Sarah's Window (2 page)

It was her grandfather's accident up at Thut's quarry that had changed the shape of their lives. Just one of those freak things nobody would ever figure out, because Jack Bryden had shot rock all his life, and nobody shot rock better than him. When the guys would reminisce about the old days, they'd talk about plug 'n feather work and how Jack always knew how tight to drive the wedge by the sound of the ring, and how he'd squat under the hot sun pouring black powder into his hand, measuring it with his hawk eye so he got it just right. He always kept a Pall Mall dangling from his lips to light the fuse. Didn't inhale much. Didn't really like to smoke, although he kept the habit even after the accident.

Jack was drilling holes that cold October afternoon when Sarah was sitting in her art history class up at the University of Kansas. He had just stepped up to grease the spinning bit when he felt something swing low overhead, heard the soughing of wings and looked up to see a peregrine falcon pass so low he could see the titmouse in its claws. He'd been so excited he just stood there with a big grin on his face, shaking his head and wishing Sarah was there to see it.

What had probably happened was he'd stood for too long with his wrinkled neck craned upward in awe, and he'd tottered just a shade. Maybe that pesky wind had unsteadied him, and the drill snatched hold of his old work pants and grabbed him and jerked him off his feet, just set its claws into him like that raptor and spun him through the air. It was a terrible sound to hear, and the closest man, about two hundred feet away down at the bottom of the overhang, never forgot it, heard it in his dreams the rest of his life. He was a young trucker backed up to the rock crusher, waiting in line to fill his Dumpster. When he heard the old man's blood-chilling screams, he threw open the truck door so hard it bounced off its hinges, and then he fought his way up the cliff in a white panic. He said later he couldn't even feel his knees underneath him and he was afraid he wasn't moving because it all felt like a long dreamwalk. He had to claw his way up the last few feet of the face of that cliff and then he was racing toward the control box. When he got the drill stopped, there was an awful, paralyzing silence, and the young trucker looked up into the sky because he couldn't bear to look down. Then, suddenly, men appeared from everywhere, and the foreman was already on his cell phone and they were shouting at one another as they tried to disengage Jack's mangled leg from the drill. But the young trucker still stared up at the sky. His eyes were swimming with tears and he didn't dare look down because he knew then that what he thought were clumps of mud clinging to his shirt was the old man's flesh.

Sarah had nearly cut the class that afternoon, a tedious and uninspired survey course in art history taught by a mediocre professor, but on this day there was a guest lecturer, a Dr. Ernst Sebestyen, a Hungarian scholar of considerable renown. She had arrived late and found the auditorium full, and so she proceeded toward the front, finally squeezing into a seat near the center of the second row, directly below a wide motion-picture screen erected on the stage.

No sooner had she dug out a pencil and flipped open her notebook than the auditorium lights dimmed and an iron-tall figure in black strode slowly onto the stage. Without an introduction he advanced the first slide.

It was an image that stole her heart: a madonna and child with eyes like wounds, deep and dark and wide with suffering. It was the work of a little-known painter named Mikhail Vrubel, introduced by Dr. Sebestyen as a Russian Cézanne. The voice on the stage was captivating, but it was Vrubel who spoke to her that day. There were his scenes of Portofino in Italy, and
a
nineteenth-century Spanish woman in gray satin that rustled in the silence of the auditorium. There was a bejeweled houri-eyed little girl swathed in red silks with a full-blown pink rose in her hand, a child with eyes so distant she reminded Sarah of herself.

And then there was the
Demon Seated,
a
shirtless young man with long hair curled behind his ears,
a
painting so modern, breathing such life, that she found herself instantly infatuated with the image, found herself drawn in by the tension in his sculpted jaw and muscled shoulders and bare back, and the tormented look on his beautiful face.

Sarah had to hurry to catch up with the professor after class. The elevator was full and so she sprinted up three flights of stairs to the art history department. She found him down the hallway where a group of fawning graduate students surrounded him, and she waited, her wide eyes fixed on him, listening while they formalized plans to reserve a table at dinner where he would be their guest of honor. Finally, he detached himself and stepped into an office and closed the door.

Sarah knocked but did not wait for a reply. His head shot up, a startled look on his face when she closed the door behind her. She nodded a breathy "hello" and shed her heavy bag of books onto a chair. He fixed her with his dark eyes.

"Yes?" he asked. The voice tried, unsuccessfully, to hide his impatience.

But she did not know what to say to him, did not even know why she was there. Her shyness abruptly closed her down, the way it so often did.

"You were looking for Dr. Lungstrom, perhaps?"

She shook her head. For a second Dr. Sebestyen thought he had seen her somewhere before. But no, it was only that the face held such promise, such appeal.

"Was there something you wanted?" he probed, a little more gently.

"I'm sorry. I hope I'm not intruding."

"Well, that's a beginning at least." His mouth softened a little, and his shoulders, once rigid and square, relaxed.

"I just came from your lecture...." She hesitated.

"Yes? And?"

"I was very moved by what I saw."

"Ah!" he answered in a booming voice, and his heavy eyebrows arched steeply. "You were moved!"

Sarah sensed he was mocking her. "I'm sorry." She reached for her book bag. "I shouldn't have come."

Her fair face seemed so earnest that he laughed.

"Wait," he said, waving her back. "Tell me. How were you moved? What did you see?"

She did not answer, but stood gripping the heavy bag with both hands, studying him warily.

"This isn't a test." He laughed a little gruffly. "There is no right answer. But I'd like to hear what you felt. Not what you heard me say. I want to know what
you
felt." He motioned to the chair next to his desk. "Please, sit down."

