The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque Read online

  “At his desk, he did not bother to scribble but simply held up the two flakes we had transfixed, and stared at them through the magnifying glass. I sat on the couch watching him, noticing that he still seemed nervous. After quite a while, he put them down and got up out of his chair. He crossed the room to the window and stood in silence with his hands joined behind his back, peering through the darkness into the blinding storm that now raged. Only then did I register the ferocity of the wind, like the wailing of ghostly children.

  “When he finally went back to his desk, he called me over to him. He held up the two new samples and positioned the magnifying glass before them. ‘Tell me, Lu, what do you see here?’ he asked. I was concerned by his behavior, but at the same time I felt something akin to pride, since he was asking my opinion. I peered through the glass and immediately noticed the most astonishing thing.

  “‘They’re identical,’ I said.

  “‘Impossible but true,’ he said.

  “I looked at him, and his face was a mask of worry. There was also something about his eyes, a peculiar lack of light that could only be described as hopelessness. In that moment I had a premonition, like a sudden bright flash in my mind, of the supply team trapped in the blizzard on their way down the mountain. A few days later, the Twins, as my father and I had come to call the identical crystals, began to exhibit their strange qualities.”

  Mrs. Charbuque fell silent then, and for the first time since her story had begun, I looked down at my sketchbook and saw that I had drawn nothing. The page was as white as a blizzard.

  “The Twins—,” I said to her, but had no chance to finish my question, for as I spoke the door behind me opened and Watkin said, “Your time is up, Mr. Piambo.”

  Dazed, I rose and slowly left the room.

  THE VIZIER’S COURT

  AFTER LEAVING Mrs. Charbuque’s, I walked over to Central Park and entered at Seventy-ninth Street. As it was a weekday and bitterly cold, the place was fairly deserted. I headed south, toward the lake, on a path lined with barren poplars and strewn with yellow leaves. Once there, I sat on a bench at its eastern shore and gave myself up to considering all she had told me. The wind rippled the water, and the late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the bare branches, adding a golden patina to the empty boathouse and esplanade.

  My first question was, of course, whether or not she was to be believed. “Crystalogogist,” I said to myself, and smiled. It sounded almost too bizarre to be fiction. She had spoken with the facility and authority of truth, and I had clearly seen in my imagination, plain as day, her father’s thick muttonchops, his riotous eyebrows and kindly smile. I had felt the bitter cold of the laboratory and peered through the glacial undersea glow. My mind was a whirl of imagery—snowflakes, lists of numbers, iced machinery, toothpicks, black velvet, the frozen lake, and reflected in it the drawn, dour face of the mother.

  When I again noticed the water before me, I was smoking a cigarette and reasoning that if Mrs. Charbuque had lived some part of her early life during the heyday of Malcolm Ossiak, she was most likely close to my own age. This did little to help, for what I really wanted was a glimpse of the face of that little girl, living out half her childhood in a frozen wasteland. All I could conjure of her was that she wore her hair in pigtails and that her eyelashes were long and beautiful.

  I smoked another cigarette and noticed that it was getting late. The orange sun had now dipped behind the trees, and the sky at the horizon was a splash of pink, darkening to purple and then to night above. I had sat too long in the cold and was shivering. Adopting a brisk pace, I hoped to reach the Fifth Avenue entrance just north of the unsightly, ramshackle zoo before night fell in earnest. As I hurried along, I entertained the idea that perhaps Mrs. Charbuque, though she sounded sane enough, was truly unhinged. And then as quickly, I asked myself, “Would it really be of any great consequence to my portrait?” I realized I was lending a great weight of importance to her personal history, whereas in reality the mere cadence of her words, the gentle tone of her voice, and even the lies she might be telling me were every bit as alive with clues to her face and figure as was the reality of her days. The whole affair was like trying to reassemble the pieces of a convoluted dream shattered by waking.

