Patricia McKillip - The Gorgon in the Cupboard

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2024-12-22 0 0 175.18KB 30 页 5.9玖币
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The Gorgon in the Cupboard
PATRICIA A. McKILLIP
HARRY could not get the goat to stay still. His model, who was an aspiring actress, offered numerous impractical
suggestions as she crouched beside the animal. In fact, she rarely stopped talking. Harry didn't like the look in the
goat's eye. It wasn't very big, but it seemed to him arrogant beyond its age, and contemplating mischief.
"Give it something to eat," Moira suggested. "Goats eat anything, don't they? That old leather sack, there."
"That's my lunch," Harry said patiently. "And the less we put into the goat, the less will come out of it. If you get
my meaning."
She giggled. She was quite charming, with her triangular elfin face, her large green eyes with lashes so long they
seemed to catch air like butterfly wings as they rose and fell. She dealt handily with the goat, who was eyeing Harry's
lunch now. It strained against the rope around its neck,occasionally tightening it so that its yellow eyes verged on the
protuberant. A bit like hers, Harry thought.
"Try to remain serious," he pleaded. "You're a scapegoat; you've been falsely accused and spurned by the world.
Your only friend in the world is that goat."
"I thought you said you were just sketching the outlines today. Putting us in our places. So why do I have to be
serious?" The goat, in whose rope her wrists were supposedly entangled, gave an obstinate tug; she loosed one hand
and smacked it. "You should have gotten a female. They're sweet-natured. Not like this ruffian." She wrinkled her
nose. "Stinks, too, he does. Like—"
"This one was all I could borrow. Please."
They were still for a miraculous moment, both gazing at him. He picked up charcoal, held his breath and drew a
line of the goat's flank onto the canvas, then continued the line with her flank and bent knee. She swatted at a fly; the
goat bucked; they both seemed to baa at once. Harry sighed, wiped sweat out of his eyes. They had been there half the
morning, and little enough to show for it. The sun was high and dagger-bright; the tavern yard where he had set his
poignant scene was full of sniggering critics. Idlers, he reminded himself, resuming doggedly when the pair settled
again. They wouldn't know a brush from a broom straw. Still. He paused to study his efforts. He sighed again. There
was something definitely wrong with her foot.
"It's hot," she said plaintively, shaking her heavy hair away from her neck, disturbing the perfect, nunlike veil
across her face.
"Ah, don't—"
"And I'm starving. Why can't you paint like Alex McAlister? He lets me sit inside; he dresses me in silks; he lets
me talk as much as I want unless he's doing my face. And I get hung every time, too, a good place on the wall where
people can see me, not down in a corner where nobody looks."
The goat was hunkered on the ground now, trying to break its neck pulling at the rope peg. Harry glanced
despairingly at the merciless source of light, looked again at his mutinous scapegoats, then flung his charcoal down.
"All right. All right."
"You owe me for Thursday, too."
"All right."
"When do you want me to come again?"
He closed his eyes briefly, then fished coins out of his pocket. "I'll send word."
One of the critics leaning against the wall called, "Best pay the goat, too; it might not come back otherwise."
"I might have work," Moira reminded him loftily. Mostly she worked early mornings selling bread in a bakery and
took elocution lessons in afternoons when she wasn't prowling the theaters, or, Harry suspected, the streets for work.
"That goat won't get any younger neither," another idler commented. Harry gritted his teeth, then snapped his
fingers for the boy pitching a knife in a corner of the yard. The boy loosened the goat from the peg, got a good grip on
its neck-loop to return it to its owner. He held out his other hand for pay.
"Tomorrow then, sir?" he asked indifferently.
"I'll send word," Harry repeated.
"Don't forget your dinner there, sir."
"You have it. I'm not hungry."
He dropped the charcoal into his pocket, tucked the canvas under one arm and the folded easel under the other, and
walked home dejectedly, scarcely seeing the city around him. He was a fair-haired, sweet-faced young man, nicely
built despite his awkward ways, with a habitually patient expression and a heart full of ravaging longings and
ambitions. He was not talented enough for them, this morning's work told him. He would never be good enough. The
girl was right.
