Vigil for a Stranger

by Kitty Burns Florey

  But he would get very depressed about his abilities, and I knew he was chagrined at not being able to excel at something he loved so much. Once when I walked in on him he was sitting there on the floor, the room full of clear yellow light the way the Bellini painting was full of light. He was working on some flashy runs (the kind of stuff Big Bill does in “Pig Meat Strut”) and it was sounding pretty pathetic. When I walked in on him, he put down the guitar, leapt to his feet, and picked up the skull (stolen ages before from the biology lab) that he kept on his bookcase. He held it up and declaimed, “The last poor oryx. I knew him, Horatio”—one of his bad puns, the punchline to a long buildup about an African antelope called an oryx becoming extinct.

  I’d heard the joke a dozen times (that and his un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq joke, about the three drowned French cats), and that particular occasion wouldn’t, in fact, have stayed in my mind if it hadn’t been for the way Pierce looked standing there in the light—like an earthier, more cynical St. Francis, the look on his face silly and rueful and intelligent and fond of me all at once.

  I didn’t mention the guitar-playing. I said, “I wish I had my sketch pad, you look great.”

  He said, “Damned right I do, and I should have had the fucking part, too.” His rival in the Oberlin Dramatic Society, the devastating Jerry August, had played Hamlet the spring before; Pierce was Horatio, and it was one of those things he never got over. He hated Jerry, I have no doubt, until he died.

  “Quit brooding over it.”

  “I’m the Hamlet type, brooding is my middle name. That’s only one reason I should have had the part.”

  He replaced the skull on the bookcase, and then he put on a Roosevelt Sykes record, and we sat down to smoke a joint together. Gradually, the brilliant late afternoon light faded, and we went out somewhere or Charlie came in or someone else came in, I can’t remember, it was just an ordinary day, but it came back to me (what he said, how he looked, the skull, the music) as I stood there at the Frick, so vividly that my knees felt weak and I had to leave the room and sit down out in the hall on a bench in front of the Ingres painting of the Comtesse D’Haussonville.

  My mind cleared. I was vaguely aware of the gurgle of the fountain behind me, and of the maroon-suited guard, hands clasped behind his back, who was eyeing me in a concerned way—as if I looked not distracted but dangerous. I stared at the Comtesse, at her perfect, plump arm and her red hair-ribbon. She stared back at me with haughty interest. I thought of the woman on the train, Alison Kaye, and her appointment with Orin Pierce on Thursday. I saw the faceless, hatted man on the corner. Sentences fell into my consciousness like those brainteasers whose random pieces of information will, on examination, make up a perfectly logical statement:

  Pierce never wore a hat in his life.

  Pierce died in an accident in New Mexico twenty years ago.

  For various reasons, including Silvie’s desire to discuss Denis with me, I am in a mildly excitable condition today.

  Twelve years ago, I had a vision of my brother Robbie.

  Pierce loved me.

  The conclusion, not logical, but necessary, that I drew from these facts was that Pierce was alive, he was in New York, and I had just glimpsed him wearing a hat and getting into a taxi on Fifth Avenue.

  I took a deep breath and got up and made my way down the marble stairs to the women’s room to bathe my face with cold water, and then I went back into the museum to look at Rembrandt’s painting of the Polish rider.

  Chapter Two

  My belle-mère lived on Central Park West, in a building with a striped awning in front and a doorman dozing inside by the mailboxes. He ignored me. I took the elevator up to 8G and when Silvie opened the door, I said, “You know, Jack the Ripper could come up here with a knife dripping blood in each hand and your doorman wouldn’t even notice.”

  She shrugged and said, not quite irrelevantly, “I’ve lived here twenty-four years.” She gave me a hug and said, “Come in, darling.”

  “Bon jour, Silvie,” I said. I pointed toward the window. “Comment c’est beau au dehors! I mean, il fait beau, n’est-ce pas?”

