Standing by a front window, Jack opened the letter.
Dear Mr Sutherland:
A note to say that I think your twenty-eight drawings are brilliant. Each has a freedom and freshness, and I wouldn’t want to say add something or take something out—in short, do the drawing over, because you might not do it as well. These come out like doodles, personal and real. Well, they’re certainly not real, but I mean they look as if you hadn’t strained.
Congratulations.
Trews
Trelawney E. Watson
Jack smiled, looked around the living-room without seeing anything, and felt his heart beating harder for a few seconds. From Trews. Well, well, he was in! Should he call up Joel and tell him? No, cool it, Jack told himself. Joel might be getting a letter from Dartmoor, Aegis this morning too, in regard to a contract. Surely the drawings’ approval would mean a contract.
It was around 9 a.m., and Natalia was still asleep. Susanne had taken Amelia off to the zoo earlier, and had charge of Amelia all day. And Natalia was due at the gallery by noon.
Jack had been up early, and had gone out for a run down Bedford Street, and over to Hudson and back again. He had spotted the guy called Ralph airing God, and if Jack hadn’t been mistaken, he had raised a hand or a ringer as if he wished to speak to him, but Jack had pretended not to see him. Imagine getting stuck at 6 in the morning in a track suit, having to listen to a lecture on human goodness, maybe, morals, as Elsie Tyler had said?
He looked at Trews’ note again, and noticed a tiny “over” in the bottom corner of the page. The words on the back were in longhand:
I know of another project that might interest you. Call me soon.
The day was starting well! Jack went to his workroom and looked at his latest sketch for a painting. He was trying for a composition of balance, a look of floating tranquillity that he so admired in some of Braque’s abstracts, and he was working with pencil, eraser and color pencils. Was it good to try hard, he wondered, or was it fatal? Out of perhaps twenty-five paintings that Jack had done and kept, four or five really pleased him. Should he stick to drawing? Would he be asking himself the same question ten years from now, still trying to paint? Yes, probably.
By the time Natalia got up, Jack had made fresh coffee and had set the kitchen table for a breakfast of croissants that he had picked up earlier. He showed Natalia the note from Trews.
Natalia pronounced it “marvelous”. “I hope they do some advertising. That should be in the contract. What’s the price again?”
“Someone there said sixteen ninety-five. Too bad it’s a slender book. At that price.”
“People pay for drawings,” Natalia said calmly, biting into a croissant. “I’ll tell Isabel—ask her to have a few of the books on a table in the gallery.—I think she already offered.”
Jack was in his workroom when Natalia parted the curtains to say she was leaving.
“Back around six-thirty, I hope. I straightened up Amelia’s room a little. Might inspire Susanne to do some more. Gad, what an untidy little girl!” Natalia said, emphasizing the last two words.
Jack laughed.
A couple of minutes after the sound of the apartment door closing, Jack yielded to his impulse to call Joel MacPherson.
Joel answered on the ninth ring, sounding breathless. “I was just going out shopping—had to open the door again.”
“Can’t you send Terry out shopping?”
“Terry’s not here. You think she lives with me?”
“I don’t ask rude questions.”
“Then cut out your in-sin-uendos,” Joel said.
“I’m calling because—I had a nice note from Trews. He likes my stuff. No changes.”
“No kidding! No changes! That means a contract. Thank you, Jack.”
“Show you his note some time. He’s almost poetic about how much he likes ‘em.—Go down and get your own mail.”
Then all was quiet and Jack worked, oblivious of what the time might be. He was trying his colors, brown, pale green, dusty yellow, imagining them in oil. The yellow was an almond shape, floating. He propped the sketch up on the table, and stepped back to look at it.
The doorbell sounded, briefly.
“Dammit,” Jack murmured. It could be kids playing tricks on a Saturday morning. He opened the apartment door, intending to go down to see who it was before he pushed the release button, and heard murmurs, then the soft but clear voice of Susanne, then Amelia’s. Jack hadn’t been expecting them back before late afternoon, and was a bit annoyed. He leaned over the hall rail, and when they were on the second floor, he called:
“Something the matter, Susanne?”
“No, Jack.—Amelia needs a coat.”
It was getting cold out, Susanne reported. Amelia said she already had a cold, and Susanne told her she had not, and to stop exaggerating. Susanne had brought some lunch, something from her own house made by her mother, and asked Jack if he wanted to join them, and Jack declined.
“We’ll shut the kitchen door, Jack, so you won’t hear any noise. You probably want to work,” Susanne said.
