The Portrait, page 2
At fifty-four, Faye did nothing to hide her age. She dressed in conservative business style. She had sacrificed the frills of femininity in order to let the men she worked with know that she was one of them, and as powerful as any of them. She exuded an aura of strength, intelligence, and seriousness. She wore her blonde hair short, used very little makeup, and seemed timeless, not of any particular era. She had worn a plain black suit to the funeral, by no particular designer. She had no interest in fashion. She had more important things to do. She had gotten on well with her father-in-law, better than Charles ever had. Her own parents had died years before, so Liam had just lost the only grandparent he had. Patrick had liked him better than his own son. Patrick had had a hard time warming up to anyone, even his own flesh and blood. It went against the grain.
Charlie, Faye, and Liam left for the cemetery as quickly as they could. The hearse had just pulled away as they came down the steps of the church. The pallbearers had been the men on the board. With Patrick’s secretary, Faye had organized a reception for several hundred guests at his home in San Francisco. Charlie was dreading it. It would be stifling, with the rooms full of all the social and banking people that he didn’t care about. He had carved out a niche for himself in a very different world of modern, unorthodox, high-tech thinkers, people who had come up from nothing and made incredible fortunes with innovative ideas, not by following in their predecessors’ footsteps. They were all the people Patrick disapproved of and didn’t understand, like his son.
In time, Charlie intended to step down from the board quietly, but he couldn’t do it yet. He had to go through the motions for a year or so. He was going to his father’s office the next day, to tie up some loose ends, and then flying to New York that night for meetings. His company was opening twenty more healthy fast-food restaurants in the suburbs of New York, and in the days following, he had meetings planned in Boston, Atlanta, Miami, and Chicago. He had a busy few weeks ahead. Liam was leaving for his trip to Europe to celebrate his recent graduation from Yale. Faye had a new fund she was opening to her firm’s investors. They each had their own plans and Liam, who was now twenty-two, would be starting his architectural studies back at Yale in the fall, building his future.
As Charlie left the church, a boyhood friend, Adam Stein, stopped him briefly with a smile. They still saw each other for lunch from time to time. He was the managing partner of the biggest law firm in the city, and Charlie’s lawyer.
“I’m sorry, Charlie,” he said respectfully, although he knew that Charlie was less so and his father’s death was a relief, a release from a relationship that had been painful all his life. “You’re up, Mr. Chairman,” he said in an undertone, with a teasing glance, and Charlie winced. “I’ll call you for a loan next week. Maggie wants me to build a new house in Belvedere. I’m counting on you.” Charlie knew Adam wasn’t serious about the loan. He was one of the most successful attorneys in the city.
“I can’t wait to turn you down,” Charlie quipped back. “And I’m not ‘up.’” He and Adam used to play baseball together on their school team. “I’ll be out as fast as I can get away with it. I’ll be on the road for the next few weeks. They’ll do fine without me.”
“You’ll have to play ball with them at least for a while,” Adam reminded him, and Charlie looked pained. Board meetings bored him intensely and never moved fast enough for him, which Adam knew. Charlie thought fast, moved fast, acted decisively. The bank moved with the speed of an iceberg and the members deliberated at length before making any significant decisions, and they were never exciting ones. Acting as chairman, even for a year, was his father’s final punishment for him, after a lifetime of them. Charlie had never won his father’s approval.
“See you at the house later,” Adam said, and patted his friend’s arm, as Charlie nodded and moved through the crowd to find Faye and Liam. They were waiting at the car that would take them to the cemetery for the private burial, where it would all finally end, with a handful of earth thrown into the grave, after the minister’s last words.
Faye looked at him questioningly, to see if he was okay. Charlie looked as calm and in control as he always was. He had waited forty-nine years for this day, and it had finally come.
They drove to the cemetery without a word, each of them lost in their own thoughts, with nothing they wanted to say to each other. Charlie remembered hazy moments of his mother’s funeral and felt a rush of sadness. Faye remembered her own parents, and Liam thought of the grandfather who had always scared him a little but had been kind to him. He would miss him, or miss just knowing he was there.
The silence was familiar to all three of them, and was easier than sharing what they felt—or admitting what they didn’t feel, in Charlie’s case. The silence was where they each felt safe. After a lifetime of distance between them, they knew there was nothing to say.
Devon Darcy woke up as she did every morning, with daylight streaming into the room, sometimes bright sunshine, and the light from the lamp she left on at night near her bed. She liked knowing where she was immediately on waking. In the darkness, she was haunted by ghosts of the past. She had learned to live with them. There was a tree outside her window that she could see from her bed, and hear the birds perching on it. They started chirping even before daylight.
She lived on the top two floors of a well-kept once-elegant townhouse in the West Village in downtown New York, on the West Side near the Hudson River. It stood in a row of houses like it, and down the street there were shops and restaurants and people. The street was quiet, and the neighborhood alive with old people, mothers and children, runners, dog walkers, and people laughing and talking to each other. She liked that. They were there if she wanted to see them when she took a break from work and went for a walk.
