And you said to the back of his head, “I never knew that was how you did it.”
He went on filling in peach on the old house third from the left and at first you thought he hadn’t heard you and so you repeated, shamelessly, “I never knew that was how you did it.”
And without turning, he snarled, “I can’t draw.” He made it sound low, filthy. “I won’t draw. All I care about is the color.”
And he had taught you, without words, that art was the highest calling, worth all sacrifice, yours, as well, and you had believed him. And so, for all these years you have slept under the painting and yet refused to acknowledge it, hanging on to it after his death although collectors still call for it.
Remember, Matilda, how in his last year he came to your annual show in the big city gallery, how you avoided him cringing in a corner; he was crippled by then, wasn’t he, slope-shouldered like an old raven in his wheelchair, and she, the latest nurse or wife, parked him in front of the long wall holding your black-and-white photographs, each one larger than his largest canvas,
… wrinkled heap of Sierras, vast Salt Sea, stone idol face of the Hoover Dam, and he looked briefly then gestured for her, compliant nurse, last wife, to roll him to the next wall. There it was, implacable, black, white, and all grays in between, the cold clear Colorado slamming across the photograph, scouring, tearing, so huge it took the entire wall;
… then another gesture and she rolled him to the third wall where the boulder studies hung, each darker and more menacing than the last.
He sat for twenty minutes before saying to the air or to anyone nearby, “She’ll do. She has talent. And she listens.”
Upstate
A Novella
1
I am standing on Shultz Hill at six o’clock in the morning: Labor Day. To the west, the Hudson River Valley is streaked about equally with industrial smoke and fog. The river itself is hidden by a fold of hills. Beyond it lie the Catskills, those humpbacked purple mountains, which we never climbed in our eight years here. To the east, the Berkshires back up against a cloudbank, reddened by the hidden sun. At my feet, the little hills and valleys of my country are lined with banners and processions of mist. It is an old, failed landscape, the farms gone—my place was one of them—and the fields grown back with sumac, heaven trees, and scrub pine. Even on my hilltop, I can hear the buzz of early-morning traffic to Poughkeepsie.
Eight years ago, I bought the white house, which I can see in the valley: a small frame house, with eight rooms divided four downstairs and four up. It was the cheapest advertised that Sunday in the Farms and Country Homes section of the New York Times. Waiting for the real estate agent to unlock the door, I heard the traffic on the highway beyond the yard and a row of old maples. I was carrying Jeff, and Molly and Keith were picking along behind me. “You do hear the road,” my husband observed.
“That’s just 11H,” the real estate lady said, “an old two-laner they’ll never get around to widening. You can’t actually see it from the house.”
A few hours later, I had decided to buy the house, with money my grandfather had made off railroads in Florida.
“Do you want it?”
“Yes, do you want it?”
“Yes. But you do hear the highway …”
I was a righteous person, nursing my third baby, protecting my two older children from most of the rigors of the world and satisfying my husband to the best of my distracted ability; fortunately, his demands were minimal. I had packed my life so tight there was no room for one alien impression, one mistaken impulse to intrude. So, buying a house on a whim was like buying a mad hat or a chocolate ice cream cone: it just didn’t fit. My husband was too kind to point that out.
The sun moves up out of the cloudbank, blinding me and casting my stork-tall shadow across the grass. A blue jay screams in the woods behind me. The grass as it warms smells sweet. Across the river, the trees shimmer and turn green and the traffic on the highway picks up. It is morning, time to go home.
I turn down the path. The first climb, and the last. At eight o’clock, the auctioneer and his men are coming to set up their tent in my yard. We are selling eight years of accumulation—“household effects,” the advertisement called it—because the house has been sold and we are moving on.
We?
I think of the children sleeping, each in her or his cell. Their light breath fills the house, lifting it slightly, ballooning out the thin frame walls.
