The Swan Thieves

  "And Yves knows that you took it?" She somehow does not want to say her husband's name here, in this other man's rooms.

  "Yes, of course. I asked him first, but not you--I knew he would say yes and you would say no."

  "I do say no," she tells him, and the tears brim over and run down her face. She is humiliated, she who seldom cries, even in front of her husband. She can't explain how it feels to see this private painting in strange surroundings, or--above all--to hear it praised. She wipes her face, searches for a handkerchief in the velvet bag at her wrist. He has moved closer, pulling something from inside his jacket. Now he is carefully wiping her face--patting, drying, arranging with hands that have spent years holding brush and pencil and palette knife. He takes her elbows deliberately in

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  his cupped palms, as if weighing them, and then he draws her toward him.

  For the first time she puts her head against his neck, his cheek, feeling that it is permissible to both of them because he is comforting her. He strokes her hair and the back of her neck, and at his touch a network of cool strands runs down it. His fingertips move over the mass of braids at the back of her head, touching them without disturbing their meticulous arrangement, and his arm goes around her shoulders. He pulls her against his chest, so that she has to put one hand on his back to steady herself. He strokes her cheek, her ear; he has already come very close, so that his mouth finds her mouth before his hand does. His lips are warm and dry but rather thick, like softened leather, and his breath tastes of coffee and bread. She has been kissed many times, but only by Yves, so it is the alien nature of these new lips she understands first; only after that does she realize that these lips are more skilled than her husband's, more insistent.

  The impossibility of his kissing her and of her wanting him to kiss her puts a wave of heat into her face and down her neck, a fist clenching inside her, desire that she hasn't known before to associate with desire. He holds her by the upper arms now, as if afraid she will pull away. His grip is strong, and again she feels the years when she hasn't known him, when he built up that strength simply by living and working.

  "I can't let you," she tries to say, but the words disappear under his lips, and she doesn't know whether she means that she can't let him send her painting to the Salon or that she can't let him kiss her. He is the one who gently puts her away from him. He is quivering, as nervous as she is.

  "Forgive me." His words come out choked. His eyes hold hers but blindly. Now that she can look at him again, she sees he is indeed old. And brave, she realizes. "I didn't mean to offend you further. I have forgotten myself."

  She believes him; he forgot himself, remembering only her.

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  "You have not offended me," she says in a voice she can hardly hear herself, straightening her sleeves, her bag, her gloves. His handkerchief is at their feet. She can't stoop for it in her stays; she is afraid of losing her balance. He bends to pick it up, but instead of giving it to her again he tucks it slowly inside his jacket. "The fault is mine," he tells her. She finds herself staring at his shoes, brown leather, the tips a little worn, the edge of one spattered with yellow paint. She is seeing the shoes he works in, his real life.

  "No," she murmurs. "I should not have come."

  "Béatrice," he says. He picks up her hand seriously, formally. She remembers with sharp misery the moment when Yves asked her to marry him years ago, the same formality. They are, after all, uncle and nephew, so why would they not share gestures, family characteristics?

  "I must leave," she says, trying to withdraw her hand, but he retains it.

  "Before you go, please understand that I respect and love you. I am dazzled by you, by who you are. I will never ask anything of you except to kiss your feet. Allow me to tell you everything, just once." The intensity of his voice moves her, the contrast of it with his familiar face.

  "You honor me," she says helplessly, looking around for her cloak and hat. She remembers that they are in the other room.

  "I also love your painting, your instinct for art, and I love them apart from my love for you. You have a splendid gift." He speaks more calmly this time. She realizes that, in spite of the nature of the moment, he is sincere. He is sad, earnest--a man time has already left behind, and who has little time left. He stands before her a moment longer and then disappears into the next room for her things. She ties the bonnet on with shaking fingers; he holds the cloak carefully around her while she buttons it at her throat.

  When she turns back, there is such loss in his face that she goes to him without allowing herself to think. She kisses his cheek, pauses, then his mouth, swiftly. To her regret, it already feels and

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  tastes familiar. "I really must go," she says. Neither of them mentions tea or her painting. He holds the door open for her, bowing in silence. She clutches the balustrade all the way down the stairs to the street. She listens for the sound of his door closing but does not hear it; perhaps he is still standing in the open doorway at the top of the building. Her carriage will not return for at least another half hour, so she must either walk up to the stables at the end of the block or find a hansom to take her home. She leans against the front of his building for a moment, feeling the facade through her glove, trying to steady her mind. Succeeding.

  But later, when she sits alone on her sunporch, trying to make everything simple, the kiss returns, fills the air around her. It floods the high windows, the carpet, the folds of her dress, the pages of her book. "Please understand that I respect and love you." She cannot make the kiss disappear. By the next morning she no longer wants it to. She means no harm--she will do no harm--but she wants to keep that moment with her as long as she can.

