Painted Ladies

29

I was alone in my apartment. The door was locked. It was very quiet. I was lying on the bed, sipping some Black Bush on the rocks and reading the files on Ashton Prince that Kate Quaggliosi had given me. The file was boring. But I loved the silence.

Ashton Prince had been born forty-eight years ago in Queens, New York, and attended public school there. He had majored in art at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and graduated in 1982. He’d gone on to acquire a Ph.D. in art history from Boston University. No mention of his parents. No mention of Ascher Prinz. He’d been a teaching fellow for a couple of years at BU while he was getting his degree. He taught art history for a couple of years at Bridge-water State College before he moved on to Walford as an assistant professor. He settled in at Walford. His specialty was seventeenth-century low-country realism, and he had written some essays for academic journals, and a book about the Nazi confiscation of art during World War Two. The book was published by Taft University Press and was titled Aesthetics and Greed in the Second Great War. He had spent a sabbatical year in Amsterdam. He was a tenured full professor when he died. Married to Rosalind Wellington for fifteen years. No children.

I shut the lights off and lay on the bed for a time in the near darkness, a little light coming in from the kitchen, even less coming in from the streetlights on Marlborough Street. I sipped a small sip of Black Bush. Irish whiskey was good for sipping carefully, alone, in silence. It was good for grief also, though I hadn’t needed it lately. I took my glass and walked to my front window and looked down at Marlborough Street. Every moment of intense happiness in my life had been spent with Susan. Whenever I saw her I felt a thrill of excitement. If she went out to get the paper off the front porch, I was thrilled when she came back in. And yet as I stood looking down at the motionless street below me, I loved the solitude. Susan and I shared many nights, but we didn’t live together. I’ve never known quite why. We tried it once, and it made us both unhappy. Maybe the thrill of seeing her was more intense because we didn’t share a roof. We were very different. What we had in common was that we loved each other. What was different was everything else. She could feel deeply and think deeply, but she tended to rely more on the thinking. I was probably inclined somewhat the other way.

“If one is a bit insecure, despite all appearances,” she had once said to me, “one tends to think ahead very carefully.”

“And if one is not?” I had said.

“Then,” she had said, “one tends to trust one’s feelings and plow ahead, assuming one can handle whatever results.”

“A nice balance would be good,” I had said.

“It would,” she had said. “And it would be rare.”

I smiled. Where did the covert insecurity come from? Her first marriage had been very bad. But that marriage was probably a function of insecurity, not a cause. The cause probably lingered back in Swampscott, in the Hirsch family dynamics. Whatever it was, it was then, and we were now, and the hell with it.

On Marlborough Street, a man turned the corner from Arlington Street, walking a brisk Scottie on a leash. Late for walking the dog. Maybe he had trouble lasting through the night.

My glass was empty. I went to the kitchen and got more ice and poured in more whiskey and sat in my armchair by the cold fireplace in the living room and took a small swallow. It eased into my capillaries and moved pleasantly along my nerve patterns. I have taken more from whiskey than whiskey has ever taken from me.

There was a pattern here, someplace, in Prince’s death. It wasn’t clearly visible yet, but there was some kind of design in place that I couldn’t fully get. It had to do with the Holocaust, and Jewish, and Dutch, and art. But if I knew some of the ingredients, I still didn’t know the design, except that it might well be of darkness to appall. I was used to that. I’d spent most of my life looking around in dark places that were often appalling. But oddly, I was never really appalled. I looked where I needed to look to do what I did. And what was there was there. I’d done it too long to speculate much on why it was there. When I needed to, I could flatten out my emotional response until it was simply blank. I liked what I did, probably because I was good at it. And sometimes I won. Sometimes I slew the dragon and galloped away with the maiden. Sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes the dragon survived. Sometimes I lost the maiden. But so far the dragon hadn’t slain me . . . and I was never terminally appalled. And I was with Susan.

I smiled to myself and made a little self-congratulatory gesture with my whiskey glass.

“Sometimes solitary,” I said to no one. “But never alone.”

I celebrated that singular fact in the happy darkness until my glass was empty.

Then I went to bed.