TWENTY-FIVE
The plane gathered speed and bumped down the runway at Montréal’s Trudeau International Airport.
Reine-Marie had booked on the airline that flew into the small Island Airport in downtown Toronto, rather than the huge international airport outside the city. It was far more convenient.
But it meant a prop plane and not everyone on board was comfortable with that. Including the woman sitting beside her.
She gripped the armrest and had a grimace on her face like a death mask.
“It’ll be all right,” said Reine-Marie. “I promise.”
“How can you know, turnip head?” the woman snapped. And Reine-Marie smiled.
Ruth couldn’t be that frightened if she remembered to insult her.
The plane popped into the air. If a jet took off like a bullet, the small turboprop took off like a gull. Airborne, but subject to wind currents. It bobbed and wobbled and Ruth started praying under her breath.
“Oh, Lord, shit, shit, shit. Oh, Jesus.”
“We’re up now,” said Reine-Marie in a soothing voice. “So you can relax, you old crone.”
Ruth turned piercing eyes on her. And laughed. As they broke through the cloud, Ruth’s talon-grip released.
“People weren’t meant to fly,” said Ruth, over the roar of the engines.
“But planes are, and as luck would have it, we’re in one. Now, we have an hour before landing, tell me more about your time in that Turkish prison. I take it you were a guard, not an inmate.”
Ruth laughed again, and color returned to her face. So afraid to fly, Ruth had come with Reine-Marie anyway. To keep her company. And, Reine-Marie suspected, to help find Peter.
Ruth gabbed away, nervous nonsense, while Reine-Marie placed her hand over Ruth’s, and kept it there for the entire flight of lunacy.
* * *
“Have you shown Chartrand those paintings?”
Gamache gestured toward the rolled-up canvases Clara carried with her all the time now, like a divining rod.
“No. I thought about it, but Peter could’ve shown them to him and chose not to. If he didn’t, then I don’t think I should.” She looked at Gamache closely. “Why? Do you think I should?”
Gamache thought about it. “I don’t know. I can’t honestly see how it could matter. I suppose I’m just curious.”
“About what?”
“About what Chartrand would make of them,” he admitted. “Aren’t you?”
“Curious isn’t the word,” said Clara with a grin. “More like afraid.”
“You think they’re that bad?”
“I think they’re strange.”
“And is that so bad?” he asked.
She thought about his question, bouncing the canvases in her hand. “I’m afraid people will see these and think Peter’s nuts.”
Gamache opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“Go on,” she said. “Say what’s on your mind. Peter is nuts.”
“No,” he said. “No. I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Then what were you going to say?”
Far from feeling defensive, Clara found she really did want to know.
“Warrior Uteruses,” he said.
Clara stared at him. She could have spent the rest of her life guessing what Armand would say, and she’d never have come up with those two words.
“Warrior Uteruses?” she repeated. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“You did a series of sculptures a few years ago,” he reminded her. “They were uteruses, all different sizes. You decorated them with feathers and leather and fancy soaps and sticks and leaves and lace and all sorts of things. And you put them into an art show.”
“Yes,” Clara laughed. “Oddly enough I still have them all. I considered giving one to Peter’s mother as a Christmas present, but chickened out.” She laughed. “I guess while I can sculpt them, I don’t actually have one. A warrior uterus, I mean.”
“That series wasn’t all that long ago,” Gamache reminded her.
“True.”
“Do you regret it?”
“Not at all. It was such fun. And strangely powerful. Everyone thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t.”
“What was it?” Gamache asked.
“A step along the way.”
He nodded and got up. But before leaving, he bent down and whispered, “And I bet everyone thought you were nuts.”
* * *
“He wasn’t just crazy,” said Professor Massey. “He was insane.”
He looked from one woman to the next. They were seated in his classroom studio. He’d given Ruth what was clearly his favorite chair. The one that looked across the open space filled with drop sheets and easels, old gummed-up palettes. Blank canvases were stacked in a corner and Massey’s own paintings, unframed, were here and there on the walls, as though stuck up casually. They were very good, enlivening and warming the space.
“And not the fun sort of insanity,” Professor Massey warned. “Not eccentric. This was the dangerous kind.”
“Dangerous? Like violent?” Reine-Marie asked.
Try as she might to catch and hold his eye, the elderly professor’s attention never stayed on her for long. His eyes kept drifting back.
To Ruth.
Ruth, for her part, seemed to have lost her mind. But found, Reine-Marie thought, her heart.
The old poet had actually giggled when Professor Massey had taken her hand in greeting.
They’d arrived half an hour earlier, unannounced, though Reine-Marie had called ahead to make sure that Professor Massey would be there.