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  CHAPTER 42 Marlow

  Before dawn, I loaded the car and daydreamed my way up into Virginia, along highways whose embankments had gotten even greener since my trip down. It was a softly chill day, rain falling for a few minutes and then ceasing, falling and ceasing, and I began to long for home. I went straight to my one late appointment at Dupont Circle. The patient talked; out of long habit, I asked the right questions, I listened, I adjusted a prescription, I let him go, confident in my decisions.

  When I reached my apartment in the dark, I unpacked quickly, heated a can of soup. After the Hadleys' dreary cottage--I could admit it now; I would have torn the place down in a minute and put up something with twice as many windows--my rooms were pristine, welcoming, the lamps perfectly adjusted on each painting, the linen curtains smooth from last month's dry cleaning. The place smelled of mineral spirits and oil paint, something I don't usually notice unless I've been away for a few days, and of the narcissus blooming in the kitchen; it had burst out while I was gone, and I watered it gratefully--careful, however, not to overwater. I went to my father's old set of encyclopedias and put my hand on one spine, then stopped myself. There would be time; I took a hot shower instead, turned out the lights, and went to bed.

  The next day was busy: my staff at Goldengrove needed me more than ever because I'd been away; some of my patients had not

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  done as well as I'd hoped and the nurses seemed cranky; my desk was covered with paperwork. I managed in the first few hours to stop by Robert Oliver's room. Robert was sitting in a folding chair at the edge of the counter that served as a desk and supply shelf, sketching. His letters lay next to him, arranged in two piles; I wondered how he'd divided them. He closed his sketchbook when I came in and turned to look at me. I took this as a good sign; sometimes he ignored my presence altogether whether he was working or not, and he could keep this up for disconcertingly long periods. His expression was weary and raw, and his eyes shifted from his recognition of my face to a contemplation of my clothes.

  I wondered, for perhaps the hundredth time, if his silence was allowing me to underestimate the degree to which his illness currently affected him; possibly it was much more serious than I could judge by observing him, however closel
y. I also wondered if he could possibly have guessed where I'd been, and I considered settling down in the big chair and asking him to clean his brush and sit on the bed opposite me, to listen while I gave him news of his ex-wife. I could say, I know that when you first kissed her, you lifted her off the floor. I could say, There are still cardinals at your bird feeder, and the mountain laurel is beginning to bloom. I could tell him, I know even better now that you are a genius. Or I could ask, What does "Étretat" mean to you?

  "How are you, Robert?" I stayed in the doorway.

  He turned back to his drawing.

  "Fine. Well, I'm off to see some other folks." Why had I used that word? I'd never liked it. I made a quick scan of the room. Nothing seemed different, dangerous, or disturbed. I wished him good sketching, pointing out that the day promised to be sunny, and left him with as genuine a smile as I could manage, although he wasn't looking.

  I fought my way through rounds until the end of the day and stayed late to catch up at my desk. When the day staff was gone and dinner had already been served to the patients and was being

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  cleared away, I shut my office door and locked it, then sat down at the computer.

  And saw what I'd begun to remember. It was a coastal town in Normandy, in an area much painted during the nineteenth century, particularly by Eugène Boudin and his restless young protégé, Claude Monet. I found the familiar images--Monet's tremendous rough cliffs, the famous arch of rock on the beach. But Étretat had apparently attracted other painters--lots of them, including Olivier Vignot and even Gilbert Thomas of the self-portrait with coins in the National Gallery; they had both painted that coastline. Almost every painter who could afford to get on one of the new northern railway lines had gone out and had a crack at Étretat, it seemed--the masters and the minor ones, the weekend painters and the society watercolorists. Monet's cliffs rose above all the others in the history of paintings of Étretat, but he'd been part of a tradition.

  I found a recent photograph of the town; the great arch looked as it had in the Impressionists' day. There were still wide beaches with boats pulled up and overturned on them, cliffs green on top with grass, little streets lined with elegant old hotels and houses, many of which might have been there when Monet was painting a few yards away. None of this seemed in any way related to the scrawl on Robert Oliver's wall, except perhaps through his personal library of works on France, where he would surely have come across the name of the town and some depictions of its dramatic setting. Had he been there himself, to experience "joy"? Perhaps on the trip to France that Kate had mentioned? I wondered again if he might be mildly delusional. Étretat was a dead end, a beautiful one, the cliff on my screen arching down toward the Channel, disappearing into the water. Monet had painted an astonishing number of views of it, and Robert, unless I'd missed something, had painted none.

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  The next day was Saturday, and I took a run in the morning, just to the National Zoo and back, thinking about my glimpse of those mountains around Greenhill. Leaning against the gates, stretching my tight hamstrings, I thought for the first time that I might never be able to make Robert well. And how would I know when to stop trying?

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  CHAPTER 43 Marlow

  The Wednesday morning after my run to the zoo, there was a letter with a Greenhill return address in the upper corner of the envelope waiting for me at Goldengrove. The handwriting was neat, feminine, organized--Kate. I went into my office without stopping to see Robert or any other patients first, shut the door, and took out my letter opener, which had been a gift from my mother on my graduation from college; it often occurred to me that I shouldn't keep such a treasure in my rather public office, but I liked to have it near me. The letter was one page and, unlike the address on the envelope, typed.

