Now, her goal attained, Althea felt a faint jolt of disappointment that intensified as she glanced around at the other work. The longed-for honor was tarnishing swiftly. In a few moments she was thinking: Oh, God, one more daub.
“Please take it down,” she said in a clogged voice.
He turned to her. “Hnn?”
“If that’s where you intend leaving my sketch, I want it back.”
He looked at her, his eyes seeming to radiate beams through his spectacles. “You feel the other work is not good, and that makes yours not good also?”
He understood her.
Being understood presented dangers from which Althea could not protect herself. Her affection for the exile flickered like a light bulb during a power dim-out. Hunching her shoulders, she thought her old litany: there are enemies, only enemies.
“Each one of these,” said Henry Lissauer, gesturing, “they represent the proof I am right. I select a student, but unless this student becomes one with the work, I am failed. Some of these works are inept, that is true. But believe me, each shows a breakthrough. The innocent eye. Not copying another artist, but having the courage to see reality.”
“May I have my sketch back?” she whispered with stiff lips.
Silently he untacked it, handing it to her.
She crushed the paper, throwing it in the office’s big wire-mesh wastebasket.
“This you should not do,” he reproved with anxious mildness. “You are my most promising student. This is strange to say of a great heiress like you, Miss Cunningham, but you are hungrier. You have more of the hunger for perfection than the others. I think therefore that you will succeed more.”
“Is this the psychoanalytical society in session?” Althea’s smile was wide.
“You will succeed, hnn, but you will never believe that you have succeeded.”
She ran from the office, nausea churning. His kind eyes and perceptive remarks terrified her.
* * *
That evening the Cunninghams, as usual, ate in the dining room with its mural of flowers and birds painted in situ by Cecil Beaton. The conversation centered on the following morning, when Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham would return to Washington—off and on he performed hush-hush work for the State Department, work having to do with his fluency in Russian. At the German surrender, an urgent message recalled him immediately. Althea sat at the Sheraton table midway between her parents, discussing their trip with casual, tolerant humor.
After the broiled sole was served, Mrs. Cunningham asked, “How is your painting?”
“I don’t paint yet,” Althea retorted, her composure fading. How she loathed her mother’s invading questions!
Mrs. Cunningham drew in her receding chin anxiously. “Mr. Lissauer promised Daddy that you would learn to use oils and watercolors.”
“True, toots, true,” said Mr. Cunningham.
“Then he’s a miracle worker. He can’t even teach me how to sketch!” Althea gulped down a fragment of buttery fish, reminding herself that she was mature enough not to be scrubbed raw by each inquiry her mother aimed at her.
“I have every faith,” said Mr. Cunningham.
“Did I tell you?” said Mrs. Cunningham. “Aunt Edna has heard of Mr. Lissauer.”
“Should I fall on my knees and cry Hallelujah?”
“Now, now.” Mr. Cunningham smiled. “Your aunt’s knowledgeable in the art field—after all, she has what’s considered the best collection of moderns in the country.”
Mrs. Cunningham said nervously, “I only brought it up to reassure you.”
Althea dropped her fish fork loudly on her plate. “Aunt Edna,” she cried, “is a fat, blind philistine who tosses her money around to give herself a big reputation! She doesn’t know real art from a hole in the ground!”
Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham glanced at one another over the length of the table. Mr. Cunningham refilled his wineglass.
* * *
The scene rattled Althea, keeping her awake: after turning restlessly for nearly an hour, she went onto her veranda. A sycamore grew so close to the house that one of its branches had attached itself to a point on the veranda rail. On impulse, she clambered onto the limb as she had done when very young—a forbidden daredevil trick—straddling it like a horse, feeling the roughness of the bark through her silk pajamas.
All around, twigs and branches creaked, timpani to the deep croaking of the frogs and intermittent sawing of crickets. Her face hot, she kept going over her juvenile outburst.
