The Captive Condition by Kevin P. Keating Page B

constant reminder that fame and fortune were as fleeting as the phantoms that, for a few brief hours in the night, floated freely among the monuments. For this reason a few excoriating critics dared to assert that she bore an uncanny resemblance to a medium at a séance, summoning spirits from the ether, a two-bit charlatan exploiting her gifts at some silly spook session for a bunch of gullible fools holding hands around a table.
    Completely at ease among the gravestone slabs, she rested an elbow against the porch railing and said to the Gonk, “One of those instructors at the college, oh, what’s her name? I’m having another senior moment.” Her arms were like winter branches, and the wind snatched the cigarette from her fingers. “Marianne Kingsley! She’s planning a retrospective of my work on New Year’s Eve, a modest exhibition for a nearly forgotten sculptor who spent more than four decades hiding in a tiny tinderbox in the woods. People ask why I no longer pursue fellowships and awards, and I tell them I don’t want my tombstone to read: ‘She was always scrounging for money.’ But deep down I’m as venally vain as the next sculptor or painter or pornographer, and this retrospective will serve as the epitaph to my career. I’ll never enjoy another exhibition at a prestigious gallery. No, a farcical French bistro on the square in Normandy Falls, that’s my last stand before my work is destined for the cultural trash heap. Takes courage to admit that.” She shrugged. “I’m told you have artistic ambitions. Even taking a couple of classes at the college.”
    He shook his head. “I’m an amateur. Art is just a hobby. I do a little carpentry, too, but mostly I work with steel. Helps take my mind off things.”
    Her smile became a disapproving frown. “My good man, art isn’t a pastime, it’s an ordeal, and it’s apt to make your suffering a whole lot worse, intolerable even. Watch yourself. The human heart is an inexhaustible fountain of creativity, and those who drink from it have been known to develop a very dangerous addiction, one that all too often proves to be incurable, irreversible, and final.”
    Not even noon, and already she was making a rambling speech, slurring her words, disguising her gaseous eruptions with a hacking cough, but the Gonk was in neither the habit nor the position of judging someone as accomplished and highly lauded as the great Colette Collins, a sculptor long retired from the world of art and now living in obscurity. In her prime she had been the recipient of several prestigious grants and high-profile commissions, the town’s first hippie before anyone even knew what hippies were, but with the steady decline of her health, and some might argue her creative capacities, she made fewer public appearances and preferred to spend her days, what days were left to her, in almost total seclusion, drinking herself toward the sweet oblivion of a midafternoon nap.
    “I’m not holding my breath, but I hope the college will hire a preservationist to fix up these headstones and do a little excavating. That’s the sort of thing that excites them, fixing up graveyards. They wouldn’t have an interest in this house, of course. It’s petty and hypocritical, I realize, to think the college might raise a few dollars to put a small plaque beside the door, but I ask you, sir”—with difficulty she raised her bamboo cane and indicated an immense sandstone obelisk, cracked and jigsawed together, near a row of gargantuan white oaks—“what purpose does
that
hideous thing serve? I never dishonored the memory of my three husbands with anything so ostentatious. You can hardly make out the infamous name carved on that appalling edifice. I’ll wager you’re the only man in town who knows the poor fellow planted beneath that rock pile, am I right? The only descendant to return to this human wilderness, this moronic inferno to pay his respects?”
    She swallowed the dregs from her mason