Authors: Hilary Sloin
Art on Fire
Art on Fire
A Novel
Hilary Sloin
Ann Arbor
Copyright © 2012 Hilary Sloin
Bywater Books
, Inc.
PO Box 3671
Ann Arbor MI 48106-3671
All rights reserved.
By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Bywater Books.
Bywater Books First Ebook Edition: March 2013
Bywater Books First Edition: October 2012
Cover designer: Bonnie Liss (Phoenix Graphics)
Cover photo: Barbara Hadden
ISBN: 978-1-61294-032-8
This novel is a work of fiction. Although parts of the plot were inspired by actual events, all characters and events described by the author are fictitious. No resemblance to real persons, dead or alive, is intended.
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I dedicate this story about love and art and death to my canine companion in all those endeavors for fifteen years, Zen. She was the most beautiful soul I have ever encountered, and I am fairly certain she will never be rivaled. She was with me all through the writing of this book. She died on July 21, 2011, at the age of 15. Not a day goes by that I don't feel her absence and thank whatever force it was that brought us together.
Contents
Woman Reclining on a Blue Couch
, 1984
The Lisa Trilogy (Lisa Gone, Genius, Virgin)
, 1982
Study of White Figure in Window
, 1988
Reality Has Intruded Here
, 1989
This is How She Looked in the Morning
, 1989
                 Â
There's no place like home, and many a man is glad of it.
F. M. Knowles,
A Cheerful Year Book
     Â
On March 12, 1989, at 3:12 a.m., a greedy fire erupted in an otherwise placid neighborhood, decimating the modest house at 312 Riverview Street,
1
along with its residents: Alfonse and Vivian DeSilva, Isabella DeSilva, and Francesca deSilva,
2
foremother of pseudo-realism and arguably one of the greatest American painters.
Approximately nineteen of deSilva's paintings were destroyed in the fire. Their monetary worth is undetermined; their artistic value, immeasurable.
The perspicacious reader will visit the Francesca deSilva Memorial Museum in Truro, Massachusetts, where the thirteen paintings discussed in this volume hang side by side, to devastating effect. This is how the work was meant to be experienced, and this encounter, more than any words you will read in any pages, provides the truest testimony to deSilva's genius.
A Cry from the Attic
New Haven, 1974â1981
Unlike her sister Isabella, whose genius was of a flamboyant variety, Francesca deSilva exhibited no early signs of excellence. At best, she displayed a vague propensity for mechanical repair: tinkering with broken radios and jammed doorknobs, devoting entire afternoons to the assembly of a new purchaseâa fan, a chair, a light. A sturdy, somber girl of few words and a solitary nature, she spent her ample free time playing along the river that ran across the street from her home. It was a wide, brisk river that rolled around bends and over hills, splashed into smooth, open pools, some of which were deep enough to float in. She passed many hours on its sandy shores, lying flat with her eyes closed and listening to the inside of the world.
Each day after school, upon stepping off the bus, Francesca waitedâtying and untying her shoe or searching for a stick of gumâuntil the other children had dispersed. When she was certain of her solitude, she swung her book bag across her back and spilled down the embankment, twisted around prickers, and hopped rock to rock over the gelatin swamp, until she arrived at her destination: a slice of river beach, far from her house, smoother than the shores of the Long Island Sound. There, she stood at the shore and let water lick the rubber tips of her sneakers.
She longed to be Sam Gribley, the boy in
My Side of the Mountain
:
3
to run away from home and survive on instinct, live alone with a wild animal she'd tame. Bathe in the river, stew berries. Instead of living inside a hollowed-out tree as Sam had, Francesca would furnish a hut. She'd drawn up specs and pilfered a sheet of chamois from her father's collection to make a door. But being a pragmatic child, and having long been accustomed to delayed gratification, she'd resolved to start construction on the perfect day, when the sky was clear and the air
crisp, when she could be certain several hours preceded nightfall. When at last this day arrived, Francesca scoured the woods like a rabbit, piling fallen branches on her outstretched arm. She sought out the evergreens, whose green needles clung like curtains long after the sap had dried up. With these branches she would form the walls of the hut; for the base, she needed thicker, sturdier boughs of oak or maple. She worked without pause, running up the embankment and back down, wiping her forehead with the back of her soiled hand, growing her two pilesâevergreen, miscellaneous hardwoodâhigher and higher, until they were as tall as Francesca herself.
