Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  I wasn’t sure there would be room to get her chair in between the makeshift bar set-up and the wall, but there was, just. I started to push it down that narrow aisle, grateful that we’d at least be leaving the rest of the retinue behind us, when Elizabeth cried: “Stop!”

  I stopped at once. “Elizabeth, are you all right?”

  “Just a minute, honey—hush.”

  We sat there, looking at the paintings on the wall. After a little bit, she fetched a sigh and said, “Wireman, do you have a Kleenex?”

  He had a handkerchief, which he unfolded and handed to her.

  “Come around here, Edgar,” she said. “Come where I can see you.”

  I managed to get around between the wheelchair and the bar, with the bartender bracing the table to make sure it didn’t tip over.

  “Are you able to kneel down, so we can be face to face?”

  I was able. My Great Beach Walks were paying dividends. She clutched her cigarette holder—both foolish and somehow magnificent—in one hand, Wireman’s handkerchief in the other. Her eyes were damp.

  “You read me poems because Wireman couldn’t. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Of course I remembered. Those had been sweet interludes.

  “If I were to say ‘Speak, memory’ to you, you’d think of the man—I can’t recall his name—who wrote Lolita, wouldn’t you?”

  I had no idea who she was talking about, but I nodded.

  “But there’s a poem, too. I can’t remember who wrote it, but it begins, ‘Speak, memory, that I may not forget the taste of roses nor the sound of ashes in the wind; That I may once more taste the green cup of the sea.’ Does it move you? Yes, I see it does.”

  The hand with the cigarette holder in it opened. Then it reached out and caressed my hair. The idea occurred to me (and has since recurred) that all my struggle to live and regain a semblance of myself may have been paid back by no more than the touch of that old woman’s hand. The eroded smoothness of the palm. The bent strength of those fingers.

  “Art is memory, Edgar. There is no simpler way to say it. The clearer the memory, the better the art. The purer. These paintings—they break my heart and then make it new again. How glad I am to know they were done at Salmon Point. No matter what.” She lifted the hand she’d caressed my head with. “Tell me what you call that one.”

  “Sunset with Sophora.”

  “And these are … what? Sunset with Conch, Numbers 1 through 4?”

  I smiled. “Well, there were sixteen of them, actually, starting with colored pencil-sketches. Some of those are out front. I picked the best oils for in here. They’re surreal, I know, but—”

  “They’re not surreal, they’re classical. Any fool can see that. They contain all the elements: earth … air … water … fire.”

  I saw Wireman mouth: Don’t tire her out!

  “Why don’t I give you a quick tour of the rest and then get you a cold drink?” I asked her, and now Wireman was nodding and giving me a thumb-and-forefinger circle. “It’s hot in here, even with the air conditioning.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I am a little tired. But Edgar?”

  “Yes?”

  “Save the ship paintings for the last. After them I’ll need a drink. Perhaps in the office. Just one, but something stiffer than Co’-Cola.”

  “You’ve got it,” I said, and edged my way back to the rear of the chair.

  “Ten minutes,” Wireman whispered in my ear. “No more. I’d want to get her out before Gene Hadlock shows up, if possible. He sees her, he’s going to shit a brick. And you know who he’ll throw it at.”

  “Ten,” I said, and rolled Elizabeth into the buffet room to look at the paintings in there. The crowd was still following. Mary Ire had begun taking notes. Ilse slipped one hand into the crook of my elbow and smiled at me. I smiled back, but I was having that I’m-in-a-dream feeling again. The kind that may tilt you into a nightmare at any moment.

  Elizabeth exclaimed over I See the Moon and the Duma Road series, but it was the way she reached her hands out to Roses Grow from Shells, as if to embrace it, that gave me goosebumps. She lowered her arms again and looked over her shoulder at me. “That’s the essence of it,” she said. “The essence of Duma. Why those who’ve lived there awhile can never really leave. Even if their heads carry their bodies away, their hearts stay.” She looked at the picture again and nodded. “Roses Grow from Shells. That is correct.”

  “Thank you, Elizabeth.”

  “No, Edgar—thank you.”