My husband is here too, for the auction, installed in the downstairs guest room. We have been married for fifteen years and separated for the last five months. His hairbrush and shaving gear are laid out on the toilet tank in the bathroom, as neatly aligned as they were on the shaky nightstand in Florence, in the room where we spent our first careful, sticky night. He had a zip-up bag which contained all the necessities, even a pack of rubbers which he slipped under the pillow, not quite escaping my eye. Those were the old days, and my diaphragm had stayed in my pensione with my guidebooks and camera and list of letters to write home. He was kind then, too, and I was delighted to have his full attention, if only for the few minutes when we made love.
I stop at the edge of the highway, feeling self-conscious in my rubber boots and old Mexican serape. Pale faces peer from the interiors of speeding cars. At last I cross, at a dead run. I hurry up the gravel road, wondering what David will think if he wakes up and finds me gone.
I cross the patch of parched grass between the concrete slaughterhouse and the side porch. My begonias are blooming in cracks on either side of the door. I slide it back and step into the smoke from the burning pancakes. David is standing at the stove in his white pajamas, pouring batter onto the griddle. He glances at me, smiles, and pours another dab. “Good morning, Ann. Enjoy your walk?”
I grunt. His civil behavior is a cross I will not bear.
“The children are still asleep,” he says, to reassure me.
“They wouldn’t be frightened if they woke up and found I wasn’t in bed. They know I take walks in the early morning.”
“Would you like some pancakes?”
“No, thank you.”
“I put blueberries in them, Ann, the way you like them.” He is proud of his newly acquired cooking skills. I am thinking of the price of the blueberries, charged to my account at Mrs. Hunter’s fancy fruit market. “Yes, but I paid for them.”
“You sound like a teenager,” he adds agreeably. I notice his slight hunch, his sideways glance.
“You put me in my place.” I push my boot heel into the crude wooden bootjack which Edwin and his eldest son made for me last Christmas. Stepping on the back of the jack with my other foot, I imagine that I am stepping on David’s neck.
“I see you still have that thing,” he says, sitting down to his pancakes. His pajama fly gapes, and I catch sight of a mass of dark curled hair. He closes his fly with one hand, then pours maple syrup liberally on his pancakes. “I thought you said you were going to get rid of it.”
“It has been in and out of the garbage several times,” I admit, embarrassed. Watching him eat, I am annoyed by his silent assumption: he has always said that Edwin caused it all. “I am going to keep everything he gave me,” I add defiantly. We both know he gave me nothing else.
I hang the bootjack on its nail and stop its swinging, gently, with my hand. Edwin’s handiwork. Why is it that making love once with Edwin under a full moon in a wet field mattered more to me than fifteen years of discussion, dinner, parties, agreement, affection, shared meals, plans, children? Edwin, the maker, with his small strong hands, the opposition between thumb and forefinger maddeningly delicate, precise. Edwin, the wizard, the healer, the one who splits the soul.
David eats, his fork traveling to his mouth at regular intervals. Now and then he wipes his lips with a folded paper napkin. He has set the sugar bowl where he can reach it for his coffee, next to the vitamin pills and lined up silverware on either side of his mat. Next to his right hand, he has laid a ye
llow legal pad and a sharpened pencil. I see the date written across the top.
“What are you going to write on your pad?” I ask, smiling. I am being reasonable, to match him.
“Just a few thoughts. When are they coming to set up the tent?” Consciously, he tips only half a teaspoon of sugar into his coffee.
“In half an hour, at eight. Tom wants to have everything set up and ready to start the auction at ten.”
We both glance into the living room where the furniture is huddled in a corner. “I notice you’ve decided to sell your aunt’s sewing table,” David remarks. “It’s very fine. Don’t you think you ought to keep it for the children?”
“I’ve told you several times. I’m keeping almost nothing.”
“It seems to me you ought to keep something from your family for the children.” He catches a runnel of maple syrup on the side of his fork and carries it to his mouth.
“What are you keeping from your family?” I ask.
“Nothing really. I don’t like that heavy Victorian stuff. My mother asked for the pair of Ming lamps—I told her I’d see to it that she gets them.”
