The Art of Death (4 page)
Authors: Margarite St. John
Ghosts
Saturday, May 4, 2013
After the Derby party, Madeleine and Anthony did not return to the Appledorn farmhouse. Instead, they shared bangers and mash at O’Reilly’s Irish Pub in The Harrison on South Calhoun and then went upstairs to the doctor’s fourth-floor apartment. Why he’d rented a three-bedroom end unit was a mystery. He had no children or out-of-town friends who needed a room from time to time. The mixed-use building, constructed as part of the Harrison Square project to revitalize downtown, was advertised as the only true urban living in Fort Wayne. Though Madeleine thought the modernity of the apartment didn’t suit Anthony’s old-world affectations, it made his visits to the Embassy Theatre and other downtown attractions easy. His office was on the second floor, so he had at the worst a 60-second commute. And both of them enjoyed the view of Parkview Field from the balcony.
“You’d better ease up on the blow,” Anthony warned, half-teasingly. He handed her a glass of wine and a tissue. “Those glittering eyes and that runny nose will give the game away if you’re not careful.”
“Then don’t make it so easy for me to get it,” she retorted.
“I won’t,” he said, not bothering to explain that the recent arrest of his drug courier had scared him. “But if I hadn’t let you have a toot every week after your friend’s little swimming accident, you’d never have gotten your act together. Maybe you don’t remember, but you were so far down the well you couldn’t see the sky above. Without a little chemical stimulation, you’d have spent the last twenty-three years rotting away in a psych ward, tied to a bed so you couldn’t cut yourself, living in darkness and filth, screaming obscenities.”
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“It is. What I did for you was genius.”
“And you’re so confident it was genius that you’ll publish that report to the world? Exactly what you did to
cure
me?”
He snorted. “I don’t pretend to cure anyone. Besides, genius is never recognized until the sage is long dead.”
“Genius! Really?” Madeleine exclaimed.
“It is genius not to pathologize everything. These days, helping a patient through sex and drugs is original and, in your case, it made you the woman you are.”
Madeleine reached for the wine bottle but before she could grasp it, Anthony gallantly poured her another glass. “Here you are, Schatzi.”
She smiled at him over her glass. “You were just lucky I never squealed to Daddy about your unorthodox practices. He’d have killed you with his bare hands, especially if he knew how we really used that couch.”
“As Woody Allen said, ‘I don’t know the question, but sex is definitely the answer.’”
Madeleine shot him a wicked smile. “I can quote too, you know. ‘Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.’”
“Who said that?”
“Oscar Wilde. He said practically everything worth saying.”
“Our sex wasn’t about power. I made you into a woman. Otherwise, you’d have stayed a troubled child forever.”
“Who says I haven’t?”
He chuckled. “Speaking of your father, is Nettie going to stay the night with him?”
“Of course. The silly old thing couldn’t find a better-paying job than playing nursemaid to Daddy. I just hope she lives long enough to see him through to the end.”
“You know, your friend Kimberly is a silly old thing too.”
“She isn’t silly and she’s my age, for heaven’s sake.”
“After she saw in the newspaper the face of a girl you reconstructed a year ago, the one you’re getting an award for, she thought for an instant that Nicole had come back from the dead. She was so shaken that she began having flashbacks.”
“She never said anything to me about flashbacks.”
“She wouldn’t. She’s deathly afraid of you.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“She says you really did reach Nicole far out from the pier and when you did, you struck her in the head. That’s why she drowned.”
Madeleine hissed her contempt. “Then why wasn’t her body found?”
“The riptide carried her away. That part, at least, was true. She also says you got scratched, not from hitting something in the water, but from Nicole when she fought back.”
“What a story! You don’t believe it, do you?”
Anthony’s face was a mask.
Her face flushed with anger, Madeleine looked away. “Kimmie’s just jealous of the attention I got back then. In the newspaper accounts, I was hailed as a hero and she was made to look like a fool, stepping on a nest of bees. And she’s jealous of what happened afterward. I’m now a rich woman -- self-made, I might add -- while she gives facials to women in a downscale salon. I don’t need therapy anymore, but she never got her act together. She’s still your patient, after all.”
