The Other Adonis Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2001 by Frank Deford

  Internal design © 2001 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design © 2002 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover image: Venus and Adonis by Peter Paul Rubens

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

  Gift of Harry Payne Bingham, 1937. (37.162)

  Photograph © 1983 The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Magnifying glass © Photodisc

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900, FAX: (630) 961-2168

  www.sourcebooks.com

  First published paperback 2002

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Deford, Frank.

  The other Adonis: a novel of reincarnation/by Frank Deford.

  p. cm.

  (alk. paper)

  1. Reincarnation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.E37 084 2001

  813’.54—dc21

  2001031329

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Before

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  After

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Betsy and Tommy Kearns,

  Double Ones

  Acknowledgments

  For their kindness and expertise in helping me research this book, my very special thanks go to Andre and Paulette Dierckx and Dirk Stoclet in Belgium. They were invaluable in helping steer me through Antwerp and through Flemish. For their generous advice and guidance with the manuscript, I am most grateful to Sharon O’Connell and Barry Rosenbush. For their determination and devotion in seeing the manuscript become a book, my sincerest gratitude goes to Sterling Lord and Hillel Black. For hanging Venus and Adonis upon its walls and letting me wander through its wonders, I am indebted to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and its most pleasant staff. And for inspiration, I bow to Peter Paul Rubens.

  Frank Deford

  Westport, Connecticut

  June 6, 2001

  Before

  In the dark, Peter Paul Rubens could hear nothing but the gentle breezes barely stirring the leaves near the top of the tallest trees at his magnificent villa. So still a summer’s night it was. Besides, his famous showplace was adjacent to The Meir, which was the most fashionable square in Antwerp, away from the hurly-burly of the port’s activity. So, rarely did any of the more raucous city sounds disturb the happy residents of Rubenshuis. Most mornings, Rubens himself would rise refreshed before dawn, then set off, walking a few blocks to attend four o’clock mass at his parish, Sint Jacobskerk—Saint James Church.

  The great master had been widowed in middle age, and as perhaps the best known man in all of Europe—a diplomat of renown, no less than the most honored artist—it had been assumed that one so wealthy (and yet so handsome, too) would remarry into the grandest of nobility. Instead, at the age of fifty-three, Rubens had found himself almost mystically drawn to Helena Fourment, the plump, sixteen-year-old daughter of a mere local silk merchant.

  How joyous had been that union! Now, but four years later, by this sweet August night of 1635, Helena had already blessed Rubens with three children. The youngest was still nursing. Moreover, as her husband’s favorite model, Helena had reinvigorated his work. Never before had the suave genius of Antwerp felt so fulfilled. In fact, Rubens’s painting was now all the more ambitious because he had abandoned his political duties to concentrate solely on art—“la mia dolcissima professione,” he called his beloved work in Italian, the language he most favored of the six that he spoke.

  Indeed, this, his fabulous mansion six years in the building, was itself like a Genovese villa that had somehow been transported north to Flanders. Well, really it was two separate houses joined by a portico. There, on one side, the Rubens family lived, while on the other, he and his assistants worked. Everywhere, though, he painted his Helena—in the main studio downstairs, in the other huge public rooms filled with statuary, or even outside in the bountiful gardens where peacocks roamed amid the fruit trees, from the portico to the honeysuckle arbor, between the jonquils and the tulips and the lilacs.

  Sometimes, Rubens would paint Helena as the good Christian mother, attired modestly in her finest satin and lace, brocaded in gold. Other times, he would portray her as the most tempting pagan goddess, naked and sensual. Almost always, though, it was Helena who adorned his canvases, even as she embroidered his reputation and brought new joy to his soul.

  Alas, after a magic—and temperate—life, one that had almost been free of any infirmity, Rubens had contracted gout. In time, the disease would go to his arm and inhibit his ability to paint, and soon enough after that, it would reach his heart and kill him. Now, in his fifty-eighth year, the gout would only come and go, from discomfort to remission. On his worst nights, however, Rubens could not sleep and he took to leaving his bed and walking about his estate, cursing de gicht.

  He was again in discomfort this particular evening. It was the last minutes of August 15th—Assumption Day, that glorious holiday that celebrated the ascension of Mary, the Virgin Mother, into heaven. It was an especially important date in Antwerp, for Mary was the patroness saint of the city. The cathedral was named for her, and statues of her were erected, it seemed, on every street corner. An excess? Perhaps. But only of devotion. How better to show the cursed Protestants where the spiritual allegiance of Antwerp would always lie? All Christians might share—must share—Jesus, but Mary belonged to the loyal Catholic communicants of the precious capital of the Spanish Netherlands.

