The off-the-shoulder evening gown is her own, a Vogue copy made by the seamstresses in Abuelita’s hat and dress store. She keeps the gown at Herb’s studio and changes into it behind a standing screen near the wood-burning stove in the corner. She’d rather change in the privacy of one of the other rooms, but Herb has his reason for doing it this way. He’s explained: One thing the common man or woman on the street doesn’t understand even one bit about portrait painting, Yolanda, is that it’s a drama, like an opera or a play. Listening to the rustle of the gown’s silk and lace from behind the screen as he sits on the stool in front of the easel patiently waiting to begin is the musical prologue. Often Herb puts on an opera record while he works. On the morning that Mamita turned six, her eardrum was blown out by the celebratory chain explosions of firecrackers set off too close, but her nahual, a spider monkey, caught the gossamer membrane before it hit the ground, preserved it inside the chamois eyelid of a fawn, and twenty years later changed it into a small mole on the back of her infant son’s left hand; the infant now floating inside her womb without any use yet for his indispensable, directional mole. So Mamita doesn’t know which operas Herb plays and doesn’t enjoy orchestral or opera music anyway, too complicated a commotion for just one ear. She likes simple songs she can sing along to, tralala’ing until she reaches the words she knows: Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. When it’s her own voice inside her head, it’s almost like being able to hear in both ears again.
Herb is a large, thick-necked, broad-chested, strong-looking man. Listening to opera records while he paints, he becomes very animated, puffing out cheerful baritone notes of the melody between taut lips, repeatedly bringing brush back to palette and peeking out at Mamita from behind a side of the easel. During those rousing men’s choruses that Mamita described years later without knowing what they were—“like all the soldiers singing as they march,” so maybe Boris Godunov or some such—he strides around his studio, singing along without words, suddenly coming to a stop in front of the canvas to stare at it like he’s never seen it before, then launching into another extended spell of painting, vigorously jabbing, smearing, slapping paint on with his brush, his singing subsiding to soft yelps and whimpers and finally falling silent inside his tunnel of concentration, the record still spinning, stylus knocking against the last groove. He has cut-up cardboard boxes laid over the floor instead of drop cloths and often falls to his knees to draw with a charcoal pencil or chalk, rows of preliminary sketches of Mamita’s hands crossing the cardboard floor. It astounds Mamita that a man can have become wealthy doing what Herb does. Even in winter, he wears a pigment-splotched white T-shirt, black horsehair shooting out through the V-neck like upholstery stuffing, and if the room feels cold, instead of encumbering his arms with sleeves, he puts on an old vest, its shaggy wool stiff as papier-mâché with paint smears from wiping and cleaning his own brushes against it. Joseph’s Mastodon Fur Vest of Many Colors, he calls it.
He often makes these little joking remarks about Jewishness. Like Bert, he considers himself a secular nonbeliever. Bert rarely mentions Judaism, though whenever he does, he sounds respectful or else nostalgically affectionate, as if referring to a lunatic but beloved old relative. The priest at San Sebastián, Mamita’s family church, had agreed to marry them so long as Bert vowed that their future children would be raised Catholic. But we weren’t raised Catholic.
Bert is always going on about how Herb is a true war hero. Mamita has heard him brag to some of his University Club squash-playing friends: My boyhood friend Herb Felman fought in D-Day, the Shrub War to Paris, and in the Battle of the Bulge, so don’t tell me he didn’t have a goddamned war. Who else do you know had a war like Herb did. Bert sure didn’t, he made bombs in a factory in Delaware. Bert has also told her that Herb is homosexual. Maybe it makes Bert feel a little better to evoke Herb’s homosexuality in the context of his own not-so-manly war. Somebody had to make bombs and, anyway, Bert was in his mid-thirties, commonly considered too old to go to war without an officer’s commission. But Herb was a thirty-four-year-old ordinary GI. With his broad face and noble nose, black hair receding over a strong forehead, thick, arched black eyebrows, and amber-brown eyes, Herb is a handsome man, he even somewhat resembles one of those broad-shouldered Aztec warriors she saw so many of in Mexico City during her honeymoon, depicted in murals and as statues. But his mouth is a little off-putting; the way his excessively rubbery lips seem nearly to turn inside out when he’s excited, exposing large front teeth, reminds her of that famous comedian who only she seems to think isn’t so funny. Years later, feet up in the recliner in her den, watching Carol Burnett on television performing a skit with that slapstick, doughty pathos that always brought out such gales of deeply felt laughter in Mamita, it will come back to her, and she’ll look over at her son and say, I’ve always thought Jerry Lewis would have been funnier as a woman.
