She wasn’t afraid of the painting, at least not in the visceral heart-pounding way in which she feared the lurking darkness in her closet at night or the alien scuttle of centipedes. Rather, the discord between the painted hands and the rest of the figure haunted her, an unphysical conjunction that she felt rather than understood. Fear would have driven her away; she was not a brave girl. Instead, the unpleasant power the painting had over Helen drew her to it repeatedly. To her family, this was a relief, as they would not have understood her fear. Infatuation they could expect; the painting was the lens through which the family saw their history, the assembly of wood, paint, canvas, and varnish as much a family member as the person it depicted. It would have been unusual for a child not to become obsessed with it, however briefly. Yet it seemed odd to them how quietly she watched it, less absorbed than wary in her study.

The painting was an odd choice for a family’s founding document: a half-length portrait from the early nineteenth century of a young woman in a dress the color of bruised peaches, sitting in front of a minimally rendered arch festooned with navy drapery. Through the arch, a close observer could discern tiny boats huddling beneath a pile of geologically suspect mountains. Dark grey buildings tumbled down the slopes to merge with the pale water. The ornate walnut frame had darkened considerably over the years, but the painting itself retained much of its original color; a slight muting of the whites and pinks was especially noticeable at close range. The young woman’s coal black eyes, slightly too large for the wedge-shaped face, seemed to float over flushed cheeks and delicate nose like they had been cut from some other work and laid down onto an earlier face. The small, closed mouth appeared almost an afterthought. Minimal brushstrokes suggested brown hair gathered tightly at her nape, leaving the details to the viewer, who presumably knew what attractive hair looked like and would mentally furnish the remainder. The body was likewise representational: sloping undersized shoulders, an impossibly tiny torso, mismatched arms, no jewelry, or any indications that the peach dress was meant to be a real item of clothing. The hands, though, were rendered with incredible anatomical detail. The left hand rested in the young woman’s lap, while her right was raised in the act of gesturing inscrutably towards the viewer. The blank eyes made Helen uncomfortable; the hands gave her nightmares. She could handle the eerie too-black eyes among the rest of the distorted figure; it was too strange to be human. But the hands were normal enough to stand out and, combined with the diminutive flattened body and dead eyes, bespoke something monstrous.

“’The Belle of New Rochelle,’ she was called,” Helen’s grandmother said. “The prettiest girl the town had ever seen. You’ll be that pretty one day, too, dear.” Helen hoped not. The person in the painting was only pretty from the corner of one’s eye. Looking directly at her, all the incongruities became apparent. Individual features were pleasing enough, but not glamorous. No prince would sweep her away to his castle to live happily ever after. She looked a bit like her Aunt Jackie if one squinted, which Helen would often do, trying to puzzle the painting out. When caught doing this, Helen’s sister would roll her eyes at such little kid behavior, while her mother would narrow hers suspiciously and remind Helen not to get too close. At least her mother didn’t scold her about squinting at the painting like she did when Helen watched TV. Close study of the painting was acceptable- preparation for fulfilling her mother’s hopes that Helen’s beauty would someday rival the Belle’s (she had a name, but to Helen, she was always “The Belle”). Helen didn’t think she could look like the woman in the painting; her shoulders weren’t that narrow and, though still a child, her torso was already bigger. Her hands were plumper and wider than those of the Belle and her eyes were a shocking blue. She was always told she took after her father’s side of the family rather than the Belle’s, at least by non-relatives.

Her mother was “quite the knock-out, back in the day,” according to a common self-appraisal. “Not quite as pretty as the Belle, but…” Helen’s mother would look to her husband at this point for confirmation and he would nod dutifully. Yet she didn’t look like the woman in the painting either. Perhaps, Helen thought, it was something that afflicted one during puberty. Eagerly she scrutinized her older sister. Would she too develop steeply sloping shoulders? Would her head and hands grow much bigger than her body for a few years, before it caught up and she looked like a normal person again? But when her sister leaped from gangly pre-teen to stocky college shot-putter, Helen neglected to notice.

