Four Souls Read Free Page B

later testimony, as in Fleur’s mind the bed was incorrectly situated.
     
    A SCENE , days later. I am posing for my sister, who is painting me as Nebuchadnezzar. To oblige her talent I have taken on hosts of mythological disguises over the years, and her studio is filled with my representation and figure in classical and biblical settings. She is working on a large-scale triptych called Knowledge and Godlessness , in which my face appears as almost every scowling pagan from Marx to Salomé, “occluded by veils.” Mother was Semiramus. I am desperate to scratch my chin.
    “I must see to this new laundry woman.” My fingers steal beneath the gray horsehair beard of the troubled hesiarch.
    “Your crown! You’ve tipped it! I wanted it just so,” scolds Placide. She wears her dark blond hair smooth to the head, in a simple cut, so as not to detract from what Katherine Hammond called “the purity of brow.” It was thirteen years ago, at Miss Hammond’s school, that Placide first began to realize her vocation. Painting china plates was how it started. Now, each Wednesday and Friday at noon, the painting teacher comes from the university and the two seclude themselves for hours, engrossed in an intense exploration of form and color.
    “I’m tired. I have so much to do.”
    “Oh well, then .” Placide bites back on her words, as if to tell me that I have once again shown my true philistine stripe, my low valuation of her talent. She thinks of very little other than the unfolding of this fascinating side of herself, this vibrational urge, as she calls it. Brother-in-law, who makes no secret of his opinions, who called Miss Hammond’s vital lessons on deportment “simpering instructions,” and referred to my mother’s discriminations and opinions as “one long swoon of platitudes,” makes short shrift of the painting teacher and the efforts of Placide. I have tried to make up for his lack of kindness by remaining still for hours, sometimes in the most excruciating attitudes, but nothing quite replaces a husband’s approval.
    “Go, go,” says Placide, weary and absorbed.
    I pull off the beard, put the paste crown in its hatbox, and am just about to untie brother-in-law’s quilted satin smoking jacket when I hear a sort of low howling begin, muffled and irregular. It issues from the south side of the house, the glass porch where brother-in-law sits on fine mornings and takes the strengthening light. I am up in a flash, racing downstairs for the opium bottle. My sister’s husband has little physical reserve left these days, and I must dole the medicine out according to the doctor’s orders. Fantan would simply pour the stuff down his throat and keep him stupefied, as in fact the poor man wishes. I am more judicious. At these times, all through my brother-in-law’s wasted limbs a kind of electrical fury proceeds, each nerve connected and lit up, each muscle pinched and bound. His suffering is a mystery, positively terrible to watch. He flails and runs at the mouth. He loses consciousness, whimpers like a baby or whines, and by the crablike force of his convulsed limbs makes his way under furniture, hides where he can. We believe he suffers from a neuralgia, perhaps the hitherto undetected result of deadly chlorine gas, worsening over the months.
    I am, to my mind, adept at dealing with brother-in-law though he always seems to hate the fact that I’ve seen him and touched him in his state rather than allowing Fantan to administer the medicine. There is no doubt he’ll fly into a rage at me, later, but I’ve locked the medicine away in a drawer just to be sure it isn’t given on the sly. In that, my mother failed. She should have made certain long ago that brother-in-law’s deterioration was monitored—not by that strange and sorry scarecrow, but by herself. Since I’ve taken over brother-in-law’s treatment, Fantan says he’s worse, but I say that’s the illusive quality of progress. Things always seem