The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 38

I left Kate with heartfelt thanks, and with my notes on our sessions in my briefcase. She shook my hand warmly but also seemed relieved to watch me go. At the edge of downtown, I stopped at a coffee shop, but stayed in my car and got out my cell phone. It took only a little searching. The switchboard operator at Greenhill College sounded friendly, casual; there was some kind of rustling in the background, as if she might be eating lunch on the job. I asked for the Art Department and found an equally receptive secretary there. "I'm sorry to call out of the blue," I said. "I'm Dr. Andrew Marlow. I'm writing an article on one of your former faculty, Robert Oliver, for Art in America. That's right. Yes, I realize he's not there anymore--I've actually interviewed him in Washington, DC, already."

I could feel some sweat at my hairline, although until that moment I'd been completely calm; I wished I hadn't named a particular journal. The question was, did they know at the college that Robert had been arrested and institutionalized? I hoped that the incident in the National Gallery had been publicized mainly in the Washington papers. I thought of Robert stretched out like a fallen colossus on his bed, arms behind his head, legs crossed at the ankle; he was staring at the ceiling. You can talk to anybody you want.

"I'm passing through Greenhill today," I pressed on cheerfully, "and I know it's short notice, but I wonder if any of his colleagues might be able to sit down with me for a few minutes this afternoon or--or tomorrow morning--and comment on his work a bit. Yes. Thank you."

The secretary went away for a moment and came back with surprising rapidity--I pictured a big warehouse studio, loft-style, where she could stop anyone at an easel and ask a question. But that couldn't be correct. "Professor Liddle? Thank you very much. Please tell him that I'm sorry about the short notice and that I won't take too much of his time." I clicked the phone off, went in and got an iced coffee, and wiped my forehead with the paper napkin. I wondered if the young man at the counter knew from looking at me that I was a liar. I haven't been one in the past, I wanted to tell him. It crept up on me. No, that wasn't quite accurate. It happened recently, by accident. An accident named Robert Oliver.

The drive to the college was short, perhaps twenty minutes, but my suspense made it feel endless: a big arching sky above the mountains, highways planted with vast triangles of wildflowers, something pink and white that I didn't recognize, smooth asphalt. "You can even talk with Mary," Robert had said to me. It was easy to remember what he'd said because he'd said so little in front of me.

There were only three possibilities, I thought. The first was that his condition had deteriorated to the point of delusions since the time of his break with Kate, and he now thought a dead woman was still alive. I hadn't seen real evidence of this, however. Surely if he were plagued by delusions he wouldn't be able to maintain his silence in such a studied way. Another possibility was that he had been lying to Kate, elaborately, and Mary was not dead. Or-- but the third possibility wouldn't quite take shape in my mind, and I gave up on it around the time I had to start watching for the exit to the college.

The area wasn't my picture of backwoods Appalachia; perhaps you had to go farther off the interstate for that. Greenhill College was responsible for the stretch of neat country road I turned onto, a sign informed me, and--as if to prove it--there was a group of young people in orange vests picking up negligible amounts of trash in the ditch off the shoulder. The road wound into mountains and past a sign that I realized must have been the one Kate had described, weathered carving framed with gray fieldstones, and then I entered the drive to the college.

This wasn't the backwoods either, although some of the buildings near the entrance were mellowed old cabins, half hidden in stands of hemlock and rhododendron. A big official hall turned out to be the dining center; wooden dormitories and brick classroom buildings climbed the slope behind it, and beyond that in every direction were woods--I had never seen a campus so nestled in woodland. The trees on the grounds were even bigger than those at Goldengrove--patrician, wild--oaks scraping the blustery sky, a great sycamore, skyscraper spruces. Three students played Frisbee on the lawn in a neatly balanced triangle, and a golden-bearded professor was holding class on the piazza, all the students balancing their notebooks on their cross-legged laps. It was idyllic; I wanted to go back to school myself, start over. And Robert Oliver had lived for several years in this little paradise, ill and frequently depressed.

The Art Department proved to be a concrete box at one end of campus; I parked in front and sat looking at the gallery building next door to it, a long narrow cabin with a colorfully painted door. A board outside announced a student art show. I hadn't expected to be so nervous. What was I afraid of? I was there on an errand of mercy, essentially. If I wasn't being open about my profession or its relation to former painting instructor Robert Oliver, that was because I knew I'd get no information otherwise. Or less information, at least--perhaps far less.

