The Underpainter

by Jane Urquhart

  If I close my eyes now, I can see that drunken boy, stretched like the corpse of a clown on a battered park bench, the words pinned to his jacket making a fitting epitaph. I can see this as clearly as I would have had I been Rockwell and not myself on that October morning. As it was, though, nothing in me that should have died did die, and I was as immune to the experience of the world after I recovered from the hangover as I had been before I met the man and drank the pints that caused it to happen. Yes, I had a new friend. I was impressed and delighted by him, and flattered by the fact that he had spent some time in my company. But I was capable of allowing myself to travel only a short distance with him. I was a pedestrian, after all, and he was driven by the engines of emotion, of desire, towards destinations that I, clinging to safe, rectangular spaces, could scarcely imagine.

  Well, what I wanted from life was just a good view, wasn’t it? A paintable view, a perfectly composed view, and, now and then, a perfect figure in a perfect landscape. Decade after decade I spent summers standing on the north shores of huge bodies of water, gazing towards the south with my back turned to a whole country full of forests. Once or twice I allowed Sara to take me into the greenish dark of the woodlands that stood behind Silver Islet and stretched, I imagine, almost all the way to Hudson’s Bay, but the effect on me was a growing sense of claustrophobia and a desire for open space and light, while she thrust her face into the needles of the pines and inhaled the perfume.

  Rockwell himself crashed into the woods in every conceivable way, travelling farther and farther north until he emerged, radiant, beyond the timberline, where everything, he said, was white and clear by day and where stars broke through the black like a shower of diamonds at night.

  When he wasn’t in Greenland, or Alaska, or Tierra del Fuego, and while I was still a student, we got drunk regularly, twice a month. He would appear at the door of the studio, say a few words to Robert H., and while they talked I would clean my brushes, reach for my coat. Before we stepped onto the street Rockwell would be in full flight, as if I, some kid, had stumbled into a conversation — an argument really — he was having with himself. There were few certainties. Many of his sentences began with the words “on the other hand” or “let’s play the devils advocate” as he proceeded to take apart one of his own intricately constructed theories. He was Jacob. His mind was the angel. The dance that resulted from this contest formed his character. There were only three issues about which his views never wavered: the hideousness of the war, the immorality of capitalism, and the spiritual superiority of the north.

  I loved him unconditionally, even when he ignored me, preferring the conversation of the bartender or the labourer at the next table, even when he humiliated me by telling the bartender and the labourer that my father was a capitalist. On several occasions he abandoned me early on in order to go home with a woman who had caught his attention. And once he insisted, against my protestations and growing panic, that I go home with a woman to whom he had slipped a five-dollar bill.

  When it was over I found Rockwell waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “It’s about time,” he said. “Next time you pay your own way. Now, let’s hit the Lower East Side.”

  Later that night, he offered the only piece of advice he ever gave me. “Pay attention to women,” he said.

  I couldn’t imagine that this was going to be a problem. I thought about sex constantly and, now that I had experienced the real thing, I feared I was going to be thinking of nothing else.

  “I don’t mean sex,” he said. “I mean pay attention to how they move, what they look at, what they think about, what they say.” He lit a cigarette and twisted in his chair, signalling to the waiter who appears in my memory now like a white ghost in a black apron. “I’m perfectly serious,” he continued. “Faites attention. They are far superior to us and beautiful besides.”

  Four years later, when I was taken to Silver Islet by my capitalist father, I believed that I was following Rockwell’s instructions when I began to paint Sara, a miner’s daughter in a northern setting. I remember thinking how pleased he would be by the fortuitous combination of landscape, class, and gender.

  And yet it was my paintings of Sara that caused the final break between Rockwell and me, years later.

  But, that night, I still loved him unconditionally, loved him and all his contradictions. “Women are like forests,” he said. “You can’t just enter them, you must let them enter you as well. You must let their fluidity form one-third of your character.”

  I idolized this man, yet I couldn’t help but suspect that what he was telling me was sentimental nonsense. It wouldn’t be the first night that one or the other of us had become maudlin.

  “Hey,” he said, reading my mind. “This is the only piece of advice I’m ever going to give you. It’s a gift. Take it.”

  Gifts didn’t really interest the thief in me. That night, however, I had not yet grown to know myself, and I was young enough and drunk enough to be moved by sincerity.

  “I’ll take it,” I said. “Thanks.”

  After the financial disaster of my father’s attempt to reopen Silver Islet Mine, he lost interest in Canada altogether, sold the summer house in Davenport, and turned his attentions to the stock market and rebuilding his fortune. I, however, having discovered the gorgeous north shore of Lake Superior, returned each summer, lured by landscape and by Sara.

