The Swan Thieves

  So I returned to Paris no less ailing than when I went away, and on my arrival I resolved to try even here to throw myself into work and leave you in peace. I will not hide from you the pleasure your note brought me -- the thought that perhaps in some little way you had wished me not to leave you alone -- that you had missed me, too. No, no -- there is no offense taken, except what I have perhaps in my own foolishness given you. I can only resolve to live in proximity to you with all the composure I can summon.

  How foolish for an old man to be so stirred, you will think, even if you are too kind to tell me so. You will of course be right. But in that case you will also underestimate your own power, my dearest, the power of your presence, your receptivity to life and the way that moves me. I shall leave you in peace as much as possible, yet not separate myself completely any longer, since you do not seem to wish it any more than I. For which all those imperious, crumbling gods I saw in Italy be praised.

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  This is only a part of my story, however. Here I must draw a deep breath and put down for a moment or two the task of writing you, to reach for the extra strength I shall need. I felt all the time I was away that I could not, even if you should wish it, return to you either in person or on paper without fulfilling the hardest promise I have made you.

  As you will recall, I said I would one day tell you about my wife. I have hourly regretted that declaration. I am selfish enough to feel that you cannot know me without knowing about her, and even that I might--as you surmised--gain some small relief by doing so. And I would not intentionally break any promise to you as long as I live. If I could give you all of my past, and abscond with all of your future, I would do that, as you must guess; and it is perennial grief to me that I cannot. You see how abundant is my selfishness-- to think as I do that you might be happy with me when you already have every reason to be happy.

  At the same time, I have felt deeply my mistake in making this promise, because my wife's story is not one I would willingly put into your mind, with its lovely innocence, its hopes for the world. (This will, I know, annoy you, and you will see the sad truth in my assessment only too late.) In any case, I beseech you to save the following pages for an hour when you feel able to hear something terrible, yet all too real--and I ask you to realize that I shall regret every word. When you have read this, you will know a little more than my brother does, and a great deal more than my nephew. And more, certainly, than all the rest of the world. You will know, also, that this is a political matter, and as a consequence some of my safety will rest in your hands. And why should I do such a thing -- tell you something that can only dismay you? Well, that is the nature of love: it is brutal in its demands. The day you recognize its brutal natureJoryourse1J, you will look back and know me even better, and forgive me. Probably I will be long gone, but wherever I am I will bless you for your understanding.

  I met my wife rather late in life; I was already forty-three and she was forty. Her name, as you may know from my brother, was Helene. She was a woman of good family, from Rouen. She had never married, not because of any ineligibility on her part but because of her care of her widowed mother, who died only two years before we met. After her mother's death, she came to live with her

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  older sister's family in Paris, and she made herself as indispensable to them as she had been to her mother. She was a person of dignity and sweetness, serious but not humorless, and from our first meeting I was attracted by her bearing and by her consideration of others. She was interested in painting, although she had had little in the way of education in art and was more inclined to books; she read German and some Latin as well, her father having believed in learning for his daughters. And she was devout in a sense that put my own lighthearted doubts to shame. I admired her steadfastness in everything she did.

  Her brother-in-law, an old friend, was my advocate in the courtship (although he knew too much about me, perhaps, for the good of my reputation), and he settled a generous dowry on her. We were married in the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, with a few friends and relations in attendance, and went on to a house in Saint-Germain. We lived quietly. I pursued my painting and exhibitions, and she kept an excellent household in which my friends felt welcome. I came to love her very much, with a love that had perhaps more esteem than passion in it. We were too old to expect children, but we were content with each other, and I felt in her influence a deepening of my own nature and a taming of some of what she doubtless considered my wayward earlier life. Thanks to her steady belief in me, my absorption in painting also deepened and my skill increased.

  We might have lived happily forever in this way if our emperor had not considered it his right to plunge France into that most hopeless of wars, invading Prussia--you were, my dear, a girl, but news of the Battle of Sedan must be shocking in your memory, too. Then came the terrible retribution of their armies--and the siege that ravaged our poor city. Now I must tell you, and frankly, that I was among those whom all of this angered beyond endurance. True, I was not part of the barbaric rabble but was one of those moderates who believed that Paris and France had suffered more than enough at the hands of unthinking, luxurious despotism and who rose against it.

  You know that I spent many of these last years in Italy, but what I have not told you is that I was an exile, removing myself from what would undoubtedly have been peril, until I could be certain of resuming a quiet life in my native city-- removing myself in grief and cynicism as well. I was in fact a friend of the Commune, and in my heart I have no shame about that, although I grieve for my

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  comrades who were not forgiven by the state for their convictions. Why, indeed, should any citizen of Paris have endured without revolutionary response--or the strongest complaint, at least--what we had not sanctioned in the first place? I have never abandoned that belief, but the price I paid for it was so dear that I might not have committed myself to action had I known what that cost would be.