Jack did. The two were going to take off after lunch.
“Oh, something in the mailbox downstairs, Jack. I’d have brought it, but I haven’t the key now, you know.”
“I got the mail this morning. Does it look important?” The mailbox had a flower-shaped design in its front through which one could see.
“Can’t tell. White envelope. Want me to go down?”
“No, no, I’ll go.”
Jack went down out of curiosity. The envelope had no stamp and was addressed in longhand to John M. Sutherland with street address and zip code. He was about to open it, when he saw Mrs Farley on the sidewalk with her little two-wheel trolley full of groceries, so Jack carried it up the front steps for her, then up the first flight, because she lived on the second floor. Mrs Farley was over seventy, and lived alone.
“That’s very kind of you, Mr Sutherland! My, you’ve got strength!”
“Huff! Puff! A pleasure, Mrs Farley!” Jack grinned. He made sure she got the trolley into her apartment hall, then went up the stairs.
The letter was from Ralph Linderman, Jack saw, and was handwritten. He began reading with a puzzled frown that deepened as he went on.
Sat. a.m.
Dear Mr Sutherland,
I think a letter to you is less of an intrusion than a telephone call and maybe also I can be clearer. This is about Elsie—I am sure you know her name by now—whom I saw coming out of your house with you yesterday. I do not know what went on between you. Elsie is a very impressionable young girl, very soft in the sense that her character is unformed. She can easily be led astray and it has already begun. She has recently—very recently—come to this big city, does not know how to protect herself, and I know she has already fallen into what by anybody’s standards would be called bad company. I believe the girl with whom she shares an apartment is a common prostitute, though very young also. Elsie has not much money and you know the temptations.
You are a married man but many a married man has gotten in trouble, and not because he wanted to. Two things could happen. Elsie could try, in her ways, to get money from you, or one of the hoodlums she associates with could for some reason decide to attack you. Nothing is impossible in this huge city in which so many half-insane people live. I am thinking of the best interests of you and Elsie both. If I may say so, with no intrusion meant or offense meant, I think it is best if you and she do not see each other again.
I would like to say a few more words to you on the subject, if you are willing to listen. If not, please take my words here as they are meant—kindly, constructively, hopefully.
Yours sincerely,
Ralph Linderman
The old guy was full of wild imaginings, with a salacious slant to them. The letter made Jack feel uneasy, somehow menaced. It was on two sides of a sheet of typewriter paper, which most people didn’t have in the house, Jack thought. Was Ralph L
inderman writing fiction in his spare time? Essays on morals? His handwriting was smallish, legible, all letters in each word connected.
The thing to do was ignore it, Jack thought. Attention, more talk was just what the old guy wanted. But it irked Jack that Ralph Linderman seemed to be patroling the neighborhood, even to Jack’s very doorstep. Jack had no plan to ask Elsie to come and sit for him, but suppose he had? Who was this nut to make a fuss about it? Ralph Linderman had not put a return address on the envelope. Jack went to the telephone book and looked up Linderman. Rather to his surprise, since he hadn’t expected Linderman to have a private telephone, he found a Linderman, Ralph W., on Bleecker Street, where Elsie had said he lived. It gave a degree of respectability to Linderman, and Jack didn’t like even that.
Jack had thought of telling Natalia that evening about Elsie and her surprise visit, and her connection with the man who had returned his wallet, but he hadn’t told her, because they had talked so much about the play Fool for Love, which Natalia had liked more than he. But Jack felt that if he told Natalia about Elsie, and then about Linderman’s letter of this morning, it might be only disturbing to Natalia, and not funny enough to warrant telling for amusement value.
He remembered a morning about three weeks ago, when he and Amelia had gone out together to buy something at Rossi’s, and Amelia had suddenly pointed a finger and said, “Look! There’s that man you drew, Daddy! With the dog!” And so it had been, Ralph Linderman across the street (Bleecker) watching God lifting his leg. “You’re not going to say hello to him?” Jack had replied, no, not now, and had tugged his daughter along.
Ralph kept odd hours. That was an added nuisance, making Jack think of a three-man, round-the-clock, eight-hour-shift eye on him. The girl Elsie kept odd hours. But matter of fact, so did he, working sometimes till 2 a.m., and if he felt hungry, he went out for a hamburger at some all-night place in the neighborhood.
Jack decided to ignore Ralph Linderman, pretend not to see him or hear him, if Linderman tried to talk to him on the street. Linderman would tire of the game, maybe switch to someone else Elsie might be seeing.
