The Pariah (3 page)

   
THREE

Before lunch, I took a solitary walk across Salem Common, the collar of my coat turned up against the cold, my breath fluttering like smoke. All around the Common, the bare trees stood in the silent fright of winter, like a gaggle of Salem witches, and the grass was silver-faced with dew. I went as far as the bandstand, with its cupola dome, and sat down on the stone steps, while a little way away from me, two young children played on the grass, tumbling and running, leaving figure-eight tracks of green across the lawns.

Two children like ours might have been: Nathaniel, the boy who had died in his mother’s womb. What else could you call a boy who was going to be born within sight of the House of the Seven Gables? And Jessica, the girl who was never even conceived.

I was still sitting there when an old woman appeared, in a bundled-up Thrift Store coat and a shapeless felt hat, carrying a carpet-bag that was more backing than carpet, and a red umbrella, which she inexplicably opened, and left beside the steps. She sat down only four or five feet away from me, although she could have sat anywhere.

‘Well , now,’ she said, as she opened a brown paper bag, and took out a liver-sausage sandwich.

I looked at her cautiously. She probably wasn’t as old as she had first appeared to be, 50 or 55 maybe; but she was so shabbily dressed and her hair was so white and frayed that she could have been mistaken for 70. She began to eat her sandwich, with such neatness and gentility that I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

That was how it was, for almost twenty minutes, on the steps of the cupola bandstand on Salem Common, on that cold March morning; the woman eating her sandwich and me covertly watching her, and people passing us by along the radial paths which crossed the Common, some strolling, some intent on business, but every one of them chilly, and every one of them accompanied by their own personal mouth-ghost of frozen breath.

At five before twelve, I decided it was time to leave. But before I went, I reached into my coat pocket and took out four quarters, and held them out to her, and said, ‘Please. Just do me a favour, will you?’

She stared at the money and then she stared at me. ‘People in your position shouldn’t be giving silver to witches,’ she smiled.

‘You’re a
witch?’
I asked her, not very seriously. ‘Don’t I
look
like a witch?’

‘I don’t know,’ I smiled. ‘I’ve never seen a witch before. I always thought that witches carried broomsticks, and black cats on their shoulders.’

‘Oh, superstition,’ the old woman said. ‘Well, I’ll take your money, if you’re not too worried about the consequences.’

‘What consequences?’

‘People in your position always have to suffer consequences.’

‘What position is that?’

The woman rummaged in her bag and eventually produced an apple, which she polished on the lapel of her coat. ‘Alone, aren’t you?’ she asked me, and then bit into it, chewing on one side of her mouth like a Disney chipmunk. ‘Not long alone, but alone nonetheless.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, evasively. I was beginning to feel that this conversation was heavily laden with unspoken implications; as if this woman and I had met on Salem Common for some predestined purpose, and that the people who walked all around us along the common’s radiating pathways were like chesspieces. Anonymous, but there for a special reason.

‘Well , you know the best of that,’ the woman told me. She took another bite of apple.

‘But that’s the way
I
see it, and I’m not often wrong. It’s a mystic talent, some people say. But I don’t see any harm in calling it for what it is, especially here in Salem. Good witch territory, Salem; best in the country. Perhaps not a place to be alone, though.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked her.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were a peculiar pellucid blue, and there was a scar on her forehead like an arrow, or an upside-down crucifix, in the faintest glistening red.

‘Everybody has to die sometime, that’s what I mean by that,’ she said. ‘But it’s the
place
you die, not the time, that makes the difference. There are spheres of influence; and sometimes you can die within them, and sometimes you can die without them.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I told her. ‘I don’t really understand what you’re saying.’

‘Suppose you died in Salem,’ the old woman smiled. ‘Salem is the root, heart, bowels, and belly. Salem is the witch’s boiling-pot. What do you believe those witch-trials were really all about? And why do you think they stopped so sudden? Have you known
anybody
show such remorse, so quick? Not I. I never did. Not as quick as that. The influence came, and then the influence fled; but there are days when I believe that it didn’t flee for good and all. It depends.’

‘Depends on what?’ I wanted to know.

She smiled again, and winked, and said, ‘All kind of things.’ She raised her head to the sky, and revealed around her throat a neck-band that looked as if it were made of braided hair, fastened with silver and turquoise. ‘The weather, the price of goose fat. It depends.’

