I remembered the girl saying she wanted to talk to me about something. She probably wanted me to help her out financially.
—No.
—She showed me some of her work.
—Any good?
She paused. She was tentative.
—Promising.
We watched each other as another of her artistic judgements hung in the air between us. This one was less contentious than the last.
—I think she needs some help from you. A loan.
—I thought she might.
—You’re a good woman, Gin.
—I’m very fond of her. So is Jack.
—Yes. Jack.
We were back to it. She sat staring at the table and I just plunged right in, and told her what I knew about the night Peg died. I tried to present it as neutrally as I could, the drunken boat trip, the clouds concealing the moon, the coral head waiting in the dark water, and then I asked her the question that had woken me in the middle of the night. What had she meant when she said that if it hadn’t been for Jack Peg would still be alive?
She was staring at me. She looked stunned.
—Gin, that’s a complete fiction.
In her own kitchen, sitting across the table from this woman I had known all my life, I was not combative. I had lived with my brother’s past for so long it was as familiar to me as my own. I knew his account of his own experience was not rigorously objective, but what account is? Any version of as dense a weave of events and feelings and intentions and effects as a life will inevitably be flawed, its stresses and emphases reflecting not the truth—as if there were such a thing—but shapes of bias and denial, rather, crafted by memory in the service of the ego. Jack was no different, locked as he was in the Narcissus posture of the dedicated artist, and I had always taken the pinch of salt, though in fact the appalling guilt with which he had for so long been struggling suggested a mind unwilling to distort or erase the past so as to live with itself more comfortably—!
But now I asked myself if I had been deceived. The history suddenly seemed unsound, the entire edifice unstable. The wind rattled against the windowpanes and I glanced out at the sky, and across the valley the bare trees on the hills above the river. It occurred to me that a clarity of vision was possible here that was not possible in the city, I mean not just visually but intellectually, or spiritually, even. There was less noise, less static, somehow, in the atmosphere. Vera was talking and I began to pay attention once more, and in that cold kitchen, with the wintry sky outside the window, and in the silence of this high place, her words had a terrible stark ring as she spoke about how badly Jack had treated her and Peg in Port Mungo. In the city truth is an elusive bird, as flighty in its way as falsehood is sticky. Too much noise in the city, too many clashing accounts of any given phenomenon, so one learns to be tentative and circumspect. Sceptical, ironical, stoic, detached: this is the urban posture. Up here her statement was clear and sincere, and I had no desire to contradict her.
—Go on.
So she told me. I knew my brother for a driven man, I knew what he had sacrificed in order to make his art. Had I ever properly attempted to imagine how it was to live with such a man? I thought I had; in Port Mungo I thought I’d seen what his dedication cost those who lived with him—that ingrown, negative energy—but I hadn’t seen it properly, not in view of what Vera was now telling me. She spoke of Jack’s cruelty. How sneering and critical he was about her work, and later about Peg's. How difficult he made it for anyone else to work under the same roof. I thought of the vision he had so often talked about, of the art partnership, the American Studio—surely it wasn’t possible that the man who dreamed that dream could be destructive of the work of others?
But it was, apparently. He could belittle Vera in front of other people, call her a wash-out, a has-been, a never-was. Alone with him in Port Mungo she found it difficult to sustain any belief in herself.
—Why didn’t you go?
—I did go.
—But not for good. Why couldn’t you go away and not come back? If he was so dreadful.
—Because of Peg and Anna.
—You couldn’t take them with you?
No, she couldn’t. She didn’t know how to look after children. She was not a motherly sort of a woman. She drank too much. She wanted to travel, she wanted to paint. She had no money. As a child Peg was happy. She knew to keep out of her father’s way during his working hours, and if she did go into the studio she knew to keep quiet. And certainly she was better off in Pelican Road than she would have been bumming round the Caribbean with her mother. So Vera travelled to get away from Jack, and came back for her children.
I sat at her kitchen table and did not know what to say. I thought: But she too has her bias. Doesn’t she exaggerate? Men and women argue! Terrible things are said in the heat of anger! Men and women when angry with each other do not speak a truth-seeking language, they speak adversarially—they prosecute, they defend, they make a case—
I made this case to Vera but she shook her head. It wasn’t quarrelling, she said. Again the quiet tone, the words falling in a silent room like rocks into water, one by one. My brother was a cruel man. Selfish, unreasonable, demanding, he stayed in Port Mungo because there he could play the tyrant, and she, beaten down, without money, made frail and rapidly slipping into alcoholism, she could neither challenge him nor abandon him, not while he still had Peg and, later, Anna. And Peg belonged to him, he had made this abundantly clear. He looked after her, fed her, sheltered her: she was his. And when she grew up she was still his. Peg took my place, said Vera, quietly, and I became the weak one. The child. You understand what I’m saying?
This was difficult to listen to. Again we heard the footsteps on the floorboards above. She sat up and turned towards the door, but nobody appeared. She looked at me and blew out a lungful of air.
—Shall we go out? Or are you too cold to move?
—A walk would warm us up.