He was.
He always was, it seemed. And now Reine-Marie started noticing other things. A pillow with blankets folded neatly on top of it, beside the worn sofa.
A microwave oven on the counter by the paint-encrusted sink. A hotplate. A small fridge.
She looked around the classroom and realized it felt less a classroom and more a studio. And less like a studio and more like a loft space. A living space.
Reine-Marie’s gaze returned to the elderly man. Perfectly turned out in pressed corduroy slacks, a crisp cotton shirt, a light sweater vest. Neat. Clean.
How did it happen, she wondered? Did he once have a wife and children? A home in the Annex?
Did the children move away? Did the wife pass away?
Did he just stop going home? Until this became home? In the company of familiar and comforting scents. And blank canvases. Where students dropped by at all hours. To ask questions. To have a drink and a sandwich and to talk pretentious nonsense.
She looked at the canvas on the easel.
How long, she wondered, had it sat there. Empty.
“Not violent,” he said. “Not physically anyway. Not yet. We couldn’t take the chance. Sébastien Norman was the messianic sort. The kind who held strong and inflexible views. We didn’t know that when we hired him, of course. He was to teach art theory. A fairly benign course, you’d have thought.” Massey smiled. “I suppose we weren’t clear that it was art theory he was to teach, not his own personal one. We began to realize fairly early on that we had a problem.”
“How so?” Reine-Marie asked.
“Rumbles in the corridors. I started overhearing what his students were saying. Most mocking him, laughing. My instincts are always to defend a fellow professor, so I asked them what was so funny. And they told me.”
“Go on.”
“Well, it sounds so silly now.” Professor Massey looked embarrassed, and glanced at Ruth. Reine-Marie simply waited, and finally he seemed to overcome his reluctance.
“Apparently Professor Norman believed in the tenth muse.”
He grimaced as though to apologize for the stupidity of what he’d just said.
Now Ruth spoke. “But there were only nine.”
“Yes, exactly. Nine daughters of Zeus. They personified knowledge and the arts. Music, literature, science,” he said.
“But not painting,” said Reine-Marie. “I remember now. There was no muse for art itself.”
Now Professor Massey turned his full attention to her. And what attention it was. Reine-Marie felt the force of his personality. Not violent, but overwhelming. Enveloping.
She felt his intelligence and his calm. And for the first time in her life she wished she’d been an artist, if only to have studied with this professor.
“Strange, isn’t it?” he said. “Nine Muses. That’s quite a gang. But not a single one for painting or sculpture. God knows the Greeks liked their murals and sculptures. And yet, they didn’t assign them a muse.”
“Why not?” asked Reine-Marie.
Massey shrugged and raised his white brows. “No one knows. There’re theories, of course.”
“Which brings us back to Professor Norman,” said Reine-Marie. “What was his theory?”
“I never spoke to him about it directly,” said Massey. “What I know was cobbled together from speaking to his students. I’m not even sure I’ll get it right now. It’s been so long. All I know is that he believed there had in fact been a tenth muse. And that to be a great artist you had to find her.”
“Did he believe this tenth muse lived in an actual place?” Reine-Marie asked. “That you could knock on the door, and there she’d be?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what Professor Norman really believed. It was a long time ago. I should have known. It’s my fault. I actually encouraged the college to hire him.”
“Why?”
“Well, I’d seen a few of his works and thought they showed promise. He was new to Toronto, didn’t have much money or many connections. This seemed perfect. He could teach part-time, make some money, meet some people.”
His voice faded away. All that energy, all that force of personality, seemed spent and the quite magnificent man deflated. The very thought of Professor Norman seemed to sap him of life.
“It was a mistake,” the professor said. He was quiet for a moment, casting his mind back to that time. “Norman wasn’t fired for his crazy beliefs, you know. We were a very liberal institution then. Though his theories weren’t approved of, and the students had no respect for him. His appearance didn’t help.”
“He looked crazy?” asked Reine-Marie, and, unexpectedly, Professor Massey laughed.
“We all looked like lunatics. He looked like a banker. A prosperous banker. Everyone else was sorta seedy, or at least tried to be. It was the uniform of the time. Now we all try to look successful, respectable.”
He gazed down at his clothing, then over at seedy Ruth.
And Reine-Marie wondered if that canvas on the easel would have been so blank had Professor Massey not been so respectable.
“Why was he fired if not for this tenth muse theory?”
“I was on the Board of Governors and we agonized over it. Norman wasn’t violent, at least not yet. That’s the problem, isn’t it, with these things? Hard to fire someone on suspicion they might do something.”
