A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  After staying with me for two weeks, Sarah left to resume her gallery life. I was alone for the first time in my life. Never was my aloneness as palpable as when, laden with the bustle and dust of the city, I would open the door to my silent rooms and call out, “Hi, it’s me.” And in my heart I would hear his soft, quickening voice answer, I’m here. And there was a different Clem voice that would awaken me in the night: Jenny, stretched to two strong syllables. Reflexively, I would jump up, then stop. Silence. I had heard, but not heard, caught in that hypnagogic moment between dream and reality. His calls that had been so much a part of our last year lingered for months, a bittersweet tie that I wasn’t ready to relinquish.

  I slowly slipped into sadness and depression and turned to my support systems: Al-Anon, and group and now private therapy at the clinic. At their urging, I tried a bereavement group at the YMHA, where I had once begun my journey into the theater, but this time I had less success. A group of twenty or so women and one man met in a preschool room. As we squatted on tiny chairs, everyone told their stories: brief glimpses into the vast nature of coupledom. At one extreme, glued-at-the-hip unity. In the middle ground, the many variations of glued-at-the-hip unity. And at the other extreme, our free-floating separate/togetherness.

  One woman had lost her husband a year before. She had tried a bereavement group but had been unable to go in because she was paralyzed by the idea that it was the first time she had been anywhere without an escort. Escort—I was moved by her use of the quaint word. But overall I felt like an alien amid those widows of “normal marriages,” who were mourning losses of things that had never been at the core of my own. More than that, I felt that what Clem and I had had was illegitimate and that, in comparison, I wasn’t entitled to mourn my loss. I didn’t go to session two.

  Sometimes over the next months I would think sympathetically about the “escort-less woman.” She and her story were emblematic for me. So many times over the years I had been torn between envy for such a conjoined couple and revulsion for the crippling consequences of such bondage.

  During the summer, the regimen of widowhood continued as I moved back into the bedroom, moved my computer into Clem’s office, and began the ritual of sorting his clothes. Just as he bought clothes reluctantly, he was reluctant to ever throw any away. Clothes were still there that had been in his closet at the beginning of our marriage, and they had grown old along with us. The things I chose to keep would carry the provenance of my love for the man I had chosen to live with. No wonder I remembered in such detail the occasions when we had bought those skinny wool ties and treasured felt hats in London, and those brown suede shoes in Calgary. I let most of his things go, except for the mantles from his various honorary degrees—no sentiment there, but they were pretty—and his suede and wool “bagel jacket” that hailed from our Bank Street days. And those wonderful hats that still grace the hat racks in the hall closet. I don’t notice them much, but they are there.

  While I was still in the crucible of the clinic, it was suggested that I try antidepressants. Why not? I would be a new Jenny who wasn’t fretful, who didn’t totter along the rim of depression, dipping a toe and a leg in now and then. Hell, I wouldn’t have to experience widowhood at all. I said none of this. I liked my group therapy, I liked my therapist, and, after dutifully reeling off my sixty-year history to an in-house psychopharmacologist, I took a Prozac. Within a few hours, I began to shake, sweat, and feel a band tighten around my head, and I figured I would be joining Clem any minute. I was switched to Paxil. I slept twelve hours a night, and now and again a lightbulb would explode in my brain and hurl slivers of glass that flashed behind my eyes. My report of these “short circuits” was greeted with skepticism. I stuck with Paxil for six months. But during the weaning process I experienced full-blown depression for the first time. Palpable, like thick, scratchy blankets were being stuffed into my head. The good news: It was temporary. The best news: I finally knew what real depression felt like, and I knew that that wasn’t me. No more pills. Good times, down times—I might dip my toe in, but I now knew I would never drown. Besides, widowhood was an experience I didn’t want to miss.

  That fall I got a call from Tod Catlin, who suggested that the University of North Carolina might be interested in buying the art collection. We had met Tod on our “honeymoon” trip to the Walker Art Center in 1956 and had stayed in touch. His call touched off a surge of renewed energy. I realized how much I needed to be at work, and here was the opportunity. I reopened the computer and began to finalize the detailed inventory of over 150 items that I had begun the previous year. I had it appraised, and Tod moved forward. Thanks to my ignorance, I assumed all would go well and was ready for whatever came next.

