by Brian Hodge
CREATION
2000
Ariel
Lightning blanched the side of the farmhouse, freezing a flash photograph. Thunder shook the thin windows in anger, as if they were so many wall frames whose portraits had been stolen. There were faces enough in the history of the house to fill each one, three to a casement. A century and a half of faces had sheltered behind the glass, contemplating spring floods, summer droughts, winter freezes. The thousand storms that had laid siege to the roof and the foundation had never penetrated. All those generations kept safe and sound until now, and the house was still a virtual fortification. But the need tonight was not for refuge. The need tonight was for escape.
She stood there in the weather-ravaged window frame high up on the third story, a white-faced hag, her stare bulging with just a hint of Graves' disease out at the storm. This was Ariel Leppa, whose once clear eyes were now becoming opaque. They saw nothing in the present, nothing in the future. And the past, which remained so vivid in her thoughts, was like a single day. The compression of life into one day was not so strange considering that time had shunned her.
It had taken seventy-four years to live that past, but now it was like a single day into which she had arisen, stupid with hope and trust, in the morning. And even when the afternoon of that solitary day was upon her and the details of her personal reality had begun to crush her, she had still believed. Stupid. Because by that time she had shallow friendships of convenience, and a husband who "kept" her like something in a drawer, and a headstrong daughter she had raised but never controlled.
Beyond the tyranny of marriage and parenting, the unending day had been about omissions—things that had never truly happened. Like friendship and respect. Ariel had gone to school, church, dances; she had worked for a time in the world. Why had all her relationships been variations on the single theme of rejection? Ariel Leppa. Ariel the Leper. Her successes had been defaults, her minor ascendancies consolations. She had never been anyone's first choice for anything. They had merely taken her in. Tolerated her. And when better options came along or they felt acquitted of charitable obligations, they shoved her back into the shadows. That's who she was and who she wasn't.
But now it was over, if only because the major players in her melodrama were dead. They had gone down one by one like autumnal fireflies winking out in the cold. Except for her daughter. Amber might as well be dead, partially paralyzed and on dialysis at age forty-four because of a fall in a rock climb eleven years ago, living—if you could call it that—with a husband and a grown son. How dare Amber be happy in such a state when her mother, whole in mind and body if not spirit, was so miserable!
Ariel stood in the skittering flashes and bombast of the storm, waiting to feel vindicated. (See who is left standing!) But all she felt was cheated.
When the lightning flashed again, the high window frame was empty. Ariel Leppa was flying through the house like a Valkyrie. Wait for me! Tonight she would rejoin the context of her life. No tepid suicide hers, no whiny note or play for attention. Her death would be a temper tantrum equal to the storm outside. Hurling her own thunderbolts, she swept the nightstand and dresser clean. She had a cane she used but did not much need, and this she raked along the upper corridor between the doors, tearing down pictures—faces and places that kept the wounds of condescension fresh. What malevolence deemed that she, the most unwanted of her life's circle, be the survivor? All those funerals she had attended, most recently her husband's—that tyrant. Even he, the invincible Thomas Leppa, was in his grave. What a shock to discover that she needed them, wanted them back. Why wasn't she triumphant to have outlived them all?
It was because she hadn't lived. She was still waiting to live. And they had been her audience who might yet applaud, might accept her before the curtain rang down, might give some meaning to the play and her performance. And now the best she could do was exit stage left to an empty … house.
Down the staircase she hammered, stiffness be damned. The resistance in her dried-up old joints made her a frightening spectacle, stumbling against the banister, scrawny limbs advancing with jerky animation. A good headlong pitch to the bottom might do it, flashed through her mind. But what if she wasn't lucky enough to break her neck? What if she survived only to go on existing in a wheelchair, like Amber? Better to start a fire on the first floor. Better to go up to the roof where she could fall three stories, glaring at the world all the way down. No one ever got an Oscar for a quick death. She hadn't been up there since she was a little girl, she thought, and suddenly the image of her childhood attempts to touch the sky tore through her with softness and light. She faltered against the wall and slid down hard on the bottom step of the staircase. A blue flash filled the side glass by the front door, followed by a sharp bark, like heavy furniture being nudged on a wooden floor, and then the lights failed exactly like house lights going down for the start of a play.
