“In due course my mother married a man who was as far from the art world as she could get. He was an accountant. He rarely drank, his parents lived in the same house they’d bought when they were first married, and he hadn’t been inside an art gallery or museum since high school. Utterly stable, unimaginative, twelve years older than my mother, completely devoted to her, and, I think, somewhat awed by her sharp mind and beauty. A good man, and if he wasn’t exactly what my mother needed, he was certainly what she wanted. The snapshots he took of her in those early years show a happy woman. Until my second birthday. They didn’t have any other children, though as far as I know there was no physical problem. And I never had another big birthday party—she was probably afraid of having someone give me a set of paints or something.
“Of course, at the time I knew nothing of her background, why she so furiously hated my obsession with drawing. I was probably too young, even if she’d tried to tell me, but she never did try. It was only recently, about five years ago, that I finally pieced it together.”
“And how did you feel about it?” Lee asked curiously.
“Vastly relieved. When I was young I thought it was my fault, and that my inability to control myself led to their deaths. Later I put it onto her, and it seemed to me that she was a sick, jealous woman. After I dug out the truth and learned about her parents, I felt a tremendous relief. It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t even her fault. It was inevitable, perhaps; certainly acceptable.
“I wonder too if her phobia didn’t drive me more deeply into it. It would have been there anyway, but perhaps a more gentle, natural talent. As it was, her continual attempts to distract me, find other interests, pull me away from my crayons and pencils served only to make me more completely single-minded. I wasn’t interested in toys; I didn’t want to play with other kids; I just wanted to draw. Before I was four, the lower half of the house walls were a disaster, and nobody could put down a piece of paper or a pen without my making off with it. I can remember having a screaming tantrum one day when she tried to get me past the crayons in the grocery store. It must have been one unending nightmare.
“When I started going to nursery school, at about four, at first the teachers were overjoyed with this little kid who could do the most amazingly mature drawings. After a few weeks, though, they got very tired of fighting to drag me out into the playground, or sit and listen to a story, or do all the things normal, well-balanced kids do. That’s when I started going to a psychiatrist.
“I must have gone through a dozen of them in the next couple of years. The earlier ones were mostly women, and looking back I think that at first they all figured that I just needed a firm hand and an understanding ear. When that made no difference they’d begin to suggest that perhaps they should be treating Mother instead, and soon I’d go off to another one.
“When I was about five, maybe six, they began to be men, rather than women, and older, and more serious. I remember asking my mother once why some of them had framed pictures on their walls that had only writing on them, and she explained about diplomas and the like.
“Finally, when I was seven, we met Dr. Hofstetter. He had a whole wall of framed diplomas and letters in his waiting room, and I was intrigued with the pattern of the black frames against the white paper and the beige wall. Four of them had red seals, beautiful symmetrical sunbursts that leapt out from the wall, the color of blood.
“I spent several months with Dr. Hofstetter, talking about what I liked to draw and looking at books, and finally he must have decided that radical therapy was needed, because one afternoon my father took me out to a movie—it was the beginning of summer vacation—and when we came home there was not a single writing instrument in the entire house. No crayons; no paint; no pens, pencils, or chalk. I was furious. They had to use tranquilizers to get me to sleep that night. The next morning I poured my porridge onto the table and drew in it, so my mother started to feed me by spoon. If I went outside I’d use a stick in the dirt, so I stayed in. I made patterns with soap on the bathroom tiles, so I wasn’t allowed to bathe myself.
“I stood it for five days. I just couldn’t understand why they were doing it to me. It was like being told not to breathe. I felt like I was going to explode, and finally on the sixth day I wouldn’t get out of bed, wouldn’t eat or drink, and wet myself. Mother bundled me off to the shrink, who tried to explain that it was for my own good. I just sat there, staring straight ahead, not really hearing his voice, and finally he gave up and led me out to the waiting room while he and my mother went into his office. I could hear their voices, hers very upset, and his receptionist in the next room typing and making telephone calls while I sat there in the stuffed chair and looked at the pattern of the frames on his wall, and the red sunbursts.
“As I sat there, alone in the world with those seals, they began to bother me. They were wrongly arranged, out of balance, and the more I studied them, my mother’s voice rising and falling in the background, the more they bothered me. It needed another spot of red, just up there, on the upper right, above the sofa, and I reached in the pocket of my coat for my crayons, but of course they weren’t there, and I thought of going in and finding something in the secretary’s desk, but I knew she would stop me, and there was that unbalanced arrangement of red seals waiting for me to do something about it, and I had to do something—I couldn’t stand it, sitting there with those lopsided marks dragging at the wall—so I did the only thing I could think of, which was to stand up on the sofa and bite my finger, and use that.”
She paused in the deathly silence and looked down at her hand, and rubbed her thumb across the pale scar that curved across the pad of her right index finger.
