He came back, though. That’s another thing. Rune lived with me in Minneapolis when he supposedly dropped out of sight and couldn’t be found. He had come home to visit Dad, and while he was staying with him, Dad fell down the stairs. Rune called 911 and a little later he called me. The doctors told us he’d had a stroke. They guessed it happened while he was on his way down to the basement, and that he fell and then injured himself more. He never regained consciousness, but he lasted a week, and then he passed away. Rune took it so hard. Dad and Rune never got along too well, and after Mom died, I think Rune reminded him of her — too much of her, if you see what I mean. They looked a lot alike. Dad also thought it was absolutely nuts to be an artist, but that’s a pretty typical attitude. Our father was not some strange bird in that regard. Dad recognized the Mona Lisa, knew that Van Gogh had cut off his ear, and that Picasso made pictures of people with scrambled faces. That was about it, but so what? I was closer to Dad because we understood each other, I guess. I used to work to try and cheer him up when he was down. I’d do little dances for him, play him something on the clarinet, show him my good report cards, rub his shoulders, whatever. Sometimes my little schemes worked. He used to call me “his brave, hardworking girl.” After Dad’s funeral, all the air went out of Rune. He was so depressed he could hardly move, so I said I’d put him up for a while. I had graduated from college, done my training, and had my first job.
Rune would lie in my den on the sofa, staring at the ceiling for days on end. I finally got him to a doctor, who prescribed medication. Whether it was the drug he was taking or something else that got him going again, I don’t know, but he started moving around, eating a lot more, and fiddling with his sketchbooks, but he turned nasty. He complained about my cooking, my clothes, the way I talked — that nasal Midwestern accent, ugh. One morning he was actually out of bed before I went to work, and he started criticizing my apartment and the convertible sofa he had been sleeping on for months. “Do you have any idea how cheap and tacky this thing is?” He started kicking it with his foot. He called the furniture vulgar and crass. It was unbelievable. “This is what you want?” he said. He kept saying that. “You want Jim and shag carpeting and some middle-class shithole ranch house for the rest of your life?” Jim is my husband. He was my fiancé then. We met at work. I said, yeah I wanted Jim and a house and my work, and I wanted children, and what the hell was his problem? He told me he’d “severed” the name Larsen from his existence. Did I know that? He and I were no longer related. He hated Mom and he hated Dad and he hated me. I told him not to bad-mouth the dead. You have to understand I had been supporting Rune. He didn’t have much money then, and it wasn’t any fun to have Jim over with Rune moping around, but he was my brother, and I stuck with him. I did what I had to do. I took care of Rune. He had taken care of me when I was little, after all.
And then he told me that he was having a fight with Dad before he fell. I felt sorry for Rune. It made sense that he fell apart. I said it must be awfully hard to live with that, and he said, “How do you know I didn’t push him?” I screamed at him that Dad had a stroke. He just stood there smiling and said, “But we don’t know when he had it.” I was stunned, literally. I mean, if someone had bonked me on the head with a bowling ball, I couldn’t have been more amazed. He must have let a minute go by, seriously, a whole minute. Then he started laughing and said, “Oh my God, you believed me, didn’t you? You must think I’m the devil. You think I could kill my own father? What kind of a sister are you?” And then he said he had another one for me to try on. He said Mom had climbed into bed with him when he was little and touched him sexually, more than once. “Do you believe that one?” he said to me. He said that and just kept on smiling. I didn’t believe it. “You’re crazy,” I said. I told him he had to be out by the time I came home from work.
When I came home that day, Rune was gone, but my apartment had been trashed. He had broken all the glasses and plates in the cupboards and turned over chairs and burned the sofa bed with cigarettes and cut my rug into pieces and left his turds smeared on the toilet seat.
You know, a normal person doesn’t do those things. A normal person doesn’t say, “Maybe I pushed my father to his death,” and then, “Maybe my mother molested me,” and then destroy his sister’s apartment. I kept saying to myself, My brother must be out of his mind. Without Jim, I don’t know what I would have done. Jim and I got married sooner than we had thought we would because I didn’t want to stay in that place anymore. We didn’t tell Rune, and he didn’t call or write to apologize or anything. My own brother scared me. Of course, I found out that he had gone back to New York and plunged into his art again. Things went really well for him, but without the Internet I wouldn’t have known. My friends here in Minneapolis aren’t keeping track of artists in New York City. I know he was famous, but he wasn’t famous out here.
Hess: You weren’t in touch with Rune?
Smith: No, not for years, not until September 11, when I panicked. I called his gallery, that’s how I was finally able to reach him. Nothing really mattered to me then, except knowing that he was all right. He was the only family I had in the world, except Jim and the kids. We started calling each other once in a while, and eventually I asked him about the awful things he had said. It’s hard to explain how terrible it is to have those ideas in your mind, even if you don’t believe them. It pollutes your thinking. Someone comes along and throws dirt into your head, and you can’t clean it out. He said he had lied to hurt me and that sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. He liked to be outrageous just for the heck of it.
Hess: But you didn’t visit each other?
Smith: No, Jim didn’t want him near the kids. I had to respect that, and the truth is, after that terrible day, Rune made me nervous, too. I wasn’t sure of him anymore.
Hess: I have to ask if he ever mentioned Harriet Burden to you.
Smith: Yes, a couple of times. At first I thought he was talking about a man, but then I realized Harry was a woman. He told me he was cooking up something with her.
Hess: Those were his exact words?
Smith: Well, I don’t know if those were his exact words; something like that.
Hess: Anything else?
Smith: He seemed to be enjoying himself, and he thought she was refined. Refined was a big word in Rune’s vocabulary. He said she was really smart and had read a lot and they had things in common. I don’t think there was anything else.
Hess: He didn’t say what they had in common?
Smith: No. You explained to me that he might have stolen her work. It sounds awfully complicated to me, and she sounds fairly nutty herself, using those guys to show art that was actually hers, but I just don’t know. He didn’t talk about Beneath at all until after the show, and then he sent me some clippings. Listen, I wish I could tell you he confessed everything to me, but I can’t.
Rune and I loved each other as kids and then we grew apart. It wasn’t easy for either of us at home, but was it that bad? I don’t understand what happened to him, why he turned out the way he did. His death was just plain sad, and I don’t really care if he wanted to kill himself or not. He must have known that taking those pills was dangerous, that he might kill himself if it went wrong. After all, that’s how Mom did it. There are days when the whole story comes rushing over me, and I get pretty low. I try to keep a positive attitude, but it isn’t always easy, and then I just feel like crying. But that’s not every day. And I say to myself, Rune will send my kids to college. The money from his estate will pay for Edward and Kathleen, who never even knew him. Something good will come out of all the sadness.