  The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles had written to me about the acquisition of Clem’s papers. Most of his vast correspondence through the mid-eighties had been donated to the Archives of American Art. Now I searched through Clem’s casual filing system and set to work meticulously cataloging manuscripts, drafts, lecture notes, travel diaries, journals, daybooks, correspondence, everything that said papers to me. The clerical nature of the work, the burrowing, head-down, get-each-detail-right aspect of it, was like a warm bath to me. And the bonus: For the first time, I immersed myself in Clem’s thoughts and the arc of his oeuvre, and marveled at the breadth of it.

  As if on cue, I received an inquiry from agent Andrew Wylie concerning the handling of Clem’s literary estate. Just as Clem had never had a lawyer or a doctor, he had never had the need for an agent. But this was a new day, and I knew I would need help with this deal and others in the future. I also knew that, since the embezzlement, it would require a huge leap of faith for me to trust others with our affairs. Fortunately, good sense prevailed and that winter, Sarah at my side and the archive inventory and Getty letter in hand, we met Andrew Wylie. He was everything an agent should be: businesslike, shrewd, and imaginative. At our second meeting, Andrew told us what we could expect from the Getty and we discussed the sale’s terms, the most important item being that the estate would retain all copyrights on the material.

  Over the next year Andrew’s associate Sarah Chalfant was the negotiator. I was in awe of her steely resolve, which kept the process on point and kept me out of counterproductive pettiness and impatience. The end result was a full-price contract that covered every imaginable contingency. After years of carrying guilt and shame for having put our family’s finances in James Powers’s hands, I felt a weight lift from me. Most important, under the superb guardianship of the Getty, Clem’s papers would be preserved in perpetuity and available to all.

  On Thanksgiving of 1994, at Alexandra Truitt’s house in South Salem, Connecticut, Sarah met Matthew Morse, the man she would marry. The circles of life, linking as they do as one ages, had intersected yet again. Matthew had been brought to the gathering by Sam Truitt, Anne and Jim Truitt’s son. This was Sam, the baby who had “slept in his crib upstairs” during that homey Camelot dinner party in Georgetown when Anne had taught me how to make salad dressing. Now, in Connecticut, a perfect day: a houseful of young beautiful people, Trivial Pursuit, and an invitation to take a walk with the handsome, charming Matthew, who told me he was thirty-two, a poet, had spent a year traveling around the world after college, and as a teenager had bicycled across the country. What more did a mother need to know? On the train home I asked Sarah what she thought of Matthew. She shrugged. By July they were engaged, and in November I gave the bride away.

  On the one-year anniversary of Clem’s death, we held a memorial at the Century Club. For me, the soaring moment was Sarah, who had prepared a poem-like remembrance of being her father’s daughter, the refrain being “Lucky me.” But for the most part I felt oppressed by the solemnity in the room. Not that I had expected a cabaret, but I wasn’t surprised when, after the designated speakers had had their say, only a hesitant few came forward to spontaneously share their memories. Later, some of us gathered at the Algonquin Hotel around the
corner. Predictably, the mood lightened, and predictably, the men drifted off from the lounge to the adjacent bar to salute Clem with single malt and cigars.

  In the years since, I have gone to many memorials, so many that I call them “the weddings for my generation.” Some, multimedia events and dinners, so elaborate that the star attraction was drowned out. Some, simple occasions at home. Most, on the heels of death and others, like Clem’s, so delayed that the emotional impetus was lost. Whatever the choice, I never did come to understand what was meant by closure. Probably because I never sought it or felt the need of it.

  That summer, the University of North Carolina’s interest in buying the collection was officially withdrawn, having collapsed under the weight of the divisive factions of a large, diverse university. It had taken them a year to agree that they would never agree. Over the next years there would be three more flurries of interest, until finally, in 2000, the right suitor came along: the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. The museum had almost no contemporary art, but it did have a determined director, John Buchanan, and curator, Bruce Guenther, who had the foresight to know that the collection would not only attract national attention, but also act as a magnet for future donations and acquisitions.