Since Ralph Linderman seemed to walk God along Bedford, Jack began to avoid that street on his morning runs, which he did not take every day anyway, and head west for Hudson on Grove. And sometimes Natalia was in the mood in the early mornings, came half awake and awakened him with a slide of her arm across his waist, a part of his body—of all places—which was the most erotogenic for him, at least at the beginning of things. Often Natalia fell into sound sleep afterward, which pleased Jack because it made him think he had pleased her, and he would awaken her later with a cup of black coffee, if she had to get up for some reason, and otherwise let her sleep until she awakened.
The following week brought a small disappointment and a small note of cheer. The disappointment was that the book offered to Jack to illustrate was vulgar, strained and unfunny, in Jack’s opinion. This was from another publishing house called Flagship. It was nothing more than a joke book—Joel’s Half-Understood Dreams was a novel by comparison—so Jack declined politely. A glance at the manuscript or joke pages in the office was enough. One of the jokes had a crude pun on the word cockpit. John Sutherland’s drawings were supposed to make and sell the book, Jack supposed. Surely Trews hadn’t known what junk it was. Jack did not like the editor with whom he had to speak either, or maybe by association with the joke book did not like him, so Jack wildly elevated his prices. “I’m asking a thousand a drawing now, plus royalties to be adjusted, and…” Did the editor believe him? His eyes went wide, anyway, and perhaps the news of his price would get around, which, as Natalia would say, wouldn’t hurt. Jack decided not to mention this hiccup to Trews, unless Trews asked him about the Flagship interview.
The bright spot was a postcard from Elaine and Max Armstrong, their favorite neighbors, who lived on West Eleventh Street. They were coming back from Paris in early November and wrote that they hoped Natalia and Jack would be on Grove. Max was a lawyer, nearly forty, and had been sent to Paris for four months by his firm. The Armstrongs had a six-year-old son, Jason, a fact which had led to their meeting the Armstrongs at the Little People’s Theatre in the Village. Elaine worked for an interior decorating company, and was several years younger than Max. It was Max’s second marriage.
“I missed them,” Natalia said a few minutes after she had read their postcard. She said it in the earnest way she had sometimes, frowning a little, not looking at Jack, as if she were thinking out loud. At such uncomplicated moments, Jack adored her.
She had made an equally simple remark about the Shepard play, Fool for Love. “I can see how a half-brother and half-sister could be in love more intensely than people who aren’t related.” Natalia thought there was a strong drive toward incest in everyone, which was why a tabu had been put upon it. She spoke of little siblings crawling around on the floor together, and Jack remarked that in the play the two hadn’t met till they were about fifteen. “They still knew then that they were half-brother and -sister,” Natalia had said, “and what I’m talking about is as primitive as sibling kittens mating as soon as they’re able to.” Jack understood her words, but did not understand the emotion she was talking about, not when it was attached to people. That often happened to him with Natalia.
Natalia spent as much of her spare time away from him as with him, Jack thought. There was always Louis Wannfeld on business trips to Philadelphia and New York, so that when Jack thought Louis was in one city, he might be in the other, and maybe Natalia was too, and seeing Louis not deliberately but because Louis happened to be around. Natalia came home at 2 and 3 in the morning after evenings with Louis “out somewhere”, or at Louis’ apartment, but if she felt tired the next morning, she could call Isabel, who was usually at the gallery by 10, and say she didn’t feel like coming in till 2 p.m., and Isabel was never annoyed as far as Jack could tell. Jack could have accompanied Natalia on the Louis evenings, he knew, but he also knew that Louis’ group was mainly all men, and that meant homosexuals, with whom Jack felt a bit odd-man-out.
“We don’t talk about sex—or tell jokes,” Natalia said rather defensively to Jack. “In fact there’s more talk about sex and more advances made at straight parties, if you ask me.”
They talked about everything but sex, according to Natalia. But they (the boys) always liked a girl or two around, or an older woman. Natalia an older woman at twenty-eight! On the other hand, Jack had learned that some of the boys were twenty. Jack was not really annoyed, or resentful, because the terms of their marriage had been that both should show respect for independence, avoid “feeling stuck together,” as Natalia had put it. Intellectually, logically, Jack did agree that this was a good idea. For one thing, it staved off boredom with each other, and might prevent it entirely. Before their marriage, Jack had made a promise about this kind of independence, and he was not going to go back on it. Another element, which Jack could not complain about, was that it left him more time alone in which to work.
