At St. Clement’s, what kept me going was that some of these children thrived, even blossomed, in the art classes that Rachel and I taught. They fought against math and grammar and languages. Some of them even refused to play sports. But St. Clement’s, wisely, stressed art instruction; at least a year of studio art was required of all students. Through art, they were freed—if only for those few hours every week—to say or do or explore anything. For many of them, it was the first time in their lives that they weren’t afraid to be themselves.
It seemed wrong, at first, that the students not only enjoyed my classes, but began to like me, as well. I didn’t want anyone to like me. I wanted to punish myself, I wanted my life to be unfulfilling in every way. I don’t know what I had expected, what kind of teacher I had planned to be—some stern and strictly functional automaton who would give a prim lecture, a brief critique, then disappear out the door. At St. Clement’s, of course, that was not an option. To punish myself would mean I must punish the children, who more than anything needed the contact of humans who cared about them. I knew I was going to be changed by that school, the place was going to invade my heart whether I wanted it to or not. In each of those needy children I saw my daughter, and I felt that the only way I could even begin to redeem myself was to give them whatever they wanted from me—to give them myself.
This was dramatically illustrated in a little boy named Timmy. Half a dozen circular scars from cigarette burns dotted the backs of his hands; there were rope burns on his wrists and jagged white gashes across one cheek, just below his eye; he limped; his hearing was impaired. He was the saddest child I ever met. Six, but small for his age, and thin, as most of our children were, he never spoke. We were told that he screamed in his sleep. He was terrified of everyone. He would actually shake with fear when I tried to get him to draw with a crayon.
Then, after a few weeks, he seemed to get used to me, and after a few more weeks he wouldn’t leave my side. Gradually, all he wanted was to sit on my lap. Nothing else satisfied him, and he would cry if I had to put him down to do something else. He was like a baby, or an insistent puppy, who couldn’t understand the inconvenience of what he demanded. It became increasingly difficult for me to do any teaching in the classes Timmy was in. Eventually, I requested a conference with Mr. Munro, the headmaster, and Mary Kirk, the school’s head social worker. It was decided that for a while I would do nothing for an hour each afternoon but sit with Timmy on my lap.
“He trusts you, you see,” Mary said. “I feel it’s important that we capitalize on that.”
“We can try it for as long as you can stand it, Wynn,” said Mr. Munro.
“I can stand it,” I said. “As long as he needs it.”
And so after lunch every day, while the children were in their rooms for the official rest periods, I would sit in a big comfortable chair in Mr. Munro’s office, and lift Timmy onto my lap. And we would sit. And sit. That was all. He demanded nothing more. He didn’t want to be told a story, he didn’t fall asleep, he didn’t move. He wanted only to snuggle there peacefully, perfectly still, his head tucked beneath my chin, one of his hands holding one of mine, his skinny legs dangling down like sticks.
For me, that hour or so with Timmy every day was a kind of therapy. I won’t say it did me as much good as it did Timmy; to say that my own horrors in any way equaled his would be nonsense. But that time was incredibly important to me. I was never bored or impatient. Even in the summer, sweating from the contact with Timmy’s warm little body, I never wished him elsewhere. We would sit there, breathing in unison, and the time would go by in a dream. I was always astonished when Mary poked her head in to tell me it was three o’clock, and I had to teach my watercolor class.
At first Timmy cried when he was taken away, but it wasn’t long before he could accept it. He knew he could come back the next day, and the next. Those quiet afternoons were perhaps the only good thing he had ever had to look forward to—surely the only affection he had ever received. After a few months, he was talking, and beginning to play with the other children. At the end of a year, he was well enough to be placed with relatives in Cornwall. The day he left I broke down and wept—the first tears I had shed in a very long time.
St. Clement’s saved me. Rachel, Mary Kirk, Henry Munro. Timmy. Poor, doomed, suicidal Violet who could paint rings around me. A physically and sexually abused girl who went from white-faced catatonia to an Oxford scholarship. A pair of twins—Derek and Richard—who had been raised in a cage and, until Mary began working with them, knew almost no words but obscenities. The green and fragrant garden behind the brick buildings, the predictable routine, the amazing art the children made—all this gave me more than I can say. Working with the kids at St. Clement’s was far from a constant joy, it was so often frustrating, difficult, insanely demanding, and futile. And sometimes a child was just plain hateful, or terrifying. We didn’t succeed with every one; our failures were frequent and heartbreaking. But we saw many of them become happier and more trusting under our care, and go on to lead something approaching normal lives.
• • •
I had never planned how long I would be away, but I ended up teaching at St. Clement’s School for four years.
I wrote to my father every week, phoned him when I could afford it, and twice a year I flew to Florida for a visit. He had begun to regain his good spirits, and he didn’t talk so much about my mother any more. He flirted with a well-off, three-times-widowed woman named Sophie Hope, whom he met at the marina, and eventually they began dating. She was a fisherman like Dad—an overweight, talkative, pretty woman with a loud laugh, a little older than he and very different from my mother. She called my father Jim. She told me, in gory detail, about her two face-lifts, showing me the white scar under her jawline, and once she took me aside and whispered to me that my father was really amazing for his age, if I knew what she meant. She wore red lipstick and blue eye shadow, and favored printed dresses with plunging necklines that showed off her freckled cleavage. She reminded me a bit of Anna Rosa.