So we walked along the road and got the blood moving in our veins, and the conversation of the kitchen table seemed somehow less awful out in the open air. How little I knew my brother after all, it seemed. He was cantankerous, yes, and stubborn, and selfish, but no more so than any serious artist, or so I had thought. Life with Jack was quite tolerable, and I said this.
—You don’t threaten him.
This was true. I didn’t threaten him, I indulged him. I supported him. I had supported him all his life. I thought about the paintings he had made since coming back to New York, during the years in Crosby Street, and then in my house, and I saw again that they were filled with rage, but more than that, a sort of bravura, and an empty bravura at that, they didn’t say anything: these the paintings that coincided with the gradual collapse of his career. The Port Mungo paintings, the work of his so-called tropicalist period, those at least had fed off the colours of the world rather than the colours of his mind, or of his angry, isolated soul. We walked on in silence. I recognized that we had reached the point where we must talk about Peg’s death. We were at a crossroads, I mean we were literally at a junction, where Vera’s road met a road coming in from the east, and where the roads met, a grassy island with a bench overlooked the river. The view was astonishing. We sat in silence for a minute or two.
—Tell me about Johnny Hague, I said.
—Johnny looked after me.
—Was he your lover?
—Gin!
She said my name sharply, with annoyance, as though to say, Listen to what I’m telling you. She said she needed someone to look after her. At times she needed a doctor, often enough there were bruises and cuts after some squalid drunken fight in Pelican Road. Johnny patched up her cuts and he patched up her spirit. He was tender and protective. He loved her. And yes, he was her lover, for some years, early on, but later he was simply a good friend to a woman caught in a ghastly fix, trapped in a destructive relationship and an addiction to drink and unable to get clear of either.
—He
knew Gerald, she said.
—I know.
—They were at King’s together.
—He told me. Was he addicted to morphine?
—He had it under control.
It seemed to go with the territory, to be of the character of Port Mungo, somehow, that the doctor would be addicted to morphine while his friendship, or his unrequited love, rather, sustained a woman driven to alcoholism by an artist too obsessed with his work to pay her any attention.
Suddenly I saw Peg as a scapegoat: an innocent, whose function it was to draw off all these toxins and pacify or even purify the community with her death. She purified it to the extent that Jack and Vera became free of Port Mungo, free to come north and begin again, and Anna too—Anna fortunate to get away from Port Mungo before she too was crippled by the squalor and disorder of their lives down there.
—And Johnny, what became of him?
—He got out in the end. He came up here to see me. I have no idea how he found me, I forgot to ask. Probably through Gerald.
I asked her how that visit had been. He was a funny, dear man, she said. He wasn’t young any more. None of us is young any more. But still the same old Johnny, dreamy, muddled, idealistic, good-hearted, self-indulgent. A gentleman, she said, if that means anything at all these days. Unsettled, looking for a place, unable to stay in Port Mungo, which apparently was becoming unrecognizable as the western Caribbean attracted more and more visitors, and resorts sprang up along the empty beaches. Johnny had stayed in the farmhouse for a few nights. They’d talked about the old days.
Silence, there on our windswept crag high above the Hudson River. Then she began to speak again, staring straight ahead, her hands flat on the boards of the bench. That’s when she told me. It took a few minutes. Calmly and quietly she told me how Peg had become so depressed that she went into the mangroves one night and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She told me how Johnny had been in the bar of the Macaw when Jack came in about ten days after her body was found. He was in a bad way. He had been drinking for days. He had to talk, and whatever antagonism existed between the two men was forgotten in the extremity of Jack’s desperation and need. He began to spill his feelings at the bar, and Johnny took him to a table at the back of the room where they would not be overheard.
What Jack had then told him, Johnny had immediately passed on to Gerald. Since then he had said nothing to anybody until the night he’d sat at Vera’s kitchen table. What he’d told her was this: One night Peg and Jack had sat up drinking—Vera was away, somewhere down the coast—and the more they drank the more distraught Peg had become. Jack’s memory of that part of the evening was more or less intact. But what happened after midnight, about that he was confused. What he thinks happened was that he had at last been forced to agree with her that her life had become an unspeakable horror. And such was the state of drunkenness they had reached, he said—or such the state of clarity, rather, a certain kind of drunkenness can create in the mind, the alcohol rousing a kind of higher sobriety—he had agreed with her that she would be better off dead.
Vera stopped here.
—Jack told Peg, I said slowly, that she would be better off dead. Told his own daughter she’d be better off dead. Why?
—He didn’t know if he said it or not. He said it was possible, given all that had been said already. I don’t have to tell you why. You know why. Gerald told you.
—Oh dear god.
Over the hills on the far bank of the Hudson a hawk hung in the sky, far off in the distance. Tiny bird drifting on the currents of the wind. The bare bleak facts of the thing, coughed out in a Port Mungo bar by a drunken man incapable any longer of keeping to himself the evil he had done. I doubt he ever told anyone about it again, said Vera, and Johnny Hague, whom he had chosen, perversely, to hear his confession, spoke of it only twice: to Gerald, and to herself. And who had Vera told? Only me, she said.
—Not Anna?
—No.
—Anna doesn’t know?
—No.
—Why didn’t you tell her?