“That was the end of psychiatrists for a long time. My father came into my room that night, with a paper bag. He sat on the side of my bed and he opened the bag and took out one of those giant boxes of sixty-four crayons, with silver and gold and copper, and a real artist’s pad, thick, textured paper. He put them on my bedside table and he crumpled the bag into a twist and he started talking to me. He told me that artists needed wide experience to do their art properly, that anyone who never looked up from the paper soon had nothing to draw. Therefore he would make a deal with me. I could draw and paint for one half hour before school in the morning, for two hours in the afternoon, and for one hour after dinner if I would agree to pay attention in class, play outside at recess time, read, and do my homework. If I agreed to this, and if I stuck to it, I could begin to have lessons on the weekends. He was a very wise man, but he was not very well and was totally intimidated by my mother most of the time. His compromise stuck, and that was how I lived for the next six years, until they were killed.”
Vaun looked at the flickering fire for a long moment and shook her head.
“My poor mother,” she said again. “If she had lived…But I would be a different person, not Eva Vaughn at all. They died when I was thirteen, in a stupid boating accident—the man at the helm was just drunk enough to make a mistake. I went to live with Red and Becky, my mother’s normal half-brother and his normal wife and two nice, normal kids, aged nine and eleven. They were totally unprepared for someone like me dropping into their life—smack into puberty, terrified at losing my security, and filled with anger at my parents and a guilt that I couldn’t express, awkward and ugly physically, and saddled with this all-consuming obsession that nobody could understand and I couldn’t even begin to talk about. I moved three hundred miles away to a small farming town, into a school with overworked teachers, kids who’d never even known an adult artist before, much less a weird kid their own age—and, of course, no more weekend lessons.
“They tried, my aunt and uncle, they really did, but they didn’t even know where to begin. I bullied them into giving me a shed to paint in, and before long I just lived out there. I tried, too, when I thought about it. I took over a number of jobs around the place to make myself less of a burden. When I was sixteen I began to babysit around the community, to e
arn money for my supplies. I built a box to hold my paints and small canvases, and I was happy to cover a kitchen table with newspapers and work until the parents got home.
“For about six months I was happy, really happy. I had money for paint, my aunt and uncle had decided hands off until I was old enough to leave, school was easy enough to be undemanding, and the local librarian was very good at finding me books on art theory and reproductions to study. At seventeen I began to think about going to college. My grades were decent, there was a small settlement left from my parents’ death to get me started, and I was putting together a portfolio that I thought was not too bad. With my uncle’s approval I sent in applications to three universities.
“It was an exciting time. I was in my last year of what I thought of as exile, and I could see that my work was good, that I had a future waiting for me. These were the early seventies, and even in rural areas the times were exhilarating. Then in December of my senior year two things happened: I slept with a young man, a couple of years older than I was, and he introduced me to drugs. Andy Lewis. It was part of the whole package, you know. If you looked like ‘one of those hippies,’ it meant you did drugs, so I did. For six months I did, mostly grass, but twice LSD. The first time was in December.
“The acid was interesting. It changed the way I saw colors and intensified the vibrations of different colors, the glow everything gives off. Not only while I was under the influence but for a couple of weeks until it faded back to normality. And in the middle of March when Andy offered me another tab, I took it.
“It was bad. I don’t know why it was so different from the first time, but I just went insane. A little while after I swallowed the stuff I was sitting and looking down at my hands. There was a faint smear of red paint on my finger, near the scar, and as I watched it suddenly started smoldering and bubbling and eating into my finger and exposing the bone, which turned into a white bristle brush—” She broke off and looked up sheepishly. “There’s no need to go over all the bizarre details, but in the end what happened was that my fingers turned into brushes and when I looked at one of the guys there—not Andy, I don’t remember him being there, it was one of the kids who used to hang around—I saw paint pumping through his body, pulsing, every color, brilliant and iridescent. I was trying to get at the paint in his throat when the police arrived, and after I attempted to throttle several other people, they hauled me off to the hospital and filled me with some kind of heavy-duty tranquilizers. It was a lot of excitement for our little town, as you might imagine.
“By the next morning I was okay—sick and covered with bruises, but my fingers were flesh and blood again. They let me go home later, and the following day I was carrying a pan full of hot soup across the kitchen and felt my fingers turn to wood and dropped the pan. I had half a dozen relapses—sometimes I’d see paint pulsing in one of my cousins—but gradually it tapered off in frequency and intensity. I swore I’d never touch anything again, and bit by bit my family began to relax.
“In the first week of May I received a letter from one of the universities, the one I badly wanted to go to, saying that if I wished to send some samples from my portfolio I would be considered for a freshman scholarship in the fall. I went through the stuff I’d been doing, and somehow it didn’t look as good as I’d thought it had. The next day I laid it all out, and I was appalled. I’d done nothing but crap since January. There was not one piece that wasn’t sloppy and careless, and what was worse, it was all false, pretentious, shallow. Typical druggie stuff. I flushed the various leaves and tablets down the toilet and that afternoon told Andy to take a jump and got to work.
“As I said, that was early May. Just before my eighteenth birthday.” She paused and wiped the palms of her hands on her knees. “Could I have a drink? Yes, that would be fine. Thank you.
“Early May. In mid-May Mrs. Brand called and asked me to babysit. She was a neighbor I’d worked for before. Some of my regulars didn’t ask me much that spring—word gets around in a small town, and I wasn’t exactly discreet. Well, this was their anniversary, and I think my aunt reassured her that I was okay. I needed the money, so I took my paint box and went along at about eight o’clock.
