Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

The envelope was not sealed. Inside was one sheet of paper, densely covered in my mother’s handwriting that was as meticulous as typescript. I read it slowly:

  Wynn dear,

  I’m writing a letter I may never send. Maybe I’ll destroy it as soon as it’s written. Or maybe I won’t, and you’ll find it somewhere years from now, when I’m dead. Or maybe someday I’ll be able to sit down with you and say what I’m about to write. I hope I can do that. But I know myself, and I’m afraid I never will, and so I have to write this.

  I need to tell you I’m sorry, and to ask you to forgive me. I wish I could have let you find a way to keep the baby. I know how much you wanted that, and I disappointed you. Yes, there were things we could have done. But I discouraged you because I knew that was right. I have to say I was afraid of that baby. I am aware of your capacity for devotion, and for passion, and for uncompromising love. I know those things about you, Wynn. I was afraid that motherhood would take you over, you would give up your soul to that baby, and you would forget you’re an artist before anything. Motherhood! You were only sixteen, my daughter. A child yourself. Life is complex enough without adding teenage motherhood to it.

  The baby haunts me every day, the little girl with your face. But that doesn’t change my mind about what we did. I just hope that someday you’ll forgive me, maybe when you have a daughter of your own. And I hope that your life will be happy. You grew up too fast, you grew away from Daddy and me. Don’t think I don’t know that, and don’t think I don’t regret it. I only wish—

  It broke off there.

  • • •

  This letter shattered me. I kept going back to that day in the hospital when we had simply stared at that baby, she and I. Saying nothing. Now I had seen her madness in print, I knew exactly what she had been thinking. I was afraid that motherhood would take you over and you would forget you’re an artist before anything.

  And look at me now, Mother, I thought. I was not an artist. I would never be an artist. My mother’s insane ambition ruined my life, and my daughter’s. She made me give her up; by giving her up, I caused her to die; her death made it impossible for me to paint. There was a poisonous satisfaction in plotting out this circle of waste and futility. I hoped my mother, sitting in her particular, complicated purgatory, was aware of what she had wrought. I hoped the knowledge ate away at her worse than any flames of hell.

  One sentence stayed in my mind: I just hope that someday you’ll forgive me, maybe when you have a daughter of your own. The heartlessness of it. I had a daughter of my own, I thought. I had a daughter! And thanks to you my daughter is dead.

  I ripped the letter into tiny pieces and burned them in the kitchen sink.

  • • •

  I lingered in Key Largo for nearly two weeks, packing and cleaning and putting my father’s house on the market, sitting alone in restaurants eating fish called snook and grunt and mutton snapper. I wasn’t sleeping well, and when I did sleep I had strange, unsettling dreams about the Edna Quinlan Home, about my mother on her deathbed, one horrible nightmare about a dead and bloody child. But it was hard for me to leave. I wanted to get over the bitterness I felt, the pure devastating anger, and I couldn’t find a way. I wanted to see Sophie, but she was visiting friends up north for Christmas. I needed someone, and as I walked along the beach and lay open-eyed in my father’s guest room, I felt more alone than I’d ever felt in my life. I wanted my father, who was dead. I wanted Patrick, who was lost to me forever. I wanted Marietta, Rachel and Will, Jeanie—they were all far away, they had their own lives. I had no one. I was close to no one. There was only me, Wynn, and I wasn’t nearly enough.

  I knew that it was time for me to leave England. I would hand in my resignation when I got back and then store everything until the end of the school year, when I would return to the States. It wasn’t just the need to find a home for my childhood icons. It was that I had lost so much—everything I loved—and I felt that I needed at least to be on my home ground.

  I would move to Boston, I decided. I adored New York, but I couldn’t live where Patrick lived. And with my parents dead Florida meant nothing to me, nor did Maine, where I no longer knew anyone. I remembered how Boston used to be our city, mine and Patrick’s, how every inch of its pavement was full of our love for each other. And I remembered, too, how I had lived there those four long winter months when I was pregnant. Boston would be difficult, a painful place to settle down in. But it was familiar, too, the baggy gray city on the river where I had always felt at home. In truth, I had nowhere to go. And it wasn’t my business to shrink from a little pain: Hadn’t I made pain my mission?

