The Shadow Catcher

  Still he stared, didn’t speak.

  “If you can speak, I need you to tell me what year it is.”

  A shadow passed through his eyes as if he had reason to fear or distrust her and she could feel both of the Indians searching her face for a reason. What year is it, Edward? she asked again, fully recalling Paragraph Two of her textbook: ASCERTAINING MENTAL FUNCTION AFTER REGAINING CONSCIOUSNESS.

  “1889,” Edward said, and his speech wasn’t slurred.

  “Very good. And what is the name of your brother?”

  “Which one?”

  Clara smiled. She had forgotten Edward had two brothers, and the fact that he was remembering what she hadn’t recalled was a good sign.

  “Raphael. And Asahel,” he said. “And your brother’s name is Hercules.”

  “Excellent. Now I want you to follow the tip of my finger with your eyes.” He did, and so did the Indians, after which she asked him, “Are you in pain?”

  He nodded briefly, glancing sideways at the Indians.

  “Right hip.”

  She touched him there. She could see from the angle of his legs and from the lack of blood that he might have landed on his buttocks.

  “How bad is the pain?”

  It was not a question, she realized once she’d asked it, that he would ever answer.

  “I fear you might have broken some bones in the fall, Edward,” she repeated, “and I’m not skilled enough to diagnose or treat that condition so I need you to ask these gentlemen to go at once and fetch a doctor. Can you do that?”

  Edward looked at the two Indians and nodded. They stood up.

  “Wait,” Clara said. She looked at them, then back at Edward. “They understand English?” She looked at them again. “But you never do as I instruct,” she marveled.

  “They take no orders from a woman,” Edward said.

  Clara stood. “Before you go you need to help me move him. Off the ground into the house,” she instructed. “We’ll use those sheets hanging over there.” They nodded and went to the laundry line, returning with the sheets, onto which the three of them gently rolled him, mindful not to cause him extra pain, but doing so, she could see, despite their care. He made fists and a line of perspiration glistened on his forehead but he made no sound of protest. They lifted him inside the sheets and Clara led the way into her bedroom, turning back her mother’s hand-embroidered Belgian linen bedcover so they could lay him down. Clara drew aside the Indian who had had the fish innards and asked him, “Have you any remedy for pain?”

  Again, by his masked response, she had the feeling she had asked another unanswerable question, that, although there might be some solution either she was not entitled to it or something else boycotted the reply. “Have you anything to help him?” she rephrased.

  “Edward brave,” the Indian told her, as if she doubted it. “We go now,” he said.

  “If you don’t know how to find a doctor, then find Asahel and tell him.”

  “We know what to do.”

  They left and she was alone with Edward in the house he’d built. He stared straight ahead. “What place is this?” he asked.

  She sat near him on the bed and looked at him carefully, afraid that he might be lapsing into insentience again.

  “This is the house you built,” she said, starting, very slowly, to straighten one of his legs and then begin to massage it, very lightly, with both her hands, feeling for alignment in his bones.

  “I’ve never seen this room,” he argued.

  “You have,” she told him, continuing to work to straighten both his legs. “Your initials are right over there, carved in that beam, see them? ‘E.S.C.’”

  “No, this is different.”

  “How?”

  “This is not the room I know. Something is different. The walls. They’re white.”

  “I painted them.”

  “These pictures.”

  “Those are my father’s paintings.” She unlaced his shoes and prised them off, keenly observing him for any register of pain.

  “I tell you,” he said, still looking around, “I would not recognize this room as a place that I have seen before. Except the ceiling. I recognize the ceiling.”

  “I’m going to have to cut you out of these pants, Edward—”

  “No.”

  “—to see where there is bruising.”

  “You will not cut these pants.”

  She removed his stockings and asked him to wriggle his toes. He did, in silence. The pants, she said. She laid a hand on one of his shins. It hadn’t escaped her notice that the pants were doeskin, nor had she failed to note how soft—almost sensual—they were.

  “No cutting,” he repeated. “There’s a drawstring,” he proposed and started to untie the knot at his waist.

  “No, don’t move,” she said, “I’ll do it. You lie still.” She unslipped the knot and slid the waistband open. She had never seen a pair of pants designed like these.

  “They’re hand sewn,” he said.

  “I can see that,” she replied and began to shimmy the fabric down around his hips. He looked away, toward a corner of the room as his naked body was exposed. “Whose sea chest is that?”

  “Mine,” she answered—then, noticing the blossom of discoloration on his hip, said, “Here it is.” She touched his skin. “This is where you landed…” She slid the pants over his thighs and knees and feet, then held them up to look at them, hardly aware that he lay exposed. The pants were extremely light but what made them extraordinary in her eyes was that they were lined on the inside, top to bottom, with aged royal blue silk taffeta, the smoothest taffeta she’d ever felt, as if from a deceased contessa’s dowry.

  “I made them myself,” he said. “To my own specifications. Took a month. Very practical. Lightweight, water resistant, but still sturdy.”

  And pretty, she assessed. She folded them, then turned back to examining the point of impact on his body. Again, Edward looked away when she touched him. Roll this way, she signaled and helped him roll to the side that hadn’t been bruised.

