By Patricia Schultheis
The Irish troubles in their fourth year, Robert Keelty could take no more: his wife Margaret refusing to return from America with the kids; reporting the latest blast for the paper; and all Belfast choking from foul suspicion. Now, Sunday, endless Sunday, with only Molly and Mayve, his quarrelsome cats for company, and the evening ahead a choice between a cup of tea with the old widow downstairs, or elbows on the bar down the street.
The paper’s art critic — a miracle they still had one — called the exhibit of the American Mathias Randolph’s paintings at the museum, “sentimental” and “over-wrought.” But Robert was desperate in the way lonely, forty-six-year-old men get and went anyway.
Only a bow-backed woman with a walker and two red-headed lads were in the first gallery, where Robert found the American’s paintings neither “sentimental,” nor “over-wrought.” Instead, he thought the stark landscapes with their incidental people were honest and hazed with longing. The one of a solitary man in a green knit cap trudging up a treeless hill especially moved him. “Harvest” in the second gallery reminded him of the landowner Levin working beside his serfs and harvesting the wheat for winter in Anna Karinina. The third gallery was empty except for a woman in a raspberry-colored jacket looking at a painting of a tattered lacey curtain blowing over an open, four-paned window with a distant view of the sea. Robert made himself study “Nightfall,” then “Barn Supports” before standing beside her.
“How he captured the movement of that curtain, amazing”— a hackneyed remark, he knew, but nothing else came to him.
She spoke with an Eastern European accent and low voice. “I wasn’t really thinking about the curtain.”
“What, then?”
“Whoever’s passing that window.” She made a vague gesture toward the painting. For a long-boned woman, her hand was surprisingly plumb. “This is someone else’s viewpoint; not the painter’s. It’s as though Randolph created a fictional person who’s just passing this window, like they’ve done thousands of times before, and we’re seeing the scene through that person’s eyes, whoever they are.”
Her comment’s novelty played in Robert’s brain — once he and Margaret tickled each other with remarks like that, but then the children and the troubles came. “Who do you think that person is?”
The woman looked at him full on now, deep knowingness in her brown eyes. She smiled. “Oh, I don’t know . . . probably a middled-aged woman. Who do you think?”
“Why a middle-aged woman?”
“Whoever’s passing that window, they’ve got a sense of hurriedness about them . . . a dozen things to do . . . no time for window gazing. The lot of middle-aged women everywhere.”
Her perfume reminded Robert of the one a lover wore before he married Margaret, when he was just a young reporter in Bierut. Aya was eight years his senior and favored musky scents and silk — those afternoons of gull cries out her open window—Aya.
“Would you care to join me for a drink, then? There’s a bar half a block down.”
The woman turned to the painting, then back to him. “I know the place . . . so, yes then, but . . . . ”
“But?”
“Give me twenty minutes, will you? I’ll meet you there . . . twenty minutes.”
“By the way, I’m Robert.” He held out his hand.
She held out hers. “Clara.”
“Twenty minutes, then.” He initially thought she wanted the time to give him the dodge perhaps or to call her boyfriend with some excuse. But by the time he’d reached the bar, he’d conjured a sweeter explanation: their flirtation was as delicate as a spider web flecked with dew, and she didn’t want to tear it with something mundane like a splattering sneeze, a need for the loo, or her handbag slipping awkwardly off her shoulder to the sidewalk—he’d noticed hers was large and well-crafted. No, she wanted to collect herself and in twenty minutes, she’d come through the door.
The bar was the sort that required its employees to wear nametags pinned to flimsy black vests. When the lad served Roberth his single malt, he remarked about the lad’s name. “Conan, my own boy’s name. He’s in America with his mum for the time being.” He hoped small talk would quash his urge to check his watch, but he failed to engage the lad, so he pulled back his cuff— nine more minutes.
Then the bomb went off.
The blast wave ripped through the museum and into the bar, shattering the glass in the display of swords behind Robert, throwing him into cascading weapons, a 1900 cutlass nearly severing his right ear, and robbing the air from his lungs. Then blackness.
When he opened his eyes in the hospital, Margaret was at his bedside, holding his hand and gazing out the window at the harbor. Her longing face gave him to know she’d left the children in America. He squeezed her hand. She turned to him, bent, and pressed her cool cheek against his, their secret, wordless sign.
The authorities, of course, interviewed him several times: Why had he gone to the museum? Did he notice anything suspicious? Why was he alone? What about the two red-headed lads? He hadn’t stayed long, now why was that? A woman was there, what about her? Robert played confused and gave them the woman with the walker. He never knew what became of the woman who had asked him to wait twenty minutes.
In the fragile peace that came years later, the questions would come, mostly at night. Then, careful not to wake Margaret, he’d get up, pour himself a drink, and look through the parlor’s lacey curtains at the starry Belfast night. Twenty minutes. Had she given him time to save him? Or had she left, too, by some other exit, and gone to the place she was meant to be all along?
* * *
Patricia Schultheis is the author of Baltimore’s Lexington Market, published by Arcadia Publishing, and of St. Bart’s Way, published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House and A BalanceLife, published by All Things That Matter Press The author of nearly 40 published, she is the recipient of numerous awards.