The Rags of Time

by Maureen Howard

  Now, bussing her, one cheek then the other.

  Isn’t this swell? Legendary. Moffett’s retreat.

  The world he brings with him is of this moment, apparent in lightly streaked hair, two-day beard. Torn jeans sport their patch like a price tag. The black leather jacket, silky soft, seems live as she takes his arm, faces him toward the postcards on display. It’s been some years since she’s seen Blodge in the city, at openings, or at the museum properly suited for the trustees. To be fair, they are both costumed. They now stand side by side, Louise in that artist’s smock over black turtleneck and L.L. Bean cords, wool socks, leather sandals. Her glasses, thick lenses, hang round her neck from a chain mended with twisties, at the ready in case, just in case she does not see the aerial view (6” × 4½“) to be Wells Cathedral, or that the bombed church (Moselle, France) with the big clock face standing in rubble (Paul Strand, 1950) reads 9:35. Time of the blast?

  Blodge will have tea. No milk, no sugar.

  Lapsang souchong?

  Beautiful.

  But when steeped, poured into their mugs, the smoky fragrance mingling with the oils and turp is faintly nauseating. The music blasts its way in from the car. Like street music, do what you will, no way to silence the din, as in the city on Lower Broadway where Louise Moffett worked in her loft, mid- to late nineties. Blodge takes in the current scene. In this barn she has set up a diorama—his term, calling it that, arms spread in an expansive gesture—her postcards on canvas, tools of the painter’s trade abandoned? Half-executed copies, her Poussin missing its tiny human figures; St. Catherine delivering her dialogues to an inkpot. No scribe. Louise has set her postcard next to the frozen moment of the original. Moffett’s men: Duchamp without chessboard; John James Audubon birdless, eyes scummed with cataracts in his demented old age.

  Christopher Blodgette leans in, examines the background, the canvas itself (4’ × 6’), size of a throw rug.

  Louise on the defensive, laughing. It’s not black-black, not a shroud, don’t you see? More organic, like soil composted with manure. Now why talk country to this creature of the city?

  The bulletin board, as you say, is painterly.

  Did I say?

  For posting notices in the school hall, Louise, the essence of darkness diluting claustrophobic emotion.

  She bridles at his untranslatable instruction, or (more likely) at his deep misreading of her work past and present. He goes on about her continuing vitality as though she must be propped up to carry on beyond time allotted. Music now pulsing, Pearl Jam or maybe Nirvana. Once she could have called: Teen Spirit. Louise claps her hands over her ears.

  Blodge raps on the glass door. Keep it down. They watch in the blessed silence as his driver jogs round the car pursuing his puffs of cold air, then stretches against the hood.

  Bing needs his workouts, sitting all day in the car.

  Bing?

  Back to Blodgette’s curatorial business. Truly amazing, the random collection. Great work so diminished. Then rescued with the investment of your documentation.

  Documentation?

  Your reenactments, Lou, updating, bringing it all back home.

  He takes up a small drawing, size of a postcard, Washington Crossing the Delaware. In Moffett’s rendering, only the prow and founding father are sketched in. The rest of the crew still awash in the cold river?

  Perfect draftsmanship.

  She takes that as a cut. Since when did dusty old draftsmanship figure in his vocabulary? Since he learned to please old ladies with money, partner them at benefits, Park Avenue dinners. Louise remembers Blodgette just down from Cambridge with the proper degrees, a lanky boy scarfing the hors d’oeuvres at every opening, gobbling art world in one viewing. Fond of him, she had so looked forward to this day. They’d been friends on the rise, not close but of an age. Once they stayed up all night in her shoe-box apartment, pre-loft, drinking jug wine, last of the easy tokers, that’s how she remembers it, Coltrane on a Summer night, pressing PLAY again and again, the window thrown open to the noise of revelry below. They had no interest in each other, not really. Discreet fondling, sex consumed by their dreaminess, or was it ambition? She was ahead of the game, her first postcards so carefully observed and painted, photographic in detail. Small sightings of where she came from—dairy farm in Wisconsin, the landscape of memory mocked, distorted as memory will have it.

