Mr. Thurston went on. And on and on. But I was no longer capable of understanding what he said. The very core and fiber of my being had been torn apart and shredded, as by some mighty internal explosion. With excruciating pain and blinding light the truth of all that Mr. Thurston said burst upon me.
It was futile to try to express thoughts and emotions with abstract forms, as I had been doing. My pictures had to look like the objects they represented. It was really so simple...
It goes without saying that it was Mr. Thurston’s wise and generous criticism that made my paintings the success they are today. A reporter was with the policemen who broke open the door of my room and his newspaper printed photographs of Mr. Thurston lying beside his portrait. Other reporters, too, were kind in describing the likeness as “uncanny,” “startling,” “an incredible similarity.” Art dealers and collectors have been clamoring for more of my work ever since.
Unfortunately the light here is bad and I am kept too busy shuttling between the courtroom and the doctor’s examinations to continue my painting. So the portrait of Mr. Thurston will probably be my last painting. That’s the opinion of the lawyer assigned to me by the judge; he believes I have only another six weeks or two months left, and I’m too exhausted to complete a major work in that time.
But that’s all right. The portrait is my masterpiece.
Thank you, Mr. Thurston.
Funeral Music
by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.
As he wrote the confession he could hear the laughter of children playing in a distant meadow.
Hydrangea bushes, deep blue and soft white, swayed in the light summer breeze outside the study windows. He bent over the steel typing table and tapped out the confession with slow precision, using only the middle finger of his right hand. From the stereo speakers mounted on wall brackets above the desk came the softly haunting strains of the Baudelin String Suite No. 2 as the words slowly filled the sheets of cream bond paper under the printed heading: H. JOSHUA HAWES.
“Before I take my life I must write this. Paul Baudelin’s second wife did not die by her own hand but by mine.
“I will not repeat at length what I established in my book, The Life and Music of Baudelin, and what has been confirmed for me each day of the seven years I have lived with the Master as his business manager, biographer, and shield against the blows of everyday existence. Before his first marriage he was simply one of many competent young composers in a milieu dominated by his betters — Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Hindemith, Poulenc, Milhaud.
“Then in 1947 he met Claudette and within hours he was savagely, passionately in love. And on their honeymoon in Spain that winter occurred that famous freak accident in contemporary music history — the sudden collapse of a decaying and condemned building as she happened to be walking along the street, so that within moments Mme. Claudette Baudelin was crushed beneath tons of rubble, and Baudelin, who had been so full of the joy of love, was desolate.
“It was the shadow of that lost love, snatched away by sudden blind chance, that filled, one might almost say obsessed, his music from that day, and lent to his compositions a fullness and poignancy, a sense of the merciless randomness of the universe. It is to the fate of Claudette that we owe the four great Symphonies, the second Suite for Strings, the cycle of Death Songs — all the major works of Baudelin’s second period which established him as the foremost French composer of the generation.
“And then last year he fell in love again. He was in New York City to conduct the Philharmonic in his Third Symphony. Elana Nassour was second violinist, and her musicianship was superb. It was her rendition of the sublimely difficult passage at the end of the lento movement that first stirred his heart, Baudelin told me. The night after the performances of the Symphony they slept in each other’s arms.
“Suddenly he was like a boy of eighteen again, this fifty-year-old titan of world music. The universe revolved around Elana and he was soaringly happy. The sense of unutterable loss that was the hallmark of his second period vanished. He almost ceased composing, and what little he wrote was no longer worth hearing. I couldn’t stand to see that happen. I loved his work too much.
“And so, four months after they were married — I allowed him that much time of happiness — I mixed an overdose of sleeping pills into the thick Turkish coffee she drank each night before bed.
“I was both careful and lucky. There has been much speculation whether her death was accident or suicide, but no suggestion of murder. And in the year since her death, out of his grief at the loss of her, Baudelin has begun to compose great work again. If she had lived, the Fifth Symphony and the tone poem La Mort de Dieu would never have been. That is my justification.
“But it is not enough. I have come to see that no work of art is worth a human life, not even a masterpiece by Baudelin. I have committed a great wrong which can be expiated in only one way. And so I shall go upstairs and take the revolver from my night table drawer and place the barrel in my mouth and squeeze the trigger.
“Baudelin, old friend and benefactor, do not curse my memory, I beg you.”
The string suite on the stereo came to an end, and the record player shut itself off with a sharp click. He tugged the third sheet of paper out of the typewriter — it began with the words “can be expiated” — and reread the confession with infinite care.
When he was satisfied he swiveled to the oak desk and placed the final sheet of cream bond on the blotter, above the last page of a signed copy of the management contract between Paul Baudelin and H.Joshua Hawes.
And then Baudelin picked up one of the felt-tipped pens with which Hawes customarily wrote, and boldly traced the signature of H.Joshua Hawes at the end of the suicide note, deliberately permitting variations, remembering that no two signatures by the same person are ever exactly the same.
When he compared the result with Hawes’s genuine signature, he gave a little gasp of delight: the forged signature, he was sure, would deceive an expert. He put the contract away in a drawer, slipped the protective lid over the typewriter, and fastened the sheets of the confession together with a paper clip. He then crossed the rooms of the spacious Connecticut farmhouse they had rented for the season.
The perfect murder, he reflected, is not so difficult after all; in fact it requires far less skill than the composition of a symphony. He sprang up the staircase two steps at a time and slipped into Hawes’s room without knocking.
His manager-biographer-buffer was sprawled in a wing chair with his huge belly bulging beneath his scarlet dressing gown and his slippered feet resting on the edge of the bed. On the little teakwood table beside the chair there was a water tumbler half full of thick apricot brandy. A bright-jacketed detective novel lay open on Hawes’s lap.
Baudelin sauntered casually across the room until he was within one step of the night table where he knew Hawes kept his revolver.
“What’s up?” Hawes glanced up half irritated and spoke in a foggy mutter.
Touching only the end of the paperclip, not the papers themselves, Baudelin set the three sheets of the suicide note on top of the book on the other’s ample lap. “You might find this document more interesting than the detective story.”