  She stepped back to look at me. “I’m not sure about that haircut.” She touched my hair, gingerly, and then my face, as if to be sure it was still me (round cheeks, brown eyes, freckles, Roman nose) under the crew cut. “I think you need more hair—for balance,” she added—an enigmatic statement, but I knew what she meant (I am tall and big-boned), and imagined her thinking pinhead in French and trying to come up with the English equivalent.

  “It was my hairdresser’s idea,” I said.

  “I’m reserving judgment,” said Silvie. “But I like your skirt very much. Mmm.… And that sweater is very good with the belt.”

  “Comment ça va, Silvie?” I asked her. “Moi, je vais bien.”

  Lunch was ready, and we sat down to it: Silvie’s usual canned soup and crackers, with celery sticks. Silvie couldn’t be bothered with cooking. There were dozens of things she couldn’t be bothered with: shopping, reading, going to movies, donating blood, giving dinner parties, having pets, taking photographs, sending Christmas cards, wearing a watch, finishing crossword puzzles. She was married to Fred Rafferty who, in spite of his name, was a professor of French literature at Columbia. Her first husband left her for a minor Swedish movie star, and his successor (Emile’s papa) dropped dead of a heart attack, dramatically, on the Champs-Elysée when Emile was a toddler. She was fond of Fred, possibly because he worshipped her, and I believe she was very happy up there on the eighth floor in her luxury pad. But how she filled her time was a constant mystery to me.

  “Put some crackers in that,” she said to me, and I obediently crumbled a Ritz into my minestrone. We ate at a tiny table by the window in the cluttered, shabby living room (decorating and putting things away were two more things Silvie couldn’t be bothered with) because the dining room table was covered with what Silvie called Fred’s junk (his laptop, plus the books and papers and notecards he was using for his book on Stendhal) and the maid was out with the flu. Over the mantel through the French doors was one of my paintings, a large, semi-realistic watercolor of Central Park through Silvie’s window that was very much like the view visible today: the trees in full, gaudy autumn bloom and beyond them a beautifully jagged grey-and-black skyline.

  “The soup is good?” Silvie asked.

  “It’s very good.”

  “Maybe a bit on the salty side.”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “Well.” She stopped to push her sleeves up her thin, bangled wrists, then said, “Denis is applying to Yale.”

  I was still thinking soup—used though I was to Silvie’s hit-and-run method of conversation. “Yale?” I repeated, while I processed what she had said.

  “Yes. He seems quite set on it.”

  Well, of course. It made perfectly good sense. In all his years living in New Haven teaching drawing and art history at a suburban art school, Emile’s only contact with Yale had been his Sunday afternoons looking at paintings in the Yale Art Gallery, but, when people asked where he lived, he loved to say, “New Haven,” and give his smug smile while the words “I’m at Yale, of course,” hung silently in the air. He had revered the place, for no reason except that he was an outsider—a nobody—and also a snob. I was one of the few people on earth who knew that his degree was from a commercial art school in Albany.

  “And what does Emile think of that?” I asked Silvie. I could see him passing his Yale hangup on to Denis, as he would pass on his taste in ties or his pronunciation of certain words, but I couldn’t imagine him actually encouraging our son to return to the States, particularly to the city where I lived.

  Silvie said, “Oh, he’s all for it, believe it or not,” and then she smiled. “Emile is in love. He’s getting married again. A very nice young woman, twenty-nine, a dress designer.”

  I felt nothing—not jealousy, not chagrin, and not one soupçon of good will. There was no regret and no b
enevolence in my feeling for Emile. It had taken a while, but my only emotion toward my ex-mari was relief that he was gone. His French dress-designer chippie was welcome to him.

  “And so he’d just as soon get rid of Denis?”

  Silvie frowned. “I wouldn’t put it quite that way.”

  “How would you put it?” I asked, and then I repented. “Oh, I know Emile is fond of Denis. And he spoils him rotten.” Silvie smiled at this, approving. “I’m sure if Denis wants to go to Yale he’s not going to forbid it. I’m just wondering what Emile thinks of Denis and me being in the same city. I mean, for twelve years he’s done his best to keep us apart.”

  Silvie considered this. I could see her wondering if she should object to what I said, and deciding that it was fruitless. “I think he’s reconciled to it,” was what she finally said. “After all, Denis is nearly eighteen, and he’s strong-minded.”