  Once again, the push-pull took what seemed to be the requisite year. At last, in July 2001, our family, now including four-year-old Clementine and six-week-old Roxanna, boarded the plane to Portland for the opening of “The Greenberg Collection.” For the first time we saw all of the art gathered together and saw each piece as it was meant to be seen: beautifully installed and in a blaze of light. The catalog—an award winner for its design—exceeded all my expectations and was a testament to the artists, to their work, and to Clem. For three days we were pampered and feted by the museum and the art lovers of Portland. People asked me if I would miss the art. In one way, yes—I had been the caretaker. As familiar to me as old friends, the paintings and sculptures were the “furniture” of my life. But I had never thought about them in terms of ownership; I always knew that they were just passing through.

  While I was inventorying Clem’s archive for the Getty, three publishing projects had clearly presented themselves. The first was a series of nine seminars on aesthetics that Clem had presented at Bennington College in 1971. For years he had been thinking about writing a book on the subject, and he’d seen the seminars as an opportunity to formulate and argue his theses in front of an audience. Though he had reworked the seminar texts and published them in art magazines over the next years, he never had written his book on aesthetics. As editor, I structured the book in three parts: the finalized pieces, published as a unit for the first time; the original texts, as delivered at Bennington; and a transcript of the Q & A sessions that had followed each seminar. The book would show Clem’s work process as he brought the pieces from concept to verbatim discussions to final edit. Collaborating was Peggy Noland, Ken’s ex-wife, who coincidentally was transcribing the seminars for her master’s thesis. It was her transcript that I edited for the book. Homemade Esthetics—Clem’s title and spelling—was published by Oxford University Press and was named a 1999 New York Times Notable Book.

  My next project was inspired by a carton of over four hundred handwritten letters Clem had written to his best college friend, Harold Lazarus, between 1928 and 1943. The letters began when they were juniors at Syracuse University and ended after Clem’s discharge from the army. As I transcribed and edited them, the young Clem spoke to me each day of his goals and feelings as he detailed his personal and intellectual journey against the backdrop of the Great Depression. The intimacy of the story his letters tell, the nearness of him, swept me away, and when the book was published in 2000 by Counterpoint Press, I went everywhere I could to do readings.

  There was one more Clem project. I wanted to complete the four volumes of his collected works that had already been published by the University of Chicago. The fifth volume would cover 1970–1986, with additional interviews up to 1994. Unlike Homemade Esthetics and The Harold Letters, this volume required the straightforward gathering of pieces and the writing of an introduction. The art historian Robert Morgan had approached me about doing such a book, and I gladly passed the editorial task on to him. The Late Writings was published by Wisconsin University Press in 2003.

  Those years were not all about editorial work, Clem, and my computer. In 1997, a few months after the Getty sale, Sarah, Matthew and I took out a map of New York State, drew a circle, highlighted a few towns, and set a price limit. The goal: a country retreat less than an hour’s drive from the city, whose pleasures and expenses we would share. This wouldn’t be another Norwich, whose location had made it useless to everyone but Clem.

  Soon after, a realtor took us up a dead-end road in Putnam Valley, onto a driveway that crossed a little wooden bridge over a babbling brook, to a fifties saltbox house on a rise. Matthew, who, like Clem, is precise with words, deemed the house “graceless,” and indeed it was small and boxy. But the grounds: lawns, spectacular trees, a beautiful pool where one could swim naked and only the deer would know. I imagined children running across the grass, sailing high on the old wooden swing, paddling in the pool, sledding down the hill, catching frogs in the brook. We bought the house that night. And soon all my visions came true, after Clementine and Roxanna were born.

  In the late nineties, my brother came for a visit with his new partner, Brenda. My sister-in-law and good friend, Lou, had died in 1992. Norden suggested we drive to Rye and revisit the places of our childhood. Our first stop was the faux Tudor mansion in Green Haven that our grandfather had built for Vera and David in 1925. As Brenda took our picture on the grounds, the current owners emerged and invited us in. The trappings were different, but the bones were the same. I felt again the vast gloom, the hollowness a small girl would feel. There was the stairwell where I had told my first lie, that I had brushed my teeth, and the amazement, and sly pleasure, that I had been believed. Framed in the glow of the orange pongee drapes, I could see the grand piano and my mother as she stretches out her silken legs to place her open-toed, high-heeled shoes upon the pedals. She straightens her back, breathes a long, perfumey sigh and begins “The Missouri Waltz” so fast that her clickity red nails blurred into the ivory keys. I smelled her closet and walked in her magic gold party sandals.