  During the 1920s, on my way to Silver Islet, I would often stop for a few days in Toronto, and sometimes George would drive seventy-five miles west on the King’s Highway Number Two and meet me there. I would take him out for dinner at the Royal York Hotel on Front Street, and we would ask each other polite questions about the previous year while we ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and drank some of the worst wine I have tasted anywhere at any time. I remember that during these clipped, formal encounters George would sit with his back to the wall and his eye on the door — a habit learned from years of shopkeeping. I was aware that we both felt displaced and uncomfortable, and eventually I decided that I wanted Davenport, the China Hall, and the memory of the prewar summers to be part of our visits, so I would take the train from Toronto along the shore to the lakeside town and stay with my friend for two nights. I liked the atmosphere of the store, George in his apron, customers coming and going. Because we knew that interruption was always a possibility our conversations remained comfortably casual, never developing beyond what I considered to be an acceptable level of intimacy. In retrospect I see that the China Hall was home to me in a way that nowhere else had ever been. I knew which of the two stools behind the counter was mine, and where the scotch was hidden. I always slept exceptionally well in the dark formal bedroom that had once belonged to George’s mother and father.

  It was in the China Hall, during one of my traditional two-day stopovers in Davenport, that George first brought up the subject of Augusta Moffat, a young nurse he had met at the Number One Canadian Hospital in Étaples and had rediscovered when he returned to Canada. We had been talking about his parents, who had been dead for some time now having succumbed to the 1917 influenza while George was in France. He said that when he was informed of their deaths he could barely process the information. Surrounded as he was by corpses and ghosts and a daily life that had all but obliterated his childhood, it seemed only natural to him that they should be gone.

  “I suppose I never really mourned them,” he confessed. “I found the idea of them dying unmaimed, and in clean sheets, to be almost soothing.”

  He noticed I was looking at him oddly.

  “You don’t understand,” he continued. “Often when we thought about ordinary household objects — a pillow, or a sofa, or a bathtub — they would seem like the greatest of luxuries. That was at the beginning when some of us still spent our time talking about what we would most appreciate when we got back — those of us who still believed that we would get back. We’d say that we’d want warm fresh bread, a down-filled quilt — that sort of thing. But finally, any
thing at all beyond the basics of just staying alive seemed frivolous, almost intrusive. By the last year of the war some of the fellows didn’t even bother to unwrap parcels from home. We began to resent the fact that human beings had wasted their time inventing things such as automobiles and furniture with which to pamper themselves.” He laughed. “Even clean underwear annoyed us, the whole idea of laundry.”

  I couldn’t imagine laundry being on the minds of soldiers, one way or the other, and said so.

  “It wasn’t, of course,” George answered. “Unless we went to hospital in a condition that would allow us to notice. That was the only place that any of us saw even a trace of cloth that was clean. I remember one man, one of the walking wounded, totally refusing to get into a bed because it was so pristine. It was almost as if he were afraid of it. Finally they had to give him a shot of something to make him lie down.”

  At this point, a man George knew walked into the store and was quite surprised when I insisted on waiting on him. He wanted some trinket for his mother’s birthday. Because in the past he had always given her teacups, we decided on a porcelain thimble. George stood by and watched the proceedings with some amusement. After I had got the money safely into the cash register and the man had departed with his tiny parcel, George picked up where he had left off.

  “With me,” he said, “my most memorable moment in the hospital was when I first heard a woman’s voice singing. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that a nurse would do this. And then later, when I got back from the war, I found the singer herself, this nurse, Augusta Moffat. I was amazed that she was here in Davenport. I remembered her because she had sung to me, well, to all of us in the ward. Some of us even ended up singing with her.”

  George had not been seriously injured, he told me — a flesh wound in the thigh — so spent only a few days at the hospital before returning to the front. “I remembered how she just started quite suddenly to sing. It seemed absolutely extraordinary, magical, at the time, though later she told me that nurses were expected to serenade the patients.

  “And then when I returned, there she was. Up the hill. At the asylum.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the south. “It began, you know, as a hospital for shell-shock victims.” George was painting a delicate tangle of wisteria on a vase as he said this, and his voice was oddly cheerful, following the lilt and curve of the vines.

  I had walked by the asylum several times on my way to and from the station. It was a large white-stucco building, each floor of which was fronted by screened porches so that it resembled a huge rabbit hutch. Sometimes, beyond the screens, I had seen dark shadows pacing. Behind a high wrought-iron fence was a lawn that always remained a sad yellow colour, whether the season was dry or damp, and on it one or two thin cedar trees swayed in the breeze. No, I hadn’t liked what I had seen of the asylum.

  “So your friend was nursing there,” I said, encouraging George to tell me more. This was the first time since Vivian that I’d heard him mention a woman.

  He spun the turntable on which the vase sat, then brought it to a stop with a gentle touch of his right hand. “She wasn’t nursing there,” he said, without looking at me. “She was a patient for a month or so. Some of them are still there, you know, from the war, though now it caters more to the secular insane.”

  “But what on earth was she — what was a woman doing there?”

  The look that George gave me seemed to suggest that this might have been the most foolish question he had ever been called upon to answer. “She was suffering from shell shock,” he said.

  George continued to speak as he carefully removed the vase from the turntable, returned it to the shelf, and began to clean his brushes in a small sink he had installed behind the counter for this purpose. “A group of us went in at Christmastime, carolling, just after the end of the war. She seemed to respond to the music, though it was hard to tell for certain, and it was then that I remembered her from the ward in Étaples. Some time later she told me that she had sung in the Mendelssohn Choir when she was in training at the Toronto General Hospital, before she went overseas.” He paused. “I was as surprised then as you are now to find a woman there.”

