The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 43

The Wednesday morning after my run to the zoo, there was a letter with a Greenhill return address in the upper corner of the envelope waiting for me at Goldengrove. The handwriting was neat, feminine, organized--Kate. I went into my office without stopping to see Robert or any other patients first, shut the door, and took out my letter opener, which had been a gift from my mother on my graduation from college; it often occurred to me that I shouldn't keep such a treasure in my rather public office, but I liked to have it near me. The letter was one page and, unlike the address on the envelope, typed.

Dear Dr. Marlow:

I hope this finds you well. Thank you for your visit to Greenhill. If I was of any assistance to you or (indirectly) to Robert, I'm glad. I don't feel I can continue our communication much, and I'm sure you'll understand. I valued our meeting and am still thinking about it, and I believe that if anyone can help Robert, it will be someone like you.

There was one thing I did not give you while you were here, partly for personal reasons, and partly because I didn't know if it would be ethical, but I've decided I do want you to have it. It's the last name of the woman who wrote Robert the letters I told you about. I didn't tell you then that one of them was written on a piece of stationery, and it had her full name at the top. She was a painter, too, as I mentioned to you, and her name was Mary R. Bertison. This is still a very painful topic for me, and I wasn't sure I wanted to share this detail with you, or f it might even be wrong for me to do so. But if you are going to seriously try to help him, I feel I have to give you her name. Perhaps you will be able to find out something about who she was, although I'm not sure exactly how that could be useful.

I wish you all the best in your work, and especially in your efforts to help Robert.

Yours truly,

Kate Oliver

It was a generous, upright, irritable, awkward, kind letter; I could hear in every line Kate's determination, her decision to do what she thought was right. She would have been sitting at her table in the upstairs library, maybe in the early morning, typing her way stubbornly through her pain, sealing the letter before she could change her mind, making tea in the kitchen afterward, affixing the stamp. She would have been grieved by her own exertions on Robert's behalf, and yet satisfied with herself--I could see her in neat-fitting top and jeans, sparkling jewels in her ears, setting the letter on a tray by the front door, going to wake the children, saving her smile for them. I felt a sudden pang of loss.

But the letter was the same--the closed door I'd observed before, even if it opened another one, and I had to respect her wishes. I typed a brief response, grateful and professional, and sealed it in an envelope for my staff to mail. Kate had offered me no e-mail address, nor had she used the one on the card I'd handed her in Greenhill; apparently she wanted only this official, slower communication between us, an actual missive crossing the country on an anonymous tide of correspondence. All of it sealed. It was what we might have done in the nineteenth century, I thought, this polite, secret exchange on paper, conversation at a remove. I put Kate's letter away in my personal files rather than in Robert's chart.

The rest was surprisingly easy, not a detective story at all. Mary R. Bertison lived in the DC limits, and her full name was listed, bold and clear, in the phone book, which said she resided on 3rd Street, Northeast. In other words, as I'd suspected, she was quite possibly alive. It was strange to me to see this artifact of silent

Robert Oliver's life lying out in the open. There could, I supposed, be more than one woman with this name in the city, but I doubted it. After lunch I phoned the number from my desk, my door shut once more against other eyes and ears. Mary Bertison might, I thought, be at home, since she was a painter; on the other hand, if she was a painter she probably had a day job, as I did--in my case, the little matter of my being a licensed doctor of medicine fifty-five hours a week. Her line rang five or six times. My hope diminished with each ring--I wanted to catch her by surprise-- and an answering machine clicked on. "You have reached Mary Bertison at--," a female voice said firmly. The voice was a pleasant one, made a little harsh, perhaps, by the necessity of recording a phone message, but firm on the ear, an educated alto.

It occurred to me now that she might actually respond better to a courteous message than to a startling live call, and it would give her time to think over my request. "Hello, Ms. Bertison. This is Dr. Andrew Marlow--I'm an attending psychiatrist at Goldengrove Residential Center in Rockville. I'm currently working with a patient who I understand is a friend of yours, a painter, and I wondered if you might be willing to give us a little assistance."

That careful "us"--it made me flinch in spite of myself. This was hardly a team project. And the message itself was enough to worry her, if she still considered him a close friend, at the least. But if he'd lived with her, or come to Washington to be with her, as Kate suspected, why on earth hadn't she turned up at Goldengrove herself by now? On the other hand, the papers hadn't reported his being placed in psychiatric care. "You can call me here at the center most weekdays, and I will get back to you as soon as possible. The number is--" I gave it clearly, added my pager information, and hung up.

Then I went to see Robert, feeling in spite of myself as if I had visible blood on my hands. Kate hadn't told me not to mention Mary

Bertison to him, but when I reached his room I was still thinking about whether or not to do this. I had called someone who might not otherwise ever have learned that Robert was in psychiatric care. You can even talk with Mary, he had told me contemptuously on his first day at Goldengrove. He had said nothing more, however, and there must be twenty million Marys in the United States. He might remember exactly what he'd said. But would I have to explain where I'd gotten her last name?

