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Calpurnia by Anne Scott Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended)
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Imagery Ann Scott’s debut novel, Calpurnia, presents an imaginative tale, set in Main Line Philadelphia, at Villa Calpurnia, the grand 19^th century stone home of a late artist, Maribel Archibald Davies. Presented first through the eyes of the estate agent, Elizabeth Oliver, who is trying to liquidate the former artist’s belongings for the heirs, by the end of the novel, a reader has many perspectives. Especially through Elizabeth’s eyes, readers come to understand Maribel’s art and her life, both of which are full of entanglements and complications. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 22 (pp. 180-191): Elizabeth gives herself an extra half hour to find a parking space. The house on Franklin Square is on all the tourist itineraries; it was built as the rectory to the famous nineteenth-century church from which most of the city's first families were once either married or buried, before people moved to the country and the country became the suburbs and the old farmhouses became hot properties in the multiple-listings books. Elizabeth’s own mother, good Episcopalian though she was, had never gone to the same church for five years in a row, and even then only if the flowers were beautiful; when the altar arrangements and the soloists no Ionger met their standards her mother and her mother's friends all moved by preagreement to another church like theatergoers to another show. Elizabeth hasn't been to church since her mother died. She’s impatient with the American stained glass and the secondhand Tudor of the local architectural canon. The flower arrangements at St. Mary's seem businesslike to her, and at St. Asaph’s the preacher puts her off. She misses the hymns, the smell of damp stone, and the sense she once had of being a credit to her mother, a good girl and a happy one. Her mother took to her bed when told that Elizabeth was leaving Douglas and never really got up again, the divorce overlapping with the final stage other own fatal illness; Elizabeth would have tried to outwait her if she had known. Along the river the dogwoods have finally finished flowering; the sculls are locked up in the boathouses again after the June heats, and there's a golden drift of pollen on the off-ramps; under the yellow-green trees Elizabeth has the road mostly to herself. It's that secret, semisweet moment of the year when spring shades disappearingly into early summer, the nameless season between the end of the flowers and the first signs of any kind of fruit. Elizabeth fumbles in her open bag on the seat beside her for her Filofax to check Lipscomb’s address, but it's wasted effort; the church is visible from ten blocks away. Next to it Lipscomb’s house has a worldly look that seems unsporting in this leafy setting. Its limestone facade is late Renaissance revival, the bell ring a brass oval knob shined to a fare-thee-well and set squarely in the middle of the door; even from here Elizabeth can hear the baritone chime as it echoes musically inside. A rich man's house, well kept and carefully appointed, mindful of the face it turns to an increasingly watchful and dangerous world. Elizabeth introduces herself to the small scurrying woman who comes to open the door: the nurse, to judge by her white dress and stockings, her sensible rubber-soled shoes. Inside another door there is another woman: elderly, white-haired, with small classic features in a shapeless face, her mouthful of perfect teeth bared in an official-looking smile. "Madeleine Cavanagh, Charles’s sister; oh, Charles will be so pleased," this woman says, initiating a flow of almost seamless small talk (the noise, the traffic, the weather) like deejay) or master of ceremonies. "Its so kind of you to drop in; we get so tired of each others faces here, don't we, Charles?" "Don't we what?" The voice is an old man's, but unmistakably a man's; it comes from a leather wing chair at the other end of the room and reminds Elizabeth, jarringly, of someone she knows. David, she thinks suddenly. Something about the inflection, the self-certitude, and the pitch. "It was so nice of you to see me, Mr. Lipscomb," she says. Elizabeth never calls people by their first names unless and until she’s invited to, and sometimes not even then. She follows Madeleine Cavanagh the length of the impressive Aubusson carpet and comes to a standstill in front of Lipscombs leather chair. "This is Elizabeth Oliver, Charles: a friend of Freddy Friedrichson's," the old lady says. And, trilling girlishly, to Elizabeth: "A friend of a friend is a friend." "Friedrichson’s girlfriend, did you say?" Lipscomb asks. Elizabeth laughs. "No, no; just a colleague," she says. "Hardly even that." Lipscomb raises his head and gets a fix on her, squinting to bring her into focus like a statue on a plinth. "No, of course not," he says in that rich, young, uncanny voice of his. "Too bad for Friedrichson. A girlfriend's about the last thing poor Friedrichson would ever need." Elizabeth looks for a way to get this dialogue back on track. Friedrichson’s sexual proclivities are no concern of hers. “I’ve been talking to Mr. Friedrichson about arranging a retrospective of Maribel Archibald Davies' work," she says. There's a moment of raw silence. In the background the brown-haired nurse makes herself useful adjusting the angle of the window blinds, and daylight advancer a foot or two into the room, then recedes