  Now the sky performs one of its tricks, quick clouds moving in. Louise gets a glimpse of herself in the glass door: the weight she’s put on, the uncontrollable blink of her tired eyes while Blodge drinks the dregs of his tea as though sipping an elixir from the fountain of youth, a rather crusty cosmeticized youth, still. . . . And the show he proposes is a group show, planning stages. Louise has missed a beat in his e-mail request for the studio visit. Retro: had he not made that clear? Artists of the Nineties, Eighties if we can look back that far. He runs through a list of possible survivors, Moffett’s pulled through. She must suck that hard candy as a compliment.

  He speaks of the return to her strong suit, narrative, then pops Spiral Staircase, Statue of Liberty off the canvas for a closer look. Two boys and a man who might be their father are trapped in the belly of this cast-iron symbol, climbing toward the deleted torch as Blodge reads it. The visit dwindles to gossip, past the demise of po-mo to talk of the art market, holding despite . . .

  Christopher? Her voice barely audible. We’ll have lunch up at the house.

  Lou-Lou, I must take a pass. On the road to New Haven, chat up the folks at the Mellon. . . . They are distracted by the driver huffing and puffing at the glass door. He sweeps his hands toward the heavens, protests snow gently falling. He is a large, untidy boy. His sad moon face begs his release.

  When they are gone—Bing and Blodge, really!—she reposts Spiral Staircase: unlovely industrial green, the great weight propping Miss Liberty—that’s all she meant, if she meant anything at all. She wraps a shawl round her smock, begins the walk back up to the house.

  Artie will ask. How’d it go?

  Her husband never got the hang of these visits. In his world of mathematics, things mostly work. If they don’t, go figure. He understands her anxiety. Lou no longer courts, perhaps fears exposure. It’s not unlike . . . but there his comparison ends. Math is most often content with its equal signs, unlike art’s uncertain proof of the pudding. Today she tells Artie that the visit was something like a courtesy call.

  So he looked?

  He scanned. Nothing on the dotted line.

  Best keep it to herself, the group show with golden oldies. Blodgette’s response to her installation—she will call it Last Mailing—was inattentive, rambling at best. He had not opened the book right there on the table, a ledger with a worn marbleized cover. On its pages lined for debit or credit, she had written messages for each postcard mounted, and for those stacked, which he did not shuffle through. On the path home, Louise experiences not anger, just the melancholy of solo flight often felt when she’s working. Her ledger has no narrative at all; jottings, no story. She kicks a stone aside with the artsy sandals; now she will have a sore toe. Bing, huffing and puffing, or his friend the curator who had not been curious about her new work, just dropped by, pumping her studio full of hot air. Her bitter thought: He must call his exhibit “Old Masters,” not her way of thinking at all, but it lightens her way to the house, where a child is sick and needs her attention. A dusting of snow in the tire ruts is already melting away.

  Then, too, a flock of red-winged blackbirds flitter across her path, birds now seen too often in the marsh encroaching on the Freemans’ land. Birds that should be out of season. For a moment she longs for Central Park with its spectacular migration, that rectangular plot with less acreage than her father’s megadairy. Or, on this last lap of her journey, did she long for a girl with a neat ponytail who flagged down a bus early, before milking? It stopped by the side of the road, picked her up with one suitcase and a portfolio of drawings to show the world. The bright imag
e of that girl long abandoned, only the looming shadow in which she might see herself, sharp as a silhouette with all the forgiving details gone.

  I should have said, Open the book.

  Should have said? The old chestnut of regret.

  Open the book. You see, it’s people I’ll never meet, greetings from where I’ve never been, but where I might like to go. To Marienbad (1923), pink clouds over the Grand Hotel. Allegory of the Planets and Continents, Tiepolo (1770-96). Open the book, Blodge: 0 through 9, Jasper Johns (1960), the artist’s numbers consuming each other in a magician’s scribble. That’s for Artie, my math husband, who will love my Cobb salad, Bibb lettuce scooping still-life goodies presented on an Italian platter (Deruta, 2003). You might say an inspired show curated for Christopher Blodgette with a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau in season.

