A Masterpiece of Revenge Read online

  More than recognition. I have wanted to be declared “authentic.” That’s it exactly. “Jane Caldwell. Of Known Provenance.” The phrase that appears on the fax here in my hand.

  Genius? You never even believed I had talent. As far as you were concerned, it began and ended with my red hair. After Mother’s death, the only warmth I ever found was in the company of my pony, grazing the gorse in Port Meadow. His moist muzzle offered more affection than your dry little pecks to my forehead.

  “Say but one word, Lord, and your child shall be healed.” I heard that phrase at church one day and it went straight to my heart. You see, if you had said just one word, I would have been saved. A tiny gesture on your part to show you loved me. It would have been enough.

  Instead I believed I needed to make you proud. I knew this would be hard work, and I worked hard. You know I did. I was determined to excel in something artistic — literature, or music, perhaps. I learned to play Chopin’s etudes. I tried writing poetry. Do you remember? I memorized all of Keats’s odes and most of Shakespeare’s sonnets, as well. “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”

  In the end it was my first art teacher who offered me hope. My assignment had been to paint something freehand on an Oxford theme. I produced a watercolor of Lewis Carroll, whom I depicted waiting for Alice on an autumn evening on the Magdalen Bridge, where it crosses into the botanical garden.

  A magical spot at a magical time of year. Autumns here in Oxford are unmatched in their beauty, don’t you agree? “Season of mists,” Keats has it. Mists seem to gather along the rooftops, making them fairylike. The whole city is washed, bathed in gray, gently illuminated by the sun.

  It’s our little paradise, isn’t it Papa? Emerald lawns and ambling goats, students reading Herodotus under elms. Tame deer graze on lush grass turned golden by the sun’s lengthening rays. Lines of dons in flowing gowns strolling along medieval walls. Young men in blazers and boaters punting with their sweethearts under weeping willows. The garden is full of dahlias. Leaves fly from cloister to cloister. Goldfish sparkle in the lake, near where the river runs through the meadow, with its wavy reflection of Magdalen Tower.

  I was thinking of Turner when I did that watercolor. I studied one of his paintings in a book and fell in love with his yellows. Ocher, liquid gold, and light browns — these were my delights.

  My drawing teacher praised my work. Do you know I can still remember his words? “You have captured the air and light perfectly. This shows real talent, Miss Caldwell. You might paint one day.”

  How proudly I brought home my piece to show you. “Jane, you have a jaundiced eye.” That was your reaction.

  I should have been wounded by it but I wasn’t. Oddly, you were paying me a compliment without knowing it. Turner also had a jaundiced eye, you see. That flaw was the basis of his genius.

  So I kept painting landscapes bathed in their sickly yellow light. I got particularly good at doing cataclysms and catastrophes — world-engulfing and world-ending disasters: snow storms, avalanches, floods, hurricanes. I was taking all the frustrations trapped within me and spinning them into gold. Camouflaging them with bright light. They didn’t go away, but the colors tinged them with melancholy and poignancy and gave them an aching sort of beauty.

  You looked at my works and said it would be an abuse of language to call them “art.” Someday, perhaps, you told me, I might get a job in the family business. But by then, Papa, your sarcasm was less devastating. I kept painting. It was all I had to save me when you sent me to that dreadful boarding school, at which, you said, I would receive the education my mother — God rest her soul — couldn’t give me. You told the headmistress that I needed to be watched closely. I had a tendency to lie.

  You were right. I did lie. I lied all the time. About my feelings, my fears, my sadness. Unhappy children are always liars. They cannot tell true from false. Most true to me were my dreams of love. It was the world that was false.

  The one place where truth and beauty remained was painting. I began to believe in my abilities, believe that they would bring me the joy for which I longed. Painting brought me serenity. I considered everything I saw from the perspective of shadows, lighting, and color combinations.