again, leaving the sepia shadows intact. The browns, Roberto had called the school of Academy portraitists of which Lipscomb had once been de facto dean. "Mrs. Davies was a painter," says Elizabeth. "I think you knew her once; she sat for her portrait with you in the forties or thereabouts, if I'm not mistaken. A wonderful painting. The lady of the house as Aphrodite, looking at her reflection in Ares' shield." "Oh, my dear, Maribel of course," trills Madeleine Cavanagh, picking up the thread. "Charles, you remember Maribel Davies of course you do." She turns to Elizabeth: "And how is Maribel? But didn't someone tell me she was ill? It’s been so long; we see the same faces here day after day. Can I get you something to drink. Miss Oliver? Iced tea? Or something with a little kick to it—just say the word; we have everything under the sun except sherry and beer. Charles never goes out anymore, and neither do the rest of us. We try to keep him company, so we do all our drinking at home." "Mr. Lipscomb doesn't want hard liquor," says the birdlike nurse. "I'm sure." "Something cool would be wonderful," says Elizabeth. She hasn't come here to get drunk with Lipscomb and his sister; her mind is fuzzy enough these days as it is. "Does Friedrichson know Maribel?" says Lipscomb. "Clever son of a bitch. On to a good thing, Friedrichson. Every little Sunday painter and painter's wife up and down the Main Line has had her little show with Friedrichson. I wish I had one tenth of the money that fellow's managed to salt away." "Oh, be a good sport, Charles," says the old lady. "You've salted some of your own away in your time too." "Yes, I have; and I'm sitting on every last bit of it right here in my own living room," says Lipscomb. "House rich; that's why Bettina left me: money in the bank. That's why Vivian left me. That's why Miss Oxtoby is going to up and leave me one day too, aren't you, Miss Oxtoby? Women always know what’s good for them. Money in the bank, and the hell with pictures on the wall." The nurse laughs unmusically. "Oh, no, Mr. Lipscomb," she says. "You know I wouldn't leave you. Doctor’s orders. You'd have to fire me first." Elizabeth smiles politely with the rest of them; they're performing for her, showing off their accustomed comic riffs. "I know," she says. "I was surprised to hear that Maribel had shown at Friedrichsons. Did you know that she died last month? I hope 1m not bringing you bad news." There's another of those moments of sudden and intractable silence. Conversation stops; motion ceases; even the clock on the mantelpiece seems to go up a notch in pitch, and the ice in Elizabeth’s tea sinks toward the bottom of the glass with a small explosive sound as the air conditioner gasps, then soldiers loudly on. "Oh my dear," says Madeleine. "You see what happens when you stay home all day and never open your mail? No one in this town ever tells anyone anything anymore. I heard she was sick, of course." "It had to be in the paper, Madeleine," says Lipscomb. "How could you miss it? You've got eyes in your head. You can still read a line of print." Madeline Cavanagh defends herself from his easy sarcasm, the invalid's revenge. "Maybe so, but not the obituaries," she savs. "They're much too depressing. That goes for all the wars and murders too; too frightening. And politics, why bother? I never keep up with politics. Because plus ca change, plus cest la meme chose, don't you agree? (Is it Miss Oliver or Mrs?) In fact I'm not even sure I'd know who the British prime minister was today if it didn't happen to be a woman this time around." Lipscomb clears his throat and says; "Maribel was a decent painter, she studied with the best. Including, if I may take a small bow, yours truly. Until she went off on her own tack—expressionist, Kierkegaardian, Teutonic, not my cup of tea. But of course that's all very ancient history by now." Elizabeth sips her drink and settles back in her brown chair, smiling in a small way, hypnotized by the sound of Lipscomb’s bizarrely familiar voice. Lipscomb's an old man now, he must be well up in his eighties, but his masculine presence is still intact. He doesn't paint anymore, he says; he gave it up a long time ago; first his sight went and then his hands: he could throw paint at the canvas like Pollock but that's about it, and since he has never had a good word to say about abstract expressionism in his heyday, he's not about to start pretending to promote it now. "The skittery little nurse clicks her tongue at him, afraid that he may be speaking ill of the dead. In his youth, Lipscomb says, he knew John Sloan, he knew Glackens, for that matter he still knows de Kooning—he's known them all, and he knows one or two things about them that you won't find in Art Forum or Bettinger's archives, no indeed. Elizabeth nods in her high-backed chair, more than happy to be impressed by the impressive names. Lipscomb's handsome profile is still matinee-idol in its exactitude; it's easy to imagine him as Maribel’s lover, dispensing a ruthless and unbending charm, and the voice is still as rich and resonant as a much younger man's. When she sees David in August it will be seven and a half months since their last visit, the longest they've ever been apart since her divorce. Long enough for him to fall out of love, meet someone else, or decide to recement his wavering attachment to his long-suffering wife, for all she knows. People are always after him to write a book, says Lipscomb, but he's not tempted, his lips are sealed: discretion's his middle name. He remembers Maribel, yes, of