Unbeknownst to Natalia, who respected his creative efforts and never demanded to see what he had been doing lately, Jack was trying his mostly elongated weirdo personages on canvas in acrylic. They looked rather good in pale, pastel colors, with the finest of black outlines, sometimes incomplete outlines. Of course he could not even with a fine brush get the speed of a pen. But his ten or so efforts were not bad, he thought, and he especially liked one he called “The Suicide”, which depicted a figure of indeterminate sex bending over a nearly full bathtub and clutching a rope, a straight razor, and a bouquet of flowers.
Even avoiding Bedford Street, Jack spotted Ralph Linderman one morning as he, Jack, was loping around the corner of Hudson into Barrow Street. Linderman was just then crossing Barrow, with God on the leash, of course, toward the north side of Barrow, saw Jack and called from the sidewalk, “Oh, Mr Sutherland! May I have a…”
Jack ran on up the clear sidewalk opposite Linderman, as if he had heard nothing. It had
been two weeks, maybe more, since Linderman’s letter, which Jack had torn up and thrown away.
9
The latter part of October and early November brought nothing but unpleasant shocks in the life of Ralph Linderman. In October, he received a telegram saying that his mother had died of a heart attack and that his “services were needed”. He was to communicate with “undersigned Mabel Haskins”, who had sent her telephone number. Ralph recognized her name, had even met her, he thought. She was his mother’s closest neighbor and best friend in the last years. So Ralph telephoned and learned that his mother had lain nearly twenty-four hours on the floor of her living-room before she was discovered by Mabel and the house superintendent who had a key. Ralph should come at once, if he wished to attend the funeral.
Ralph didn’t want to attend the funeral, but he notified the Midtown garage of his sudden call of duty, and went to New Hampshire, only to find that his mother had been buried six hours before. The coroner came especially to see him at his mother’s apartment. Her funeral arrangements had been taken care of according to her insurance and health policies. The funeral had been done nicely, said Mabel Haskins, who was with Ralph when the coroner arrived. Ralph had papers to sign, which he did. What Mabel Haskins knew of his mother’s affairs was little, but better than nothing. She knew where his mother had kept her checkbook, and it seemed there were only a couple of little bills to pay in the neighborhood. Ralph had to arrange for his mother’s furniture—none of which was worth much—to be auctioned or given to the Salvation Army. Mrs Haskins kindly invited him to stay the night at her house—she was a widow too and had a spare room—so Ralph did. He could not get to sleep for his thoughts, the strange room, the fact that he was not used to sleeping at night anyway, but no matter. He had requested an extra day to wind it all up. Somehow he still owed eleven hundred dollars on his mother’s expenses for the funeral, toward which he signed a two-hundred-dollar check, with a promise to pay the rest within a month. There was a little jewelry, and Ralph hesitated, then decided to keep a ring he remembered, and for which his mother’s fingers had probably grown too knobby in the last many years. Ralph emphatically did not want any of his father’s jewelry, no tie pin, no cufflinks. He gave various things to Mrs Haskins, whatever she could use or even sell. She was a bent but spry little woman. One of her brown eyes was clouded over, due to an injury, she said. In the end, he was grateful for her help. After two days, he hadn’t even visited his mother’s grave, because he didn’t want to. In the two (almost) sleepless nights, Ralph had stared at a dark and creamy ceiling corner of his room, and recalled that when he had been ten and twelve, he had loved his mother, had been even jealous of his father, because of his mother’s affection for his father. Then his mother had seemed to spurn him when he was about twelve, and Ralph had been deeply hurt, and had kept the hurt to himself. She had continued to take care of him, preparing his meals and all that, but Ralph had sensed a terrible coldness. He had got over this by pretending to hate his mother for a while, though he had never really hated her. When he had become eighteen, and had gone to college for a while, he had realized his mother’s limitations, and then he had decided to accept her as she was, and to do his duty by her also, when his father had died. But love her? Not any more. She had forced him to go to church, too, prodding him even when he had been fifteen and more. Even his father had begged out on many a Sunday, with one feeble excuse or another. His mother had contributed to his hating the church, which had been all to the good. Only when his father had died, and Ralph had had to leave college and take a job, had he refused to set foot in church again, any church. What had the church to do with morals? Very little, and that more honored in the breach than in the observance. Ralph could see that the church gave people a nice funeral service when they died, made the people attending feel they were doing the right thing, showing respect for the dead. Well and good. But the church throughout history had twisted right and wrong to suit itself, had usually sucked up to the powers-that-be, which meant the church had been anti-poor a lot of the time, to maintain social order.
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