“Be sure to put a label on them.”
“I will, as soon as I’m finished here. Surely you’re going to keep the grandfather clock?”
“I don’t think the children are going to want a grandfather clock.”
“Why should you decide for them?”
“They can have my diaries,” I say, “when they want them. That’s the whole story: money and desolation. The furniture, the silver, the china—the trimmings.”
“I don’t like yard sales.”
“This isn’t a yard sale. It’s a cut higher—an auction. The last yard sale was a disaster.” I like to make concessions when I can. “People parked all over the grass, and they wanted to see what else we had in the house.”
“That woman from Red Hook came into the parlor and actually asked me the price of the chair I was sitting on.”
“You were very polite. You even offered her a cup of coffee.”
We laugh and the weight lifts. I go on eagerly, “It was a real disaster, a mistake in judgment. Do you remember, it began to rain after lunch, and we had to haul everything inside? We only made something like nine dollars, and that had to be divided among the three children.” I do not remind him that I was helpless with giggles of relief all day, rattling my change box like a leper’s bell. It seemed we might be getting rid of the past.
Since then, I have wanted to throw out the rest of my possessions. When David moved out, my wish began to grow vigorously, sprouting roots and leaves. I am bound to my mistakes by these chairs and tables, these nesting ashtrays and mismatched lamps, all remnants of other pasts, some mine and now partially detached, some connected to other people’s lives. It seems to me that change will come more quickly without the framework of my mother’s good taste, my own extravagance, David’s mother’s vulgarity, and his own cleverness at spotting a good buy.
I imagine the way the living room will look cleared out, full of sun, as it was when I first saw it. I am making space here again, clearing the way. I am also hoping to make a little money. With it, I will be able to buy the essentials for the apartment in the city where I will be living alone with my two younger children.
I look into the living room again. My family’s things—the sideboard from the Georgia house, the Shaker rocking chair, the cradle we never used—are pushed together with the carved wooden knickknack shelf, the icon with its staring eyes, and the curly-legged rosewood chairs which David’s mother contributed. Around and beneath these objects lie the things we bought ourselves—the little round mirror from the antique store in Claverack, the tool chest the children used for blocks. Everything has fused into a molten lump.
I remember unlocking the front door on winter Fridays, my arms full of groceries, the children scrapping at my heels. The furniture loomed in the dark like the real inhabitants of the place. The overstuffed chairs by the fireplace were as gross and misshapen as the farm wives whose yearly labors took place in the downstairs guestroom. The china cabinet loomed like a maiden aunt. I only loved the house in the beginning when it was nearly empty. Then there was the sweet smell of baby powder, the pine fragrance I used in the vaporizers, the fine stink of diapers. As the children began to grow up, the house began to feel stifling, and then the parties started.
Last New Year’s Eve, I sat on the basement steps with Edwin, his cool hand down the back of my jeans. Looking down, I noticed a cow snake lying on the warm cement next to the furnace. “Look,” I said. Edwin got up, went down the steps, took up the broom and, with a whack, broke the snake’s back. Then he opened the basement door and scraped the snake out, where it lay in a loop on top of the frozen snow. “You could have kept it to eat the mice,” he said, coming back, the cold air fresh in his dark hair. Sitting down again beside me on the stairs, he put his hand again down the back of my jeans. His fingers were chilly.
Now Edwin and I do not see each other anymore, and I do not know what to do with what I have become. In a year of living alone, I’ve seen enough to know that my carefully selected opposites at dinner parties will never warm my hunger. Even Edwin had his doubts, calling me names when I was too greedy. He did not believe me when I told him that he wasn’t enough. He wanted to be accepted for his sex—but also to be honored as a friend, revered as a doctor, appealed to as an authority on the problems of childhood, respected in general for his commitment, his moral stance. The many splits in this man were so wide and so various that my ceaseless attempts to bridge them were as futile as a spider flinging a thread from one fence post to the next.