  For all that, I didn’t fall behind in my studies. I was always a good student. You know that, Papa. Once you even congratulated me. Do you remember? You said, “You’ve made a grammatical mistake on the last page of your essay on Chaucer.” That meant that you’d read through the whole essay This filled me with happiness. So you were interested in what I was doing! When I graduated at the top of my class, you said, “Perhaps you will make something of your life after all.” From you that was dithyrambic praise indeed.

  Then you had to ruin everything. Didn’t you just. I wanted to attend an arts college and become a painter. Painting was my calling. I was responding to a power greater than myself. You wanted me to work in your chemical business, so that I could carry on your name —- in the place of a stillborn brother, whose birth had killed the woman whose face I can only dimly remember, but for whom I grieve each day

  You had always taken care of everything, and your will was the ultimate authority in all matters. You and your ego were not to be denied. So when you informed me that I should become a biochemist, this wasn’t a request, it was an order, a biblical command. Struggle was futile. I could have thrown myself at your feet and it would have made no difference.

  What you never understood, Papa, was that a calling such as the one I felt, it was not something you can control and channel. Like a river it will always find its way to the sea, however it diminishes itself to get there, as a trickle, a stream, a creek. It will wait for its time and seek its outlet.

  So I waited for my time. I pursued biochemistry at Oxford. Five dreary years studying nature’s marvels through an electron microscope. But I made the best of it. I learned everything there was to learn about the physics of color, materials science, and the secrets of carbon 14 dating.

  Even you could never have guessed how someday I would use this knowledge. Had you known, you might have preferred I’d enrolled in art school. By insisting that I become a biochemist, Papa, you gave me both weapons and an understanding of their use.

  Be patient, Papa. Don’t close your eyes. There’s a point to all this. I’m trying to explain my actions, to show you the torturous path that led to this magnificent fake, this masterpiece I am now offering you on bended knee.

  I’m going to implicate you. We’re going to be partners in crime, you and I.

  Do you know what I’m remembering just now? A bronze statue I once saw in the Pére-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. It was of a recumbent man, holding in his hands the mask of a woman. She wore a sad smile and had large, lifeless eyes that stared at the man. He seemed to be trying to bring his mouth to hers. They are frozen within inches of each other. So near, yet light-years apart. Drops of rain fell from the yew trees and ran down the cheeks of the woman’s mask like tears.

  I used to fantasize that at night the statue came alive, that their faces could touch, that their mouths could whisper words of love to each other.

  But I knew it wasn’t true. Art is cold, like Keats’s Grecian urn. The man would never console her, never kiss her tears away. One day, far in the future, the woman’s head would crack and roll onto the moss and leaves and they would forever be separated.

  And that is how far apart we are. Your pride made it that way. Your puritanical fear of women. I would guess that you made love with Mother with your eyes closed. There was no foreplay and no tenderness. You were depositing your seed.

  You always thought I was an emotional wreck, but actually I’ve inherited some of your inability to express love. Oh, yes, of course, I have fallen in love. Quite often, actually — but only for long enough to be intrigued by the mystery of a man, and then to be disappointed. At first, sex was marvelous. After a lifetime of not being touched, being ravished was exquisite. Oh my, yes. But the moment of bliss would pas
s, and the men would feel like conquered terrain.

  Boredom ended most of my affairs. Until I met Ambrose. He came to the company in response to an ad I had placed in the Oxford Mail. When he entered my office, I believed I perceived the outlines of happiness, happiness at last.

  The one and only time I believed that perfection might have human form was when Ambrose looked at me. He reminded me of you, Papa. He had your profile, you see, your eyebrows, your deep voice. And he was a molecular biologist by training, just like you.

  I have destructive tendencies. Those deep forces that drive me to demolish everything I construct. Ambrose was beautiful, but love was a hopeless wish. I had always emerged from it persuaded of the falseness of all feelings. Ambrose could have been everything I had always wanted. He was certainly everything you would have wished for me.

  For that reason alone I knew we were doomed as a couple. Every time I looked at him a sixth sense tingled with premonitions of disaster. So I did absolutely everything wrong.