  I should have gone home and at least tried to work out some of the figures of her story on paper, but I was still too caught up in the mystery of my new commission to concentrate at the drawing board. Besides, I feared that waiting for me would be responses to those letters of disengagement I had sent to my erstwhile patrons, and wanted to forestall facing their thinly veiled unpleasantries and innuendos hinting at my lack of professionalism. Samantha, I knew, would be busy propping up the insubstantial performance of the amnesiac ghost, so there was no possibility of spending time with her. I decided to head down to the seamy side of town and harass Shenz for a spell. Out on the avenue, I caught a hansom cab easily enough and directed the driver to my friend’s address.

  Shenz lived on Eighth Avenue on the outskirts of that area known as Hell’s Kitchen, a nightmarish territory marked by stock-yards, warehouses, and tenements, where a gumbo of humanity’s destitute scratched out a grim existence that in its inadequacy staggered the imagination. The closest I wished to get to it was Shenz’s place. Of course, being the liberal-minded fellow I was, I had read enough of the recent crop of publications exposing society’s ills to be sympathetic to the plight of these poor people, but in reality my mission was not to effect change. Instead, my efforts went selfishly toward avoiding, geographically and philosophically, the whole unsightly mess.

  Shenz was interesting in that respect. As he had told me, he liked to live close enough to these cataracts of chaos to feel the raw energy of life they contained. He said it did something for his painting. “At times, Piambo,” he had said to me, “it is a good thing to leap the garden wall and join the living. That society we move in for our work is too often so delicately moribund.”

  Back before they had cleaned up the Tenderloin, scattering the vermin who squatted there like scorpions under rocks, and turned it into an area of commerce, Shenz had an address perilously close to the illicit action. Once, when I made some disparaging remark about what they did with their women and children, he retorted that I would most likely think it only good fun to attend one of Stanford White’s soirées where each distinguished gentleman was given his own naked female as a party favor. That’s what I admired most about Shenz—he could move through any stratum of society and adopt its customs, but he never lost sight of the truth. It was precisely this quality that I now sought out in relation to the conundrum that was Mrs. Charbuque.

  Stepping from the streets of the West Side into Shenz’s rooms involved a disconcerting transition. At one moment you were out in the dark on the hard cobblestone, a thuggish figure moving toward you through the shadows, the ill aroma of the slaughterhouses wafting around you on a breeze from the Hudson. The next you were transported into a Turkish vizier’s court. In his painting and his taste, Shenz was a Romantic, a Pre-Raphaelite with a great belief in the pertinence of the mythological and a strong allegiance to the exotic. Jasmine incense smoldered in the gaping mouth of a brass dragon. Thick Persian carpets covered the floors like flowering beds of mandalas, and the tapestries that hung upon the walls pictured beasts and birds and Eastern beauties cavorting through forests of trees whose crisscrossing branches made a design as intricate as lace. The furniture, with overstuffed cushions, appeared to have no legs at all but to float a few inches above the floor.

  We sat facing each other in exceedingly low, wide chairs that required one to sit cross-legged like a swami. Shenz took a puff of his opium-laced cigarette, its blue fog mixing with the brass dragon’s exhalations and causing my eyes to water. With his pointed beard and trim mustache, those eyebrows that curled up in points at the ends, and a paisley satin robe, he looked for all the world like a modern-day Mephistopheles about to broker a deal.

  “The last I saw of you, Piambo,
was your back as you fled from Reed’s,” he said, smiling.

  “I had cause for alarm,” I said. “The missus, as she mimicked kissing my cheek, whispered to me that she wished for me to die.”

  He laughed out loud. “True?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Good God, my boy, another satisfied customer.”

  “Shenz,” I said, “I can’t believe you haven’t been robbed yet. Don’t your neighbors know that you are living here like Mani in his pleasure garden?”

  “Certainly,” he said, “but my house is protected, and I have free passage in Hell’s Kitchen.”

  “Do they fear your palette knife?” I asked.

