He reached for Andrew’s hand, lowered his head. Elaine saw that Andrew’s eyes were closed, his narrow-featured face frozen into a mask of grief and fear.
“I don’t know what I would do if I ever lost Andrew,” Denis said.
His words came in a whisper, and Elaine looking down at their clasped hands, remembered that Neil had died with his hand resting on her own.
“People survive,” she said. “You would learn to go on. The morning sun comes up. The evening sun goes down.”
She turned again to Andrew’s collage and stood for a very long time staring up at a photograph of an elderly couple seated beneath a piñon tree, their life-worn skin dappled by the low-hanging leaves.
On their last afternoon in Taos, while Denis and Andrew met with an artist who was contributing a large painting to the clinic gallery, she wandered through galleries, leisurely wending her way through the Navajo exhibits in historic homes and in adobe houses. She bought turquoise jewelry for Sarah and Leora, and a necklace for Ruth’s daughter Michal who was marrying her Gideon in a few weeks’ time.
“What will come first—my baby or Michal’s wedding?” Sarah had written. “And you will miss them both.”
Elaine had discerned the teasing accusation in her daughter’s words and carefully placed the letter in the bottom of her work box.
At yet another gallery she bought filigreed silver earrings for Lauren and Lisa and sets of kachina dolls for Renée and Genia.
“Would you like to see some ceramics?” the proprietor asked her. “I have some interesting new work. And please take my card. I’m Jane Cunningham and this is my gallery.”
“It’s a beautiful gallery,” Elaine said and she followed Jane Cunningham to a far corner of the huge room. There, on a pale wooden shelf, were the golden glazed bookends and a slender vase of silver-stippled purple she herself had crafted for Renee Evers in California.
“Elaine Gordon’s work,” the gallery owner said proudly. “I managed to buy just these two pieces from a gallery in L.A. Do you like them?”
Elaine smiled.
“Actually,” she said, “I’m Elaine Gordon.”
Jane Cunningham flushed with astonishment and pleasure.
“Fantastic,” she said, “I love your pieces. Are you working in Taos now? Would you have any work to show me?”
“I’m just here on a visit,” Elaine explained. “My son lives in Santa Fe and I’m staying with him for a few weeks. It’s not a working vacation but I’ve fallen in love with the landscape—the blending of colors, the rock formations. It’s a haven of inspiration for a ceramicist.”
“Then you should really think about working here. Taos is a great place to live. There’s terrific studio space, access to cutting-edge kilns. And a ready market. Really. Here. Please take my card. Think about it and get in touch. I’ll help in any way I can. It’s a privilege to have met you, Elaine Gordon.”
A customer approached her and she hurried off.
Elaine studied her card and placed it carefully in her wallet. Yes, she thought, as she left the gallery and continued her walk down Paseo de Pueblo Sur, Taos would be a wonderful town in which to live and work. She glanced at her watch. She was late. Denis and Andrew would be waiting for her and the thought of their loving impatience filled her with pleasure.
twenty-four
They returned to Santa Fe and Denis and Andrew were immediately caught up in their demanding work schedules. As the days of her visit drifted into weeks, they established a comfortable routine. They shared cooking and food shopping, adjusted their schedules to accommodate each other. Occasionally, on a Sunday morning, Andrew went to church. Always, on Friday evenings, a Sabbath service was held on their patio. Each evening Denis and Andrew went running and once a week they went to Vanessie’s piano bar. Elaine was often awake when they returned home and she smiled to hear them humming snatches of Gershwin or softly singing a Billy Joel ballad.
Each evening Elaine walked alone up the mountain path and once a week she and Denis had lunch together in town. She was grateful for those hours of ease because she knew that her son had little time to spare.
He left for his office or for a courtroom appearance early each morning. His caseload was heavy, his work varied. He represented large commercial interests but he also was an advocate for native Americans. He had a reputation among the Pueblo, Navajo and Apache tribes for fairness and they turned to him to resolve threatening legal issues.
