The Shadow Catcher

Everything about her education and her guidance by her parents had habituated her to a way of life that had revolved around ideas, around a larger social order, around a daily conversation with the culture that men and women had constructed against odds down through the ages in outposts as far away as Athens, Antioch and Alexandria. Her mother had taught piano theory in the front room of their family home in St. Paul, Minnesota, and performed winter concerts under gaslight chandeliers in the conservatory of the Scandinavian Club. Her father was a portrait painter, a man who had translated the St. Paul Gazette into Latin over breakfast for amusement, who had traveled both to Holland and to France to learn the alchemy of paint and gesso. There had been laughter in their lives, music and impromptu joy, puns in foreign languages and the company of people who delighted in the unexpected transport of a Dvoák scherzo or stood mesmerized before a canvas of a woman clutching violets in her snow white hand. It had been a shock to learn how close to ruin her parents had maintained the pretense of a comfortable life, how the bright patina of her parents’ lives had hidden darker currents—debt—how everything, even the piano and the trays of oils and pigments, had been hocked and balanced in thin air on borrowed money, mortgaged to their spent tomorrows. Had she been their sole survivor, Clara would have mustered the required guile and courage to apply herself to modest labor and found herself employment in the city of her birth — that’s what her parents’ legacy had taught her; that’s what her mother would have done. Clara had to her advantage the example of her mother’s perseverance as an archetype. While she was alive, her mother, Amelia, had sewn and cooked, performed Chopin études backward, laughed and joked and told Greek myths for bedtime stories. Traduced Ariadne, vain Icarus had been Clara’s childhood imaginary friends — extensions of her mother’s storytelling. Theseus, Prince of Athens, had been her own Prince Charming; Medea, her first knowledge of the ideal of womanhood gone wrong. From her father she had learned different types of tales, painted narratives confined in gilded frames. Her father had told her about paintings he had seen in Europe, icons of religiosity, the archangel Gabriel lighting through a window on a cloud of fire to announce to the young Virgin that she, alone, among All Women, had been elected by God to bear His child. A girl could get intoxicated by such stories. Especially in St. Paul, Minnesota, where happy endings waited through the heavy winters, where the winters were experienced as weights of snow, and where the nights were haunted by the untranslatable messages in the music made by trains.

Here — out here in the Territory — the nights were haunted by the banshee notes of loons and the persistent sloughing, like a giant’s respiration, of the Puget Sound. Here, her nights were haunted by her memories of happier days and by the horror of her parents’ corpses still too vivid in her mind. Had she been their sole survivor she would have stayed in Minnesota to find employment, but since their deaths her duty and concern had been for her younger brother, eleven years her junior, her parents’ bonus baby and the center of the family’s adoration. Hercules. Lullabies had been written for him; paintings painted. He had been doted on and coddled and, unlike his namesake, was more like fresh milk in a loving churn, his nature undisturbed and thick as cream. Hercules: only eight years old, he was as feckless as an egg in an abandoned nest. She couldn’t leave him and she couldn’t find a way to raise him on her own. Entreaties for help to her parents’ patrons and their coterie of artist friends in the days following their deaths amounted to sympathetic but polite nothings. Only Ellen Sheriff Curtis, her mother’s childhood friend, responded with a concrete, though less-than-perfect, Plan. Come to Washington Territory, she had telegraphed.

Train fare enclosed.

Think of us as family.