—Better she think it my fault than that Jack—
—Jack what?
She wouldn’t say anything more. So I repeated what Gerald had told me in his room at the Park Plaza twenty years before, and she disputed none of it, not even her own guilty awareness of the changes in her daughter, and the suspicions she repressed, or drowned, rather, in floods of booze, until the day Johnny Hague sat at her kitchen table and told her what Jack had told him in the bar of the Hotel Macaw.
—That was the end. I had to stop drinking, I had to get straight. I couldn’t see Jack after that. Not until last week, or whenever it was.
—Because you’d heard about Anna.
—I couldn’t miss Anna, could I? And you two were keeping her to yourselves.
—I should have called you.
—Yes you should, said Vera hoarsely.
—So you’re telling me that it started, I said, this thing between Jack and Peg, before Anna was born, and went on after? And she killed herself because of it?
—Yes. And there’s more.
—What?
—It was Jack took her out to the mangroves.
That was quite enough for me. The entire edifice rested on the word of Johnny Hague, and Johnny Hague hated Jack!
—I don’t believe it, I said. I don’t believe a single bloody word of it. Not a bloody word!
Chapter Eighteen
I caught an early-evening train. I got into Penn Station after dark and found a cab. There was nobody in the sitting room or in the kitchen. It was Dora’s night off. I poured myself a drink. The silence in the house was not comfortable. I paced about downstairs, responding to a restlessness, or a disturbance, rather, in the atmosphere of the house. Something had happened—this thought struck me all at once, and with considerable force. While I had been away, while Jack and Anna were alone, something had happened here. No, it was me. I was rattled, anxious and desperately weary. I had been numb on the train, unable even to begin to assimilate what I had heard that afternoon. I remember once thinking, with regard to Peg’s death, that there are no mysteries, only secrets. Only people who keep secrets. Nothing had changed. People were still keeping secrets.
I tried to read the newspaper. Normally I enjoy having the house to myself, for me solitude is a pleasure. On those rare occasions when I am alone here, I indulge the pleasure of possession—the house is mine. Not shared, mine. Not this night. This night the house was by no means mine, others had taken possession of it, in a manner that was not yet apparent to me, and had then gone out. Or were in their rooms, though they had not responded when I went upstairs and called them. Nor was there anybody in the studio: I had seen no lights on up there when I got out of my cab. For some reason there was a large kitchen knife on the windowsill, and nobody had drawn the blinds. I drew them now. Then for some minutes I sat down with the paper, until I heard steps on the staircase.
I became unaccountably alarmed at that descending footfall. I was unable to say a word. I sat frozen in my armchair, half turned towards the door.
Why could I not call out?
Anna appeared in the doorway.
—Oh hi, Gin.
I stared at her, the tumult still working in me.
—Anna.
She flung herself into an armchair and would not look at me. She chewed her thumbnail. When she did lift her eyes to mine I was unable to read her expression. I felt we were back where we’d been when she first moved in, awkward with each other and unable to make conversation.
—Is everything all right? I said.
—Not really.
—What’s the matter?
No answer to this. A kind of morose shrug, eyes averted once more, then out with the tobacco and the rolling papers. I felt I was in a dream. With trembling fingers she assembled an untidy cigarette and lit it.
—Gin.
—Yes Anna.
—Jack’s dead.
I don’t
suppose I shall ever forget that moment. How to describe the—lurch—the mind makes when it is given information so utterly unanticipated—a lurch into the void, as though one has stepped off the high ledge of a building, and in one’s freefall, clutching at the oddest twigs—
—But I’ve only been gone a few hours, I said.
How could he be dead when I’d been away so short a time? My words made no sense to Anna either. I was sitting forward, staring at the girl. I became aware that my mouth was open. I shut it.
—Where is he?
—Upstairs.
But I didn’t move. I suppose I was in shock. It took a minute for me to organize an appropriate question.
—What makes you think he’s dead?
—I better tell you what happened.
—Have you told anyone else?
—I was waiting for you.
So she began to talk, and I sat there attempting to make sense of this girl’s telling me that my brother was dead upstairs. I didn’t know what she was saying. I interrupted her.
—Is he in his bedroom?
—No, he’s in the studio.
I told her to go on. I suppose the reason I didn’t want to go upstairs was that then I would have to confront it, whatever it was she was talking about. Down here in the sitting room it was not real. I think I expected to see Jack appear in the doorway at any moment. Then it would be clear that this was all some new oddness on the part of this odd girl. She was telling me that after I’d gone Jack had asked her to pose for him again. He wanted to work on the portrait. She didn’t really want to but it seemed so important to him that she’d agreed. She went up to the studio in her bathrobe, as she’d so often done before, and when he was ready she’d slipped it off and stood in front of the hanging drape in the pose he had taught her.
I nodded my head. This was all clear enough.
But he was behaving so strangely. He was muttering to himself and she couldn’t understand what he was saying. He would suddenly turn towards the window and stand very still, as though listening to somebody speaking to him from the building across the street. She grew more and more uncomfortable but when she moved he shouted at her to stay where she was. After this she became frightened.
Port Mungo Page 22