  Leaving London wasn’t easy—my job, my friends, the lively streets, the diverse accents. I had inherited from my father enough money to live on—modestly, but with a degree of comfort—and I knew I could return to England for visits when I liked. But it would never be the same. During those last months of that warm and fragrant spring, I worked hard at my job, trying to give my students as much as I could. But I spent my spare time going for long walks around London. I took endless photographs, wishing I were still a painter, so I could have gone out there with my easel and kept the England that I loved alive in my heart in the best way I knew how. You’re an artist before anything, my mother had written. And I had to admit that there was still truth in her statement. It was just that I was an artist who didn’t paint.

  Saying good-bye was painful, but when I finally got to Boston that summer, I was happier to be home than I had expected. I rented a sunny apartment in Cambridge near the Fogg Art Museum, and had the contents of my father’s house shipped there. I kept my mother’s photographs and other things stored in boxes—they filled me with anger and disgust, but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them. The memory of the day she died, the way the tears ran down her face and her breathing went silent and stopped, came back to me in flashbacks at unexpected moments and made me cold with sorrow. There were even times when—desperately, childishly—I still missed her. But I couldn’t bear to see her photographs on my wall.

  I arranged a row of Dad’s old toys on a shelf, and I slept in my childhood bed, with the old quilt folded at the bottom. I thought of how many times I must have walked right by this building with Patrick on the way to the Fogg, little knowing that some day I would sleep there alone, thinking of him. I didn’t realize until then how apprehensive I had been about coming home. Lying in bed, listening to the traffic noises in the street, I was visited by the old familiar grief, but with something new added to it: the consciousness that my life was slipping away and that all I had to show for it was memory, loss, anger, and these shabby treasures from my youth. I had to remind myself that that was only right: I had what I deserved.

  • • •

  Without a job to keep me occupied, the days were very long. I felt strangely disoriented. I took walks. I bought books at the Harvard Co-op, brought them home to my apartment, read them, went back for more. I watched movies on TV. I applied for a position teaching art at a private school in Brookline; they rejected me because I had never taught “normal” children. I applied for a receptionist job in a Boston gallery, but they said I needed to know how to type, and when I inquired about a bookselling job at the Co-op they said I was overqualified. Those were the only jobs I came across for which I seemed even remotely suited.

  One hot, aimless day in July I woke up possessed by an impulse I couldn’t resist. I didn’t examine it, I just did it: I went to the spare-room closet, unpacked my brushes and paints and set them out on a table. I began sorting the tubes of paint. Some were dried up, hopeless; others were fat and ready to use. I examined my brushes, looked for something to pour turpentine into, searched in vain for my old stapler. I made a list of what I needed and then walked over to Heller’s and bought paint, canvas, stretchers, a stapler, an easel, and lugged it all home in the heat. I couldn’t wait for them to deliver. I had to paint. I had to paint now.

  I spent the afternoon preparing canvases—
stretched half a dozen and sized them. The next morning, I set up the new easel in front of my dresser, and painted a hairbrush, a pair of earrings, a folded scarf. I painted the light as it slanted through the window, a portion of the window with its striped curtain, and the vague reflection of myself, painting, in the mirror. I did what I had done all those years ago when I began art school: I painted what was there, but now I worked in oil, not watercolor.

  It was a large painting. It took me most of two days. I stayed with it, eating only when I began to feel faint, sleeping badly and waking up early on the second day, painting in my nightgown, with my morning coffee cooling nearby. My apartment was hot, but I forgot to turn on the air conditioner. I didn’t think about the heat, or about being hungry. I didn’t think about anything. I just painted.