  Cyril comes in the kitchen door. It’s past noon, Friday, half day of school. He hears his parents at a distance, finds them in the dining room.

  What’s this? Tablecloth, weird gourds in a basket. He slings down his backpack.

  Salad?

  No thank you. Pepperoni pizza at school, it being Zig’s birthday. Cyril is ten, a scrawny kid, red hair courtesy of a grandmother long gone, owl glasses, wry smile as though he knows what’s up. Maybe he does. Shivering in a T-shirt though he will never admit it. Good boy, he asks after his sister. Maisy is watching, is allowed to watch a cartoon. Odd about his parents drinking wine middle of the day, like they were practicing for Christmas when the whole dairy-land crew comes from Wisconsin. General talk of the weekend, last soccer match at the high school where afreeman.edu teaches. His father is pals with advanced nerds, writes their language. His mother offers cumulus clouds on a soupy pudding.

  Floating island?

  No thank you.

  It is awfully quiet. Only Maisy’s cough, now persistent, finds its way to where they sit at the round table with candles unlit and bread crumbs. Louise runs for the stairs, turns back to her boy.

  Run down to the barn. Not calling it my studio. Latch the door. Pleading as though urgent, Please put on your sweatshirt. Do it. She never does lock up. There have been no incidents. Moffett’s barn is safe as houses. But today there has been an intrusion. And who knows? In the bluster of this cold wind, could be her postcards will scatter.

  Maisy watches a rabbit fool a fox, a fairly brutal episode—pops to the fox snout with one hell of a carrot. Her mother’s hand on her forehead is cool, cooler than the sweat that breaks her fever. They lie together on her parents’ big bed watching a cartoon they have seen many times. Lou not following the blow-by-blow script: on the path back to the house, she admitted she had looked forward to his critical eye with just enough of the old desire to show work in progress. Everything arranged, then she had not welcomed the visit. Going through the paces with Christopher Blodgette, she’d been at best inhospitable. Should she have defended her reverence for the tools of her trade? See, I’ve not abandoned my craft, only given it halfhearted attention, might as well collect postcards, not a random stack. These are my people great and small. Tour my chosen places—most never seen. As for diorama—taxidermy art, Blodge knows it. Well, she is not yet stuffed, propped behind glass. She can post her many views, change scenes. So why tears, just a few, as she trotted the path home? Tears of brisk wind, not sorrow. The fox has a net—aha!—stretched over the farmer’s garden. He watches his unwitting prey chew a whole row of leafy lettuce, then makes his move. We knew the net would entangle him; still Maisy laughs and so does her mother as the rabbit digs his way out of this fix.

  The studio door is latched, a flimsy arrangement. It will be easy for Cyril to break into his mother’s sacred place. He thinks about it, then tests the bolt, which springs back against the shingles. Before he enters, he looks through the glass door at the setup framed just like a picture, her big dark canvas, a painting half done on an easel and all her brushes and turp on a table. He slides the door open. Warm inside, cozy. Who’s to hear the tread of his sneakers, see him rub the sleeve of his sweatshirt across the snot dribbling from his nose? Catching his sister’s cold? Just the chill of the day. He sits Indian style facing the night sky of his mother’s painting. Funny and fun, two words fit together. He flips the stacked postcards. There’s the little green one, he gets it—Adam and Eve, and the fuzzy picture of a bearded old man looking dead-eye at the camera. He’s Audubon, responsible for his parents’ birdwatching, for the most boring hours he’s ever lived, trailing them in silence for the flap of a feather, a flick, a tweet. Fair is fair. Cyril has his lepidoptera pinned in glass cases. Slews not yet collected. Even now the pupae dig in, wintering over. That guy at the chess table should sacrifice his rook, save the queen. Old Market, Innsbruck: fat fellow with a humongous cheese. Clock stopped in the rubble, some church in France. St. Catherine doesn’t look like she’s talking, but the monk, doofus if ever, is writing. What’s awesome is the wall above them dissolving, and who’s there? Christ, that’s who, coaching, cheering them on. San Francisco, leveled to ash, lies in the distance.

