Part 3
David Livingston
September 1980
I knew his voice immediately, but I didn’t know who it was. I couldn’t make the connection. It had been a long time.
“Kalso,” he said. “Robert Kalso. Your old Svengali, remember?”
I had fallen asleep on the sofa watching the six o’clock news. The room was dark now except for an eerie blue light cast by Johnny Carson and Buddy Hackett. I stared out the window. I was living in a high-rise in Alexandria, Virginia, and the lights of the nation’s capital glittered balefully on my horizon. I felt sick to my stomach, vaguely frightened. I told Kalso it was great to hear from him, but it wasn’t. I hadn’t seen or talked to him in years, and the only thing between us now was the past, and I was no big fan of the past.
Kalso was calling from downtown. He was having a photo exhibit at a gallery in Georgetown, and he wanted me to come to the opening on Friday. I didn’t want to go. I told him I would certainly be there. I had no intention of going. I was too muddled for an immediate excuse, but I figured I could think one up later on.
“I think you’ll like it,” Kalso continued. “I’ve got a surprise for you which is guaranteed to bowl you over.” This cemented my desire to avoid the affair. I hate surprises.
I went. I got to feeling guilty, and guilt can always get me going where a nobler impulse would fail. I had dropped Kalso as an agent after I left Newburg. How many years ago was that? Thirteen? Jesus. We had parted amiably enough. I think he understood my wanting to get away from all those associations. And I hadn’t deprived him of a fortune, since my romance with the New York art entrepreneurs languished and died. I found it hard to stir up much enthusiasm for what I was doing. No one was happy with the stuff I was producing. I hasn’t happy with myself. And I painted less and less. It got harder to begin a painting. I drank a lot, and one day drinking was more important than painting, and I knew it. I took all the canvases, finished and unfinished, that filled up the apartment—I was living in Florida at the time; I got around a bit after Newburg but it isn’t a rousing travelogue—and I piled them in a heap and poured gasoline on them and set them on fire. I felt a sense of immense relief.
Friday came and I drove down to Georgetown, parked at the bottom of Wisconsin Avenue and walked up to the gallery. It was around seven in the evening, a chilly, wet day, and I was already having reservations about going. Georgetown isn’t my favorite place on a good day. There are a lot of people in Washington, D.C., with a lot of money—this is the country of the Mercedes Benz—and they come to Georgetown to buy tasteful things. These are successful citizens who appreciate Beauty and are willing to pay for the endorsed, genuine article. This lust for elegance is fierce and depressing.
I found the gallery, a narrow townhouse with a little gold-and-black sign about the size of a license plate. The place was already thick with people, cigarette smoke, noise.
I didn’t see Kalso so I started looking at the photographs. I was alone in this pursuit. The other people were drinking wine, laughing. I suppose they had already seen the exhibit or were so intimately connected with the photographer that they didn’t feel required to feign interest in his stuff. This wasn’t the gawking public; this was the inner circle, knowledgeable, slightly bored.
I started edging along the walls, studying Kalso’s photographs. My first impression was that his style hadn’t changed much, hadn’t flown off in some outrageous direction. Many of the photos were quite small, postcard size or smaller. They were in color, but the colors were muted, fading away. There were landscapes, rural stuff, a photo of some raggedy kids playing baseball on a country road. Evening is coming on, a blond head seems to glow, a baseball bat burns iconlike in the twilight.
I moved down the hall. There were pictures of a group of women in long dresses, holding hands, laughing beneath a blue sky. There was a picture of an old woman in a rocking chair, proudly holding a large box turtle on her lap. There were more landscapes.
There was a photo of Anna, looking directly into the camera with her odd, small smile and her bright eyes. She was wearing a high-collared blouse and a long blue skirt, and her hands were folded primly in her lap. He hair was pulled back from her forehead and she was sitting on a kitchen chair. I could see part of the kitchen sink, cupboards, a window through which white light streamed.
I had never seen this photo before, and I wondered why Kalso had saved it for this exhibit. I stared at it for a long time, skirting the pain, stricken, as always, by the beauty that Anna could radiate. Then I moved along.