  I glanced back for Wireman and saw him talking to that other lawyer from my other life. They seemed to be getting along famously. I only hoped Wireman wouldn’t slip and call him Bozie. Then I turned to Elizabeth again. She was still looking at Roses Grow from Shells, and wiping her eyes.

  “I love this,” she said, “but we should move along.”

  After she’d seen the other paintings and sketches in the buffet room, she said, as if to herself: “Of course I knew someone would come. But I never would have guessed it would be someone who could produce works of such power and sweetness.”

  Jack tapped me on the shoulder, then leaned close to murmur in my ear. “Dr. Hadlock has entered the building. Wireman wants you to speed this up if you can.”

  The main gallery—where the Girl and Ship paintings hung—was on the way to the office, and Elizabeth could leave by the loading door in back after having her drink; it would actually be more convenient for her wheelchair. Hadlock could accompany her, if he so desired. But I dreaded taking her past the Ship series, and it was no longer her critical opinion I was worried about.

  “Come on,” she said, and clicked her amethyst ring on the arm of her wheelchair. “Let’s look at them. No hesitating.”

  “All right,” I said, and began pushing her toward the main gallery.

  “Are you all right, Eddie?” Pam asked in a low voice.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “You’re not. What’s wrong?”

  I only shook my head. We were in the main room now. The pictures were suspended at a height of about six feet; the room was otherwise open. The walls, covered with coarse brown stuff that looked like burlap, were bare except for Wireman Looks West. I rolled Elizabeth’s chair slowly along. The wheels were soundless on the pale blue carpet. The murmur of the crowd behind us had either stopped or my ears had filtered it out. I seemed to see the paintings for the first time, and they looked oddly like stills culled from a strip of movie film. Each image was a little clearer, a little more in focus, but always essentially the same, always the ship I had first glimpsed in a dream. It was always sunset, and the light filling the west was always a titanic red anvil that spread blood across the water and infected the sky. The ship was a three-masted corpse, something that had floated in from a plaguehouse of the dead. Its sails were rags. Its deck was deserted. There was something horrible in every angular line, and although it was impossible to say just what, you feared for the little girl alone in her rowboat, the little girl who first appeared in a tic-tac-toe dress, the little girl afloat on the wine-dark Gulf.

  In that first version, the angle of the deathship was wrong to see anything of the name. In Girl and Ship No. 2, the angle had improved but the little girl (still with the false red hair and now also wearing Reba’s polka-dotted dress) blocked out all but the letter P. In No. 3, P had become PER and Reba had pretty clearly become Ilse, even back-to. John Eastlake’s spear-pistol lay in the rowboat.

  If Elizabeth recognized this, she gave no indication. I pushed her slowly up the line as the ship bulked larger and closer, its black masts looming like fingers, its sails sagging like dead flesh. The furnace sky glared through the holes in the canvas. Now the name on the transom was PERSE. There might have been more—there was room for more—but if so, it was hidden by shadows. In Girl and Ship No. 6 (the ship now looming over the rowboat), the little girl was wearing what appeared to be a blue singlet with a yellow stripe around the neck. Her hair in tha
t one was orange-ish; it was the only Rowboat Girl whose identity I wasn’t sure of. Maybe it was Ilse, since the others were … but I wasn’t entirely convinced. In this one the first few rose-petals had begun to appear on the water (plus one single yellow-green tennis ball with the letters DUNL visible on it), and an odd assortment of geegaws were heaped on deck: a tall mirror (which, reflecting the sunset, appeared filled with blood), a child’s rocking horse, a steamer trunk, a pile of shoes. These same objects appeared in No. 7 and No. 8, where they had been joined by several others—a young girl’s bicycle leaning against the foremast, a pile of tires stacked on the stern, a great hourglass at midships. This last also reflected the sun and appeared to be full of blood instead of sand. In Girl and Ship No. 8 there were more rose-petals floating between the rowboat and the Perse. There were more tennis balls, too, at least half a dozen. And a rotting garland of flowers hung around the neck of the rocking horse. I could almost smell the stench of their perfume on the still air.

