The Remains (10 page)

He started for the back door. I followed him.
When we came to the door, he turned back to me.

“I’m not feeling very good now,” he revealed.
“I’ve never seen you so full of worry. I never knew about your
past; never knew what you had to hold inside. I look at you, but I
don’t know you.”

“Maybe you’ve never really seen me before,” I
said trying to work up a grin. “Go now. Don’t keep Cinderella
waiting.”

But he just looked at me quizzically as he
opened the door.

“Promise me you’ll lock this when I
leave.”

As my ex walked off into the darkness of the
October evening, I closed the door behind him, dead-bolted it
secure. Turning to face my empty apartment, I burst into tears.

FOR A CHANGE IT had been a night without
dreams, a night without voices, a night without texts. But then it
had also been a night of sleeplessness. Or, when I did manage to
sleep at all, I would wake up minutes later with a start, as if to
sleep even for a minute was to let my guard down. My mind and my
body were speaking to me, telling me I had to start getting to the
bottom of the reasons behind Franny’s paintings. It meant that
instead of going straight to work, I would go see Franny’s mother,
speak to her face to face.

I called Robyn from the car just as I was
crossing the Hudson River via the South Troy Bridge. I told her I’d
be in sometime later that morning after I took care of some
personal business. She told me “No sweat.” That she owed me for all
those nights I closed up alone.

“
Take
the
freaking
day,
Bec,” she insisted.

I told
her I wouldn’t know what to
freaking
do with myself.

Ten
minutes later I entered into what Michael would no doubt refer to
as ‘Indian Country’. This was the rural farm-scape of Brunswick
Hills and beyond that, the foothills that eventually turned into
the blue mountains of Massachusetts. I cruised U.S. Rural Route 2
that paralleled the winding path of the Postenkill, a stream as
wide and deep in parts as a river. It always ran fast and frothy
white in early October from the September rains that soaked the
region. Trooper Dan taught us to fish for trout in the stream back
when we were twin pups. While I never caught much of anything (the
only thing I hated more than touching a live fish was a worm),
Molly never made it home without a fish or two in her creel (she
loved the feel of live fish and worms). Thinking back on it, her
fishing prowess made my Dad proud, especially in light of my,
ah,
girlish
apprehension. For years I’ve sometimes wondered if Molly
might have been the boy Dad never had.

After a while I made it through the small
town of Postenkill with its two or three antique shops, general
store and one-bay firehouse. From there I continued along Route 2
until I came to Garfield Road where I hooked a sharp right at the
Civil War cemetery.

It had been a long time since I’d made a trek
back to this country and I felt the years piling up in my stomach
like so many bricks. Ten bricks to be exact—one for every year I’d
been away. Ten years that coincided with Molly’s death. It’s not
that I made a conscious decision never to return. It’s just that
there was nothing left for me here. Nothing other than the shell of
a house that had been handed down to me by my parents upon their
deaths along with the land that went with it, including a major
chunk of Mount Desolation.

I hadn’t been entirely neglectful.

I paid the taxes on the property, even paid a
local carpenter to keep the house up and to mow the field grass.
But since Molly passed on, I hadn’t been able to get myself to
return to the old homestead, as if some invisible force-field was
holding me back—the never too distant memory of a monster who once
lurked inside the deep woods. Not even Michael, my former husband,
had laid eyes on the place.

So why then, after all this time, had I come
back to the Brunswick Hills?

Frances Scaramuzzi and his mother had been my
neighbors; which in this unspoiled country meant that our
respective spreads were located a good three miles from one
another. Out of sight but not out of mind.

The sun was shining bright as I pulled into
the driveway of Franny’s two-story white clapboard farmhouse. I cut
the engine on the Cabriolet, got out. Immediately I was struck by
the smell of the land, of the century old trees that surrounded me,
their leaves golden and shedding in the fall breeze.

Just like my parents’ place, the Scaramuzzi
farm no longer supported any livestock or animals. But the barn and
the fields beyond it were still there. The fields of tall grass
seemed to go on forever until they touched the foothills just a
mile eastward.

