“And let’s face it,” Mayra was bellowing. “The Louvre has its drawbacks. It’s dark whenever the sun isn’t shining, and their own painter, David, recorded his scorn in 1795 when he said the gallery produces false illumination almost always unfavorable to the paintings.” Mr. Seligson rushed in with the tray of tea and cups and cookies. He lowered the tray to the table in front of the sofa where Mayra was not sitting but where she was supposed to be sitting, where she was when he left the room. “I won this samovar with Green Stamps,” he said.
“It’s beautiful.”
He filled her cup, then his. He put hers on the table in front of the sofa, his beside it. He sat down and motioned to her to come over, saying, “I have some rather good news for you, Mayra dear. Please. Sit down.” He motioned again.
“I’m fine. This is a wonderful chair.” She darted across the space and got the cup. She returned to the chair, gripping the cup with both hands. She was wearing an old black dress of her mother’s and no lipstick. It had been her idea, but Mama had said she didn’t understand—nothing could make her look less than sensational. “Are those some of your paintings, Mr. Seligson?” she asked.
“Call me Casey.” He had always liked the name. His name was Mort, but he had always liked Casey. He had never before suggested that anyone call him that, but he had never before been about to take himself a gorgeous Negro mistress either. Age sixteen, maybe seventeen, tops.
“Casey?”
He knew he would have to wait until “after” before she’d call him Casey. “It looks very much as though I have been able to get you that scholarship at Shannon-Phillips.”
Mayra clasped her hands under her chin, her face as expressionless as a face can become.
“I sent along a portfolio of your work, of course,” he continued, “but I very much suspect that it was my endorsement and my twenty-three-hundred-word analysis of your work that clinched everything.”
“I am grateful,” Mayra said. “I am very grateful.”
His eyes suddenly filled with tears. “It was a privilege. An honor. I lay myself down as a bridge over which you may carry your talent into the world.” He slid to the end of the couch, directly beside her. “You must go forward into a greater appreciation of the gifts God has seen fit to accord you.” He slid his left hand swiftly along the channel made by her tightly closed legs and moved straight toward the treasure. Her torso leaned forward as though to receive the hand, but the movement was to free her right hand, which slammed like a steel building-wrecker’s ball into the side of his jaw. She sprang to her feet and ran to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator door and impressed her finger and palm prints upon its enameled ceiling.
She fingered all the eggs in the egg compartment. She fingerprinted the bottom of a roasting pan she found in the oven, the steam pipe and the side of the stove. She returned to the living room and sat down in a straight-backed chair, her purse and her white gloves neatly in her lap, her feet together.
“That did it, Mayra. Just forget it. Forget the scholarship. Forget even passing your art course—and see what that does to your graduation.”
She listened politely. The side of his face was red. He did not open his eyes as he spoke to her. “Monday morning I go to Shannon-Phillips and tell them with regret that you have been caught stealing art supplies from my class and that severe doubts have been cast upon your morals because you were seen having sexual relations with three men in Van Cortlandt Park. You’ll be sorry for the rest of your life that you turned down my friendship.”
“Mr. Seligson?”
“Too late! Never mind. There’s nothing you can say. Let actions speak now. Maybe, and it’s a big maybe, if you get those clothes off and get over here—”
“Mr. Seligson, I have been leaving my fingerprints in different places all over your apartment, and my mother is waiting for me right across the street. The police station is right over on Audubon Avenue, and a business friend of my mother’s is a reporter on the Daily Mirror.”
“Are you blackmailing me?”
“I thought you were blackmailing me.”
“Listen here, Miss Smartass—” His lower lip began to tremble. “Just how far do you think your word is going to carry against mine? Hah? You think they’ll take the word of a little—a little colored girl—over the word of a respected educator, eleven years a teacher with the Board of Education, City of New York?”
“I’m a minor, Mr. Seligson.”
