Warpaint (19 page)

“Oh, C.C. –” she said aloud.

 

 

Quiola folded the letter up and slipped it back into the envelope with the sketch. She sat for awhile doing nothing, until her coffee went cold. Then she collected her things, and walked back up to the Carriage House, only to see Mark's Toyota Corolla parked off to one side of the garage. He and Peter stood like refugees on the front stoop.

“Hey!” she called, hurrying up the slate walkway.

“Quiola,” said Mark, hugging her, and handing her over to Peter.

“You two,” she said, stepping back. “What in the hell are you doing here?”

Peter smiled. “We're on a little road trip. Had a hankering for the City, got in the car, and I-95 just took us to your place.”

“Come in, then,” she said, unlocking the front door and stepping into an empty, echoing space.

“My God, Quiola, what's happened? Where's did all the furniture go?”

“Oh, I can't live here anymore. She loved this place, but it's too big for just me, and without her –” Quiola shrugged. “I gave some of the older things to Ted and Belinda, when they stopped contesting the will, then sold what I didn't need. I'm going to move back into the ‘shed' as soon as I can rent this place. Want some coffee?”

“Love some,” said Mark. “I can see why you prefer the ‘shed'.”

“Me too,” said Peter. “It's cozy. I'd work better in that space than this one.”

“So how's the new one going?” asked Quiola, grinding beans.

“Oh, my. Touchy subject,” said Mark, throwing a quick glance at his partner.

“I'm tapped out,” Peter explained. “That's how it feels. I write a line, cross it out, write another three and need to scream. It's not happening right now.”

“Me too,” said Quiola. “But with this –” she lifted her cast, “– at least I have an honest to god excuse until it comes off.”

Peter put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “You need a break of a different sort.”

Quiola kept her gaze firmly on the coffee pot. “I need to keep busy.”

“That, too.”

“You never told us,” said Mark, “what happened with your crazy ex – the one who spooked the horse and broke that wrist?”

Quiola smiled grimly. “I took out a restraining order, and I gather she just left. Went back to the West Coast, and put a continent between us again. I think seeing me fly off Splash ended something for her. At least I hope it's over, now, and for good. It's exhausting to have your mistakes follow you around.”

Just then, the doorbell rang.

“Um, expecting someone?” asked Peter.

“No – and don't worry, it won't be Evelyn, trust me. Just let me go see –” she left the coffee pot on and went back through the empty, echoing house to peer through the spy-hole, then open the door.

“Good morning – Miss Kerr, is it?” said a short, rumpled man with an ingratiating smile. “My name is Ben Griffin.” He stuck out a rather pudgy hand.

“Yes? What can I do for you?”

“I'm a reporter for the
Clinton Gazette
. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your unfortunate friend – she was a friend, is that right?” He glanced at his notebook. “Charlotte Calliope Davis? That's a mouthful, isn't it?”

“Please,” said Quiola roughly, “go away.” She shut the door before the man could say another word.

He rang the bell.

She locked the door.

He rang the bell again, which brought Peter out from the kitchen, worried. “What's going on?”

“There's a reporter out there. Sniffing about for dirt on C.C.”

“Oh brother!” He took Quiola's good elbow and tugged her back to the kitchen, even as the doorbell rang again.

“Ghoul,” muttered Quiola. “They're all ghouls. Lizzie warned me: suicide sells. But somehow I wasn't prepared for things like this.”

“Let's have some coffee,” said Peter, soothingly.

“What's up?” asked Mark.

“A reporter. He wants to know more about C.C. Nothing nice, let's just say.”

“Oh, yuck.”

“Please, talk about something else,” said Quiola. “He'll go away eventually.”

“Well as a matter of fact, Mark and I have a proposal for you. We'd like to take this place off your hands, in a sense – we'd like to rent it from you, and open a gallery here. A green gallery, too, something both earth and artist friendly, and a warm, inviting place for art we like, not for profit, for you and me and people like us.”

“We'd call it the Charlie Davis Gallery – what do you think? You could finally mount a full show of your own, mixed media, everything. And we have some connections, we know people in the business –”

“– like you –”

“Guys!” said Quiola. “I paint. I throw pots. I've no head for business, and no real contacts.”

“Oh, yes you do,” Peter said, eyeing her. “Quit with the pride, girlfriend. You can call Liz Moore for us. With her in the mix, the Charlie Davis Gallery will have legs!”

Peter's idea blossomed as if organic, a thing of the earth. Liz, to Quiola's shock, was only too happy to promise the ice-blue
Wirkorgan
she had in her bedroom as the center piece for the gallery's first night opening, a gift that was a instant sensation, plastered in full color in that Sunday's
New York Times
Arts & Leisure section. The mere existence of what critics dubbed simply “The Blue” proved electrifying. But what was truly astonishing to everyone, including Quiola, was the way in which “The Blue” and the other work showing that night – C.C.'s
Planets
, and her last sequence, so painful on it's own, somehow made serene in converse the sheering cold of “The Blue” while Quiola's watercolors danced – all seemed to pulsate, throbbing with a visual music that was an orchestration of light and dark, of color that seemed almost to chime, a
vibrato
of three visions, fusing, at last and as if by design, into one.