Elaine waited in his reception area one afternoon, seated opposite two Navajo men, each of them clutching a worn envelope crammed with documents. She watched as Denis escorted three well-dressed corporate executives out of his conference room, smiled apologetically at her and invited the Navajo men to enter.
“I’m sorry you had to wait, Mom,” he said, when they at last sat over lunch in the garden café he favored. “But these meetings were important. A technological company wants to set up an information technology center in Santa Fe and they have their eye on some land owned by the Navajo. They want me to represent them.”
“But you do so much work with the Navajo. Won’t that be a conflict of interest?” Elaine asked.
“I’ve made it a merging of interest, actually. I’ve gotten them to agree to set up a training program for the Navajo and in return the tribe will lease the land to them. A good balance. Their fee offsets my pro bono work for the tribe.”
She smiled, proud of his competence, of his sense of justice. Neil’s legacy, clinic work balanced with private practice.
“A good balance for me,” he had said more than once and his words had not been lost on Denis who spoke them now without self-consciousness.
“Your father would be proud of you,” she said to Denis. “He would be proud of all of you. As I am.”
She reached across the table, took her son’s hand in his own and felt the answering pressure of his touch.
“I hope Andrew won’t be home too late tonight,” Denis said. “He’s really involved in this project.”
Andrew had been commissioned to do a series of photographs for a brochure being prepared by the New Mexico Tourist Bureau. He was often away, scouting out new locations, taking action shots and now and again gently encouraging a shopkeeper or a school child to pose for a candid portrait.
“I want people to see this state as it is,” he said as he explained the assignment to Elaine and showed her his contact sheets. “The faces of the people, the mountains and the plateaus, the majesty of it all. That’s what Gordon Cummings did for Jamaica.”
He glanced at the action photo of himself as a skinny, barefoot boy that Gordon had taken all those years ago in the Ochos Rios marketplace. Denis had framed it and hung it above their kiva fireplace. “But damn it, although I can see what I want in my mind’s eye I simply can’t get it on film. I think I have it and then the developed film proves me wrong,” he continued.
“I know just how you feel,” she commiserated.
She herself was spending long hours at the drawing board, executing and discarding design after design for the mural until finally deciding on those that captured the elusive visual image that chronicled Neil’s relationship with Denis. Father and son reading beside a fire. Father and son hiking a mountain path. She and Neil separated by a shadow from Denis and Neil, although the four of them stood in a circlet of sunlight.
The shadow, she realized, as she wire-brushed it onto the yielding clay, symbolized their shared inability to honestly confront the truth of Denis’s life in all its joy and in all its pain. They had, instead, protected each other, sealed themselves into a false acquiescence rather than the loving, wholehearted acceptance of their last-born child that now invigorated her.
Denis had never questioned them but she knew that he had of course sensed their evasiveness, and although they had heard the pain in his voice and seen the hurt in his eyes they had said nothing, not to each other and not to him. But the tiles in her mural would not dissimulate. Neil would have wanted the
visual chronicle of his life, of their family’s life, to be honest. He would have approved of that delicate shadow that did not, after all, cancel out the pool of light in which they stood.
She etched each concept onto her carefully crafted tiles, and brought them to the ceramic studio where she had rented space. She mixed her glazes, waited breathlessly as each small piece was fired, the enamel baked to the precise shining gloss she hoped for. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, and she willed herself to surmount disappointment and begin again.
She went with Andrew on a day trip to Santa Clara where he took photograph after photograph of the beautiful Black Mesa. It was there that she bought a beautiful carafe crafted of the unique black-on-black pottery of the region. The potter wrapped it in newspapers and Elaine put the awkward bundle in her newly purchased straw basket as she and Andrew walked back to their car. Suddenly two muscular motorcyclists, steel staples glinting on their black leather vests, one of them with a shaven head and the other with greasy blond hair falling to his shoulders, swerved down the narrow street, barely avoiding two barefoot Indian children. The blond cyclist careened so close to Elaine that the basket was knocked from her hand.
“Hey, watch where you’re going,” Andrew called angrily and they veered back toward him, their revved motors racketing in staccato bursts.
