She didn’t say that she was sorry, but sorrow like a river ran beneath her words. Although she wanted me to grant her absolution, I was not then — nor am I now — ordained with such a power. I could only say to her, “I love you, Momma, and I always will.”
We sat there in the yard, in the rocking chairs, for a while longer. I couldn’t say with certainty if it was ten minutes or an hour. We sat in silence, and the stars that crowned the night seemed to descend around us, until the house and the woods and the lane that connected us to the outer world all disappeared as if behind a veil, and a great host of diamond-white stars sparkled above and to every side of us, an encapsulating dome of stars under which we were safe.
54
Previously, Gwyneth had seemed to turn aimlessly from street to street when in fact she had been guided by a purpose; but now she was indeed making her way by whim and notion.
The city appeared less real than before, fading into falling snow not as though shrouds were being cast upon it, but as if it were retreating. The high-rises immediately around us stood their ground as always, but those that I knew to be a block away looked as though they had moved an additional block. Those buildings at any greater distance were pale shapes, their glowing windows like befogged running lights, as if they were enormous ships long docked but now cast off and setting sail swiftly away.
She said, “Charles Paladine was a much-hailed artist. He painted what he sometimes called abstracted abstracts, and though he said such things and even sillier stuff, no one in the arts community laughed at him. In fact, he was exceedingly well reviewed and, by the age of twenty-eight, he sold out every show, whether here, in New York, or London, and Goddard Galleries represented him exclusively. He went from triumph to triumph. He was said to be the next Jackson Pollock, the next Robert Rauschenberg, the next Andy Warhol, all rolled into one modern master. Then Paladine did something peculiar that endangered his reputation. He stopped painting abstracts and became obsessed with realistic scenes featuring marionettes.”
I said, “Black tuxedo, black shirt, white tie, top hat.”
“Yes, that one, but also others — men, women, and children. The scenes were exotic, moody and disturbing, sometimes featuring several marionettes and sometimes only two. The marionette you mean, the one in the antique-toy store, was often the most prominently featured, but in paintings where other marionettes were the focus, the one in the tuxedo always at least lurked in the background, half shrouded by one thing or another, or in shadow, but always there. The critics who praised Paladine’s abstracts were puzzled by his new direction. They had proclaimed him a genius for so long that they couldn’t at first be harshly critical. But their positive reviews weren’t quite as adoring as before, and some of them openly lamented that he had abandoned abstracts.”
“I’ve never understood abstract art,” I admitted.
“Sometimes I think no one does, but they have to pretend or be considered uncool and unsophisticated. My father liked to quote the critic Paul Johnson, who once referred to Jackson Pollock’s work as ‘inspired linoleum.’ Daddy deeply disliked the marionette period of Paladine’s career, but he said that at least the artist had been putting something recognizable on the canvas instead of the blobs of nothing and nihilistic scratching that had made him rich.”
She drove around a city plow that moved too slow to please her, and coming the opposite direction was a second plow. She maneuvered fast between them in a center lane that was as yet uncleared, and both drivers gave her a blast of their horns in disapproval.
“What happens if a policeman pulls you over?” I asked.
“Won’t happen. Anyway, Paladine sold his marionette paintings, but at a lower price — until he killed his wife and two children, a boy of ten and a girl of twelve. In some of the paintings, he’d used their faces as the faces of the marionettes. When they were dead, he beheaded them—”
“I don’t like these kinds of stories.”
“It doesn’t exactly bring a smile to my face, either. Paladine beheaded and dismembered his wife and children. Then he sewed their heads and limbs back on, though loosely, with coarse black thread. He painted their faces white, added black details, and drew bright spots of rouge on their cheeks.”
With cloaks and robes and cerements of white whirling and billowing and swooning in every quarter, the city looked as if it must be populated by more ghosts than living people, and all those spirits were agitated in their haunting.
I said, “Did he ever explain himself? In court, I mean?”
“No need for either a trial or an asylum. After he finished with his family, Paladine painted his own face like that of the marionette you saw in the shop window. Then he went to the roof of his four-story house, right here in the finest neighborhood in the city, and threw himself into the street.”
I shuddered. “Why?”
“We’ll never know why.”
“Where do the real marionettes come into this?”
“Police found the six of them in Paladine’s studio, which was there in his home. They were identical, like the one you described. He had carved them from cubes of yew wood and crafted their joints and painted them himself. Do you know the yew tree, Addison?”
“No. I’ve not had much experience of trees since I was eight.”
“The yew is the graveyard tree, symbol of sorrow and death.”
“What happened to the six?”
“Oh, they were sold to collectors. His paintings of marionettes soared in price — I won’t say ‘value’—following the murders and the suicide. Many Paladine collectors no longer wanted his work from that period, but certain … enthusiasts purchased multiple paintings. And each of the six hand-carved marionettes brought a serious price when Edmund Goddard put them up at auction.”
I said, “All this happened before you were born.”
“Yes. Before you came to the city.”
“And then, when you turned thirteen, you used the marionette as the inspiration for your Goth look. Why?”
“I happened to see photographs of it in a magazine article.”
“Yes, but why make yourself like it?”
Instead of answering the question, she said, “As you heard me tell Goddard, through surrogates I’ve tracked down and purchased four of the six. I personally oversaw the burning of them.”
“Are you going to buy and destroy the other two?”
“I haven’t known where they are. Which greatly worried me.”
“Worried you — why?”
We arrived at the traffic roundabout in Washington Square, where atop a plinth, the first president and legendary warrior sat on his horse, his stone face solemn, as though he issued a challenge to the city, if not to the world, a call to rise to his vision of truth and liberty and honor. Three Clears in hospital whites stood around the statue, looking for whatever it is they seek, waiting for whatever it is they anticipate.
Gwyneth drove three-quarters of the way around the circle before taking one of the avenues that radiated from it. A first-pass plow had cast the snow from the street onto parked cars, which by morning would be so buried that they would look like a series of igloos along the curb.
Throughout these two nights together, I had feared that if I pressured her too much to reveal her secrets, I would trigger her social phobia, that she would retreat from me or even terminate our friendship. But now I knew that her life and mine shared points of intersection long before we met, beginning in fact on the night she was born. In light of that puzzling discovery, I resolved to press her a bit more insistently.