The Remains (11 page)

“Listen Rebecca,” she said, “I can tell
something’s got you upset, so perhaps I should explain a little
about Francis’s condition. It might shed some light, help you to
understand why he does the things he does—why he paints the way he
does.”

I nodded. It was worth a shot.

She sat back, both hands wrapped around her
mug, deep eyes peering into it as though it were a crystal ball
that revealed the past instead of the future.

“Not long after Franny was born he was
diagnosed with retardation,” she said in an almost exasperated
tone. “As harsh as that sounds even today, I can’t begin to tell
you how devastating it sounded almost a half century ago.”

“I thought he was autistic?”

“
They
didn’t know what autism was. Back then, they often confused it for
insanity. In those days, the most my husband and I could expect for
Francis was for him to perhaps live a relatively comfortable
existence inside a facility. Or what they used to refer to as
an
asylum
back in
the day. But that would have been a disaster. Autism was only one
of his problems. He was also affected by heart and lung problems.
Congenital ailments that still plague him and force the daily
intake of blood thinners.” She paused, eyes still focused on her
tea. “In all honesty, Rebecca, Franny is not long for this
world.”

Her revelation hit me like a punch to the
belly. Franny had always seemed so healthy to me. I also could not
imagine a world without him.

“
In any
case,” she said, “I—
we
—resolved to
raise Francis here, on the farm. Give him as normal a life as
possible, for as long as his life lasted.” Finally she raised her
face and looked me directly in the eye. “And thank God we did.
Because it didn’t take long for us to discover that the doctors had
been all wrong.”

I wasn’t sure I understood her, so I asked
her to explain. But she got up from out of her chair.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ve got something to
show you.”

I stood up, began to follow her.

“What exactly did the doctors have wrong?” I
asked while being led to an old wood door at the far side of the
kitchen.

She brushed back her long hair, opened the
door to reveal a dark basement. Reaching out for the string that
ignited an exposed overhead light bulb, she said, “Francis might
have been different, but he was far from retarded. Down in this
basement is the evidence.”

Turning, she wiped away a spider web and
began to climb down the old wood plank stairs.

Ever the cautious twin sister, I
followed.

WITH ITS EXPOSED DAMP dirt floor surrounded
by fieldstone foundation walls, the basement felt more like a cave
than the foundation for an old farmhouse. A single overhead light
bulb sprayed a dull beam on the gray-brown dirt. The smell of old
raw onions and mold permeated the moist air. Caroline led me across
the length of the open floor to a large closet-like room that had
been built out of plywood, its walls covered over with clear
plastic over Styrofoam boards. Protruding from out of the side of
the room was a long section of rubbery ductwork that snaked itself
all the way up to an opening at the top of the foundation wall.

This was
a room built
inside
a room—a
space independent from the house that contained it and that
maintained its own atmospheric ventilation system. As an artist, I
wasn’t ignorant of such specialty rooms. Lots of artists and art
collectors had them built inside their homes and galleries in order
to better preserve their precious treasures. Because after all, art
never decreases in value, no matter what.

When Caroline opened the door to the room, I
could immediately see that she possessed quite the collection. The
brightly lit space was stacked full with original art pieces. Every
bit of wall space in a room I estimated to be twelve by twelve feet
was covered with paintings, sketches, and black and white drawings,
the largest of which was a full-sized self portrait of Franny
himself. The artist was dressed in his usual uniform of baggy
jeans, Converse high-tops and a fire-engine red T-shirt. In the
painting, his face was noticeably younger, but just as round, just
as smooth and chubby. His hair was thicker but mussed up. Thin arms
hung down straight at his side, almost like a toy soldier standing
at attention.

The expression on his face was nothing less
than stunning. The piercing gray eyes cut holes in my chest. The
image seemed so real to me, so life-like and vivid, I half expected
him to open up his mouth and speak.

Caroline must have taken notice of my
amazement.

“Francis painted that ten years ago,” she
explained, breaking me out of my spell. “Some of these paintings he
did as early as three years old.”

That’s
when she reached out, took hold of my hand and led me to a small,
post-card-sized pastel drawing of a hobby horse. Its execution was
as detailed and photographically rendered as a
Saturday Evening
Post
, Rockwell, but as
distorted, distant and disturbing as a Van Gogh.

“
He was
three?”
Had
I heard her right the first time?

“
Three,”
she said. “It was an exciting time for us. Because we knew then for
certain that Franny was no idiot. He was
gifted
.”

“
The G
word,” I said. “I don’t use it often. Never at the art center.
Except for
one
very special
artist.”

Caroline pursed her lips, nodded.

“Tell me something, Rebecca, how much do you
know about Savant Syndrome? Autistic Savant Syndrome in
particular?”

I shook my head, breathed in the room’s
strong scent of paint, turpentine and alcohol. “Other than what
I’ve learned from my direct contact with Franny over the years, not
a whole lot.”

Crossing her arms, Caroline focused her eyes
not on me, but on the eclectic pieces of art that covered the wall
behind me.

“
In
layman’s terms,” she went on, “autistic savants are born with
miss-wired neurons. In a few scattered cases, this miss-wiring
affords them extraordinary gifts.” She raised her hands as if to
say,
Just
take a good look around at all these gifts.

“Not long before Francis painted that hobby
horse, we were told that he would never be cured. Francis would
never be mainstreamed and would for the duration of his life
require constant care.”

I looked over her shoulder at Franny’s face,
looked into eyes that seemed to lock on mine from wherever I stood
inside the small square-shaped room.

“Not the most optimistic of outlooks.”

“Until he started painting,” she said.
“That’s when everything changed.”

“But how exactly?”

