Alena: A Novel

by Pastan, Rachel

  She looked pleased. “Yes. I made these this winter.” She touched one with her finger, a scallop, fluted and mottled, slightly asymmetrical, curled in on itself like a sleeping animal. “I love scallop shells, don’t you?” she said.

  “You’ve been making them for a long time,” I observed.

  “Well,” she said, “but these are completely different.” I smiled, taking the remark for a little joke, but then I saw that she wasn’t joking. “I was so excited that you called now, just after the major breakthrough I had this winter!” There was something childlike about the unguarded way she spoke, her golden eyes glowing with affection as she moved through the room, pointing and describing, her Chinese slippers making shushing noises against the linoleum and her plump, blunt-fingered hands opening and shutting like bivalves in bursts of enthusiasm. She told me about the experiments she’d been doing with glazes, and how she’d come to understand that her earlier work had been too matte, the colors too dull, that the brushes she had been using were the wrong kind entirely. Also, she explained, the constancy of temperature while firing could not be overemphasized. As she talked, her fingertips caressed first one small sculpture and then another; she couldn’t keep her hands off them. She’d pick one up, cupping it carefully, and offer it to me to touch. “See how smooth that is?” she asked of a long, pointed, cone-shaped shell, rather like an icicle. “Your finger glides over it like glass.” Putting it down, she picked up a simple clamlike shell. “See how this one is just the slightest bit coarser? Smooth but also rough, the way silk is rough.” She picked up a shell that looked like an icing flourish on a fancy cake. “This one’s a periwinkle. It feels like polished quartz.” Obediently I touched each one, running my finger across the surface, listening and nodding, trying to feel the differences. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think I’d like to have a show where the room was pitch black, or where everyone was given blindfolds. Instead of looking, people could use their sense of touch.”

  “It would be a shame not to see the colors,” I said.

  “The world has had enough of color,” she said. “No one has ever used color better than Giotto, and no one ever will. But to make art for the blind—now, that would be something!” Her eyes were as bright as a bird’s, her head cocking, birdlike, to one side as she went on: “Before I die, I want to make a glaze the exact texture of skin. Can you imagine that? But the technical challenges are mind-boggling.”

  Slowly we made our way around the room. In addition to the shell ceramics, there were a few large pieces resembling tree stumps that she had carved out of wood, very detailed. She explained which was which, the American beech with the smoothest bark, the oak furrowed with dark rings, the white pine patchy and scaly with broader rings reflecting its quick growth. The roots spread out across the floor like the tentacles of octopi. I liked them very much. I wandered among them, asking questions, touching, comparing. The longer I looked, the more human they seemed: the apple with a kind of maternal grace, the several oaks dark and handsome like the heroes of romance novels. I asked her how long she had been making them.

  Her mouth pursed and her forehead furrowed (like an oak!), making her look older. “This is my memorial series,” she said. “The lady who owned the land behind me died last year. Her sons sold it to a developer—five acres of mostly woods. They cut down the trees to build one of those places, you know. Oak Farms or Pine Estates or Cherry Tree Bower.”

  I said it must be a hazard of living on the Cape.

  Her golden eyes glowed angrily. “I took pictures,” she said. “I documented it! And I worked from those. These are portraits of corpses.”

  I looked at the wood pieces again, seeing more clearly their penumbral, desolate quality, dark smears and stains where the sap had been spilled—very different from the shells that pulsed with gossamer being—and what came into my mind was Morgan McManus. His photographs of exploded human bodies. His candy-colored viscera and dismembered limbs. What was the essential difference between them, the narrow but profound crevasse that made me like the one and reject the other? Was it that the subject of one was human and the other wasn’t? That one was beautiful—aspired to beauty—and the other wasn’t, and didn’t? Did it have to do with the impulse of the artist?

  But how could one ever pin down impulse, really? And how hopelessly outmoded even to try. “Have you shown these pieces?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t show them,” she said feelingly. “That would be like exhibiting the dead.”