I suddenly felt like a complete tourist. Here I was, letting some half-dotty woman string me along with stories about ‘spheres of influence’ and witches, and actually taking her seriously. She was probably going to offer to tell my fortune next, if the price was right.

In Salem, where the local Chamber of Commerce enthusiastically exploits the witch-trials of 1692 as a major commercial attraction (‘Stop by for a Spell,’ they entreat you) it was hardly surprising that even the panhandlers should use witchcraft as a selling-angle.

‘Listen,’ I told the woman, ‘just have a good day, all right?’

‘You’re going?’ she asked me.

‘I’m going. It’s been nice talking to you. Very interesting.’

‘Interesting, but not believable?’

‘Oh, I believe you,’ I said. ‘The weather, the price of goose fat. By the way, what
is
the price of goose fat?’

She ignored my facetious question and stood up, brushing the crumbs off her worn-out coat with a hand that was blue-veined like cheese. ‘You think that I’m begging for money?’ she demanded. ‘Is that it? You think I’m a beggar?’

‘Not at all. I just have to go, that’s all.’

A passer-by stopped to watch us as if he could sense that an interesting confrontation was about to develop. Then two more stopped, one of them a woman, her curly hair turned into a strangely radiant halo by the winter sun.

‘I will tell you two things,’ the woman said, in a trembly voice. ‘I shouldn’t tell you either, but I will. You will have to decide for yourself if they are warnings or riddles or nothing but nonsense. You cannot be helped, you know; for the life we lead on this earth is a life without help.’

I said nothing, but stood warily watching her, trying to work out if she was a simple lunatic or a not-so-simple con-artist.

‘The first thing is,’ she said, ‘you are not alone, the way you believe yourself to be, and you will
never
be alone, not for evermore, although you will pray to God sometimes to release you from your companionship. The second thing is, you must stay away from the place where no birds fly.’

The passers-by, seeing that nothing particularly exciting was going to happen, began to disperse, and walk off their separate ways. The woman said, ‘You can walk me to Washington Square, if you care to. You are going that way?’

‘Yes,’ I said. Then, ‘Come on, then.’

She gathered up her bag and folded her red umbrella and then walked beside me to the west side of the common. The common was enclosed with decorative iron railings, which threw spoked shadows across the grass. It was still very cold, but there was a noticeable inkling of spring in the air, and a summer very different from last year.

‘I’m sorry that you thought I was talking nonsense,’ the woman said, as we emerged on to the sidewalk of Washington Square West. Across the square stood the Witch Museum, which commemorates the hanging of Salem’s twenty witches in 1692, one of the fiercest witchhunts in all human history. In front of the museum was the statue of Salem’s founder Roger Conant, in his heavy Puritan cloak, his shoulders glittering with dew.

This is an old city, you know,’ the woman told me. ‘Old cities have their own ways of doing things, their own mysteries. Didn’t you begin to sense it, just a little, back there on the common? The feeling that life in Salem is a puzzle of kinds, a witch-puzzle? Full of meanings, but no explanations?’

I looked away from her, across the square. On the opposite sidewalk, among the crowds of tourists and pedestrians, I glimpsed a pretty dark-haired girl in a sheepskin jacket and tight denim jeans, a stack of college-books held against her chest. In a moment, she was jumbled up in the crowd, but I felt a funny catch at my heart because the girl had looked so much like Jane. I guess lots of girls did, and always would. I was definitely suffering from Rosen’s Syndrome.

The woman said, ‘I have to go this way. It’s been an unusual pleasure to talk to you. It’s not often that men will listen, not the way you do.’

I gave her a half-hearted smile, and raised my hand.

‘You’ll want to know my name, of course,’ she said. I wasn’t sure if that was a question or a statement, but I gave her a nod which could have meant yes and could just as easily have meant that I didn’t particularly care.

‘Mercy Lewis,’ she said. ‘Named after Mercy Lewis.’

‘Well , Mercy,’ I told her. ‘Just make sure you take care of yourself.’

‘You too,’ she said, and then she walked off at a surprisingly fast pace until she was lost from sight.

For some reason, I found myself thinking of the words that Jane used to read to me from the
Ode to Melancholy.
‘She dwells in Beauty - Beauty that must die; and Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding adieu …’

I turned up my collar against the cold, pushed my hands deep into my pockets, and went to find myself some lunch.