His paintings, if chosen at all to be hung for important exhibits, always ended up too high, or too close to the floor,
or in obscure, badly lit corners. He thought of McAlister's magnificent Diana, with the dogs and the deer in it looking
so well-behaved they might have been stuffed. And Haversham's Watchful Shepherd: the sheep as fat as dandelions
and as docile as—as, well, sheep. Why not scapesheep? he wondered despondently, rather than scapegoats? No goat
would stand still long enough for mankind to heap their crimes on its head.
Then he saw that which drove every other thought out of his head.
Her.
She was walking with her husband on the other side of the street. He was speaking fervidly, gesturing, as was his
wont, probably about something that had seized his imagination. It might have been anything, Harry knew: a poem, the
style of an arch, a pattern of embroidery on a woman's sleeve. She listened, her quiet face angled slightly toward him,
her eyes downturned, intent, it seemed, on the man's brilliance. He swept fingers through his dark, shaggy hair, his
thick mustaches dancing, spit flying now and then in his exuberance. Neither of them saw Harry. Who had stopped
midstream in the busy street, willing her to look, terrified that she might raise her dark, brooding eyes and see what
was in his face. She only raised her long white fingers, gently clasped her husband's flying arm and tucked it down
between them.
Thus they passed, the great Alex McAlister and his wife Aurora, oblivious to the man turned to stone by the sight
of her.
He moved at last, jostled by a pair of boys pursued through the crowd, and then by the irate man at their heels.
Harry barely noticed them. Her face hung in his mind, gazing out of canvas at him: McAlister's Diana, McAlister's
Cleopatra, McAlister's Venus. That hair, rippling like black fire from skin as white as alabaster, those deep, heavy-
lidded eyes that seemed to perceive invisible worlds. That strong, slender column of neck. Those long fingers,
impossibly mobile and expressive. That mouth like a bite of sweet fruit. Those full, sultry lips…
I would give my soul to paint you, he told her silently. But even if in some marvelous synchronicity of events that
were possible, it would still be impossible. With her gazing at him, he could not have painted a stroke. Again and
again, she turned him into stone.
Not Aurora, he thought with hopeless longing, but Medusa.
He had tried to speak to her any number of times when he had visited Alex's studio or their enchanting cottage in
the country. All he managed, under that still, inhuman gaze, were insipid commonplaces. The weather. The wild-
flowers blooming in the garden. The stunning success of McAlister's latest painting. He coughed on crumbs, spilled
tea on his cuff. Her voice was very low; he bent to hear it and stepped on her hem with his muddy boot sole, so that
whatever she had begun to say was overwhelmed by his apologies. Invariably, routed by his own gracelessness, he
would turn abruptly away to study a vase that McAlister had glazed himself, or a frame he was making. McAlister
never seemed to notice his hopeless passion, the longing of the most insignificant moth for fire. He would clap Harry's
shoulder vigorously, spilling his tea again, and then fix him in an enthusiastic torrent of words, trying to elicit Harry's
opinion of some project or profundity, while the only thought in Harry's head was of the woman sitting so silently
beyond them she might have been in another world entirely.
He walked down a quiet side street shaded by stately elms, opened the gate in front of the comfortable house he
had inherited from his parents. Looking despondently upon his nicely blooming hollyhocks, he wondered what to do
next.
If only I could create a masterwork, he thought. An idea no one has thought of yet, that would attract the attention
of the city, bring me acclaim. Make me one of the circle of the great… Now I'm only a novice, a squire, something
more than apprentice yet less than master. Harry Waterman, dabbler at the mystery of art. If only I could pass through
the closed doors to the inner sanctum. Surely She would notice me then…
He went across the garden, up the steps to his door, and stopped again, hand on the latch, as he mused over an
appropriate subject for a masterpiece. The goat, while original and artistically challenging, held no dignity; it would
not rivet crowds with its power and mystery. At most, viewers might pity it and its ambiguous female counterpart, and
then pass on. More likely they would pity the artist, who had stood in a sweltering tavern yard painting a goat.
Aurora's face passed again through his thoughts; his hand opened and closed convulsively on the door latch.
Something worthy of those eyes he must paint. Something that would bring expression into them: wonder, admiration,
curiosity…
What?
Whatever it was, he would dedicate his masterpiece to Her.
The door pulled abruptly out of his hold. Mrs. Grommet, his placid housekeeper, held a hand to her ample bosom
as she stared at him. "Oh, it's you, Mr. Waterman. I couldn't imagine who was making that racket with the door latch."
She shifted aside, opened the door wide for him to enter.
