Free House of Secrets - v4 by Richard Hawke

sixth birthday, Robbie Smallwood had amply accustomed himself to the winged creatures, having by then already visited New York City’s veritable warehouse of angels — the Metropolitan Museum of Art — many dozens of times with his mother. For nearly a year leading up to that birthday, Robbie and his mother had engaged in a weekly ritual of visiting the museum every Wednesday afternoon. Tartly done up and with a smart little hat on her head, Vivien Smallwood would usher her son and his sketchbook to the museum’s grand second-floor galleries and their scores of paintings that were crammed full with pink, dwarfish angels. Robbie was completely enthralled with the creatures. Their opaque, disconnected expressions. Their puckered limbs and pink-blushed skin. They hovered about on the canvases like little plump bumblebees.
    Robbie’s “special place” was the lacquered bench directly in front of Lorenzo Lotto’s
Venus and Cupid
. Vivien Smallwood would park her son on the bench, give him a lingering kiss on the cheek, then disappear, flashing a smile at the ash-haired security guard who patrolled the galleries as she hurried off to the exit.
    The painting was a complete wonder to the boy.
Venus and Cupid
. Each time he saw it, he was confounded anew. The angel in the painting was
peeing
on that naked lady. Actually peeing. A filament of liquid, clear as could be, arched from the cherub’s pudgy little penis on its way to the lady’s stomach. The lady herself — Venus — was also pink and quite fleshy, and thoroughly unashamed. More than that, she looked amused, reclining on the ground atop a gray blanket, one hand lightly brushing a swelling breast while this little winged urchin
urinated
on her belly! Robbie was enthralled by the look of coquettish mirth on the woman’s face. Could she actually be enjoying this? Was she encouraging the imp to debase her in this way? Over the hour and a half of his mother’s absence, Robbie sat on the wooden bench, scratching away feverishly in his sketchbook. Over the woman’s head dangled a conch shell. Its pink, shellacked lip curved back in a fashion that Robbie instinctively found disturbing. Even more than the rest of the inscrutable painting, it was the spiral shell that burned itself onto Robbie’s inner eye. His sketchbook was choked with his artless attempts to reproduce the incongruous mollusk. Each failed attempt — and there were hundreds of them — bore the concluding strokes of the boy’s final frustration, the mean, jagged scratchings-over of his fat black pencil.
    His mother’s return was always punctual. Hearing the
click, click, click
of her heels on the parquet floor as she approached, Robbie would close his messy sketchbook and slide off the bench, bracing himself for the oversize hug.
    “My angel!”
    The security guard tended to regard Vivien Smallwood coolly as the two hurried from the gallery, though Robbie’s mother never seemed to notice. Robbie noticed. He could read the man’s expression. The guard was not impressed with his mother. Robbie could see that the old black man thought there was something distasteful about her.
    And always the routine.
    “I hope he was an angel.”
    “Oh yes ma’am, he was. I’m expecting those wings of his to start pop-pin’ out any old day now.”
    She couldn’t see it. The man was mocking her.
    Robbie Smallwood had prayed like the devil for those wings to make their appearance. Straining as hard as he could, he used to imagine that he could actually feel them trying to break through the skin just below his shoulders. It was several weeks before his sixth birthday when his father caught him one morning standing stark naked on a chair in front of the bathroom mirror, twisting his body to get a better look at the reflection of his back. His father’s abrupt entrance into the room took the boy by surprise, and he let out a cry as he half-leaped, half-fell from the stool. His father beat him. To Robbie’s horror,