Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

Sybil found herself laughing, as if rough fingers were tickling her. She thought of how it might have been... had she had a father, and a mother: her own family, as she’d been meant to have.

Mr. Starr was squatting now on the grass close by and peering up at Sybil with an expression of extreme concentration. The charcoal stick in his fingers moved rapidly. “The ability to laugh,” he said, “is the ability to live — the two are synonymous. You’re too young to understand that right now, but one day you will.” Sybil shrugged, wiping her eyes. Mr. Starr was talking grandly. “The world is fallen and profane — the opposite of ‘sacred,’ you know, is

‘profane.’ It requires ceaseless vigilance — ceaseless redemption. The artist is one who redeems by restoring the world’s innocence, where he can. The artist gives, but does not take away, nor even supplant.”

Sybil said, skeptically, “But you want to make money with your drawings, don’t you?”

Mr. Starr seemed genuinely shocked. “Oh, my, no. Adamantly, no.”

Sybil persisted, “Well, most people would. I mean, most people need to. If they have any talent” — she was speaking with surprising bluntness, an almost childlike audacity — “they need to sell it, somehow.”

As if he’d been caught out in a crime, Mr. Starr began to stammer apologetically, “It’s true, Blake, I... I am not like most people, I suppose. I’ve inherited some money — not a fortune, but enough to live on comfortably for the rest of my life. I’ve been traveling abroad,” he said, vaguely, “—and, in my absence, interest accumulated.”

Sybil asked doubtfully, “You don’t have any regular profession?”

Mr. Starr laughed, startled. Up close, his teeth were chunky and irregular, slightly stained, like aged ivory piano keys. “But, dear child,” he said, “this is my profession — ‘redeeming the world’!”

And he fell to sketching Sybil with renewed enthusiasm.

Minutes passed. Long minutes. Sybil felt a mild ache between her shoulder blades. A mild uneasiness in her chest. Mr. Starr is mad. Is Mr. Starr ‘mad’?

Behind her, on the path, people were passing by, there were joggers, bicyclists — Mr. Starr, lost in a trance of concentration, paid them not the slightest heed. Sybil wondered if anyone knew her, and was taking note of this peculiar event. Or was she, herself, making too much of it? She decided she would tell her Aunt Lora about Mr. Starr that evening, tell Aunt Lora frankly how much he was paying her. She both respected and feared her aunt’s judgment: in Sybil’s imagination, in that unexamined sphere of being we call the imagination, Lora Dell Blake had acquired the authority of both Sybil’s deceased parents.

Yes, she would tell Aunt Lora.

After only an hour and forty minutes, when Sybil appeared to be growing restless and sighed several times, unconsciously, Mr. Starr suddenly declared the session over. He had, he said, three promising sketches, and he didn’t want to exhaust her, or himself. She was coming back tomorrow—?

“I don’t know,” Sybil said. “Maybe.”

Sybil protested, though not very adamantly, when Mr. Starr paid her the full amount, for three hours’ modeling. He paid her in cash, out of his wallet — an expensive kidskin wallet brimming with bills. Sybil thanked him, deeply embarrassed, and eager to escape. Oh, there was

something shameful about the transaction!

Up close, she was able — almost — to see Mr. Starr’s eyes through the dark-tinted lenses of his glasses. Some delicacy of tact made her glance away quickly but she had an impression of kindness — gentleness.

Sybil took the money, and put it in her pocket, and turned, to hurry away. With no mind for who might hear him, Mr. Starr called after her, “You see, Blake? — Starr is true to his word. Always!”

4. Is the Omission of Truth a Lie, or Only an Omission?

“Well! — tell me how things went with you today, Sybil!” Lora Dell Blake said, with such an air of bemused exasperation, Sybil understood that, as so often, Aunt Lora had something to say that really couldn’t wait — her work at the Glencoe Medical Center provided her with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of comical and outrageous anecdotes. So, deferring to Aunt Lora, as they prepared supper together as usual, and sat down to eat it, Sybil was content to listen, and to laugh.

For it was funny, if outrageous too — the latest episode in the ongoing folly at the Medical Center.