“But what made you think he’d become violent?” asked Reine-Marie.
“We just didn’t know. He had outbursts, verbal. He shook with rage. I tried talking to him, but he denied there was anything wrong. He said that real artists are passionate, and that was all it was. Passion.”
“You didn’t believe it?”
“He might’ve been right. Maybe real artists are passionate. Lots are nuts. But the issue wasn’t whether he was a real artist, but if he was a good teacher.”
“What made him angry? What would set him off?”
“Anyone who disagreed with his tenth muse theory. And anything he judged to be mediocre. The two went together in his mind. Unfortunately, as the year went on he became more and more unbalanced. We didn’t know when he’d go over the edge, and who he might take with him. We had to protect the students. But we didn’t act in time.”
“There was an incident?” asked Reine-Marie.
Beside her, Ruth was no help at all. Reine-Marie wasn’t even sure she was listening. There was a goofy smile on her face as she watched Professor Massey.
“Not violence,” said the professor. “Not physical anyway. Without telling anyone, or getting the college’s permission, Sébastien Norman created the Salon des Refusés.”
“Clara Morrow told us about that. But what was it?”
“It was a show that ran parallel to the real exhibition. It featured the rejected works.”
“And why was that so bad?”
Reine-Marie could immediately feel his censure. It radiated from him, waves of disapproval, of disappointment. In her. And she found herself regretting asking the question. Intellectually she knew that was silly. It was a legitimate question. But in her gut she felt she’d let this man down in not knowing the answer.
Even Ruth deserted her now. She drifted off and started examining the paintings on the walls. Pausing before each one. Paying more attention to them than she ever had, as far as Reine-Marie knew, to Clara’s or Peter’s.
“Are you a teacher?” Professor Massey asked.
Reine-Marie shook her head. “A librarian.”
“But you have children?”
“Two. Both grown up now. And two grandchildren.”
“And when they go to school and get an assignment wrong, would you like the teacher to hold it up in front of the class? In front of the school? For ridicule?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, that’s what Professor Norman did. Ask your friend Clara how it felt. How it still feels. These are young people, Madame Gamache. They’re gifted, and many are fragile, having been marginalized most of their lives for being creative. We live in a society that doesn’t value being different. When they come here, to art college, it’s probably the first time in their lives they feel they belong. Safe. Not just valued, but precious.”
He held her eyes, his voice deep and calm, almost mesmerizing. And Reine-Marie felt again the pull of this man, even in his old age. How powerful he must have been in his prime.
And how comforting his message to the young, lost, wounded men and women who straggled into the college with their screw-you attitudes and piercings and broken hearts.
Here they were safe. To experiment, to explore. To fail and try again. Without fear of ridicule.
She looked at the worn sofa and could almost see the generations of young, excited artists lounging about in animated debate. Finally free.
Until Professor Norman got ahold of them. And then it was no longer safe.
The Salon des Refusés.
Reine-Marie was beginning to see just how vile that was.
“Would the college have Professor Norman’s address in their files?”
“They might. He was from Québec. I know that. He had a funny sort of accent.”
“Do you know where in Québec?” Reine-Marie asked, and he shook his head.
“Did Peter ask these questions, when he visited you?”
“About Professor Norman?” Massey was clearly both surprised and amused. “No. We talked about him briefly, but I think I was the one who brought him up.”
“Is it possible Peter’s looking for Professor Norman?” Reine-Marie asked.
“I doubt it,” said Massey. “He said nothing about that when he left. Why?”
“Clara and my husband and some others are trying to find Peter,” she said. “And it seems Peter was trying to find someone named Norman.”
“I’d be shocked if it was the same man,” said Massey. And he looked shocked. “I hope that’s not true.”
“Why?”
“If Sébastien Norman was insane thirty years ago, I hate to think what he is now.” Massey took a breath and shook his head. “When she left, I advised Clara to just go home. To get on with her life. And that Peter would come back, when he was ready.”
“Do you think he planned to return to her?” Reine-Marie asked.
“He didn’t mention it,” Massey admitted. “But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t going to do it.”
“Like looking for Norman, perhaps.”
“Perhaps.”
The professor’s gaze left Reine-Marie and found Ruth. She was down at the far end of his studio looking at another painting.
“I don’t suppose you have a picture of Professor Norman?”
“In my wallet?” Professor Massey smiled. “Actually, I might be able to find you one. In our yearbook.”
While Massey examined the bookcase, Reine-Marie walked over to Ruth.
“Is this the painting Myrna said was so good?” asked Reine-Marie. She looked at it and saw what Myrna meant. The rest were good. This was great. Mesmerizing.