Herb begins each portrait session by arranging Mamita in a white high-backed chair, setting her bare arm on the padded armrest so that the soft inner flesh of her slender bicep and the underside of her forearm are turned toward the viewer, hand resting slightly palm up on the silvery fabrics of her lap, giving her a look of relaxed, unselfconscious summer afternoon lounging. The other arm rests conventionally bent at the elbow on the padding, fingers dangling over the whorled wooden knob, engagement ring displayed. He tucks the orchid, always a fresh one, inside her décolletage. Holding up the Lady Agnew reproduction, he says, Try to hold your head just like this, Yolanda, with your left eyebrow just slightly raised. He wants the contrast with the slight droop of her opposite eyelid. The axiom of the slight symmetry-subverting flaw that lets beauty open out from the canvas. During one of their first sittings, Herb said, Yolanda, I want you to tell me a funny story without allowing yourself even to smile, never mind laugh. She told him about Coco, her pet monkey, and how she always spoke to Coco in English. He said, That’s wonderful, Yolanda. Now tell me the saddest story you know, but again, trying not to show any emotion. Mamita told how Coco had suffocated to death. Of course Mamita knew sadder stories, but this one, I think, was the one she relied on in an uncomfortable social setting to keep herself from impolitely laughing. While telling her funny Coco story, Mamita had involuntarily allowed a corner of her mouth to turn upward, and when she told the sad one, on that same side her mouth had involuntarily turned ever so slightly downward. By combining the two in a visibly invisible manner, Herb achieved the sensuous effect he was aiming for: the corner of Mamita’s lips invisibly trembling, close to twitching from the tension of the two opposite impulses. Likewise, in her eyes, silent laughter rippled over their surface when she told the funny story, while their depths transparently darkened when she told the sad one. Again, he combined them.
I’m very pleased with how beautifully it’s turned out, says Herb. Aren’t you?
Oh yes, Herb, I am, she says happily. I think you’re every little bit as good as John Singer Sargent. There’s no equivalent way to say “every little bit as” in Spanish. You can say a “little bit of ” or a “little pinch of.” She enjoys correctly wielding this coy American idiom.
Herb has begun every session so far by saying: You know it’s impossible to paint a woman’s face as pretty as it really is, Yolanda. Eventually he confessed that he was quoting Sargent. Herb intensely identifies with Sargent: a successful portrait painter with Boston roots and larger artistic ambitions, who went to the World War I battlefields to paint their horrors, just as Herb went to the Second World War to both contribute to and try to end its horrors. Sargent was also a big masculine man who liked to go to rough sporting events and who never married, essentially a loner despite many friendships, including with many of the women he painted.
When Herb was only nine, his gift for artistic drawing already noted by his school art teacher, his older brother took him to see Sargent at work on his series of murals at the Boston Public Library. His older brother was a friend of the son of one of th
e guards, and they’d arranged to go in the morning, before the library was open but when the artist was already at work. Herb stood at one end of the hall watching through the chilly gray light as Sargent, at the opposite end, stood on a ladder painting along a seam in one of his murals. His bowler hat had so many paintbrushes sticking up out of the band, it looked like Chief Massasoit’s headdress, and he wore a thoroughly splotched vest of many colors that he wiped his brushes on, though it was a tailored suit vest, not a wooly one like Herb’s. The guard told Herb and his brother that when Sargent left the library to go to one of his society parties in the evening, he’d keep the vest on and come back still wearing it in the mornings. How do you like that for an anecdote, Yolanda? Isn’t that wonderful?
