Circles of Confusion (4 page)

Claire slipped the photos into her pocket, but the other things in the bathroom—a hairbrush, sample bottles of moisturizer, a cardboard-colored cardigan sweater nearly worn through at the elbows—she gathered up to carry to the trash.

"Is anyone at home?"

A barrel-chested man in a too-tight jacket was just stepping through the open trailer door. "I'm Karl Zehner." He spoke in a precise, fussy voice that was at odds with his size. "And you must be dear Cady's son." He offered his hand to Evan, who had methodically been stacking newspapers in a box.

Evan slipped off his dust mask. "I'm afraid you're mistaken. She didn't have any children." He nodded at Claire. "This is Claire Montrose, her great-niece."

Claire thought she saw the man's expression tighten, but when he pivoted to her, his face was again smoothly jovial. "I occasionally took your great-aunt to church."

Church? Claire was a little surprised. They had sorted through hundreds of books, but she didn't remember seeing a single Bible.

Karl Zehner clasped his large-knuckled hands piously in front of his chest, while his eyes roamed about the trailer. "I was so sorry to hear about dear Cady's untimely demise."

"Maybe you could tell me something more about her. I haven't talked to her in nearly twenty years. What was she like?"

He blinked rapidly. "A sweet, God-fearing lady. Of course, now I can see why she never invited me in. She must have liked to hold on to things, and it got a little away from her." His eyes found the two boxes that held the few items they had deemed worth keeping. "She used to talk about some art she owned." His voice was muffled as he leaned over to finger a yellow Bakelite bracelet carved with leaves.

"Art!" Evan snorted. "Maybe she was referring to her collection of frogs. She had frogs made out of stuff I didn't even know you could make frogs out of." They had found frogs carved out of soap, macramed out of twine, even a frog made of little pieces of macaroni fitted together and spray-painted gold. Evan picked up a stack of boxes. "Those frogs were about as close to art as she got. Now, if you two will excuse me, I'm going to take these out to the Dumpster."

"What kind of art?" Claire asked the other man.

He shrugged. "Oh, she never really said. Perhaps it could have been ... a painting?"

His speculation was interrupted by the sound of raised voices from outside. Evan stormed in, the screen door slamming behind him.

"The manager says we're going to have to take all those boxes to the dump. He refuses to have this be, and I quote, 'on his ticket.'" He pulled his keys from his pocket and turned to Karl Zehner. "So where is the dump, anyway?"

He stepped back. "The dump? I'm afraid I've never been there."

"Well, surely you know where it is?"

The man's huge feet, like pontoons covered in oxblood leather, jigged nervously. "No, sorry, I have no idea." He made a show of looking at his wrist, already walking out the door. "Look at the time! I'm afraid I must be going." He called back over his shoulder, "So sorry for your loss!"

"What a strange man!" Claire said after he left. "He reminded me of my relatives when somebody died—like he was looking for whatever he could carry off."

"Well, I wish he'd have gotten here before us. Anything he took would have saved us the trouble of throwing it away." Evan sighed.

"I guess I'll go see if I can find a neighbor who knows where the dump is."

Standing in front of the kitchen faucet waiting for the water to run cold, Claire looked out the window just as a long dark car pulled out from the parking lot behind Burritos Now! Even in a Cadillac, Karl's huge bulk looked crammed behind the wheel, The car had a vanity plate, A-l 35, Claire remembered at the beginning of the year she had approved a series of plates that went from A-l 1 to A-l 78, with a few gaps here and there where other people had already claimed the plate for reasons of their own. The series had begun with A-l because the cars had all belonged to a Portland company that specialized in luxury cars: A-l Rent-A-Car.

H20UUP2

The trailer was nearly empty and Evan was on his third trip to the dump when Claire found the battered tan suitcase pushed far underneath Aunt Cady's narrow bed. Brushing away a half-inch of dust exposed cracked leather covered with decals from distant, long-vanished destinations.