  “I can’t believe he’s old enough to go to college,” I said—though it was one of those automatic, tempus fugit remarks, and not what I really felt at all. I had no trouble believing seventeen-and-a-half years had passed since the morning I gave birth to him, and nearly thirteen years had gone by since he had lived with me. Three years since I’d even set eyes on him. The time had passed swiftly, as time always does, but the years had been long nonetheless.

  In those twelve years, I had seen my son three times: when he was eight, when he was ten, and when he was fourteen. I had talked to him on the phone only once—it hadn’t worked out; we were both tongue-tied, and the connection was bad. But we had exchanged innumerable letters. Dear Maman and Cher Denis, over and over, at least one a week, since that first visit when he was eight. I still possessed every one of his letters, in his always improving but still eccentric and Frenchified English—from the laboriously printed early ones with their magic-marker pictures of dogs and spacemen, to the last several, typed on Emile’s fancy new Macintosh. I kept them jumbled together in the capacious bottom drawer of my desk, and I got them out and reread them often: it was a constant source of refreshment to me, to open the drawer and choose a couple of letters at random and read them over before bed at night, or when I stopped painting to have a cup of tea, or when I was bored or unhappy or missing him, missing my baby, my beautiful young son.

  I absorbed, very suddenly, the impact of what Silvie said. “And so he may go to Yale! My God, that’s wonderful, Silvie, I can’t believe it.”

  She smiled and patted her lips with her napkin. “If he gets in, of course.”

  “Do you think there’s any doubt?”

  “There’s always doubt. Look at poor little Hilary.” Hilary was Fred’s granddaughter, who had her heart set on Harvard and ended up at SUNY Binghamton. “And Brian, out there in Minnesota breaking his heart.” Brian, slightly less tragic, had gotten into Carleton but not Swarthmore. Fred had seventeen grandchildren, and Silvie had become an expert on the quirks of college admission requirements. “They say Yale is getting as choosy as Harvard. Fourteen per cent, that’s all they take. And kids in America can take those SAT prep courses. There’s nothing like that in Paris, darling.”

  “But Denis has done awfully well, Silvie. Plus he has his trumpet, the youth orchestra, all that. And I’m sure it’s an advantage to be French. They like to have an interesting mix.”

  Silvie lowered her eyes and looked into her soup. I noticed, as I always did, how beautiful she was. Her eyelashes were impossibly long and curly, like insect legs; she had high cheekbones and a full, perfect mouth and a straight nose and coarse grayish-blonde hair done up in a messy bun. She was wrinkled, of course—she was sixty-something—but even her wrinkles were delicate and tasteful, as if someone who loved her had etched them, reluctantly, into the soft skin of her face. Emile looked nothing like her—his father must have been a dark, hairy, thin-faced, saturnine sort of fellow.

  “What I wondered is if you know anybody,” Silvie said, raising her blue eyes to my face.

  “Know anybody where?”

  “At Yale, Christine. In the admissions office.”

  “God, Silvie, I’m certainly not going to go down to Yale and try to convince them they should let my son in.” But I would, I thought. I would if I could.

  She sighed. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world, Chris.” An expression like dog-eat-dog sounded hilarious in Silvie’s accent. “Without connections—” She gave her Gallic shrug. “Rien.”

  “I have faith in Denis,” I said, crumbling another cracker. “He’ll get in. Where else is he applying?”

  I thought, even if he ends up at Brown or Amherst or Columbia he’ll be near me, and then while Silvie rattled on about the merits and demerits of various schools, I began to get cold feet. What if we didn’t get along? What if he hated me when he got to know me? What if he came over here to school and refused to see me? Or saw me only out of a sense of duty? And why hadn’t he written to me about his desire to go to Yale? Silvie had heard it from Emile: maybe he was spreading the rumor so that I would anticipate Yale and get slapped down with the Sorbonne or Grenoble.