Walking over the gravel drive I made my way
up onto the wood porch, reached my hand out for the doorbell. But
before I could press it, I heard a car pulling up behind me onto
the gravel drive.

Caroline. Franny’s mom.

She drove a blue Chevy pickup that had to be
ten years older than me and that still looked to be in tip-top
shape. Stenciled on both the driver and passenger side doors were
the words ‘Scaramuzzi Farms’ on behalf of the vegetable-slash-art
stand that Mrs. Scaramuzzi used to set up on the front lawn from
spring to late fall. The art part of the enterprise came about when
Franny started selling his original oil paintings alongside the
ears of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers and summer
squash, plus homemade apple and blueberry pies.

Now that he could regularly command five
figures or more for his work, Franny no longer had to hawk it out
of a three-sided shack on the front lawn. It also meant his mother
no longer had to make ends meet by selling homegrown vegetables and
baked goods.

Planting a smile, albeit a nervous one, on my
face, I watched the small but still athletic woman exit the truck,
slam the door closed with a vigor that betrayed her seventy-plus
years. As she made her way up the drive she began to take more
shape and I was able to make out her smiling, smooth face, her
brown eyes and friendly mouth.

She was wearing a red bandanna over long but
thick salt and pepper hair. In each of her earlobes she sported
dangling silver earrings. She wore an eggshell-colored turtleneck
over a pair of well worn Levis and for shoes, a pair of green Crocs
over gray wool socks.

She stopped upon reaching the porch
steps.

“Something’s wrong with this scenario young
lady,” she smiled. “Aren’t you supposed to be critiquing my Francis
right about now?”

I laughed because, well, yes I was supposed
to be critiquing him. In theory anyway.

“Come on, Mrs. S,” I said, “you know as well
as I do that Franny critiques us.”

Laughing, she turned away, as if the comment
made her blush, even though it had been directed at her son.

“’Sides,” I said, “Robyn has been begging me
to get some one on one face-time with our most gifted
artist-in-residence.”

“Don’t forget famous,” Mrs. S said.

I raised my eyebrows while she made the
stairs, walked on past me, and opened the unlocked door.

“Just yesterday,” she went on speaking as we
entered the house, “I got a call from New York. An associate
producer from MSNBC, grew up in this area.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, moving
into the semi-dark, musty smelling living room.

“I kid you not. Woman by the name of…” She
peered upwards as if her memory escaped her. And apparently it had.
“Oh I forget her name. But she had a nice voice and she was all
excited about Franny, his art. She’s putting together a primetime
special report on autistic savants. Musical savants, mathematical,
literary. Franny would cover the visual arts aspect.”

She headed through the living room and into
the kitchen at the end of it. When I entered behind her, I watched
her take a tea kettle from off the gas stove and begin filling it
with water from the tap.

“So don’t leave me in the dark, Mrs. S. Did
you accept?”

“I haven’t called back,” she admitted
solemnly. “To be honest, I have not made up my mind about it.”

“It could mean fame and fortune for Franny,”
I said, stating the obvious. “A spot on MSNBC in the primetime
would catapult him into the limelight.”

“Which is exactly what worries me, Rebecca.”
She sighed as she joined me at the large harvest table. “It’s just
that Franny has never been beyond the farm. Oh, he goes to Albany
of course. To the Albany Art Center. But I just can’t imagine how
he might handle going on national television in New York City.
I…” She let the thought trail off while shaking her head, staring
down at the table-top.

Her gestures, her ambivalence: they made me
wonder who was more scared of Franny’s moving on. This lovely widow
or Franny himself.

There was a long pause. Long enough for it to
become a little uncomfortable. When the tea kettle whistle blew, it
nearly frightened me out of my chair. Mrs. Scaramuzzi got up.

“Enough television talk,” she ordered.
“Obviously you’ve made a prodigal return to your homeland to meet
with me up close and personal. So let’s get to it.”