The secretary turned out to be a student, or young enough to be one, wide-hipped in jeans and white T-shirt. I told her I was there for a meeting with Arnold Liddle, and she showed me along hallways to an office with a door; I got a glimpse of someone with his legs on his desk. They were scrawny legs in faded gray trousers, ending in sock feet. When we came in, the legs went down and the person on the phone hung up abruptly--it was a normal phone, the old kind, not wireless, and it took him a second or two to uncurl the spiral cord from his arm. Then he stood up and shook my hand. "Professor Liddle?" I asked.

"Just Arnold, please," he corrected me. The secretary was already gone. Arnold had a lively thin face and hair that receded to a ginger haze around the back of his shirt collar. His eyes were blue--large, pleasant--and his nose long and red. He smiled and motioned me to a seat in the corner, facing him, and put his feet back up. I had the urge to slip off my shoes, too, but didn't. The office was cluttered: there were postcards of gallery shows on a bulletin board, a big poster of a Jasper Johns over the desk, snapshots of a couple of skinny children balanced on their bicycles. Arnold settled more deeply into his chair as if he loved it there. "How can I help you?"

I folded my hands and tried to appear at ease. "Your receptionist may have told you that I'm doing some interviews about the work of Robert Oliver--she thought you might be able to help me." I watched Arnold carefully.

He seemed to consider this, falling silent, but not with any special awareness. Perhaps he hadn't heard or read about the incident at the National Gallery after all. I felt a small surge of relief.

"Certainly," he said at last. "Robert was--has been--a colleague of mine for about seven years or so, and I know his work pretty well, I think. I wouldn't say we were friends, exactly-- private kind of guy, you know--but I've always respected him." He didn't seem to know quite where to go after this, and it surprised me that he didn't ask for my credentials or why I wanted to know about Robert Oliver. I wondered what the secretary had told him--whatever it was, he seemed satisfied by it. Had she repeated the Art in America claim? What if the editor had been his art-school roommate?

"Robert did a lot of good work here, didn't he?" I hazarded.

"Well, yes," Arnold admitted. "He was prolific, kind of a superman, always painting. I have to say that I find his paintings a little derivative, but he's quite a draftsman--a great one, actually. He told me once he'd done abstract for a while in school and didn't like it--that didn't last long for him, I guess. While he was here he was working mainly on two or three different series. Let's see--one of them was about windows and doors, kind of a Bon-nard interior, but more realistic, you know. He showed a couple of those in the entry of our center here. One of them was still lifes, brilliant, if you like still lifes--fruit, flowers, goblets, kind of like Manet but always with something odd in them like an electrical outlet or a bottle of aspirin--I don't know what. Anomalies. Very nicely done. He had a big show of them here, and the Greenhill Art Museum picked up at least one. So did some other museums." Arnold was rummaging through a can on his desk; he pulled out a stub of pencil and began to twiddle it between two fingers. "He was working on a new series for a couple of years before he left, and toward the end he had a solo show of them here. That batch was, I'll be frank, bizarre. I saw him working on them in the studio. Mostly he worked at home, I guess."

I tried not to look too interested; by now I'd managed to get my notepad out and arrange myself in journalistic calm. "Was that series also traditionalist?"

"Oh yes, but weird. All the paintings showed basically the same scene--pretty gruesome scene--a young woman holding an older woman in her arms. The young woman is staring down at her in shock, and the older woman is--well, shot through the head, shot dead, you can tell. Kind of Victorian melodrama. Clothes and hair and incredible detail, with some soft brushwork and some realism, a mix. I don't know who he got to pose for those--maybe students, although I never saw anyone working with him on it. There's still one painting from that series at the gallery here--he gave it for the lobby when they renovated. I've got a piece there, too--all the current faculty were represented, which means they had to build a lot of pottery cases and all. Do you know Robert Oliver well?" he asked suddenly.

"I've interviewed him a couple of times in Washington," I said, alarmed. "I wouldn't say I know him that well, but I find him interesting."