  When it was done, I couldn’t look at it. I cleaned my brushes, and then I went outside for a walk. It was early evening, the humid end of a hot summer day when the air was like the inside of a plastic bag. I walked down to the river and over the bridge and back again, going fast, my brain empty except for registering the glassy look of the water, the chopped brown grass where languid students hung out in shorts and T-shirts, the old brick buildings rising up between the trees. When I got home again, I was sweaty and sick, my heart pounding. What I felt was a kind of terror, as if I had committed a crime and knew I must turn myself in.

  I stripped off my clothes and stood under the shower. The cool water poured down on my head and shoulders and my closed eyes. I raised my head to drink it. I stood there a long time, letting the water calm me down. Then I put a towel around my hair, wrapped myself in a bathrobe, and went down the hall in my bare feet to look at the painting.

  It was crap. In one quick glance, I took it all in—the insipid colors, the timid brushwork, the awkward, pointless composition, all of it overlaid with a sort of eager desperation. It was the work of a student trying to impress. It was the work of an amateur. It was a huge, ugly, meaningless painting of nothing. The thought that I had kept down during my long, hot walk, that would have edged into my mind if I had let it, came to the surface: My daughter died so I could paint. I looked at the painting and saw myself, my presumption, my sins, my punishment.

  • • •

  Near the end of that year, an odd thing happened. A letter came from Santo Peri, forwarded from England. It was two months old. Santo said in his letter that he was curious about my work and would love to see what I was doing now. Could we get together the next time he was in London?

  He wrote on his gallery’s letterhead stationery: the Peri-Prezio Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. I agonized over whether or not to answer, but finally what decided me was simple loneliness. I longed for some human contact, even with an old friend I hardly knew any more and hadn’t seen in—how many? Four years? Someone from my old life. I didn’t tell him I had no work to show him. I only said I had left London, I was back in Boston, I would like very much to see him if he was ever in town.

  He had to be in Boston on business, and we arranged to have lunch. It was a cold spring day. Santo came to my apartment, and we stood in my front hall talking while I found my coat and scarf. Santo was fatter, sleeker, definitely more prosperous. His present lover was a stockbroker and art collector—the Prezio half of the gallery. Santo wore a spectacular camel-hair coat, and when he hugged me I smelled expensive cologne. I had made lunch reservations, but he wanted to see my paintings first.

  “Where is your studio?” he asked. “Or do you paint here at home?”

  I said, “I’m afraid I lured you here under false pretenses, Santo. I don’t paint anywhere.”

  He frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t paint any more.” I knotted my scarf around my neck, trying to keep my voice casual. “I’ve stopped painting.”

  He spread his hands with a small, puzzled smile. “So—what are you working on, then?” His dark eyes twinkled, as if he expected me to take him into a studio full of art pottery or marble sculptures.

  “I’m not working on anything.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I see.” He waited for me to say more, and when I didn’t he looked at me for a moment in silence. Then he said, “Well, I’m sorry to hear it. I’m shocked to hear it. But of course it wasn’t just your work I wanted to see. I’m delighted to see you looking so well and so—” He gestured vaguely. His face—dark, handsome, a bit jowly—gave me no clue to what he was thinking. He forced a smile. “Shall we go to lunch?”

  We walked the three blocks to Vittorio’s. I heard myself nattering on about Cambridge, the weather, the buildings we passed. I pointed out a little bakery where I bought bread, showed him a shop where I had found the scarf I was wearing. Santo was silent, and his disappointment, disapproval, plain stupefaction at what I’d said hovered around us like a sour smell.

  When we were seated at the restaurant, I stopped babbling. We looked at the menu, ordered wine and food, then sat staring at each other. “Wynn,” Santo said. “Wynn, what is it? What’s going on?”

  I didn’t know how to reply. He was looking at me with the kindness and affection that I remembered from years ago. The waiter brought our wine, and a basket of bread. I took a piece of bread and sat there holding it. I knew I had to say something. “Santo,” I got out finally. “Why did you want to see my work? My paintings?”

  “Why?” Santo unfolded his napkin and tucked it into his collar, smiling. He took a sip of wine. “Why do you think, Wynn? Because you’re a talented artist. Because I always loved your work. Because of all the painters I knew in New York in those days, you were the one I thought would make it.”