Grabbing hold of the tea kettle she set it
onto an unlit burner.

“But before we get started,” she went on,
“I’d like it if you’d call me, Caroline. Mrs. Scaramuzzi was my
husband’s mother.”

I laughed.

“Caroline,” I said, trying it on for size.
“Caroline is fine.”

I got up from the table to help her with the
tea. While Caroline set out mugs with good old fashioned Salada tea
bags in them, I picked up the kettle and began pouring in the hot
water.

“Go sit, Caroline,” I insisted. “I’ll get
this.”

“A guest in my own home,” she said, sitting
back down at the table. “Feels kind of sweet.”

“How do you take your tea?” I asked, while
replacing the kettle onto the stove.

“Naked,” she said. “Like my men.”

The ice broken, we both had a good laugh
while I carried the mugs back over to the table.

THE
SPACIOUS KITCHEN WAS something out of
Town & Country
Magazine
. The farmhouse
that contained it had to be over a century old. Most of the
stainless steel appliances were new, no doubt the spoils of
Franny’s hard work and talent. You couldn’t look at a single wall
and not spot at least a reminder of the success the autistic savant
had become in the many years I’d known of him, and the seven years
I’d truly come to know him.

Even inside the kitchen, the walls and
shelves were ripe with framed sketches, limited prints, original
canvases of every type, style and theme. From crazy eye-dancing
abstracts to serene landscapes, to black-and-white self-portraits
to pencil sketch studies of his mother engaged in various tasks
like cooking, clothes pinning laundry on the outside line, or
working in the vegetable garden.

The one image that provoked skin-deep chills
was a simple drawing of Caroline. She was standing alone at the
edge of the gravel drive, long hair blowing back across her face by
a storm-driven wind produced by blue-black clouds visible on the
horizon. It was a scene that evoked Wyeth, but that hit me deep
inside since its true-life subject was sitting directly in front of
me.

We sat with our steaming mugs of tea.

I attempted to sip mine. But it was still too
hot.

Caroline smiled graciously.

“So what’s on your mind, young lady?”

I guess when you’ve gone beyond 70 in years
lived, 42 seems almost adolescent.

“Are you aware that over the past two days
Franny’s given me two of his paintings?”

I looked for a sign of surprise on her face.
An upturned brow, a flushing of the cheeks. I got neither as she
calmly sipped her tea.

“I’m aware that Franny has been working
feverishly. I see that he brings his paintings along with him to
the art center. But I didn’t know he was painting them for you,
Rebecca.” She peered down at her tea, then up at me again. “Why do
you think he would do something like that?”

“That’s what I came here to find out. So far
this week he’s been at the studio everyday, all day. Today will
make the third day in a row. A record for him. And from what you’re
telling me, he has another new painting with him today.”

My
stomach did a little flip when I said it. I couldn’t imagine what
kind of image I would have to confront when I made my return to the
studio later that morning.
What word might I see buried inside it? Which one
of the three out of five senses left?

“If Francis wants to give you his paintings,”
Caroline said after a time, “then that’s his business. I have no
problem with it.”

“Oh don’t get me wrong, I love Franny and I’m
honored to be gifted his work. To be frank, I’ve learned from his
style.”

Caroline shook her head, pursed her lips.

“Then what’s the problem?”

I took another sip of my still too hot
tea.

“Has Franny been acting a little strange
lately?” I nervously asked.

Caroline broke out in laughter.

“He’s autistic, Rebecca.” She giggled. “He’s
always acting strangely.”

I was more than a little taken aback at her
response. And I think she knew it. Because she started laughing
even harder, from deep inside the raspy lungs of a former
smoker.

“It’s a joke,” she said, eyes wide. “Get it?
Strange? Autistic? When you stand in my shoes, young lady, you
don’t expect normalcy from a boy like Francis. You expect something
new and weird and quite wonderful with each new day.”

I
couldn’t help but take notice of her referring to a man pushing
fifty as a boy. But then Franny
was
a boy. He would never grow old despite his body.