“It’s an Orlando Hand Bears,” her parents would boast, inviting guests to marvel at it. Guests who even the eight-year-old Helen could see shared her confusion at the phrase. She could reasonably chart her childhood based on which outlandish interpretation of that phrase she was using at the time: the painting’s value lay in its coming from a land of tiny bears, animals no bigger than one’s hand, like teacup poodles; it was painted by someone named Orlando who had bears for hands; it was made by a type of very dexterous bear native to Florida that could paint, like Koko the gorilla. When her sister told her, somewhat incredulously, that it was nothing more than the painter’s name she was mortified and secretly disappointed. The painter was moderately famous but didn’t sign the front of his work, so their parents had to name him themselves for the benefit of guests. Helen was offended. For years she had been playing painter all wrong. Tracy, the girl next door, had been thrilled that she could have a monopoly on the role of elegant lady sitting for a portrait. Helen was much more interested in donning a pair of mittens with cat and dog heads (eyes, noses, and floppy ears done in felt) and pensively, ruminatively dabbing watercolors onto an easel while Tracy preened. She avoided Tracey for weeks after learning the truth. This crumpling of the fantastical aspects surrounding the painting also coincided with the onset of the dreams.

In Helen’s nightmares, the hands would be the only illuminated part of the Belle. Her left hand stayed in her lap, while the right hand made a series of elaborate gestures meant to entice Helen to approach within grabbing range. She didn’t want to. She willed herself not to move a muscle, but still, she approached, beckoned closer and closer to the Belle’s left hand, which grew with a quiet menace in her lap, preparing, Helen knew with the certainty of dreams, to envelop her.

The story of the family and the painting began with its subject as if its creation was responsible for the family’s as well. The Belle was painted at seventeen, “just before she came out.” (“No wonder she’s so pale,” Helen thought. “I’d be that pale if I didn’t leave the house for seventeen years.”) From among a score of marriage proposals, she accepted that pressed on her by John Wesley, who “made his fortune in the California Gold Rush.” That was what Helen knew from the story her parents would tell visitors in a cadence resembling the prayer responses at church or a sedate TV commercial. However, the painting did not leave the main hall of her house to accompany the Belle and her new husband on their trip to New Orleans shortly after her eighteenth birthday. It was thus able to greet the Belle’s infant son who was shipped home with a wet nurse after the Belle died in childbirth somewhere in Tennessee. Her husband did indeed make his fortune in the Gold Rush, but not for a few decades, and he left it not to the Belle’s son, but to the children given to him by his new Californian wife. These details, of course, Helen didn’t learn until much later.

The Belle’s son did not appear in the tale. It skipped straight from the Belle’s marriage to the rescue of the painting as the house in New Rochelle burned to the ground. According to the tale, the fire was started by a spurned suitor of the Belle’s niece. The successful suitor managed to spirit both painting and niece out in one death-defying trip. Many years later, Helen received a copy of an 1859 story in the New Rochelle Pioneer from a distant cousin who had taken up genealogy. The story described the cause of the conflagration not as revenge for love denied, but as attempted insurance fraud.

By the 1870s, the family had moved to Amherst, and the painting hung over the mantel in the parlor where the family entertained the celebrities of the day. Winslow Homer would compare–favorably, of course–the young wife of the Belle’s grandson to her picture. Governor Washburn would prophesy great things for the family’s fledgling steel works. Mark Twain would take brandy with the Belle’s grandson and his brother-in-law, and later the three would stagger down to hide in the bushes under Emily Dickinson’s window and make eerie noises.

The brother-in-law would sometimes make a return appearance in the tale, but only after Helen’s father was well into a long night of entertaining. Childless and a widower, the brother-in-law ended his life with his sister and her family. In his infirmity, he became convinced that the Belle would speak to him on those nights when he was insomniac with gout. Such delusions would normally be considered unduly depressing for the topic of a tipsy anecdote and were the story to end there, Helen’s father would not have brought it up. However, her father would continue, according to the brother-in-law, the Belle confided that she didn’t die en route to New Orleans. She lived for another twenty years, and her late-night conversation consisted of salacious tales of her exploits in the brothels of the West. The brother-in-law’s residence ended after a memorable lunch with the minister when in response to a request to pass the salt, he accused his sister of “marrying into the family of a profligate hussy.” No one else seemed to appreciate the humor, but Helen’s father found it uproariously funny to have likewise married into the line of a “profligate hussy.”