Sargent was working on one of the last murals of his series The Triumph of Religion, which was supposed to be, you know, says Herb, the American Sistine Chapel. The expectations for it were very high and not just in Boston. But Sargent never finished it. Probably because of the synagogue mural that represents Judaism as kneeling, blindfolded, her scepter snapped in half, distinctly not triumphing. Yolanda, do you get my meaning? Not triumphing. In the mural at the opposite end of that same wall a radiant golden girl in a corona of light symbolizes the Christian Church, triumphant. You can see why some people were upset, not just Jews, but also taxpaying secular Americans who didn’t think the public library should be used to denigrate one religion at the expense of another. Between those two murals on that wall was a larger panel, still blank, that according to Sargent’s plan was going to sum up and conclude the entire series. Maybe he had in mind an allegory of varied images that was somehow going to cast a new light on the synagogue mural and absorb even Judaism into the Triumph of Religion in America. But I doubt it, says Herb. The scandal that started in Boston was reported on and argued over throughout the country. My own art teacher was one of the Jews who joined the protests at the library, Yolanda, demanding that the synagogue mural be removed. I think that even Bostonians who agreed with the protests in principal asked, Who are these bearded overwrought maniacs, shouting in their foreign and Bolshevik accents? Where did they come from?
After a pause, he continues, But poor Sargent, really, I think it was a sort of innocence that did him in. Defending himself with all that art historical baloney about medieval traditions in religious painting from Michelangelo to the Reims Cathedral. All fine if you’re painting in a medieval cathedral or even a contemporary one, where I suppose you’re allowed to tell your worshippers a version of their own story, but not in a democratic public institution. The library’s Brahmin trustees didn’t back down; they supported Sargent to the end. But I think their support embarrassed him. A fool he wasn’t; he knew what was going on. He finally understood the emptiness of what he was trying to do, the vain grandiosity of what was essentially an academic imitation of a kind of art he really had no deep feeling for, however excellent the execution. So he left that culminating center panel blank and walked away. He felt exposed and knew that he had nothing of true meaning and conviction to put up there. Blaming the Jews and their protests provided an easy escape. In London, you know, Sargent was put down by the snobs as “the painter of Jews.” But there was some truth to it. Somewhere he said that he far preferred the emotional and intelligent liveliness of his Jewish women to the dullness of most of the British aristocratic women whose portraits he painted. Our Lady Agnew here was an exception, but anyway, she was Scottish. Oscar Wilde was his friend. And Parliament had just made it a crime to have intimate physical relations with any person of your own sex.
A silence descends on them. This is the closest Herb has ever come to speaking about his own sexuality with Mamita. He seems more discomfited than she does. Did it just slip out? Does he think she doesn’t know?
I forgot to feed the dogs, says Herb. It’s horrible, Yolanda, I’ve been having recurring nightmares in which I’m traveling faraway, in Europe, and suddenly I remember my dogs, my cat, that they’re here in Boston in a room, dead on the floor, starved to death due to my own having forgotten to feed them. What would Sigmund say about it, do you think? Please excuse me, Yolanda.
He dashes out of the room. Downstairs, somewhere, are his three dogs. She doesn’t know about dog breeds. Two are quite large but extremely thin, with long noses and ears, golden brown long hair. One is small with curly whitish fur. Somewhere there is also a long, luxuriously black cat with emerald-green eyes.
There is a charcoal sketch pinned to a small easel on the floor over there in the corner, a nude man on his knees, his sinewy, perfectly proportioned torso upright but arching backward, head thrown back, mouth open in ecstasy or anguish, and between his spread thighs where his sex should be there is a smudgy blankness. I know what you must be thinking, even you, Mamita, because it doesn’t look like anything else. It’s as if that blankness represents the back of the head of a nebulous ghost. She can hear dogs barking downstairs, and now Herb’s bellowing Red Army Choir voice is singing “Happy Birthday.” A young Asian man comes a few days a week to houseclean, but there is no one to regularly feed his dogs. Herb must always worry about forgetting.
