Warpaint Read online

  “Lizzie,” said Sara. “I will call her Lizzie,” and in the warmth of her new mother’s arms, or simply from exhaustion, the baby hushed, peering out of her bundle with olive-green eyes, eyes a color no other Moore child had.

  Shakily, Liz brushed out her thin, no-color hair and listened to the roar and boom of a lashing Lake Superior. A storm had swept down from Canada blasting an already frigid Lutsen with more snow. She’d gotten up early as always, but once she dressed and went into her dark, silent kitchen, found herself without appetite, without even a trace of desire not even for coffee, so she took the little elevator to her studio. The Lake sounded even fiercer up in the loft, booming hard against the rocky shores, and the sky darkening as if toward night again.

  She sat down before the neat, almost finished self-portrait, done in the style of her Series B, but not of that series. On the canvas, the figure of a slim, dark young woman, almost but not quite a girl, in the blue-dark shadow of winter dawn trees, the glance of her eyes inward, lidded, a swift, furry sylvan thing caught in transition, as if she had once been wild, only becoming human as the light turned over the land. Or maybe it worked the other way around and soon the girl would scurry, leaving paw-prints in the snow. Liz painted her name on the back of the canvas, then wiped clean the brush and took her private elevator downstairs again. If anything she was even less hungry than when she first got up. She checked her watch; Sara would be over that afternoon, to fix lunch. Carefully and slowly she built a fire in the massive stone hearth of her living room, just as her father had taught her, and once it no longer needed human prodding, she took a throw from off the back of her couch, curled up with a novel and turned a few pages until she felt a tug and so rested her head on the arm of the couch, where Sara soon found her, the fire still bright, lending her dark cheeks a deceptively live heat.

  NY TIMES December 20, 2003 – Elizabeth Sara Moore, abstract painter, one of the last true modernists, died at 11:50 a.m. today at Treetops, her estate in Lutsen, Minnesota according to Beth Moore, a niece and spokeswoman for the family. The cause of death was heart failure. Liz Moore was 95. Daring, outrageous and undiscovered until she was in her declining years, Ms. Moore was nothing short of a one-woman artistic phenomenon; over the course of eight or more decades her experimental style and bold vision altered time and space, marshaled nature into culture, and presented the visual arts with a new pair of eyes. Few artists have experimented so broadly; none living today equal her power to see what others do not. In a surprise turn of events, Beth Moore revealed that her aunt was part Ojibwe, of the Grand Portage Band. Born in Lutsen Minnesota in….

  ♦

  Treetops. It had been an obvious name for a house that, as C.C. had said, in the lovely spring of 2000, “…Lizzie’s mother had built, sometime in the forties.” She pulled their rental onto 61, heading for Lutsen, Minnesota. “Sara Moore hired an architect, someone she knew, and he’s the one who built and designed the place to her liking.” C.C. had slipped easily into the role of local informant, relaying to Quiola what she remembered Lizzie as having said, back in 1967, as the two older women had made their way up to Lutsen, for Parker Moore’s funeral.

  “Her mother had left her father, didn’t she?”

  “In practice. Not legally. They never divorced. Sara lived at Treetops until she passed away, and Parker Moore stayed on the farm, where he died. His funeral was grim – Lutheran and tense. Of course everything was wilder, back then,” she said. “Took longer to get up to Lutsen. Even now, I wouldn’t want to try it in winter. Don’t know how Liz manages, to tell the truth. But she has family to help.”

  “I find it hard to believe I’m here at all,” said Quiola. “Doesn’t seem real. I wonder if Mother would be angry at me.”

  C.C. smiled, concentrating on the slick road. It wasn’t raining, but the Lake mist that morning made everything damp. “I can’t believe your mother never, not once, brought you here. It’s so beautiful.”

  “And terrible if you are poor, lonely, bright and a girl – and pregnant. So Mom used to say. I don’t doubt it. I bet high school kids up here have a that wild-horse roll to their eyes, ‘get me the hell outta here.’”

  C.C. laughed. “Some of them do. It’s weird to see punk-mohawks and piercing in Grand Marais. I thought that all ended with the ’90s.”

