past. About paintings that spoke to me. About ambiguous texts. About voices that came to me in my dreams.
As the new sun shined bright inside the kitchen window, the grass in the common glistened from the rain water that still clung to the blades. For a quick second or two I gave serious thought to heading into the spare bedroom I’d converted into a painting studio. If I could paint, I could forget about life.
But it had been a while since I’d painted anything. Aside from the occasional ten minutes here, ten minutes there, it had been almost ten years since I’d produced any art of consequence. That is to say, anything I considered finished and ready to go to market.
So why the hesitation?
While painting could indeed help me forget about things for a while, it could also have the reverse effect. It could actually provoke too much thought. There had been a time when the act of painting or drawing was my sole refuge. My art began for me almost immediately after Molly and I were ambushed in the woods all those years ago. Since we’d been sworn to secrecy, I had to do something to express the torment I physically felt inside my body, the same way Molly must have felt her cancer years later. Although each and every bit of wall space in my Brunswick Hills bedroom was covered with landscape watercolors and hand-study sketches, I couldn’t very well produce a large canvas with Whalen’s gaunt face plastered on it. My mother and father would surely take notice. What would they say? How would they react to such an awful, ugly face rendered with such bitter anger with every brush stroke?
But whether it happened consciously or not, I found myself pencil-sketching his face inside the blank margins of the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The reality of it is that in the fall of 1978, Molly and I had entered the seventh grade. Harper Lee’s story about little Scout, her righteous lawyer father, and the mysteriously frightening Boo Radley had been assigned to us by our English teacher, Mr. Hughto (Mr. Huge-Toe, as Molly dubbed him). While Molly dismissed the story as ‘sentimental slop’, it nevertheless hit home with me.
Why?
Because we had our own Boo Radley living in our midst. The mysterious Francis Scaramuzzi was a man/boy who lived on the neighboring farm and, like the scary Boo himself, never came out of his house. I also lived with the tenacious, gutsy, fearless Molly. In my mind, Molly and Lee’s adventurous and precocious character, Scout, was one and the same person. To Kill a Mockingbird did not only hit home with me, I felt as if Harper Lee had written the story for me and me alone.
I read the book for school, then read it again for myself, again and again. After the attacks, I never let the book leave my side. I began to secretly sketch inside the margins, and when I ran out of room, I sketched on little pieces of white notebook paper and stuffed them inside the novel’s printed pages. Whalen’s gaunt face was my sole subject. That cartoon face was both a product of reality and imagination. Had I really taken the time to get a good look at my attacker during those frightening minutes down inside the dirt floor basement of his house in the woods? I had been too afraid to look closely into his face; into his eyes. Yet I still knew what he looked like. And I could reproduce him detail for detail.
So what then possessed me to compulsively sketch the face? Do it for my eyes only?
For some unknown reason it gave me comfort to draw him; to be able to compartmentalize him like that; to be able to control him. Therein lay my refuge in a world where I had no one other than Molly to cry to and to cry with.
Taking my coffee with me, I opened the back door and stepped out onto the stone terrace. I breathed in the sweet smell of a rain-drenched morning that now warmed itself by the new sun. A bright, breezy, cheerful day loomed large. Even if it killed me.
For a brief moment I finally succeeded at forgetting about Whalen. I looked out across the large expanse of green grass, large oak trees, wrought iron benches, neatly trimmed paths, and the old four-story brick buildings, the green ivy running up the sides to the slate roofs. I was a student at Princeton, Yale or Harvard. Gazing up at the white wispy clouds, I felt like I had become a character in an Impressionistic Monet. Maybe Boats Leaving the Harbor or my favorite, Sunrise. I sipped the still too hot coffee and I felt my body shiver from the morning chill. Something Monet characters never did.
The white dreamy angels that floated above me… Every one of them bore the name Molly.
A second cup of coffee later, I was showered and dressed in my most comfortable Levis, black Nicona cowboy boots and black turtleneck sweater. Hair pinned back, I put on sunglasses to mask tired, wired eyes. Throwing my knapsack over my shoulder, I went to leave the apartment the usual way. Via the back door.
But Franny’s painting stopped me cold.
It tugged at me, pulled me in with its invisible tractor beam. I stared down at the many lines and patterns but even now the main focal point came in the form of the word ‘Listen’.
Was the painting Franny’s way of communicating with me? If it was his was of communicating, what exactly was he trying to tell me? Listen? Listen for what exactly?
Bending at the knees, I picked up the painting by its border, turning it around so that it faced the bookcase. Then I left the apartment for what I prayed would be an uneventful day at work.
Chapter 9
Somehow I knew that the day would be anything but uneventful.
Something was happening inside me. I wasn’t in any pain. I didn’t feel queasy. I didn’t have cancer, God willing. I just had this feeling that I was no longer guiding myself; that the events of my life were being guided by circumstances beyond my control. Maybe this explained why instead of passing by the Saint Pious Roman Catholic Church like I had day in and day out for the past ten years, I acted on impulse, turned into the empty lot, pulled up close to the church doors and killed the engine.
I couldn’t honestly admit to being a believer anymore. But for reasons even I could not understand I opened the door, stepped through the vestibule, walked past the wall-mounted Holy Water decanter, past the marble Baptismal font, past the Christian magazine rack, past the padlocked poor box.
Stepping into the big empty brick and wood church, I was hit with the organic smell of smoke and incense. At the same time, I became engulfed in a kind of cold that wasn’t freezing, but that somehow still managed to penetrate my skin and bones.
I slid into a pew toward the back. For a split second I was tempted to kneel, but instead I chose to sit. I stared out across the pew, focused on the dimly lit altar, the focal-point-crucified Jesus hanging from the far back wall. The early morning rays that poured in through narrow, parallel stained glass windows bathed Him in blood red. The place bore a stillness that disturbed me. It was a place not of comfort or sanctuary, but of ghosts. Molly’s ghost.
I saw the spot where her casket was rolled to a stop by the black clad funeral directors, the place where my broken down parents stood beside it looking old and so forlorn in their grief. I could almost see the premature death painted on their faces-deaths that touched them both within one year of Molly’s. I saw the bone-colored casket like it was still there; still in place. I saw the friends and extended family who came to pay their respects. I heard the organ music and I saw the heavy-set, white-robed priest, beads of sweat dripping from his forehead as he blessed the metal casket with holy water.
I saw it all like it happened only moments ago.
For me, it had.
But that’s when I began to feel like I was being watched. By who or what I could not say. I begin to perspire, the droplets running down the length of my spine.
Paranoia took over. Paranoia and claustrophobia. I became convinced the big wood doors were about to slam shut on me. I had to get out of that pew, get out of that church-that house of ghosts. Standing, I slid out of the pew, but not without tripping on the kneeler. I fell down onto the carpeted marble. Fell hard onto my chest. But I didn’t feel any pain as I got back up on my feet, bolted for the vestibule, through the wood doors and out into the parking lot.
Standing by the open car door, I inhaled long, slow breaths and exhaled them.
What was happening to me?
Somehow I knew it was a question better left unanswered.
