Finding Katy – Chapter Six

A little more than a week after Dawn and I visited the gallery, I got a call from Sally.  She excitedly asked “how quickly can you get up here?”

I was caught by surprise and it took me a few seconds to get my wits about me long enough to say “I can walk up there in about fifteen minutes.” Almost commandingly, Sally said “drive.”  I asked her if she had gotten robbed or if had there been a fire or my fondest wish, if had she found the artist.

“Just get up here,” she said.  I grabbed my car keys and headed up the street.  I was so nervous, excited, worried and a little hopeful that when I got to the gallery, I didn’t even remember how I got there.

I walked in and Sally grabbed my arm.  “Come here,” she said.  We walked to the area where Katy’s paintings were.  A gentleman was standing there and she introduced us.  “What’s going on?” I asked.

She said “this gentleman was looking at The Journey Of Life and when I was lowering the shades, he yelled ‘hold it…hold it…hold it’.”

She leaned over and whispered “I thought maybe he was having a stroke or something so I ran over to see about him.”

He said “look.  You can see just the faintest difference in the colors here and I think I can see a word.  I noticed it when the sun hit it in a certain way.”

Sally said “he asked me if I had a black light, which of course I did, so we lowered all the shades, turned off the lights and shined the black light on the paintings.”

She smiled and said “and there it was…on all of them.  A word.  She said “it was in a foreign language and I didn’t know what it meant, but he did.”

The gentleman scratched his head and said it was a strange word to be on paintings and it really didn’t make any sense to him.

When he told me what the word meant, I understood why it was there and I immediately knew that my suspicions had been right all along.  There was no doubt that all of those pieces had been painted by Katy.

I believed that Miss Mabel somehow had a hand in this particular gentleman showing up on this particular day, at this particular time, looking at this particular painting.  Again, I wrestled with the idea of telling Sally that I knew who the artist was but I think Katy’s intent was to have a certain je ne sais quoi attached to her paintings and I would not take that away from her.

I would like to say that once again, paintings mysteriously began to arrive at the gallery.  I would like to say that I was eventually able to purchase one of her masterpieces.  I would like to say that I found her and discovered that she had finally found peace and happiness.  I would like to say all of those things but I can’t.

I have no idea what happened to Katy.  She just might be on that island as I hoped, or she might be resting in the cemetery near Miss Mabel, having been reduced to nothing more than a forgotten, nameless number.

I did know one thing.  I had been witness to extraordinary work, the likes of which I was sure I would never see again.  Katy had touched me in a way that no other had or ever would.  As long as I lived, she would not be forgotten.

Some of the notes she left had almost ripped my heart out but the paintings she left made it sing with joy.

I think we all want to leave a mark and whether or not she realized it, she had done just that.  She left a mark on many lives…Miss Mabel’s, mine, Samwell’s, Dawn’s, Sally’s and every person who gazed in awe at her exquisite work.

I think about the word she hid in all of her paintings.  The brutality of her father’s words had never stopped ringing in her ears and the wounds left by those words had never healed.

I kept repeating the word and I will never forget the gentleman at the gallery cavalierly saying.  “The word is WORTLOS.  It’s German.”

“Translated, it means…worthless.”

 

Das Ende.

 

Finding Katy – Chapter Four

Two years had passed.  Katy was still haunting me and often visited my dreams.  I would see her standing in front of the house or kneeling beside Miss Mabel’s grave.  Every time I called to her, she disappeared just as I awakened.

I was getting along with my life but I wasn’t really living.  I was sleep walking.  I went through all the motions of daily chores and at the end of the day, I still talked to Katy’s bear.  I hadn’t kept my promise to myself or to Miss Mabel and I finally admitted that I was a miserable failure.

I started walking uptown just to get out of the house.  All of the major department stores that used to grace the landscape had given way to craft shops and specialty stores.  Vendors were selling everything from Voodoo dolls to herb gardens.

For some reason, I happened to walk down a side street paved with bricks. “How charming is this?” I thought.  I could imagine horse-drawn carriages traveling from one end to the other, delivering ladies of yore to the local dressmaker for a new frock.

A one time shoe repair shop had been replaced by an art gallery.  I admit that I didn’t know the difference between Manet, Monet or Tippy-Tippy-Day-Day.  I also admit that I had never appreciated the kind of avant-garde abstract art being displayed in the store front window, but for some reason I went inside.

There were partitions, posed to resemble walls of rooms.  There were paintings by local artists as well as reproductions of famous works.  Portraits of someone with both eyes on the same side of their face had always disturbed me and were, I thought, perfect means of evoking nightmares.  I gravitated toward the realistic ones.  The ones like Katy painted.

One in particular caught my eye.  The painting was of a female’s age progression.  I asked the curator, who had introduced herself as Sally, who the artist was and she said that she didn’t know because they didn’t get any paperwork nor could they find a signature.  “There’s only the year,” she said.  “2016.  We titled this one: The Journey Of Life.”

It was at that very instant, I started to believe that Miss Mabel had guided me to that gallery.  I also believed that not only was I was looking at Katy’s work…I believed I was looking at Katy.  The curator said that she believed all the works in this particular “room” were painted by the same person.

I was sure they had all been painted by the same person.  I was sure they had all been painted by Katy but I didn’t say anything.

I asked her if I could buy one.  She said “we get a lot of offers for this particular artist’s work but they aren’t for sale because we don’t know who they belong to.”  Looking at “The Journey Of Life,” she said “one person offered us a sizable sum for this one but we had to refuse.”

I understood why they made an offer and so did she.  She looked at it and said, “have you ever seen such detail?  Look at the progression of the hair color.  It looks like this artist painted every individual hair on every individual head and it gives you the sense that if a cool breeze blew by…the hair would start flowing.  Look at the faces.  The faces show every line and wrinkle that tell the story of this woman’s life.  I’ve never seen work like this before and I have studied art for almost twenty years.”

She stepped back and said “you can see how time touched this person…but look at the eyes.  They eyes never change.  There’s such a deep sadness in the eyes.”

I asked her how she came to have them.  She said “every so often, we would get a painting delivered.  There was never a return address and as I said, they were never signed.  Then, two years ago we stopped getting them.”

I asked her if she knew why and she said “maybe they died, or moved away but we’ve been here for over ten years and we had been getting them since we first opened.  It’s a shame, really.  Such a fine artist and I don’t think anybody will ever know who they were.”

 

To be continued____________________