There were two other photos of Anna. In one she was pushing hair out of her face, her hands wet with suds from the sink. Obviously this picture was another from the kitchen, same light, same old-fashioned blouse—with the sleeves rolled up now.
The third picture had been taken, apparently, with a self-timer, for Kalso himself appeared in the photo. He was standing next to Anna. Anna was barefoot in a t-shirt and jeans. Kalso was wearing a business suit. They were in the far left of the picture, which was dominated by a green, stagnant pond, a riot of weeds and willow trees. Anna and Kalso were waving enthusiastically at the camera, like tourists in front of the Grand Canyon.
This picture unsettled me more than the other two, and I didn’t know why, couldn’t figure it out. Anna was almost out of the picture, although it was unmistakably Anna. Kalso was also in shadow.
I went around the room again to see if I had missed any Anna photos. I hadn’t. I came back to that third picture and it still troubled me and I didn’t know why.
That’s when Robert Kalso came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. “David,” he said. “My dear David. What do you think of my surprise?”
“How is it being rich?” Kalso asked me. The party had moved from the gallery to a friend’s house, a brief, noisy march down tree-lined blocks of townhouses, and I was drinking a cup of coffee while Kalso poured himself a glass of wine.
“I’m not rich,” I said.
Kalso raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps I have you confused with another David Livingston, the one who wrote and illustrated The Fearless Egg, Eddie Albatross, and The Summer Troll.”
“That’s me,” I said. “Maybe I’m a little rich.”
Kalso laughed. “You deserve it. You beat the snobs. You didn’t even play their game. Now you have more critical respect—honestly earned—than all those frauds at Keely’s or Bard’s.”
“Luck,” I said.
Kalso smiled, raised a glass of wine to his lips, winked, and drank deep.
Well, none of it had been planned. When I gave up painting masterpieces in Florida, I figured I had better find some kind of work. I started doing illustrations for several local publications, and I learned a lot about commercial illustration, learned how to use an airbrush, gouache. Then the drinking put an end to that, and I did some other things in other states, and I got married and I got divorced, and I went into a hospital in Austin, Texas, on a shaky, hallucinatory whim. In that hospital’s detoxification unit, I watched Father Martin movies about alcoholism, hung out in group therapy with a jittery bunch of fellow alcoholics, and got ferried to AA meetings in a big van. And I wrote and illustrated a children’s book called The Fearless Egg, a work of occupational therapy, as it were. I worked on it for another year after I left the rehab, worked on it while spending my daylight hours in chaste, clerk-typist disciplines. Then I sent it off and the third publisher liked it enough to publish it, and it did okay and the next book did better and The Summer Troll was presently on The New York Times best-seller list and had been there for an outrageous sixty-seven weeks.
“The whole business makes me nervous,” I told Kalso. “I’m not saying I don’t like it. I like it fine. But it does make me nervous. I guess good fortune has a way of emphasizing the arbitrary nature of things, more even than a series of tragic events. All this stuff happening so fast.… It has an accidental, flimsy feel to it. I don’t know.”
Kalso nodded. He had grown a mustache somewhere in the last thirteen years, and his features had lengthened somehow. He still conveyed the air of knowing more about what he was doing than most of us know (which wasn’t false advertising, I’m sure). He looked more than thirteen years older.
I was feeling pretty good, talking to Kalso, bringing him up to date, and I thought I could broach the subject of Anna without getting weird.
I told him I had enjoyed the exhibit and was indeed surprised by the photographs of Anna. I had figured out that they must have been taken up at the commune, the Divine Dancers or whatever they were called, but I had never seen them before, didn’t know they existed.
“That’s the surprise,” Kalso said, and I didn’t understand that, and he was leaning forward, clutching my arm. “They aren’t old photographs.”
I couldn’t make out what he was talking about, but I was staring at his features, wilder with age, red hair flying, mustache bristling, and I realized what had bothered me about the photo of Kalso and Anna. Kalso had had a mustache in that photo. The Kalso in that photo was the Kalso in front of me.
That realization was underlined by Kalso’s next sentence. “I took those pictures this summer. Out at the commune.”
“Anna’s alive?”
Kalso nodded, smiled broadly. “Now there’s a surprise, right? Bowl you over or what?”
“That’s impossible,” I said.