  He opens the book. His mother’s swirling cursive, the way she writes notes to Maisy’s teacher, even the list of stuff she needs at the store. He reads, but only pieces that go with the pictures he likes.

  The cotton picker screens his face from the camera, covers his mouth with that big worn hand. What would he say, or dare say, that isn’t in his eyes or the concealing shadows?

  Washington standing up at the prow. Father of our country knew with the ice floe and waters raging what any boy on a camping trip knows. Don’t rock the boat. Aim for heroic.

  St. Catherine not speaking, so what is the scribe taking down, pen and ink at the ready? Tempera and gold on wood. Classy medium, uncertain message.

  Cyril flips pages but stops where his mother draws a little nest of numbers. He’s good at math, even at this early age can deal with negative numbers. His mother has written: Artie likes teaching his students to see the beauty of shapes and numbers. At night he is often content with his mathematical journals, or so I believe. Must believe he has survived his youthful promise. I do know I will never balance this book of my magpie collecting and spending. No final answer.

  Well, that’s his mother, loopy. He closes the ledger, suddenly shy as any child should be, embarrassed by the note about his father. He shuffles the stack of postcards, comes up with a smiling lady. Her plump body takes up most of the foreground. It’s hard to see the sheep, cows, and men working. Mrs. Heelis on Her Farm (Beatrix Potter, watercolor, D. Banner). It’s sunny, so why the shawl and umbrella? She holds a quill pen in her hand. Cyril remembers when he was little, liking her stories. He takes a thumbtack, pins Mrs. Heelis right up there on the canvas, between paradise and earthly destruction.

  Daybook

  She had made out a check to Daily Bread, a worthy fund, this year recalling day-old Wonder Bread doled out to the poor, a small story recalled for Kate, who is studying the Great Depression in fourth grade. As though the yeasty smell of a neighborhood memory might take its place with Les Misérables or the starving children in Darfur. How Mrs. Howe stole down the street for the handout before dawn not to advertise her need; how Jack Cleary sold aprons door-to-door. His wife ran them up on the Singer—that’s a sewing machine. We had lots of aprons. It’s better to read about those times than to live them. Should he tell the kids that their grandmother was, as a girl, safely installed in the little house, not the big house next door with the sub-Tiffany window and the bronze statue of a woman praying—The Angelus now holding a sprig of gilded holly? He thinks not. That was her story.

  The tree, best we ever had. Toys in attendance.

  He would keep the terrarium sweating for its unnatural life. Someday in the future, he might show them a book with Magic Marker slashing down the pages; and the printout of her revision. They must know she never got the love story right, said perhaps it was not meant to be a love story at all.

  He would walk with them to the Park, to the empty slope that
was Seneca Village, or, in a pleasant season view the Pool and wilderness where she climbed slippery rocks though did not fall to her death. Her end was delayed mysteriously, a stunt of the body. Question is, why did she scale the heights? To see beyond her limited view of the Park and the brazen towers of El Dorado. He might say, Come along, let’s look at the mural in the lobby where golden skyscrapers are sketched in, phantoms set beyond the horizon line, the dim arena of the future raised above the fantasy life below. Do you think she preferred to stay in the foreground? Costumed, up for the performance?

  They might ask, What’s that box?

  The casque? A sci-fi device in an old movie, sends you to the stars.

  Daybook, January 6, 2008

  Why must she know—high-tide, crescent moon? Where are we now? That’s not an easy question. But he had been married so long to the detective’s daughter, he scouts the date. In the spineless black Mass book, propped up in plain view, she had placed faded red and green ribbons to mark both the Day of the Holy Innocents and the Feast of the Epiphany. Which day did she intend in reckoning time? He thought Holy Innocents, given her complaints against the war, though it might be Epiphany, the consolation of gifts brought to a stable in Bethlehem that took the prize—gold, incense. What exactly is myrrh?