  “Nothing goes out of style anymore. I never thought I’d see bell-bottoms again. Should’ve saved mine, they’d be honest-to-God antiques.”

  Suddenly she took a sharp breath. Even though she’d seen the Lake in Duluth, even though they’d been driving alongside Superior for some time, the full expanse of it hadn’t made itself felt, not physically felt, until that moment, just before Gooseberry Falls. The morning fog had thinned to mist, and the ever-changing Lake weather decided to offer up that overwhelming horizon, under a blue-pink sky.

  “I told you it was beautiful,” said C.C.

  “Words.” Quiola stared out at the bold scale of the rugged coast, unleashed from cityscape, alive in its own skin.

  “They’ll tell you up here as you approach the Boundary Waters that if you don’t like the weather, just wait three hours. Or drive a mile. The Lake is so deep and so cold, it’s like a huge refrigerator, and makes its own weather patterns. You’re looking at one tenth of all the world’s fresh water, by the way – Quiola?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  And so they drove the rest of the way in silence, while Quiola watched the Lake be her fickle self, changing color every few miles from dark to light, blue to slate gray chop, now sharply defined, now shrouded in fog, rough to calm, moldy and odiferous then fresh with pine. She jumped a little when C.C. pulled off the main road, surprised at how fast ninety minutes had passed. “We’re here already?”

  “You weren’t driving.” The car humped along Rollins Creek road. “I hope Liz remembered to get in some food. I don’t know why, but she likes to empty the fridge. While we’re there, listen to the way she talks about it. She’s proud at how little she keeps. I don’t know if it has to do with going through the Depression, or living alone all these years, but there you are, a guest, hungry, and she’ll go on about how efficient she’s been with the leftovers. Except you never do see even the ghost of a leftover. Not a crust.” She shook her head. “Honestly, Liz hasn’t a clue about hospitality. Never did.”

  “I’m not very good at always keeping my eye on supplies, either.”

  “Ha!” said C.C. “You love to cook. You always have food on hand, in case someone drops in – you are gracious. Liz, on the other hand, enjoys keeping empty space cold. Here’s the driveway –”

  ♦

  May 20, 2004. The flight from La Guardia to Minneapolis, then from Minneapolis to Duluth went by, swift and unremarkable. Quiola was grateful. Traveling light, one knapsack, one wheeled bag, and three of everything else, she had agreed to stay a week with Sara Moore at Treetops. But that seemed a lot of time, as she watched clouds, to be away from Amelia, and home. And what would it be like to be back in Lutsen, once again, but now without either C.C. or Lizzie?

  For some reason, the Alamo rental car man in the Duluth airport was nearly beside himself with joy. He whistled, he hummed, he assured her the car would be just what she wanted as he waved to his fellow car-rental competitors. She began to think he was daft, so she smiled cautiously and said, “Are you always so eager to rent a car?”

  “You don’t understand, Miss. The sun is out!”

  She glanced over her shoulder. The plate-glass windows were alight, the sky that particularly unbearable blue of spring. “Yes. Lovely.”

  “No. Miraculous. It’s been raining for a week. More than.” He wagged his finger at her. “Enjoy the sun. Supposed to start with the rain again tomorrow. Murderous weather.”

  “Aren’t winters worse?”

  “You’re from Connecticut, right? You wouldn’t understand – snow, that’s bearable. No sunshine for going on two weeks? Murderous.”

  She
nodded, wanting to say “I was born here. Right here, on Lake Superior.” But what did it matter? She was from the East, now.

  Quiola took the keys to the rented Chevy, and made her way from the airport across town to the same scenic North Shore drive that had taken her breath away five years before, and on out past old, stately lake-side Duluth mansions. Some of those graceful places were being torn down, replaced by even more enormous new homes crowded onto a patch of lakeside land, ungainly, ungenerous, for they gave no clear view of the water to a passerby.

  And all the while the power and gray enormity of the Inland Sea, Lake Mother Superior, there, glinting and ruffling her blue-gray self, mumuring back to the sad gulls’ cry. At a certain point on 61, when she looked ahead, the road seemed to dive into the lake – behind, the same, an optical illusion but also a dizzying sense of being nowhere and everywhere at once.

