Paint by Magic (13 page)

Then it hit me. She was frozen because he
was
painting her. Because he was making her
pose
for him. "No," I whispered. "Stop."

There was silence all of a sudden in the studio. Absolute silence. Then Fitzgerald Cotton cleared his throat. "You must tell me what you know of her, boy."

I sucked in a deep breath and glanced behind me to make sure the door to the room was still standing open. No way was I going to be locked in here with this guy. "I know that's one unhappy model," I said as I pointed to the big canvas, where Mom was terrified, trapped, helpless. "You're
killing
her."

Fitzgerald Cotton turned back to the canvas. He studied it. I waited in silence, wanting like anything to scream at him that this was my mother, and he'd better stop tormenting her, or else—or else! Or else what? I couldn't think what. And I couldn't think what he'd do to me if I said she was my mother.

"I
must
paint her!" He daubed a little paint onto Mom's face, then he growled low in his throat like a wolf or some other wild creature. "She wants me to paint her! You know, boy, how the eyes of portraits often seem to follow the viewer? It's an illusion, of course—usually. But
her
eyes really do follow me. They're begging me to paint her."

"I think they're begging you to
stop
painting her!" I returned in as steady a voice as I could manage—not very steady at all, really. This was one scary guy.

"I just can't get the face right anymore," he whispered. "She was so easy to paint while she was here—so lovely. I don't know why I'm remembering her now like
this!
Every time I've tried to paint her since she left me, from memory, I get
this!
" He swept his arm toward the easel.

I ventured: "It's obvious, isn't it, from the way she looks, that she's gone off to some faraway place and she doesn't
want
you to paint her anymore!"

He didn't seem to hear me. He dotted more paint onto Mom's face. "Look! It's rubbish. Even with my most special paints:—I just can't capture her now."

Oh, but he
was
capturing her, big time. Could he really not know it?

I scrubbed my fingers through my hair, trying to think. My mom had arrived here—somehow. This guy had painted my mom while she was here—I knew
that
from seeing the pictures in the art book and from what the kids had told me. He called her his muse, his inspiration. Had he held her captive? He must have somehow, I told myself firmly. Or else Mom wouldn't have stayed a full year in this place.

But then Mom had come home to us—escaped?—somehow. And so Fitzgerald Cotton lost his muse and had to paint her from memory. But...

Here I felt lost. Because I couldn't figure out why his painting Mom from memory should make her look like such a monster.

Fitzgerald Cotton was watching me closely. He pushed his wild hair out of his eyes and took a deep breath, like he was trying to calm himself. Then he seemed to relax. He reached out a big hand and cupped my face.

"You look like her, you really do. I saw it yesterday. That's why I want to paint you. Are you related? You must be! Same big green eyes. Same fair curls. Same little chin—" His fingers tightened, and kept on tightening. I jerked my head away.

"All right," I said, not answering any of his questions. "Fine. Go ahead and paint me. Just stop painting
her.
"

He turned away and scooped up some of the fallen brushes. "Yes, could be it will calm me to have a change of subject. I get so agitated, thinking of her, my mysterious Pamela."

Again it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him she was no mystery, she was my mom. I wanted to
claim
her. But his face was so fierce, I just kept quiet.

"Pick up that fallen chair, there's a good boy, and set it just to the right of the window," he directed me. "See how the light comes in?" He positioned me with my hands folded loosely in my lap. "Comfortable? Not too bad,
hmm
? Can you hold it like that for a while?"

Where had the raging monster gone? I was tense with waiting for it to reappear.

"Good lad," said Fitzgerald Cotton. "Now, where are my paints?"

"Behind you, there on the big easel," I snapped, not moving from my pose. "In that old wooden box." Was the man blind as well as crazy? He'd been using those paints just two minutes ago.

Fitzgerald Cotton shook his head. "Oh no, no, not
those
paints. Never those
special
paints—not for a portrait of
you.
Not with pigments more precious than gold!" He walked over and snatched up the box. It was a small wooden sort of trunk, about as big as a shoe box, but very dark and cracked. The wood was shiny, even though the box looked really old. It looked like somebody had polished the wood with great care.