course he does; but his memories are polite and sanitized; he’s sorry to hear she’s dead but then, if we live long enough, isn't that what happens to all of us in the end? A wonderful woman, though, he says, marvelously talented, but she never had the courage other artistic convictions. He'd tried to get her to open up, paint the human body, paint her wav into or out of those claustrophobic interiors she was always so obsessed with, or, if not, at least bring some light and color and reality to bear on them—but it was a hopeless task. "It's all in the eye, of course," says Lipscomb, "but people forget that the eye can look either in or out. And how can you paint something you can't even see? Maribel didn't paint from life; she painted from memory." Miss Oxtoby plunges in. "Now, now," she says, "time out. You promised we weren't going to think anything but happy thoughts today." Lipscomb opens his mouth as if to laugh but starts to cough instead and Elizabeth looks pointedly away, at linen-fold paneling on both sides of the fireplace, paintings on the walls. Portraits, as expected, and studies of human heads, ink and wash pastels, red chalk: mostly of women, and most of the women just this side of beautiful. You could date them by their hairdos and cut of their collars if you had to, they’re that accurate, that reportorially acute. Who are these women, Elizabeth wonders, and are they still among the living? Did Lipscomb seduce their daughters, did their husbands pay the bills? She has the feeling that if she saw any of them in the flesh she would know them instantly, anywhere; and, waiting for him to finish coughing, waiting for his blood to fill back up with oxygen and life to regain the upper hand on death, it dawns on her that she doesn't need Lipscomb’s signature to know who drew the studies of Nina in Maribel's powder room. The signature’s unimportant, a mere detail. There's corroborating evidence right here in this room on every wall. Lipscomb goes on hacking. His cough has a sad, organized sound to it, as if it were something he does every hour on the hour, on doctors orders, but without enough muscle behind it to make any real difference to respiration or longevity. When he's finally finished, the hand that houses to raise the water glass to his mouth is trembling and there's a film of sweat on his forehead that wasn't there when he began. Nurse Oxtoby has gone to get something for Lipscomb’s cough, and with Madeleine Cavanagh mixing drinks by the door Elizabeth is suddenly alone with him in this otherwise uninhabited corner of the room. She pulls her chair closer to his and leans forward into his line of sight. It's now or never: for a split second she feels the sick bravado of a reporter at a crime scene, thrusting a microphone or a camera into the face of the next of kin. "I came across some drawings of yours at Calpurnia," she says, keeping her voice low, her eyes on his. Once the words are out she’s amazed at her own fearlessness; it’s as if she's reading lines from someone else’s script. "The house is on the market, Villa Calpurnia, up for sale; we're in the process of appraising the effects, and I wanted to ask if you could authenticate the drawings for me. Assuming that you agree they're yours." Lipscomb looks at his hands and shakes them slightly as if he's touched something hot. "Mine?" he says, and adds, "Are they signed?" It's not clear whether he's asking her or telling her. "They're unsigned, actually, yes," says Elizabeth, "as far as I can tell." Lipscomb turns his impressive profile to the light. "If they're unsigned it means they're probably unfinished; and vice versa; which means they could be anyone's. We're not talking about old masters here, I assume? Nowadays you don't sign things until you're sure you're finished with them. Unfinished means unsigned." Elizabeth tries to read the expression on his face. Is he pleased by her attention, or leery of possible reprisals come back to haunt him in his golden years? Or, for that matter, does he even have any idea what she's talking about? Is it possible, that is, that artists don't always necessarily remember everything they paint? Elizabeth watches his inscrutable profile with its single unreadable eye. At the other end of the room Madeleine Cavanagh is arguing with Nurse Oxtoby about the ice, an old lady in nonstop communication with a narrowing world. "Or inauthentic, even," says Elizabeth. "I mean, who knows?" "Or inauthentic?" Lipscomb asks. "A forgery? I like that; imitation being the sincerest form of flattery." Once, in the old days, back before Elizabeth was born, he says flatteringly; 'there was a young woman who tried to paint a series of Lipscombs and pass them off as the real thing. "It caused a lot of trouble, more than you might think." Lipscomb breaks a small and wavery laugh. "But that was in another country; and besides the wench is dead." "I’ve admired your portrait of Maribel so much," says Elizabeth. "I never knew her, but your painting has made her very real to me." . And in a way it's true; apart from the odd snapshot and posed family portrait from the fifties, the only idea she has of Maribel's face is Lipscomb’s, true or false, its layers of allusion and irony inseparable from Peg's tall stories and Coby’s childhood memories of his mother, variations on an undocumented theme. Lipscomb is known for his uncanny likenesses, but how far can that take you in the throes of first love or, better yet, its terrible aftermath? "I wondered if I could bring the drawings around for you to look at sometime soon," she says. "And