“You watch where you’re going and what you’re doing, Sambo. Faggot,” the bald cyclist shouted and they rode off in a cloud of dust, shaking their fists threateningly, their harsh laughter mingling with the frightened sobs of the children.
“Bastards, homophobic bastards,” Andrew muttered as he picked up the basket.
Elaine turned to the frightened children.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t cry.”
She wiped their tears and walked them over to a kiosk where she bought each of them a chocolate bar. Only when they were in the car on their way back to Santa Fe did she look into the basket. The carafe was not broken but all her pleasure in it was gone. Her heart beat rapidly and she looked at Andrew who drove too quickly, his fine-featured face a mask of misery.
“Who were they?” she asked.
“Homophobic hatemongers,” he said. “We have our own lunatic fringe in Santa Fe. They’re not worth worrying about. But please, Elaine, don’t tell Denis about it.”
She nodded. She would be complicit with her son’s partner. She could not protect Denis from danger but she could shield him from fear.
She left the house that evening, as she always did, at the twilight hour. She would not allow that brush with ugliness in Santa Clara to deter her from the walk she took most evenings. She wanted to banish the memory of the motorcyclists, to submerge herself in silence and beauty. How naive she had been to observe only the peace of the life Denis and Andrew shared and never to recognize the lurking danger. She had not wanted to recognize their vulnerability just as she had not wanted to acknowledge the very real danger that confronted Sarah’s family in Israel. Now, at last, she confronted both the danger and the vulnerability.
She followed the narrow trail that led to the clinic, now stooping to pluck up an oddly shaped stone or a slender cottonwood twig, now glancing up at the slowly darkening sky across which a crescent of moon floated while glittering constellations, reluctant actors on that vast celestial stage, slowly appeared. Slowly, with the onset of evening, the tensions of the day eased.
Denis and Andrew had seldom joined her on those nocturnal strolls. They sensed her need for solitude, for the precious privacy of melancholy, and she was grateful for their tacit understanding. There was so much she had to think about. She walked slowly, her steps weighted by decisions untaken and as she neared the clinic, a flock of wild geese scissored their way southward through the cobalt-colored sky. She stared up at them, startled by their beauty, their symmetry, their certainty of destination, their purposeful infallible radar. She herself was still without direction or anchor.
When she returned from her walk, Andrew suggested that Denis show her the drawings he planned to exhibit at the gallery opening. He hesitated briefly and then spread the contents of his worn black leather portfolio across the table. She studied her son’s work and admired the fluency and tenderness with which he captured moments of intimacy. She stared for a long time at a drawing of two men reading before a blazing fire and thought of her own etching of Andrew and Denis in the garden. Her heart turned at his rendition of a bearded man seated at the bedside of an emaciated invalid. Phil and Mel, she guessed and swiftly shifted her gaze to the drawing of a quartet of men and women, prayer books in hand, eyes lifted skyward, candles blazing on a simple wooden table.
She marveled at how subtly Denis had captured the mood of the Friday night services held each week on his patio, the coming together of men and women who forged their own Sabbath celebration, reading and singing from the prayer book of their own compilation. They sang the hymn that welcomed the day of rest, the same hymn Moshe intoned each Friday evening as Sarah stood beside him in their Jerusalem home, and they swayed to a chant taught to them by a Navajo shaman. At one service Elaine had listened to a slender blond woman dressed in white play a haunting Cabbalistic tune on her flute and at another she had watched two graceful young men dance toward each other, their hands clapping in rhythmic devotion. And at the conclusion of each service she had stood with sad-eyed Phil and together they had intoned the Kaddish. Her husband, Neil, and Phil’s partner, Mel, were remembered and mourned in this small congregation gathered beneath a canopy of stars. She had wondered briefly if Sarah and Moshe would sanction that prayer offered in such an unorthodox setting and decided that probably they would and the thought comforted her. She was glad that Denis had included that tender pen-and-ink drawing of the four worshippers among the work he planned to exhibit.