  Rubens himself had, in fact, most cherished some of his early works that featured his first wife, Isabella, as Mary. Helena, for all her beauty, was yet too young and captivating to be a Mary. But, happily for Rubens, he had found at Saint James another woman who could serve as his ideal model for the Madonna until that future time when Helena could grow properly Marian of face and form.

  Anyway, on such a soft and s
tarry night as this—the Virgin’s own!—Rubens decided not to go down to the garden. Rather, although struggling with his gout, he went up the stairs by his bedroom and then across the top of the living quarters into his own private studio. It was there that, alone, he sketched his favorite models. Always here, in private, is where he drew Helena in the nude. And likewise here, only a week ago, is where for the last time he had painted Elsa.

  Poor, poor Elsa. Rubens threw open one of the windows and looked up to the Flanders sky, tearing up at her memory. For she was dead now, Elsa was—brutally murdered. Strangled.

  He thought of her now. It was easy to remember her. Elsa had been so much fun to paint, always teasing him for his stuffy propriety, even holding up her big, pink bosom before him, promising Rubens a dandy time indeed if only he would sneak away from Helena one night to partake of her favors down at her room on the Burchtgracht. A lot of Rubens’s models were whores. After all, what ladies of respectability would go naked—even for the master of Europe, even for posterity? But Elsa was so lively, so cheerful, that Rubens hoped that he might be able to hire her full time to take her away from the brothel.

  But then, Monday night, they had discovered her body in the canal, down from what was called Bloed Berg—Blood Hill—the building where the butchers in town threw away the useless offal. When they spotted her, Elsa was floating out to the Schelde River among the blood and the guts.

  Distraught when he learned of Elsa’s terrible demise, Rubens himself had immediately gone down to the scutters’ guild hall and told those private policemen that there would be a hundred-guilder reward for whomever apprehended the villain. The schout, the chief officer, was surprised. Why would such a man as the great Rubens care so for any whore, even if she did model for him? After all, there were these unfortunate endings for these disposable women all the time.

  Rubens replied, “Did not Our Lord Himself extend the largest measure of his love to that other Mary, who was just such a woman as Elsa? Did not he promise the Magdalene eternal salvation?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes, of course,” cried the schout.

  But never mind Rubens and his Mary Magdalene. Rubens and his hundred guilders! Suddenly, every scutter in Antwerp was on the case of the strangled whore.

  And now, in his studio on Mary’s night, Rubens thought of Elsa again and prayed for her. Surely, she was already with the Virgin in heaven. Then he walked across the tiled floor to the other window and threw it open, too, to peer across the Wapper Canal to the spires and gables of the city he loved. And he breathed deeply the cool Flanders air.

  But hardly had Rubens begun to draw in the soothing night breezes than he heard the piercing cry. It seemed to come from his left, from somewhere around the next corner. Perhaps just down Hopland Street? Yes, it must be that close. Still, wherever it came from, the scream was so horrific that it assaulted his ears. In the silence, there had been nothing whatsoever to prepare him for that one long, blood-curdling wail that ended as abruptly as it had begun.

  This is what Peter Paul Rubens heard that night of August the fifteen, 1635:

  “…owwwllllleeeeeee…”

  It was so dreadful a cry, so full of pain, that as soon as the silence returned, Rubens fell straightaway to his knees upon the tiles, crossing himself in the moonlight.

  Immediately then, hearing nothing else, he retraced his steps, going back down to Helena’s bedroom where she was up now herself, nursing the baby. “Such a sound, myj wyfken—my pretty wife,” Rubens said, “as I have never heard before. First poor Elsa. Now this.”

  “Now what?”

  “Be assured, Helena, some awful business has just happened in Antwerp.”

  “Well, sleep, myj goeds man. We will surely, soon enough, learn of the matter from the scutters.”

  Which they would. Especially since, as with Elsa, it very much involved those whom everybody at Rubenshuis knew.

  1

  It was not spring fever that had troubled Nina this day. She had lived most of her life in New York, where spring, at its best, came only in fits and starts. This year, it didn’t even seem that it would ever settle in—and here it was, well into May. You could not possibly contract any full-blown fever. At best: a twenty-four-hour spring flu. Rather, Nina was distracted by something real.

  Somebody, she knew, was checking up on her. There had been too many odd calls, improper queries; too often, she had even felt that somebody was watching her, and—who knows?—maybe even following her. To this point, yes, Nina had been more curious than fearful. Still….

  “Mother, I am not ‘glossing over’ your concerns. I am simply saying that it is a mistake to jump to conclusions.” That was Nina’s daughter, Lindsay, addressing her mother over the phone from her office in Washington. Lindsay went on, “You know how it is nowadays, with computers. There’s no secrets out there. If you simply enter the Publishers Sweepstakes, that’s enough to put your name on every list known to man—your social security number, pin number, mother’s maiden name, date of birth, and expiration date.” Lindsay paused. “Maybe, Mother, you didn’t pay your bill.”

