Shaking his head a little, Tommy said, ‘That’s good, but I don’t mean that way ‘zactly, Grandpa. I mean if you saw him step or float out of the picture, come off the picture like, same size and everything as in the picture.”
“That would be something,” Wolf said, catching his son’s idea. “Mickey Mouse, say, mouse life-size—no, comic book size—waltzing around on the coffee table. That tiny, his squeak might be too high to hear.”
“But Mickey Mouse isn’t a ghost, Pa,” Tommy objected.
“No,” his grandfather agreed, “though I remember an early animation where he challenged a castle run by ghosts and fought a duel with a six-legged spider. But that surely is an interesting idea of yours, Tommy,” he went on, his gaze roving around the room and coming to rest on the large reproduction of Picasso’s “Guernica” that dominated one wall, “except that for some pictures,” he said, “it wouldn’t be so good if their figures came out of the frames and walked, or floated.”
“I guess so,” Tommy agreed, wrinkling his nose at the looming bull man and the other mad faces and somber patterns in Picasso’s masterpiece.
Terri started to say something to him; then her eyes shifted to Cassius. Wolf was watching her.
Loni yielded to the natural impulse to look around at the other pictures, gauging their suitability for animation. She hesitated at the dark backgrounded one which showed the head only, all by itself like a Benda mask, of a rather young Helen Kruger with strange though striking flesh tones. She started to make a remark, but caught herself.
But Tommy had been watching her and, remembering something he’d overheard before dinner, guessed what she might have been going to say and popped out with, “I bet Grandma Helen would make a pretty green ghost if she came out of her frame.”
‘Tommy…” Terry began, while, “I didn’t—” Loni started involuntarily to protest, when Cassius, whose eyes had flashed rekindling interest rather than hurt at Tommy’s observation, cut in lightly and rapidly, yet with a strange joking or mocking intensity (hard to tell which) that soon had them all staring at him, “Yes, she would, wouldn’t she? Tiny flakes of pink and green paint come crackling off the canvas without losing their configuration as a face…. Esteban always put a lot of, some said too much, green in his flesh—he said it gave it life…. Yes, a whole flight, or flock, or fester, or flutter, or flurry, yes flurry of greenish flakes floating off and round about in formation, swooping this way and that through the air, as though affixed to an invisible balloon responding to faintest air currents, a witches-sabbath swirling and swarming…. And then, who knows? Perhaps, their ghost venture done, settling rustlingly back onto the canvas so perfectly into their original position that not the slightest crack or faintest irregularity would be evidence of—”
He broke off suddenly as an inhalation changed into a coughing fit that bent him over, but before anyone had time to voice a remark or move to assist him, he had mastered it, and his strangely intent eyes searched them and he began to speak again, but in an altogether different voice and much more slowly.
“Excuse me, my dears. I let my imagination run away with me. You might call it the intoxication of the grotesque? I encouraged Tommy to indulge in it too, and I ask your pardons.” He lit another cigarette as he went on speaking measuredly. “But let me say in extenuation of our behavior that Esteban Bernadorre was a very strange man and had some very strange ideas about color and light and pigments, strange even for a painter. Surely you must remember him, Wolf, though you weren’t much older than Tommy here when that painting of Helen was executed.”
“I remember Esteban,” Wolf said, still studying his father uneasily and revolving in his mind the words the old man had poured out with such compulsive rapidity and then so calculatedly, as if reciting a speech, “though not so much about his being a painter as that he was able to fix a toy robot I’d broke, and that he rode a motorcycle, oh yes, and that I thought he must be terribly old because he had a few grey hairs.”
Cassius chuckled. “That’s right, Esteban had that mechanical knack so strange in an artist and always had some invention or other he was working on. In his spare time he panned for gold—oh, he was up to every sort of thing that might make him money—the gold-panning was partly what the motorcycle was for, to take him up into the little canyons where the little goldiferous streams are. I remember he talked about vibrations—vibes—before anyone else did. He used to say that all vibrations were one and that all colors were alive, only that red and yellow were the full life colors—blood and sunlight—while blue was the death, no, life-in-death color, the blue of empty sky, the indigo of outer space….” He chuckled again, reflectively. “You know,” he said, “Esteban wasn’t really much of a draftsman; he couldn’t draw hardly anything worth a damn except faces; that’s why he worked out that portrait technique of making faces like hanging Benda masks; that way he never got involved in hands or ears or other body parts he was apt to botch.”
“That’s strange,” said Wolf, “because the only other one of his pictures I seem to remember now from those days—I think now that it had some influence on my life, my choice of profession—was one of a leopard.”
Cassius’ sudden laugh was excited. “You know, Wolf,” he said, “I believe I’ve got that very picture up in the attic! Along with some other stuff Esteban asked me if he could store there. He was going to send for them or come back for them but he never did. In fact it was the last time I ever saw him, or heard from him for that matter. It’s not a good picture, he never could sell it, the anatomy’s all wrong and somehow a lot of green got into it that shouldn’t have. I’ll take you up and show it to you, Wolf, if you’d like. But tomorrow. It’s too late tonight.”
‘That’s right,” Terri echoed somewhat eagerly. “Time for bed, Tommy. Time for bed long ago.”
And later, when she and Wolf were alone in their bedroom, she confided in him, “You know, your father gave me a turn tonight. It was when he was talking about those dry flakes of green paint vibrating in the air in the shape of a face. He dwelt on them so! I think imagining them brought on his coughing fit.”
“It could have,” Wolf agreed thoughtfully.
The third-floor attic was as long as the house. Its front window seemed too high above the descending hillside, its rear one too close to it, shutting off the morning sunlight. Cassius piloted Wolf through the debris of an academic lifetime to where a half dozen canvases, some of them wrapped in brown paper, were stacked against the wall behind a kitchen chair on which rested a dust-filmed chunky black cylindrical object about the size and shape of a sealed-in electric generator.
“What’s that?” Wolf asked.
“One of Esteban’s crazy inventions,” his father answered offhandedly, as he tipped the canvases forward one by one and peered down between them, hunting for the leopard painting, “some sort of ultrasonic generator that was supposed to pulverize crushed ore or, no, maybe agitate it when it was suspended in water and get the heavier gold flakes out that way, a mechanical catalyst for panning or placering, yes, that was it!” He paused in his peering search to look up at Wolf. “Esteban was much impressed by a wild claim of the aged Tesla (you know, Edison’s rival, the inventor of alternating current) that he could build a small, portable device that could shake buildings to pieces, maybe set off local earthquakes, by sympathetic vibrations. That ultrasonic generator there, or whatever he called it, was Esteban’s attempt in the same general direction, though with more modest aims—which is a sort of wonder in itself considering Esteban’s temperament. Of course it never worked; none of Esteban’s great inventions did.” He shrugged.