She rallied herself and turned to Ruth. “Are you ready to leave or are you measuring the windows for curtains?”
“And would that be so laughable?” Ruth asked.
Reine-Marie was shocked into silence. Stunned not by what Ruth said, but by her own behavior. Belittling, even ridiculing, Ruth’s feelings for the professor.
“I’m so sorry,” said Reine-Marie. “That was stupid of me.”
Ruth looked over at the elderly man, pulling out yearbooks, examining them, then returning them.
The old poet drew herself up and said, “Noli timere.”
Reine-Marie sensed the words were not for her ears, just as the look on Ruth’s face was not for her eyes.
“Here it is.”
Professor Massey walked toward them holding up a yearbook in triumph. “I was afraid it’d gotten lost in the renovations. Or sealed up in the walls. You’d be surprised what they found when they took them down.”
“What?” asked Ruth, while Reine-Marie took the yearbook.
“Well, asbestos for one, but they expected to find that. That’s why they did the renovations. It was the other stuff that was a surprise.”
The yearbook was dusty and Reine-Marie turned to the professor. “Asbestos?”
“Yes.” He looked at her, then understood why she’d asked. He laughed. “Don’t worry. That’s just two decades of dust. No asbestos on it.”
He took the book back, wiped it off with his sleeve, and handed it back. He led them to the sofa.
Ruth and Paul Massey sat, while Reine-Marie stood and flipped through the yearbook.
“What did they find in the walls?” asked Ruth. Her voice was almost unrecognizable to Reine-Marie.
“Old newspapers mostly. Turns out the building, or its foundations, were much older than anyone thought. Some Italian workers had left parts of sandwiches, and biologists were able to grow some tomato plants from the old seeds they found. Plants that had become all but extinct. They also found a couple of canvases.”
“Was that one?” Ruth pointed to the painting they’d been looking at, at the back of the studio.
Professor Massey laughed. “You think that’s garbage?”
He didn’t seem insulted, simply amused. Pleased even.
“Professor Massey painted that,” said Reine-Marie, jumping in to smooth over a potentially embarrassing moment, though she seemed the only one uncomfortable over what Ruth had said.
“You can see the paintings they found in a display case near the front door,” said Massey. “Nothing remarkable, I’m afraid. No Emily Carr or Tom Thomson stuffed in for insulation.”
As they talked, Reine-Marie studied page after page of photographs of young men and women. Most of the students were white. Most with long greasy hair. And tight turtlenecks, and tighter jeans. And petulant, disinterested expressions.
Too cool for school. Too cool to care.
Reine-Marie stopped and turned back a page.
There, unmistakably, was Clara, with hair that looked like Einstein’s. Wearing a shapeless smock and a huge, happy grin on her face.
And beside her on the sofa, the same sofa Reine-Marie had just been on, various students slouched. Professor Massey, younger and even more vigorous, was standing behind them, speaking to a young man.
They were locked in earnest conversation. A cigarette hung from the young man’s mouth, a puff of smoke obscuring his face. Except for one eye. Sharp, assessing. Aware.
It was Peter.
Reine-Marie smiled at the photograph, then returned to searching for Sébastien Norman. But when she found the section on the professors it was a disappointment.
“I’d forgotten,” said Massey, when shown the section. “That was the year the editors decided not to use our actual photographs. Maybe in response to the Salon des Refusés, they published pictures of our art instead. I think they deliberately chose the most embarrassing examples.”
He took the book back and turned a few pages, and grimaced. “That’s mine. The worst thing I think I’ve done.”
There were columns of bright paint, with slashes through it. It seemed to Reine-Marie quite dynamic. Not bad at all.
But then, artists probably weren’t the best judges of their own work.
“May I take this?” she asked, indicating the yearbook.
“Yes, as long as you bring it back.”
He spoke, not surprisingly, to Ruth. He said it so tenderly that Reine-Marie was tempted to answer for her.
“I’ll be waiting,” he said to the old poet. “I just sit where I’m put, composed of stone and wishful thinking.”
Reine-Marie recognized the quote from one of Ruth’s poems. She wanted to warn this man to stop. She wanted to tell him that while he might think he was wooing Ruth with her own words, he had no idea what he was poking.
Ruth turned to Professor Massey and spoke, her voice strong and clear.
“That the deity who kills for pleasure will also heal.”
She’d completed the couplet.
As they left for home, Reine-Marie mulled over what she’d heard. About Professor Norman. His passion, and his folly. The tenth muse. The missing muse.
That the deity who kills for pleasure will also heal.
Was the tenth muse that deity? Like the other muses, did it inspire? Did it heal?
But did this one also kill, for pleasure?