  “Where did you learn this?”

  “Learn what?”

  “What you’re doing.”

  “I don’t really know what I’m doing…”

  He looked at her sharply, as if she had crossed him. “You do. I can tell.”

  She rolled him back over. Let’s take your shirt off, she said, and as they struggled him out of his sleeves she told him, “Before my parents were killed. In St. Paul. I studied nursing. It’s what I wanted to do in my life.”

  “Women want that?”

  “—want what?”

  “Something to do in their lives.”

  “—well of course.”

  “Not the women I know.”

  “—and how many is that, Edward?—two?”

  He almost smiled.

  “Three. Counting you.”

  Now roll onto your stomach, she told him. “I’ll help you.”

  Nothing back here, she reported. No bruising, no marks. “Other than here,” she said, cupping his hip, “are you in pain anywhere else?”

  He shook his head. Shaken up, is all, he said. He began to shiver. She positioned pillows behind him and coaxed him to relax, drawing one of Amelia’s linen sheets over him, topped with a damask featherbed and she watched his long expressive fingers assess the expensive counterpane. She tucked the bed linens around him and said, I have an idea. “Stones,” she told him. “Heated stones. They’ll draw your attention away from the pain. It’s a trick I learned on the train when—” He gripped her hand—forcefully, then made it tender—as if he waited to make these physical gestures toward her only when she least expected them. Or when he least expected them. Or when he no longer had any control over himself. Thank you, he said. He caressed her fingers with his own. “If you hadn’t been there—” His blue eyes nearly floored her.

  “But,” she started to say. “…I’m the reason that you fell.”

  “What do you
mean?” She colored. “Oh, that.” He released her hand. “You’re not to blame. The gunshot startled me.”

  So intimate and yet not intimate at all. Clara did not know how to interpret most of everything he said to her, or did, so she fell back to the safe practice of nursing him. “Are you hungry? I boiled a chicken this morning and there’s broth—”

  “Broth,” he said the word as if beginning to recite a prayer.

  “I’ll bring you some. And heat the stones—”

  He gripped her hand again. Is that you? He nodded toward the portrait of Amelia pinned up on the wall.

  That’s my mother, Clara said. Painted by my father.

  “He painted all of these?”

  She nodded.

  “And he made a living from it?”

  He let go of her hand in another of his abrupt transitions.

  “He made a life,” she said. “A very happy one.”

  “A life,” he repeated.

  She touched his arm. Will you be all right on your own while I go into the kitchen?

  If you give me something to do.

  —to do, she said. She looked around.

  I must be doing something, he explained.

  Of course you must, she understood, going to the Icarus chest and extracting several books. “These ought to keep you busy.—Dutch?—or, no, here—this one was my father’s. In Italian, but there are pictures—”

  She went to the kitchen, refreshed the fire in the stove and set about making a tray of bread and soft-boiled eggs and broth to take to him. She caught a shadow of herself reflected in a pane of glass of the cabinet and it brought her up short, the shadow of herself, looking like a hospital intern, cotton shift hanging off one shoulder, hair unkempt.

  When she returned carrying the tray she found him tossed back on the pillows, arm across his forehead, shading his eyes, as if he had just survived an agony. He said, “There’s a chance that I’ve been blind my whole life.”

  Well that’s possible, she told him, “but I doubt it. Sit up, Edward. Have some food.”

  He gripped the book she’d given him. Where did this come from? he asked.

  “My father brought it back from Florence.” Italy, she added. She set the tray down, rolled back the bedsheets and placed a heated stone on his right hip and another on his thigh. Then she covered him again and set the tray beside him. There was service on the tray for one. Aren’t you eating? he asked.

  She fed him bread dipped first in egg and then in broth. “Do you feel the stones?”

  He nodded.

  “We need your mother here to pray to God—forgive me—that you haven’t shattered your pelvis, Edward,” she told him. “Here, I’ll show you—” She dug in the Icarus chest until she came up with a heavy tome with the words ANATOMIE/DAS SKELETT etched in gold on its green leather. She sat on the edge of the bed, turning pages. Beautiful book, Edward said. He ran his fingers down its padded edge. “Handsomely made. I thought only Bibles were as beautiful as this.”

  “Lodz thought I was a fool for taking all of these—Lodz was our neighbor—he thought I was irresponsible taking all these books in foreign languages I can’t even read but how could I resist? They were so pretty—” She realized she was talking far too much, although from the way he stared at her he didn’t seem to mind. She found a page in the German anatomy book where there was a drawing of the human pelvis and she held it up for him to see. I don’t think you’ve damaged the ball and socket, here, she said, “or else we’d see it, I’d feel the dislocation beneath your skin…but this pan-like bone,” she pointed, “you can see how it’s a single piece and it can shatter, crack, just like a plate and we wouldn’t see the damage with our naked eye.”

  “And a doctor would?”

  “He could diagnose it, yes. Through manipulation.”

  She turned the page to a drawing of the human spine attached to the pelvic girdle, legs and feet. They looked at it together. It’s intricate, she noted. “I could make it worse by pulling or stretching any of these bones the wrong way.”