“I think so, too,” Kalso said. “On general principles, I refused to credit my senses when I first saw her. But it is her. I talked to her. She recognized me too, said, ‘Hey Robert, how you doing?’ You know Anna, she never paid much attention to time. What’s ten or fifteen years to someone like Anna?”
As Kalso talked, I felt an odd babble of voices blowing in my mind. Anna was dead. I had thirteen years of knowing that, waking up at three in the morning to have it reaffirmed. They never found the body. But two kids watched her being stabbed, watched her drown, and they did recover the body of her murderer. She was dead. Thirteen years of being dead.
Kalso told me about his decision to photograph the commune. “It was an inspired idea, really,” Kalso said. “I wanted to show a utopia-gone-to-seed, an over-the-hill commune.”
But Father Walker and his followers weren’t welcoming visitors, and Kalso had been turned away at the gates. It hadn’t been difficult to sneak in, however. All he had had to do was walk across a couple of fields and there he was. He had walked up on the porch of the big white farmhouse and knocked on the door, and the door had been answered by his holiness himself, Father Walker.
And Anna Shockley had been hanging on Father Walker’s arm, smiling. That’s when she asked Kalso how he was doing.
“Okay,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”
Anna had giggled.
Father Walker invited Kalso in. Now that Kalso was actually there, they didn’t seem upset by his presence. Walker told how one of his people had found Anna, bleeding, almost dead, and this person had fetched others and they had taken her back to Father Walker.
“Death didn’t want her,” Walker told Kalso. “So we kept her. As you can see, the years have been kind to her. She has nothing to complain of.”
I was puzzled and interrupted. “Why the secrecy? Why didn’t Walker take her to a hospital?”
Kalso shrugged. “Father Walker doesn’t function along entirely rational lines. He strikes me as an authentic guru, very spiritual, very crazy. Like he says, he kept her. Maybe I asked him the same question because I do remember him saying he couldn’t, morally, return her to the river since it had given her up. He couldn’t throw her back.”
I couldn’t sort all this in my mind. I kept thinking I had it and then I didn’t. I was hyperventilating on some credibility level, and I made Kalso keep repeating the story while the party rushed around us, laughing, hooting, cranking up the stereo. What I really didn’t understand was how Anna could stay out there all those years without anyone knowing.
Kalso, speaking with uncharacteristic gentleness, said, “Anna didn’t loom so large in most folks’ universe. Most of the world did not know Anna Shockley. She was no social butterfly.”
“What about the police?” I asked. “Shouldn’t the police know about this?”
“Why?” Kalso asked. “What purpose will that serve at this late date? Her attacker died at the same time she did—poisoned himself, according to the coroner—so there isn’t any wrong to be righted by her coming forward. The press might be interested, but I don’t think Anna would appreciate the publicity.” Kalso paused, frowned. “I’m not sure she could hold up under the publicity. I was amazed at how unchanged, how young Anna still looked when I saw her, all these years later. But damage occurred, you understand. I don’t know how much, and Anna never thought, never lived in the world on quite the same wavelength as the rest of us so it is hard to say the extent to which she was harmed by that experience. But she was harmed.”
I knew that. She couldn’t go through the sort of experience she had been through without suffering some emotional and mental trauma. A new thought occurred to me.
“Does Diane know that Anna is alive?”
Kalso sighed. “Diane told me you would ask that one. She does. I told her this summer.”
“She never said anything to me.” Diane was the only one I still kept in touch with in Newburg.
“No. She went out to the commune with me once and talked to Anna. She said Anna was where she should be. She didn’t want me to tell you about it either, but I’m stubborn in my own way.”
I wasn’t angry with Diane. I realized that she was doing what she thought was right. And when it came to Anna, she didn’t trust my judgment. History was on her side.
Another question occurred to me. “Why are you telling me? Diane didn’t want you to say anything.”
Kalso looked surprisingly serious. “I think you are entitled to know, David. I was around when you and Anna were together, and I was touched by those times, the two of you. I was saddened by the tragedy. I think you deserve to know the rest of the story. I believe in free will. I also believe in advice, and I will give you some: Don’t go near her. Rejoice that she is alive and well, and stay as far away from her as possible.”