“Go! Out!” His face pressed itself into grimaces of humiliation, then she gave it to him to save him. She gave him the smile that showed him how much she truly admired him and how very much she would have wanted to lay him if only her parts had not been cemented over at infancy. “Goodbye, Casey,” she said. “No hard feelings. I’ll do you proud with that scholarship.” She let herself out of the apartment. Casey poured himself a cup of tea and began to peck at the pile of Hungarian cookies.
CHAPTER THREE
The scholarship to the Shannon-Phillips Institute of Art was the cloud upon which the Virgin Mayra ascended to womanhood. The Institute confirmed that she could paint and that there was indeed a world existent south of 110th Street that was not (necessarily) exclusively for whigros, the word Mama used for whites or, when she got real mad at them, whiggers. Indirectly through the Institute she was caused to yield her maidenhood without any of the dismaying diversions, such as the need to convince herself that she had fallen in love, and she got high pleasure and much spiritual excitement in return. Even Mama approved of the cherry-taker and in more ways than several.
His name was Caspar P. Lear, Jr. He was a black art teacher, a painter, a spiritual follower of Mao, a graduate of City College and a possible contender, he told Mayra, for the light-heavyweight championship, although he didn’t exactly say of what. He held a degree as a chemical engineer, had been offered good jobs as a chemical engineer. He was also about the handsomest man she had ever looked at. But all of that was not what had decided her to topple over in his bed.
They had their art and health and color in common, but he had never set a straight course on seducing her, nor she him. He preferred to discourse on the many forks ahead in his road, which he thought he might take and what he’d do when he got where he figured to be going. He was never dull, but she wasn’t altogether pleased with his perfection either. Everything about him was just maybe a little too much to think about living with forever, but he gave her more than the one thing she had not yet encountered—the possibility of revolt, the open door to rebellion. No hat-in-hand waiting around for whitey to run you for alderman or drag you screaming into the membership of his country club. Caspar P. Lear, Jr., believed in the expanding promise of black revolution.
After she had looked dreamily into his eyes, showing the high glaze of lust as they lay side by side on the big daybed in his apartment on 95th off Central Park West, and she had murmured “Let’s fuck,” she wanted to move in with Caspar because he did everything as well as he did everything else, but Mama talked her out of it. She said living with the first man you made it with was too habit-forming, and sometimes people never got out of the habit. She agreed that he sounded like a good man, but that didn’t mean Mayra had to go and live with him. Mayra capitulated when Mama suggested that she just try it out on Friday and Saturday nights. The Ashants were living on Long Island, and that was the right way to arrange it. It was a wildly exciting love affair once it got started, and once it did get started they didn’t talk about black revolution much any more. It lasted four months, then Caspar decided to accept a job in the petrochemical division of the Morania Oil Company in Philadelphia. There wasn’t much romantic sadness. They both knew how they felt by then, and she said she understood why he wanted to try the square side of the tracks for a little while. He told her not to be too sure, to keep reading the sports page, and anyway Philadelphia was only ninety miles away. “And, hey,” he decided to tell her, “one thing. You might like to hear that the Institute thinks you’re th
e most talented student painter they’ve had in almost fifteen years.”
Her eyes got misty.
“Whassamatta?”
“I don’t see how they can think that.” She turned away. “And I’m not fishing.”
“Why can’t they?”
“My stuff comes out okay, but I don’t feel anything about it. I don’t hear any bands playing in my head. I can’t smell much life coming off the canvas.”
He grinned, “They said ‘student painter,’ didn’t they?”
Her face brightened. “Yeah, I forgot that.”
He touched her cheek. “Technique first, always technique. When you got a lock on that, time enough to pour yourself all over it.”