The night sounds soothed her, and she began a mental thumb through of her life plan. She would retreat to a small gray wood house in the rugged, foggy crags of Big Sur, and have nothing to do with the rest of humanity, who inevitably hated or despised or betrayed her. She would waste no more of her yearning on people, but would train herself to paint the sunlight shafting through towering branches of the millennia-old sequoia trees, paint the fog lapping over majestic coastal rocks that had been sculptured by eternity. She would live an existence dedicated to art, she would be a pure artist like that divine lunatic Van Gogh, but she would not permit herself to be driven bonkers by human indifference. In her lifetime she would allow no showings, but after her death, the world would resound with praises for Althea Cunningham. She smiled as she composed yet another posthumous review redundant with words like genius and magnificent.
“Althea?” Her father’s slurred, questioning voice came from inside her room.
Startled, she caught her breath. Her fingers and toes went cold as a corpse’s. Oh, God, God, she thought, please not that.
“Where are you? I want to say good-bye to my toots. . . . Althea . . . ?” There was a coaxing tenderness in his drunken voice.
She clung to the sycamore branch as if pressing herself to become living wood. The sound of her own heart banged loudly in her ears.
“It’s your daddy.” Raspily hoarse, yet wooing of tone.
She heard shambling footsteps retreating through the room.
The door opened. A final, “Toots?”
She sprawled there like some boneless sea creature, not moving.
The door closed.
She waited a full minute; then her held-back breath burst out in a long, sobbing gasp. She swung her leg over the tree branch, climbing off shakily. Inside the dark bedroom she locked the window and ran to the door to press home the dead bolt.
It was then that the drunken laughter sounded.
She saw the big, weaving shadow. “Fooled you, fooled you, toots. . . .”
She cowered against the door. “Go away. . . . Daddy, please don’t. Please . . .” Her whisper shook.
But he was roughly jamming her to himself in the strong, inescapable embrace of a drink-demented man, shuffling with her toward the bed, his breath hot and boozy around her. This horror had occurred infrequently, maybe a dozen times at most since she was ten, yet it had blighted and colored her every mortal response.
“Don’t!” she cried hoarsely. “No!”
Even as she struggled, she was remembering herself as a small child, ill in that bed and being soothed by these strong hands with fingers elegantly tapered like her own. The bedside chair crashed over. He shoved her backward on the mattress.
She gave up.
When the crushing, thumping assault on her body had ended and he had staggered from the room, she buried her face in the pillow, which smelled of liquor, of his sweat and hair lotion, and smothered her storm of childish sobs.
* * *
The following morning as she drank her orange juice her father came downstairs carrying a gray topcoat over the arm that held his briefcase. Her mother, shoulders rounder than usual, followed a step or two behind him.
Mrs. Cunningham hugged her good-bye, and Althea searched the timid, homely face, wondering for the thousandth time if her mother could possibly be unaware of the indefensible, unbearable secret.
“Well, toots, it’s good-bye time again,” said her father, smiling with fresh-shaven pleasure.
To even mentally question what he recollected of the previous night brought a strangling tightness to her chest. “Have a good trip, Daddy,” she said, smiling back with the same innocence.
“What would you like us to bring you back?” he asked.
“Oh, the National Gallery,” she said.
* * *
There were no spaces remaining in back of the institute, so she parked on Brighton Way. She closed the front door of the wagon, her palm covering the ghostly remnant of the scraped paint: “The Big Two.”
As she reached the institute’s back steps, Henry Lissauer emerged to meet her. “Miss Cunningham,” he said, the apologetic kindness in his eyes magnified by those thick spectacles. “I have been thinking about our interview yesterday. This is important, that you must learn to see your work exhibited.”
Anger, inexplicable, sudden, and consuming, forced tears into her eyes. “I don’t like my sketches made fun of,” she said through clenched teeth. “That’s hardly the way to help a student, is it?”
“I assure you I had no intention of ridicule. Believe me, nothing . . . I have every respect for you.”
“It’s a piece of cake for a famous teacher to poke fun at a novice. That’s what makes it so rotten.”