  “I had no idea that women suffered from shell shock.”

  “Just her.” George leaned against his stool, folded his arms, and smiled at me. “Just her and a hundred damaged men. The ones who couldn’t cope. With the war. In their condition … well. She wouldn’t have been bothered by them anyway. They knew she had been a nurse, that she had been overseas, and they would have respected that. And the odd thing was, she wasn’t beautiful then. It was her awakening, her … recovery that made her beautiful. After that she just shone.”

  “Well, I’m glad she recovered.”

  “Oh,” said George, “so am I.”

  Years later Augusta would tell me about the Davenport hospital, about coming to know George. She would tell me about the war. I imagine she was a very good nurse; George, in fact, told me that she was, but said he wished she were involved in a less hazardous occupation. I thought he was referring to the war, hazardous enough for her as I eventually discovered, but it was another danger altogether that he had been referring to.

  Augusta later told me she had been a patient only twice: once in the Davenport Hospital for Shell Shock Victims — a period in her life she barely remembered — and once, a few years later, when persistent throat infections necessitated a tonsillectomy.

  I have said that I have never successfully used the stories Augusta told me in a painting, and I did not lie. But there was something about her description of this simple children’s operation, performed in peacetime in the safety of a Toronto hospital, and the strangeness of the dreams it triggered that made me want to explore the narrative. And so, at the beginning of last year, I completed a major canvas entitled The Lost Jane Eyre, and it is now hanging in my gallery in New York City. The critics assumed that the subject of the underpainting dealt with the heroine of the famous book, and much scholarly nonsense was written about the search for and subsequent elimination of the feminine in my own psyche. Some of them even suggested that the painting was a statement about the repression, the eradication, of all that is feminine in society, and about everything that has been lost as a result of this. The truth is that I spent nearly six months painting a series of images that related to what Augusta had told me about the aftermath of her surgery, carefully building up texture with layer after layer of thick paint, then adding glazes of increasingly paler hues. Sometimes I painted images directly on top of other images in order to create an hallucinatory effect. In the end, it took many more glazes than anticipated to obscure the subject because the colours I used in the underpainting had been so extraordinarily vivid.

  But the results were not totally successful, despite the positive critical reception of the picture and the price attached to it. Augusta’s character — what I was to know of it — would not permit obviation. All this is true. But my own character will not permit me to stop trying, and beyond this is the fact that the subject of her fantasies and nightmares, during her illness, fascinated me. It fascinated the visual bandit in me.

  As she struggled back from the black pool of the anesthetic after the operation, Augusta maintained that she had begun to have dreams — delusions perhaps — about a real little girl called Jane Eyre who had been lost for a few days in the woods near Davenport during the first decade of the nineteenth century. The name, of course, is famous now, but at the time of the actual incident, twenty years still had to pass before the Victorian novelist would lift her pen to write the celebrated book. But in Augusta’s post-operative, drugged mind, the small child George had told her about — the story was a Davenport legend — and the young woman in the novel she had read fused, became one lost female spirit. Voices called the name “Jane” in Augusta’s brain while she dreamed about a weeping little girl floundering across a barren moorland setting or, sometimes, through the thick virgin forests that had existed at the b
ack of Davenport in the early 1800s. It seemed as if the child were trying to elude her rescuers. She had Augusta’s face, her will. She wanted the heath, the woods, the isolation, and her seekers were like hounds. She had no voice, it had been ripped from her throat. The followers, Augusta knew, would force the child to commit the act of speech, and then there would be the pain of crying out. George was among the searchers, beating the brush with a stick. “Augusta!” he called. “Jane!” Nothing in the child, or in Augusta, wanted to answer. Her voice had been torn out.

  Later during that same night, Augusta believed she was back in the Number One Canadian Hospital in Étaples; that it was the spring of 1918 and that broken soldiers were calling out in agony from the surrounding beds. The guilt in her was so terrible that she could not rise from her own bed to administer to them. She wondered if it was her friend Maggie’s shift and if she would be able to cope all alone. Then the calling voices were, again, those of the search party, the vigilantes, the brush beaters, and Augusta was again a child being trailed, the branches of the forest tearing at her clothes and hair.

  The next morning the delirium abated and the territory of Augusta’s bed once more had become starched white sheets. Beside her lay a kidney-shaped basin into which she vomited stale blood.

  George made the trip in from Davenport and appeared with flowers, but she could not speak to him. He held her hand and bathed her forehead with a damp cloth.

  Augusta’s nursing colleagues came in now and then to visit. One of them brought a stuffed toy because, as she said, Augusta had had the children’s operation.

  Augusta smiled, but she couldn’t shake the memory of the lost little girl weeping, her voice gone, and the world demanding she return. The sun cascading through the window, the white teeth in her friends’ smiles, hurt her throat. She remembered that George had kissed her neck and she believed, as she slipped into sleep, that by doing so he had increased the pain there.