Claire opened it, expecting another of Aunt Cady's collections, perhaps matchbooks or music boxes. Instead it held a jumble of odds and ends, making it resemble a small-scale reflection of the trailer's interior. On top lay an upholstered pink satin book, about the size of a paperback, bound with a band of brass. It was like the diary Claire had gotten for Christmas when she was twelve, the one she had filled with nothing more exciting than the fact she had made Appian Way pizza for dinner again because her mother was on another strange diet and refusing to cook.

She picked up the diary, eyeing the moldering brass mouth where a key would go. Already knowing the key was surely lost, she riffled the sheaf of yellowing papers that had been underneath it. They seemed to be pamphlets written in German, the old-fashioned impenetrable lettering looking appropriate for a King James Bible. Her breath caught. The cover of one leaflet bore the broken cross of a swastika. Claire thought of the delicate tracery of numbers on her roommate Charlie's wrist and shuddered.

A bracelet set with dark blue stones caught her eye. The metal must be silver, but it was tarnished so badly that it was almost black. A small black jewelry box was tucked in the corner of the suitcase. Claire opened it, thinking she might find an engagement ring from a long-ago liaison. Inside, a silver ring gleamed against a black velvet lining, but instead of a diamond it bore a square death's head. Claire snapped the box closed and tossed it back into the suitcase.

The whole thing, Claire decided, would go straight to the dump on Evan's next trip. She no longer cared what her great-aunt had written in the diary, or that the suitcase—with its decals of hotels and even countries that no longer existed—would be snapped up by any antique dealer in Multnomah.

A flash of yellow at the bottom of the suitcase caught her eye. Claire pushed aside a sheaf of crumbling papers and there it was, a small, nearly square painting in a red and gold wooden frame. Her breath caught.

In the painting, a young woman stood in front of an open window that washed the scene with tones of pale light. She was half- turned toward the viewer, her lips slightly parted, her eyes wide and luminous. The expression on her face was enigmatic, although Claire thought her lips were beginning to smile. Light shimmered off her blond hair, which was caught up in a smooth bun wrapped with strands of her own hair. Side curls fell over her ears and dangled to the hollow of her white throat. She wore a lemon-yellow satin jacket that fastened at the throat and then fell away from her body. Its wide sleeves were trimmed with black-spotted white fur that she had pushed back above her elbows. In her hands she held a letter.

There were some other elements to the painting—a brass- studded chair in the corner of the room, an oriental carpet that lay bunched in folds on a table between the woman and the viewer— but it was the woman's enigmatic expression and the way the pale light poured into the room that mesmerized Claire.

The woman was clearly from another age, but the scene looked so fresh, so real. Claire ran her fingers across the hard swirls of paint, her heart skidding.

She sat back on her heels and lifted the painting to her lap. Only a little more than a foot tall, it was surprisingly heavy, the thick and bulky frame a contrast to the still, small beauty it held. Claire had seen real paintings before, on school field trips to the Portland Art Museum, but there she had certainly never been allowed to touch one. Again she ran her fingers across the ridges of paint that still showed the brush marks of the artist, whoever he or she had been. She knew suddenly that it was a man, a man painting a woman he loved. It was in the light that shone on the woman's luminous face, and in the sheen of the pearl eardrop she wore.

She stopped cleaning and simply waited for Evan to return to the dump. As soon as she heard the screen door squeal, she ran to him. "Look at this!" Claire's hands jittered as she held the little painting toward him.

"Where did you find this?" He took it from her, angled it to the light

"Underneath the bed in a suitcase."

Incredibly, he shrugged and handed it back to her. He indicated the three boxes behind them. "It's your call. Keep, Goodwill or trash."

"Trash?" Claire echoed, unbelieving. "It's beautiful." She looked down at the painting again, at the woman's face and the molten light.

"Some little paint-by-number job? It's a miracle that your great- aunt managed to get all the right colors on top of the right numbers. Look at that frame! It looks like a wood shop extra credit project painted by someone with an overactive craft gene."

Claire had to admit that the garish frame did not match the trapped beauty it held. The thick, rough-hewn frame was painted a chipped red, with gold wooden stars stuck every few inches around it.

