“The Portraitist at work!” Mrs. Fahey said in a voice even lower and richer than Sarah’s.
Jamie scrambled to his feet. She offered her hand. Sargent’s portrait was apt, though she’d aged. Her hair was cut in a blunt bob, and her face was bare of makeup and full of amused intelligence.
“Let’s see it,” she said, holding a hand out for the drawing pad, which he had lifted, out of protective instinct, toward his chest. “Oh!” she said, when he handed it over. “But it’s wonderful. I shouldn’t be surprised. What you did of Sarah was marvelous, but this is…it’s a whole scene. I’m going to have both of them framed.”
“Don’t you think he should do one of Jasper, Mother?” said Alice.
“Certainly. And one of Penelope and the baby.” She gave the drawing pad back to Jamie. “Penelope is my eldest daughter. She has a new baby. I’d want you to draw my son and my other daughter, too, so I could have a complete set, but they’re away.”
“And you,” said Alice, still under the tree.
“What about me?”
“He should draw you, too. See how it stacks up against the Sargent.”
Jamie said, “I think the comparison would be depressing.”
Mrs. Fahey raised an eyebrow. “For you? Or me?”
“Me!” he said. “Of course. I mean—I would be happy to try, if you want.”
“Good, then,” she said, amused. “So you shall.”
* * *
—
July turned to August.
He made progress cataloging the art, but the job was too big for half a summer. Still, he persisted, sorting and describing as best he could. Examining so many drawings and paintings was an education. He looked carefully at each piece, considered what the artist had achieved versus what might have been intended. Much of the work seemed mediocre at best. （“My husband’s greatest pleasure is in the hoarding of his treasures,” Mrs. Fahey said one day. “He takes pleasure in their number and in their being his.”） But the collection also included many fine pieces and more than a few extraordinary ones. As instructed, Jamie set aside any that struck a chord in him, including a set of a dozen unidentified small watercolors he found in a shallow box tied closed with ribbon. They were washes of color: gyres of gray and blue, or bands of brilliant orange and green, and though they could not be said to be clearly of anything, Jamie was certain their subject was the sea. Something illegible was scribbled on their backs—a signature, maybe. If the expert from UW came, Jamie almost hoped he would say the watercolors were junk because then he might be bold enough to ask if he could keep them.
In the evenings, on his way home, he bought cans of tongue or hash, loaves of day-old bread, whatever was cheap, and fed stray dogs. Sometimes he sketched them, a few quick lines. He hated when they snarled and snapped among themselves or when they followed him back to the boardinghouse.
If Mr. Fahey was not expected home early, Sarah might go for a walk with Jamie after he’d finished cataloging for the day. He’d finally gotten his nerve up to kiss her. The first time had been unexpectedly simple. She’d come with him to feed the strays. At their feet, a dog was devouring a mound of canned meat, and he had leaned forward and put his mouth on Sarah’s. They’d both stood perfectly still, lips together, until Sarah pulled softly away. The next time, beside the waterfront, was not simple. Her long pliant body had bowed against his, and in his excitement he grasped her too roughly, startling her. With a little practice, though, they found an equilibrium that, while not quite satisfying, was sustainable enough. He could hold her in his arms if no one was around to see but not squeeze her too hard or push her against a wall, not feel her breasts. Sometimes, though, she forgot herself and pulled him closer, one of her long thighs sliding between his. This never lasted long. She would snap back to propriety and extricate herself, as disorientated as an awakened dreamer, her cheeks flushed.
“Tell me more about your adventures,” she would say sometimes, and he told her about how he and Marian and Caleb had hitchhiked to Seeley Lake and then hiked the fifty miles back through the mountains, or how they’d once found a human skeleton in the woods with a hatchet lodged in its moss-speckled skull, or about the rail-yard bull smacking his shins. “I don’t know if those are really adventures,” he said.
“They are!” she exclaimed. “I’ll never get to do anything exciting. I wish I could meet Marian and Caleb,” she said. “And Wallace.”