  “Don’t call your mother a deadbeat.”

  “Well, are you in trouble with the IRS?”

  “Lindsay, please. You know me. I pay my taxes ahead of time.”

  “Mother, all you have to do is stiff one credit card by mistake—maybe even their mistake—and the sirens go off to everything you’re attached to. Really, I’ll bet you’ve been naughty somehow, and don’t even know it.”

  That made Nina sigh. She was sitting in her office, alone, her feet literally up on her desk. “Believe me, darling, I have not been naughty lately. That, I know.”

  Lindsay chuckled on the other end of the phone. “Still no boyfriend, huh?”

  “Boyfriend? Not even any doddering, old-man friend.”

  “Sorry, Mom. But don’t despair. It’s spring, the time for l’amour…even for men.”

  “Oh, thanks. You’re no help whatsoever.”

  “Really, Mother, it’s the global village now, which means that there are no secrets and everybody is a gossip. Trust me; it’s all some computer thing.”

  Nina Winston said yeah, probably, thanks, and good-bye, Lindsay. But, she kept thinking, the trouble with each and every younger generation nowadays is that all the members thereof tended to explain everything on account of computers and other mystical wonders of technology. But it stayed with Nina that maybe, just maybe, somebody—some actual human being—really was after her.

  Oh well.

  She swung her feet from off her desk and tried again to apply herself to the task at hand, which was the folder that lay where her feet had momentarily rested. It was even more difficult for Dr. Winston to concentrate because her next patient bored her so. Well, he bored her as a patient. As company, he was quite diverting—Mr. Floyd R. Buckingham. Call me Bucky. Everyone does.

  Bucky. What a perfectly awful thing to be called by everyone. By anyone. Worse, every time that Nina had met with him—three fifty-minute hours’ worth—she had learned nothing about him. As absolutely professional as Nina had tried to be, using every standard procedure, her sessions with Bucky were more cocktail conversation than psychiatric probing.

  But, forcing herself once more, Nina opened Buckingham’s file and reread it:

  Buckingham, Floyd Robert

  age: 44

  resides: Darien, Connecticut

  education: graduate, University of Virginia

  married: 16 years to Phyllis

  Nina paused. Again. Every time she read the file, she came to Bucky’s wife’s name and thought: Phyllis. I don’t know anyone named Phyllis anymore. Well, there was a particular reason this would occur to her. Nina was not Dr. Winston’s real name. That was Thelma. She must be, Nina always thought, the last of the Thelmas. Besides, even when Thelmas ruled
the Earth, little Thelma Winston hated her name. She took the name Nina for herself, just like that, one summer’s afternoon after she saw Nina Foch playing second lead in a movie.

  Now, the Phyllis diversion past, she returned to the Buckingham file:

  children: Timothy, 13; Sarah, 10

  occupation: publisher, Snow Ski Vacations and Summer Sailing magazines

  referral: “Somebody gave me your name a few months ago, but I forgot who.”

  Comments:

  First Session—April 23rd

  “Mr. Buckingham speaks vaguely of doubts and fears, of midlife crisis, and other blurry concerns, which he does not articulate clearly. He is expansive—garrulous, really—in talking all around himself, but is unable (or unwilling) to explain quite what it is that he thinks is bothering him. Perhaps he needs time to get comfortable with me.

  “Curiously, apropos of nothing, he did ask me once if I ‘did’ hypnosis. He was pleased to hear me respond in the affirmative, but displeased when I told him that I’d learned hypnotism from a dentist—rather than from some Svengali. I explained, then, how hypnotism was more about dealing with pain than power, which irritated him some. But, soon enough, B recovered his suburban savoir faire and was again more engaging than forthcoming. Drat.”

  Second Session—April 30th

  “Ditto 4/23. Why did I get the feeling midway through our hour that B was doing a better job analyzing me? He certainly felt more trusting of me when I informed him that I, too, had been in counseling once. Men all like that physician-heal-thyself angle. (Of course, I didn’t tell B that my counseling adventure turned my life upside down and destroyed his marriage, but where does it say that I must declare caveat emptor?) Anyway, what is B’s worry? Yes, yes, I know that the male of the species always takes longer to reveal himself, but with B, something secret really does appear to be lurking there. Whatever, we’ll not meet again for two weeks because he has some America’s Cup boondoggle in San Diego, and is taking the wife along. B likes San Diego a great deal. Let me tell you about La Jolla, Nina! He did open up on that important subject.”