"Sorry, Mrs. Grommet," he murmured. "Throes of creation."
"Of course, Mr. Waterman. I didn't expect you back so soon. Have you had your lunch, sir?"
"No. Just bring me tea in my studio, please. I expect to be in the throes for the rest of the afternoon."
"Yes, sir."
In the highest floor of the house, he had knocked down walls, enlarged windows to give him space and light, views
from a city park on one side, the broad, busy river on the other. Mrs. Grommet came panting up with a great silver
tray. He slumped in an easy chair, sipped tea as he flipped through his sketchbooks for inspiration. Faces, dogs,
flowers, birds, hills, rocks, pieces of armor, horses, folds of heavy tapestry, drifting silk, hands, feet, eyes… Nothing
coherent, nothing whole, nothing containing the lightning bolt of inspiration he craved.
He read some poetry; words did not compel an image. He paced for a while, his mind a blank canvas. He
beseeched his Muse. Anybody's Muse. Inspiration failed to turn her lovely face, her kindly attention, toward him. He
wandered to his cupboards, pulled out old, unfinished canvases, studied the stilted figures, the fuzzy landscapes for
something that he might redeem to greatness.
One caught at memory: a head without a mouth. He placed it on the easel, stood studying it. The head, when
completed, would have belonged to Persephone at the moment she realized that, having eaten of the fruits of the
Underworld, she was doomed to spend half her life in that gloomy place. The young model he had chosen for it had
vanished before he could finish it. Harry gazed at her, struck by her beauty, which had inspired his normally clumsy
brushwork. The almond-shaped eyes of such pale gray they seemed the color of sun-kissed ice, the white-gold hair, the
apricot skin. A true mingling of spring and winter, his model, who had disappeared so completely she might have been
carried away into the netherworld herself.
He tried to remember her name. May? Jenny? She had gotten herself into trouble, he suspected. Harry had noticed
a certain heaviness in her walk, the frigidity of terror in her expression. Moved, he had offered, in his nebulous,
hesitant way, to help. But she had fled. Or died, perhaps, he was forced to consider. In childbirth, or trying to get rid of
the child, who could know? He had tried to find her so that he could finish the painting. But no one seemed to know
anything at all about her.
He wondered if it might be worth finishing. Her eyes, gazing straight out at the viewer, compelled attention. Idly,
he traced a mouth with his forefinger, rifling through all the likely mouths he might borrow to finish it. There was
Beresford's cousin Jane… But no, even at her young age, her lips were too thin to suggest the hunger that had caused
Persephone to eat forbidden fruit… Or was that a different tale?
He recognized the invisible mouth his finger had outlined, and swallowed.
Some passing Muse, a mischievous sprite, tempted him to reach for crimson paint. The lips that haunted him
burned like fire in memory… but darker than fire, darker than rose, darker than blood. He toyed guiltily with all those
colors on his palette. Only paint, he told himself. Only memory. The color of wine, they were, deep, shadowy
burgundy, with all the silken moistness of the rose petal.
Vaguely he heard Mrs. Grommet knock, inquire about his supper. Vaguely he made some noise. She went away.
The room darkened; he lit lamps, candles. Mrs. Grommet did not return; the streets grew even quieter; the river faded
into night.
He blinked, coming out of his obsessive trance. That full, provocative splendor of a mouth was startling beneath
the gentle, frightened eyes of his Persephone. But the likeness transfixed him. Aurora's mouth it was; he had succeeded
beyond all dreams in shifting it from memory into paint. He could not use it. Of course he could not. Everyone would
recognize it, even on some other woman's face. Which he would need to go out and find, if he wanted to finish this
Persephone. Maybe not his masterwork, but far easier to manage than the goat; she would do until inspiration struck.
He lingered, contemplating that silent, untouchable mouth. He could not bring himself to wipe it away yet. He
would go down and eat his cold supper, deal more ruthlessly with the mouth after he had found a replacement for it. It
did not, after all, belong to him; it belonged to the wife of his dear friend and mentor… He tore his eyes from it, lifted
the canvas from the easel and positioned it carefully back in the cupboard, where it could dry and be forgotten at the
same time.
He closed the door and the lips spoke.
"Harry!" Its voice was sweet and raucous and completely unfamiliar. "You're not going to leave me here in the
dark, are you? After calling me all afternoon? Harry?"
