Harmony House, officially launches July 31st. Preorder your copy today! You can also get an invite to the online launch party when you visit Houze.Live and “audition” just as the characters in the book do.
Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.
Previously…
In his office, Harry Hasselblad finally told Marabelle his story: after his wife Gina died, the homeless portraits she'd bought undid him, and he tracked down all fourteen subjects to build a quiet found family, now run by Sadie, the daughter of one of the painted women. Marabelle left humbled and ashamed—still guarding the secret that the artist who "saved" these people was her own mother.
Kelly woke up the morning after Lefty returned home to take care of me, and she felt restored. Lefty infused her with a confidence and sense of purpose that she couldn’t manufacture on her own. He understood her like no one else did. For her, the art was like heroin: too much would kill her, and not enough would make her a twitchy tangle of live wires. Lefty’s primary role in managing her was to calibrate the dosage.
He loved the new series she had begun and they talked excitedly about it for the three days he was with her. The calculus for him was always complicated, muddled by his own ambition. How could he be her partner and protector, keeping her alive and happy, while continuing to lay the next course of stones in the staircase of their ascension to greatness? His success in the art world is nothing short of a miracle given how little he actually understood or knew about art. He is masterful at observing people and adapting to most any situation. The skill works well enough in selling stereos or real estate but art is different. Art must activate something deep inside us and stir us in sometimes uncomfortable ways. These new paintings my mother was doing were not the kind people would want staring back at them in a formal dining room or above the mantel at their Swiss ski chalet, so he was filled with reservations as he boarded the plane. But ultimately, he was an expert in reading his wife, and he knew when she was stepping into her flow that it was best to trust it. There was no other way.
Kelly checked out of the Palace hotel and bought a cot, sleeping bag, microwave, and hot plate for the small studio space which became her home for the next seven months. Every Monday, a new delivery of supplies would come—tubes of oil paint, fresh canvases stretched to the dimensions she requested, and an assortment of frozen dinners along with bags of junk food that was my mother’s fuel during these long campaigns. Lefty paid a woman handsomely to be on call 24/7 to respond to anything Kelly needed. He programmed the woman’s number into the new cell phone he bought Kelly before leaving the city. The condition of this cushy job was that the woman could never go into the studio or ask any questions. Lefty paid a premium for privacy throughout our lives.
In the weeks that followed, Kelly established a routine that would only have made sense to her or someone equally possessed. The routine, regardless of the time of day, was: begin work and work to the point of exhaustion, then binge like a ravenous animal, crash for a few hours, then wake up and take a brisk walk before returning to the studio to start all over again. The most important part of this routine was the walk, because it was during these walks that she encountered the people that would animate her canvases.
At first, she observed them from afar, pushing their overloaded shopping carts through the park or huddled under a filthy blanket as they sat shivering to keep warm over a grated vent in the sidewalk, but eventually she began to engage them. Unlike Lefty, who had a compulsion to talk with any stranger, Kelly had trouble ordering in restaurants, so for her to strike up a conversation with a hulking man who smelled of urine and was muttering and shouting to himself was an extraordinary act. She came to learn the man’s name was Jerome and he had been living on the street for nearly twenty years. The first time she spoke with him, he had been struggling to stand up his shopping cart, which had tipped over and spilled everything he owned in the world across the sidewalk on 8th Street. There were hundreds of aluminum cans, plastic grocery bags ghostly thin and stuffed with wadded-up clothes, and a collection of random totems like a scuffed pink tennis ball, a cracked snow globe, a small fish net for an aquarium, and a stack of McDonald’s french fry boxes, flattened and bound in a rubber band like a deck of cards.