 

♦

 

November 12, Lutsen, 1917. The night and the snow fell together, hard and brutal, without mercy or mind. Each of the Moore boys was forced to carry a lantern for safety's sake, and the string of light moved slowly once the storm had abated, and dawn crept in over the blanketed land. Hunting hounds, three of them, snuffed but did not bay. Parker pressed his old roan on through drifts, following his long-tethered dogs as thick air stabbed the lungs. The horse staggered, and he pulled up just as the sky grayed to light.

“Father!” said Park. “We've got to stop. It's no use.” He kicked his own mount up beside his father, and lifted the lantern. “We're all beat and Lizzie's half-froze to death. We should go back.”

“No.”

“We've been at it for hours. Don't you think we would have found –”

“Don't. We're going up to the old Novitsky place. Now – or I'll beat the life out of you.” He twisted around in his saddle. “All of you – on up to Novitsky's.”

Johannes – Jo – the oldest after Parker, had Lizzie belted to him, in the saddle. He gathered the reins in one hand and hunched forward, trying to shield her from the wind as he nudged the horse after his father. The younger boys, Sven and Ralph, followed and the family made a ragged line of light. What might have been a short ride dragged on into a dreary morning as they fought through the snow, searching. None of them spoke as they came to the abandoned Novitsky land that Ojibwe family had given up farming for fishing a generation back. As they rode on, the dogs began to howl a trail. Parker tugged them to a halt and dismounted to check the ground – sure enough, fresh prints, half filled in but still visible. Remounting, he let the anxious dogs have their heads again, and baying out clouds of breath, they led the family to what had once been a barn, standing now doors open to the weather, the roof worn to ribs. The five lanterns converged bright as the Moores rode in and the dogs bayed at their success. Parker threw himself off the roan and ran into the shadows at the dogs, and at the man and the boy, huddled together in a half-sheltering corner of the dead barn.

Jo struggled to unhook the belt that held Liz to him, as the other boys moved in to help. One of the dogs began suddenly to howl. A horse blew and stamped.

“Is it Gus?” said Jo, letting Lizzie down and dismounting himself, the last of them.

Parker stepped out of the shadows into the lighted circle of his living sons, with the dead baby boy, stiff and blue about the lips, in his arms. Liz walked up and just took the body from him and he let her do this, let her take the baby and cradle him close, as if her warm child's breast might give Gus comfort, somehow. But then she lifted her head and howled, inhuman, pure grief, so pure the dogs took it up until Liz had exhausted her throat with pain.

 

Years after the night of his death-bed confession, Liz could not help but picture him as a young man, big and bearish on the thick-legged, round-bellied roan cantering down the dirt road to his farmhouse, the mud and snow frozen stiff from another night's dip below zero, one arm awkward and full of a shrieking bundle even more bundled than he against the weather. In her picture, the sky was blue and flat and cloudless and he kept his face as clear and as flat as that sky when he walked up the stairs into his wife's kitchen. He sent his oldest boy out to stable the roan, then turned to her, his wife, Sara Svetson Moore, there beside the kitchen hearth, seated on her sturdy pine hearthside chair. She met his gaze as he stood beside her, the warmth of the kitchen melting the needles of ice prickling his overcoat and boots. He had not stopped as he always did to take off boots or coat, because of the child.

Sara's mild eyes took him in, all of him down and through to the squalling mistake he carried in his arms. She put aside her knitting, and stood up.

“Give it to me, Father,” she said, reaching her arms as she did
into his, and under the squirming bundle. “You never could hold a child safe.”

“She's to be named Elizabeth, mind. I promised.”

“Promised?” and on her tongue, the word hissed while that baby girl shrieked, each inhale a wheeze, each exhale a wail.

 

You were named after her half-sister. You were hungry and cold and had just lost your mother, a fact that sent me, on my sturdiest horse, up the road and past the Cut, to the homestead on which I'd found her, my Paulette, a breed so bewitching and young and poor, stuck there with her grandfather and his no-good, drunken bastard of a son. Those two she lived with, one drunk, the other old and shamed, they gave you to me when she died, because I was your father and because I was Parker Moore, a man of means in these parts, a man who lived by the work of his own two hands. We may not have has much, but what we had, I made.

 

“Lizzie,” said Sara. “I will call her Lizzie,” and in the warmth of her new mother's arms, or simply from exhaustion, the baby hushed, peering out of her bundle with olive-green eyes, eyes a color no other Moore child had.