The rain beat steadily now, drumming up a deluge of memories and memories told to her. She had been born in this house, breathing the dust left over from another century. The foundation had been laid in 1856. So sayeth The History of Minnesota: A County Survey up in the sewing room. It was a proper house, the first real one in the area. The cellars—plural because there was a subcellar that sloped down from the main one—had gone in first. In those days, five years after the Dakota Indians sold their lands to the government and two years before statehood, you couldn't know that disgruntled bands wouldn't come back to burn you out. The charred bones of many settlers mingled with ruins still traceable in local lore. A civil war came and went, and a whole Victorian age. The new century had brought, among other things, a chic decadence, and there was a dark chapter where her grandfather had permitted mobsters from far-off Chicago to run Canadian whiskey that had been stored at the farm into Saint Paul. That too she missed, but just barely. She had heard that tale fresh: how men named Torrio and O'Bannion had stacked cases of smuggled bourbon in tunnels that had been extended from the cellars; and how five of their gang had been gunned down with Thompson submachine guns right there; and how her grandfather had then sealed off the tunnel. Were dead men still in the cellars? No one could or would answer that, and she had loved exploring the tunnels as a little girl, discovering quaint tools, puzzling over Chautauqua souvenirs and patent medicine relics. The cellars became her first studio. She learned to draw down there and later to paint. Painting was all she had ever accomplished. It had saved her from loneliness at the same time that it condemned her to be alone, because two-dimensional people done in oils became her three-dimensional society, her friends, her lovers….
But she couldn't paint herself a husband, and her father had volunteered to fight Hirohito and neglected to return, leaving her mother to claim abandonment and file for divorce, so the farm had no man. And then Thomas Leppa stepped in. He was no more attractive than she, a fact they both understood. But Ariel was almost thirty, and no one else was looking at her, least of all the undeclared inamorata of her life, Kraft Olson, who only had eyes for a woman named Danielle, so Ariel married Thomas Leppa, and he gave her Amber along with a lifetime of abuse.
When the farm began to fail in 1960, they leased the lower floor of the house to a Lutheran country day school, and a wing was built that extended the house closer to the barn. After that they lived in the upstairs while nearly four decades limped past. They were still farming at a subsistence level when the Lutheran day school closed its doors. But the loans had all been paid off by then, and there were just the two of them. And then there was one. And now, by dawn, there would be none.
Except … that she couldn't just end herself without a final statement. Wasn't that funny? So much never accomplished, and now she needed something for closure before she could give it up.
She rose stiffly from the step and stumped through the rooms on her cane, pausing for lightning flashes to show the way. With her eyes she took diluted pictures at each illumination: the floor lamp, the Morris chair, the ottoman dr
ained of color—ghosts standing, sitting, lying. And suddenly it occurred to her that she couldn't remember what her father looked like. He was the first to abandon her. Was that when the pattern of rejection was set? He had said he loved her—he wrote that he loved her. He wrote when she was thirty-three. A little late, Daddy … He must have known it was too late, because what he actually wrote was that he had "always" loved her, as if he had finally figured out what a little girl needed to hear, to feel. She had never before been able to laugh at this absurd tardiness, so typically male, and for the first time in the forty years since she had learned of his death she wanted to forgive him, embrace him. But he had died in Iraq, in a helicopter crash, and his ashes …
Where were his ashes? Those oddly red ashes his partner had sent.
She hadn't seen the glass flask since before Amber's accident. It had gone from the mantel to the study after the Lutheran day school leased the lower floor, but it wasn't there now. She was sure of that. Had it been thrown away? On the brink of self-destruction, the thought that her father's ashes had disappeared from her life seemed apocalyptic.