  The road was mercifully peaceful at that early hour, empty of the semi-trucks that would hound a slow driver on this two-lane road. Out beyond Duluth, the lake was sheeted with fog, which here and there lifted above steel-blue impatient waters. At Gooseberry Falls, she stopped. She wasn’t expected up at Treetops until the early afternoon, so she parked in the empty lot of the park, locked herself in, crawled into the back seat, and slept for about an hour. When she woke, the sun had burnt off the remaining fog, and the parking lot had filled halfway. She got up, stretched and then drove on, past several small towns, then past the road which would take her to Lizzie’s house, and on past the tiny, five-store Lutsen, down past Cut-Face Creek, and into the town of Grand Marais. The sun stayed with her, but the air was still frosty when the wind blew off the Lake. She went straight for the Trading Post, bought a green-wool jacket and then headed for a restaurant she knew, a lakeside eatery called the Angry Trout.

  She was early for the lunch crowd, and so the only customer. The wait-staff were still rolling napkins and joking. Quietly, she possessed herself of a bayside window to watch a schooner maneuver its way from harbor to bay.

  “Would you like something warm, coffee maybe?” asked a waitress. “Would you like me to close the window?”

  “Oh, no, it’s fine. I enjoy the fresh air. And coffee would be wonderful.”

  The girl smiled. “Our coffee is wonderful. You’ll see.”

  But Quiola remembered how perfect the coffee had been, no doubt still was. Sitting there in the window, she could hardly credit so much time had passed since she’d been in that dining room, where time and space seemed about to collapse on her, where the sun and the sky promised, cruelly, to be eternally the same, and where, if she just looked up at the right minute, a glowing, happy C.C., her curly blond-white hair tucked under a sky-blue baseball cap, all coiled energy and delight, would be coming back from the rest-room, alive and whole again.

  “Shit,” she muttered to herself. The North Shore’s chilly embrace had softened the tough old dog chew she thought she’d become.

  As she scanned the menu, an old man sat at the next table. She didn’t notice him at first, and was nearly finished eating her sandwich, when the man, sunburnt an alarming mahogany, his thick hair white and grey, said, “Excuse me, don’t I know you?”

  Quiola smiled. “I don’t believe so. I’m a visitor.”

  But he kept on searching her face.

  Discomforted, she said, “Well, my mother grew up here –”

  His gaze cleared. “That’s it. You look like Marge. Marge Otter.”

  “Oh, yes. She was my grandmother. Did you know her?”

  The man was shaking his head, his eyes now averted, but seeing, still, a face he knew. “I asked her to marry me, once. She refused.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not! Such a stubborn one! She’ll go around with me, to pow-wow, in spring, and on Memorial day for those of us who died in World War I or the War we both remember best, and she might wear a Jingle Dress to make me jealous, or tease me with maple and wild rice and even let me take her to Church, but she always said she’d married, as the Good Lord commanded and that was that. Oh, I don’t blame her. I’m a fisherman. Hard business. Mind if I sit?”

  “Please.” Quiola was fascinated. Never at any point in her life, did she think she’d meet someone who’d known her grandmother. “Mr. –?”

  “Novitsky. But you should call me David.”

  “My name’s Quiola.”

  “I know, I held you, once. You weren’t more than this.” He placed his hands a tiny baby size apart. “Rosie left us for the city. But a city’s no place for an Otter.”

  Quiola felt a tempo of quick anger. “She was a good mother.”

  His dark eyes sparked. “Unlike her own? Hmm?”

  “My grandmother, I gather, was a difficult woman.”

  “Difficult!” He pursed his lips. “Have you come to visit her?”

  “Have I come…whatever do you mean?”

  He slapped his knee meditatively with a one-hand beat. “She lives up yonder.”