"I keep this box under lock and key," Fitzgerald Cotton said, moving across the room to a big wardrobe in the corner. He had to step over his huge mess to get there, but when he did, he opened the cupboard and stashed the box deep inside. Then he locked the door and slipped a key into his bathrobe pocket. What a weirdo.

"Those paints are my special paints," Fitzgerald Cotton hissed at me. His eyes gleamed with excitement or something. An unpleasant smile lingered on his lips. "Those paints are called tempera. They're incredible. I use them only for my finest works. They're the sort of pigments every artist dreams of owning, and they are very,
very
rare." Fitzgerald Cotton shook a pink-smeared finger in front of my nose. "They must be used only for the most important paintings—because once they're gone, there's no replacing them. Do you follow?"

"Um—not really," I said, shifting slightly on the hard seat. I scanned the room, looking for any sign of the sketch. Everything was such a mess—the single piece of paper could have been stashed
anywhere.

He set a small blank canvas on another easel and positioned it about eight feet away from me. Then he grabbed up a kidney-shaped palette with lots of messy dabs of paint everywhere. "These paints will do for the likes of you," he told me, shifting his chair so that he was behind the easel and I couldn't see much of him anymore. "They're good paints. Perfectly ordinary oil paints. Nothing special, but fine for a nice ordinary subject—like you." He peered at me from around the easel, eyes narrowed.

"I save my tempera pigments for my muse," he told me. "Those particular powders aren't just any old paints—though they are very, very old indeed.
Incredibly
old. How old do you think?" When I didn't answer, he barked at me, "How old?"

"Uh—like, five years?" I ventured.

"Hah! Try five
hundred
years!" Again Fitzgerald Cotton's face peered at me from around the canvas. "MORE THAN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS! Those pigments are my treasure. They're extraordinary."

He repositioned my hands, then stepped back to study me. "All right, hold it like that. And don't look so stupid. So
vacant.
You can't expect me to paint you, looking like a dullard. You need to think about something to engage your mind—and your expression."

"Can I talk while you paint?"

"Certainly, but don't move."

As soon as somebody tells me to keep still, I feel like twitching and jumping around and stuff. But I tried. I concentrated On my mission—finding the sketch. I moved only my eyes, looking around for it. But I could tell I'd never find it in all the mess. There must be another way.

"Um, do you do other kinds of art?" I asked hesitantly, mumbling a little so not to move my mouth much. "I mean, like sculpture or—you know. Sketches?"

"No sculpture, boy. Paint is my medium. The canvas is my kingdom—the brush is my sword! I sketch a few preliminary poses of my model in charcoal, but then I use oils or, in special cases, tempera. Both are complex mixtures, young man. They need to be—to catch the complexity of the people who sit for me."

"And what do you do with the charcoal sketches afterward?" I ventured. "Do you keep them? Like, um, in a special drawer somewhere?" I looked quickly around the studio.

"Hold still!" he shouted at me. His arm moved back and made a few stabbing motions at the canvas, but of course I couldn't see what was taking shape. "No," he said in a calmer voice. "I don't keep the sketches. Unless—unless they are special to me." He scowled at me over the top of the canvas. "Why do you ask?"

"No reason," I said hastily. We sat in silence for a few minutes, and I tried not to look over at the canvas that held the ghastly portrait of Mom.

He saw the direction of my look and nodded. "For my muse I use only the best paints. My special ones. Pure history in every brush stroke, my boy, in every color."
He paused and gave me that little unpleasant smile. "Sit still now, and I shall illuminate their history for your edification."

"Okay," I said. "Whatever." I watched him peering at me intently around the side of the easel. Then he started dabbing paint onto the canvas in broad strokes—and talking a mile a minute. I thought fleetingly of Homer and Chester out in thé lemon grove making their tree fort. I thought of Betty and Elsie playing dolls on the porch. I wanted to be with them, not here. The tree fort sounded fun, but, hey—I'd eVen play with paper dolls. This guy was creepy.

