French Braid(29)

Lily was nodding vigorously. “He can do that,” she said. “Morris is good at things like that.”

Mercy could believe he was. She only wished she could remember what the man looked like.

Well, it all worked out. Robin was stony-faced at first—actually tried to follow Mercy and Lily out to the kitchen, till Mercy ordered him to stay in the living room with Morris. But when they returned with the coffee, Morris was telling Robin why it made sense to spring for slate shingles instead of asphalt, and Robin was nodding and saying, “Durn right it does. Durn right, I say.”

So. Morris came for Thanksgiving.

He wore a brown suit and a tie, and Lily wore a brand-new maternity smock. Alice gave Lily a lecture on natural childbirth. Kevin told Morris and Robin about the advantages of enclosed shopping malls. Little Robby refused to sit in her high chair and staggered around the dining room with both fists high in the air, practicing her walking. And Mercy sat at the end of the table smiling, smiling at all of them.



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For her portrait of the Shepards’ house Mercy chose their upstairs hall, focusing specifically on the grandfather clock standing between two bedroom doors. This was not her first choice, to be honest. Her first choice was an obscure corner of Evelyn Shepard’s sewing room: a weathered footlocker dating from Clarence’s military service, spilling over with various remnants of fabric in all different colors and weights and patterns. But she knew better than to settle on that.

This clock was massive and ornately carved, its brass pendulum swinging ponderously behind a rectangle of thick glass, its face a disc of creamy porcelain topped by an arc of glittering brass moons in varying phases. Clarence told Mercy he had always cherished it, implying that it had been handed down through his family. Evelyn told Mercy they had found it in an antique store in New Market, Maryland, a year and a half ago. What neither one of them seemed to know (or maybe they just didn’t want to know) was that down near the base on the left-hand side, just above the egg-and-dart molding, the initials CTM had been clumsily scratched with some sharp object. Needless to say, Mercy included the initials in her portrait.

She had a long debate with herself before she showed the Shepards the finished painting. If they asked her to remove the initials, would she refuse? Silly, of course: this wasn’t worth some lofty moral stance about freedom of expression. But still…She wavered. All for nothing, it turned out. Evelyn Shepard loved the picture, and Clarence said it was very nice. They appeared to pay no more notice to the painted initials than they had to the real ones.

Originally, Mercy had fantasized that the Shepards might spread the word—that their commission might lead to others after their friends saw the picture. But that didn’t happen. (Could the Shepards have hung it someplace out of the public view? Mercy had no idea.) Who did spread the word, to her surprise, was Morris Drew. He telephoned her at her studio a week or two after Thanksgiving and asked if he might take a supply of her postcards to his office. “People buying a new place,” he said, “they tend to be very house-proud. I could slip a card in with their papers at the settlement and they might decide to have a portrait painted.”

Mercy was touched. And it did have some effect: a young couple with a new condo called to ask her prices and said they would think it over, and then an older woman called to commission a picture for her son and daughter-in-law, who had just bought a lovely Victorian on the wrong side of Roland Park.

You couldn’t say Mercy was making an actual living at this. But she hoped she might, someday.

At Christmastime, David finally came home. He seemed more self-assured and more comfortable in his own skin; his hair was so long that it fell across his forehead like a sheaf of wheat, and he had developed a new habit of saying “Right? Am I right?” after almost every sentence. But oh, it was so good to see him! Mercy kept finding excuses to give him a hug, or just to trail a hand across his back as she walked past him. Often he was out who-knows-where with his friends, but still she thought the house had a different feel to it now.

That whole three weeks while he was home, she didn’t spend a single night in the studio and she stopped by there only a few times during the day, even. She was forced to rely on the clothes and toiletries she had left behind at the house, which made her realize how thoroughly she had relocated. Well, she’d moved out, really. It had reached the point where Robin would ask, “Will you be here tonight?”—not taking it for granted anymore; and if she said yes, he would get all happy and relieved. And when Alice and Lily phoned, they tried her studio number first now, not even seeming to think about it. Neither girl asked outright what was going on. Neither one said, “Have you left? Are you and Dad splitting up?” Maybe they didn’t want to know. Maybe, like the Shepards, they preferred not to see the initials scratched on the clock. While David, of course, had no reason to ask, since as far as he could see nothing had changed.

She was reminded of the first time Lily brought Morris to visit—how she’d announced forthrightly that she was going to marry him, blithely gliding right past the facts that she was already married and that Morris was too, and making no mention whatsoever of her pregnancy. Was it really so easy to convince the world that life was proceeding as usual? Mercy had wondered.

Yes, it was, evidently.



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