She asked if he needed help three times before he understood she was talking to him. He looked up, angry and frightened, but mostly confused, like a ghost who had suddenly been seen. She helped him stand up the cart and began picking up the cans, tentatively at first, then in armloads. He didn’t say anything in that first encounter, even when she pressed a twenty-dollar bill into his hand. But she would talk with him in the days and weeks that followed, learning about his life in exchange for a cup of coffee, a bagel, or a hamburger. Jerome loved french fries, but only McDonald’s french fries, Kelly would learn. They were more to him than sustenance. They represented comfort and normalcy. He told her that his mother used to take him there as a treat on Sundays before she overdosed. Jerome was just ten years old when he went into the system. Despite his winning smile and uncanny talent for numbers, he was never adopted and only fostered a couple of times. No one was willing to take on a black boy whose mother died a junkie. The system spit him out at eighteen and for a couple of years, it looked as if he might be one of those stories that comfortable white people slurp up in the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. He attended a community college in New Jersey studying mathematics and, because of his size, worked nights as a bouncer at a club in Jersey City.
There was no single immovable force he met that blocked his path to a promising future. It was a thousand small obstacles that stole his momentum, and the dark leviathan of an undiagnosed schizoaffective disorder that surfaced and made even the most pedestrian of situations harrowing and chaotic. The threadbare net of kindness from his small circle of friends, teachers, and co-workers gave way, and he ended up in a state facility for a few months before eventually being placed in a halfway house. He preferred the half that didn’t require him to share a room with a man who chronically masturbated and occasionally screamed out for his mother, so Jerome learned to live on the street.
All this Kelly learned, and all this she captured in his portrait, as she did with the thirteen other subjects she painted during this period. I knew their stories from her journals and I had high hopes when I went to see them at Hasselblad’s penthouse, but as I stood before “Jerome,” I only saw paint on canvas, blended and scraped into the shape of a tormented man. When I studied each of the canvases, I saw my mother’s attention, the many thousands of hours she spent away from me absorbed in these strangers, and it made me angry and sad—feelings for which I immediately felt foolish. What she had given of herself and taken from me, she had applied to these paintings, these paintings that had moved a man to meaningfully change the lives of two generations of people who would have been invisible to him otherwise.
She could have easily given them some of the wealth our family had amassed and made that change herself, but I don’t think she understood the world on those terms. Her choices were always intuitive to her but utterly confounding to me. I will never be the kind of artist she was because I’m too caught up in the expectations of the world and the role I play in it. In the same situation, I would have felt equally heartbroken for these abandoned and forgotten people, but I wouldn’t have engaged with them. Maybe one of them would’ve become a character in a book I was writing, and maybe I would’ve donated to a local soup kitchen, but I wouldn’t have taken them so completely into my heart and stayed up for days trying to pour the essence of them into a canvas.
In one of our conversations near the end of her life, when I was interrogating her, desperate to extract the magic I didn’t really believe in but knew would die with her, I asked about these portraits. I didn’t know then what I do now about Hasselblad and his mission. Here’s what she said.
“Don’t do this, Marabelle. Please, I beg you. I don’t want to be preserved, gilded, or vilified. I’ll tell you anything you want to know but I don’t think you’ll understand because it’s not even something I can understand. When I would take those walks, comfortable in my goose-down coat, warmed by my hot cup of coffee and the fresh pastry in my tummy, I wasn’t really thinking about anything. I had no plan. I was just walking and then I would feel something familiar, this tugging sensation I’ve learned to pay attention to.”
“It was always wildly uncomfortable and if I’m being honest, my acting on these impulses was a compulsion. I didn’t want to do many of the things I did, but I feared what would happen if I didn’t. The time I spent with those people—it’s not anything like you might be imagining. I didn’t have some deep, empathic ability. I was scared to death most of the time. More than once I was shouted at and spit on. I was propositioned more than once and ran away frequently. But when I persisted, or when I returned on another day and I stayed and listened, something would shift. I would see a person not unlike myself. They heard voices, but fuck, I hear voices. It was as if all the other people in our heads, the voices we had to keep secret, had to lock away, could be heard finally, and no one thought we were crazy.”
Though I’d always known my mother wasn’t normal, I’d never thought of her as mentally ill like so many of the people in those portraits. But they were strangers; Kelly was my mother. She painted them so well because she understood their estrangement and recognized the everyday terror of their daily existence.