The day grew dark suddenly, the way it does in September in New England, as if winter had been hovering the whole time, picking its moment. Without warning, she could see nothing. The river was just a rushing sound to her right; the woods were black and filled with sudden slapping sounds. She scrambled back through the marsh, swatting at prickers, twisting her ankles into soft spots. Exhausted, she scaled the embankment on hands and knees.
A blaring porch light announced her house on the other side of the street. She plodded across the road and onto the lawn, ignoring the walkway her father had carved in the center of the tidy, square lot. Blinking against the sudden brightness, she pressed the doorbell, then held onto the threshold and emptied pebbles from each shoe onto the freshly swept porch. Twigs perforated her dusty hair. She cupped her hands and peered into the picture window. Through her own reflection she saw bowls of chips and candy set out on the lucite coffee table. The sheets had been removed from the furniture.
Vivian DeSilva opened the door, erect as a sailor in her navy blue dress, a gold chain-link belt tight around her narrow waist. Her burgundy hair was piled on her head, twisted and tucked in a complicated design. Thick, orange paint made her lips glow in the dusk.
“You look nice, Mom,” said Francesca.
Vivian dragged her gaze down until it found Francesca's face. “Oh, Francesca!” She covered her mouth and clasped the girl's small shoulders, pulled her into the house. “Alfonse! Alfonse!” (louder the second time). “Honey, don't touch anything,” she said, her face collapsed with worry. She held Francesca's dirty hands in the air.
Alfonse, also gritty after a long day planting perennials around a new shopping center, trotted down the stairs and arrived in the foyer. “You rang, Madame.” He roughed up Francesca's dusty hair.
“Honey, go get your toothbrush,” she told Francesca. “Papa will bring you to Grandma's.”
“I don't need a toothbrush. Grandma lets me use hers,” said Francesca, boasting.
Vivian looked at Alfonse. She popped her eyes wide and opened her palms. “Well? What are you waiting for? I have eleven dinner guests coming in an hour. Could you lend me a hand here?” Alfonse rubbed her back and kissed her spuriously on the cheek, then rested his heavy hands on Francesca's small shoulders. “Let's go, Tiger.” He guided her through the kitchen and out the back door.
In an effort to give a leg up to the lagging social development of her older daughter, Vivian had located the families of four other child geniuses in Connecticut and invited them for dinner. But now that the event was imminent, she was stricken with a pervasive sense of doom. She trotted to the top of the stairs, then knocked cheerfully on Isabella's door. “Bella!”
Slowly Isabella pulled back the door. She stood solemn and erect, in an old brown sweater and black wool skirt. Vivian half-recognized the outfit as the one she'd worn to her father's funeral eleven years before. The skirt hung to Isabella's ankles, punctuated by white knee socks and misshapen black shoes. “What are you wearing?” she demanded.
“My outfit.”
“I see that! But we have people coming over.” She pressed two fingers of each hand to either temple, holding the sides of her head together as if they might come apart.
“This is what I'm wearing to the party. I'm dressed as someone important. A great hero of this century.”
Vivian forced a chuckle despite the fever of panic beginning to rise inside her. She couldn't stand how much she loved this child. “Okay, Miss Smarty Pants. Who? Who are you dressed as?” She crossed her arms and tapped the floor with her foot.
“Guess.”
“Oh, I don't know . . . Annie Sullivan.”
“Wrong.”
Vivian searched her watery memory for dowdy female heroines. “Virginia Woolf?” she asked, hoping she wasn't entirely misinformed. It wasn't easy, being less intelligent than your eleven-year-old daughter; she shook her head, enjoying every moment of it. Brains like these had to come from somewhere, and certainly Alfonse's family hadn't cultivated them in the pizza kitchen in Wooster Square.