Shakily, Liz brushed out her thin, no-color hair and listened to the roar and boom of a lashing Lake Superior. A storm had swept down from Canada blasting an already frigid Lutsen with more snow. She'd gotten up early as always, but once she dressed and went into her dark, silent kitchen, found herself without appetite, without even a trace of desire not even for coffee, so she took the little elevator to her studio. The Lake sounded even fiercer up in the loft, booming hard against the rocky shores, and the sky darkening as if toward night again.

She sat down before the neat, almost finished self-portrait, done in the style of her
Series B
, but not of that series. On the canvas, the figure of a slim, dark young woman, almost but not quite a girl, in the blue-dark shadow of winter dawn trees, the glance of her eyes inward, lidded, a swift, furry sylvan thing caught in transition, as if she had once been wild, only becoming human as the light turned over the land. Or maybe it worked the other way around and soon the girl would scurry, leaving paw-prints in the snow. Liz painted her name on the back of the canvas, then wiped clean the brush and took her private elevator downstairs again. If anything she was even less hungry than when she first got up. She checked her watch; Sara would be over that afternoon, to fix lunch. Carefully and slowly she built a fire in the massive stone hearth of her living room, just as her father had taught her, and once it no longer needed human prodding, she took a throw from off the back of her couch, curled up with a novel and turned a few pages until she felt a tug and so rested her head on the arm of the couch, where Sara soon found her, the fire still bright, lending her dark cheeks a deceptively live heat.

 

 

♦

 

Treetops. It had been an obvious name for a house that, as C.C. had said, in the lovely spring of 2000, “…Lizzie's mother had built, sometime in the forties.” She pulled their rental onto 61, heading for Lutsen, Minnesota. “Sara Moore hired an architect, someone she knew, and he's the one who built and designed the place to her liking.” C.C. had slipped easily into the role of local informant, relaying to Quiola what she remembered Lizzie as having said, back in 1967, as the two older women had made their way up to Lutsen, for Parker Moore's funeral.

“Her mother had left her father, didn't she?”

“In practice. Not legally. They never divorced. Sara lived at Treetops until she passed away, and Parker Moore stayed on the farm, where he died. His funeral was grim – Lutheran and tense. Of course everything was wilder, back then,” she said. “Took longer to get up to Lutsen. Even now, I wouldn't want to try it in winter. Don't know how Liz manages, to tell the truth. But she has family to help.”

“I find it hard to believe I'm here at all,” said Quiola. “Doesn't seem real. I wonder if Mother would be angry at me.”

C.C. smiled, concentrating on the slick road. It wasn't raining, but the Lake mist that morning made everything damp. “I can't believe your mother never, not once, brought you here. It's so beautiful.”

“And terrible if you are poor, lonely, bright and a girl – and pregnant. So Mom used to say. I don't doubt it. I bet high school kids up here have a that wild-horse roll to their eyes, ‘get me the hell outta here.'”

C.C. laughed. “Some of them do. It's weird to see punk-mohawks and piercing in Grand Marais. I thought that all ended with the '90s.”

“Nothing goes out of style anymore. I never thought I'd see bell-bottoms again. Should've saved mine, they'd be honest-to-God antiques.”

Suddenly she took a sharp breath. Even though she'd seen the Lake in Duluth, even though they'd been driving alongside Superior for some time, the full expanse of it hadn't made itself felt, not physically felt, until that moment, just before Gooseberry Falls. The morning fog had thinned to mist, and the ever-changing Lake weather decided to offer up that overwhelming horizon, under a blue-pink sky.

“I told you it was beautiful,” said C.C.

“Words.” Quiola stared out at the bold scale of the rugged coast, unleashed from cityscape, alive in its own skin.

“They'll tell you up here as you approach the Boundary Waters that if you don't like the weather, just wait three hours. Or drive a mile. The Lake is so deep and so cold, it's like a huge refrigerator, and makes its own weather patterns. You're looking at one tenth of all the world's fresh water, by the way – Quiola?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

And so they drove the rest of the way in silence, while Quiola watched the Lake be her fickle self, changing color every few miles from dark to light, blue to slate gray chop, now sharply defined, now shrouded in fog, rough to calm, moldy and odiferous then fresh with pine. She jumped a little when C.C. pulled off the main road, surprised at how fast ninety minutes had passed. “We're here already?”

“You weren't driving.” The car humped along Rollins Creek road. “I hope Liz remembered to get in some food. I don't know why, but she likes to empty the fridge. While we're there, listen to the way she talks about it. She's proud at how little she keeps. I don't know if it has to do with going through the Depression, or living alone all these years, but there you are, a guest, hungry, and she'll go on about how efficient she's been with the leftovers. Except you never do see even the ghost of a leftover. Not a crust.” She shook her head. “Honestly, Liz hasn't a clue about hospitality. Never did.”