  The Commune established itself on March 26, and there was little real trouble for my unit until the beginning of April, when fighting began in the streets where we were stationed. You would have been living in the suburbs already, and safe, as I know from questions I have put to Yves since my return; he tells me that he did not know your family until later, but that you went through the calamity unscathed, apart from deprivations none could escape. Perhaps you will tell me you heard shooting in distant streets, perhaps not even that. Where there was gunfire, I involved myself with taking messages from one brigade to another, making sketches of the historic scene wherever I could do so without risking lives other than my own.

  Helene did not share my sympathies. Her faith allied her strongly with the rights of the recently fallen regime, but she was tender toward all I believed; she asked me not to share with her anything that might compromise me, were either of us to be caught. In honor of this wish, I did not tell her where the brigade with which I was most deeply involved was bivouacked, and I will not tell you now. It was an old street, and a narrow one; we blockaded it during the night of May 25, knowing that this rampart would be of great importance in the defense of the area if, as we expected, the false government sent in militia to try to break us the next day.

  I promised Helene that I would not be late, but during the night the need arose to relay a round of messages to our comrades in Montmartre, and I volunteered to take those messages, as I was not yet suspected by the police. I traveled without detection, in fact, to that area, and would have returned in the same manner had I not been caught and detained. It was my first encounter with the militia. My questioning was prolonged and threatened several times to become violent, and I was not released until noon the next day. I thought for many hours that I might well be executed on the spot. Again, I will not tell you the details of my interrogation, as I don't wish you to be privy to them, even eight years afterward. It was a terrifying experience.

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  But I will and must tell you what
is infinitely worse: Helene, missing me during the night and taking alarm, began to search for me at first light, asking among our neighbors until her apprehension finally persuaded one of them to take her to our barricade. I was still imprisoned. She arrived before the barricade to inquire after me at the very moment troops from the center appeared. They opened fire on everyone present, Communards and bystanders alike. The government, of course, has denied all such incidents. She fell, shot through the forehead. One of my companions recognized her, pulled her from the skirmish, and protected her body behind the rubble.

  When I arrived, having run first to our home and found it empty, she was already growing cold. She lay in my arms with the gush of blood from her wound drying on her hair and clothing. Her face showed only surprise, although her eyes had closed by themselves. I shook her, called to her, tried to rouse her. My only, and pitful, consolation lay in her having died instantly--that and the belief that if she had known what was about to happen, it would have been in her nature to commend herself in that moment to her God.

  I buried her, more hastily than I wanted to, in the cemetery of Montparnasse. Within days my grief was increased by the swift defeat of our cause and the execution of thousands of comrades, and especially our organizers. During this final extinction, I slipped out of France with the help of a friend who lived near one of the city gates. I traveled alone toward Menton and the border, feeling that I could do nothing more for a country that had refused its only hope of justice, and unwilling to live in fear of future arrest.

  My brother remained faithful to me throughout this ordeal, tending Helene's memory and grave in silence and writing to me from time to time during my absence to advise me whether or not I might return. I was a small player in that drama and not, in the end, of interest to a government with much rebuilding to accomplish. I returned, indeed, not out of any desire to contribute to France's well-being but out of gratitude to my brother and the wish to be of service to him in his afflictions. I discovered, not from him but from Yves, that he was losing his sight. Whatever assistance I could give him, and the dogged habit of pursuing my painting, were the only pleasures left to me until I met you. I was a wretch without wife, children, or country. I lived without the dream of society's improvement that must be the motivation of every thinking man, and my nights

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  were a horror because of the death that had filled my arms with useless, cruel sacrifice.

  The radiance of your presence, your natural gifts, the delicacy of your affection and friendship, have meant more to me than I can say. Now I think I will need less than ever to explain that to you. I will not demean you by insisting on secrecy--most of my happiness already rests in your hands. And, lest I find myself unable or unwilling to fulfill my promise and send you these truths about myself, I will close quickly by signing myself, heart and soul,

  Your

  O.V.

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  CHAPTER 53 Marlow

  I'd paid particularly close attention to Mary's report that Robert Oliver had first met the woman of his obsession in a crowd at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and now I considered whether I could ask Robert about the incident directly. Whatever had happened there, whatever he had seen in her, had absorbed much of his attention--and probably shaped his illness--since then. If he had imagined the woman in that crowd at the Met--in other words, if she had been his hallucination, this would imply a rethinking of my diagnosis of Robert, and a serious shift in his treatment. Did he now paint from memory, whether he'd originally seen a real woman or not? Or was he still hallucinating? The fact that he was apparently painting a modern woman, glimpsed once, in nineteenth-century clothing, implied in itself some act of imagination, perhaps involuntary. Did he have other hallucinations? If he did, he wasn't painting them, at least not at the moment.

