by Hilary Sloin
“Francesca?” Mrs. Val Noonan extended her hand, “I’m Mrs. Noonan, your sister’s literary agent.” She pulled a Tootsie Pop from her purse. “Hungry?” she asked.
Francesca stared at the candy, then gazed into the woman’s face. How old does she think I am? she wondered, taking the lollipop. She stood up and glanced in the direction of her family. “Thank you,” she said.
“You’re most welcome. How about we go for a walk? I have an inkling we’ll be here awhile.” She gestured for Francesca to follow. They stepped out into the quiet, damp night, now cooler than it had been only half an hour ago. Mrs. Val Noonan’s pointy shoes clicked along the pavement. She dropped her cigarette on the ground and demolished it with her shoe, then lit another.
“I was born in New York City. Have you ever been to New York City?” she asked.
Francesca shook her head and unwrapped the lollipop.
“My family was quite well off. We lived on the Upper East Side. That may not mean anything to you, but we had an apartment on Central Park, which is quite exclusive.” She took a loud drag on her cigarette. “I had an older sister, June. She was a gifted pianist. Not a genius like your Isabella, of course. But from the moment June touched that keyboard, it was spectacular! Miraculous! Even when she didn’t know the notes, long before she could read music, she could pick out complicated melodies—Mozart, Chopin, Bach. It seemed she could play anything. Absolutely anything.”
Francesca listened closely with vague recognition and stared down at shiny puddles and soggy yellow cheeseburger wrappers, the streetlights distorted on the wet, black pavement. They walked the perimeter of the well-lit area, not venturing anywhere dark since it was after 1:00 and the hospital was located in what Mrs. Val Noonan called a bad neighborhood.
“I was also talented.”
Francesca unplucked the lollipop. Her cheeks slackened. “What did you do?” she asked.
“I played the flute.”
“Oh,” she said, unimpressed.
“One night,” Mrs. Val Noonan sighed heavily, “June was practicing the piano. She was doing scales over and over. Da da da da da da da . . . Up. Da da da da da da da . . . Down. Over and over and over, the metronome clicking and clicking and clicking in the background.” Mrs. Val Noonan rolled her eyes. “My sister,” she paused, the whole thing coming back in a flood, “could practice those scales all night long.” She reached in her small pocketbook for another cigarette as an ambulance pulled up. Francesca turned toward the screaming siren. The hospital doors flew open.
“I was upstairs practicing the flute,” continued Mrs. Val Noonan, entranced. “My parents had gone away overnight to a wedding in the Hamptons. On my bookshelf was a giant rock I’d brought home from a trip to the Peabody Museum one summer. It was a fossil rock, said to contain a fragment from a footprint of an actual Tyrannosaurus Rex. Just a toe, really. Could have been anything.”
“Supposedly, a Tyrannosaurus Rex would be the size of a football field. That’s larger than this parking lot,” exclaimed Francesca.
“That’s interesting,” Mrs. Val Noonan said absently, lingering at this last hopeful point in the story. “I still don’t know what came over me. I picked up that rock and, God help me, I walked down the stairs. I heard June practicing those goddamn scales and before I knew what I was doing I slammed that rock down onto the keys, just the bass notes, where June’s fingers weren’t playing, of course. And in one, impulsive gesture, I destroyed the priceless baby grand Steinway that had been in my father’s family for generations.”
Breathless and energized, Mrs. Val Noonan shook her head and closed her eyes, the whole thing happening again behind her eyelids. She chucked her spent cigarette and stepped onto the rubber mat, forcing apart the glass doors. They re-entered the busy room. Francesca quickly found Evelyn and sat close to her, feeling disoriented from the lateness of the night and the creepy story. She unclasped Evelyn’s pocketbook and removed a stick of peppermint gum to lift the Tootsie Roll from the crevices of her teeth. Evelyn reached over and squeezed Francesca’s nylon-covered knee, then looked suspiciously at Mrs. Val Noonan. The agent paced the bright room, wishing she’d thought of more appropriate conversation with the younger daughter, hoping she hadn’t worsened her own standing by unearthing her dark tale.