Yet Edwin is the only man in the world who seems worth reassembling, to me, or loving in pieces (he would say, to pieces), the only man in the world whose honest pain cannot be comforted, whose rage cannot be placated, who exists independently of my love and attention (although not his wife’s), like a meteor on a dark country night.
David has taken his plate to the sink. “I think you’re making a mistake with this auction,” he calls over the running water.
I walk over to him, realizing as I do that there is a space of inert air, as resistant as plastic, between us. “We talked about this months ago, David. I told you I wanted to get rid of practically everything.”
“I don’t believe you can do it.”
“I know. Also, I need the money.”
David adds wearily, “Everything I make goes back to the farm.”
This is something he will not discuss. He squeezes soap onto the dishes. We’ve been going over this ground too many times and now it is parched.
“When are you going to decide how much you can afford to give me for the children?”
“My lawyer is talking to your lawyer next week. I doubt if you’re going to clear very much on this auction by the time we’ve split the proceeds and paid the expenses. Labor Day—whose idea was that?” For the first time, he is crisp.
“Tom thought it was a good idea—the end of the summer, people feeling restless, ready to buy. He should know, I thought.”
“Tom? Well, he’s in the business. I never heard anything good about him, though. He has those auctions in that rundown inn in Hillsdale, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, those and that one which was really quite good—the Hull place on the river.”
“Still, I would have thought Labor Day was a bad time to choose, especially with the weather. People are going to the lake.”
“We’ll just have to see, won’t we?” My tone has turned to the nasty, harsh, self-justifying voice I used with my children when they were too young to argue back.
Attracted by my sharpness, he asks, “How are you managing living alone? Are you all right?” He is coming with the bandages.
“I like it a great deal. I’ve always liked living alone. The year before we were married, when I was working in New York, was one of the happiest times of my life.” That of course is not entirely untrue. I add, “Being up here
alone for eight summers with the children was what convinced me I wanted to live by myself.”
“I don’t know how you can say that.”
“Well, it’s so, in a way. The more conspicuous reason may turn out in the end to have been less important.”
His eyes slide around the curve of my cheek before catching on my ear; they hang there briefly while he speculates. “Don’t you think it might have been worth something—another year of trying or so?”
“I don’t know. Nothing would have changed.”
He gets up to let in the cat who is scratching at the kitchen door. He waits until she has finished rubbing against his legs and then sits down so that she can jump onto his lap. “It might have changed,” he says.
“Why? You weren’t hurting, and I was half-asleep.”
“I was starting to notice a little something.”
I laugh, hear the teetering sound and stop. “A little something. Such as that we never wanted to fuck anymore. When I used to talk about it, you’d say I was being pessimistic.”
“You were always so black. You never wanted to talk about the good things.”
“What were they?”
He fingers the gilt edge of his mother’s antique coffee cup, carefully drying it. “It’s late to talk about that now. First you made up your mind you wanted a separation, and now you want a financial settlement as well.”
“I thought you wanted it too—to straighten things out, so we didn’t have to go to court.”
“I told you, if you want it, I’ll agree. If you want a divorce, I won’t fight it.”
“Anything I say. Why is it I’m not worth a fight?”
“Because you’ve already made up your mind,” he says.
And yet I want him to fight for me, to struggle against the current that is sweeping us apart. I sit down at the table and put my hands carefully on my knees.
After a pause, David asks, “Where are the children?”
“They’ll be up soon.” I now see he has reached the limit of his endurance; the children will provide a little padding. How easy it still is for me to read his signs. David’s mother, the dragon lady, used to ask me why I couldn’t understand her son. She had taught him a set of signals which worked quite well in the rest of the world, worked superbly well, in fact, in his investment firm and at dinner parties. I tried to explain that I could read him well enough but that his vocabulary was too limited. My own is simplified enough, but it is entirely different. It is only in the last year that I have been forced to add a few qualifiers to what is after all only the old sordid, all-engulfing search for love. Now I know that I must also learn to survive, and that is another language.
Treason Page 4