She went to work on Monday, because the Charleston Historical Society's reading room opened at nine whether or not its archivists' lives had detonated over the weekend, and because the archive β she had understood this about herself by Sunday night, sitting sleepless among her mother's reassembled ghosts β was the only weapon anybody in this story had ever left her. Henry had courtrooms. Vivian had telephones. Rose had left her a fragment, a key, and a profession. Clara intended to use it.
She began, professionally, the way she would have begun for any patron: with the name, the date, the place. Thomas Wren. Savannah, August 1993. Painter.
He was not hard to find. That was the obscene part, the part she would return to for weeks: Thomas Wren had been famous, in the small, hot way that regional art scenes make men famous. The Society held the Savannah papers on microfilm and the art quarterlies in bound volumes, and by eleven o'clock Clara had filled four pages of her notebook and forgotten, twice, to breathe normally. Thomas Wren, born 1966, trained in New York, come south in 1989 and taken Savannah by charm and talent. Portraits, mostly β huge, tender, unflinching portraits of women, praised in print for 'refusing to flatter and refusing to look away.' A studio on Jones Street. A show in Charleston, in the spring of 1992, reviewed under the headline A WREN AMONG THE PEACOCKS. Clara read that review three times, hunting between its lines for her mother, and found, in the last paragraph, a list of sitters. Among them: Miss Rose Sinclair, whose portrait the reviewer called 'the exhibition's beating heart β a young woman painted by a man plainly in the process of falling, hopelessly and in public, in love.'
Ellis, the Society's senior librarian, found her at the microfilm reader at noon with cold coffee at her elbow and, being a man who had survived forty years of other people's family documents, set a sandwich beside the keyboard without comment. "Sinclair girl," he said at last, nodding at the screen, where Rose's exhibition review was frozen. "I shelved that catalogue when it was new. Half of Charleston went to that show to see whether the painter had got her right, and came home and said he had not, because admitting he had meant admitting they'd all seen it." Clara looked up. "You knew?" "I knew a portrait was bought back quick and quiet, and that nobody hung it, which in this town is the loudest thing a picture can do." He adjusted his glasses. "Your grandfather's secretary paid cash and took it away in a station wagon, like a body. I helped her load it. I've wondered for thirty years where it went, Miss Clara. Archives aren't the only things that keep. People keep, too β we're just worse at cataloguing, and we burn easier." He went back to his desk, and Clara sat with her hands flat on her notebook, understanding that the conspiracy she had imagined as a single slammed door might instead be a whole city of people, each quietly holding one small piece of her mother shut.
His portrait of Rose hung, it turned out, in no museum. It had been sold privately, in 1992, to a buyer the gallery records listed by a single initial: C. Clara wrote the letter down and underlined it until the paper thinned. C. For Charles. Charles Sinclair, her grandfather, Rose's father, dead twelve years and still β in family memory, in the marble of his monument in Magnolia Cemetery, in the way Henry said his name β the most powerful man any of them had ever known. Charles Sinclair, who had built a fortune and a family with the same set of tools and no visible distinction between them. Charles, who it now seemed possible had bought his daughter's portrait off a gallery wall so that no one else would ever stand in front of it and see what a reviewer had seen in one glance.
The fire was in the December papers, where Clara's hands began to shake. STUDIO FIRE CLAIMS SAVANNAH ARTIST. December 19th, 1993. A fire of unknown origin, consuming the Jones Street studio and the apartment above it. Thomas Wren, twenty-seven years old, presumed dead. She read the follow-ups with her mouth dry: presumed. The accounts of the remains β Clara forced herself through them, archivist's discipline, eyes on the line β spoke of a body recovered from the studio's ruins, of damage so extensive that identification had rested, in the end, on effects: a ring, a watch, the testimony of the landlord. Dental comparison, one late, small item conceded, had proven 'inconclusive.' Inconclusive. Clara sat in the humming dark of the microfilm room and stared at that word as if it might, under sufficient attention, become another word entirely. In thirty years, no one β not the fire service, not the Savannah police, not any newspaper β had ever printed that Thomas Wren's body had been identified. They had printed that he was dead. Those were, her whole training whispered to her, two different documents.
On an impulse she would examine later, she telephoned the Savannah public library and asked for the local history desk, and was given a Miss Delacroix who had the archivist's true gift of becoming more interested the stranger a question grew. Wren, Thomas. Yes, there was a clipping file; yes, there had been a fire; no, the file had not been requested in β Miss Delacroix consulted something β in eleven years, and the last requester had been a lawyer's office in Charleston, in the matter of an estate. "Which estate?" Clara asked. "It doesn't say, sugar. It never does, with lawyers. But I'll tell you one thing that's in here that never made the papers, because I typed the index card myself: half of what was in that studio was insured and itemized, and the other half β the personal canvases, the ones of a woman, the sitter in Charleston everybody talked about β those were never claimed on. Not one. Either they burned so complete there wasn't ash to swear by" β a pause, freighted β "or somebody carried a great many paintings out of that building before anybody called the fire department, and nobody in thirty years has ever said who." Clara thanked her, and wrote carried out in her notebook, and circled it until the pen tore the paper.
The obituary ran on December 23rd, dignified and brief, placed by no family anyone named β 'friends in Savannah' β and Clara placed it on the light table next to the last document she pulled that day, though pulled is the wrong word: she had known where this one lived since she was nineteen. The Society kept the Charleston wedding announcements the way other institutions keep scripture. Rose Marie Sinclair to Henry Bennett, the younger son of a good family, a rising lawyer β married at St. Philip's, in a ceremony the announcement called quiet, on the 26th of February, 1994, eleven weeks, almost to the day, after Thomas Wren's studio burned.
Clara did the arithmetic the way she had been doing it, unwillingly, since Saturday, the way she understood her mother had done it, in terror, in 1993. August: Savannah, a summer dress, a laughing pregnant girl. December: a fire, a presumed body, a word β inconclusive. February: a quiet wedding, a judge's son, a name with walls around it. May 12th: a daughter, born, as everyone had agreed for thirty-two years, a respectable six weeks early to Henry and Rose Bennett.
Six weeks early. Clara closed her notebook very carefully. She had been somebody's six weeks early all her life β it was in the family liturgy, the explanation for the smallness, the lungs, the week in the hospital no one discussed. And now a scrap of paper no bigger than a stamp, carried to a grave in a gold heart, said otherwise, in a clerk's plain ink: Father: Thomas Wren. Which meant the wedding had not been the beginning of her story that came a little too fast. It had been a rescue, or a sentence, or a cover β and her mother had worn the truth against her skin every day of the marriage it concealed, and Henry Bennett, who had always known where the chain was in the portrait, had raised another man's daughter in a house full of closed doors.
Clara took the tiny brass key from her purse, where it had spent the weekend, and set it on the desk beside the obituary. Number 14. Somewhere β in a bank, in a station, in a building in Savannah β there was a lock with her name's beginning inside it, left there by a woman who wrote do not open until you are ready to lose everything you think you know.
She was not ready. Clara understood that clearly, sitting among her dead. She also understood that it no longer mattered, because the thing she thought she knew β that Henry Bennett was her father β had finished, sometime between the marble floor and this humming room, being something she knew at all.
Chapter 6: The Leak