The doctor said it was likely Isabella would expel her tooth within the next couple of days. He advised poking around in the vomit, the carpet, and bedspread, to see if it might have already passed. If the tooth were found within forty-eight hours, it would be possible to reattach it. “Failing that, you’ll need to see a dentist.” He shrugged, smiled, and left the room, stopping in the hallway to note something on his clipboard.
Later, Vivian and Alfonse took turns checking on Isabella. Mrs. Val Noonan, having consumed a fair share of the champagne supply on her own, was beached on the largest piece of the sectional, chain-smoking Tareytons, staring off into space and chastising herself for her poor judgement. “I should have known,” she said aloud. “It’s a genius thing. At the very least, it’s a writer thing.” She tried to reunite a run in her stockings.
“How could you know?” asked Alfonse. He gathered small, pink paper plates containing soggy toothpicks and balled-up napkins.
“Look at the odds.” She sat up with some effort, stubbed out her cigarette, and rearranged her legs on the coffee table to examine her ankles. She adjusted the straps on her shoes, not missing the opportunity—Vivian was upstairs checking on Isabella—to examine Alfonse’s behind, which made her feel a little weak in her middle, the walnut-shaped tussy, tight and small, grabbing her attention, no matter how well it was hidden under baggy trousers.
“Hemingway, Joyce, Faulkner, O’Neill. My God, I could go on forever,” she watched him bend down and pick up some fallen Triscuits. “And that’s saying nothing of what becomes of the women.”
Alfonse looked up with knitted eyebrows. These, too, she found adorable—the little wiry hairs running in different directions.
“What about the women?” he asked, straightening up with a small groan.
“You don’t want to know.” She turned her attention to the staircase where Vivian was descending with a bucket, a look of deep despair revealing lines in her face that hadn’t been there hours ago.
Vivian collapsed on the couch, kicked off her navy-blue pumps, and undid the sailor’s bow on her perfectly matched dress. She stared at the floor.
“Cheer up baby,” said Alfonse.
“Kids are naturally curious,” added Mrs. Val Noonan.
“I did this sort of thing myself,” said Alfonse.
“I did as well!” chimed Mrs. Val Noonan, experiencing, in that very moment, a deepening bond between her and Alfonse.
Vivian looked up slowly, dragging her scowl over each of them. Her pancake was slick as silly putty. Her bloodshot eyes were pushed far into their sockets, sketchy mascara dripping down in spider’s legs. “She drank a whole bottle,” she said slowly. Hatefully. Still waiting for someone to explain how this could have happened to her, when only hours ago her life had seemed blessed by some infinitely generous force.
“Well, no. No, she didn’t.” Alfonse had already thought this through. “Because she spilled a lot of it.”
Vivian spoke slowly. “What made her do it? What made her run to the refrigerator, steal the bottle, and drink it? Open it with her teeth! She opened it with her teeth!” She looked at Alfonse as if this last part were the worst of it.
“I insist on paying the hospital bill,” said Mrs. Val Noonan.
No one protested.
Emergency Room, 1986
It is a paradox that the lackluster parenting of Alfonse and Vivian DeSilva prepared Francesca for her initiation into the fraternity called American Art. Often faulted by the academy for being lazy, uneducated, and intellectually vacant, she was also said to have a minuscule vision, be overly concerned with matters sexual, and to possess “a generous, audacious talent dwarfed by an uncurious mind.”19
/> The painting most often cited in discussions about deSilva’s narrow scope of vision is the 1986 canvas Emergency Room. First exhibited in Primal Scream,20 a short-lived international exhibit in 1987, Emergency Room depicts a late-night, inner-city trauma unit. The clean, beige check-in desk is illuminated by a stray light from an unknown source above the counter (quintessential deSilva), the overflow spilling across a scuffed linoleum floor. At the far left of the canvas, draped in darkness like a bit player waiting to make a stage entrance, is a bucket with a mop standing idly inside it.21 Nearby, a young girl, dressed in powder-blue nylon pajamas and a denim jacket is crouched beneath the seats, one palm extended, apparently searching for treasures on the floor.
