In part two of this episodic psychological thriller, Nicole Jeffords. convinced that healer, Victor Goodlove, who disappeared ten years earlier is buried under her studio, continues her search for him, contacting old patients all over Austin and dis...
Maria led me into a kind of workroom just beyond the kitchen. It had a table along one wall covered in books and papers, several rows of glass cabinets filled with medicines and tinctures, a smaller desk with a fancy computer setup, and a big comfortable chair. None of these were particularly shocking. As I entered the room just behind Maria, I thought, Oh, what a nice office. And then I saw it, a portrait painted by my mother of a woman with a long neck, high cheekbones, hooded eyes, a painting I knew well as it also hung in my living room in Austin. What the hell?! My mother, Franyo, had always painted two portraits of a subject, keeping one, and giving one to the sitter. This must be the one she'd given to the sitter.
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Franyo, Portrait of Clara Becker
"How'd you get that painting?" I squawked. When Maria didn't answer right away, I grabbed her by the shoulders and repeated the question. "That painting? Where'd you get it?" I was angry. I couldn't explain it then and I can't now, but I was furious that work of my mother's would be in this house that belonged to a woman who was identical to me and who, I felt at the moment, had stolen my life. Irrational, I know. Maria's life was totally separate from mine, but right now our paths had collided and I didn't understand what my mother was doing in the mix.
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France
"It's of my mother," Maria said in Romanian, Andra translating.
"Your mother? That's your mother?" I thought of the strange woman who'd been hanging in a row of portraits in my living room for years because it was such a good example of my mother's work. That was Maria Danciu's mother? My brain was not understanding this freaky coincidence. I pointed at Franyo's signature and explained that she, the painter, was my mother.
"No way," exclaimed Andra.
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Clara's portrait in Nicole's living room
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Franyo's signature on Clara's portrait
Maria took my hands by the wrists and began gently to run her fingers across them. She didn't seem that surprised by the weird fact of our mothers' connection, just went on massaging my wrists with an oddly complacent look on her face. I wanted to shake my hands loose, slap her, but the arthritic pain in my wrists that had plagued me the whole time I was in Romania had begun magically to subside. As she was working on me, she and Andra had a rapid back and forth conversation that Andra translated as follows:
"My mother" (Andra's grandmother) "whose name was Clara Becker was from Berlin and she sometimes posed for art students. That was around 1930 when she was in her early twenties, and needed extra spending money. The woman who painted her portrait was extremely talented and was kind enough to give Clara the picture you see here. Her name was similar to mine — Marga — but Clara, who grew quite close to her, dubbed her Franyo because she was kind of a wild woman and the name sounded right. I grew up with this picture and treasure it greatly."
As she made that last statement, she removed a jar of cream from one of the glass cabinets and began to rub it into my wrists. I wasn't paying too much attention. My mind had grabbed onto the fact that my mother, whose given name was Marga Victoria, had indeed been in art school in Berlin in the early thirties and had always told us about a good friend who'd disappeared in the years before the war and who had nick-named her Franyo, a truly bizarre name that stuck for the rest of her life.