Dad seemed genuinely happy with Sophie, though his health wasn’t good. He still complained about his arthritis, his chest pains. I could see him getting older, more frail every time I visited, and he would fall asleep in his chair after dinner. This was especially disturbing to me, who was used to seeing my father rise at dawn, work all day, and then play poker or chess far into the evening.
And, of course, watching my father age, I saw myself getting older, too.
On those trips back home, I never got in touch with Patrick, and I waited, half in hope, half dreading it, for my father to say Patrick had phoned or written him, looking for me. It never happened. Nor did my old friend Gwen mention him in her infrequent letters. Or Jeanie, with whom Patrick and I had stayed friendly after she and Andrew married and moved to San Francisco.
I wrote to Marietta, who was working as an assistant producer at a very minor studio in Hollywood, giving her my new address and explaining that Patrick and I had broken up; I told her I couldn’t talk about it yet. She wrote back: Please don’t push me away, Wynn. When you’re ready, tell me all about it—please. I never did, of course; I implied something vague about his work coming between us, and she said she was sorry, but she wasn’t surprised. The idea that Patrick would let his work separate us seemed a particularly vicious untruth but I couldn’t be honest about it even to Marietta. We wrote to each other regularly, and I sometimes expected a letter from her saying Patrick had written to ask if she knew where I was. But there was no evidence that Patrick had ever tried to track me down, and I was grateful to him for respecting what I had asked in the note I left: Please don’t ask me why. He was, of course, better off without me. I knew that, and I assumed he did, too.
Still, I wondered constantly what he thought, how he had taken it, where he was, did he ever think of me. I bought a small, carved wooden box at a junk shop near the zoo, and into it I put the Mexican turquoise beads, the tiny stuffed cat Patrick had b
ought me at a Village street fair, a few clippings about him I got from art magazines. He was in a major group show, he got a Guggenheim. One of his sculptures was purchased by a Japanese banking firm for their New York office; with this notice there was a small photograph of him, a side view, standing beside a huge metal assemblage. It could have been any tall, unsmiling, dark-haired man, and yet of course when I looked at it—the set of his head, the angle of his shoulders—I saw the man I would always love, the man I had abandoned, and I touched my fingers to his face, his mouth, his body, forcing myself to remember, to want him back, and to understand deep in my soul that I would never have him.
I kept the box on the table beside my bed; it was the last thing I saw at night, and the first thing I saw in the morning. I wish I could say I was able to laugh at the pathetic absurdity of it—of clinging to these shards of our past while Patrick, it was obvious, was getting on perfectly well with his life. But I didn’t laugh. I didn’t cry, either. I just sat there with the beads wound through my fingers, the little cat pressed to my cheek, the bits of paper spread out around me.
• • •
Painting in New York had been difficult, even humiliating. In London I had renounced painting, as I had renounced Patrick. I didn’t miss putting paint on canvas the way I missed, daily, hourly, the presence of Patrick in my life. But it was harder than I had expected. I was always working with paints, involved daily with the production of art. Many of my older students were incredibly gifted—almost as if the suffering they had endured qualified them in some subtle way to see more sharply into the world, as if art had been given to them as a compensation. I knew from my own experience as a student that the best and most democratic way to teach was to paint along with them, and to let them critique my work as I did theirs. In a way, I was sorry to miss out on their honesty, even their brutality. They could be cruelly tactless with each other. I thought sometimes that if I allowed myself to paint at St. Clement’s, my paintings could no longer be dishonest: I would have no choice but to paint what was in my heart.
At the end of the day, when my student helpers and I tidied the studio and cleaned the brushes, I would breathe in the smells of turpentine and oil and have such nostalgia for the life of a painter that I would nearly break down. And that was the way it should be, I reminded myself. My child died so I could paint. Denying myself was the point.
• • •
Rachel was married a year after I arrived in England. Will was in his late thirties, ten years older than Rachel; they resembled each other, both short, energetic, and sandy haired with chubby, angelic faces. Will had a struggling rare-book business in Bloomsbury, but he was a painter, too, and he and Rachel used to invite me to go with them on painting excursions. We would ride the bus out of the city on our days off, to places as close as Kew or as far away as the Suffolk downs, and they would paint while I sat under a tree with a book.
Rachel, of course, asked me why I wasn’t painting.
“I need a break,” I said. “It was going so badly in New York. I think I just need to quit for a while and recharge.”
“Maybe you were too influenced by Patrick’s work,” she said.
“I often thought that was true,” I admitted.
“I miss seeing your paintings.”
I laughed. “I don’t.”
“Is that why you left him so suddenly, Wynn? Because of your painting?”
I had lied to Marietta in a letter, but I couldn’t lie to Rachel face-to-face. Several times I was, in fact, sorely tempted to tell her the story. When I first arrived, and she asked what had happened, I said only that we had broken up, that it was painful and I couldn’t talk about it. I decided as time went on that it was unfair to her to be so secretive, and so that night I told her the bare bones of the truth: that I’d done something shameful when I was young that had terrible repercussions, and decided that I couldn’t simply go on with my happy life. I needed to make a change in it. And that was why I left New York: to atone.