He flung himself against the door, hearing his heart pound like something frantic trying to get out of him, or trying
to get in. He tried to speak; his voice wouldn't come, only silent bleats of air, like an astonished sheep.
"Harry?"
"Who—" he finally managed to gasp. "Who—"
"Open the door."
"N." -
"You know I'm in here. You can't just keep me shut up in here."
"N."
"Oh Harry, don't be so unfriendly. I won't bite. And even if I did—" The voice trilled an uncouth snigger, "you'd
like it, from this mouth."
Harry, galvanized with sudden fury, clutched at the cupboard latch, barely refraining from wrenching it open.
"How dare you!" he demanded, feeling as though the contents of his inmost heart had been rifled by vulgar, soiled
hands. "Who are you?"
"That's it," the voice cooed. "Now lift the latch, open the door. You can do it."
"If you force me to come in, I'll—I'll wipe away your mouth with turpentine."
"Tut, Harry. How crude. Just when I'm ready to give you what you want most."
"What I want—"
"Inspiration, Harry. You've been wishing for me ever since you gave up on the goat and gave me a chance to get a
word in edgewise."
"You're a mouth—" He was breathing strangely again, taking in too much air. "How can you possibly know about
the goat?"
"You called me."
"I did not."
"You invoked me," the voice insisted. "I am the voice of your despair. Your desire. Why do you think I'm coming
out of these lips?"
Harry was silent, suddenly breathless. A flash went through him, not unlike the uncomfortable premonition of
inspiration. He was going to open the door. Pushed against it with all his strength, his hands locked around the latch,
he was going to open… "Who are you?" he pleaded hoarsely. "Are you some sort of insane Muse?"
"Guess again," the voice said cooly. "You looked upon your Beloved and thought of me. I want you to paint me. I
am your masterwork."
"My masterwork."
"Paint me, Harry. And all you wish for will be yours."
"All I wish…"
"Open the door," the voice repeated patiently. "Don't be afraid. You have already seen my face."
His mouth opened; nothing came out. The vision stunned him, turned him into stone: the painting that would rivet
the entire art world, reveal at last the depths and heights of his genius. The snake-haired daughter of the gods whose
beauty threatened, commanded, whose eyes reflected inexpressible, inhuman visions.
He whispered, "Medusa."
"Me," she said. "Open the door."
He opened it.
DOWN by the river, Jo huddled with the rest of the refuse, all squeezed under a butcher's awning trying to get out
of the sudden squall. In the country, where she had walked from, the roads turned liquid in the rain; carriages, wagons,
horses, herds of sheep and cows churned them into thick, oozing welts and hillocks of mud deep enough to swallow
your boots if you weren't careful. Here the cobbles, though hard enough, offered some protection. At least she was off
her aching feet. At least until the butcher saw what took up space from customers looking in his windows and drove
them off. Jo had been walking that day since dawn to finish her journey to the city. It was noon now, she guessed,
though hard to tell. The gray sky hadn't changed its morose expression by so much as a shift of light since sunrise.
Someone new pushed into the little group cowering under the awning. Another drenched body, nearly faceless
under the rags wrapped around its head, sat leaning against Jo's shoulder, worn shoes out in the rain. It wore skirts;
other than that it seemed scarcely human, just one more sodden, miserable, breathing thing trying to find some
protection from life.
They all sat silently for a bit, listening to the rain pounding on the awning, watching the little figures along the
tide's edge, gray and shapeless as mud in their rags, darting like birds from one poor crumb of treasure the river left
behind to the next. Bits of coal they stuffed into their rags to sell, splinters of wood, the odd nail or frayed piece of
rope.
The bundle beside Jo murmured, "At least they're used to being wet, aren't they? River or rain, it's all one to them."
Her voice was unexpectedly young. Jo turned, maneuvering one shoulder out from beneath a sodden back. She
saw a freckled girl's face between wet cloth wrapped down to her eyebrows' up to her lower lip. One eye, as blue as
violets, looked resigned, calm. The other eye was swollen shut and ringed by all the colors of the rainbow.
Jo, her own face frozen for so long it hardly remembered how to move, felt something odd stirring in her. Vaguely
she remembered it. Pity or some such, for all the good it did.
She said, "Whoever gave you that must love you something fierce."
"Oh, yes," the girl said. "He'll love me to death one of these days. If he finds me again."
There was a snort from the figure on the other side of Jo. This one sounded older, hoarse and wheezy with illness.