“They were so isolated, Marabelle. They lived, they survived without really ever being seen by anyone. I got lost in their sorrow and I wasn’t able to break free of it. If your father hadn’t come, hadn’t forced me to stop, I wouldn’t have been able to leave them.”
I remember the day when my mother came home. Lefty had been preparing me for weeks. I had spoken to her on the phone a dozen times during her absence and it was always awkward and one-sided, her trying to fill all the empty space.
“Your mom’s not like a normal person,” Lefty had told me the night before she was to return. We were in the kitchen and he was making dinner. “I know that’s hard to understand and it’s not fair that she can’t just be a normal mom, but it will be easier if you can understand she’s different and it’s got nothing to do with you. The way she is—she can’t help it. She loves you more than anyone, even if it doesn’t seem that way.”
“I know,” I told him.
I think he wanted to have a long conversation about it, to do everything he could to prepare me for us becoming our weird little family unit again, but I wasn’t having it. Of course I knew she wasn’t a normal mom. Nothing would make me stop wanting that, though. I saw how anxious Lefty was and it made me anxious, so I tried to do what he wanted me to do. I made a pathetic welcome home sign on some printer paper with a magic marker and then I went into my room and played Nintendo.
That’s what I was doing when she came home the next day. I heard the car door slam and then the front door open and then her walking across the wooden floors of the front room and then down the hallway to my door. It took a long time for her to open the door, and when she did, I didn’t look up—just kept staring at the small television, nudging Mario along.
“Hi sweetheart,” she said. “Can I play too?”
She picked up the other controller and we played for a couple of hours. She didn’t try to hug me or ask me any questions. We just played. She was actually surprisingly good and seemed genuinely into it, so I forgot I was mad at her for going away.
Later that night we went into town to get dinner, just the two of us. She thought it would be a treat to go to McDonald’s, but I said that was for little kids. I wanted quesadillas from my favorite Mexican restaurant just off the square in town. It wasn’t tourist season so the place was quiet, and we sat at a table by the window. I remember everything about that conversation. I had been rehearsing it for a year.
“Why did you have me?” That’s how I opened things.
She looked like I had struck her but she nodded, put her napkin in her lap, and said, “Because I couldn’t not have you.”
“What do you mean? I know how babies work, Mom. I’m not like Jesus or something. You and Daddy made me. Why did you make me?”
“We don’t always choose things that happen to us, but we do get to choose what to do next—what to do about them. I was too young to really know what I was doing, so even though I didn’t exactly choose to make you, I did choose to keep you. I couldn’t imagine anything else.”
I remember not really understanding this at all, but I did understand that she was being honest with me. “Why is your art more important than me?” I asked, following my script.
She looked away, focusing her attention on the people passing on the sidewalk outside. When she answered, her voice was quavering. “It’s not as simple as that. It’s not right and it’s not fair to you and I could lie to you, but you’re just too smart and too precious to me.”
She could tell this answer wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Her eyes filled with tears and when she looked back at me, I could see how scared she was. She looked like someone held hostage. She looked like I felt when I was trapped in that hotel room. Maybe it was just guilt, but I don’t think so. I think she was afraid of so many things—of losing me, of disappointing Lefty, but mostly of losing herself.
« Previous | Table of Contents | Next »
Did this chapter take you in? Leave a ❤️ below to help fellow travelers find it. Speaking of fellow travelers, a lot of friendships have started in the comments of my serials.
Goodness these last two chapters are powerfully insightful Ben, you have such a discerning understanding of an artists mind, "She could have easily given them some of the wealth our family had amassed and made that change herself, but I don’t think she understood the world on those terms." the tunnel vision, the belief in what they are creating over and above all else, even children. Your story, or Marabelle's, capture that so well.
Beautiful brushstroke: “He looked up, angry and frightened, but mostly confused, like a ghost who had suddenly been seen.” I’m enjoying seeing this through Marabelle’s adult eyes, including her questions and feelings as a child. It’s wrenching and real.