"Maybe this is the painting that man was asking about. Do you think it could be real?"

"Real in what sense? That you are holding it in your hands? Then yes. In the sense that it is a valuable painting? The chances of that are near zero."

"The frame may be ugly, but I think the painting is beautiful. I don't care who painted it, even if it was Great-Aunt Cady from a kit. I want to keep it."

Evan turned away, although Claire could tell from the way he held his shoulders that he thought she was being foolish. "I already said, it's your call."

It was nearly nine in the evening when Claire stepped over the huge ceramic dog dish that lay on the front porch of her house. The dish was nearly a foot wide, and along its edge it bore the legend Duke in gold script. Charlie had bought the bowl at Saturday Market and paid the dollar extra to have it personalized. She said it was a lot cheaper than a burglar alarm—or a real dog.

With the box of items rescued from Aunt Cady's trailer—including the old suitcase—braced on her knee, Claire turned the knob of the front door. She pushed it open with her hip, and set the box on the white oak floor. Behind her, Evan's tires crunched on the gravel as he backed out of the driveway. The strings of Claire's body loosened. She rolled her shoulders and stretched her arms overhead, relaxing the kinks of a five-hour, nearly silent drive.

Charlotte Heidenbruch—Charlie to her friends—came bustling out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. The enticing smell of baking bread wafted after her. She was eighty-three and just four-foot-eleven, but she managed a quick waddling stride. Charlie was the star of her Self-Defense for Seniors class.

"How was your trip, Clairele?" she asked, giving Claire's name the affectionate "le" ending that was one of the few things she had kept fifty years after leaving her hometown of Vahingen. Her English, although nearly flawless, was still flavored by the cadences of southwestern Germany. But no matter how persistent any questioner might be about what she was, Charlie always insisted that she was, of course, an American.

Claire bent down to be enfolded in a quick, fragile hug. Next to Charlie she felt huge and ungainly, galumphing around in her size ten shoes. To top it off, her stomach let out a growl loud enough that even Charlie could hear. Evan's lunch of five-spice tofu, whole wheat pita bread and knobby organically grown carrots had left her starving. In the midafternoon, Claire had discovered an unopened bag of Doritos in a kitchen cupboard, and she'd crammed handfuls into her mouth each time Evan took a trip to the dump.

"Could I tell you about it after I eat something?"

Charlie made a Little scooting motion. "Take a shower, and by the time you are done, I'll have something heated up for you."

Claire did as she was told, feeling the peacefulness of the house enfold her. Built in 1919, it had the kind of craftsmanship that was unheard of now—gumwood and mahogany trim, all corners perfectly mitered, and built-in everything. Built-in bookcases flanked the living room fireplace, there was leaded glass in the dining room's built-in china cupboard, and the master bedroom even boasted a built-in vanity. Like everything else in life, the house's greatest attraction—its age and style—was also its largest drawback. The old pipes were always developing mysterious leaks. The five-foot-wide front door had gradually shifted on its hinges so that all winter long a cool breeze skidded around their ankles. On weekends, Claire haunted the aisles of nearly identical warehouses, each as big-as an airplane hangar, that housed Home Depot, Home Quarters or Home Base. Each store carried thousands of items, but never exactly what she needed, some part hand-lathed seventy years before.

Claire had moved in with Charlie shortly after turning thirty. She had met the older woman by literally running into her. Claire had been hurrying downstairs to the weight room at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center. MJCC attracted a lot of non-Jews from the surrounding neighborhood, like Claire, because of its convenient location and reasonable rates. A flyer on the bulletin board at the turn of the stairs caught Claire's attention. The next thing she knew, she had crashed into a tiny old woman in pink tennis shoes. Even sprawled on her back with her head resting against a concrete wall, Charlie had insisted that she was fine, fine, and that there was no need to help her up. A remorseful Claire had insisted on buying her a cup of coffee (while surreptitiously monitoring the older woman for any sign of injury, shock and/or heart attack), and what had begun as an accident had eventually led to a friendship.