about our meeting, now Time itself yawned and closed its eyes.

  “I was wondering if today you could tell me something of your childhood,” I finally said. “I’m not so interested in a general history, but I was hoping you could relate to me the precise event that comes in all children’s lives when you first realized that you would not remain a child forever. Do you understand?”

  I saw a vague shadow move on the screen and tried to read the figure, but there was not enough light coming in the windows for the projection to reveal anything specific.

  “I do,” she said.

  “Please,” I said, “tell me in as much detail as possible.”

  “I will. Let me think for a minute.”

  That morning as I had ridden uptown I had formulated a method by which to proceed. I had recalled that during my tutelage under M. Sabott, he had once had me practice a certain technique. Set up on one of the tables in his studio was a still life composed of a human skull, a vase of wilted flowers, and a lit candle. I was to draw the scene by indicating only those places where the lines of the three objects and the lines of the background images intersected with each other.

  “I forbid you to draw any entire object,” he had told me. When M. Sabott forbade something, it was unwise to go against his wishes.

  All I created that day was a sizable hill of crumpled paper. Many times, just when I thought things were going well, my mentor would walk by and say, “Begin again. You have botched it.” To say I loathed the exercise was putting it mildly. Three days later, the flowers having lost all their petals, the candle now a guttering nub, I finally grasped the technique. Sabott leaned over my shoulder and said, “You see, it is possible to define a figure by its relation to those things that surround it.”

  Now I crossed my right leg over my left, positioning the sketchbook upon my thigh, and then brought the charcoal pencil down to hover over the blank page. If the details offered by Mrs. Charbuque were keen enough, I hoped to expose her by those elements of the story that were not her. Luckily I had a strong memory of M. Sabott. He lurked in the back of my mind, eager to tell me even now if I botched it.

  The wind, muted by the marble architecture, whipped around outside the house, and I noticed through the window that the last yellow rose petals had flown. That is when I became aware of the light respirations of Mrs. Charbuque. Her slow, steady breathing was like a whispered chant that inculcated itself into my consciousness and regulated my own respiration in accordance with hers.

  “You,” she said, and the word startled me, “must be familiar with the name Malcolm Ossiak.”

  “Certainly,” I said. “The man who had it all and lost it all.”

  “At one point he was as wealthy as Vanderbilt. His influence was felt in nearly any industry one could imagine. His mills turned out everything from textiles to hydraulic pens. He had interests in railroads, shipping, real estate, and armaments. Some believe that for a time he was the wisest businessman this country had ever seen, as there are those who will tell you he was a complete fool. Be that as it may, he was a very singular man in that he sought advice not only from his stockholders, managers, accountants, and salesmen but also from a legion of diviners. He had on his payroll astrologers, card readers, interpreters of dreams, and even a band of old hunters who read the entrails of beasts killed upon the grounds of his western estate.”

  “I had no idea,” I said.

  “His belief,” she said, “was that to remain the preeminent man of the present, he had to have an edge on the future. He hoped that through these metaphysical disciplines he could circumvent the drudgery of waiting for the natural passage of time. When he was questioned about it by reporters, his only response was, ‘For every raised eyebrow and mocking laugh of the doubters, I have made a thousand dollars on my investments. My wealth runs into the tens of millions, while the cynics scrabble for crumbs.’”

  “You are related to Ossiak?” I asked, hoping for a tangible clue to Mrs. Charbuque’s lineage.

  “No, but my father was one of his diviners, who coaxed hidden meaning from Nature’s processes. Unlike the others, though, my father’s expertise was in a field so unique, he was its only practitioner. I don’t believe my father thought of himself as part of the group of metaphysical investigators, because his pursuit employed mathematics as much as it did intuition and an understanding of arcane lore. He thought astrologers to be charlatans, and dream interpreters he referred to as ‘ringmasters of nightly befuddlement.’ On the other hand, he would proudly tell anyone who asked that he was a crystalogogist.”

  “A what?” I asked, hearing the word but not registering its meaning.

  “It has a tendency to tie the tongue in a knot,” she said. “A crystalogogist—crystal referring to the crystalline form and logos being the word.”

  “Very interesting,” I said, “but could it mean that he listened to the discourse of salt?”

  She laughed. “No, he decoded the hieroglyphics of the sky. He searched for import in the formations of snowflakes.”

  “No doubt he had incredible vision and the ability to read very rapidly,” I said.

  “Nothing of the sort,” she told me, “but his work did require that we live half of each year in a remote location high in the Catskill Mountains. From October to March, we were like cast-aways. It was of the utmost importance that we be present to read the first and last snowfalls of each cycle of the seasons. Up there at a great altitude, at the edge of an old-growth forest only a few hundred feet below the tree line, the flakes were unsullied by the soot from mills and the warmth of civilization. Back in those days that area was the stuff of fairy tales—wolves, dark days, crested drifts as tall as a man, a startling silence in which the only thing louder than your thoughts was the wind, and a seamless, unchanging solitude.

