The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed (6 page)

On the other hand, movies were silent back then, liquor was illegal, chicken cost more than steak, and a car cost less than a good bicycle costs today. Of course, people got paid a lot less, too.

I didn't find anything about Cornelius Fletcher, but I didn't really mind. I was enjoying looking at the old papers. At least I was getting a better sense of the time he lived in.

I was reading an article about a fourteen-year-old girl who was suing her husband for divorce when a voice above us said, “You can spend months looking for information that way.”

Chris and I turned around. Then we looked up because the man standing behind us was incredibly tall. He was also so skinny that I kind of worried he might break in half while he was standing there. He had rumpled black hair, big glasses, a huge nose and a friendly smile. The knees on his jeans were patched, a fact I noticed because they were so close to my eye level.

“You
are
Chris and Nine, aren't you?”

“I'm Nine. She's Chris.”

“I understand you're interested in Cornelius Fletcher.”

“Ms. de la Pena told us you knew how he lost his legs,” Chris said.

Marcus nodded. “It's a pretty nasty story. Doesn't put this community in a very good light. Why do you want to know it?”

“We saw one of his paintings the other day, and it got us interested in him,” I said.

Marcus looked more interested. “Which painting?”

I made a face. “‘Early Harvest.'”

“You mean a print?”

“No, we saw the original,” Chris said.

Suddenly Marcus looked very interested. “Then you've met the owner?”

“If you mean Phoebe Watson, then the answer is yes.”

“All right, here's the deal; I'll tell you what I know, if you'll tell me what she's like.”

Chris and I looked at each other.

“I've been trying to get an interview with her for over two years,” said Marcus. He sounded a little desperate. “I need
something
about her for my thesis.”

“Well, okay,” I said, feeling confused.

Marcus seemed to relax a little. “Let's go over there,” he said, gesturing to one of the library tables. “I'll tell you as much as I know of the story.”

When we were all settled around the table, Marcus took off his glasses, rubbed them on his shirt, settled them back on his beaky nose, and began.

“Okay, here's what I've been able to figure out. It seems that when Cornelius Fletcher came back from the war, he was filled with despair over what he had seen. It was a terrible war, you know. I mean, they all are, but this one was something new in the history of the world—new kinds of weapons, new ways of fighting. Fletcher went over with stars in his eyes and came back with rage in his heart, particularly at the old men who ran the war and sent young men off to die.”

I thought about “Early Harvest” and all the young men dying in the forest.

“His style of painting changed,” Marcus continued, “became very political. It was a bad time for him to do that—at least, in terms of his own career. The country was going through a reactionary backlash, and freedom of speech had just about been thrown out the window. Poor Fletcher might have been all right if he had been living in Greenwich Village or someplace like that. But not around here. The more famous his work became, the more upset the reactionaries got. Finally a gang of them jumped him one night and ‘taught him a lesson'—which is to say they beat him so badly that he nearly died.”

“That's terrible!” I cried.

Marcus nodded. “What made it even worse was that he was already half crippled. His legs had been injured in the war, and he had to walk on crutches.”

“They beat up a guy on crutches?” Chris asked in astonishment.

“They didn't like what he was painting,” Marcus said. His voice was sharp with anger. “They left him in a ditch, and he had to crawl home. Only he couldn't get in, because the whole place was surrounded by a stone wall. Fletcher had locked the gate when he left, and now he couldn't reach it to unlock it. By the time somebody found him, his legs were so badly frostbitten, they had to be amputated. People mark that as the time when he began to move deeply into his insanity.”

“What happened to the men who beat him up?” I asked.

“Most of them were never identified. The police weren't big on tracking down people who attacked suspected radicals; they figured Fletcher had it coming to him. You have to understand the times. During the war Congress actually passed a law that made it an offense to criticize the uniforms of the army.”

“You mean you could be sent to jail for saying there was something wrong with the way soldiers dressed?” asked Chris.

“You got it,” said Marcus.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

“Anyway,” he continued, “it wasn't an atmosphere where the authorities had a lot of respect for people who spoke out against the official line. Even so, at least one of the men came to justice—the ringleader of the group, in fact.”

“What happened to him?” asked Chris eagerly.

“His name was Hiram Potter. After the beating it came out that Fletcher had saved Potter's son's life during the war. The day Fletcher's legs were amputated, Potter went out to his barn and hung himself.”

CHAPTER NINE

Art Lesson

I shivered. There's a lot about the past they don't teach you in school.

“What happened next?” Chris asked.

Marcus shrugged. “I've spent the better part of the last year trying to find that out. Unfortunately, it's still pretty much a mystery to me.”

“Well, if we find anything, we'll let you know,” Chris said.

Marcus laughed. I could feel myself begin to blush. Clearly he thought the idea that
we
might turn up something he hadn't already found himself was pretty ridiculous. Yet it wasn't a mean laugh. If anything, it was a little bitter. I had a feeling he was getting frustrated with his research.

“Just tell me what you know about Phoebe Watson,” he said. “That will do for now.”

We told him a shortened version of our visit to Phoebe's house—more about what Phoebe was like and how the painting was displayed than about what had happened there.

“Why is Phoebe so important to you anyway?” Chris asked when we were done. “I thought your paper was about Cornelius Fletcher.”

Marcus gave us a knowing smile. “I guess you still have a few things to learn yourself,” he said. “Phoebe Watson is Cornelius Fletcher's daughter.”

He could see by our faces that he had scored with that piece of information. He let it sink in for a while, then told us that if we went over to the Everson Museum, we could see some more of Fletcher's work.

I wasn't all that eager to see more paintings like “Early Harvest.” On the other hand, I couldn't think of anything else we should do next. So we left the library and headed for the museum, which was about three blocks away.