   
FOUR

I ate a lone corned-beef and mustard sandwich at Red’s Sandwich Shop in the old London Coffee House building on Central Street. Next to me, a black man wearing a brand-new Burberry kept whistling
She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain When She
Comes,
over and over, between his teeth. A young dark-haired secretary watched me without blinking in one of the mirrors. She had a strange, pale, pre-Raphaelite face. I felt tired now, and very alone.

About two o’clock, under a clouded sky, I walked to Holyoke Square, to Endicott’s Auction Rooms, where they were holding one of their six-monthly sales of antique maritime prints and paintings. The catalogue listed three important oils, including Shaw’s painting of the Derby ship
John
but I didn’t expect to be able to afford any of them. What I was looking for was antique-shop fodder: engravings and etchings and maps and maybe a water-colour or two, the kind of picture I could have re framed in gilt or walnut and sell at ten times its actual cost. There was one painting listed by Unknown Artist:
A View of Granitehead’s Western Shore Late 17th Century
which I was quite interested in buying, simply because it showed the promontory on which I lived.

Inside, the auction-rooms were cold, high-ceilinged, and Victorian, and the winter sunlight slanted down on us from high clerestory windows. Most of the buyers kept on their overcoats, and there was a chorus of coughing and nose-blowing and shuffling of feet before the auction began. There were only about a dozen buyers there, which was unusual for one of Endicott’s sales: I couldn’t even see anybody I recognized from the Peabody collection. The bidding was low, too: the Shaw went for only $18,500, and a rare drawing in a scrimshaw frame fetched only $725. I hoped this wasn’t a sign that the recession had at last caught up with the maritime antiques business. On top of everything else that had happened, bankruptcy would just about round off my year.

By the time the auctioneer put up the view of Granite-head, there were only five or six buyers left, apart from myself and an eccentric old man who attended every Endicott auction and outbid everybody for everything, even though he wore no socks and lived in a cardboard box near one of the wharves.

‘May I hear $50?’ the auctioneer inquired, thrusting his thumb into his dapper gray vest, complete with watch-chain.

I gave him a rabbit-like twitch of my nose.

‘Any advances on $50? Come along, gentlemen, this painting is history itself.

Granitehead shoreline, in 1690. A real find.’

There was no response. The auctioneer gave an exaggerated sigh, banged down his gavel, and said, ‘Sold to Mr Trenton for $50. Next item, please.’

There was nothing else at the auction I wanted, so I scraped back my chair, and went around to the packaging room. Mrs Donohue was there today, a motherly Irishwoman with carroty hair, upswept spectacles, and the largest behind I had ever seen in my life.

She took the painting, and spread out her wrapping-paper and string, and called sharply to her assistant, ‘Damien, the scissors, will you?’

‘How are you doing, Mrs Donohue?’ I asked her. ‘Well, I’m barely alive,’ said Mrs Donohue. ‘What with my feet and my blood-pressure. But I was so sorry to hear about your darling wife. That brought the tears to my eyes, when I heard about it. Such a beautiful girl, Jane Bedford. I used to see her in here when she was tiny.’ ‘Thank you,’ I nodded.

‘Now is this a view of Salem Harbour?’ she said, holding up the picture.

‘Granitehead, just north of Quaker Lane. You see that hill there? That’s where my house stands now.’ ‘Well, now. And what’s that ship?’ ‘What ship?’

‘There, by the farther shore. That’s a ship now, isn’t it?’

I peered at the painting. I hadn’t noticed it before, but Mrs Donohue was right. On the opposite side of the harbour there was a fully-rigged sailing-ship, but painted so darkly that I had mistaken it for a grove of trees on the shoreline behind it.

‘Now, I hope I’m not being interfering, or trying to teach you your business,’ said Mrs Donohue. ‘But I know you haven’t been buying and selling the old stuff for very long; and now your darling wife’s lost to you … But if I were you I would take a tip and try to find out what ship that might be.’

‘You think it’s worth it?’ I asked her. I wasn’t embarrassed about an auction-room packaging lady giving me good advice. Good advice is good advice, wherever you pick it up.

‘Well , it’s impossible to say,’ she told me. ‘But Mr Brasenose once bought a picture here that was supposed to be French ships off Salem Sound, but when he took the trouble to identify the ships by name, he found that what he had on his hands was the one and only contemporary painting of the
Great Turk;
and he sold it to the Peabody for $55,000.’