Sarah sat down on the edge of the chair, the bag between her feet. She looked down at her hands, and at that moment there flashed before her eyes the hands of the
Demon Seated,
and her nervousness faded.

"I felt..." She hesitated, then continued very softly, speaking barely above a whisper. "I felt as if I had seen into the depths of another human being. That I knew this man in the only way he really wished to be known." She paused again, her eyes averted. "I felt like he'd done something I'd always wanted to achieve, but didn't know how to go about it." She looked up. "He found a way to voyage out of this world, didn't he?" She said this with complete assurance, and her eyes hung on his with intensity and directness.

"I think he must have been profoundly lonely," she went on. "And hungry. I mean spiritually." She reflected again, and then said quietly and deliberately, "It's as if he were able to take up paint and canvas and without any inhibition whatsoever, without any shame, cast his soul."

A long silence followed, and she looked down selfconsciously.

When he finally spoke, Dr. Sebestyen's voice was low and gentle. "Are you an artist yourself?"

"I paint a little. But just watercolors. Landscapes. My home." She was surprised that she could say these things to him. Behind his gruffness, she sensed a warmth.

"Are you any good?"

"I have talent," she answered matter-of-factly. She paused, then fixed him with a steady, unflinching eye. "But I'll never be great."

"Ah, but perhaps your greatness lies in your sentience. Your feeling. It is a gift, you know, to see and to be moved. What would Vrubel and his kind do without people such as yourself? Who would see them?"

She drew a great breath then, as one might after a confession, then rose and heaved her bag up on her shoulder.

"Please, sit back down," he urged.

"I can't. I have another class and I'm late already."

"Wait, just a moment."

He swept a large hand through his straight black hair,
a
gesture Sarah found strangely appealing. "If you're free this evening, there's
a
group of graduate students coming out to dinner. Nothing formal. The pizza place down on Massachusetts Street."

"I'm only a sophomore."

"That's not important. You'll be my guest. You know the place?"

"Yes."

"Can you come?"

Once again she hesitated, withdrew into shyness.

He added in a reassuring tone, "You'll sit next to me." Then he leaned forward in his chair, mocking her lightly. "And you won't have to talk. You can just listen. And watch us all."

She smiled. "All right."

"So you will be there."

"Yes."

"What is your name?"

"Sarah Bryden."

He rose with
a
jubilant, almost childish satisfaction on his face, and gave a stiff little bow, a gesture brought from the Europe of his childhood that resurfaced from time to time.

"Good," he said, and held out his hand and she shook it. "See you tonight, Miss Bryden," and then he turned abruptly away and began to remove his jacket.

Sarah wanted to skip, to dance, to fly all the way back to her dorm, but she contented herself with a brisk walk. Her future unfolded before her as she sped down the lane. She would learn Russian, travel to the great wide sweeps of the Russian steppes, journey into the heart of a great continent to see for herself this Vrubel's work. She would write monographs on him, bring his work to the attention of Western scholars and make him known. Not just Vrubel, but others, all kinds of great artists she would discover because she had this gift for seeing.

It never came to pass.

Even as she had sat in the auditorium reeling from the impact of the
Demon Seated,
her destiny was being redrawn by the flight of a peregrine falcon over the autumn-brown sweep of the Flint Hills.

As Ruth Bryden watched her granddaughter enter the hospital room and hurry to her grandfather's bedside, she felt a strange sense of vindication surge through her. She had known so much hardship and disappointment in her life that she was comfortable with nothing else. Good fortune seemed to her a precarious and fearful thing; any second she could be plummeted down the cliff, swept away in a rushing avalanche of unforeseen disasters. "You see, Sarah, I knew something like this would happen," she might have said. "This is my lot." Her eyes, constant wells of unhappiness, said as much.

She tapped Sarah on the shoulder and motioned her into the corridor. Her old beige purse, discolored by the sweat of her palms, dangled from her elbow, and she poked around in it until she found a Kleenex and unfolded it with trembling hands.

"They had to cut off part of his leg," she said, and her voice rose in a high-pitched whimper. She bent her head, and her shoulders heaved with sobs. She blew her nose, and her tired, pained eyes darted this way and that as she spoke. "His jacket tore... it was an old thing... you know the one." She blotted her eyes, but the tears kept flooding down her cheeks. "But his pants were those new ones," she spluttered, "and they just... wouldn't... it just chewed him up."

Sarah had been listening in heart-sickened silence. She reached for her grandmother and took the woman's thin shoulders and drew her close, but Ruth Bryden did not like to be touched, and Sarah met with tense resistance. Even in the heart of an embrace, Ruth kept her back stiff, her face turned away.

"I knew this would happen one day." She took a deep breath and broke free of Sarah's embrace. "He should've quit years ago. He was getting careless. He didn't used to be that way."

She stuffed the soiled tissue in her purse and pulled another out of the cellophane package.

"But he was doin' it for you. So you could go to college," she spit out bitterly. She looked back at the doorway to his room.

Sarah returned to the university for one day, just the time it took to pack up her books and clothes and complete the necessary paperwork to withdraw from all her classes. She consigned her textbooks to her roommate, who had offered to cart them back to the bookstore and send Sarah whatever money they fetched in resale.

But Sarah kept her art history book. It sits on a shelf up in her room along with the few books her mother had left behind. It is
a
strange collection—Charles Doughty's
Travels in Arabia Deserta
and a much-used Greek guidebook squeezed in between volume one of Anais Nin's diaries and a trilogy of gothic fantasies by an obscure English author. At the end sits Sarah's book on modern art with a topographical map of Kansas marking the page on a Russian painter by the name of Mikhail Vrubel.