“Maybe he can’t communicate with us the way
we want him to. Maybe he can’t stand loud noises or closed in
spaces. Maybe he can’t look us straight in the eyes. But one day he
picks up a pencil and paper, he starts to draw like an artist ten
times his age. My husband and I were floored, to say the
least.”

“
We
showed his drawings and sketches to his doctors at the Parson’s
Center in Albany. They in turn found them remarkable and
immediately labeled Francis a
savant
,
which was a new word for the time. Francis possessed an unusual
gift. This wasn’t the era of PET scans where doctors are able to
see computer pictures of someone’s brain. But they did subject
Francis to a grueling series of diagnostic tests. At the end, it
was determined that because of his autism, Francis was able to use
far more of his creative mind than normal people like you and me
could ever hope for.”

“Francis hadn’t been burdened with a
handicap,” I said, “he’d been given a rare gift.”

“Nowadays we know that savants tap into areas
of the mind that function sort of like super computers. The
computers process a massive amount of data from the senses and in
turn create their own unique working model of the world.”

“Thus the world class artwork.”

I thought about my own childhood, how Molly
and I had become fully aware of a boy named Francis who lived on a
nearby farm. A boy who was older than us, but a boy who some of the
other kids at school referred to as a ‘freak’, even if I thought of
him as Boo Radley. I hated to admit it, but there had been more
than one occasion when Molly, myself, and some of our friends had
snuck onto the Scaramuzzi property to get a quick look at Francis,
only to be frightened away by a dog or by Mr. S himself. Standing
in the basement of their home all these years later, I suddenly
felt very ashamed of myself.

Still, one question loomed large in my
mind.

“Caroline,” I said, “if Franny possesses the
ability to tap into portions of his brain you and I can’t even
touch, is it possible he might possess a sixth sense? A kind of
ESP?”

She looked at me with wide unblinking dark
eyes. “You mean, can Francis predict the future?”

I shook my head. “Not the future
necessarily,” I clarified. “But would it be possible for him to
simply sense an event that is to come?”

She cocked her head and pursed her lips. “I
believe it’s possible. Francis has more abilities than even I am
aware of, so if he is giving you signs of something—if that’s one
of the reasons you have come here, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”
She paused for a beat. “Is there something you’re not telling me,
Miss Rebecca? Something specific?”

I thought about Whalen; about his having been
released from prison; his living somewhere in Albany County. I
thought about all the ways of telling her about it. But I knew I
couldn’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Instead I looked at my watch as
if to shift my attention to something else.

“I should be getting back to the studio.
Thank you so much for your time.”

She gave me an open-eyed look before turning
for the door. The look froze me. My eyes locked on her smooth face,
her long gray hair, her deep eyes—eyes that read me more than
looked at me. Her closed mouth expression spoke to me better than
words. It told me she knew I was hiding something. Caroline had
spent the better part of a lifetime trying to communicate with a
genius son who had virtually no communicative skills other than his
painting. Certainly Caroline knew better than most how to read a
face. I guess it would have been stupid for me to believe I could
fool her.

Call it politeness or sensitivity or both,
but she chose not to push me.

“You’re welcome here anytime,” she whispered
after a pause. “I miss you; your sister; your mother and father.
Even though you lived a few miles away from us, it felt good to
have such sweet neighbors.”

There they were again: the forks of guilt
stabbing at the insides of my stomach.

“We weren’t always great kids,” I
confessed.

She laughed, set a hand on my shoulder.

“You mean all those times you tried to get a
sneak peak at Boo Radley?”

I felt of wash of pure humiliation pour down
my back. At the same time, I thought about the ratty novel that to
this day sat on my nightstand; all those sketched faces inside its
once blank margins.

“Well allow me to let you in on something,
young lady. We used to get such a kick out of scaring you kids.
Francis especially enjoyed it. It was the only time you’d hear him
laugh.” For the first time since I arrived, I sensed her holding
back a tear. “In a real way, you were his only friends.”

I turned for the door. But before I stepped
out, something caught my eye. A small black and white sketch I
hadn’t noticed when I walked in. The sketch was of Molly and me,
back when we were about twelve years old, around the time of the
assaults.

My God, Franny was drawing us back then.

“You and your sister,” Caroline said.
“Beautiful girls, beautiful painting. Francis must have been about
twenty-one or two when he did this.”

I swallowed, because now it was me who was
holding back a tear.

“Come on,” Caroline said, turning off the
light. “Francis is waiting for you at the school of art.”

CAROLINE WAS RIGHT. FRANNY was waiting for
me. But instead of hooking a right at the end of her driveway, I
turned left, drove deeper into the heart of the country. The road
was more narrow and winding than I remembered it. It followed the
up-and-down contours of the foothills instead of plowing right
through them like in the suburbs.

After about a mile, I was able to make out
Mount Desolation situated beyond the woods and the fields that I
now called my own. The mountain was covered in the most beautiful
array of autumn reds, oranges and yellows. As it grew larger and
closer, I began to feel that tingle inside of me. It was an itch
that I used to often feel. The itch that signified the urge to
paint. Had I brought along my easel, I might have set up outside my
parents’ house and reproduced that small mountain and the dark
forest that surrounded it; reproduced it for the canvas, not unlike
Franny had just days ago.

But I wouldn’t stay there long.

Pulling up into my parents’ circular
driveway, the urge to create something gave way to the urge to
split the scene. But that wouldn’t be right. The three-story
farmhouse and its wraparound porch was all that remained of my
family history. I had to at least make sure the place was being
well cared for.

I parked the Cabriolet at the top of the
drive, got out. Making my way to the front porch steps, I began to
feel my heart beat. Not a frantic pounding, but a speedier than
normal pulse that drummed inside my head. I slipped the key into
the lock and, twisting the knob, opened the door to that old
familiar creaky hinge noise. I stepped quietly inside, as though
not to wake the ghosts of my family.