  “And I just don’t think Oberlin would be right for him,” Silvie said. “No offense, darling. But out in the middle of the midwest like that, after living in Paris. It would be worse for him even than for Brian, who after all is from Pittsburgh.” She gave a little shudder. “I think Denis might find Ohio hard to survive.”

  We went on like that for a while, through the minestrone and the crumbled-up crackers, the celery sticks, the instant coffee and tangerines and Pepperidge Farm gingermen and—Silvie’s little vice—the lunch-size snifter of Courvoisier.

  “And now you’re off to see this gallery man,” she said to me at the door. “You’re having a show in New York, that’s so wonderful.”

  “I might be having a show. Someday. How did you know?”

  She smiled archly. “I have my methods, don’t I?”

  “Really.”

  “Well—James told me.”

  “When were you talking to James?”

  “Last night. I called him at the restaurant. I needed to know how you would take my news. I wasn’t sure whether to tell you or not—about Denis. But James said you would take it very well, you would be thrilled. And so you are, I’m happy to see.”

  I said, “Silvie, I am not an invalid or a nut case. I have been a perfectly stable member of society for a long time. I’m in much better shape mentally than Emile ever was, believe me. I refuse to have you check up on me like that. What did you think I was going to do? Throw myself out the window? Go back to New Haven and plant bombs at Yale?”

  Silvie smiled. “Christine, you are so extreme, chérie. Please. Don’t blame me. I have only your welfare at heart. And don’t blame James, certainly. He is so sweet. I made him swear not to tell you I called.” It was true: James was the one I was angry at. He should have told me. Silvie laid a hand on my arm. “Don’t be mad. It’s just that everything is so difficult with you and Emile. Everything is so delicate.”

  “This has nothing to do with him,” I said stiffly. “It’s between me and Denis.”

  “Actually, as long as you’re happy about it, it’s between Denis and Yale, I’m afraid.” She smiled dreamily. “Won’t it be exciting? To have our boy right here with us?”

  During the cab ride to the Aurora Gallery, I took out my wallet and looked at the latest photograph of Denis—a lycée picture. He wasn’t smiling, he wore a white shirt and regulation tie, and his steady gaze was slightly mocking. I preferred candid shots of him, but I didn’t get many of those: they would have involved Emile and his camera, and I could imagine him refusing to take photographs just so I couldn’t have one. Denis had sent me one taken by a friend, of himself, in jeans and a t-shirt, straddling a bicycle. I had another, of Denis in a group of students in ski clothes, that Silvie had given me. From what I could see, he had grown tall and broad-shouldered, and every time I looked at his photographs I was struck by his increasing resemblance to my brother Robbie.

  George Dres
cher at the Aurora Gallery on Greene Street was a big fan of my work. A great watercolorist, he said, was rare—especially a painter like me, who had wonderful technique and didn’t insist on applying it only to flowers and landscapes. George used to operate a gallery in New Haven—I was once in a group show there—and now he was trying to make a go of it in Manhattan.

  He was succeeding, I thought when I walked in. The gallery was on the fourth floor of a landmark building, and it was pristine and bustling. George specialized in works on paper, and the show that was up was a series of startling woodcuts of ferocious, bejewelled animals—at least half of them bore tiny “sold” dots. I walked around and looked at them before I gave my name to the woman at the desk. George had asked me to come to New York so he could show me the actual physical space and we could discuss the possibility of my showing with him. He came to meet me with his arms outstretched as if a massive hug were coming up, but he only took my hand and shook it hard. “This is Christine Ward,” he said to the woman at the desk (she was Japanese and anorexic, dressed in chic, shapeless black) as if I were a celebrity. The woman smiled at me blankly, and George hustled me into his office.

  “So how are you, sweetie?” he asked. “What’s new? What’s going on in the provinces? What have you been up to?”

  George’s office was spare but expensive, with a table made of red marble, Italian-looking chairs, and what had to be a Picasso drawing on the wall. I felt slightly dazed from the events of the morning and the cognac at Silvie’s and the luxury of George’s gallery. His New Haven place had been located over a copy shop on Elm Street. “Oh, I don’t know, George,” I said. “I just found out my son is coming to Yale.”