  I hired him, knowing full well that I would jump into his arms the very next day even though office romances are silly, hopeless affairs. I spent my days seeking him out for no reason and then running away. I would drop by his lab on the spur of the moment, and watch impatiently for his return when he was having a meeting outside the office.

  I loved him to distraction. And to extinction. Serenity in love was not my style. Love is not love when it becomes habit. Therefore I produced drama: I fretted and was jealous and suspicious. I turned our love into a tortured thing. When I didn’t see him, I mentally dissected our previous meeting for hours on end.

  The truth was Ambrose was too good-looking, too brilliant, too young, too loving, too too. I didn’t deserve him and therefore I heaped my sins on him so that he would turn away. He did, eventually. He became afraid of someone so possessive and obsessive, particularly when working for her. He left seeking quieter pleasures.

  Ambrose’s departure, I felt, placed me squarely in the long line of tragic women: Dido, Phaedra, Medea. I wanted to die, you see, because I was predestined for unhappiness. I nearly became anorexic, swallowing gallons of coffee, smoking three packs of cigarettes every day, working ridiculous hours. The paradox of all this self-destruction was that our family business started becoming very profitable.

  Of course there were always people to console me. I would sometimes even forget I was a tragic heroine. I still found solace in a pretty face, in the abandonment an embrace can bring. I celebrated my despair with laughter, men, and spirits. I bought a Porsche and drove recklessly. I took up skydiving. Every day was a game of Russian roulette. Whee! The only way to live was in excess, with abandon.

  Because I had been abandoned. By you. And by Ambrose.

  Do you remember those letters I sent from boarding school declaring my love for you? I sent them by registered mail, so that you couldn’t say you hadn’t received them.

  After your first stroke, I lived in the terror you would disappear altogether. You don’t happen to recall what I said to you, do you? I said I didn’t want to wait until you were on your deathbed before embracing you in the way that a daughter has the right to embrace her father.

  You looked as if you had just gazed at Medusa. After I’d kissed you on the cheek, you said, “Your breath smells like garlic.”

  It was the crudest thing you’d ever said to me. Cruel to the point of being hilarious.

  Look at us now, Papa. For six years, you’ve been at my mercy. I can kiss you and hold you as much as I desire. I can tell you things that before would have made your flesh crawl. Perhaps you understand what I’m telling you. I do have the feeling my visits do you good. Perhaps even keep you alive. The doctors smile when I tell them that. Contact of this sort, they reply, has no effect — but if it makes me feel better, then chat away by all means.

  They tell me this with all the sympathy of an atheist talking to a mother praying at the tomb of her son.

  The clinic’s director doesn’t share their skepticism, I’m glad to say He’s different. Before becoming director he worked at a hospital that specialized in the treatment of coma victims, and his experience with those patients has left him more cautious about making sweeping generalizations. Absence of reaction on a patient’s part does not constitute absolute proof that he is oblivious to words and gestures.

  I choose to believe him rather than the others. I want to believe that you can feel my hand on your cheek. I want to believe that you can still smell your favorite aftershave, which I brought you last week. I need to believe that you can hear me.

  Don’t sleep, Papa. Listen to me now, if only with your eyes. I’m getting to the crux of what I came to tell you. Everything I’ve said up to now is the truth. Now things get more complicated. What is false becomes inextricably mixed up in what is true.

  8

  Your second stroke left you completely paralyzed. The mighty oak had been felled. Never again would you wound me with sarcasm. Your active part in my life was at an end. I was delivered from your tyranny and the ice pick of your gaze. Your voice, which once had made me tremble, was silenced.

  The first thing I did was sell your business. I had hated running it. I wanted to devote myself to Art, to satisfy the hunger gnawing deep inside of me, though I knew that by now the creative spark might have been extinguished.

  I decided to open my own laboratory, specializing in the analysis and restoration of artwork. It seemed like the right place to begin.

