Portraits of His Children Read online

  Portraits of His Children

  by George R.R. Martin

  ElectricStory.com, Inc.®

  Portraits of His Children

  by George R. R. Martin

  Richard Cantling didn't regret the sacrifices he had made for his work, but he had expected his daughter to forgive and forget. When the painting arrives, it seems a gesture of reconciliation—until he's brought face to face with another of his offspring, one he never planned to meet... Winner of 1986 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

  PORTRAITS OF HIS CHILDREN

  Copyright © 1985 by George R. R. Martin. All rights reserved.

  Original Publication: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1985

  Ebook edition of “Portraits of His Children” copyright © 2005 by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-59729-071-5

  Kindle ISBN: 978-1-59729-044-9

  ElectricStory.com and the ES design are registered trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  This novella is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.

  Cover art by and copyright © 2005 Cory and Catska Ench.

  Original Ebook conversion by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

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  Portraits of His Children

  By George R. R. Martin

  Richard Cantling found the package leaning up against his front door, one evening in late October when he was setting out for his walk. It annoyed him. He had told his postman repeatedly to ring the bell when delivering anything too big to fit through the mail slot, yet the man persisted in abandoning the packages on the porch, where any passerby could simply walk off with them. Although, to be fair, Cantling’s house was rather isolated, sitting on the river bluffs at the end of a cul de sac, and the trees effectively screened it off from the street. Still, there was always the possibility of damage from rain or wind or snow.

  Cantling’s displeasure lasted only an instant. Wrapped in heavy brown paper and carefully sealed with tape, the package had a shape that told all. Obviously a painting. And the hand that block-printed his address in heavy green marker was unmistakably Michelle’s. Another self-portrait then. She must be feeling repentant.

  He was more surprised than he cared to admit, even to himself. He had always been a stubborn man. He could hold grudges for years, even decades, and he had the greatest difficulty admitting any wrong. And Michelle, being his only child, seemed to take after him in all of that. He hadn’t expected this kind of gesture from her. It was . . . well, sweet.

  He set aside his walking stick to lug the package inside, where he could unwrap it out of the damp and the blustery October wind. It was about three feet tall, and unexpectedly heavy. He carried it awkwardly, shutting the door with his foot and struggling down the long foyer toward his den. The brown drapes were tightly closed; the room was dark, and heavy with the smell of dust. Cantling had to set down the package to fumble for the light.

  He hadn’t used his den much since that night, two months ago, when Michelle had gone storming out. Her self-portrait was still sitting up above the wide slate mantle. Below, the fireplace badly wanted cleaning, and on the built-in bookshelves his novels, all bound in handsome dark leather, stood dusty and disarrayed. Cantling looked at the old painting and felt a brief wash of anger return to him, followed by depression. It had been such a nasty thing for her to do. The portrait had been quite good, really. Much more to his taste than the tortured abstractions that Michelle liked to paint for her own pleasure, or the trite paperback covers she did to make her living. She had done it when she was twenty, as a birthday gift for him. He’d always been fond of it. It captured her as no photograph had ever done, not just the lines of her face, the angular cheekbones and blue eyes and tangled ash-blond hair, but the personality inside. She looked so young and fresh and confident, and her smile reminded him so much of Helen, and the way she had smiled on their wedding day. He’d told Michelle more than once how much he’d like that smile.

  And so, of course, it had been the smile that she’d started on. She used an antique dagger from his collection, chopped out the mouth with four jagged slashes. She’d gouged out the wide blue eyes next, as if intent on blinding the portrait, and when he came bursting in after her, she’d been slicing the canvas into ribbons with long angry crooked cuts. Cantling couldn’t forget that moment. So ugly. And to do something like that to her own work, he couldn’t imagine it. He had tried to picture himself mutilating one of his books, tried to comprehend what might drive one to such an act, and he had failed utterly. It was unthinkable, beyond even imagination.

  The mutilated portrait still hung in its place. He’d been too stubborn to take it down, and yet he could not bear to look at it. So he had taken to avoiding his den. It wasn’t hard. The old house was a huge, rambling place, with more rooms than he could possibly need or want, living alone as he did. It had been built a century ago, when Perrot had been a thriving river town, and they said that a succession of steamer captains had lived there. Certainly the steamboat gothic architecture and all the gingerbread called up visions of the glory days of the river, and he had a fine view of the Mississippi from the third-story windows and the widow’s walk. After the incident, Cantling had moved his desk and his typewriter to one of the unused bedrooms and settled in there, determined to let the den remain as Michelle had left it until she came back with an apology.