His scrawny body seemed to shrink inside the dark suit. He swallowed rapidly.
Seeing him like this, cowed, she felt her abrupt anger fade. “Then you really liked my rosebush, Mr. Lissauer?”
“It was good work, excellent.”
“Truly?” she asked in a demure whisper.
“Again I say, you are my most promising student.”
“I believe you,” she said, resting her finger on his black serge sleeve.
His arm trembled.
She preceded him into the institute, feeling young, clean, inviolately strong.
24
The walls of three upstairs bedrooms at the institute had been knocked down to form a commodious U-shaped studio where windows of different sizes and shapes gave onto three exposures. On this cool May morning two weeks after VE Day, a fortyish nude lounged on harem pillows, a small electric heater casting a rosy glow on her pendulous breasts while the unwarmed flesh of her buttocks, thighs, and arms resembled that of a pale plucked chicken.
Fifteen students had showed up for this live-model session. Twelve were female, a not unusual proportion for a wartime classroom; they wore engagement diamonds with or without wedding bands, and a smock to cover their sweater sets and sensible tweed skirts. Althea alone was ringless and had on a man’s shirt over shorts.
One of the three male students had set up his easel to the right of Althea’s. She did not know his name. He had joined the institute only today. The morning session had nearly ended and his canvas remained untouched, pristine. He slumped on the stool in his Army fatigues, squinting at the model with his deep-set dark eyes while his broad, workingman’s fingers played with his brushes.
At first his sullen self-preoccupation had irked Althea, and she had ignored him ostentatiously, but working in oil was new to her, and soon she was absorbed in plotting her composition with a thin wash of turpentine.
Henry Lissauer’s voice broke her concentration. “Yolanda,” said Herr Professor. “Rest, hnn?”
The model pulled on a sleazy, too-short robe. The voices of the student painters rose in a shrill hubbub.
“Got a butt?” The man in fatigues was looking at Althea.
“I don’t smoke,” she replied coolly.
He shrugged and slumped back on his stool, returning to his brooding examination of the empty dais. Althea glanced sideways at him. He had a broad Slavic face with belligerently high cheekbones, a short, blunt nose, and coarse curly brown hair that grew low on his forehead. He was about twenty-five and common as dirt, she decided. But she had to admit to herself that he was attractive.
Henry Lissauer had come to examine her morning’s work. “Very good, Miss Cunningham,” he said. Since their run-in two weeks earlier, he approached her with bashful respect, as if he were the student, not she.
She smiled graciously. “Doesn’t that leg look a mite improbable?”
“May I show you?”
“Please,” she acquiesced.
He picked up one of her thick sable brushes, dipping it in the coffee tin that contained turpentine, and with a few strokes altered and humanized the limb. “There,” he said with a humble smile.
“Thank you, Mr. Lissauer,” she said, touching his arm.
He took little gulps of air, then moved to the next easel.
“Horak, you better commence.”
“What’s the hot rush?”
“The model,” said Henry Lissauer. “After lunch she will be here only one hour.”
The man in fatigues shrugged.
His canvas remained untouched at 12:30, when they broke for lunch.
The institute was across the street from the Tropics, but that watering spot was reserved for expense accounts or leisurely seductions. Several of the students strolled over to Beverly Drive to eat at Nate and Lou’s deli or Jones Health Food, but most brought sandwiches to eat in the big kitchen. Roxanne de Liso, who when not using her metal crutches was confined to a wheelchair, invariably sat at the head of the deal table. Her husband, Henri de Liso, was a set designer, and Roxanne, her face vivid with expression, led conversations about art and artists. At first Althea had been drawn to sit at the table. But one day Mrs. de Liso talked about Joshua Fernauld: “Yes, a baby! Of course he’s absolutely nuts about that gorgeous child he’s married to, but imagine starting a new family when you’re fifty.”