The other day I picked up this Rudolf Serkin recording of French Suites, says Herb when he comes back into the room, holding the record. I’ve been playing it in my bedroom. A quieter mood, he says, quieter but magical.
You were singing “Happy Birthday,” Herb?
Yes, to Mitzy. My female borzoi. He straightens up from the record player, the music gently dancing out into the studio. Even listening with one ear, Mamita likes it.
It is magical, she says.
Reality is magical, don’t you think, Yolanda? he says.
This assertion she needs to think over. How many people in Guatemala, including some she knew, who were in the Árbenz government or were even just considered sympathetic to it have been killed or imprisoned in the three years since the coup. The gringos compiled a list of suspected Communists for the new government, supposedly ten thousand people are on it. Could she be on it? Or was she considered just an ordinary young female secretary from a known anti-Communist family, not a member of the diplomatic service under Árbenz, who’d just happened to find a job in the Boston consulate. Was that why, after the coup, she hadn’t wanted to return to Guatemala, because she was afraid? Worried, too, that her friendship with el joven might have cast suspicion on her? In his last letter, el joven wrote that you could get put onto the Communist list even if you’d been overheard saying or were suspected of holding the belief that “in a Democracy the people choose the government.” During the months after the coup when he was taking refuge in the Mexican embassy, el joven fell seriously ill with typhoid, as did scores of others crowded together there. The United States was pressuring the ten or so foreign governments whose embassies in Guatemala were housing refugees to deny asylum to all of them because if any of those refugees were allowed into their countries they’d go on fomenting Communism there, too, and then it would all end with a giant Red stain extending from Mexico to Chile. As the months passed, those countries, exasperated with having to care for their uninvited guests, finally defied the US government, citing international asylum law as, at least, a pretext. Árbenz was allowed into Mexico, and a month later el joven followed. In his last letter el joven wrote that he’d gone to see Árbenz in Uruguay, where his exile continued, though it was destined to end in suicide after he returned to Mexico City. El joven wanted to come to Boston; he wrote that he had a new passport and identity. But we went back instead, Mamita and I, to Guatemala in 1957 or early ’58. By then the government was less worried about bilingual secretaries from good capitalist families who’d married a gringo than they were about what was, so to speak, gathering on the horizon: war that was going to last for over three decades.
I’m sure Sargent, Herb is saying, wasn’t even a regular churchgoer. I never set foot in any synagogue when I was a boy. My father was a Red, and we were, too, and so was your h
usband’s old man. Bert wasn’t exactly a yeshiva boy, you know. But he sure looked the part at his peddler’s cart after school, selling potatoes in his wool peasant coat and pants stuffed into his black knee socks, like old Moe made him do. I used to see Bert standing there in the cold, weighing out potatoes, and, oh Yolanda, let me tell you, did he look forlorn. Who could ever have seen Bert then and imagine: There’s a future University Club squash champion, master of false teeth, and the husband of a beautiful young Catholic woman from our Southern Hemisphere? The night before D-Day was the one time I ever willingly took part in a religious service, with a Christian chaplain killed the next day during the landing on Omaha. Out of a hundred and fifty men in my battalion, Yolanda, only seventeen of us survived to fight onward to Paris. Religion, schmeligion, if you ask me. Of course nowadays you have to watch your mouth; even being an ardent FDR guy is enough to make those McCarthy thugs suspect you of being a Commie fellow traveler. If these Brahmin types I’ve been earning my money from ever get wind of a tenth of what I really believe, you’ll see me out on the sidewalk on the Common making pastel portraits of tourists. And that hoity toity University Club likes having your Bert around as long as he’s winning squash championships for them, but the day they find out about old Pa Moe the Red baker, oh boy, you watch, they’ll drop him like a hot potato, alright.
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