He took the book back, wiped it off with his sleeve, and handed it back. He led them to the sofa.
Ruth and Paul Massey sat, while Reine-Marie stood and flipped through the yearbook.
“What did they find in the walls?” asked Ruth. Her voice was almost unrecognizable to Reine-Marie.
“Old newspapers mostly. Turns out the building, or its foundations, were much older than anyone thought. Some Italian workers had left parts of sandwiches, and biologists were able to grow some tomato plants from the old seeds they found. Plants that had become all but extinct. They also found a couple of canvases.”
“Was that one?” Ruth pointed to the painting they’d been looking at, at the back of the studio.
Professor Massey laughed. “You think that’s garbage?”
He didn’t seem insulted, simply amused. Pleased even.
“Professor Massey painted that,” said Reine-Marie, jumping in to smooth over a potentially embarrassing moment, though she seemed the only one uncomfortable over what Ruth had said.
“You can see the paintings they found in a display case near the front door,” said Massey. “Nothing remarkable, I’m afraid. No Emily Carr or Tom Thomson stuffed in for insulation.”
As they talked, Reine-Marie studied page after page of photographs of young men and women. Most of the students were white. Most with long greasy hair. And tight turtlenecks, and tighter jeans. And petulant, disinterested expressions.
Too cool for school. Too cool to care.
Reine-Marie stopped and turned back a page.
There, unmistakably, was Clara, with hair that looked like Einstein’s. Wearing a shapeless smock and a huge, happy grin on her face.
And beside her on the sofa, the same sofa Reine-Marie had just been on, various students slouched. Professor Massey, younger and even more vigorous, was standing behind them, speaking to a young man.
They were locked in earnest conversation. A cigarette hung from the young man’s mouth, a puff of smoke obscuring his face. Except for one eye. Sharp, assessing. Aware.
It was Peter.
Reine-Marie smiled at the photograph, then returned to searching for Sébastien Norman. But when she found the section on the professors it was a disappointment.
“I’d forgotten,” said Massey, when shown the section. “That was the year the editors decided not to use our actual photographs. Maybe in response to the Salon des Refusés, they published pictures of our art instead. I think they deliberately chose the most embarrassing examples.”
He took the book back and turned a few pages, and grimaced. “That’s mine. The worst thing I think I’ve done.”
There were columns of bright paint, with slashes through it. It seemed to Reine-Marie quite dynamic. Not bad at all.
But then, artists probably weren’t the best judges of their own work.
“May I take this?” she asked, indicating the yearbook.
“Yes, as long as you bring it back.”
He spoke, not surprisingly, to Ruth. He said it so tenderly that Reine-Marie was tempted to answer for her.
“I’ll be waiting,” he said to the old poet. “I just sit where I’m put, composed of stone and wishful thinking.”
Reine-Marie recognized the quote from one of Ruth’s poems. She wanted to warn this man to stop. She wanted to tell him that while he might think he was wooing Ruth with her own words, he had no idea what he was poking.
Ruth turned to Professor Massey and spoke, her voice strong and clear.
“That the deity who kills for pleasure will also heal.”
She’d completed the couplet.
As they left for home, Reine-Marie mulled over what she’d heard. About Professor Norman. His passion, and his folly. The tenth muse. The missing muse.
That the deity who kills for pleasure will also heal.
Was the tenth muse that deity? Like the other muses, did it inspire? Did it heal?
But did this one also kill, for pleasure?
TWENTY-SIX
Marcel Chartrand placed the rolled-up canvases on the wooden table.
They were in his office at the back of the gallery, away from prying eyes.
The gallery itself was open, and tourists and artists and enthusiasts had streamed in all day. Not to buy, but to pay homage.
It was easy to spot those from away, and those from Québec. The tourists from other provinces or countries stood before the Clarence Gagnon oil paintings and smiled, appreciating the works of art.
Those from Québec looked about to burst into tears. An unsuspected yearning uncovered, discovered. For a simpler time and a simpler life. Before Internet, and climate change, and terrorism. When neighbors worked together, and separation was not a topic or an issue or wise.
Yet the Gagnon paintings weren’t idealized images of country life. They showed hardship. But they also showed such beauty, such peace, that the paintings, and the people looking at them, ached.