Another spasm of lightning, and she twisted to scrutinize the shelves, too late to catch anything but afterdrift. She groped through to the next room and the next, and then, in the dining room, where a curved glass highboy sat, she saw something that afterward seemed like a silver finger pointing from her father's grave. Breathing heavily in the dark, she waited until a sustained flash brought back the silver glint precisely where she was peering. Dust within glass within glass, she saw. The flask sat on the middle shelf of the cabinet, crowded against mugs and knickknacks that were leather or pewter or clay.
The bramble of lightning died as she shuffled toward the highboy—the darkness where she had last seen the highboy—and her cane thumped on the hardwood floor and her other hand paddled the air as if it were webbed. Her nails scrabbled against the glass, and the door opened with a yelp. Aromas of leather and lacquered wood puffed out. She fumbled past objects, trembling as though she were really reaching to touch the hand of the man who had authored her being. A millisecond flash from the window guided her, and she clamped on to the flask as if it were the last rock before the dizzying drop of a cataract. Conception and death, the bookends of life … her father the witness to both … alpha and omega.
Something fell, something broke, and she caught her breath for an instant, even though she knew it was not glass but the muted grate of ceramic. Slowly she withdrew the flask. By weight alone she was sure it was intact. Hugging that Holy Grail to her breast, she beetled back through the house to the staircase just as the electricity came back on. Up the steps she climbed to the third floor, past the framed photos she had raked from the walls, past her bedroom into her inner sanctum: the studio.
She could tell by the smell of a painting how much it had dried, and the last one wasn't ready for varnishing yet, but she tumbled it from the easel. Still clutching the flask, she toted a fresh canvas out of the pile she had ready and bumped it awkwardly into place. Then she went to her bench and squeezed out her paints. By habit she always did this in the same order: cool colors on the short side of the rectangular palette, warm colors to the right, separated by white. When she pulled the glass stopper from the flask, she hesitated. Her eyes scanned the shelves, and now she culled containers and pigments, a mortar and pestle, linseed oil, a rack of glass jars, a ring of plastic measuring spoons, rags and clean stir sticks broken down from larger sticks. Again she hesitated, weighing alternatives. Then she picked up the palette and scraped the oils into the glass jars. Like a master chef working from scratch, she prepared her stock according to instinct and imagination, cutting—always cutting with the turps—until the paste was thinned into a liquid in the jars. The colors blended swiftly now: first a basic array, then the flesh tones, then a very subtle viridescence for the eyes, and finally a variety of flaxen tints—she would have to experiment as she painted—for the hair.
This was the cognoscente Ariel Leppa. This was what her innermost passions, left to their own designs for a lifetime, had become. She was unschooled but sure in her craft. She had sought no help, been offered none. She knew painting, knew herself, knew what she saw and how to put its essence on canvas. But tonight there would be one difference, one new element in her alchemy.
Crying dry-eyed, not daring to inhale or exhale, she unstoppered the flask. Cautiously she lowered a kind of pointel made of glass with a tiny ladle on the end into the mouth. She expected the fine red dust to be compacted, or at least to have formed a crust, but there was no tension there at all. The glass ladle slid in as if it were air. Slowly she withdrew the measure and bore it to the first container of paint, and there she sprinkled it.
It lay on the surface like nutmeg on a soup, not sinking, not changing color at all. She picked up a flat stick and stirred it into suspension. Then she scrutinized the color and texture with satisfaction. No detectable change. She could cut it again and the fine red dust would not make its presence known. The difference in handling would simply be the thinness she chose. And thinned paints were her forte.