  “And if I’ve cracked this part?” He pointed to the girdle.

  “It will mend.”

  “On its own?”

  “If you don’t move it.”

  “Do you know everything?”

  She colored.

  I want to know as much as you, he said. “Tell me more.” To her surprise he dipped a piece of bread in broth and held it to her mouth and she ate it from his fingers. “Tell me who was Lodz. Tell me about the paintings on these walls and why you have these books. Teach me about this one—” He held out the Italian book and tried to read its title, “Gli Capolavori della—”

  “‘Masterpieces of Early Italian Renaissance,’” she translated. She met his uncomprehending stare. “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know when they were painted. Who painted them. How they were painted. Where I can go to see them. I want to know about this one—” He turned to a page.

  “Oh, Giotto…my father liked him, too. He learned a lot from him.”

  “They met?”

  “—lord, no. Giotto was painting in the thirteen hundreds…I mean my father learned a lot from looking at his paintings.”

  “Looking at them.”

  “You can learn a lot from looking, Edward.”

  “Yes I know but first you have to put yourself in front of something, don’t you? You have to know that it exists. I didn’t know that these existed. I can’t ‘look’ unless I’m seeing. First I have to see a thing. And only then can I begin to look. What’s this hand supposed to be that’s hanging in the sky?”

  What do you think it is?

  Again, his uncomprehending look.

  “Understand, paintings of this era were religious paintings, undertaken for religious purposes, usually to illustrate a lesson, narrate a tale or humanize a figure from the Scriptures—Christ, for instance, or the saints or the disciples. What distinguishes Giotto from painters before him is his use of human gesture—the way he captures the emotions in a few strokes, here, around the eyes, his preference for human profile over the full face—”

  Profile, Edward repeated. “But then he paints a figure facing away from those who view it. Facing backwards. Why do that?”

  “Same question my father asked—that everybody asks the first time that we see it. That’s my father’s self-portrait over there—” She pointed to a painting on the wall of a man in the foreground standing at a window, looking out, his back turned at the viewer.

  “There’s no reflection in the window,” Edward noted. “How can you tell that the figure in the painting is your father?”

  “Those of us who knew him could—his shoulders, neck. This painting used to be in a frame and the framed picture used to hang on the first landing on the stairs in our house and as soon as I was old enough to reach it I used to take the painting off the wall and turn it around, look at the back, to try to see what the man in the painting was staring at, what he saw, where he was looking. That’s the point of drawing figures in this way. To conjure up the mystery of where they’re looking. The dark back of what they’re seeing. The dark back of time. Everything, perhaps, that ever existed, that may still exist, somewhere in time, beyond or below the horizon, beyond that place we all see on the railroad tracks, you know, when they appear to come together. The vanishing point. Logic tells us that those iron railroad tracks will never come together, never really meet, and yet our eyes tell us the opposite, they inform the optical illusion that things—lines—come together at the visual horizon. We know they don’t, and yet we see they do. And this simple fact of illusionary lines coming together seems so obvious to us, to our modern eye, to anyone who’s traveled down a long straight road or walked out onto the center of a railroad track, and yet five hundred years ago Giotto and his contemporaries couldn’t master it—they hadn’t discovered this perspective and its simple rules of rendering a landscape in the third dimension. You see how he does it with the human figure?
??here, this woman and this Madonna—how he drapes the head, shows the face behind the fabric to accentuate the depth within the eyes. He could do it with the human face and human figure, but he hadn’t figured out how to keep his buildings, these city houses, from floating off the canvas—see them, here?—the way these walls seem to collide?—the way one building belongs to a dimension that the other ones don’t share? That’s why in 1346 you have this disembodied hand—the hand of God, really—hanging in the ether, disdimensionalized, whereas a century and a half later, in this sketch of Michelangelo’s for instance, you have a full-bodied God leaning down from Heaven, in perspective, touching Man. Enormous rebirth of knowledge and technique in a single century—compare these little flames Giotto paints above the heads of saints—they look like wildfires—to the subtlety of saintliness Duccio or Da Vinci can elicit.”

  He was staring at her, looking not just seeing.

  I’m talking too much she said, realizing she was almost giddy, light-headed, with this rush of words and their relief from loneliness.

  “But then my father—”

  “—what was his name?”

  “Haarald. Haarald Phillips. When we talked about those figures facing inward toward the canvas—how unknowable and mysterious they are—father said perhaps Giotto painted them that way to depict the route of possibility. Not, as I thought, that they are looking at the past, but that they are looking at the other side of time, the time of possibilities, the time of things that might have happened but did not. The bright back of time, not the dark one. The bright one, of hope. Not the one of shadows. The back of time that is all futures. Endless possibilities. Not only the remembered past.”

  He was still staring at her, his head against the pillow and despite his stillness and his rapt attention she noticed a taut muscle in his cheek, a pencil line of white above his upper lip where the blood was drawn away. She took his hand and he clasped hers needily. “You have to tell me where the pain is, Edward. Pain is nothing to be denied. It’s your body speaking. It’s a language.”

  Almost imperceptibly he shook his head.

  “The doctor will have laudanum, at the very least.”

  “No. No opium. You must give me your word—”