Prochownik's Dream

by Alex Miller

  Roy said calmly, ‘Whatever you say.’

  ‘Did I ever have to explain myself to Dad?’

  Roy considered this. ‘It’s a point.’

  ‘You know it’s true. Between me and Dad there was never a need for explanations or reasons or why or whatever about what we were doing. We just did what we did. We loved doing it. We both loved doing it. That was it. That was our reason. Love. Dad was my inspiration. And maybe I was his inspiration. It wasn’t just me keeping Dad going. We kept each other going. That’s why I stopped painting when he died. I just couldn’t do it. For a time I hated it.’ He waited for Roy’s attention. ‘I don’t need to explain myself to Marina. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Marina and Robert know what I’m doing the way Dad knew what I was doing. They are artists too.’

  Roy said, ‘It’s not Robert Teresa’s worried about.’

  ‘We all get our energy from somewhere.’

  ‘It’s a touchy business.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that. Be straight with me.’

  Roy pointed to the corner opposite the door. ‘Dad’s suit. You did something I would never have done. I’ve always been glad you did it.’ He looked at the dark three-piece draped on the rack. ‘I can see him walking down Bay Street holding your hand when you were a kid and he’s taking you to the beach wearing that suit. Every other kid’s dad’s wearing a T-shirt and runners.’ Roy turned to him. ‘What did you mean, he gave you the go-ahead to be an artist?’

  ‘It was as if he wasn’t dead. It was like I’d woken up and his death had turned out to be a mistake. In the dream I knew he was still alive somewhere. Not here. But somewhere. He handed me a small canvas. He said, Here’s your painting, son. It was his voice. I almost felt the touch of his hand.’

  They stood silently thinking about their father.

  Roy said with feeling, ‘I never met anyone with the courage he had.’

  ‘Dad would know why I can’t do this without Marina.’

  ‘I guess you’ll do what you have to do.’

  ‘It’s not what you think between me and Marina.’

  ‘What do I think?’

  ‘I know what you think.’

  ‘She’s a beautiful woman. It’s what Teresa thinks, not what I think that matters.’ Roy stepped across to the window and lifted the drop sheet, holding it up and looking across the courtyard to the house. ‘She thinks you put this here to stop her looking in and seeing what you two were getting up to.’

  ‘It’s to get some control of the light.’

  ‘Jealous people start seeing hints and clues in everything.’ Roy dropped the curtain back into place and turned towards Toni. ‘Don’t get the idea I’m bitter about my life.’

  ‘Hey! I know you’re not bitter.’

  ‘I’m not bitter.’

  ‘I know that. You get more like Dad every time I see you.’

  ‘I know. I’ve noticed it. I don’t mind. Like you, I feel as if he’s alive somewhere.’ He placed his open palm against his chest. ‘He’s alive in here. Come on! Let’s go and have lunch with your beautiful wife.’ He waved his arm, a gesture encompassing the studio. ‘You’re doing it. He was right to hope for you.’

  As they went out the door Toni looked back at the empty canvases propped against the wall.

  thirteen

  At the front door Toni stood by and watched Teresa kiss Roy goodbye on the cheek, her hand on his brother’s arm. ‘Thanks for coming over, Roy,’ she said. And she left her hand on his arm; being motherly, protective, caring, grateful for his support—and also, no doubt, recruiting him as her ally. ‘We mustn’t wait so long till next time,’ she was saying. ‘Come and have dinner with us soon.’ She turned to Toni. ‘We should make it a regular thing. Once a month. What do you say?’

  Roy smiled. ‘Thanks, Terry.’ He turned to Toni and embraced him, then stepped away and walked down the path to the gate.

  They stood at the front door watching him. When he reached the corner he turned and saluted them, his hand lifted, then he was gone.

  ‘He’s not looking the best,’ Toni said.

  ‘Your brother’s a lovely man. It’s a tragedy. We should think of someone to invite over with him.’

  ‘You think Roy needs a woman?’