The largest and most complex drawing, the only one executed in charcoal, was of a family gathered around a table. Her own family, Elaine realized and she recognized herself in Denis’s fluid drawing of the woman seated at one end of the table, her mass of unruly dark curls so closely threaded with silver, her large long-lashed eyes darkened with grief. He had sketched her holding a ladle suspended over an oval-shaped tureen that she herself had made. Neil’s seat, at the head of the table, was empty. Easily she picked out Sarah and Lisa seated side by side, Peter holding a decanter and, at a slight remove, Denis himself, with the family yet subtly apart from them.
As in her own etching, barely perceptible charcoal strokes, scant and gentle brushings, darkened the space between each seat, wispy shadows of secret hurts and resentments separating each from the other. But those shadows, so tenderly drawn (just as she had moved her own stylus with a controlled lightness of touch) did not negate the togetherness of the family, newly bereft and newly aware of their need for each other.
Denis had caught the mood of that dinner she had prepared with such manic energy, the meal they had shared after the seven days of mourning. She remembered how she had concentrated on her cooking, welcoming the fragrance of the roasting meat. Her face had been flushed as she carried the meal to the table, the hot food that would do battle with the chill of death and fill the void of irrevocable loss.
She saw that in his drawing all the bowls on the table were empty. Denis had held his charcoal stick aloft and refrained from filling them. He understood his siblings’ needs, their sense of deprivation that matched his own. He had sketched them as they awaited her maternal distribution of nurturing and nourishment. And they awaited it still, all these months later.
She stared down at the drawing, and thought of her sons and daughters, remembering the children they had been, thinking of the adults they had become. Sarah and Lisa, Peter and Denis. Their names and faces, the homes they had built, the lives they had invited her into, danced through her mind; their love filled her heart. She thought to speak but words eluded her.
“You don’t like the drawings?” Denis asked and she realized that her long silence had unnerved him.
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�But I like them very much,” she protested. “I’ll help you mat them.”
He smiled in relief and Andrew nodded, the comforting I-told-you-so shake of the head lovers offer each other.
They worked together on the mats over the next several days and Elaine built simple frames of pale wood. A week before the opening they brought them to the gallery and hung them on the whitewashed wall across from Andrew’s black-framed serial photographs of the trees of New Mexico.
“They offset each other wonderfully,” Elaine said.
“As well they should.”
Andrew took Denis’s hand and they looked at each other, proud of their work, content in their love.
The next day Elaine returned to Taos and visited Jane Cunningham’s gallery. She was relieved to see that both the golden glazed bookends and the slender vase she had crafted so carefully were still on display. She smiled at Jane who hurried to her side.
“Don’t think that there hasn’t been interest, lots of interest, in those pieces,” Jane assured her. “But I’ve held on to them. Partly because I think they’ll appreciate and partly because I just love having them here.”
Elaine smiled.
“I’m flattered,” she said. “But Jane, if you’ll let me buy them from you, I promise to let you have some other pieces that I think you’ll like as well or even better. I’m working with new colors, desert hues. Perfect for your gallery. I should have them ready in a few weeks but I need these pieces now. I want to exhibit them next week at the opening of the gallery that will be part of a clinic that my son and his friends have underwritten.”
Reluctantly then, Jane Cunningham packed up the vase and the bookends.
“I’ll be waiting for your new work,” she said, as Elaine left. “I told you that New Mexico would work its magic on you.”
“And it has,” Elaine agreed.
She drove swiftly back to Santa Fe. She had arranged to meet Denis at his office for a late lunch. “Our weekly date,” Denis called it teasingly, always reserving a table at a small garden restaurant where they watched varicolored hummingbirds flutter through blazing flowerbeds as they waited for their meal and spoke softly, trading memories, making plans. The past and the future melded as they sat in the sunlit garden, Denis now recalling a hike he had taken with Neil, then speaking of a reunion. “All of us,” he had said. “Moshe and Sarah, Peter and Lauren, all the kids, Lisa and David and Genia, you and me and Andrew.”
Open Doors Page 34