  “Santo, I was painting so badly!”

  “Yes, you were,” he agreed, his smile still in place. “But you were painting badly in an interesting way. Your work was never boring. It was like a good wine, maybe a fine burgundy like this one we’re drinking, that’s still a bit too young, it needs mellowing, it’s not there yet. But it has all the ingredients, and you can drink a glass and enjoy it, not for what it is but for its promise.” His smile became a grin. “Forgive the pretentious claptrap, Wynn. You know what I mean. I’m saying I believed in you as a painter. I thought that by now you’d be a superstar.”

  The buzz of excitement I felt took me by surprise. Could it be true that those chaotic, directionless paintings I was making in New York had had some value—had been interesting failures? It had been a long time since anyone had praised my painting, or even said anything at all about it. How long since I’d talked about my work? My work. I thought of the wretched canvas I had produced during those two hot July days—that alien, pathetic mess—and took a quick sip of wine. “What you say means a lot to me, Santo,” I told him. I had always respected his opinion, his eye, even years before when we were all struggling and Santo was just starting out. “If I did have any work, I would love to show it to you, I’d love to hear what you thought of it.”

  “My gallery is doing very well,” Santo said, “and one thing I like to do is give exhibition space to emerging artists—young people with talent who haven’t been discovered yet. I admit I was looking forward to discovering you.”

  “I—yes,” I said. “I know about your gallery.” I hesitated, not knowing how to go on. I kept seeing that painting, imagining Santo’s face if I’d shown it to him, his stumbling attempts at tact. There was an awkward pause.

  Santo gave me an ironic smile. “And?”

  “Well—”

  His voice became very gentle. “Wynn, I meant what I said. I would be willing to give your work a serious look, if it were the way I remember it. And not just because we go way back. You have it in you to be a very, very good painter.” His smile deepened. “I’m a businessman, not a philanthropist.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then—are you saying that—assuming you did have anything to show me—you wouldn’t want my gallery to consider representing you?”

  “No,
that’s not what I mean.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  I took a deep breath and looked down at the tablecloth. “I don’t know how to say this, Santo. I didn’t come back to the States to return to my old life or to get involved in the New York art world. I’m not ready to do that.” I raised my head. “It’s a personal thing. I can’t really talk about it.”

  Santo had very large, deep-set, liquid brown eyes, thickly lashed. He studied me for a moment with his steady gaze, as silently and thoughtfully as he would examine a painting, and I could see the questions forming in his mind. I knew he was curious about why I had disappeared, why Patrick and I had broken up. What in hell is wrong with you, Wynn? Why aren’t you painting? Why did you just walk out on that guy? I looked right back at him, and my eyes were as unflinching as his. Forget it, Santo. It’s nobody’s business but mine.

  “I haven’t seen you, then,” he said. “That’s what you’re saying. Am I right? If anybody asks, I haven’t seen you, and I don’t have a clue as to where you are or what you’re doing.”

  There was another pause, while we stared at each other. Then I reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Is that all, Wynn?”

  “Yes.” I spoke around a lump in my throat. “Thank you, Santo.”

  For how could I tell him of my fears? That Patrick would find me, would confront me in anger, would reproach me for what I had done—anger and reproaches that I knew I deserved, but that I knew I wouldn’t be strong enough to endure. And that would turn to horrified disgust if I could bring myself to explain why I did it. Santo looked at me, shaking his head, and then he picked up my hand and kissed it. “Ah, Wynn,” he said.

  A few days later I got a note from him. It said: I didn’t know if I should tell you when I saw you, but I think maybe you would want to know this. He enclosed a photograph, cut from The New York Times, of himself and another man. They were both in black tie. Standing with them was a stunning blond woman in a slinky black dress. She was holding the arm of a third man, also in a tuxedo, and that man was Patrick. The caption underneath the photograph read: At the American Cancer Society Art Benefit, Douglas Prezio and Santo Peri of the Peri-Prezio Gallery, Sonia Shapiro of the DGA Gallery, and her husband, sculptor Patrick Foss.