possibly ask you to help me put a price on them, before the sale." She's skating on thin ice here; but what does she really have to lose? The old man takes his glasses off and puts them on the table beside his chair. There's a remote tattoo of footsteps on uncarpeted stairs, a telephone ringing in a distant room. "I suppose they could be mine," he says. He crosses his long thin legs, and then his hands; she has the strong impression that he's enjoying her uneasiness. "Or then again they might not." Elizabeth nods and holds her breath; then lets it out. "But wouldn't it be best to know?" she says. "Would it?" he says. "Why?" Elizabeth works at keeping her voice steady and reasonable. "Well, for the record: I mean what about the biographies? The catalogs, the retrospectives, and so forth." Lipscomb bares his teeth in what she supposes is meant to be a smile; but he's beyond flattery. "Yes, indeed, the biographies," he says, and laughs. "All fifty of them, authorized and otherwise." He puts a wadded handkerchief to his temples, gingerly, as if there's no place on his skin that doesn't give him some degree of pain when touched. "Although it might surprise you to know that there's a fellow at the University of Virginia who's actually sounded me out on the subject once or twice." "But it doesn't surprise me at all," says Elizabeth. Lipscomb gropes for his glasses on the tabletop. "These drawings of yours," he says carefully, in David’s ghostly voice. "What makes you think they're mine?" She's stumped. It's a ridiculous question: what makes people think a Rembrandt is a Rembrandt, or a Degas a Degas? What makes anyone think her face is hers, for that matter, or his is his? Elizabeth says, "I'm not a painter, and I'm afraid I'm no good at nailing down provenances." And then, before she can stop herself: "Does the name Nina Archibald English mean anything to you?" As soon as she's said it Elizabeth feels the space between them go dead and she knows she's gone too far. At the other end of the room the women's voices rise and fall like traffic on a quiet street, but Lipscomb's eyes on Elizabeth are unblinking, and, when he finally speaks, something in his voice makes it clear to her that he knows exactly what she's talking about and remembers the drawings perfectly. Lipscomb leans forward in his chair. "Look, my dear young woman, I don't know what your game is and I'm not sure I even care," he says. "But for the so-called record—or what did you say: for the biographers?—here's all I have to say, and I'll say it under oath if I have to, to you or anyone else, in any court of law. These drawings of yours could be mine, they could be yours, they could be anyone's; but if they don't have my name on them there's nothing I can do for you. Or you for me." Elizabeth nulls back into the shelter other chair, out of the line of fire. She's gone too far too fast; she should have waited, made herself indispensable, baited her trap with flattery and I goodwill. Lipscomb unfolds his hands from his belly and leans back, a lion retreating to its lair. His tone softens. "The old eyes, my dear," he says. He points two fingers to his scored and deeply knotted temple. "The old eyes aren’t what they used to be. Miss Oxtoby has forbidden anyone to mention it, but the fact is I'm legally blind. If those things aren't already signed my word on them one way or other wouldn't stand up in any kind of court at all. The plain fact is I can't see them; I can't see the wallpaper on the wall; I can't see the newspaper to read it or the lamp to read it by. That painting above the fireplace is just a blur to me; your face could be beautiful or you could be a fright: I can't see anything. The only paintings I've still got it in me to authenticate are the ones up here inside my head. The unpainted ones, to be exact; and nobody's beating down my door to ask for them; not anymore." Elizabeth drains her glass of iced tea and puts it down, ready to go, glad that he can't see the rush of color in her face if what he's said is true. "These drawings of yours," Lipscomb says. His voice is confidential, almost boyish in its intensity, and so uncannily like David's that she has a hard time focusing on the words. "All I can do is imagine them. Did you think you'd brought me some pearl of rare price?" He smiles: a brief baring of his old man's ridged, chewed-down, and grayish teeth. "I've drawn a lot of things in my day, finished and unfinished, sketches, scribbles, you name it, signed or not. Works on paper, including paper napkins and the backs of envelopes, forgettable and otherwise, scattered far and wide." He puts out a hand in search others, misses it, and takes it back, one finger at a time. "I'd ask you to describe these particular specimens to me," he says, "but I have a feeling you'd prefer I didn't; or am I misjudging you? Were you a such good friend of Maribel's? Do we understand each other? Am I wrong?" He flails the tabletop beside him for his handkerchief, then flails the front of his shirt for a pocket to put it in. "Please be sure and give my regards to Miss Archibald," he says, "assuming she's still alive. Or Mrs. So and So; or whatever name it is she may be calling herself these days." Scott could have trimmed a hundred pages from Calpurnia, and it would have been a more enjoyable book. For readers looking for insight into human behavior, and who enjoy the pleasure of seeing a situation from multiple points of view, reading Calpurnia will be wonderful. Steve Hopkins, September 23, 2003
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