I knocked and called in to him, although his door was slightly open. Robert was painting, standing calmly at the easel with his brush raised and his great shoulders relaxed and natural; I wondered for a moment if he'd experienced some recovery over the last few days. Did he really need to be here just because he wouldn't speak? Then he looked up with a frown, and I saw the red in his eyes, the stark misery that came over his face at the sight of me.

I sat down in the armchair and spoke before I could lose my nerve. "Robert, why don't you simply tell me about it?"

It came out sounding more like frustration than I'd intended. He seemed startled, to my sneaking pleasure--at least I'd gotten a response. But I was less pleased to see a faint smile of what I took to be triumph, conquest, touch his lips, as if my question proved he'd flushed me out again.

In fact, that made me mad as hell after a moment, and perhaps precipitated my decision. "You could tell me, for example, about Mary Bertison. Have you thought about getting in touch with her? Or, a better question--why hasn't she been here to see you?"

He started forward, raising his hand with the brush in it before controlling himself again. His eyes were huge, full of that choked intelligence I'd seen in them the day we'd met, before he'd learned to veil it in my presence. But he could not respond without losing at his own game, and he managed to say nothing. I felt a twinge of pity; he'd painted himself into this corner, and now he had to sit there. If he spoke even of his rage at me, or at the world, or possibly at Mary Bertison--or asked me how I knew about her--he would give up the only piece of privacy and power he'd kept for himself: the right to remain silent in the face of his torment. "All right," I said--gently, I hoped. Yes, I was sorry for him, but I knew he would take an extra advantage now as well; he would have ample time in which to ponder and guess at my activities, the possible sources of my knowledge of Mary Bertison's last name. I considered assuring him that I would let him know myself, if and when I found his particular Mary, and what, if anything, she communicated to me.

But I had already given away so much that I decided to keep my own counsel again; if he could, so could I. I sat with him in silence another five minutes, while he fiddled with the brush in his big hand and stared at the canvas. Finally, I got up. I turned at the door for a second, almost repenting; his rumpled head was bent, his eyes on the floor, and his misery went through me in a wave. It followed me, in fact, down the hall and to the rooms of my other, more ordinary (I confess that was my feeling, although it's not a word I like to apply to any case) patients with their more ordinary derangements.

I had patients to see all afternoon, but most of them were reasonably stable, and I drove home with a feeling of satisfaction, almost contentment. The haze over Rock Creek Parkway was golden, and the water glinted in its bed as I took each curve. It seemed to me that a painting I'd been working at all week ought to be set aside for a while; it was a portrait from a photograph of my father, and the nose and mouth simply weren't right, but perhaps if I worked on something else for a few days I could come back to it with more success. I had some tomatoes--not much good for eating at this season, but sufficiently luminous--that wouldn't spoil for a week. If I set them in the window of my studio, they might constitute a kind of updated Bonnard, or--if I wanted to be less self-denigrating about it--a new Marlow. The light was the problem, but I could catch a little evening sunshine after work now that the days were longer, and if I could muster the energy I might get up even earlier and start a morning canvas as well.

I was already thinking about colors and the placement of the tomatoes, so that I hardly remembered swinging my car into the garage, a dank space under my apartment building whose rent costs nearly half the apartment's. Every now and then I wished for another job, one I didn't have to drive to regularly alongside all of bad-tempered suburban DC, so that I could give up my car. But how could I leave Goldengrove? And the idea of sitting in the office at Dupont Circle full-time with patients well enough to walk in there for counsel did not appeal to me.

My mind was full of these things--my still life, the sunset glancing off the trickle of Rock Creek, the tempers of my fellow drivers--and my hands were occupied fishing out my keys; I took, as always, the stairs, for extra exercise. I didn't see her until I was nearly at my own door. She stood leaning against the wall as if she'd been there awhile, relaxed and yet impatient, her arms folded, her boots braced. As I remembered, she wore jeans and a long white shirt, this time with a dark blazer over them, her hair mahogany in the bad lighting of the hall. I was so astonished that I stopped "in my tracks"; I knew then, and would know ever after, what that phrase really meant.

"You," I said, but it did not begin to undo my confusion. She was without a doubt the girl from the museum, the one who had smiled conspiratorially at me in front of the Manet still life at the National Gallery, the one who had studied the Gilbert Thomas Leda with attention and smiled at me again on the sidewalk. I had thought of her perhaps once, perhaps twice, and then forgotten about her. Where had she come from? It was as if she lived in a different realm, like a fairy or an angel, and had reappeared without any passage of time, without human explanations.

She stood straight and put out her hand. "Dr. Marlow?"