  “Dear God,” Elizabeth whispered. “She has grown so strong.” There had been color in her face but now it was all gone. She didn’t look eighty-five; she looked two hundred.

  Who? I tried to ask, but nothing came out.

  “Ma’am … Miss Eastlake … you shouldn’t tax yourself,” Pam said.

  I cleared my throat. “Can you get her a glass of water?”

  “I will, Dad,” Illy said.

  Elizabeth was still staring at Girl and Ship No. 8. “How many of those … those souvenirs … do you recognize?” she asked.

  “I don’t … my imagination …” I fell silent. The girl in the rowboat of No. 8 was no souvenir, but she was Ilse. The green dress, with its bare back and crisscrossing straps, had seemed jarringly sexy for a little girl, but now I knew why: it was a dress Ilse had bought recently, from a mail-order catalogue, and Ilse was no longer a little girl. Otherwise, the tennis balls were still a mystery to me, the mirror meant nothing, nor did the stack of tires. And I didn’t know for a fact that the bicycle leaning against the foremast had been Tina Garibaldi’s, but I feared it … and my heart was somehow sure of it.

  Elizabeth’s hand, dreadfully cold, settled on my wrist. “There’s no bullet on the frame of this last one.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  Her grip tightened. “You do. You know exactly what I mean. The show is a sell, Edgar, do you think I’m blind? A bullet on the frame of every painting we’ve looked at—including No. 6, the one with my sister Adie in the rowboat—but not this one!”

  I looked back toward No. 6, where Rowboat Girl had orange hair. “That’s your sister?”

  She paid no attention. I don’t think she even heard me. All her attention was bent upon Girl and Ship No. 8. “What do you mean to do? Take it back? Do you mean to take it back to Duma?” Her voice rang out in the quiet of the gallery.

  “Ma’am … Miss Eastlake … you really shouldn’t excite yourself this way,” Pam said.

  Elizabeth’s eyes blazed in the hanging flesh of her face. Her nails dug into the scant meat of my wrist. “And what? Put it next to another one you’ve already started?”

  “I haven’t started another—” Or had I? My memory was playing me again, as it often did in moments of stress. If someone had at that moment demanded that I speak the name of my older daughter’s French boyfriend, I probably would have said René. As in Magritte. The dream had tilted, all right; here was the nightmare, right on schedule.

  “The one where the rowboat is empty?”

  Before I could say anything, Gene Hadlock shoved through the crowd, followed by Wireman, followed by Ilse, holding a glass of water.

  “Elizabeth, we should go,” Hadlock said.

  He reached for her arm. Elizabeth swept his hand away. On the follow-through she struck the glass Ilse was starting to proffer and it went flying, hitting one of the bare walls and shattering. Someone cried out and some woman, incredibly, laughed.

  “Do you see the rocking horse, Edgar?” She held out her hand. It was trembling badly. Her nails had been painted coral pink, probably by Annmarie. “That belonged to my sisters, Tessie and Laura. They loved it. They dragged that damned thing with them everywhere. It was outside Rampopo—the baby playhouse on the side lawn—after they drowned. My father couldn’t bear to look at it. He had it thrown into the water at the memorial service. Along with the garland, of course. The one around the horse’s neck.”

  Silence except for the tearing rasp of her breath. Mary Ire staring with big eyes, her obsessive note-taking at an end, the pad hanging forgotten in one hand by her side. Her other hand had gone to her mouth. Then Wireman pointed to a door that was quite cleverly concealed in more of the brown burlappy stuff. Hadlock nodded. And suddenly Jack was there, and it was actually Jack who took charge. “Have you out in a jiff, Miz Eastlake,” he said. “No worries.” He seized the handles of her wheelchair.

  “Look at the ship’s wake!” Elizabeth shouted at me as she was borne out of the public eye for the last time. “For Christ’s sake, don’t you see what you’ve painted?”

  I looked. So did my family.

  “There’s nothing there,” Melinda said. She looked mistrustfully toward the office door, which was just closing behind Jack and Elizabeth. “Is she dotty, or what?”