Hurriedly sketched patrons slouch in the colorful plastic seats, their faces drawn by flashes of a thin brush, each one down-leaning and sleepy. The central focus of the painting is the bright counter where the late-night nurse is engrossed in a romance novel. The cover of the paperback is one of two focal points of the painting—a burly male embracing, rather violently, a bare-shouldered redhead whose neck is bent unreasonably, its images in stark contrast to the general wash that softens most of the canvas. Hanging above the counter, several feet to the left, beside a deconstruction of the Heimlich maneuver, is the second focal point of the painting, the public service poster picturing a racial melange of benevolent children holding hands and smiling. The words “Imagine . . . These Youngsters on Heroin,” written in 1960s Fillmore East-style writing, float psychedelically above their heads.”22
“The poster is so authentically executed, deSilva seems to have taken it down from the wall, shrunk it, and glued it to the canvas,” says Dialo in Women Paint! “Clearly, this advertisement and the book cover beneath it superseded, in deSilva’s mind, the usual horrors of an emergency room. Of course, this is the beauty of the work, the element of unexpectedness, the focus on insipid reading material amid the most urgent undulations of life and death—the very hub of it all. Here, as always in a deSilva canvas, the artist’s inimitable subconscious drips onto the page.”23
One area of polemics has been whether or not the poster and book cover ever existed. Anna Leighton, a Marlboro College Art History major, class of 1995, launched a thorough investigation into both artifacts, found nothing conclusive about the poster, but did unearth a pulp novel from 1958, The Longest Kiss. The salacious tale recounts a man who wrenches a lesbian from her plethora of admirers by a kiss that, literally, narcotizes her for many years. It is eventually learned that he is a vampire. The woman, rendered hopelessly heterosexual, is forced by the puritanical townspeople (as recompense for her immoral deeds, many of which involved local wives and daughters) to stab a cross through the vampire’s heart. (And then, of course, to kill herself in the village square, thereby restoring morality to the town.)24
Art aficionados, historians, and critics alike have wrestled virulently with deSilva’s choice to illuminate two icons of pop culture amid what is arguably one of the most dramatic arenas of human activity: a late-night, inner-city trauma unit. Why, they try to understand, is she concerned with a public service announcement and the cover of a pulp-fiction paperback at the expense of human life?
Says Michael Wright in Telling My Truth, “Emergency Room is about alienation. The explicit focus on these inanimate objects amid a roomful of people illustrates deSilva’s persistent sense of isolation. The selected objects present two areas where the artist remains eternally unfulfilled: childhood happiness and heterosexual love.”25 He goes on to say that the poster might express the flagrant neglect of deSilva’s childhood. Obviously her parents did not know where their child was.
Lucinda Dialo offers another interpretation. “This work, more than any other by Francesca deSilva, has been ambushed by friendly fire. Scholars are so enamored of attacking one another’s shoddy brainwork, that they fail to examine the significant depiction of a young girl, dressed so very closely in the style of the artist herself, scrounging about on the linoleum floor. Is there no intention, no artistic meaning to be found in the girl’s positioning—far away from the other humans, far away from the central metaphors? Isn’t it possible that deSilva’s intent was to contrast reality (the life or death cadence of an emergency room; the lonely, unsupervised girl on the floor) with the absurd depiction of life presented in these artifacts?”26
Chapter Seven
The next three years took much from Isabella and passed it, some might say judiciously, on to her sister. Francesca was chiseled from the rough, boasting two spectacular cheekbones; an olive complexion and dark, wavy hair; a lean, strong body with thick hands and wide feet; and a smooth, watery way of walking—swishing left, pause, right, pause, always stopping a moment in the doorway to investigate before entering a situation, always taking her time. Her voice was deep and rich, particularly for a 16-year-old, escaping from a wide, crooked mouth that, while it appeared to be perpetually on the verge of smiling, rarely did. Her stance was that of a sturdy, young boy: one foot pointing sideways, one hip forward, one hand in her pocket. And in her eyes was a rare intelligence, a gaze that made people uncomfortable, impelled them to check between their teeth, look down at their zippers. Even her teachers had begun to notice her; her gym teacher saw in Francesca shadows of her younger self and took extra time to teach her the basics of meditation, in which Francesca expressed a particular interest.