  Whatever the case, by the time of his move to Greenhill with Kate, he'd been imagining the woman's face at least occasionally; after all, Kate had found a sketch of her in Robert's shirt pocket during their drive south. But if I asked Robert about his first sighting of the woman and included any information about the museum, he would know at once that I'd been talking with someone he was close to, and the pool of possibilities would be very small, then--perhaps a pool of one, since he already knew I had Mary's last name. He appeared to have confided in Mary but not Kate and was unlikely to have talked with anyone else at all, unless he'd had friends in New York to whom he might have mentioned

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  his unforgettable first sight of the woman. He'd implied to Mary that he'd seen the stranger only a few times, but I found that difficult to believe, especially after viewing those powerful paintings at Kate's. Surely he'd known her intimately and absorbed her face and presence over time. Robert claimed he didn't work from photographs, but might he have been able to persuade a stranger to model live for him until he had enough material to work from for future portraits?

  But I couldn't risk asking Robert any of this; if I revealed the extent of my knowledge to him, I'd never win his trust. My telling him I knew Mary's name had probably been an error. I did go so far as to inquire, during one of my morning visits to the big armchair in his room, where he'd first gotten to know the woman who inspired most of his work. He looked briefly at me, then went back to the novel he was reading. After a while I could only excuse myself and wish him a good day. He'd taken to borrowing crime thrillers from the shelves of well-thumbed paperbacks in the patients' sitting room, reading them with a kind of bored dedication when he wasn't painting; he chewed up about one a week, and they were always the crudest kind of potboiler about the Mafia, or the CIA, or murder mysteries set in Las Vegas.

  I had to wonder whether Robert felt some kind of sympathy for the criminals in these books, since he'd been arrested himself with a knife in his hand. Kate had said he sometimes read thrillers, and I'd seen them on his office shelves, but she'd also said he read exhibition catalogs and works of history. There were much better books than those detective novels in the patients' sitting room, including some biographies of artists and writers (I confess I tucked a few of those into the shelves myself, to see if he'd pick them up), but he never touched them. I could only hope that he wasn't acquiring any further taste for violence, from tales of murder, although I saw no signs of it. He was as unlikely to tell me where and how he'd encountered his favorite model as to explain why he limited his reading to the very dregs of the sitting-room shelf.

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  Mary's story about his first glimpse of his lady had given me another thought, however, and perhaps it was also her reminding me laughingly of the genius of Sherlock Holmes that made me hold that little tale up to the light again and again. I even called Mary one day and asked her to repeat the story as Robert had told it to her at Barnett College, and she did, in very nearly the same words. Why was I asking? She had promised to explain more later, and she would. I thanked her politely, acknowledging the installments she was sending and careful not to press her for a meeting of any sort.

  I couldn't shake my feeling about that moment, however, and a Holmesian idea about it took hold of me--a particular suspicion, but also a sense that, on principle, one should go see the scene of the event for oneself. It was just the Met, and I'd been there many times over the years, but I wanted to find the spot of Robert's first hallucination, or inspiration, or--had it been falling in love? Even if there was no gun at the scene, no bit of rope hanging from the ceiling, nothing one could pull out a magnifying glass to examine--well, it was silly, but I would go, partly because I could combine it with a more important mission, a visit to my father. I hadn't been up to Connecticut in nearly a year, which was six months too long, and although he sounded cheerful on the phone and in the little notes he sent on his parish stationery (it needed using up, he said, and he disdained e-mail), I worried that if anything was wrong he'd never tell me by any of those media. And what might be wrong, if something really was, would likely be a drooping of his spirits, which he certainly wouldn't r
eport.

  With all this in mind, I chose an upcoming weekend and bought two train tickets, one a round-trip to Penn Station from Washington, and the other a loop up to my hometown and back to New York. I splurged on a reservation for a night in a dingy but pleasant old hotel near Washington Square, a place I'd once spent a weekend with a young woman I'd half expected to marry; surprising, now, how long ago that had been and how much I'd

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  forgotten about her, a woman I'd once embraced in a hotel bed and with whom I'd sat on the benches in Washington Square Park while she pointed out all the species of trees that grew there. I didn't know where she was now; probably she'd married someone else and become a grandmother.

  I thought fleetingly of inviting Mary to go with me to New York but couldn't puzzle out what that might entail or how she'd take it, how I could solve or even bring up the matter of hotel rooms. It might have been appropriate to go to the museum with her, since Robert Oliver's past consumed her even more deeply than it did me. But it was too much of a conundrum. In the end I didn't tell her about my plans; she hadn't called in a couple of weeks anyway, and I assumed she'd get more of her account of Robert to me when she was ready. I'd call her on my return, I decided. I told my staff that I would miss one day of work to see my father, and then I gave the usual orders for Robert and my other worrisome patients to be watched with special care.

  I went straight from Penn Station to Grand Central to catch the Metro-North New Haven Line; I'd have a long overnight with my father before my visit to the city. It's not a bad ride, and I've always liked the train, which I use for both reading and daydreaming. This time I read some of the book I'd brought, a translation of The Red and the Black, but also watched the early-summer scenery go by, the miserably damaged heart of the Northeast Corridor, brick warehouses, the backyards of railroad neighborhoods in small towns and city suburbs, a woman hanging up laundry in slow motion, kids on an asphalt school playground, a towering landfill with gulls circling above it like vultures, the glitter of metal sticking out of the ground here and there.