“I'm not very good at always keeping my eye on supplies, either.”

“Ha!” said C.C. “You love to cook. You always have food on hand, in case someone drops in – you are gracious. Liz, on the other hand, enjoys keeping empty space cold. Here's the driveway –”

 

♦

 

May 20, 2004. The flight from La Guardia to Minneapolis, then from Minneapolis to Duluth went by, swift and unremarkable. Quiola was grateful. Traveling light, one knapsack, one wheeled bag, and three of everything else, she had agreed to stay a week with Sara Moore at Treetops. But that seemed a lot of time, as she watched clouds, to be away from Amelia, and home. And what would it be like to be back in Lutsen, once again, but now without either C.C. or Lizzie?

For some reason, the Alamo rental car man in the Duluth airport was nearly beside himself with joy. He whistled, he hummed, he assured her the car would be just what she wanted as he waved to his fellow car-rental competitors. She began to think he was daft, so she smiled cautiously and said, “Are you always so eager to rent a car?”

“You don't understand, Miss. The sun is out!”

She glanced over her shoulder. The plate-glass windows were alight, the sky that particularly unbearable blue of spring. “Yes. Lovely.”

“No. Miraculous. It's been raining for a week. More than.” He wagged his finger at her. “Enjoy the sun. Supposed to start with the rain again tomorrow. Murderous weather.”

“Aren't winters worse?”

“You're from Connecticut, right? You wouldn't understand – snow, that's bearable. No sunshine for going on two weeks? Murderous.”

She nodded, wanting to say “I was born here. Right here, on Lake Superior.” But what did it matter? She was from the East, now.

Quiola took the keys to the rented Chevy, and made her way from the airport across town to the same scenic North Shore drive that had taken her breath away five years before, and on out past old, stately lake-side Duluth mansions. Some of those graceful places were being torn down, replaced by even more enormous new homes crowded onto a patch of lakeside land, ungainly, ungenerous, for they gave no clear view of the water to a passerby.

And all the while the power and gray enormity of the Inland Sea, Lake Mother Superior, there, glinting and ruffling her blue-gray self, mumuring back to the sad gulls' cry. At a certain point on 61, when she looked ahead, the road seemed to dive into the lake – behind, the same, an optical illusion but also a dizzying sense of being nowhere and everywhere at once.

The road was mercifully peaceful at that early hour, empty of the semi-trucks that would hound a slow driver on this two-lane road. Out beyond Duluth, the lake was sheeted with fog, which here and there lifted above steel-blue impatient waters. At Gooseberry Falls, she stopped. She wasn't expected up at Treetops until the early afternoon, so she parked in the empty lot of the park, locked herself in, crawled into the back seat, and slept for about an hour. When she woke, the sun had burnt off the remaining fog, and the parking lot had filled halfway. She got up, stretched and then drove on, past several small towns, then past the road which would take her to Lizzie's house, and on past the tiny, five-store Lutsen, down past Cut-Face Creek, and into the town of Grand Marais. The sun stayed with her, but the air was still frosty when the wind blew off the Lake. She went straight for the Trading Post, bought a green-wool jacket and then headed for a restaurant she knew, a lakeside eatery called the
Angry Trout
.

She was early for the lunch crowd, and so the only customer. The wait-staff were still rolling napkins and joking. Quietly, she possessed herself of a bayside window to watch a schooner maneuver its way from harbor to bay.

“Would you like something warm, coffee maybe?” asked a waitress. “Would you like me to close the window?”

“Oh, no, it's fine. I enjoy the fresh air. And coffee would be wonderful.”

The girl smiled. “Our coffee
is
wonderful. You'll see.”

But Quiola remembered how perfect the coffee had been, no doubt still was. Sitting there in the window, she could hardly credit so much time had passed since she'd been in that dining room, where time and space seemed about to collapse on her, where the sun and the sky promised, cruelly, to be eternally the same, and where, if she just looked up at the right minute, a glowing, happy C.C., her curly blond-white hair tucked under a sky-blue baseball cap, all coiled energy and delight, would be coming back from the rest-room, alive and whole again.

“Shit,” she muttered to herself. The North Shore's chilly embrace had softened the tough old dog chew she thought she'd become.

As she scanned the menu, an old man sat at the next table. She didn't notice him at first, and was nearly finished eating her sandwich, when the man, sunburnt an alarming mahogany, his thick hair white and grey, said, “Excuse me, don't I know you?”

Quiola smiled. “I don't believe so. I'm a visitor.”

But he kept on searching her face.

Discomforted, she said, “Well, my mother grew up here –”

His gaze cleared. “That's it. You look like Marge. Marge Otter.”

“Oh, yes. She was my grandmother. Did you know her?”

The man was shaking his head, his eyes now averted, but seeing, still, a face he knew. “I asked her to marry me, once. She refused.”