In tenth grade, she won a state-wide art competition for her series of abstract finger paintings,27 most of them concerning rodents, moss, and other relics of the outdoors. Her art teacher recommended she attend a school for the gifted, a program fully funded by the state. Only seven students were admitted from her high school, and Francesca was to be one of them. Vivian was skeptical, but Alfonse thrilled at his daughter’s talent: It alleviated his guilt (which was beginning to age him unkindly), but also, this particular talent made him feel that Francesca resembled him in some small way. His great-grandfather had been a portraitist, the sort that did harried drawings for small change. Alfonse, too, felt that had he not been strong-armed into working in the family pizzeria instead of going to college, he might have become an artist. Isabella had inherited her intellectual whatever it was from the Jewish side of the family, but Francesca’s gift for art and her appreciation of natural beauty had surely sprung from his lively genes.
She was separated from the high school masses each day by a small van that took her and six other students to an after-school program downtown. There, she sat on the floor with other would-be artists and peered up at female models in bathing suits positioned high above them on a desk. In thick charcoal pencils, they sketched as the models moved in and out of unnatural poses.
Isabella, who had long since refused home-schooling, spent her afternoons reading the distraught poetry of dead females and writing articles for an underground publication, Born to Die. Inviting profound dread were Thursdays, the day that the DeSilva family, en masse, traveled ten minutes to Evelyn Horowitz’s house, where they subjected each other to an emotionally—if not gastronomically—harrowing meal. Isabella made sure to get drunkest on Thursday afternoons; the mere thought of the weekly dinner—her family stiff as insects pinned to cardboard—impelled her down the carpeted staircase to the liquor cabinet, over and over again.
One particular Thursday, after phoning sporting goods stores and pawnshops to inquire about purchasing a gun (without a permit no one would help her), she glued the bottle to her lips and ingested large, thankful swallows, then shook her head left to right like a dog with fresh kill. She awoke to Vivian hollering: “Pumpkin! Time to go!”
Through a thick blanket of sedation she waded, propelling each foot forward from its spot in the rear. Inside her head, something seemed to have cracked. Air poured in, air that wasn’t supposed to be there, freezing the back of her eyeballs, the canals of her nose, the nerves at the edges of her gums. She managed to negotiate the living room and traverse the kitchen. There, hazy through the side door screen, she saw her sister�
�unless she was hallucinating—seated on the stoop with her legs crossed and eyes closed, her palms facing the heavens, looking like some kind of hippie.
She squinted for a closer look, then pushed the door open and tossed herself outside into the cool air. “What are you doing?”
“Shh,” Francesca said. “I’m meditating.”
Vivian appeared on the other side of the screen, wearing a stubborn, artificial smile. She, too, dreaded these family dinners and always outfitted herself with a hardened, I-dare-you-to-crack-this smile, behind which she was made of powdery sand, dispersible by a whistle of air. She carried her fake snakeskin bag by its chain link strap and smelled of Jean Nate. “Okey dokey,” she pressed her face to the screen, cracking her gum compulsively. “You okay, pumpkin?” she asked Isabella.
They floated along cushioned suburban streets that separated the DeSilvas’ unremarkable neighborhood from Evelyn’s arguably less remarkable one. Cars passed in clusters, followed by the sound of a barking dog came on and faded, followed, maybe, by a distant siren. A sprinkler system hissed. Otherworldly, monotonous music escaped though an open window, preceding the six o’clock news. A phone rang while they waited at a stop sign. Isabella blinked, half awake. She muttered something, smacked her lips, and turned her face toward the cool air.
Alfonse helped himself to some Russell Stovers from the cabinet where Evelyn kept her mahjong supplies.
“Mama,” Alfonse called to Evelyn, who was at that very moment removing the heavy Pyrex pan containing a steaming, thick, and sweet-smelling brisket from the oven. “Did you know that Francesca did a paper on Anne Frank and got an A+?”
He raised his eyebrows at Francesca.
Evelyn put the pan down on two wicker mats in the shape of palm leaves, placed next to each other on the dining-room table. She walked toward the living room, her hands huge inside yellow oven mittens. “Anne Frank? Wha—?”