  ‘Roy needs to meet the right woman,’ Teresa said confidently.

  ‘People have always been suggesting ways of running Roy’s life for him. Setting him up. Straightening him out. Seeing ways of putting him on a level with themselves. Everyone thinks they’ve got the answer for Roy. But none of it ever made any difference. He is who he is.’

  Teresa said calmly, ‘He needs the right woman.’

  It had always been a belief in Toni’s family that Roy had been handed his task for life and had recognised that task when he saw it. As if his steady masculinity had been given him for that one occasion, and nothing could have prevented or altered the outcome of that day. Things foregone. As unalterable as the night Nada was born and Toni had seen that she already possessed her own personality—even while she was lying on the sheet in the hospital, just separated from Teresa, almost before she had taken her first breath; a little person who was not just them but was already somebody else. ‘We’re already ourselves when we’re born,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? Who else would we be? The right woman would recognise Roy for who he is. The funny thing is, with his past and all that, he’s the one man apart from you who I’d trust with Nada. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Roy didn’t go to prison for doing something wrong,’ he said. ‘He went for doing the right thing. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t trust him.’

  ‘Well I do trust him. That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying I trust him.’

  They were silent, a brittleness between them. They stood looking out at the empty street.

  ‘Roy’s lived a life that’s been a lot like Dad’s,’ he said. ‘It’s been a broken life. I don’t know why that is. It’s almost as if one of us had to repeat something. To pay for something in the past.’

  ‘You love him.’

  ‘He’s my brother.’

  ‘You should paint his portrait while you’ve still got the chance.’

  He looked at her and laughed. ‘I will paint his portrait. What do you mean, still got the chance? Roy’s going to be around for a long time yet. Did he tell you something about his operation?’

  ‘I just meant it would give him a reason to come over and see us. He could sit for you then stay and have dinner with us afterwards. He needs a family.’

  ‘Family’s not the answer for everyone.’

  ‘That’s a ridiculous thing to say and you know it is. Everyone needs a family.’

  Two young men and a young woman came along the other side of the street. The men were carrying slabs of beer and laughing. They turned in at the house opposite and went up to the front door and let themselves in.

  Teresa said, ‘Party time again over there. Do you want to get her while I clean up the lunch things?’

  ‘Sure. Okay.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘No. I want to.’

  ‘You don’t want to. I can see you just want to go back down there and work. You hardly said a word all through lunch. Why can’t you say you want to be working instead of pretending you want to pick up your daughter?’

  ‘But I do want to pick her up.’

  ‘Her seat’s in the Honda. The keys are on the bench.’ Teresa turned and went back inside the house.

  He followed her. It was true. He had been seeing it all through lunch with Roy, the big new painting waiting for him. He could smell it, the faint enticing odour of the new cedar stretcher like the guilty smell of a lover’s skin. He paused in the passage and stood looking at his father’s framed gouache. It was a tonal image of a straight-backed chair and a corner of their old kitchen table at the flats, one of his mother’s jugs and a blue-striped bowl. The domestic vision he had inherited. Th
e gentle melancholy of the low-toned mood suggestive of a vanished Central European light. The scene speaking to him of his father’s silence. Outside the flats the night and the howling city, but in these objects of his father’s contemplation an eternal stillness. The still lives of his father’s inner world. The absence of the rattle and clatter of the moulding line. Calm. Familiarity. Simplicity. These three things, and his father’s certainty of their universal value. It was an image that bore witness to the tranquillity of Moniek Prochownik’s endurance and had not been intended for public display. Toni knew what was expected of him. It had always been his father’s noble vision of art’s place in life, and his fear that he would fall short of it, against which he had measured his own art and his life. No one but himself would ever know this little picture as he knew it. He had watched his father paint it. No one else would ever see in it the beauty and the achievement he saw in it.

  He turned away and continued along the passage. In the living area Teresa was clearing away the lunch things, scraping their plates and piling them on the bench. He stood watching her a moment as if he was going to say something, then he walked across to the bench and picked up her keys.