  Illy was standing on tiptoe, craning for a closer look. “Daddy,” she said hesitantly. “Are those faces? Faces in the water?”

  “No,” I said, surprised at the steadiness of my own voice. “All you’re seeing is an idea she put in your head. Will you guys excuse me for a minute?”

  “Of course,” Pam said.

  “May I be of assistance, Edgar?” Kamen asked in his booming basso.

  I smiled. I was surprised at how easily that came, too. Shock has its purposes, it seems. “Thanks, but no. Her doctor’s in with her.”

  I hurried toward the office door, resisting an urge to look back. Melinda hadn’t seen it; Ilse had. My guess was that not many people would, even if it were pointed out to them … and even then, most would dismiss it as either coincidence or a small artistic wink.

  Those faces.

  Those screaming drowned faces in the ship’s sunset wake.

  Tessie and Laura were there, most certainly, but others as well, just below them where the red faded to green and the green to black.

  One might be a carrot-topped girl in an old-fashioned singlet-style bathing suit: Elizabeth’s oldest sister, Adriana.

  vii

  Wireman was giving her sips of what looked like Perrier while Rosenblatt fussed at her side, literally wringing his hands. The office seemed packed with people. It was hotter than the gallery, and getting hotter.

  “I want you all out!” Hadlock said. “Everyone but Wireman! Now! Right now!”

  Elizabeth pushed aside the glass with the back of her hand. “Edgar,” she said in a husky voice. “Edgar stays.”

  “No, Edgar goes,” Hadlock said. “You’ve excited yourself quite en—”

  His hand was in front of her. She seized it and squeezed it. With some force, it seemed, because Hadlock’s eyes widened.

  “Stays.” It was only a whisper, but a powerful one.

  People began to leave. I heard Dario telling the crowd gathered outside that everything was fine, Miss Eastlake felt a little faint but her doctor was with her and she was recovering. Jack was going out the door when Elizabeth called, “Young man!” He turned.

  “Don’t forget,” she told him.

  He gave her a brief grin and knocked off a salute. “No, ma’am, I sure won’t.”

  “I should have trusted you in the first place,” she said, and Jack went out. Then, in a lower voice, as if her strength were fading: “He’s a good boy.”

  “Trusted him for what?” Wireman asked her.

  “To search the attic for a certain picnic basket,” she said. “In the picture on the landing, Nan Melda is holding it.” She looked at me reproachfully.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I re
member you telling me, but I just … I got painting, and …”

  “I don’t blame you,” she said. Her eyes had receded deep in their sockets. “I should have known. It’s her power. The same power that drew you here in the first place.” She looked at Wireman. “And you.”

  “Elizabeth, that’s enough,” Hadlock said. “I want to take you to the hospital and run some tests. Run some fluids into you while I’m at it. Get you some rest—”

  “I’ll be getting all the rest I need very soon now,” she told him, and smiled. The smile exposed a large and rather gruesome ring of dentures. Her eyes returned to me. “Trixie pixie nixie,” she said. “To her it’s all a game. All our sorrow. And she’s awake again.” Her hand, very cold, settled on my forearm. “Edgar, she’s awake!”

  “Who? Elizabeth, who? Perse?”

  She shuddered backward in her chair. It was as if an electrical current were passing through her. The hand on my arm tightened. Her coral nails punched through my skin, leaving a quartet of red crescents. Her mouth opened, exposing her teeth this time in a snarl instead of a smile. Her head went backward and I heard something in there snap.

  “Catch the chair before it goes over!” Wireman roared, but I couldn’t—I had only one arm, and Elizabeth was clutching it. Was docked in it.

  Hadlock grabbed one of the push-handles and the chair skittered sideways instead of toppling backwards. It struck Jimmy Yoshida’s desk. Now Elizabeth was in full seizure mode, jittering back and forth in her chair like a puppet. The snood came loose from her hair and flailed, sparkling, in the light of the overhead fluorescents. Her feet jerked and one of her scarlet pumps went flying off. The angels want to wear my red shoes, I thought, and as if the line had summoned it, blood burst from her nose and mouth.