She looked at me doubtfully. “Did you say atone?”
“Yes. I mean—I’ve always been so selfish, Rachel. I wanted to do something for someone else for a change.”
“And what did Patrick say to that?”
“I didn’t tell him. I just left.”
Her eyes widened. “And he didn’t know why?”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t tell him. He would have hated me. I could stand anything but that.”
“Patrick?” Her voice was incredulous. “What do you take him for? Unless I’m remembering him wrong, Patrick couldn’t hate you for some foolish thing you did a million years ago.”
Patrick. In a rush, his image came back to me: his face, his broad back, his golden-brown eyes, his smile. I remembered the first time he told me he loved me, when we were in Mexico and he fastened the turquoise beads around my neck and I made him say the words. I love you, Wynn. Te amo.
“Patrick couldn’t hate you,” Rachel said again.
“Then he would have been wrong.”
Rachel stared at me. “Wynn, what on earth was this dreadful thing you did?”
I only shook my head. I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t. Maybe I should have overcome it, but my mother’s reticence lived in me. We dropped the subject. It was obvious that Rachel disapproved of my mad flight, my silence, my assumptions, but I was convinced that if she had the whole story she would agree I’d done the right thing. And if she didn’t, I didn’t really care. I had done what I had to do, and I didn’t want to—couldn’t—discuss it. I didn’t want to be talked out of my feelings of self-disgust, my sense of horror at the horror I had perpetrated.
In my three years in London I had two brief romances. The first was with an absurdly self-important young solicitor named Colin, who was tall, toothy, bearded, and always hungry. He and I took up cookery together, concocting elaborate meals in his kitchen, a sauce-spattered cookbook open on the counter in front of us and Colin, in a filthy white apron, chopping and slicing, chatting all the time, like a lean, male, British Julia Child with a big ego.
By the time I quit seeing Colin I was a pretty good cook, and when I began dating Brian—a shy, balding little man who painted picky dry-brush watercolors of quaint architectural treasures and sold them to tourists—I often made dinner for him on Saturday nights. He couldn’t cook at all. He would bring wine and sit in the kitchen talking to me while I cooked. The food was immeasurably better, but the ritual reminded me so vividly of those awful rice-centered messes I used to concoct for Patrick on Queensberry Street that I sometimes became too depressed to eat.
I drifted away from each of them, puzzling them, I’m sure, first by my passivity, then by my indifference. It wasn’t that I didn’t give them a chance. Both those men had their virtues, and in spite of myself I did have fun in their company. But the twin truths of my life were the knowledge of my daughter’s fate, and the wrenching pain of my separation from Patrick; those two private wounds made everything else seem trivial. Sometimes I’d go out with Will and Rachel and get roaring drunk in some pub, flirting halfheartedly with the men I met and becoming moderately proficient at darts. But usually, when I wasn’t working, I preferred to be alone in my room, listening to the lions roar.
• • •
On one of my visits to Florida, my father and I had dinner with Sophie at her rather posh condo—an ultramodern space crammed incongruously with the torrent of kitsch Sophie had apparently been collecting since her girlhood: Hummel figurines, silk flowers, fancy sofa pillows, stuffed animals, music boxes, china cats, her first husband’s World War II medals, a wooden rack displaying souvenir spoons, a glass case containing dolls in different national costumes. The living room windows had a view of the golf course where her third husband had dropped dead one day trying to get his ball out of a sand trap, an event she talked about with her handkerchief to her eyes.
It was odd at first to see my father in the midst of the jumble, sharing the couch with a pair of teddy bears in
little sweaters, but it was clear that he felt comfortable at her house, and I could see how its cozy warmth could be like an embrace for a lonely widower. Under her influence, he had changed in small but significant ways: He was wearing his hair longer, and had acquired a wardrobe of bright bow ties. He played country music on his new CD player, with a special fondness for Emmylou Harris and Lyle Lovett. And once I heard him muttering to himself, “Now where the fuck did I put my glasses?” I sometimes thought that without Sophie my father would have wasted away to a dry stick of a man, and died of dullness.
After dinner—one of Sophie’s typical casseroles, heavy on the sour cream—we got talking about my childhood. Sophie, for all her husbands, had no children, and she could get very sentimental about me. “Your father has told me so often about what a dear little girl you were, Wynn,” she said. She leaned forward and laid her plump hand, with its bright pink nails, on my arm. “And every time I think about that sad thing that happened to you, my heart just goes out to you, honey. What a terrible experience for a young girl to have to go through.”
I stared at her, then at my father. Dad was looking down at his plate, and I was sure he would clear his throat and change the subject: Yes, and then there was the time Wynn won that art contest, she couldn’t have been more than four . . .
But he surprised me. He said, “I think about that often, Wynn. And I’ll never get over wishing we’d handled it differently. We let you down when you wanted to keep that baby, and it took you away from us. I know it did.”
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