  She brushed by him, banging down plates and cutlery on the draining board, leaning and flinging open the door of the dishwasher. She did not put the dirty dishes into the machine, but straightened and considered him. ‘You come out of there glassy-eyed with that lost look on your face. I said to Roy it’s as if you’ve wandered into someone else’s house.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. He waited for her hostility, for the suspicion that was burning in her to come out. Perhaps he had wandered into another man’s house. Another man’s life. Another man’s family. How to know if the life we are living is authentically our own? How to measure the degrees of our own truth against the daily events of our existence? Against the sliding scale of reality and illusion? How to check the drift from one to the other? Perhaps he had crossed a line back when his father died, and had not noticed that he was crossing a line but had blundered on, impelled by his blind grief and his loss, moving away from the painful reality of who he was. Not that terrible line that Roy had crossed, but another line, some kind of shifting demarcation of borders between imagination and reality. Perhaps, after all, he really did not belong here with Teresa and Nada. What had Teresa said about Robert and Marina? That they were only pretending to be who they were? As if she could not believe in their reality. As if they possessed for her no depth, no warmth, no humanity, but were only the drifting figures in their own landscapes, artful depictions of themselves, constructed with care, with great skill, and even with love, but figurations only, lacking the one essential of her own reality: a family.

  ‘You’re not even listening to me now!’ Teresa said, her anger coming out. ‘You sit over there at that table chewing your food in silence! There’s no getting through to you! I could serve you a plate of cardboard and you’d eat it.’ She stood confronting him; large, determined, angry, bewildered, demanding his attention. ‘So you’re not going to ask me how come your brother came over to see us? You’re not curious to know why Roy suddenly turns up on our doorstep out of the blue?’

  ‘You called him and asked him to come over.’

  ‘Yes, I called him and asked him to come over. And it looks as if it’s just as well I did. I can’t believe you’re letting that woman solve your problems for you.’

  There it was, in the open. ‘I know it must look that way to you. But that’s not the way it is.’

  ‘That is the way it is, for Christ’s sake! Just be fucking honest with yourself for once!’ Her anger flaring and beaming in her dark eyes. The incontestable logic of her case. The justice of her indignation. ‘She’s painting a background to your picture! You’re going to her for your answers! That’s the way it is!’ She began to slam the plates into the dishwasher one at a time. ‘Either have the guts to be fucking honest, Toni Powlett, or fuck off!’

  He more than half-expected her to slam a plate into his face. He was seeing her looking at Theo’s boldly erotic nymph mutilating the satyr, looking at the pictures of the bound woman under the tree, the fierce naked wrestlers, and his own suggestive painting of Marina asleep under the wattle. He wanted to explain to her the essential innocence of these images, but he knew there was no way to do that. What were the words, the tone that would carry that story? He wanted to tell her as Theo had told him, Don’t confuse art with life. He said nothing.

  Teresa straightened and closed the door of the dishwasher. ‘Just go and get her, for God’s sake!’

  •

  He drove Teresa’s Honda to the kinder and picked up Nada. On the way back he parked at the corner shop and bought a latté in a polystyrene cup for himself and a chocolate Freddo Frog for Nada. He carried her across the main road and they sat on a bench by the swings. They had their treat then spent a while on the swings before going home. He resisted going down to the studio. Later, the three of them had an early tea sitting around the television. The news came on at seven and he watched the first couple of minutes of it. Teresa was on the couch clipping items out of the travel section of the previous weekend’s paper. Nada was playing with Snoopy Dog on the rug.

  He eased himself out of his chair. ‘I might go down and do an hour’s work.’

  Teresa did not look up from her clipping. ‘You wouldn’t like to read her a story before you go?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Teresa gave Nada a cuddle and told her, ‘I’ll come in and kiss you after Daddy’s read you a story.’

  He and Nada went down the passage and he helped her undress and get into her pyjamas. She wanted Mog’s Mumps. The book was on her bedside table. She handed it to him and lay down and waited for him to begin, her eyes on him, one arm around Snoopy Dog, the toy tucked in beside her.