  In the garage I rode on the back of my brother’s bicycle on a rainy day, a rare moment of touching and oneness while Mother was honeymooning with the Con Man after Daddy had flown the coop for the Nurse. I saw my bed under the eaves and, next to it, my home within my home, my dollhouse with its tiny lights that almost kept the dragons at bay. The bed where I kept long vigils at night as I listened for the sound of our car and the rake of headlights across the ceiling as it turned up the drive and brought her home to me. She leans across my bed; I smell the intoxicating elixir of perfume, cigarettes, and booze as her dark curls tickle my nose.

  In the backyard I could see the miniature log cabin and swing that floated too far from the mother ship for the comfort of the girl who had been told those ominous words: “Go outside and play.” In the bathroom I felt the warm flow on my feet as I tried to pee like my brother peed.

  Later, at lunch in Rye, Norden revealed two memories. He, who had never revealed anything “inner” to me before, told me about the eleven-year-old who had stood on the upper landing of that staircase, the Con Man in the hall below. A stand-off. The man in a fury, demanding repeatedly that he be called Father; the boy above, mute, his knuckles clenched white with hate around the mahogany railing. And he told me about the boy in his midteens who had slapped his mother hard across the face when she had said something about a girl he was dating. For the first time I saw the boy in my brother—not the pampered, cocksure golden child who took life in stride, but the hurting child who, as he grew up, had simply become more skillful than I in shutting the lid on the past. I finally believed that we really had grown up in the same house. And by the time we finished the rounds of our haunts,
I had folded my brother into my heart with an unconditional love.

  Perhaps still on the wings of my experience with Norden, a few years later I sought and finally found a lasting peace with my mother. I had made a rare visit to Cape Cod to spend a week with my friend Edith Kurtzweil in Wellfleet. On my way back to the city, I was overcome with a desire to visit my mother’s grave, which I hadn’t seen since she died. After much searching, I found her under a tree, a few yards away from her sister, Elfrida. By then the sun had turned to clouds, the air cold and damp. I sat, my back against the tree, by the simple granite headstone and talked to her as I never had talked to her before, about the small daily stuff and the big changes, about past feelings and feelings at that moment, about Sarah and Clem, about her great-grandchildren, about widowhood, about my fears and confusions. I crisscrossed twenty-five years. And I heard what she had to say to me. I settled in. There was no rush.

  As a light drizzle stirred the leaves above, I sang “The Donkey Serenade,” her favorite song. Once again, I saw her tears when I came to the part when the girl becomes a nun and kneels to pray as her lover sadly rides away. I ate a tuna sandwich, took a pee behind the tree, cried a lot. I asked her forgiveness for the pain I had caused her, and began to forgive myself. Maybe that’s what a meander is about: It takes as long as it takes. The rest is just detours.

  The past has a funny way of reasserting itself. In 2002 I was at the Whitney Museum, and there, in a dimly lit room of its own, was a replica of our living room as it was in 1964 when it had been photographed for Vogue. The installation, “Empire,” by a young artist, Paul Sietsema, was like an oversized dollhouse. The shock of recognition. Transfixed, I peered down into my living room across forty years. Everything in its place, from the smallest bibelots to the tattered brown foam couch from Altman’s to the chattels of all the matriarchs who had preceded me. And the art: from the smallest sculptures to the largest pictures, all exquisitely reproduced to scale and in breathtaking detail. The only flaw, the color in Noland’s glorious six-foot chevron, Sarah’s Reach. But then, Noland’s palette was a gift from God and therefore inimitable. The time and industry Sietsema had expended! As for his agenda, whatever it may have been—and it was no doubt highly political, rather than aesthetic, as most art is these days—it didn’t interest me. I revisited the exhibit with my five-year-old granddaughter, Clementine, and we played a game—how many things do you see that are in Gramma’s living room? I felt he had created the room for our delight.