  You never know quite how a studio visit will go. Generally I consider these sessions among a curator’s greatest pleasures. The deep access. The invitation to step into the embodied mind of the artist. Some studios are messy, materials everywhere, the floor littered with old rags and dirty T-shirts and empty bottles and shriveled mouse droppings. Others are so clean and tidy it’s hard to see how any work gets done in them at all—and indeed, sometimes I think very little does, that a blocked artist will spend her energy arranging and rearranging until the shelves of tools become a kind of sculpture, displacing the actual work. Some artists are preternaturally verbal, especially the ones who have recently emerged from art school, where talking about your work is almost as valued a skill as making it. Increasingly in the art world, artists must be their own interpreters and advocates. The work is not presumed to speak for itself; rather, the artist becomes a living extension of the work, a kind of conjoined twin whose function is to mediate between the art—which like an autistic sibling speaks only in codes and riddles—and the outer world of gallery owners, collectors, curators, writers, and, of course, the public. With artists like these, studio visits come to resemble graduate seminars or Artforum essays, and a great deal of alert tact is necessary to pry open cracks in the slick surface of the verbal assault and let something like substance leak out.

  Celia Cowry was not an artist like that. While hardly inarticulate, and sometimes no more comprehensible than your average recent art school graduate, her words seemed to me more like occult objects than exegeses. She seemed almost to consider the pieces she had made as though she had dreamed them into existence, like a character in Borges, rather than to have actually made them with her hands. When I asked her about that first show of hers I had seen in New York, her answer shocked me.

  “I threw that work away,” she said. “It was all wrong.”

  A hard shiver washed through me. “You—what?”

  “Threw it away! I smashed it first. Working in ceramic, you spend so much of your energy trying not to break things, trying to prevent them from breaking themselves. It’s almost like spell-casting, as though if you concentrate hard enough you can summon a protective field around each object. But of course, it mostly doesn’t work. Sometimes an object just wants to break, you know?”

  I tried to look as though I knew.

  “It’s amazing to break something on purpose,” she said. We were sitting by now on the shabby, sagging sofa in the corner, sipping the sun tea she steeped in jars on the concrete ledge outside the sliding glass door. “Especially something you’ve put so much time into. And not just you! Other people. And when that something has been on display, had a value placed on it, been carefully packed and even more carefully unpacked, dusted by a trained expert with a single feather or whatever they do. To pick up an object like that and hurl it against the wall!” She leaned toward me. Her face was alight and I could smell the patchouli oil she wore, and wet clay, and the pungency of chemicals, and the fustiness of the Cape damp, and the clean pines that stood around the house, surviving cousins of the trees whose massacre she had memorialized.

  “I was so interested in those pieces,” I said carefully. “I liked the pairings. The doublings. I thought—well, of course the forms were so extremely realistic, and then the colors were natural colors but not the colors the shells would naturally have been. Human colors. Skin tones—right? You said just now that you would like to make a sculpture with t
he exact texture of skin. Isn’t that the next logical step after your exploration of skin’s color?”

  “No, no. Not at all!” She shook her head vehemently, her shoulders in the pink muumuu trembling with ardor, raised herself higher on the couch like a stretching cat, kicked off her slippers, and tucked her bare horny feet underneath her. “You’re missing the point. Color is—” she began, then broke off. “While texture . . .” Her plump arms described expansive shapes in the air.

  “What?” I asked urgently. “Color is what? Texture is what?”

  “Texture is universal!” She plucked the word triumphantly out of the buzzing air.

  I decided to go back and try again. “When I saw those pairings,” I said carefully, endeavoring to pile my words into a solid edifice, “it was the subtlety I loved. The objects were beautiful, but you also found a way to bring in other things. Family, and race. The personal and the political.”

  “No, no, no,” she said again. “That’s not it. I made the shells some colors and not other colors, that’s all. I put them in pairs because the vitrines were too big for one, too small for three.”