I took another close look at the strange dark vessel in the background of the painting I had just acquired. It didn’t look particularly noteworthy, and the anonymous artist had painted no name on the prow. It was probably a figment of the imagination, quickly sketched in to improve the painting’s shaky composition. Still, I would have a shot at identifying it, particularly if Mrs Donohue said so. It was she who had told me to look for the gryphon’s-head maker’s-mark on Rhode Island lanterns.

‘If I make a million out of it,’ I told her, as she expertly wrapped it up, ‘I’ll cut you in for five percent.’

‘Fifty percent or nothing, you rascal,’ she laughed.

I left the auction-rooms with the painting under my arm. The remaining pictures I had bought - etchings and aquatints and a small collection of steel engravings -would be delivered to me later in the week. I only wished I had been able to afford the Shaw.

Outside, as I crossed the steps in front of Endicott’s, the sun was already eating away at the rooftops of the elegant old Federal mansions on Chestnut Street, and a low cold wind had got up. Oddly, the same pale-faced secretary I had seen in Red’s Sandwich Shop walked past, in a long black coat and a gray scarf. She turned and looked at me but she didn’t smile.

Down by the curb, I caught sight of Ian Herbert, the proprietor of one of Salem’s most distinctive antique shops, talking to one of the directors of Endicott’s. lan Herbert’s shop was al soft carpeting and hushed discussion and artistically-positioned spot-lights. He didn’t even call it a shop: it was a ‘resource’. But he wasn’t snobbish when it came to talking trade, and he gave me a casual wave as I approached.

‘John,’ he said, slapping me on the shoulder. ‘You must know Dan Yokes, sales director of Endicott’s.’

‘How do you do,’ said Dan Yokes. ‘Seems like you’ve been making me marginally richer.’ He nodded towards the package under my arm.

‘It’s nothing special,’ I told him. ‘Just an old watercolour of the shoreline where I live. I got it for fifty dollars flat.’

‘As long as you’re satisfied with it,’ smiled Dan Yokes.

‘By the way,’ said Ian, ‘you might be interested to know that they’re selling off some of the old maritime collection up at Newburyport museum. Interesting artifacts; magical, some of them. For instance, did you know that most of the old Salem ships used to carry a little brass cage on board, with a dish of oats inside, to trap goblins and demons?’

‘I could use a couple of those in my accounts department,’ said Dan Yokes.

‘I’m going to have to get back to Granitehead,’ I told them, and I was about to walk away when my arm was snatched violently from behind, so hard that I was spun around, and almost lost my balance. I found myself face-to-face with a young bearded man in a gray tweed jacket, panting and agitated and wild-haired from running.

‘What the hell goes on?’ I snapped at him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped. ‘Really, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. Are you Mr Trenton - Mr John Trenton of Granitehead?’

That’s me. Who the hell are you?’

‘Please,’ the young man said, ‘I really didn’t mean to upset you. But I didn’t want you to get away.’

‘Listen, friend, take a walk,’ said Dan Yokes, stepping closer. ‘You’re lucky I don’t call a cop.’

‘Mr Trenton, I have to talk to you privately,’ the young man urged me. ‘It’s very important.’

‘Are you leaving or do I call a cop?’ said Dan Yokes. ‘This gentleman is a personal friend of mine and I’m telling you to get out of here.’

‘It’s all right, Mr Yokes,’ I told him. ‘I’ll talk to him. I’ll let out a falsetto scream if he tries anything funny.’

Ian Herbert laughed, and said, ‘I’ll see you around, John. Drop into the store one day.’

‘You mean the “resource”,’ I ribbed him.

The young man in the tweed jacket waited for me impatiently while I said my goodbyes.

Then, as I tucked my painting more securely under my arm, and started to walk towards the Riley Plaza parking-lot, where I had left my car, he fell into step beside me, occasionally skipping to keep up.

This is
very
embarrassing,’ he said.

‘What’s very embarrassing?’ I asked him.
‘I’m
not embarrassed.’

‘I’d better introduce myself,’ he told me. ‘My name’s Edward Wardwell. I work for the Peabody Museum, in the archives department.’

‘Well , how do you do.’