  He had not expected that apology quite so soon, however, nor in quite this form. A tearful phone call, yes—but not another portrait. Still, this was nicer somehow, more personal. And it was a gesture, the first step toward a reconciliation. Richard Cantling knew too well that he was incapable of taking that step himself, no matter how lonely he might become. He had left all his New York friends behind when he moved out to this Iowa river town, and had formed no local friendships to replace them. That was nothing new. He had never been an outgoing sort. He had a certain shyness that kept him apart, even from those few friends he did make. Even from his family, really. Helen had often accused him of caring more for his characters than for real people, an accusation that Michelle had picked up on by the time she was in her teens. Helen was gone too. They’d divorced ten years ago, and she’d been dead for five. Michelle, infuriating as she could be, was really all he had left. He had missed her, missed even the arguments.

  He thought about Michelle as he tore open the plain brown paper. He would call her, of course. He would call her and tell her how good the new portrait was, how much he liked it. He would tell her that he’d missed her, invite her to come out for Thanksgiving. Yes, that would be the way to handle it. No mention of their argument, he didn’t want to start it all up again, and neither he nor Michelle was the kind to back down gracefully. A family trait, that stubborn willful pride, as ingrained as the high cheekbones and squarish jaw. The Cantling heritage.

  It was an antique frame, he saw. Wooden, elaborately carved, very heavy, just the
sort of thing he liked. It would mesh with his Victorian decor much better than the thin brass frame on the old portrait. Cantling pulled the wrapping paper away, to see what his daughter had done. She was nearly thirty now—or was she past thirty already? He never could keep track of her age, or even her birthdays. Anyway, she was a much better painter than she’d been at twenty. The new portrait ought to be striking. He ripped away the last of the wrappings and turned it around.

  His first reaction was that it was a fine, fine piece of work, maybe the best thing that Michelle Cantling had ever done.

  Then, belatedly, the admiration washed away, and was replaced by anger. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Michelle. Which meant it wasn’t a replacement for the portrait she had so willfully vandalized. It was . . . something else.

  Someone else.

  It was a face he had never before laid eyes on. But it was a face he recognized as readily as if he had looked on it a thousand times. Oh yes.

  The man in the portrait was young. Twenty, maybe even younger, though his curly brown hair was already well-streaked with gray. It was unruly hair, disarrayed as if the man had just come from sleep, falling forward into his eyes. Those eyes were a bright green, lazy eyes somehow, shining with some secret amusement. He had high Cantling cheekbones, but the jawline was all wrong for a relative. Beneath a wide, flat nose, he wore a sardonic smile; his whole posture was somehow insolent. The portrait showed him dressed in faded dungarees and a raveled WMCA Good Guy sweatshirt, with a half-eaten raw onion in one hand. The background was a brick wall covered with graffiti.

  Cantling created him.

  Edward Donohue. Dunnahoo, that’s what they’d called him, his friends and peers. The other characters in Richard Cantling’s first novel, Hangin’ Out. Dunnahoo had been the protagonist. A wise guy, a smart mouth, too damn bright for his own good. Looking down at the portrait, Cantling felt as if he’d known him for half his life. As indeed he had, in a way. Known him and, yes, cherished him, in the peculiar way a writer can cherish one of his characters.

  Michelle had captured him true. Cantling stared at the painting and it all came back to him, all the events he had bled over so long ago, all the people he had fashioned and described with such loving care. He remembered Jocko, and the Squid, and Nancy, and Ricci’s Pizzeria where so much of the book’s action had taken place (he could see it vividly in his mind’s eye), and the business with Arthur and the motorcycle, and the climactic pizza fight. And Dunnahoo. Dunnahoo especially. Smarting off, fooling around, hanging out, coming of age. “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” he said. A dozen times or so. It was the book’s closing line.

  For a moment, Richard Cantling felt a vast, strange affection well up inside him, as if he had just been reunited with an old, lost friend.

  And then, almost as an afterthought, he remembered all the ugly words that he and Michelle had flung at each other that night, and suddenly it made sense. Cantling’s face went hard. “Bitch,” he said aloud. He turned away in fury, helpless without a target for his anger. “Bitch,” he said again, as he slammed the door of the den behind him.

  * * *

  “Bitch,” he had called her.

  She turned around with the knife in her hand. Her eyes were raw and red from crying. She had the smile in her hand. She balled it up and threw it at him. “Here, you bastard, you like the damned smile so much, here it is.”

  It bounced off his cheek. His face was reddening. “You’re just like your mother,” he said. “She was always breaking things too.”

  “You gave her good reason, didn’t you?”

  Cantling ignored that. “What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell do you think you’re going to accomplish with this stupid melodramatic gesture? That’s all it is, you know. Bad melodrama. Who the hell do you think you are, some character in a Tennessee Williams play? Come off it, Michelle. If I wrote a scene like this in one of my books, they’d laugh at me.

  “This isn’t one of your goddamned books!” she screamed. “This is real life. My life. I’m a real person, you son of a bitch, not a character in some damned book.” She whirled, raised the knife, slashed and slashed again.

  Cantling folded his arms against his chest as he stood watching. “I hope you’re enjoying this pointless exercise.”

  “I’m enjoying the hell out of it,” Michelle yelled back.