Because she didn't have time to let things dry. No time at all. Thick oils could take months to set completely, even years. Two weeks minimum just to dry to the touch. She had gone to galleries and talked with painters and knew she was right about this. But she had also learned to control the use of washes of turpentine, and even a drying and thinning medium like Liquin, so that she could finish quickly without sacrificing detail. The secret was a technique called alla prima. And no one, she thought, did that better than she.
Wet on wet. She would work that way, using all the tricks she had accumulated in a lifetime. The painting would glow a little, look a little pale, but that was all right. It would be complete and detailed despite the wet layering. Details were another strength of her art. Not the kind of bigger-than-life detail of the masters, but a pure skill in creating likeness. At an age when other painters began to depend on memory and habit, Ariel Leppa still saw with an evolving interpretation and possessed a flawless transfer from mind to wrist and fingers. And now she was ready for her last painting.
A painting with her father's ashes, but not his face. Because her mother had destroyed the photographs, and the recall of the child who had wiped his image irretrievably from her memory was only of Old Spice shaving lotion, and a raspy cheek when he hugged, and the faintly mellow molasses smell of tobacco in his pocket in that same hug. Try as she might, she could never pull his face into focus, as if admitting it had existed was to admit it had departed. But now she needed his presence, because the final distillation must testify to some meaning or coherence that might have been. So she merged the three critical elements of her life: her skill, her father ashes, and the hallowed subject of her final portrait …
Amber.
No shortage of Amber photos. From studio poses to blurry snapshots, monochrome to noir, seraphic smiles to glowering outrage; and a progression from bassinet to wheelchair (the last one taken at Amber's insistence because Ariel didn't want a photo of her daughter in that contraption). But Ariel Leppa, nee Kenyon, didn't need a photograph for this painting. It would be Amber at age nine. Amber when her hair was golden and her eyes were a cat's green, and when there was something indefinable on the verge of rebellion in her soul and body that was still contained by childhood and a mother's call. That was just before Ariel lost her. Lost communication and insight.
She would have preferred to paint in the daylight that entered the upper-story studio, but she didn't want to see another sunrise. With the easel moved to catch the bench lamp full and her thinned oils and solvents within reach, she made the first broad strokes and instantly the lines of force were unmistakably Amber. Amber from head to toe, a ghost, a spirit of turpentine barely visible in the first layer.
From the slashing pyrotechnics outside the house she had Sturm und Drang, and that seemed to be the right anthem. The rain drove straight at the windows as if trying to get in, trying
to dialyze the oils and wash out the dark miracle that was taking place on canvas. But Ariel painted calmly, implacably. If she had ever permitted anyone to watch, they would have imagined that painting was her therapy. The physical tension that gripped her when she worked never showed. She moved like a dancer, holding poses through sheer tensile strength while appearing effortless and graceful. It exhausted her.
But the old energy was there this night, flowing to and from the image as never before.
She painted Amber standing in a white pinafore, and it was like caressing her features to life: the frail, downy forearms and agile fingers … the crown of her head, so full in contrast to her pixie chin … the tiny fissures of her rosebud lips ("Stop pouting, young lady!") … and the eyes—which expression to choose for the endlessly changing eyes? She summoned Amber's Queen of the Nile look—a touch of impudence and boredom within a sleepy knowledge beyond her years. And outside, Zeus hurling fire. On she painted, layer by layer floating independently, like pastry, a diaphanous miracle of alla prima.
It was still dark when she realized she was finished. She had been staring for several minutes, the brush idle between her fingers, as if waiting for her child to speak. But it was the final uneasy whisper of the thunder that she heard. No more fulminations through the window. Just blackness. The downspouts murmured, as if things were fleeing. Something had left the house, something had arrived, and all was quite still.
She knew it was her best work ever. An utterly ephemeral creature sat on the canvas like a butterfly that would presently palpitate to life and resume flight. Speed had forced her to capture just what was essential, and yet the portrait was complete. Not one painter in a hundred could have done it with that technique. Maybe not one in a thousand. They would have ended up with a surreal wash, a wax figure on a hot day.