Still she cackled, "I'd one like that. I used to collect my teeth in a bag after he knocked them out. I was so sorry to lose
them, I couldn't bear to give them up. I was that young, then. Never smart enough to run away, even when I was young
enough to think there might be a place to run to."
"There's not," Jo said shortly. "I ran back home to the country. And now I'm here again."
"What will you do?" the girl asked.
Jo shrugged. "Whatever I can."
"What have you done?"
"Mill work in the country. I had to stop doing that when my mother died and there was no one else to—to—"
"Care for the baby?" the old woman guessed shrewdly.
Jo felt her face grow cold again, less expression on it than on a brick. "Yes. Well, it's dead now, so it doesn't
matter."
The girl sucked in her breath. "Cruel," she whispered.
"After that I got work at one of the big houses. Laundry and fires and such. But that didn't last."
"Did you get your references, though?"
"No. Turned out without."
"For what? Stealing?"
"No." Jo leaned her head back against the wall, watched rain running like a fountain over the edge of the swollen
awning. "I wasn't that smart."
The old woman gave her crow-cackle again. "Out of the frying pan—"
Jo nodded. "Into the fire. It would have been, if I hadn't run away. If I'd stayed, I'd have had another mouth to feed
when they turned me out. So I came back here."
Another voice came to life, a man's this time. "To what?" he asked heavily. "Nothing ever changes. City, country,
it's all the same. You're in the mill or on the streets from dark to dark, just to get your pittance to survive one more day.
And some days you can't even get that." He paused; Jo felt his racking cough shudder through them all, piled on top of
one another as they were. The old woman patted his arm, whispered something. Then she turned to Jo, when he had
quieted.
"He lost his wife, not long ago. Twenty-two years together and not a voice raised. Some have that."
"Twenty-two years," the man echoed. "She had her corner at the foot of the Barrow Bridge. She sang like she
didn't know any better. She made you believe it, too—that you didn't know anything better than her singing, you'd
never know anything better. She stopped boats with her voice; fish jumped out of the water to hear. But then she left
me alone with my old fiddle and my old bones, both of us creaking and groaning without her." He patted the lump
under his threadbare cloak as though it were a child. "Especially in this rain."
"Well, I know what I'm going to do when it quits," the girl said briskly. "I'm going to get myself arrested. He'll
never get his hands on me in there. And it's dry and they feed you, at least for a few days before they let you out
again."
"I got in for three months once," a young voice interposed from the far edge of the awning.
"Three months!" the girl exclaimed, her bruised eye trying to flutter open. "What do you have to do for that?"
"I couldn't get myself arrested for walking the streets, no matter how I tried, and I was losing my teeth and my
looks to a great lout who drank all my money away by day and flung me around at night. I was so sick and tired of my
life that one morning when I saw the Lord Mayor of the city in a parade of fine horses and soldiers and dressed-up
lords and ladies, I took off my shoe and threw it at his head." The old woman crowed richly at the thought. "I let them
catch me, and for three months I had a bed every night, clean clothes, and food every day. By the time I got out, my
lout had moved on to some other girl and I was free."
"They don't make jails nowadays the way they used to," the fiddler said. "They never used to spoil you with food
or a bed."
Jo felt the girl sigh noiselessly. "I'd do three months," she murmured, "if I knew where to find a Lord Mayor."
Jo's eyes slid to her vivid, wistful face. "What will you do," she asked slowly, "for your few days?"
"I've heard they take you off the streets if you break something. A window, or a street lamp. I thought I'd try that."
Jo was silent, pulling a tattered shawl around her. Jo had made it for her mother, years earlier, when her father had
been alive to tend to his sheep and his cows, make cheese, shear wool for them to spin into thread. When she'd gone
back, her mother had given the shawl to her to wrap the baby in. The sheep and cows were long gone to pay debts after
her father died. Her mother's hands had grown huge and red from taking in laundry. Alf, they called the baby, after her
摘要：

TheGorgonintheCupboardPATRICIAA.McKILLIPHARRYcouldnotgetthegoattostaystill.Hismodel,whowasanaspiringactress,offerednumerousimpracticalsuggestionsasshecrouchedbesidetheanimal.Infact,sherarelystoppedtalking.Harrydidn'tlikethelookinthegoat'seye.Itwasn'tverybig,butitseemedtohimarrogantbeyonditsage,andco...

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