“They had two kids, a boy of fifteen, who had some kind of a play rehearsal at school that night, so he couldn’t babysit, and yes, a little brown-haired girl, aged six. Jemima, but we all called her Jemma. She was in bed when I got there, but I went in to let her know I was there, and when I checked again at eight-thirty she was asleep.
“The son came in a bit before ten, had something to eat, and flirted a little, or tried to, but I was deeply into this piece that was going so well, the first solid, honest thing in a long time. I nodded my head a few times until he took the hint and went off to bed. The parents got home a few minutes before midnight, and I started packing away my box. When the mother went in to check on the kids, the girl was dead. Lying on the floor. Strangled. Naked.”
Vaun looked curiously at her hands, which were trembling. “I haven’t told anyone this story in fifteen years.
“I just stood there in the corner of the kitchen for the next hour, totally stunned. The doctor and police came, then more police, detectives, and then somebody thought to look at my painting.
“Have you ever had a leech on you? No? It’s the most desperately revolting feeling, to find this horrible, slimy, slow-moving thing attached to your skin, sucking away at you. That’s exactly how the policemen looked at me after seeing the canvas. I saw that look a lot in the next few months.
“That painting convicted me. Oh, there were a lot of other things, of course, from my history of psychiatric treatment to my use of LSD and what I’d done in March, which came out early on. But the painting clinched it. If I’d had a decent lawyer I might have tried to plead insanity, but as it was, the painting stood there for all to see, evidence that I was a coldhearted and ruthless murderer, a mad, artistic, murdering cuckoo in their nest.
“You see, what I’d been working on was a picture of Jemma as I’d actually seen her the week before. I had been out walking, thinking about what I wanted to do for the scholarship portfolio, when Jemma appeared. She didn’t see me. She’d obviously been down in the pond catching pollywogs, which she wasn’t supposed to do, and had her dress and underpants off so she wouldn’t get mud on them, and she looked so amazing, like some pale wood sprite, totally at ease with her nakedness. She spotted a butterfly and dropped her clothes to go racing up the hill after it, and at the top of the hill the new green grass was so soft looking, you could just see her decide to roll in it. I knew I’d have to tell her that she mustn’t do that any more, for her own protection, but for a few minutes I just enjoyed the sight of this nature child. At the end of it she just lay there, all alone in the universe, head back in the grass, looking at the clouds, and I knew I had my main piece for the portfolio. The colors were perfect, the position technically challenging, and there was this subtle innocent exuberance that I knew I could capture. And I did. It was a good, solid painting, one of the best I’d ever done, and it sent me to prison for ten years because she was found in exactly that position, arms sprawled, head back, and naked.
“I know now that the whole trial was a farce. There wasn’t enough money for a proper lawyer, so I had a public defender, who was a total incompetent, but what did I know? I couldn’t imagine those twelve people would actually believe the prosecuter’s accusations, they seemed so utterly absurd. Once when he was going on and on about Timothy Leary and the hippie movement being anti-Church and the painting being a crucifixion scene because Jemma’s father was a deacon in the local church, I actually laughed, it was so ridiculous. That was a big mistake, I realized later, but by then the verdict was in.
“The first few months in prison were pretty hellish, but after that things calmed down. They let me paint for a few hours every day, and my aunt sent endless supplies of pastels and Conté crayons and paper. I learned to walk very quietly around certain inmates, and I made a l
ot of flattering drawings. That was my first taste of prostitution.” Her smile was gentle, and ugly.
“I had been in for just short of three years when there was a riot at some low-security prison in the Midwest, and all of a sudden the press was full of stories about how prisoners were being coddled instead of punished, and the law-and-order people grabbed onto us. Our prison had a reputation of being more humane than some, which I suppose was why I was sent there, because of my age. Some newspaper decided to run an exposé of the place, as an example, and the powers-that-be were forced to crack down on us. I learned all that afterwards. The first thing I knew about it was when my painting privileges were taken away. Two days later there was a sweep through the cells and all my supplies disappeared. It was like when I was seven, only now I had no parents who I knew, underneath the confusion, loved me. Now I had nothing.
“And you know the funny thing? The relief was tremendous. I had carried the burden of this gift since I was two years old, and it had ruined my whole world. Now it was all over, it had been taken away from me, and I had no control any more, none whatsoever. I felt as if I were floating, and I could let go. So I did. At first they thought I was, as they called it, ‘being difficult,’ instigating a hunger strike I suppose, and they slapped me into solitary confinement. When they came to get me out, I was catatonic.
“The rest of it you’ve seen in my records, I’m sure. I used to wonder what would have happened to me if Gerry Bruckner hadn’t decided to volunteer one afternoon a week at the prison, or if he’d been an ignoramus about art, or if the prison’s warden and governing board had been less cooperative. What if, what if…. So many opportunities for that little game in a life like mine, aren’t there? What if he hadn’t thought to put a crayon in my hand, and what if two years later he hadn’t had a good friend with a gallery in New York, and what if the pieces hadn’t sold so well, and what if he hadn’t been willing to fight for me….