After he left, Mayra was in the rhythm of staying in town Friday and Saturday nights, and she’d meet Mama and they’d have dinner, then go to a movie, then check into a mid-town hotel and do some shopping Saturday morning. Mayra got to brooding about technique, and one Saturday morning when Mama had agreed to go uptown to a laundry customer’s to sit with two of her kids while the woman took the littlest to an eye doctor, Mayra went to the 42nd Street Library and began to look at books in the art room. The first book she picked up was a book about trompe-l’oeil painting by a Martin Battersby, and as she read it and studied the illustrations she lost her sense of time and she kept looking at trompe-l’oeil books until an hour before closing, about twenty minutes before she was supposed to meet Mama at Penn Station. She was so quiet all the way home that Mama wondered what was going on. “Just trying to figure something out about painting,” Mayra said. She kept figuring all day Sunday, then she cut classes on Monday and went back to the art room and read it all over again. On Tuesday she began to ask questions at the Institute. She was told: “After all, no one takes trompe-l’oeil especially seriously, do they, Mayra?” and “Offhand I wouldn’t have the faintest idea who you could go to to teach you trompe-l’oeil” and “But it’s all so technically difficult, and to what avail, my dear girl?” At home she went over the whole thing with Mama, who said finally, “If you want pot you don’t go to United Cigars, baby. Go ask the man who wrote the book to tell you how to paint that way.”
So Mayra went back to the library and was shocked to discover that Martin Battersby lived in England. England was farther away than the moon. England took money, and no Institute scholarship went that far. So she wrote to Caspar P. Lear, Jr., in Philadelphia and explained how her life had been changed in the art room of the 42nd Street Library, and what could she do about it? He sent her a telegram. He told her to apply for a Fulbright or a Guggenheim, or if she wanted to go first class all the way with the most, she could ask John Moodie at Shannon-Phillips how she could get a fellowship from the E. C. West Foundation, and that he wanted to be her number-one witness on the application forms, but that it might be a good idea to write to Martin Battersby first just to find out if he would agree to teach trompe-l’oeil painting.
May 14, 1954
Dear Mr. Battersby:
I am an art student at the Shannon-Phillips Institute of Art in New York who will soon complete its two-year curriculum. The faculty has said that if you will consider accepting me as a pupil they will supply high endorsements of my seriousness and ability. If you accept me as a pupil I shall apply for an E. C. West Foundation fellowship. I am Negro, almost twenty years old.
Very truly yours,
Mayra Ashant
Battersby sent his letter of acceptance in six days. His fee would be one-half of the amount of the fellowship after return travel had been subtracted and if the remainder was sufficient to cover her living expenses. She must guarantee to give not less than one year, hopefully two years, to her studies, but if she were late for class or if he found her abilities were not up to his standards she would be discharged. He looked forward to seeing her references from the faculty of Shannon-Phillips. Second to being laid by Caspar P. Lear, Jr., it was the most exciting moment of her life. She applied for the fellowship and Mama’s signature gave parental consent.
“I got news,” Mama said.
“What?”
“You know who ended Miss Baby’s career?”
“Who?”
“And you know who was Miss Pupchen’s sponsor when she kept the open line to her mama in Vienna?”
“Who?”
“Edward Courance West, that’s who.”
“Mama!”
“I think I can get through to him. He’ll remember me, baby.”
“But, I—”
“Won’t mean nothing to him. It’s all tax deducts, I read. And anyway, he never gave a damn about that open line to Vienna for five months. He’ll just tell somebody to set it up, and off you go to get what you’re after.”
“No, Mama. I can’t. This is something else, and I have to do it with my work. I mean I’m not saying it isn’t great the way you’re always there to get anything for me, but with this they got to take me because I’m a painter they’ll be proud they got started.”
“Now you talking, hon.”