  “Precisely,” he said. “Do you know the name Dutch Heinrichs?”

  “I’ve read it in the newspapers,” I said. “He’s the head hooligan, isn’t he?”

  “He controls the most powerful gang in the area, if not the city. Back in the seventies, I did a portrait of him. He had begun fantasizing about his significance in the scheme of things and decided that a record of his features would be an important artifact for future historians. Burne-Jones himself would be proud of the job I did. I depicted the seasoned criminal as a glowing saint in an ultramarine and mauve cityscape, a transcendent martyr of the mean streets.”

  “And he actually paid you?” I asked.

  “Certainly, he paid me in protection. He was a bit irascible as a subject, often intoxicated, couldn’t sit still for too long. But I tell you, when his fellows saw what I could do with a brush, they were in awe. Art, you would think, might be the last thing that could impress them, but it did. They came to think of me as some sort of magician. Last winter I did a nice little portrait of the wife of the boss of the Dead Rabbits gang.”

  “You’re pulling my leg,” I said.

  “Not at all,” said Shenz. “Do I look like a man who fears for his safety?”

  I shook my head and sighed in exasperation.

  “There’s no difference between this world and the world of Fifth Avenue,” he said. “Life is full of blackguards. Some wear fine suits and bilk great masses of humanity; some have shoes with gaping holes and break into warehouses. Just remind yourself of the scurrilous thieves of Tammany Hall. The only difference between there and here is that their crimes were publicly sanctioned and the ones on this side of town have been deemed reprehensible.”

  “There is less murder on Fifth Avenue,” I said.

  “Think of all those poor bastards and their living deaths laboring away in one of Reed’s shoe mills. It’s all a matter of perspective.”

  “I’m still not sure I believe you,” I said.

  “As you like,” he said, and chuckled.

  “But now I have something to tell that you will certainly doubt the veracity of,” I said.

  “Do your worst.”

  “I met a blind man, a Mr. Watkin, on the way home from Reed’s the other night…,” I began, and then proceeded to tell him the whole thing, including Mrs. Charbuque’s fairy tale of snow and solitude.

  SALVATION

  I LOOKED AT Shenz and saw that his eyes were closed and he was leaning back in his chair. I thought for a moment that he had succumbed to his cigarette and was now off in some other land where haloed maidens sported with lambs and the armored chest-plates of knights pressed the nubile breasts of water nymphs, but then he spoke, one word.

  “Salvation,” he said in a groggy voice, and leaned forward wearily to train his glassy eyes upon me.

  “Salvation?” I asked.

  “Yes, yours,” he said, and smiled.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You say you are playing this game of hide-and-seek for the money, a perfectly mercenary approach and one befitting a man of your time, but then you go further and say that this money will allow you to extricate yourself from society, give you the precious space you need to discover your abilities and paint something worthy of your skill and training. The bit about Albert Ryder I’m not quite clear on. The man seems bent on producing mud puddles, but so be it, if he is your inspiration. Nevertheless, this woman’s inane proposition could be a two-edged sword of salvation for you.”

  “I wasn’t aware that I was in need of salvation, exactly,” I said.

  “Well, you are. First,” he said, “you need to do this to honor the memory of M. Sabott. You know as well as I do how shoddily you treated him near the end of his days. No…let’s not have any looks of wounded pride. You cut him loose like a dangling thread on a new suit of clothes when he became a burden to your growing reputation. Now is your opportunity to fulfill the promise he saw in you and repay all he did on your behalf.”

  “Sabott had gone mad,” I said in my defense.

  “Mad or merely in search of what you yourself are searching for now? Don’t forget, I was with you that day at Madison Square when those fine gentlemen were offering you impressive sums of money to execute their portraits. Then who should wander along but old Sabott, ranting at the sky. Do you remember, he worked himself into such a lather that he fell over in the gutter? I did not know you then, but I thought you had been or were his student, and I said, ‘Piambo, is that not an acquaintance of yours?’ You denied you knew him, and we walked on and left him there.”