Anthony studied her face. “I thought you two were still friends.”
“We are, but not the way we were. We aren’t equals anymore. I still pay her a premium to come to the house on Sundays when I’m in town so I don’t have to go to a salon, but we aren’t as chatty as we once were.”
“You have to admit it was uncanny the way you reconstructed Nicole so exactly, right down to the mole beside her nose and the color of her eyes, the length of her hair, the cleft chin. How did you know about those things if you didn’t know it was Nicole all along?”
“I didn’t. How could I? When I was hired to put a face on a skull, all I was told was that it was a very young person, which I could see for myself, a skull washed up on the Illinois side of Lake Michigan, not sure of where it became detached from the body or how long it had been missing. Even the sex of the victim wasn’t known. Fortunately, after art school, I trained at the FBI Academy in Quantico, so I know more than most coroners. And I also have a gift for seeing things. Once I begin putting flesh on a skull, I see a complete picture, a gestalt, the whole face. . . . Do you remember that skull found in the Everglades a few years ago? I hadn’t spent two days on it when suddenly I even saw the scar on his cheek, his bald spot, the crooked nose. I’d never seen the living man, but I was right, wasn’t I?”
“Some people think you’re psychic, that these insights come out of the ether.”
Madeleine flushed with exasperation. “They just don’t want to admit my insights, as you call them, come from training, experience, and dedication, that’s all. I’m an artist, I know anatomy, I never stop studying, and I’ve done dozens of reconstructions. Maybe I have second sight, maybe I don’t. So what? The fact is, I take my work very seriously. Put it all together and I’m one of a dozen really good forensic artists in the whole country.”
Anthony chuckled. “Humility was never your problem.”
“Whatever the case, it’s mean to pretend my talent is somehow outside my control. My detractors have no idea how earth-shaking it was to be given the skull of a girl who turned out to be my childhood friend. I almost fainted when I began to see the face come alive. I couldn’t believe it. I never expected to see Nicole again. And don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how upset I was because I practically lived in your office for a week after that. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I’d just gotten divorced from Ned. Daddy just had his first stroke. And then Nicole shows up in my studio like a ghost! I thought the world was coming apart.”
“Not a scientific observation, I know, but somehow disasters always show up in threes. In your case, it was the divorce from Ned, your father’s stroke, and Nicole’s ghost.”
“Like in a fairy tale?”
“Like that,” he said. “Three seems to be some kind of universal number.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” she said almost in a whisper.
“Why?”
“I’ve been married three times. I want to be married again.”
“Who’s the lucky guy?”
“Don’t be coy, Anthony.”
“You want to marry me?”
“That note of surprise doesn’t become you. Of course I want to marry you. I wanted to marry you when I was eighteen. When I told you I was cured and wouldn’t be your patient any more because I was moving to Chicago to go to school, I thought you’d stop me. I thought you’d propose.”
“It never occurred to me that’s what you wanted. Why didn’t you say so?”
“Would you have married me if I had?”
A long silence followed.
“Anthony, answer me. Would you?”
“Probably not. I’ve never been married, Madeleine. Family life never appealed to me.”
“So isn’t it about time? You’re not getting any younger.”
“I’ll think about it, Madeleine. You’re the dearest thing in my life.”
When Madeleine began to shiver, Anthony got up to drape a throw around her shoulders. “Do you want to go in? It’s getting chilly.”
“No. Not yet. I’m too wired to sleep. But promise you’ll go with me to the awards ceremony. Awards mean nothing unless I see a familiar face in the audience. And I hope Kimmie chokes to death on her lies.”
Tricky Dick
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Though Madeleine did not treat the Sabbath as a day decreed by God for rest, she nevertheless viewed it as a special day of personal indulgence. She might spend it shopping, or attending a matinée, or strolling through an art museum, especially if she was out of town. In the summer when she was in Fort Wayne, she sunbathed in the backyard. On dark, cold afternoons in the winter, she curled up in a window seat to read the novels of Paul Doherty and Anton Gill, mysteries set in ancient Egypt and Babylon.
But today she would indulge in another favorite routine.