"It was in Europe, see, after the war," Fitzgerald Cotton said. "I went to Italy to study painting. There's always something new to learn, and what better place to work than at the Academia, with all of Rome around me for inspiration? Besides, I had a special reason to go there. Centuries ago one of my ancestors made quite a name for himself as one of the Magi Painters. I'd always had a feeling in my bones that I must go there myself, back to the old sod. Back to the land of my forefathers. I visited all the museums to view the Old Masters—some of the most famous paintings in the world, my boy! I wanted to see the real thing, not poorly tinted photographs in art books."

He rubbed his hands together and leaned toward me. "While I was there at the Academia, I studied the techniques of one very special school of painters—the group who called themselves the Magi, the group my own ancestor had been part of. Can you imagine the honor? And my excitement!. This group painted together at the end of the fifteenth century, my boy, during the Renaissance. They were men from Rome and Venice and Padua, sought after by princes and kings, and their philosophy was that painting caught the essence of a subject, captured its very soul on canvas! I was amazed at the intricacy of their work-—such delicacy! Such intensity! And what color! I would give anything, I thought, to be able to paint as they did. And then I met a professor of art at the university in Rome who was making it his life's work to track down samples of the actual paints used by painters of the past. The man had little pouches of powder—Michelangelo's blue and Uccello's greens! He had dabs of Botticelli's reds and Raphael's yellows and golds. Can you imagine my excitement, boy? I decided I must try to obtain some paints used by members of the Magi School. I hoped that with such paints I could capture the pure essence of my subject as they did theirs."

Capture,
I thought. That was a very scary word.

Fitzgerald Cotton pushed his chair away from the easel. "Obtaining some of those old pigments became my quest," he continued, his voice deepening with the passion he felt about his subject. "At last I was rewarded—though I had to sell many of my finest paintings to come up with the money. Still, trading mere money for such an incredible link to past masters—maybe even to my own ancestor!—that was no hardship for me, boy. It was an honor!"

He strode over to the bookshelves that lined the wall by the door. "Look at these," he said, coming back to me, flipping through the pages of a large, heavy book. I broke my pose to lean forward and see what he was pointing at. He tapped the page. "Here they are," he said reverently. "Works of the Magi School."

The book was called
Renaissance Art,
and the pictures he pointed out to me were black-and-white photographs of paintings. The paintings were all of ordinary things—at least, I guessed they were ordinary in the fifteenth century—like cottages hunkered by the sea, and fields of sheep grazing, and grinning men wearing funny tall black hats and raising glasses to each other, and women carrying water from a well, and schoolboys sitting on a bench and holding slates on their laps, and little girls working at big spinning wheels. There were religious paintings of scenes from the Bible, like Adam and Eve in a huge garden. That one was shown in color, but the colors seemed sort of washed out.

Fitzgerald Cotton tapped the page. "I saw that one," he said. "Saw it in the flesh, so to speak. The colors are extraordinary—photography just can't do it justice. Maybe someday people will figure out how to print colors, but until then, this is what we get. Hand-tinted stuff." He snorted disdainfully. "Nothing like the real thing, let me tell you, boy."

Of course, in my time color photography had been figured out, but I couldn't tell him that. I just turned the page and looked at some portraits of rich-looking people in fancy clothes. These had all been tinted. One portrait especially stood out.

It showed a beautiful young woman. She sat on a fancy padded bench in a sort of stone castle room with tapestries on the walls behind her. The detail in the painting was amazing—
exquisite,
to use one of Ms. Rose's spelling words. The lady looked familiar.

I got up to take the book out of Fitzgerald's hands, then sank down on the couch, staring at the picture of the lady in the book. There was something about her expression. She looked—
captured.

I looked more closely at the page. The portrait had a caption under it. It said,
FRANCESCA RIGOLETTI,
1479.

Rigoletti!
That was Mom's last name!

I could feel my pulse in my temples. My whole head was pounding now. I closed my eyes, but even then I could still see the portrait in my head.

No wonder the woman in the portrait seemed familiar. The hair was darker, and she was younger—but she looked just like Mom.