  “All right, Shenz, all right,” I said. “You’ve made your point.”

  “I make it not to distress you but to show you that this is a debt that still needs to be settled. Not for Sabott—it’s not going to do him any good—but for you. Your betrayal still weighs heavily upon you.”

  “And what is the connection between that and Mrs. Charbuque?” I asked.

  “The other side of the sword. Piambo, you are the finest painter I know. You are wasting your talent on rendering the features of the banal, trading opportunity for status and wealth.”

  “The finest?” I said with a short sharp chuckle.

  “This is not a joke,” said Shenz. “You have seen my work. What do you think of the brush strokes?”

  “Varied and effective,” I said.

  “Yes, all well and good, but the other night, after you left Reed’s, I took a moment to step up close to the portrait of his wife and study your brushwork. Do you know what I saw?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I saw nothing. Now there are ways to disguise brushwork, but these methods, you know yourself, are as evident as if the direction of the application were obvious. After staring for some time, I realized that each time you touched the canvas, the effect was like a small explosion of color. I’ve seen you paint, and you approach the work with great energy, great vitality. It comes from inside you, in here,” he said, and brought his clenched fist slowly to his chest. “All this truth put in the service of lying about what you see and feel.” I said nothing. Where I had at first been irritated with him for mentioning the incident with Sabott, I was now feeling nothing but gratitude. He had just corroborated everything I knew to be true in my heart.

  “If I were you,” said Shenz, “I would paint this Mrs. Charbuque with a mind toward getting as much money out of her as possible. If this is how you feel you can free yourself, then take all you can get from her.”

  “All I need do is come up with a competent portrait,” I said.

  “No, you must capture her likeness precisely,” he said.

  “How, though?” I asked. “I’m in doubt about whether her words are meant to help or lead me astray.”

  “Yes,” said Shenz, laughing, “that business with the science of reading snowflakes is rather preposterous. But there are methods of finding your way through that squall.”

  “Such as?”

  “Cheat,” he said. “I’m sure we can find out what she looks like. There is no woman I know of with that much money who does not have a past. If there are no photographs, she must exist in someone’s memory. A little research should undoubtedly reveal her.”

  “I never thought of that,” I said. “It seems dishonest.”

  “Unlike
the portrait of Mrs. Reed?” said Shenz. “I will even help you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Think of the time free of worry or constraint the ultimate sum will buy you,” he said.

  After our discussion he brought me into his studio and showed me the first rounded sketches he had made of the Hatstell children. “These are not youngsters,” he told me, “they are doughnuts on legs.” By the time I took my leave, he had me in stitches, describing his feckless attempts to have his new subjects remain still for more than five minutes at a time. “Tomorrow I will bring either a whip or a bag of chocolates,” he said. As we parted at the door, he shook my hand and said, as a reminder of his earlier offer, “She is out there somewhere. We can find her.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief once I crossed Seventh Avenue and was heading back toward civilization. It was very close to midnight, and the streets were uncharacteristically empty owing to the cold. My head was in a bit of a fog from having imbibed, secondhand from Shenz, the blue opium mist, which had calmed me but also made me exceedingly weary.

  Although my thoughts were slippery, I tried to decide how to proceed with Mrs. Charbuque the next morning. The question I posed to myself was whether I should let her lead me on with her narrative, or force her through a series of rapid inquiries to divulge bits of information she had not intended to part with. I thought it highly suspicious that the first installment of her story had reached a climax at precisely the moment my time had expired. I suppose because I had just visited Shenz, it reminded me of the Arabian Nights entertainment, with Mrs. Charbuque in the role of Scheherazade. As much as I felt I was being led by the nose, I did very much want to know what had become of the child she had brought to life in my mind. Upon reaching Twenty-first and Broadway, I decided that I must take control and turn the tables on her. I would eschew the story about crystalogogistics for a grocery list of simple questions.