  “We had a large old house near a lake next to which sat my father’s laboratory. The house, of course, was well heated, but the laboratory was colder inside than it was out. It was a rather solitary and bleak existence for a child. I had no brothers or sisters, and there were no playmates for hundreds of miles. When I finally reached the age where I could be of some use to my father, out of equal parts devotion to him and the sheer boredom of the situation, I became his assistant.

  “We would work together as he had done with his own father, wrapped in cumbersome clothing, out in the frozen laboratory constructed from sheets of tin. Every inch of both the exterior and interior was covered by a film of frost throughout the days of winter. The mechanisms, the inst
ruments, all had icicles hanging from them. Before each reading we would have to chip the buildup off the knobs that focused the huge optical magnifier through which he would gaze at the snowflakes. We had to be very cautious with the glass lenses for that device because, in the constant cold, the slightest tap would shatter them into pieces no bigger than the crystals we were studying.

  “It seemed the snow fell constantly, but of course that is merely a child’s impression. In actuality, it probably did snow a number of times each week, usually at least flurries and sometimes great blizzards that lasted for days on end. When the conditions were right for taking a sample, the wind velocity not too high and the precipitation at the precise temperature to fashion the spindled, star-shaped formations that carried the most important information, my father would stand outside, holding up to the open skies a flat piece of wood wrapped in black velvet. As soon as his board’s collection resembled an abundance of stars in a clear night sky, he would whisk it away inside the laboratory.

  “He would then place the board onto the stage of the optical magnifier; a tall black machine with a ladder that led up to a chair situated so that the occupant could stare into a lens no bigger than a circling of the index finger and thumb. While he took his position in the investigator’s seat, I would place around the edges of the viewing stage clumps of a type of seaweed that gave off its own luminescence. It was important that he have enough light with which to see, but we could not use candles or lamps because their heat would melt our specimens.

  “At the perimeter of the laboratory there were lamps, three to be precise, but even when they stayed lit, the light they gave was weak. The glow from the seaweed was a yellow green. This, mixed with the overall blue of the cold, imbued the laboratory with a strange underwater ambience. ‘Lu, more seaweed,’ he would call down to me as he sat peering into the eyepiece at his end of the long cylinder. As the barrel of the device proceeded toward the viewing stage it flanged out, and at the bottom, where it held the huge lens that was like a circle cut from the frozen lake, it was wide enough to encompass the entire board.”

  “Lu?” I asked, interrupting the flow of her story.

  THE TWINS

  LUCIERE,” SHE said. “I was named after my mother.”

  “Forgive me,” I said. “Please continue.”

  “My father would gently turn the knobs of the huge machine, and the gears would lift and lower the long barrel holding the lenses. As he did this, I would hear him grumble and hum. His favorite saying when he would discover one of the certain flakes we were searching for was ‘Eureka.’ You must understand that, although he took his work seriously, he was not beyond a sense of humor about himself and his profession. As for my part, I would applaud to encourage his efforts.

  “Once he sighted a worthy specimen, he would descend from the chair. Fitting a jeweler’s loupe into his eye and taking out one of the toothpicks he kept handy in his shirt pocket, he would lean over the black velvet. This was my sign to run and fetch the atomizer filled with a precise mixture of clear plant resins. This noxious mixture had to be prepared in the house, each batch cooked for two hours on the stove so that it would remain in a liquid state for the course of that day’s investigations.

  “With the care of a surgeon, he would single out the flake in question and then, after licking the end of the toothpick, very carefully touch its tip to the very center of the frail and minuscule six-pointed star. Once he had it on the point of wood, he would lift it away from the board and hold it up in the air for me to spray. Usually he had singled out more than one for preservation. Since the black velvet absorbed heat that would alter the forms of the crystals after a brief period, we could not leave the flakes on the material for too long a time. In answer to this problem, my father had perfected the ability to hold up, at one time, as many as twenty toothpicks between his thumbs and forefingers. This was a delicate process, and I had to pump the atomizer ball with just the right amount of force so that the mist would cover the samples completely but not blow them away. It was a point of pride for me that I was expert at this technique. Every time I successfully lacquered another crystal, my father would praise me to the heavens. When I failed, he would shrug and say, ‘There are more where that came from.’

