“And never attempted contact?”
He shook his head. “That was her checkmate, in the end.” He leaned forward. Placed his palms softly on her kneecaps. “If I ever tried to make contact, your mother told me, she’d tell the police that I was the man who’d raped her.”
Rachel tried to get her head around it. Would her mother have gone to those lengths to drive Jeremy James—or anyone for that matter—from her life? That would be beyond the pale even for Elizabeth, wouldn’t it? But then Rachel recalled the fates of others who’d run afoul of Elizabeth Childs during her childhood. There’d been a dean whom Elizabeth had ever so gradually poisoned the faculty against; a fellow psych professor whose contract was not renewed; a janitor who was fired; an employee at the town bakery who was let go. All these people and a couple more had crossed Elizabeth Childs—or she believed they had—and her retaliation was heartless and calculated. Her mother, she knew all too well, had thought at all times in tactical terms.
“Do you think she was raped?” she asked Jeremy.
He shook his head. “I think she had sex with me and then she either paid or coerced someone into beating her up. I’ve had years to think about it and that’s the scenario I find likeliest.”
“Because you wouldn’t live a lie within your own home?”
He nodded. “And because I’d seen the depths of her own insanity. And that she could never forgive.”
Rachel kept twirling it in her head, over and over. Eventually she admitted to the man who should have been her father, “When I think of her—and I think of her too much—I sometimes wonder if she was evil.”
Jeremy shook his head. “No. She wasn’t. She was just the most profoundly damaged human being I’ve ever met. And she was relentlessly hostile if crossed, I’ll give you that. But there was great love in her heart.”
Rachel laughed. “For who?”
He gave her a look of dark befuddlement. “For you, Rachel. For you.”
5
ON LUMINISM
After she met the man she’d mistakenly believed to be her father, a surprising thing happened—she and Jeremy James became friends. There wasn’t much tentative about it; they dove in, more like long-lost siblings than a sixty-three-year-old man and a twenty-eight-year-old woman who turned out not to be related.
When Elizabeth Childs died, Jeremy and his family had been in Normandy, where Jeremy had used his sabbatical to research a subject that had long fascinated him—the possible link between luminism and expressionism. Now, as his academic career was winding down and retirement loomed, Jeremy was trying to write his book on luminism, an American style of landscape painting often confused with impressionism. As Jeremy explained it to Rachel, who knew less than zero about art, luminism grew out of the Hudson River School. It was Jeremy’s belief that the two schools shared a link, even if prevailing theory—dogma actually, Jeremy would scoff—held that the two schools had developed independently of each other in the late 1800s on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
A man named Colum Jasper Whitstone, Jeremy told her, had worked as an apprentice to two of the most famous luminists—George Caleb Bingham and Albert Bierstadt—but vanished in 1863 along with a large sum of money from the Western Union office where he was employed. Neither the money nor Colum Jasper Whitstone was ever heard of again in the Americas. But the diary of Madame de Fontaine, a wealthy widow and arts patron in Normandy, twice made mention of a Callum Whitestone in the summer of 1865, referring to him as a gentleman from America with good manners, refined tastes, and a cloudy heritage. When Jeremy first told Rachel this his eyes were lit like a birthday child’s and his baritone voice grew several octaves lighter. “Monet and Boudin painted the Normandy coast the same year. They would set up every day, just down the street from Madame de Fontaine’s summer cottage.”
Jeremy believed these two giants of impressionism had crossed paths with Colum Jasper Whitstone, that Whitstone was, in fact, the missing link between American luminism and French impressionism. All he had to do was prove it. Rachel pitched in with research, aware of the irony that she and her not-father were searching for a man who’d vanished into the dust and void of a hundred and fifty years when together they couldn’t identify the man who’d fathered Rachel a little over thirty years before.
Jeremy often visited her apartment during research trips to the MFA, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Boston Public Library. She’d departed the Globe for TV by then and had moved in with Sebastian, a producer at Channel 6. Sometimes Sebastian was there and would join them for dinner or drinks, but mostly he was working or on his boat.
“You’re such an attractive couple,” Jeremy said one night at her apartment, and the word attractive left his mouth sounding unattractive. He had developed an ability to say all the right things about Sebastian—taking note of his intelligence, his dry wit, his good looks, his air of competency—without sounding like he meant any of them.
He examined a picture of the two of them on Sebastian’s beloved boat. He placed it back on the mantel and gave Rachel a pleasant, distracted smile, as if he were trying to come up with one more positive thing to say about the two of them but had drawn a blank. “He sure works a lot.”
“He does,” she agreed.
“He wants to run the whole station one day, I bet.”
“He wants to run the network,” she said.
He chuckled and carried his glass of wine to the bookshelves, where he zeroed in on a photograph of Rachel and her mother that Rachel had almost forgotten was there. Sebastian, not a fan of the photo or its frame, had crammed it at the end of a row of books, backed into a shadow cast by a copy of History of America in 101 Objects. Jeremy removed it gently and tilted the book so it remained standing. She watched his face turn both dreamy and desolate.
“How old were you in this?”
“Seven,” she said.
“Hence the missing teeth.”
“Mmm-hmm. Sebastian thinks I look like a hobbit in that picture.”
“He said that?”
“He was joking.”
“That’s what we’re calling it?” He carried the photograph back to the couch and sat beside her.
Seven-year-old Rachel, missing both upper front teeth and one lower, had stopped smiling for cameras at the time. Her mother wouldn’t hear of it. Elizabeth found a set of rubber fangs somewhere and used a Sharpie to black out one of the upper teeth and two of the lower. She’d had Ann Marie take a series of pictures of her and Rachel vamping for the camera one drizzly afternoon at the house in South Hadley. In this, the only photograph to survive from that day, Rachel was wrapped in her mother’s arms, both of them beaming their hideous smiles as broadly as possible.