  Quiola stared at the old man, as if he’d just dropped down from another solar system. Her mind, and time, stopped and for one, upside down moment, she went hysterically blind – nothing focused. Then the old man was there, and her check, still to be paid. Trying on calm like a new garment, she opened her mouth to speak and found only the sound of silence. She tried again. “I’m sorry, Mr. Novitsky, but there must be some mistake. My grandmother died more than forty years ago.” Hadn’t her mother always said, Sweetheart, you are better off. Believe me. Mother was iron. No give to her, no bend. A switchblade and a heart got cut to shreds if it came near.

  “So, then, you’ll visit? I can show you the way. My, but Marge’ll be surprised, don’t you know.”

  The name, her name – but it had to be a mistake! And so, to make him go away, she said she had to go just then, and she gave him her cell number (she could always have it changed), and told him sure, she would meet his old friend, if he so wished, while she was staying in the area. But as soon as she got back in the rental car, she regretted it. The old man was crazy.

  But what if – Quiola pulled out of the parking lot, thinking no, it couldn’t possibly be true. He’s a crazy old coot.

  Rollins Road, when she found it, was still no better than it had been five years before: a dirt path, pockmarked by winter erosion. She eased off 61 and down into the muddy ruts and rumbled along slowly, mildly cursing Alamo for giving her a car with no pick-up or shocks. She found the driveway easily, memory kicking in like a movie – she knew these woods, this earth, even having only visited once.

  And at the end of the dirt drive: Treetops. It, too, hadn’t changed. The dark red-paint, the solid, heavy beams, an architecture of cunning and comfort, Treetops nestled on its eyrie above the lake as if it had been there since forever. Stopping, she pulled the parking brake and sat for a moment, breathing in the bracing cold. She could hear the Lake, and just barely make out its foggy horizon, a melting of one element into another. A gull mourned. She got out of the car. As she did, she could hear the creak and resonant slam of a screen door, and then from the deep shadow of the gabled entrance stepped a woman, dressed in dark green sweats and a gray pullover. She had long, straight brown hair and waited politely for her guest.

  “Welcome to my home,” said the young woman. “I’m Sara. It’s Quiola? Have I pronounced it right?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Come on in. Mom and I have been waiting for you.”

  “Not too long, I hope.”

  “Not at all.” Together they walked up the wooden porch planks to the solid front door, and back, as far as Quiola was concerned, into one of the most perfect human spaces she’d ever had the fortune to know. First, the heady perfume of the place, dominated by woodsmoke, with undertones of onion, bacon and coffee, a hint of evergreen, which wasn’t surprising given that the cabin was built of knotty white pine. When she stepped into the house, she stepped into the past; she knew these odors, of food and fresh air, of wool blankets and a hint of c
edar from closets and chests – Treetops.

  Beth Moore stood near the fireplace, still straight as a fishing rod, with the bend and grace of one as well. She put out her hand.

  “I’m so glad you could come. Aunt Elizabeth spoke of you, and of the Davis family, quite often.”

  “All good, I hope,” said Quiola, falling back on one of her mother’s phrases.

  “Oh, hardly that. My aunt wasn’t made of sugar and light, now, was she? No. She spent her last hours here, thank god. Not someone you want to try to force into hospital, or a nursing home. It would be to your everlasting regret.”

  “Mom –”

  “What? We both know she was a witch.”

  Quiola started, but Beth merely warmed her back at the fire as Lake Superior’s muted thunder filled the silence for a moment or two, until Sara shrugged and said to her guest, “Let’s get you settled. We can rake Gran over the coals later.”

  Treetops had a guestroom perched in the eaves over the kitchen; it could only be reached by going back outdoors, and up a heavy-beamed, switchback staircase where once a handyman had lived, to help maintain the place.

  “It’s a bit inconvenient,” said Sara as she helped Quiola lug her things up the staircase and inside. The room was, like the rest of the house, redolent of wood-smoke and paneled with pine. “But the other guestroom, inside, is all torn up. We had a leak, and the room is a mess. I’m sorry about this – you’ll have to come inside to use the bathroom. Or if you don’t mind,” she added, sliding open a closet door, “there’s a chamber-pot.”

  Quiola stared in mild disbelief at the heavy ceramic pot with its discreet cover.