Her cozy bedroom was on the top floor, and on the floor below, she had a large living room with a marble fireplace she never used, tall French windows with beautiful antique satin curtains with tassels, and a dining room she had turned into her studio, filled with blank canvases in a corner, others leaning against the wall, her brushes and paints spread out on a work table, a large comfortable chair for her subjects, her easel, and a number of small portraits hanging on the walls. She was a portrait artist. The canvas she was currently working on was on her easel, with layers of paint on it. She had only just begun to work on the underlayer, and sketched the shapes that would emerge as the subject came to life in her head and on the canvas. When her subjects lived in New York, she met with them once a week for several months, sometimes less if she had a strong connection with them. Those who lived far away spent a morning or afternoon in her studio with her, and she took videos and photographs of them making normal movements and expressions while they talked to her, and she would refer to the photographs later while she painted. They came to life on the canvas.
Between commissions, she painted people she didn’t know from drawings she sketched randomly from memory, or as she watched them in restaurants, or parks. She had drawn people since she was a child. It was a gift. She had dreamed of being a ballerina as a little girl, and had painted dancers in every position, like Degas. Now she painted important people, and only accepted the commissions she wanted to, through a highly reputable gallery uptown. She did portraits mostly of men, occasionally of women. She saw into their souls and listened to them during sittings. Though she’d been a shy child, she had painted the world she observed with startling maturity and insight, which had deepened over the years.
Destiny had dealt Devon a hard hand. Her parents had died in a fire when she was five. She barely remembered them. They lived in New York in a small walk-up apartment in a poor unkempt neighborhood and were both teachers. The building was run-down and caught fire. Devon was saved by the firefighters right before the roof caved in, but they couldn’t get to her parents. She still remembered them screaming as the firefighters rushed her away. Her mother was French and her father American. He had no living family. She was sent to Paris to live with her maternal grandmother, who had been a ballet teacher, became a seamstress, and made gowns for society ladies who came to the apartment for fittings. Devon would sketch them while they weren’t watching. She loved the way they looked and what they wore, the way they did their hair, and the gowns her grandmother made them.
Her grandmother was strict but kind, and she had recognized Devon’s talent. She died when Devon was sixteen. She left enough money for Devon to attend the École des Beaux-Arts, the famous art school, where she was classically trained and learned to master her gift. She married a fellow art student, a sculptor, when she was twenty-two and he was two years older. They had a son, Axel, a year later. Jean-Louis, her husband, was an orphan as she was. He worked as a waiter in a bistro to pay for school, and gave up the Beaux-Arts to support the family when Axel was born. Devon continued her studies and Jean-Louis took care of the baby in the daytime before he went to work at night at the restaurant. He never complained about the sacrifices he made for them. They managed to pay for food and the rented room they lived in. They had no living relatives, only each other and their son. She barely remembered her parents now, but she remembered Jean-Louis and their son vividly. They lived on in memory, and in her heart.
Jean-Louis was struck by a bus while riding his bike to work on a rainy night when Axel was three. Devon was a widow at twenty-six. She taught drawing at a school to support herself and Axel after Jean-Louis died, and managed to eke out a meager living. She sold drawings at street fairs, quick portraits people liked. Two years after Jean-Louis died, Axel caught meningitis and was gone in twelve hours. At twenty-eight, Devon was alone in the world. It had been fourteen years since then. Axel would have been nineteen now, which was too painful to think of, and she didn’t try. It took her a year to get back on her feet and be able to function again. She had made constant sketches of Axel during that year, in order to keep him near her. She didn’t want to forget his angelic face with all its expressions. The year was a blur. Now she couldn’t make a decent living in France, couldn’t bear the memories, and being there without Jean-Louis and Axel. Every park and street was filled with the memories of Axel. She moved to New York, with the little money she had, found the gallery which still represented her now, and when they saw what she was capable of, they began giving her gallery shows. She was forty-two years old now, and had been back in New York for fourteen years.
She had finally reached the pinnacle of success, and now could do only the commissions she wanted and refuse the rest. She researched her subjects carefully, and did those she respected. The results were extraordinary. She didn’t paint people she didn’t like, because it showed in the work. She saw into their souls, which was part of her gift. She did magnificent paintings that represented her subjects inside and out. They were alive on the canvas and looked as though they would speak at any moment. Her subjects were thrilled with their portraits.
Devon could have done three times as many commissions if she wanted to. She did eight or ten a year, and wanted to be proud of them. The sittings were intense and lengthy, some faster than others. Her years of training, her losses, and years of suffering deepened her skill and mastery of her art. She painted important men and women at the height of their success, people whom she respected for valid reasons, and that were meaningful to her.
She had painted socialites and important commercial, industrial, political, or artistic figures. She had painted a president, and declined another. She had been respected and well known herself for the past seven of the fourteen years in New York. She channeled her subjects’ inner being with depth and a highly trained eye. She was never pompous or pretentious, but she was very definite about who she would paint and who she wouldn’t, and never changed her mind.