Edward Wardwell scratched anxiously at his beard. He was one of those young American men who look like throwbacks to the 1860s; preachers or pioneers or harmonium-players. He wore crumpled corduroy pants and his hair looked as if it hadn’t entertained a comb in months. You could see young men like him in the background of almost every frontier photograph ever taken, from Muncie to Black River Falls to Junction City.

He suddenly took my arm again, arresting us both, and leaned forward so that I could smell the aniseed candy on his breath. The embarrassing thing is, Mr Trenton, I was specifically instructed to acquire that painting you just bought for the Peabody archives.’

‘This
painting? You mean the view of Granitehead shoreline?’

He nodded. ‘I lost track of the time. I meant to get to the auction-rooms by three. They told me the painting wouldn’t be put up till three. Well, I thought that would give me plenty of time. But I guess I lost track. There’s a girl I know who’s just opened a new fashion store on East India Square, and I went down to help her out a little, and that’s what happened. I lost track.’

I started walking again. ‘So,’ I said, ‘you were supposed to acquire the painting for the Peabody archives.’

‘That’s right. It’s
very
unusual.’

‘Well , I’m glad about that,’ I told him. ‘I only bought it because it shows a view of my home. Fifty dollars.’

‘You bought it
tot fifty dollars?’

‘You heard me.’

 ‘Don’t you know that it’s worth a whole lot more? I mean, $50 is a complete steal.’

‘In that case, I’m even gladder. I’m a dealer, did you know that? I’m in business to make a profit. If I can buy it for $50 and sell it for $250, that’s fine by me.’

 ‘Mr Trenton,’ said Edward Wardwell, as we turned from Holyoke Square into Gedney Street, ‘that painting has
rarity
value. It really is a very rare painting.’

‘Good,’ I told him.

‘Mr Trenton, I’ll offer you $275 for that painting. Right here and now. Cash.’

I stopped where I was, and stared at him. ‘Two hundred seventy-five, cash? For this?’

‘I’ll make it a round $300.’

‘What’s so damned important about this painting?’ I asked him. ‘It’s nothing more than a pretty inept water-colour of the Granitehead coast. They don’t even know who the artist is.’

Edward Wardwell propped his hands on his hips and blew out his cheeks like an exasperated parent trying to explain himself to a particularly obtuse child. ‘Mr Trenton,’ he said, ‘the painting happens to be rare because it shows a view of Salem Harbour that no other painter recorded at the time. It fills in a topographical picture that has been incomplete for centuries; it enables us to pinpoint where certain buildings actually stood; and where certain roads ran, and where specific
trees
grew. I know it’s inept, as a work of art, but from what I’ve seen of it, it’s unusually accurate as far as landmarks are concerned. And that’s exactly what the Peabody is interested in.’

I thought about it for a moment, and then said, ‘I’m not selling. Not yet. Not until I find out what this is all about.’

I crossed Gedney Street and Edward Wardwell tried to follow me, but a passing taxicab gave him an irritated blast on its horn. ‘Mr Trenton!’ he called, dodging in front of a bus.

‘Mr Trenton, wait! I don’t think you understand!’

‘I don’t think I want to understand,’ I told him.

He caught up with me again, and walked along beside me, short of wind, glancing from time to time at the package under my arm as if he were actually thinking of snatching it away from me.

‘Mr Trenton, if I don’t go back to the Peabody with that painting, I may very well get the sack.’

‘So, you may very well get the sack. I’m sorry for you. But the answer to your problem was to turn up at the auction on time, and put in your bid. If you’d have bid, you would have got it. But you didn’t, so you haven’t. Now the painting’s mine and for the time being I don’t want to sell it. Especially not on the corner of Gedney and Margin, on a cold and windy afternoon, if you don’t mind.’

Edward Wardwell ran his hand through his tousled hair, making one side of it stick up like a Red Indian feather. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to come on like that. It’s just that it’s really important for the Peabody to have the picture. It’s a really important picture, you know, from the archive point of view.’

I almost felt sorry for him. But Jane had told me over and over that there is one immutable rule in the antiques business; a rule which must never be broken under any circumstances for whatever reason. Never sell anything out of pity. Otherwise, the only person you’ll end up pitying is yourself.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘it may be possible for the Peabody to borrow the picture sometime.

Perhaps I can make some arrangement with the Director.’

‘Well , I don’t know about that at all,’ said Edward Wardwell. ‘They really did want to own it, outright. Do you think I could take a look at it?’