  Selling your business was complicated — and costly. After due diligence, and the government, lawyers, bankers, and accountants had taken their slices of the pie, I was left with enough money to place you in this clinic, and to equip my new lab.

  Choosing the equipment was such fun. I was like a child in a toy shop. I wanted the most sophisticated gadgets money could buy: X-ray diffractometers, to study the crystalline structure of paint samples; electronic microscopes and ultrasound radiography, to analyze the physiochemical characteristics of materials; chromatographs that use a flame ionizer; an infrared reflectometer and spectroscope; macrophotographic machines.

  I was fortunate enough to rent space next to a research laboratory with an ion accelerator and a nuclear ultrasound, replete with a measure chamber for detecting X rays, as well as a special lens system for magnetic focalization.

  I know all this impresses you, Papa. You used to take such pride in keeping your business at the cutting edge.

  My favorite machine of all was one I designed myself, by modifying an infrared X-ray spectrometer so that it could be put directly on an easel. This permitted me to perform experiments on the work, and make both qualitative and quantitative conclusions about the composition of the paint used by an artist. It holds the work in a vertical position, opposite a goniometer mounted onto a cart. That way I can minimize the size of the samples I need to take in order to study the pigments, strata by strata, on my microscope.

  I also love the thing because it puts me in direct contact with the work of art. With a hypodermic needle I extract core samples, consisting of layers of superimposed materials. Naturally I am always very careful to identify the different control points where I've done this. The pinpricks are nearly invisible, even on an enlarged color reproduction of the work under examination.

  Over time I compiled an enormous dossier, a veritable data bank with samples from the paintings of all the great masters, as well as some by moderns whose works have been imitated, such as van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and Derain.

  Really, Papa, it’s rather impressive. I undertook an ambitious program combining visual and radiographic examination. The goal was to determine with precision the methods used by each artist in his painting. The macrophotographic apparatus and indirect light allowed me to read the painting’s “handwriting,” so to speak. I mean by that the way the paint takes to the canvas, the direction of the brush strokes, the distribution and density of the paint. In other words, all the techniques and motions that make up an artist’s secret,
and supposedly inimitable, signature.

  I loved my work, Papa. I discovered every conceivable means of counterfeiting great artists, and I admired the sometimes prodigious gifts of certain forgers. Many of these copies were masterpieces in their own right.

  The most spectacular fraud that I ever came across was an allegorical landscape being attributed to Poussin. It was done along the same lines as Moses Saved from the Waters, the painting that launched the age of heroic landscape.

  The work was dense with symbols and imagery. The gentle waves of the Nile, which shimmers like a mirror, divide the space diagonally. On one riverbank are tombs, pyramids — the realm of ideas. On the other is the god of the river — the spiritual dimension. In the distance, an aqueduct — man’s attempt to control nature. The boat symbolizes the voyage of souls.

  I found that Poussin copy really quite moving. Whoever had imitated him had put a great deal of thought into it. He had known that Poussin was an artist of rare sophistication who had always studied his subject deeply before beginning work — which would happen only after he had mastered the visual language necessary to best express a particular scene.

  All the tests I did on the painting’s surface and on its pigments were favorable, but I’m afraid there were inconsistencies in the brush strokes and in the shading. Almost imperceptible, these inconsistencies, yet enough to reveal that the hand that had created this painting was not Poussin’s.

  After lengthy investigation, which I undertook personally, I succeeded in identifying the artist. He was Hungarian, and known for his nearly perfect imitations of contemporary and Impressionist works. He had made a mistake in trying to take on a classical painter.

  I didn’t turn him in, however. Do you know why, Papa? Because I thought that someday I might need his services.

  Besides, at the time I was in a very forgiving mood. I was with Peter, the architect. He was incredibly handsome, more handsome even than you, Papa. I had met him at Oxford one magical evening, when I came across him sitting in the moonlight in the Port Meadows, playing Ravel’s Bolero on his flute.