She didn’t dwell on the past or on her losses, but they were part of her now, and colored how she viewed the world. She wanted to do meaningful work and didn’t want to waste time or paint people she didn’t admire. She shied away from any real-life involvement with her subjects. Their connection was brief, ephemeral, and existed only on the canvas. They invited her to parties, dinners, weekends, and holidays at their homes but she never went. She lived in her own world. She was no longer a wife or mother, and identified herself only as an artist. She knew the scars she bore intimately, and didn’t hide from them, and she was a purist about her work, and the techniques she had learned. She was the harshest critic of her work.
Devon was a beautiful woman with red hair and green eyes the color of Imperial jade. She had delicate fine features, and was lithe and graceful. Her grandmother had paid for ballet lessons for her, from her earnings.
Devon spoke very little to her subjects, but listened to everything they said and translated it into her art.
She ran lightly down the stairs to the kitchen to make herself a strong cup of coffee, and then sat in her nightgown, thinking about the portrait she was about to start. Her subject was a giant of industry who had become an important political figure. He was a powerful man, but seemed like a person of integrity to her. She made no apologies for her work or her boundaries and respected them.
She was having a show at the gallery in two days, and had to prepare for it. She had a lot to do. She had included a series of portraits of children she had done in her spare time. They were beautiful and touching. She knew none of them. They were just random subjects that had appealed to her. There was a portrait of Axel in her bedroom. She talked to it sometimes. He looked so alive and was smiling in the portrait. It made her happy, not sad. There was one of Jean-Louis in the living room, which showed his serious, pensive side. He had been twenty-eight when she painted the portrait shortly before he died. He looked like a boy to her now, at forty-two.
She showered and put on jeans and a soft pale blue sweater and stood at her easel. She added another coat of the underlayer, and made some notes. The subject was coming to a sitting that afternoon. She could hardly wait to get started, as she smiled and got to work.
Chapter 2
Charles Taylor went to his father’s office at the bank the day after the funeral. The interment had been brief and grim. The reception at his father’s house had been exhausting. Charles had spent the night there, since he wanted to be in the city early the next day. Faye had gone back to Atherton with Liam. Charles had been deep in conversation with a member of the board and didn’t see them leave. They knew better than to bother him when he was talking business. Charlie had a single-track mode of operation, so they left. Liam was eager to leave and meet up with friends.
Charles was surprised by how well he slept in his father’s house. He didn’t feel his presence or sense any message from him. They had run out of things to say to each other years before and Charles had become an expert at deflecting his father’s never-wavering criticism of his life choices and decisions. It had fallen on deaf ears for years. Patrick Taylor wasn’t a kind man. Charlie hoped that he was himself, and tried to be. At worst, he was honest to the point of bluntness sometimes, in a casual, well-meaning way, which occasionally wounded its object more than he intended. He apologized when he was wrong or hurt someone’s feelings. Charlie had a laser-beam, astute, all-seeing point of view. He could be cutting when he was angry. He had a temper, which didn’t surface often and was quick to cool when it did. He hated laziness and dishonesty, and was merciless with either. He was an honest man, and expected the same from others. His words were sharp and intended to hurt if he felt betrayed, cheated, or disrespected. He was the commander of whatever ship he was on, and didn’t tolerate mutiny, from inferiors or superiors alike. Charlie liked to be in control and get his own way, but he was honest and fair, and a man of integrity.
Liam never challenged his father’s authority. He just did what he wanted, and counted on no one noticing, which was usually the case, since his parents were busy. He was a good kid. He never got in trouble in school, and got fabulous grades. He was as smart as his parents and sensible most of the time, with the occasional youthful poor judgment and foolishness, but not to excess. His parents were lucky. With very little supervision, Liam rarely caused a problem.
As Charlie walked around his father’s home, he felt free. No one was going to criticize him, challenge him, put him down. He could breathe. The quarrelsome old man who had hounded him all his life was gone. Finally. Charlie wouldn’t miss him.
Charlie informed the employees that he would be putting the house on the market soon and wanted any necessary small repairs taken care of immediately. They knew it was coming, and that Charlie and his family wouldn’t move to the city. Their house in Atherton was spectacular, and his father’s was somewhat gloomy with dark wood paneling everywhere, and heavy drapes that kept out the sun and light. It was a beautiful home, but not for a young family. It looked like an English men’s club, with a library filled with leather-bound books and first editions Patrick had collected. Charlie stood at the window for a minute, looking out at the view of the bay, and felt like his father as he stood there. It made him uncomfortable. He was the opposite of his father, intentionally.
He left for the bank after a cup of coffee in the kitchen. They had used the formal dining room for the reception the night before, its vitrines filled with antique silver.
The board members were waiting for Charlie in the boardroom at the bank and gave him a warm welcome. They stood up when he came into the room, to show respect, and he waved them to their seats, and took his own at the head of the table. A secretary he didn’t know set down a cup of coffee for him. All of the board members had been at the funeral, the male members as pallbearers. Charlie tried not to think of it. There was no one Charlie’s age on the board. They were all north of sixty, and most of them in their seventies, although capable, experienced, and alert. This was an informal gathering to welcome him.