  “The flakes were then cast in the coating of resin, which dried quickly in the cold air. What was left was a perfect, unmelting replica of the flake. Have you ever seen the skin shed by a snake and how that skin is exactly the form of the snake? This was how precise our models were. Once in this form, he would not have to rely on his memory or his questionable abilities as a sketch artist but could take them into the house to his study and begin to decipher their meaning.

  “Father’s study was at the back of the house. It had a large window that offered a view of the lake, and its own fireplace that was always stoked and roaring. What with the smoke from his pipe, the scent of burning logs, and the ever-present smell of the resin, the place had a very distinctive aroma. In the corner was a comfortable old couch with broken springs and stuffing peering from tears in its fabric. Many an afternoon I’d come in from a long time out in the cold and the warmth of the room would overcome me, and I’d drift off to sleep on the couch. My father sat in his chair, much like the one you are now sitting in, at his desk, surrounded by cabinets overflowing with tiny boxes that held our manufactured fossils of snow.

  “In addition to all this there were the books, handwritten tomes holding the charts and formulas necessary for translating the idiosyncrasies of each flake into a meaningful unit of knowledge. While at his desk, he would examine specimens through a magnifying glass, all the time flipping through the reference works penned by his grandfather. Upon locating the appropriate principle, he would lift his pencil and jot down a long string of numbers. An abracadabra of addition, division, and multiplication would follow, capped off by the subtraction of the digit one hundred forty-four, the numerical constant for human error. He would never tell me what the final verdict was for any of the flakes but would record his findings with neat penmanship in black ink in a leather-bound journal.

  “All snowflakes have the same basic form—six points emanating from a design of either greater or lesser complexity at the center. The first rule I learned from him about crystalogogistics was that no two snowflakes were exactly alike. Either the center pattern exhibited an extra concentric device or the spindles were burred with fewer pegs or the tips were barbed or flat, but each one came from above a unique creation. I did pick up a few hints about how to read them from the times he would let slip a word or two that would betray his knowledge. For instance, I knew that a spiderweb design in the center portended treachery, and a rounded tip a time of plenty. So this was my life when I was nine years old.”

  “And what of your mother?” I asked.

  “Mother had nothing to do with our work. She had no understanding of its importance, and I could tell even then that she considered my father a fool. I think she stayed on with us simply because she had come from a poor family and Ossiak saw to it that we wanted for nothing. She also relished the opportunity to move amid society’s elite when in April we traveled back to the city to confer with father’s employer on our findings. Then she would come alive with a sense of self-importance. I would not say she was a mean person, but as a child, when I came to her with some hurt or fear, instead of warmth or comfort, all that her cold demeanor inspired in me was an unsettling sense of awe. I never did hear the story of how they came together in their younger days.”

  She was silent for a moment, and I pictured her, strangely enough, as myself, floundering in one of those brief periods of confusion that result from my thinking too much. “I believe you were going to tell me about some change that had taken place in your life,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of all this for some time, save for in bits and pieces. Each remembered image tugs at me, wants me to follow it off in another direction.”

  “I understand,” I said.r />
  “Now that I have set the scene for you, I can address your question,” she said. “It was soon after Ossiak’s men had come with sleds hitched to mules, which was the only viable means of moving stores up through the difficult passes of the mountains. They came each midwinter to replenish our stock of firewood and to bring other supplies. For a few nights previous there had been strange lights in the sky, not the aurora, which we sometimes saw and were used to, but a kind of pulsating brightness. The captain of the supply team mentioned it to my father and asked him what it might be. Father admitted that he was equally bewildered by it. That night it became a moot point, because the clouds had moved in and it was obvious a great storm was brewing. The supply team set off without waiting until morning, hoping to make it down the mountain before a blizzard struck.

  “When the snows started, although it was late, my father insisted that we take a sample. This we did with great difficulty, since the wind was high and the temperature more bitter than I had ever felt it. Inside the laboratory we went through the usual routine, setting up and lighting the viewing stage, my father ascending the ladder to his seat. I stood looking up at him, awaiting pronouncement of the word that meant we had been successful, but it never came. Rarely did we not garner at least one spindled star. I thought perhaps this was due to the severity of the weather. Instead, he seemed very agitated by what he saw through the eyepiece.

  “Without humming or grumbling, he finally came down the ladder and took out two toothpicks. As he positioned the loupe in his eye, I noticed the most incredible thing, which prevented me from running for the atomizer. He was sweating. ‘Hurry, Lu,’ he shouted, not in his usual good humor. I came to and jumped at his command. When I returned, he had the two picks out in front of him. He saw that he had made me nervous, and said, ‘All right, girl, take a deep breath and be your best.’

  “I lacquered the two perfectly at once with a single pump of the ball. ‘You’re a genius,’ he told me, and I smiled, but it became clear to me that he was not joking. As soon as the specimens had dried we went inside.