The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 42

Before dawn, I loaded the car and daydreamed my way up into Virginia, along highways whose embankments had gotten even greener since my trip down. It was a softly chill day, rain falling for a few minutes and then ceasing, falling and ceasing, and I began to long for home. I went straight to my one late appointment at Dupont Circle. The patient talked; out of long habit, I asked the right questions, I listened, I adjusted a prescription, I let him go, confident in my decisions.

When I reached my apartment in the dark, I unpacked quickly, heated a can of soup. After the Hadleys' dreary cottage--I could admit it now; I would have torn the place down in a minute and put up something with twice as many windows--my rooms were pristine, welcoming, the lamps perfectly adjusted on each painting, the linen curtains smooth from last month's dry cleaning. The place smelled of mineral spirits and oil paint, something I don't usually notice unless I've been away for a few days, and of the narcissus blooming in the kitchen; it had burst out while I was gone, and I watered it gratefully--careful, however, not to overwater. I went to my father's old set of encyclopedias and put my hand on one spine, then stopped myself. There would be time; I took a hot shower instead, turned out the lights, and went to bed.

The next day was busy: my staff at Goldengrove needed me more than ever because I'd been away; some of my patients had not done as well as I'd hoped and the nurses seemed cranky; my desk was covered with paperwork. I managed in the first few hours to stop by Robert Oliver's room. Robert was sitting in a folding chair at the edge of the counter that served as a desk and supply shelf, sketching. His letters lay next to him, arranged in two piles; I wondered how he'd divided them. He closed his sketchbook when I came in and turned to look at me. I took this as a good sign; sometimes he ignored my presence altogether whether he was working or not, and he could keep this up for disconcertingly long periods. His expression was weary and raw, and his eyes shifted from his recognition of my face to a contemplation of my clothes.

I wondered, for perhaps the hundredth time, if his silence was allowing me to underestimate the degree to which his illness currently affected him; possibly it was much more serious than I could judge by observing him, however closely. I also wondered if he could possibly have guessed where I'd been, and I considered settling down in the big chair and asking him to clean his brush and sit on the bed opposite me, to listen while I gave him news of his ex-wife. I could say, I know that when you first kissed her, you lifted her off the floor. I could say, There are still cardinals at your bird feeder, and the mountain laurel is beginning to bloom. I could tell him, I know even better now that you are a genius. Or I could ask, What does "etretat" mean to you?

"How are you, Robert?" I stayed in the doorway.

He turned back to his drawing.

"Fine. Well, I'm off to see some other folks." Why had I used that word? I'd never liked it. I made a quick scan of the room. Nothing seemed different, dangerous, or disturbed. I wished him good sketching, pointing out that the day promised to be sunny, and left him with as genuine a smile as I could manage, although he wasn't looking.

I fought my way through rounds until the end of the day and stayed late to catch up at my desk. When the day staff was gone and dinner had already been served to the patients and was being cleared away, I shut my office door and locked it, then sat down at the computer.

And saw what I'd begun to remember. It was a coastal town in Normandy, in an area much painted during the nineteenth century, particularly by Eugene Boudin and his restless young protege, Claude Monet. I found the familiar images--Monet's tremendous rough cliffs, the famous arch of rock on the beach. But etretat had apparently attracted other painters--lots of them, including Olivier Vignot and even Gilbert Thomas of the self-portrait with coins in the National Gallery; they had both painted that coastline. Almost every painter who could afford to get on one of the new northern railway lines had gone out and had a crack at etretat, it seemed--the masters and the minor ones, the weekend painters and the society watercolorists. Monet's cliffs rose above all the others in the history of paintings of etretat, but he'd been part of a tradition.

I found a recent photograph of the town; the great arch looked as it had in the Impressionists' day. There were still wide beaches with boats pulled up and overturned on them, cliffs green on top with grass, little streets lined with elegant old hotels and houses, many of which might have been there when Monet was painting a few yards away. None of this seemed in any way related to the scrawl on Robert Oliver's wall, except perhaps through his personal library of works on France, where he would surely have come across the name of the town and some depictions of its dramatic setting. Had he been there himself, to experience "joy"? Perhaps on the trip to France that Kate had mentioned? I wondered again if he might be mildly delusional. etretat was a dead end, a beautiful one, the cliff on my screen arching down toward the Channel, disappearing into the water. Monet had painted an astonishing number of views of it, and Robert, unless I'd missed something, had painted none.

The next day was Saturday, and I took a run in the morning, just to the National Zoo and back, thinking about my glimpse of those mountains around Greenhill. Leaning against the gates, stretching my tight hamstrings, I thought for the first time that I might never be able to make Robert well. And how would I know when to stop trying?