Wolf had been able to keep tabs on his father’s progress through letters he got from an old crony of his mother, a gossipy and humorous theatrical widow named Matilda “Tilly” Hoyt, who was also a Marin resident not far from Goodland Valley and kept in touch with the old man after Helen’s death; and from infrequent, cold-bloodedly short hello-good-bye solo visits he paid Cassius to check up on him that came from a dim unwilling feeling of responsibility and from an incredulous and almost equally unwilling feeling of hope.
After several years, his father’s repeated good showings, his own reawakening good memories from early childhood before the marriage war had started, the old man’s seemingly sincere, even enthusiastic, interest in Wolf’s profession and all his son’s life, for that matter, plus some encouragement from Terri, worked a perhaps inevitable change in Wolf. He talked more with Cassius on his solo visits and found it good, and he began to think seriously of accepting the old man’s repeated invitation to bring the new family to visit.
He talked it over first with Tilly Hoyt, though, calling on her at her sunny cottage nearer the beach and the thundering, chill, swift-currented Pacific than the treacherous brown hills which rains could rumble.
“Oh, yes, he’s changed, all right,” she assured Wolf, “and as far as the liquor goes, I don’t think he’s had a drop since two or three months after Helen died. He’s got some guilt there, I think, which showed in odd ways after she died, like his bringing down from the attic that weird painting of her by that crazy French-Canadian—or was it Spanish-Mexican?—painter they used to have around.” She searched Wolf’s eyes unhappily, saying, “Cassius was pretty rough with Helen when he got very drunk, but I guess you know about that.”
Wolf nodded darkly.
She went on, “God knows I got my share of black eyes from Pat when he was still around, the bum.” She grimaced. “But I gave as good as I got, I sincerely hope, and somehow though we were fighting all the time, we were always making up a little more of the time. But with Helen and Cassius anything like that seemed to cut deeper, down to the bone, take longer to heal, they were both such nice, idealistic, goofy, perfectionist people in their ways, couldn’t accept the violence that was in them. And the fault wasn’t always on Cassius’ side. Your mother wasn’t the easiest person to get on with; she had a bitter streak, a cold-as-death witch thing, but I guess you know that too. Anyway, now Cassius is, well, what you might call… chastened.” She curled her lip in humorous distaste at the word and went on briskly, “I know he wants to meet your new family, Wolf. Whenever I see him he talks a lot about Tommy—he’s proud as anything to be a grandfather, and about Terri too, even Loni—he’s always showing me their pictures—and he positively makes a hero of you.”
So Wolf had accepted his father’s invitation for himself and Terri and Tom and Loni, and everything had seemed to work out fine from the start. The days were spent in outings around the Bay, both north and south of the Golden Gate and east into the Napa wine country and Berkeley-Oakland, outings in which Cassius rarely joined and Wolf enjoyed playing tour guide, the evenings in talking about them and catching up on the lost years and comfortably growing a little closer. The old man had spread himself and not only had his cavernous place cleaned up but also had the Latino couple, the Martinezes, who looked after it part time, stay extra hours and cook dinners. In addition he had a couple of neighbors over from time to time, while Tilly was an almost constant dinner guest, and he insisted on serving liquor while not partaking of it himself, though he did nothing to call attention to the latter. This so touched Wolf that he hadn’t the heart to say anything about his father’s almost constant cigarette smoking, though the old man’s occasional emphysemic coughing fits worried him. But the other old people smoked too, Tilly especially, and on the whole everything went so well that neither Loni’s premature departure nor the occasional silences that fell on their host cast much of a damper.
The talk about ghost stories had started just after dinner at the big table in the living room with the masklike painting of Wolf’s mother Helen with the little white light below it, looking down on them from the mantelpiece on which there also stood the half dozen bottles of sherry, Scotch, and other liquors Cassius kept for his guests. The conversation had begun with the mention of haunted paintings when Wolf brought up Montague Rhodes James’ story, “The Mezzotint.”
“That’s the one, isn’t it,” Terri had said helpfully, “where an old engraving changes over a couple of days when several different people look at it at different times, and then they compare notes and realize they’ve been witnessing the re-enactment of some horror that happened long ago, just before or just after the print was engraved?”
“You know, that’s so goddam complicated,” Tilly objected, but “Yes, indeed!” Cassius took up enthusiastically. “At first the ghost is seen from the rear and you don’t know it’s one; it’s just a figure in a black hood and robe crawling across the moonlit lawn toward a big house.”
“And the next time someone sees the picture,” Wolf said, picking up the account, “the figure is gone, but one of the first-floor windows of the house is shown as being open, so that someone looking at the picture then observes, ‘He must have got in.’“
“And then the next to last time they look at the picture and it’s changed,” Terri continued, “the figure’s back and striding away from the house, only you can’t see much of its face because of the hood, except that it’s fearfully thin, and cradled in its arms it’s got this baby it’s kidnapped…” She broke off abruptly and a little uncertainly, noticing that Tommy was listening intently.
“And then what, Ma?” he asked.
“The last time the picture changes,” his father answered for her, his voice tranquil, “the figure’s gone and whatever it might have been carrying. There’s just the house in the moonlight, and the moon.”
Tommy nodded and said, “The ghost stayed inside the picture really, just like a movie. Suppose he could come out, sort of off the picture, I mean?”
Cassius frowned, lighting a cigarette. “Ambrose Bierce got hold of that same idea, Tommy, and he wrote a story, a shorter one, about a picture that changed, only as in the James story no one ever saw it at the moment it changed. The picture was mostly calm ocean with the edge of a beach in the foreground. Out in the distance was a little boat with someone in it rowing toward shore. As it got closer you could see that the rower was a Chinaman with long snaky moustaches—”
“Chinaperson,” Loni corrected and bit her lip.
“Chinaperson,” Cassius repeated with a nod and a lingering smile at her. “Anyhow as he beached the boat and came toward the front of the picture you could see he had a long knife. Next time someone looked at it, the picture was empty except for the boat in the edge of the wavelets. But the time after that the Chinaperson was back in the boat and rowing away. Only now lying in the stern of the boat was the corpse of the… person he’d killed. Now I suppose you could say he got out of the picture for a while.”