The Italian Teacher(76)
Trembling, he crawls over to Bear, puffs another few lungfuls into the man, compresses his chest. Again life flickers in the painter’s eyes. Marsden wipes the sweat from his face and rests his hand against Bear’s hip, taking a shivery breath—whereupon he feels something under his fingers. A plastic antenna juts from the jeans pocket. It’s the cell phone. Bear had it this whole time. That must’ve been why he was running away: to call the police on Charles.
Marsden battles to awaken the digital screen. Finally, the Nokia theme. And a signal. Frantically he opens the contact list, which contains only two entries: “Charles” and “Police.”
His brain stalls, staring at gray digits.
Bear gasps, eyes desperate. His knobbly hand—which moved colors, which moved people—clutches a leaf.
Marsden looks at the cell phone again, and he stands. He glances down at the man, then back at the screen. “No,” he mutters—then underhands the Nokia over the path’s edge, into the void. The phone flips; it’s lost from sight. After a few seconds, a distant pop.
“Enough,” Marsden says, crouching beside Bear Bavinsky, his knuckles resting soothingly against the painter’s bearded cheek. “Enough of this life. It’s enough.”
60
Pinch sits in the supermarket parking lot, fogged from alcohol still, considering driving directly to the airport. But he must face what’s happening. He starts the engine, turns back toward the cottage. When he arrives, he waits in the parked vehicle, braced for his father’s wrath.
Yet he hears nothing. He gets out and perceives movement at the edge of the forest: Marsden, covered in mud, walking closer.
“Hey!” Pinch calls out. “Where’s Dad?”
Marsden shakes his head, saying something about Bear collapsing, that nothing worked. Pinch can’t make sense of it. “But where is Dad right now?” Marsden’s response bounces off him. Pinch stands there, uncomprehending, saying, “We need to get help.” He hunts in the cottage for the cell phone. “Have you seen it?”
“I don’t know. Charles, honestly—it’s too late.”
A neighbor calls the emergency number on their behalf. When the paramedics arrive, a flurry of French conversation ensues, an ambulance in the driveway, a few nosy locals peeking around. Loud voices sound from up the path, men carrying down the body. Pinch glimpses his father on a stretcher—the last sighting. Marsden drives Pinch into town to deal with paperwork. Afterward, they hardly speak, hardly eat. Nothing seems appropriate.
Two days later, Marsden leaves. It’s Pinch alone on the property. He awakens under his father’s duvet, looks around the stone walls of the cottage, imagining this place before electricity came, back when the late Cecil Ditchley lived here, forced to walk an hour to the village for bread and meat, reading by candlelight, throwing pots on his kick wheel.
Pinch finds his father’s glasses, still on the kitchen table, and throws them away. He unlocks Bear’s studio, free to do so now, and surveys a cityscape of old brushes, its cemetery of mangled paint tubes. Dad, in his inventory, turned around every canvas—thighs, shoulders, throats. In the end, what did Bear think of all these paintings?
Pinch locks up and walks toward the woods, taking Marsden’s stairs up the hillside, following the same muddy path where his father died. He steps over seedpods, dried pine needles, and plucks early wildflower buds, tucking each specimen into a piece of folded paper. A leaf floats down from a tree; it floats back up. “Lepidopterist” is the word that comes to Pinch—not “butterfly” or “butterfly collector,” nor even an idea of the insect, just the word. As that butterfly adapted to resemble a leaf, he thinks, so I adapted to resemble a language teacher.
Nobody could find the mysteriously vanished mobile, so Pinch treks down to the village phone box to place calls—first to Birdie, so she may inform the rest of the family. Next, Connor Thomas, who agrees to write and circulate a news release whose purpose is to protect the Bavinsky clan from fact-checking reporters. Unfortunately, Connor fails to list all surviving offspring, causing the obituaries to cite Pinch as the only child. Bear’s will appears to have read the same bulletin, for the entire estate goes to Pinch alone.
He learns this shortly before the memorial service in Key Biscayne and informs only Birdie. She—who arranged the event to unite Dad’s children for the first time—advises Pinch to play dumb. Telling everyone risks souring the memorial. A middle-aged schlub approaches. “This is your brother Jeff, from Idaho,” she tells Pinch. Jeff shakes hands, taking a name tag and a copy of the commemorative booklet, full of old photos of members of the Bear Bavinsky clan.
In total, Dad fathered seventeen children, it transpires, many of them in attendance along with spouses and kids of their own. Pinch looks along the buffet table; nearly every stranger is a blood relative. “Holy mackerel!” someone exclaims. “I got a nephew called Hannibal.” More uncomfortable facts emerge too. Several of Bear’s families overlapped, including a few wives. Three children have become painters (none with success), one is a struggling sculptor in Mexico, another describes herself as “a weaver and astrologer.” Aside from Birdie, the only siblings whom Pinch has previously met are Widgeon and Owen. Widge never attempted to become Dad, but she did try to wed facsimiles, a series of shady charmers, which leads Pinch to wonder about her current hubby, a small-business owner who even resembles a younger Bear. As for Owen, he was expelled from medical school decades back and is still living off the wealth of his aged mother, Carol, while working on “a machine to cure diseases” that Widge is convinced will earn her brother a Nobel. Among Owen’s many boorish traits is that he ogles every female in attendance yet refuses to speak with any.