"How is he?" Arnold was looking at me with more keenness than I'd previously noted; how had I missed the intelligence in his pale eyes? He was a disarming person, sort of loose and comfortable, with his skinny legs and arms splayed around the desk; you couldn't help liking him, and I feared him now, too.

"Well, I understand he's working on some new drawings these days."

"He won't be coming back, I suppose? I've never heard anything about his coming back."

"He didn't mention any plans to return to Greenhill," I admitted. "At least, we didn't discuss that, so maybe he's planning to -- I don't know. Do you think he liked teaching? How was he with his students?"

"Well, he ran off with a student, you know."

This time I was completely off my guard. "What?"

He seemed amused. "Didn't he tell you that? Well, she wasn't a student here. Apparently he met her when he was teaching at another college for a term, but we heard after he took a leave of absence all of a sudden that he had gone to live with her in Washington. I don't think he even mailed in an official resignation. I don't know what happened. He just didn't come back. Very bad for his teaching career. I've always wondered how he could afford to do that. He didn't seem like someone who had a lot of extra money stashed away, but I guess you never know. Maybe his paintings were selling well enough--that's a real possibility. Anyway, it was a shame. My wife knew his wife a little, and she said his wife never said a word about it. They had been living in town for a while already, not on campus. She's a lovely woman, his wife. I can't imagine what old Bob was thinking, but--you know. People go crazy."

I found it hard to follow this speech with any coherent comment, but Arnold didn't seem to notice. "Well, I wish Robert all the best anyway. He was a good guy at heart, or I always thought so. He's big-league, I guess, and probably this place couldn't hold him. That's my theory." He mentioned this without bitterness, as if the place that hadn't been able to hold Robert was as comfortable for him--Arnold -- as the chair he was settled in. He ruminated on his pencil stub and then began to draw something on a notepad. "What are you focusing on in your article?"

I collected myself. Should I ask Arnold that former student's name? I didn't dare. I thought again that she must have been his muse, the woman in the painting Kate so disliked. Mary? "Well, I'm concentrating on Oliver's paintings of women," I said.

Arnold would have snorted if he'd been that kind of person. "He did plenty of those, I guess. His show in Chicago was mainly women, or all the same woman, kind of curly, black-haired. I saw him painting some of those, too. The catalog's around here somewhere, if his wife didn't haul it away. I asked him once if that was someone he knew and he didn't answer, so I don't know who posed for those either. The same student, maybe, although she didn't live here, as I said. Or--I don't know. Odd bird, Robert-- he had a way of answering you and you realized only afterward that you hadn't gotten any info out of him."

"Did he seem--did you notice anything out of the ordinary with him before he left the college?"

Arnold let his sketch fall to the desk. "Out of the ordinary? No, I wouldn't say so, except for that last weird bunch of paintings--I shouldn't say that about a colleague's work, but I'm known for speaking my mind, and I'll be honest--they freaked me out a little. Robert has a great ability to paint in nineteenth-century styles--even if you don't like imitation, you have to admire his skill. Those still lifes were amazing, and I saw a kind of Impressionist landscape he did once, too. You would have thought it was the real thing. He told me once that only nature mattered, that he hated conceptual art--I don't do conceptual either, but I don't hate it--and I thought, Then why on earth paint all that heavy Victorian stuff? I don't know what that is, if not conceptual, these days--you're making a statement just by doing it. But I'm sure he told you all about it."

I saw that I wasn't going to get much more out of Arnold. He was an observer of paintings, not of people; he seemed to shimmer and fade in front of me, as smart and insubstantial and good-natured as Robert Oliver was deep and substantial and troubled. I would take sullen, subtle Oliver in a minute, I thought, if it were a matter of choosing friends.

"If you need some more notes, I can walk you over to see Bob's painting," Arnold was telling me. "That's about all of him you'll find here these days, I'm afraid. His wife came out one day and cleaned out his office and took all the paintings he'd left in the faculty studio. I wasn't here when she did it, but someone told me about it. Maybe he just didn't want to do it himself and those paintings would have stayed here forever--who knows? I don't think he was that close to anyone here. Come on--I need a walk anyway."

He unbent his legs, storklike, and we ambled out together. The sunlight beyond the front door was gorgeously bright, urgent; I wondered how any artist could stand that little concrete office, but perhaps it wasn't up to Arnold, and he seemed to have made the best of it.