  I couldn’t take that statement seriously. The vitrines would have been made to whatever size she and the curator worked out. “But,” I said, “that one piece. Parents, it was called. And isn’t it true that your mother was white and your father was black?” I was afraid she would be angry or offended, but she only sat back on her heels, leaning into the sprung sofa as though the invocation of her parents had softened her. “The purpose of titles,” she said, “is so you can refer to the works conveniently, without confusion. Otherwise you’re reduced to pointing, like a caveman.”

  “Still,” I persisted, “you could choose any name you wanted. You could have called that piece Snow, or Kitty Cat, or Anarchy, but instead you called it Parents.”

  She gave me a sly, sideways look. “What if I told you there was a typo on the label? That really the piece was called Patents, but the printer made a mistake?”

  “Patents?” I echoed in confusion. “What kind of a title is that?”

  “You’re the curator,” she said triumphantly. “You tell me.”

  14.

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE Bernard was scheduled to get back, Barbara picked me up in her old Mercedes station wagon with the dogs in the backseat. We had an appointment in Provincetown to meet Willa Somerset, the first person other than Barbara whom Bernard had asked to serve on the museum’s board. “She’s old now, of course,” Barbara said as we sped down the Mid-Cape Highway. Like her brother, she liked to drive fast. The dogs draped their muzzles ecstatically out the open windows, their ears careening like windmills. “And her mind isn’t always quite . . . To us she seemed old even when we were children. She used to come by on her bicycle in her skirts and long socks to bring our mother cuttings from her garden. She’s famous for her garden, and for her scrimshaw collection. She’s a scrimshaw expert. And she knows a lot about Wampanoag culture. The Wampanoag hunted whales here, you know, long before the British came.”

  “Wam-pa-what?” I asked. I was nervous, unsure how I should speak to this great Cape lady.

  “The native populations of the Cape. Nauquasset is a Wampanoag word. It means crown of the sea. Isn’t that pretty?” I thought of the building we had left behind us, glittering on the brow of the dune. It was good to be away for a morning, to be borne along amid the smells of dog and old leather and Barbara’s flowery perfume. “Of course, she doesn’t ride her bicycle now. She’s ninety-three and she’s had two strokes. Trouble with her lungs. It was Willa, you know, who donated the land for the Nauk. Her family has lived on the Cape forever—since the eighteenth century, I think. They owned a lot of property. Now she owns it. She’s the last one.”

  “What will happen when she dies?” I was thinking of Celia Cowry’s neighbor’s land, the trees cut down, the houses built. “Does she have children?”

  “She never married. She’s—you know. Like Bernie.” At first I didn’t understand what she meant, but then she went on, “I think she knew what he was before he knew himself. She used to bring him books, big books about art. Books about temples in Greece and Egyptian pyramids. There was one about Michelangelo, he used to drag it with him everywhere. He must have been about six! Oh, she always adored Bernie.”

  I tried to imagine Bernard as a boy: thin as a shadow, girlishly beautiful with those gray eyes and long lashes. Watchful, melancholy, passionate. Caressing with his gaze glossy pictures of the statue of David, the Vitruvian man inscribed in his circle, the erect finger of God igniting Adam into life. I remembered an old book my father had for some reason, of Dürer’s engravings. As a child I used to make a game of finding the hidden animals in those tricky forests of etched lines. Even then I felt something: a stirring, a veiled mystery. The bright secret magic, sensed but not understood, that rose and fell beneath the surface of marks like breath.

  Willa Somerset lived in a roomy shingled saltbox cottage set back from the road and enclosed in a riot of flowers. You entered the property through a latched gate, then ducked under a trellised archway smothered in white star-shaped clematis. Orange trumpet vine grew up the south wall of the house, tiger lilies and white and pink hollyhocks gave way to foxgloves and dark purple columbine. Fragrant tobacco flowers filled the space under the magnolia tree, and golden nasturtiums spilled their round leaves down the sides of broad terra-cotta pots. In the corner, beside the spent peonies, tall fringed orange spikes, like something in a surrealist painting, flamed out of clumps of feathery bluish foliage.