So Mrs. de Liso knew Marylin Wace Fernauld! Althea fled from the too painful reminders of her other life, making it her habit to lunch alone on the back porch.
The door behind her opened and she heard a jabbering rush of women’s voices.
The new student, the common-looking guy in fatigues, emerged, sitting on the step below her to unwrap a pack of Camels.
“Why not join me?” Althea said caustically, and when he didn’t react, she added, “I’m Althea Cunningham.”
“Gerry Horak.” He slid a cigarette between his broad lips. “What gives with you and the head honcho?”
“You mean Mr. Lissauer?”
“You’re pretty cozy with him.”
“Cozy?” She did not mitigate her disdain with a smile.
“He’s eating out of your hand. ‘May I show you, Miss Cunningham?’ “He mimicked Henry Lissauer’s German accent. “Not that I blame him. You’re quite a dish.”
“Me and Herr Lissauer. There’s an interesting thought.”
“Look, I’m not trying to insult you. He’s a little old and not exactly handsome, but he’s a decent sort.”
“Does your mind always take these adorable twists?”
“Then there’s nothing between you?”
“Nothing but this mad little love nest up in Benedict Canyon,” she said.
He grinned. “Listen, for a minute there I was positive you two had something going, and I wanted things on the level before we get anything on the burner.”
“What makes you think I’m interested in your burners?” She bit into her sandwich.
Gerry reached over and took the other half. “I can tell.” His grin was uneven and very white.
She surprised herself by grinning back. Though Gerry Horak’s crude cockiness irritated her, she felt easy with him. Why? She shrugged. Who cared? It was simply true. She had no need to measure her words or throw him off with alternate aloofness and intimacy.
“Why didn’t you paint?” she asked.
“Getting what I want in mind first.”
“You shouldn’t let a blank canvas intimidate you.”
“Is that how you figure me? Chicken?”
“Yes. And while we’re on the subject, are you in the service?”
“Yep,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt. A jagged, slick red line cut from his left shoulder, broadening into a bandaged area across his dark-
haired, muscular chest, reappearing in a thin line to trickle into his khaki pants.
The mass of fresh scar tissue roused no revulsion, only a pang in her chest that she recognized as admiration. “You were careless,” she said. “How did it happen?”
“Going up a hill near Salerno.”
“What did you do before?”
“Bummed around,” he said.
“But never painted.”
He finished the sandwich and picked up his cigarette, which was balanced on the rail. “It’s that obvious?”
“The thing is not to let a blank canvas frighten you.” As the institute’s newest student, she had been on the receiving end of advice for months now, and she enjoyed doling it out. “After lunch, paint. Don’t worry what you get down. The first few times, it’s bound to be rotten.”
“Thanks for the tip.” He grinned, pushing to his feet.
She watched him go inside. She was positive her instincts were correct; Gerry Horak knew nothing of art. How could he? He’s an assembly-line worker or a mechanic, she thought, he’s a laborer through and through. Small tingles of excitement went through her as she visualized the hirsute, scarred chest. Were those battle wounds his admittance ticket to Henry Lissauer’s carefully guarded institute?
She finished her lunch, absently watching a truck driver haul cartons through the back door of the adjacent silverware shop while she ruminated about Gerry Horak.
In the studio, the others were already intently working, except for Gerry, who was cracking his black-haired knuckles.
Taking her place, she glanced at his easel.
She heard her own gasp of surprise.
His canvas jumped with vehemently assertive squares of color that had been slashed on with a palette knife. Though unfinished, the nude’s lavender and blue skin tones showed a body flaccid with use, the head thrown back, the full thighs raised and slightly apart, a Levantine whore sprawled awaiting her next client.
An intimidatingly masterful painting. One that seemed impossible for the most talented professional to have done in less than twenty minutes.
Gerry was watching her, one thick, dark brow raised almost to his low hairline.
She felt the heat on her throat, then suddenly she laughed. “And I was wondering whether Mr. Lissauer was compromising his principles by letting you in! Do you always paint so quickly?”
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