First, she would attend to her beloved father. While Nettie was downstairs preparing Chester’s breakfast tray, Madeleine sat with him awhile in the little alcove off his bedroom. It had a view of the old family cemetery beside the barn where she had her studio. With as much animation as she could muster, given the hangover that had dulled her mind, Madeleine, ever the dutiful daughter, told him all about the Kentucky Derby party.
Chester had always liked her stories, even when she was a child.
Years ago, after the accident in the Dunes, Madeleine slipped into a deep depression. Chester had been her rock, her only comfort. She’d nestle beside him in his recliner, entertaining him with accounts of school triumphs and boy crushes and prom parties. Though she told him nothing of her nightmares or her early visits with Dr. Beltrami, she recounted every fantasy she had for her future. She read him stories she had written and showed him her art work. He told her she was brilliant.
In those days, before he suffered a series of strokes, Chester had his own stories, of course. His best ones were about the mules his father owned. “Pop’s favorite was a young beast, very handsome with intelligent eyes, who we called Tricky Dick. At half a ton, he was huge for a mule, smarter than the buggy horses and most of our field hands. We’d get him harnessed to the plow, work him a few hours, and then he’d suddenly go lame, so we’d unharness him and lead him to the pasture. There he’d stand with his head down, not grazing, not moving except to flex his leg as if it had been injured. A few days later, he’d be fine, so Pop would put him back to work. Then, after a few hours in the field, he’d go lame again. The vet couldn’t find anything wrong. So one day, after Tricky Dick once again went lame, Pop circled back to the pasture and stood in the grove. Twenty minutes went by and Pop was just fixing to leave when Tricky Dick began galloping and leaping around like a foal, making that peculiar braying/whinnying sound mules make and generally acting the fool. Nothing wrong with his leg at all.”
“So what happened?” Mattie asked, entranced despite having heard the story many times before.
“At first, Pop was angry. Then he began to laugh. He rounded the beast up and put him back in harness. A few months would go by, and Tricky Dick would work the fields just the way he was supposed to. But then would come another day when he’d pretend to go lame again. Pop wasn’t a patient man, but for some reason he let that mule have his little game. I think they both enjoyed it.”
“How did it end, Daddy?”
Chester ruffled his daughter’s hair. “Tricky Dick won in the end. Pop couldn’t put him down, so he let the old mule spend his last days at pasture doing nothing. Sometimes I’d see them together, head to head, Pop talking as if Tricky Dick was just another man. I asked Pop why he did that.”
“And what did he say?” Mattie asked, squirming with pleasure at the answer she knew was coming.
“A beast that clever was worth talking to and deserved to win.”
After the accident at the Dunes, while Mattie and Chester told each other stories, Dorothy lay on the sofa, a cold cloth on her forehead, neither talking nor even looking at her husband and daughter. She still cleaned the house and cooked their meals. She still saw her daughter off to school and waited at the end of the lane for her to get off the bus. Once in awhile she knitted something. But after the accident at the Dunes, Dorothy performed her duties like a zombie. She had no appetite, no interest in her appearance. She stopped reading even the newspaper. Gradually, she let life slip out of her hands. She faded away, like ink in strong sunlight, overtaken, Chester said, by melancholy.
A very strange word, melancholy. Mattie didn’t know what it meant. When shortly after her mother’s funeral Mattie’s Sunday school teacher said melancholy was a sin, she stopped going to church. Then and there, the teenager vowed never to let life slip away, never to let go of anything she loved. She would live her life like Tricky Dick, the clever mule who was never defeated by circumstances, who worked one day and played the next, so smart that he charmed even a hard-headed man and got his way in the end.
Now, more than twenty years later, Chester no longer told his daughter so many stories, but still Madeleine liked to be with him. On this pleasant Sunday morning she gazed at her father lovingly. She knew that people thought he suffered from Alzheimer’s, but that was untrue. He had had a series of strokes that damaged his cerebellum, the lower part of the brain. As a result, Chester had difficulty with balance, posture, and movement, but he wasn’t paralyzed on one side, as so many other stroke victims were. His speech was impaired a little, but he could still talk to her. She was grateful for small mercies.