The Ivory and the Horn

'It's okay,' Jilly said.

Neither Maisie nor Tommy were dressed well— too busy worrying about when they were going to eat and keeping a roof over their heads to worry about buying new clothes as well, she decided. It must be especially tough making do when you had a big brother like that with special needs. The least Jilly thought she could do was entertain Tommy with a story.

'Tommy wanted to know about my pochade box,' she said. 'I can sit with him over on the steps there if you've got some stuff you want to do.'

But Maisie's gaze had gone to the box. 'Pochade,' she said. 'That's French for 'rapid sketch,' isn't it?'

Jilly nodded trying to hide her surprise. Not many of her artist friends had known that— she'd had to provide the definition.

'I read a lot,' Maisie explained.

Something clicked in Jilly's mind then, and she realized that she'd heard about Maisie Flood and her extended family of foundlings before.

'You know Angel, don't you?' she asked.

Maisie nodded. 'Yeah, she's got me back into school and stuff.'

'Welcome to the club,' Jilly said. 'I'm another one of her successes.'

'Really?'

'Though I guess my time goes back further than yours.'

'What about the story?' Tommy asked.

'There's two things Tommy loves,' Maisie told Jilly. 'Pictures and stories. If you can tell a story as well as you paint, you'll have a friend for life.'

'Well, I'd probably argue about the criteria involved,' Jilly said, 'but I love making new friends.'

She led the way over to the cathedral's steps, carrying the pochade box as Tommy brought along her stool and the drying box, which held the two paintings she'd done this morning along with a number of unused gessoed panels she'd prepared for other paintings. The dogs followed in what seemed like an undulating wave of fur, settling themselves around and upon Tommy, Maisie and the steps as though they were big, floppy beanbag toys instead of real dogs.

'I really don't mind looking after Tommy if you've got some things to do,' Jilly said.

Maisie shook her head. 'Are you kidding? Where do you think he got his love for stories from?'

'It's not that great a story— doesn't really have much of a beginning or an end. It's just sort of weird.'

'You're stalling.'

Jilly laughed. 'Only partly. Mostly what I'm doing is offering up the apologia beforehand so that you don't ask for your money back when I'm done.'

'We don't have any money to give you,' Tommy said, looking disappointed, as though he thought that now they weren't going to get the story.

'It's just an expression,' Maisie assured him. 'Like letting the cat out of the bag— remember?' She turned to Jilly. 'Tommy tends to take things pretty literally.'

'I'll keep that in mind,' Jilly said.

5

— What do you mean by oblivion?

— You have to be remembered. People have to think about you. If they don't, you just disappear. That's what happens to all those people who vanish mysteriously. Not enough people were thinking about them and eventually they faded away. They were simply forgotten, remembered only when they disappeared— BECAUSE they disappeared— and then it was too late, of course. You can't bring back what doesn't exist anymore.

— Too late for those of us left behind, maybe, but you still exist somewhere, or I wouldn't be talking to you, would I?

— Sometimes I can't decide if I am actually dead— or alive, but somehow become invisible. Unheard, unseen, unable to taste or feel...

— I can't see you, but I can hear you.

— Perhaps you are imagining my voice. Perhaps you are dreaming.

— I think I'd know if I was asleep or not. Besides, I never have dreams this interesting.

— I'm happy to realize I can still be amusing.

— I'm sorry. I don't mean to trivialize your situation. Is there anything I can do to help you?

— You could riddle me this: Is it still existence, when one resides in limbo?

6

'Okay,' Jilly said. 'I guess it started when Geordie got back from his last trip to England. I wasn't expecting him back for another—'

'Who's Geordie?' Tommy wanted to know.

Maisie sighed. 'Tommy tends to interrupt,' she apologized. 'He doesn't mean to be rude.'

'That's all right. It's ruder to just expect everybody to know who you're talking about, without stopping to explain. Geordie's a friend of mine,' she added, turning to Tommy. 'He plays the fiddle and that summer— I guess it was in the mid-seventies— he went on a busking vacation of the British Isles.'

'What's—'

'Busking is when you play music on the street and hope people will give you money because they like what they're hearing.'

'We've seen people doing that, haven't we, Maisie?'

'We sure have.'

'Is Geordie good?' Tommy wanted to know.

'Very good,' Jilly assured him. 'The next time he's playing somewhere, I'll take you to see him.' She caught Maisie shaking her head, and realized why. 'It's okay,' she said. 'I wouldn't make the promise unless I was going to keep it.'

'It's just that people mean well...'

'You'll have to trust me on this,' Jilly said. Maisie shrugged noncommittally, which was about as much as you could expect, Jilly thought, given how they'd only just met. 'Anyway,' she went on, 'I'm working in my studio one morning and right out of nowhere, Geordie shows up, weeks before I thought I'd be seeing him. Seems he got caught gigging with an Irish band in a London club, except he didn't have a work permit, so he got the boot.'

'They made him come back home,' Maisie explained to Tommy before he could ask.

'I never got the boot until Maisie found me,' Tommy said. 'Before that I never had a home.'

'I know what you mean,' Jilly said. 'It's not fun, is it?'

Tommy shook his head. 'But we have fun now.'

'So did Geordie bring you the box back from England?' Maisie asked.

Jilly nodded. 'He got it at something called a car boot sale— it's like a flea market, except it's out in a field somewhere and everybody just sells stuff out of the trunks of their cars'

'Why do they call car trunks 'boots'?' Maisie wondered.

'I don't know. Why do we call chips French fries and crisps 'chips'? Anyway, I thought it was very sweet of him to get it for me. It was pretty grungy, with oil paint caked all over the insides and the tray you use for a palette was broken in two, but I'd never seen anything like it before. If I closed my eyes I could almost picture the turn- of-the-century artist who'd owned it, out somewhere in the English countryside painting en plein— outside, on location as opposed to in the studio. The pochade box is like a little studio, really, only in miniature.'

She opened the box as she spoke and showed Tommy how it worked and how everything could be stowed away in it once you were done painting.

'After Geordie left that night, I cleaned it up. Scraped away all the dried paint, glued the palette tray back together again and sanded it down so I could start off fresh with my own palette. It took me most of the day before I had it all fixed up— not quite new, but certainly serviceable. I loaded it up with some tubes of paint, rags and a few old brushes cut down to fit inside, and I was ready to head out myself, just the way I imagined its original owner had. But somehow I never did. I set it upon a windowsill, and except for taking it out into the country a few times, it's been sitting there collecting dust for years. Until I started using it again a couple of weeks