  He sat on the bed, holding the book so she and Snoopy Dog could see the pictures of the witch and the cat. He read, ‘Baked, boiled, grilled or fried, show me what’s in Mog’s inside.’ There was an X-ray of Mog’s insides. A large fish was lodged sideways in the cat’s stomach.

  Nada said, ‘Snoopy Dog said why is Mog sick?’ She asked the question as if she had never asked it before.

  ‘Tell Snoopy Dog because Mog ate too much.’ He did not enjoy the privilege of communicating directly with Snoopy Dog. Only Nada knew the language. He waited while she turned aside and whispered the explanation to Snoopy Dog. It sounded like English, but he knew better. When she was ready he continued reading.

  He read the story four times. And each time he read it, Nada asked for an explanation of each of the pictures on Snoopy Dog’s behalf, and each time she asked he gave her the same answers, as if he were giving the answers for the first time. It was a familiar ritual. Nada had heard the story maybe a hundred times. When he had first begun to read to her he had been surprised to find that she did not want the novelty of variation, but wanted the reassurance of familiarity. He had eventually seen how, with repeated readings, the stories he read to her became her own territory. Evidently there was, in her perfect foreknowledge of the story’s details, a powerful magic that she did not discuss or share with anyone except Snoopy Dog. In the early days he had introduced new twists of his own to the stories for a bit of variety, but she had been upset and had angrily accused him of not telling the truth. Hearing a familiar story repeated last thing at night before she went to sleep was a reassurance for her that, while she slept, the boundaries of her world would not change, and when she woke in the morning all would be as it had been when she had gone to sleep. Her inner world was posted with the landmarks of these familiar, unchanging stories. It fascinated him to encounter the fierceness of her distrust of innovation and to witness her implacable resistance to it. And yet her deep conservatism did not inhibit her imagination— it had been through their shared drawing sessions that he had remembered that the landscape of his own childhood had been just such a dangerous place of enchanted borderlands as was hers.


  He closed the book after the fourth reading and sat stroking her silky hair, waiting for her eyes to droop. He accepted nowadays that what she needed from him was certainty—that state of mind most deeply distrusted by artists, who nevertheless long to reconnect with the spontaneous candour of childhood. The paradox fascinated him. Nada would scarcely have benefited from Robert’s experience of the disappearing father. A parent there one minute and gone the next. And perhaps, with Robert’s background, he and Marina had been right to resist partnering their art with the demands of a family. We decided it is enough that we are artists, Marina had once said. We realised we couldn’t have everything, and we chose art. He looked down at Nada. She was wide awake, watching him. ‘It’s time you went to sleep, darling. Daddy’s got to work tonight.’

  She looked up at him steadily from the pillow, as if she were considering a question of great moment.

  He stroked her hair. Was she lonely, he wondered, as Teresa feared? Did she need a brother or a sister by her side to complete her world? ‘Go to sleep now. Mummy will come in and kiss you goodnight in a minute.’

  She asked seriously, ‘Can I come and do a picture with you, Dad?’

  ‘It’s too late now, darling. You’ll be tired in the morning. On the weekend. You can come down and work with me in the studio on the weekend. Okay? I promise.’

  Her eyes remained fixed on his face and she waited for the gravity of her request to register with him.

  Her eyes were mirrors of his father’s eyes, dark and filled with emotion and with hope and belief. Her beauty and her vulnerability moved him and he felt again the familiar tightening in his chest, his fear for her, his longing that she have a good life and that no harm ever befall her, the same longing his father had known for him and for his brother, that his children would never know the monstrous desolation that had devoured his own childhood. ‘I’m not going to be doing a lot tonight,’ he explained. ‘I just want to lay down a rough grid of this picture that I’ve got in my head. If I don’t make a note of it tonight, I might lose it. Pictures are like that. You and I both know they can disappear into their own world without saying anything to us and never come back.’