  “Good. I’d hate to think it was for nothing. This is all very revealing, you know. That’s your own face you’re working on. I didn’t think you had that much self-hate in you.”

  “If I do, we know who put it there, don’t we?” She was finished. She turned back to him, and threw down the knife. She had begun to cry again, and her breath was coming hard. “I’m leaving. Bastard. I hope you’re ever so fucking happy here, really I do.”

  “I haven’t done anything to deserve this,” Cantling said awkwardly. It was not much of an apology, not much of a bridge back to understanding, but it was the best he could do. Apologies had never come easily to Richard Cantling.

  “You deserve a thousand times worse,” Michelle had screamed back at him. She was such a pretty girl, and she looked so ugly. All that nonsense about anger making people beautiful was a dreadful clichÉ, and wrong as well; Cantling was glad he’d never used it. “You’re supposed to be my father,” Michelle said. “You’re supposed to love me. You’re supposed to be my father, and you raped me, you bastard.”

  * * *

  Cantling was a light sleeper. He woke in the middle of the night, and sat up in bed shivering, with the feeling that something was wrong.

  The bedroom seemed dark and quiet. What was it? A noise? He was very sensitive to noise. Cantling slid out from under the covers and donned his slippers. The fire he’d enjoyed before retiring for the night had burned down to embers, and the room was chilly. He felt for his tartan robe, hanging from the foot of the big antique four-poster, slipped into it, cinched the belt, and moved quietly to the bedroom door. The door creaked a little at times, so he opened it very slowly, very cautiously. He listened.

  Someone was downstairs. He could hear them moving around.

  Fear coiled in the pit of his stomach. He had no gun up here, nothing like that. He didn’t believe in that. Besides, he was supposed to be safe. This wasn’t New York. He was supposed to be safe here in quaint old Perrot, Iowa. And now he had a prowler in his house, something he had never faced in all of his years in Manhattan. What the hell was he supposed to do?

  The police, he thought. He’d lock the door and call the police. He moved back to the bedside, and reached for the phone.

  It rang.

  Richard Cantling stared at the telephone. He had two lines; a business number hooked up to his recording machine, and an unlisted personal number that he gave only to very close friends. Both lights were lit. It was his private number ringing. He hesitated, then scooped up the receiver. “Hello.”

  “The man himself,” the voice said. “Don’t get weird on me, Dad. You were going to call the cops, right? Stupid. It’s only me. Come down and talk.”

  Cantling’s throat felt raw and constricted. He had never heard that voice before, but he knew it, he knew it. “Who is this?” he demanded.

  “Silly question,” the caller replied. “You know who it is.”

  He did. But he said, “Who?”

  “Not who. Dunnahoo.” Cantling had written that line.

  “You’re not real.”

  “There were a couple of reviewers who said that too. I seem to remember how it pissed you off, back then.”

  “You’re not real,” Cantling insisted.

  “I’m cut to the goddamned quick,” Dunnahoo said. “If I’m not real, it’s your fault. So quit getting on my case about it, OK? Just get your ass in gear and hustle it downstairs so we can hang out together.” He hung up.

  The lights went out on the telephone. Richard Cantling sat down on the edge of his bed, stunned. What was he supposed to make of this? A dream? It was no dream. What coul
d he do?

  He went downstairs.

  Dunnahoo had built a fire in the living room fireplace, and was settled into Cantling’s big leather recliner, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from a bottle. He smiled lazily when Cantling appeared under the entry arch. “The man,” he said. “Well, don’t you look half-dead. Want a beer?”

  “Who the hell are you?” Cantling demanded.

  “Hey, we been round that block already. Don’t bore me. Grab a beer and park your ass by the fire.”

  “An actor,” Cantling said. “You’re some kind of goddamned actor. Michelle put you up to this, right?”

  Dunnahoo grinned. “An actor? Well, that’s fuckin’ unlikely, ain’t it? Tell me, would you stick something that weird in one of your novels? No way, joke. You’d never do it yourself and if somebody else did it, in one of them workshops or a book you were reviewing, you’d rip his fuckin’ liver out.”

  Richard Cantling moved slowly into the room, staring at the young man sprawled in his recliner. It was no actor. It was Dunnahoo, the kid from his book, the face from the portrait. Cantling settled into a high, overstuffed armchair, still staring. “This makes no sense,” he said. “This is like something out of Dickens.”

  Dunnahoo laughed. “This ain’t no fucking Christmas Carol, old man, and I sure ain’t no ghost of Christmas past.”

  Cantling frowned; whoever he was, that line was out of character. “That’s wrong,” he snapped. “Dunnahoo didn’t read Dickens. Batman and Robin, yes, but not Dickens.”

  “I saw the movie, Dad,” Dunnahoo said. He raised the beer bottle to his lips and had a swallow.

  “Why do you keep calling me Dad?” Cantling said. “That’s wrong too. Anachronistic. Dunnahoo was a street kid, not a beatnik.”