The quickest way to the museum was through Columbus Circle, which is this little plaza with a big statue of Christopher Columbus. It also has a nice fountain, a lot of pigeons, and a mix of business people and bums.

“That Marcus was a nice guy,” said Chris as we crossed the circle.

“He seemed to be,” I said. I was still a little boggled by what he had told us about Phoebe—and a little worried by what we had told him. “You don't suppose he's up to anything, do you?” I asked at last.

“Like what?”

“I don't know—trying to find the Lost Masterpiece or something? Why else would he spend two years trying to get an interview with Phoebe?”

“College students are like that,” Chris said. “Especially graduate students. One of my aunts spent three years studying fish intestines.”

“Eeuw!”

I was still feeling disgusted when we got to the museum.

“Hey, this place is fabulous!” exclaimed Chris as we walked up to the building. I happened to agree with her. The Everson Museum looks like four big concrete boxes stuck together. The artwork starts before you even get inside; there are lots of big sculptures in a courtyard outside the building, including some you can walk through, and even a few you can climb on.

My favorites aren't for climbing, though. My favorites are these five clay towers, each about ten feet tall, that look as if they were made by some giant kindergarten kid who was losing his mind. I always get upset when I see them, though, because the green one has repair lines where they had to fix it after some jerk knocked the top off.

Chris spotted the towers as we were heading for the door. “Wait!” she cried. “I want to look at these!”

“Haven't you ever been here?” I asked, after she had examined them for a while.

She shook her head. “My parents aren't big on this kind of thing.”

“Yeah, but I thought every kid in Syracuse got dragged through here on a field trip by the time they hit sixth grade.”

“Maybe I was absent!” snapped Chris.

I decided to drop the matter.

We went inside.

When you enter the Everson, you find yourself in a huge space with an extra-high ceiling. A wide concrete staircase that looks as if there's nothing holding it up curls to the second floor.

We asked a guard where to find the Cornelius Fletcher paintings, and she sent us off in the right direction. “If you're lucky, you might even see Dr. Bond there,” she said.

When we entered the room where Fletcher's pictures were hanging, I caught the smell of peaches. It wasn't until that moment that I connected the name Bond to the woman we had met at Phoebe's house on Saturday. I think it was the “Dr.” part that threw me off.

Carla Bond seemed as surprised to see us as we were to see her. “Well, what brings you two here?”

I wanted to throw the question right back at her. Unfortunately, I knew that wouldn't do me much good. Adults can demand to know why kids are in a certain place, but kids don't have the same privilege when it comes to adults.

“We got interested in that painting we saw at Phoebe Watson's house and decided to find out more about it,” Chris said. “Next thing we knew—here we were!”

I smiled. Chris had managed to answer Ms. Bond's question
and
let her know what she thought of the way she had asked it, all without crossing that invisible line labeled “smart aleck.” She had stepped
close
, but she hadn't crossed it.

Ms. Bond's face twitched a little. “You must be very interested in art to go to all this trouble.”

“Oh, we're very cultured,” replied Chris. “We act, we sing, we look at pictures.”

She was about to stick her toe over the line. “It was finding out that the artist was local that got us so interested,” I said quickly. I paused, then added, “Is that why you're here?” I tried to ask the question in a way that wouldn't offend her.

“I'm here because I'm preparing a paper on the museum's Fletcher collection. The work of Cornelius Fletcher is my specialty.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling a little silly.

“Would you like to know a little about these pictures?” she asked. She sounded friendlier, which I thought might have something to do with the fact that she was slipping into her teacher role. Ever notice that people love to tell you what they know?

“Sure,” Chris said. “We're always ready for a little culture.”

If I could have kicked her without Ms. Bond's seeing, I would have.

“Let's start with this one,” Ms. Bond said, leading us to a large picture that hung just to the right of the door. “It's called ‘Love and Flowers.'”

“Hey, I like this!” I said in surprise. “It's sure prettier than ‘Early Harvest.'”

Ms. Bond gave me her “What a rude sound!” look. “It's an inferior painting,” she said, as if I were some kind of moron not to have known that. “The museum keeps it out for historical purposes, so people can see the growth in Fletcher's work. Other than that, it has little to recommend it. It's shallow and sentimental, pretty much representative of the worst of American art during that period.”

I stared at the picture, which showed a woman and a little girl playing in a field of flowers.

“I still like it,” I muttered to myself.

“Now this piece is from Fletcher's sketchbook,” Ms. Bond said, pointing to a pencil drawing of a soldier leaning over a ragged, skinny boy. “He made it while in France, during the war. Notice that the style is cleaner, less cluttered. Of course, it's still sentimental. But he'll get past that.”

She showed us several more sketches. The work seemed to get progressively more dark and ugly, which Ms. Bond seemed to think made it progressively more artistic.

“I like the sentimental ones,” I said at last.

Ms. Bond sighed. “Most young people do. I suppose as decoration they're quite nice. But they have very little personal vision in them. In the later work you see a man being forced to face a terrible truth, and sharing that truth through his art. Cornelius Fletcher went to war filled with foolish ideas about glory. His later pictures show what he found instead.”

After the series of sketches we saw a big painting of a battle scene. Unlike looking at “Early Harvest,” where the horror was hidden at first, seeing this picture was like getting hit between the eyes with a hammer.

“This was Fletcher's first major painting after his return from the war,” Ms. Bond said. “It doesn't have the subtlety of his later work. Still, it made his reputation.”

After I had studied that picture, and the ones that followed it, I said, “It's hard to believe these were painted by the same man who did ‘Love and Flowers.'”

I wanted to ask what had happened to change him so much. But I remembered the way Carla Bond had reacted to my curiosity on Saturday, so I let the question hang.