  The door was opened by a broad-faced nurse in a white uniform, including the sort of winged cap I had otherwise seen only in old movies. Through the hall, in the long dim room, an old lady was arranged on a sofa under a gray cashmere shawl. A table in front of her was set for tea, with a plate of slices of bread and butter, a bowl of apricots, and blue and white cups and saucers, some painted with dragons and some with clouds.

  “Hello, Aunt Willa!” Barbara said. “You’re looking well.” She bent over and kissed the old woman, her bulk suspended awkwardly over the small brittle figure resting on the hard, old-fashioned, pale green chesterfield.

  “Hello, dear,” came the answer. “So nice of you to come and visit. And I see you’ve brought someone.” She peered up at me greedily through her pearl-gray cat’s-eye glasses.

  “This is the new curator,” Barbara said. “Bernie asked me specially to bring her to meet you. He’s sorry he can’t come himself, but you know how Bernie is—always rushing around!” She gestured, and I stepped forward into the light so she could see me better.

  “I’m so happy to meet you,” I said. “Your garden is so beautiful.”

  The old woman stretched her neck, her mouth working as though chewing a tough bit of quahog. “You’re not Alena!” she announced.

  A hollow place in my chest dilated, filled with an icy sting.

  Barbara sat down on the sofa and took the old lady’s hand. “You know Alena’s gone, Aunt Willa. This is her replacement. We’ve come to have tea with you.”

  “Tea, yes. I know. Everything’s ready.” She looked at me hard, as though daring me not to vanish. Then she looked pointedly away. The nurse sat on a low chair in a corner, the white of her uniform like a blank place in the crowded room in which a great number of glass cases and wooden shelves and little tables held any number of interesting objects: silver thimbles, faded cloth dolls, china egg cups, stone arrowheads, necklaces of sharks’ teeth, necklaces of shells, and innumerable pieces of scrimshaw—oval panels and curved hair pieces, bracelets and knife handles and domino boxes. In the center of the mantelpiece, a filigreed clock on a footed wood-and-ivory platform was flanked by two large whale teeth inscribed with castles and waterfalls.

  “Why don’t I pour,” Barbara said. She picked up the teapot. It was so quiet that the sound of the fragrant tea filling the cups seemed very loud, and I could hear
our hostess’s labored breathing as she reached for the plate of bread and butter to pass. “Have you had Portuguese sweet bread?” Barbara asked me. “Aunt Willa gets it from a bakery that’s been there since I was a girl. She used to take me there and we would buy sugar cookies decorated with frosting stars. Remember, Aunt Willa?”

  Our hostess didn’t answer. Her face was a mass of wrinkles and brownish age spots, over which her spun-sugar hair floated like a cloud. I bit into the soft, buttery bread. “It’s delicious,” I said.

  At the sound of my voice, the old lady turned to me, regarding me blankly as though she hadn’t noticed me before. “Who are you?” she asked.

  I put my plate down.

  “Aunt Willa,” Barbara said sternly. “This is the new curator. Bernie found her in Venice. She’ll be organizing a new show so we can get the Nauk open again.”

  Found, I thought. Like a shell on the beach.

  “I understand you donated the land for the Nauk,” I said.

  “New curator?” Her eyes clouded with confusion behind her sparkling lenses. “New? But what about Alena?” She glared at me, the ridge of her brow prominent beneath her sparse eyelashes. “Alena used to bring me things,” she said. “That eighteenth-century snuff box on the mantel. The shadow puppet from Java. Hannah, where is it? I don’t see it.” Her gaze darted anxiously around the room until the nurse said loudly in her soothing Caribbean accent, “We moved it to the dining room, remember, Mrs. S?”