  Dear Dr. Marlow:

  I hope this finds you well. Thank you for your visit to Greenhill. If I was of any assistance to you or (indirectly) to Robert, I'm glad. I don't feel I can continue our communication much, and I'm sure you'll understand. I valued our meeting and am still thinking about it, and I believe that if anyone can help Robert, it will be someone like you.

  There was one thing I did not give you while you were here, partly for personal reasons, and partly because I didn't know if it would be ethical, but I've decided I do want you to have it. It's the last name of the woman who wrote Robert the letters I told you about. I didn't tell you then that one of them was written on a piece of stationery, and it had her full name at the top. She was a painter, too, as I mentioned to you, and her name was Mary R. Bertison. This is still a very painful topic for me, and I wasn't sure I wanted to share this detail with you, or f it might even be wrong for me to do so. But if you are going to seriously try to help him, I feel I have to give you her name. Perhaps you will be

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  able to find out something about who she was, although I'm not sure exactly how that could be useful.

  I wish you all the best in your work, and especially in your efforts to help Robert.

  Yours truly,

  Kate Oliver

  It was a generous, upright, irritable, awkward, kind letter; I could hear in every line Kate's determination, her decision to do what she thought was right. She would have been sitting at her table in the upstairs library, maybe in the early morning, typing her way stubbornly through her pain, sealing the letter before she could change her mind, making tea in the kitchen afterward, affixing the stamp. She would have been grieved by her own exertions on Robert's behalf, and yet satisfied with herself--I could see her in neat-fitting top and jeans, sparkling jewels in her ears, setting the letter on a tray by the front door, going to wake the children, saving her smile for them. I felt a sudden pang of loss.

  But the letter was the same--the closed door I'd observed before, even if it opened another one, and I had to respect her wishes. I typed a brief response, grateful and professional, and sealed it in an envelope for my staff to mail. Kate had offered me no e-mail address, nor had she used the one on the card I'd handed her in Greenhill; apparently she wanted only this official, slower communication between us, an actual missive crossing the country on an anonymous tide of correspondence. All of it sealed. It was what we might have done in the nineteenth century, I thought, this polite, secret exchange on paper, conversation at a remove. I put Kate's letter away in my personal files rather than in Robert's chart.

  The rest was surprisingly easy, not a detective story at all. Mary R. Bertison lived in the DC limits, and her full name was listed, bold and clear, in the phone book, which said she resided on 3rd Street, Northeast. In other words, as I'd suspected, she was quite possibly alive. It was strange to me to see this artifact of silent

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  Robert Oliver's life lying out in the open. There could, I supposed, be more than one woman with this name in the city, but I doubted it. After lunch I phoned the number from my desk, my door shut once more against other eyes and ears. Mary Bertison might, I thought, be at home, since she was a painter; on the other hand, if she was a painter she probably had a day job, as I did--in my case, the little matter of my being a licensed doctor of medicine fifty-five hours a week. Her line rang five or six times. My hope diminished with each ring--I wanted to catch her by surprise-- and an answering machine clicked on. "You have reached Mary Bertison at--," a female voice said firmly. The voice was a pleasant one, made a little harsh, perhaps, by the necessity of recording a phone message, but firm on the ear, an educated alto.

  It occurred to me now that she might actually respond better to a courteous message than to a startling live call, and it would give her time to think over my request. "Hello, Ms. Bertison. This is Dr. Andrew Marlow--I'm an attending psychiatrist at Goldengrove Residential Center in Rockville. I'm currently working with a patient who I understand is a friend of yours, a painter, and I wondered if you might be willing to give us a little assistance."

  That careful "us"--it made me flinch in spite of myself. This wa
s hardly a team project. And the message itself was enough to worry her, if she still considered him a close friend, at the least. But if he'd lived with her, or come to Washington to be with her, as Kate suspected, why on earth hadn't she turned up at Goldengrove herself by now? On the other hand, the papers hadn't reported his being placed in psychiatric care. "You can call me here at the center most weekdays, and I will get back to you as soon as possible. The number is--" I gave it clearly, added my pager information, and hung up.

  Then I went to see Robert, feeling in spite of myself as if I had visible blood on my hands. Kate hadn't told me not to mention Mary

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  Bertison to him, but when I reached his room I was still thinking about whether or not to do this. I had called someone who might not otherwise ever have learned that Robert was in psychiatric care. You can even talk with Mary, he had told me contemptuously on his first day at Goldengrove. He had said nothing more, however, and there must be twenty million Marys in the United States. He might remember exactly what he'd said. But would I have to explain where I'd gotten her last name?

  I knocked and called in to him, although his door was slightly open. Robert was painting, standing calmly at the easel with his brush raised and his great shoulders relaxed and natural; I wondered for a moment if he'd experienced some recovery over the last few days. Did he really need to be here just because he wouldn't speak? Then he looked up with a frown, and I saw the red in his eyes, the stark misery that came over his face at the sight of me.