At some later point (Helen couldn’t remember which ancestor nor where they fit in the line), the painting was taken off the wall and stashed in the barn on a dare. When it was found a day later, the frame had nine chips along the top. The ancestor, eight at the time, received nine lashes with a birch switch across the legs or bottom. The location of the punishment varied, but the number was consistent from telling to telling: nine lashes for nine chips. Helen found it odd to hear stories about this person who was condemned to be a smarting eight-year-old in perpetuity, despite having lived to old age and sired several generations. It felt undignified. She worried greatly about how she would appear in the painting’s story. A weekend in fourth grade was devoted to filling a notebook with ideas for how to profitably enter the family history of the painting. Setting a fire and then rescuing the painting would be suspicious, it having happened once already. She could become a painter herself, inspired by the Belle. Perhaps she could bring someone famous home, or better, she would become famous for something, dancing perhaps, or being an astronaut. After that, the notebook trailed off into fantasies of being the world’s first zero-g ballet dancer.

Helen’s grandmother appeared in the tale only as a caretaker of the painting, having shepherded it through four moves, war-widowhood, a second husband, and at age 48, a divorce, all while raising three girls. She had clearly been too busy to do anything notable. Helen’s mother, the eldest child, received the painting when her first daughter, the oldest grandchild, was born, although it was often said that Helen’s mother had been coveting the painting since she herself was a child.

“We wouldn’t dream of selling it,” her parents would object during the exposition given to visitors as if they were offended that the visitors would dare even to suggest it, even though no one ever did. “She’s family. You don’t sell family.”

“You know Mom and Dad check the price every few months,” her sister would respond while the girls lurked in their bedroom two doors down, safely out of earshot, but close enough to mouth the description along with their parents. The painting hung at the end of the carpeted upstairs hallway, illuminated by a soft lamp hung above it that was turned on only when company came. It was flanked by her parents’ bedroom and the door to the attic. They would bring people upstairs solely to see it. When Helen had her own children, she realized this was partly to avoid the damage to the painting that would invariably occur if it were hung in a room where children played and partly to lend the viewing a greater sense of ceremony.

There were photographs of some of the more recent characters in the painting’s story. These were kept by Helen’s grandmother in several large, heavy black-bound books and brought out at reunions and holidays. The Belle’s son was here, heavily mustached and solemn some years before he was killed at Kennesaw Mountain fighting for the wrong side. There was the Belle’s great-granddaughter, posing with her new husband in front of the painting, she looking ecstatic, he looking sheepish. Later in the book was Helen’s great-grandfather, standing in uniform in front of another painting of a young woman, this one much less refined and stenciled on the nose of a large plane. Here was a photograph of a girl of four or so, looking unhappy and standing on the porch in front of a clapboard house. A small dog blurred itself into a puddle at her feet. This, apparently, was Helen’s grandmother. None of the people in the photographs resembled the painting.

After Helen left home, the painting had faded in her mind until it was only a familiar exemplar of early-American portraiture, full of dull-looking people with odd features in front of vague backgrounds. The hands remained vivid but unconnected to the painting itself, and only in her dreams, which occasionally tipped over into nightmares that left her feeling oddly nostalgic. As she visited museums over the next decades, elements of portraits would spark blurry memories. Yet in finding it still in its place of pride in her deceased parents’ derelict house, all of the details were as fresh in her mind as if she had been living with it for the past three decades: the angle the depthless eyes made with the tip of the button nose, the way the Belle’s mouth turned down slightly at the right side, the tall ship that Helen was sure was sinking from the way it sat lower than all the others. Everything was startlingly familiar.

Ultimately, she hadn’t had to worry about how her family would weave her into their painting narrative. Her mother had fiercely held on to the painting until her descent into dementia and death in a nursing home. Helen’s father had died suddenly of a stroke eight years earlier, a loss which hit her sister particularly hard, but that Helen and her mother had taken in surprisingly easy stride. By the end, Helen’s mother had forgotten the painting. Helen’s sister had no interest in it and no children to whom she could pass it. Helen herself had two sons, both in their early teens; they would have no use for it for many years, if ever. Her aunts were still alive but failing, and their families had scattered to all parts of the country. The length of time the painting had stayed in the empty home of her parents testified to its lack of importance to remaining family. If she didn’t pass on the stories to her children or cousins, they would disappear. Perhaps that was for the best. She took the painting off the wall and looked at it, scratched and dusty in the light from her parents’ bedroom window. The Belle’s eyes, upon close inspection, were a deep brown, darkened by time to match the color of the pupils. The nose she recognized as her younger son’s. A tiny sliver of gold necklace was visible beneath the craquelure. The right hand gestured up at her in what she realized was a parting benediction.

– Patrick M. Hare