The Institute’s austere director, John Moodie, arranged everything, and the Foundation demanded (beyond the Institute’s recommendation and photographs of three of the most representative pieces of her work) that she provide an affidavit stating that she was not then and had never been a member of the Communist party or a sympathizer with its aims. Caspar P. Lear, Jr., had instructed Mayra that Communists were almost as crazy to burn down the world as Republicans, so Mayra had no trouble signing that. Her application for scholarship was accepted and the scholarship/fellowship granted on July 3, 1954. Casp came up from Philadelphia and joined Mama and Mayra for dinner at Longchamp’s on lower Fifth Avenue. They didn’t talk politics. Mayra told him she was sailing on the Elizabeth on July 17, and, as though he were joking, Casp asked Mama what she would do with herself when Mayra had gone off to England and had left her all alone. “Mostly sit around waiting on you to call, Caspar,” Mama said, because she knew he wasn’t making any jokes, and as she told Mayra later, the whole thing gave her more confidence in her mirror. Casp was nine years older than Mayra, who was up to being twenty, and Mama was only nine years older than Caspar, and besides she had a lot of flair.
CHAPTER FOUR
Walt’s anxiety was fastened to tracks that ran from his first consciousness to the ever-retreating terminal, the present. His anxiety was a swiftly scanning eye that transmitted all minutiae, never ending in its search for clues that might lead to the discovery of why he had been painted with such wet and sticky guilt. The frantically roving eye had never been able to find any explanation in all the almost thirty years of its shuttling desperation. It had raced over switches and across endless tracks of experience reporting back its bafflement—but it could not be stopped.
When Walter West had been five days old, in 1929, his father had assigned his rearing to the Wall Street law firm of Pick, Heller & O’Connell. When he was ten years old he had asked Mr. Pick whether many of the firm’s clients had consigned their children to Mr. Pick. The lawyer had stated, “In effect, yes. Death occurs to clients (and others) at all ages. We have had young, deceased clients who left children and substantial estates, and although we had not been instructed specifically to administer the child as well as the estate, we did have the executors’ responsibility in that the children had become the primary clients.”
On the morning of the first meeting with Edward Courance West regarding his son Walter, five days following the death of Irene Wagstaff West, Mr. Pick appeared at the Harkness Pavilion discreetly dressed as befitted a serious samurai. West laid out the retainer slowly but clearly and charged Pick, Heller & O’Connell with final responsibility for the rearing of his son, whom, he explained, he did not intend to see ever again. He suggested that Switzerland would be a good place to settle the infant. He wished Mr. Pick to draw a trust agreement into which Mr. West would pay seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars on January 2, 1930. Until that date, just less than a year away, he told Mr. Pick that
he would invest the amount for the infant Walter and assign any profits to the infant’s trust. He gave Mr. Pick a power of attorney to act for Walter until it was decided whether Mr. Pick should be appointed by the court as Walter’s legal guardian.
When Irene West’s estate was probated, the Walter Wagstaff West trust fund was enormously appreciated in that Walter and his older brother Daniel were the equal and sole legatees of her estate. Irene West had been the sole heiress to the estate of her father, Walter Wagstaff, leading American railroad manipulator and operator. The morning after Mr. Pick had advised Edward West of this accrual of funds they held a meeting in Mr. West’s Pierce-Arrow, on the Harlem River Drive, motoring up and back twice past the Polo Grounds under High bridge to Dyckman Street. Mr. West told Mr. Pick that, in his wife’s memory, he wished to take over Walter’s inheritance, as he had already done with Dan’s, that he would combine Walter’s legacy with the seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars already in hand, and that he would, of course, sign all necessary papers and place in escrow all necessary collateral to guarantee the amount of Walter’s inheritance against loss. Mr. Pick reminded him of the approximate amount in millions of dollars that would be involved in the escrow agreement and Mr. West nodded absent-mindedly.
Walter West’s fortune began to multiply five days after his birth on January 14, 1929, a date forty-one days after President Coolidge in his final State of the Union message to the Congress had said, “No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time.” The statement was a certainty on December 4, 1928, the day of the President’s message, the day the Goldman-Sachs Trading Corporation was formed. By the time Walter West was eight months old and settled in Switzerland it was less true.
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