O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,48
that has to be okay. You can’t come in here—out here—and just expect me to . . . I don’t even know what you expect me to do. What do you want me to say? Jesus!” He threw the barely smoked cigarette down in the snow and stormed inside, leaving Sweeney shaking in the cold.
She looked up at the dark sky, the stars blurred by her tears. She and Toby argued often; they were both strong-willed and there were strong emotions between them. But there was something about this that felt different. She had said the one thing that she was forbidden to say and she realized suddenly how cruel it had been for her to say it. Six months ago, Toby had come to her and told her that he loved her. She had felt nothing for him, nothing for anyone. She had refused to talk to him for weeks. He had almost had to break down her apartment door to get her to talk about it. Now she saw herself plainly, needy and alone; she had come to him only when she was afraid of losing his friendship. She wiped her eyes with the back of her glove.
But she didn’t want to think about that right now. And he was right of course, that she was meddling in something beyond the scope of her interest or skill.
Curious cats often lose their whiskers.
It was something Sweeney’s mother, with her English love of quirky platitudes, had liked to say, when she caught her snooping in a party guest’s purse or holding her mail up to the light to see what was inside. But she hadn’t said it when she’d caught fourteen-year-old Sweeney looking through her journal, trying to find out how her father had died.
Her mother’s version had been maddeningly incomplete, almost tantalizing. “There was an accident. Down in Mexico,” she’d said that cold winter morning fifteen years ago. “Your father won’t be coming back to Boston again.”
And so she had snooped, in drawers and books and finally in her mother’s journal, where she had found a short newspaper clipping, slipped between the pages. “Paul St. George, the painter who became well known in the past decade for his moody, sunburnt images of Mexico and the American Southwest, died on December 2 in Mexico City, an apparent suicide. Police say St. George checked into the Casa Mexico hotel shortly before a gunshot was heard in the early morning hours . . .”
That was all she’d read before her mother found her. “So you know,” she’d said. “He was a coward. Don’t you wish you’d left it alone?”
But she wanted to know the truth, she had told her mother, who replied that the truth was a messy, ugly, overrated thing. And so it was. Life and love had taught her that.
Later there had been more details. As she’d moved up in the department in college, Paul St. George’s name had come up more and more frequently in lectures. A woman in Sweeney’s class had done her senior thesis on his Pueblo series. And she’d picked up a magazine in the department office once and read a review of the Toronto retrospective.
“Curiously, this is the first posthumous retrospective for the American painter Paul St. George, who committed suicide in 1988. The result is both fascinating and dismaying. The work as a body seems somewhat incomplete, as though he had begun a transformation, but never completed it, stilling his talent by his own hand . . .. Particularly moving are the series of pieces featuring handguns and rifles, St. George’s chosen method of suicide. In one a Mexican housewife brandishes a shotgun like a talisman against a chaotic, abstract background of swirling color . . .” She had felt suddenly numb reading those words. He was as much a mystery to her as he’d apparently been to Sweeney’s classmate, who had titled her thesis. “The Happy Enigma: Images of Joy in Paul St. George’s Pueblo Series.”
Sweeney had read the thesis, a neat treatment that wrapped the enigmatic elements of her father’s work within his background and manic depression.
That was what she liked about academic mysteries, as opposed to human ones. At the end of an academic pursuit there was a satisfying symmetry, complexity to be sure, but an answer that one could hold on to.
What about this mystery, which had started out as a neat little puzzle of a gravestone and was now something else entirely?