The Underpainter

by Jane Urquhart

  What, I ask you, is more intimate than this: total recollection of a scene I had never witnessed, but one over which I nonetheless had perfect control?

  When I was again alone with Sara in the upstairs room of her log house, I painted her with her head in profile and her back to the south wall. The charcoal reminder I had written the year before remained, smudged but readable, on the plaster.

  I painted the wall and the words into the picture. I wanted the dark calligraphy of the appointment I had broken to look like an accusation emerging from Sara’s mouth.

  One of my stopovers in Davenport coincided with a weekend, but, according to George, his friend the nurse would not be in town as she didn’t have the time off. We were spending a quiet Saturday afternoon in the China Hall. It had been raining and few customers had made their way to the shop. George was working on one of his vases at the end of the counter; I was writing a letter to Rockwell at a small table on the other side of the shop. I must have been chuckling to myself because, quite abruptly, George placed his brush on the counter and asked me why I was laughing.

  “I’ve just written something terribly funny,” I said.

  George looked at me expectantly.

  “It’s about New York,” I said. “Just something about an art dealer in New York.”

  George picked up his brush again. I had noticed, since the war, there was sometimes a slight tremor in his right hand. At this moment it seemed more pronounced. He was painting a delicate motif that involved stems and thorns and trellises, and I could see he was having trouble with it.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess I wouldn’t know anything about all that.”

  “You wouldn’t want to know,” I said. “Art politics.”

  George placed the brush on the counter again, massaged his right wrist, then resumed painting. He leaned closer to the vase. He had begun to wear glasses now when he worked, and I saw he was squinting through the lenses. Without removing his gaze from the painting, he reached towards a pot with the brush, his hand now shaking quite visibly. He missed his mark, tipped over the pot, and enamel paint spilled across the counter. A small lavender stream trickled to the floor.

  He made no move to clean up after the accident. Instead, he closed his eyes and was quiet for several moments. Then he dropped the brush, opened his eyes, rested his elbows on the counter, and looked at his hands, which he held, fingers splayed, about a foot from his face. Both of his forearms were trembling now. “God,” he said. “Jesus.”

  He just sat there and stared at his hands twitching uncontrollably in front of him, the colour draining from his face. The white cloth of one shirt sleeve had turned lavender around the elbow. The paint made a ticking sound as it fell, drop by drop to the floor.

  “I can’t…” George said. “I can’t…”

  I could not interpret what was happening to him. “What the …” I began, unable even to form an appropriate question. Every cell in my body was moving towards panic.

  George’s torso began to shake, but not with the same intensity as his hands, the fingers of which had begun to twitch spasmodically.

  “I can’t,” he kept saying. “I can’t.” Certain objects on the counter were beginning to rattle. He had pushed his stool against the wall behind him where cups and saucers on shelves were now making slight clinking noises.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?” My heart was hammering my ribcage. I registered a feeling of nausea, but I did not look away. I could see that George’s teeth were chattering. It was as if he were experiencing his own private earthquake.

  Suddenly I found myself across the room, holding both of his hands in my own. Anyone looking in would have thought we were involved in an absurd form of arm wrestling. “Stop!” I was shouting. His face was so close to mine I could see his pores.

  “I can’t,” he whispered. But the shaking was diminishing.

  “Stop,” I said in a quieter tone, my own heartbeat beginning to slow.

  “Just keep holding my hands,” George was saying. “Keep holding my hands.”

  Later, when he had regained control, he thanked me, as if my actions had been ones of intentional kindness. “It’s the war,” he said, by way of an explanation, though I had not asked one question. “This happens sometimes.”

  I had been thinking epilepsy, stroke. The war had been over for at least ten years.

  Not wanting to dwell on what had taken place I returned to my letter and began to reread what I had been writing. I saw then that the tone of it was mean-spirited, cynical. There was nothing amusing about it at all.

  After this began a period of about a year during which George wrote me several long letters about his friend Augusta. It was as if he were trying to explain his attachment, not so much to me but to himself. He loved the notion that she had grown up not ten miles away from him, that she had lived on a farm, was reared in a world of fields and villages. He wrote that he wanted to restore in her everything that had been brought to flower in that life. Those things around her that had been all but obliterated by the war. Would he have succeeded, I wonder, even for a moment? In her love for him, would she let him believe that he was succeeding when, in fact, the opposite was true? After all, they were in so many ways each other’s reminder of the war, having both seen the results of battles, having shared — if only briefly — the ward at Étaples. Still, they may have believed that restoration was possible, in George’s unchanging China Hall and during her visits from the city. They would sometimes drive on the dusty country roads, passing small brick churches and schoolhouses. Now and then they visited Augusta’s village for weddings or funerals, and quite frequently they took a Sunday meal with Augusta’s now solitary mother.

  Years later, Augusta told me that her most vivid memories of the farm concerned the infrequent days of complete silence in her house. “When we were older,” she said, “my brothers and I were able to miss the first weeks of class because of the harvest. We considered this a great treat, though we worked harder than we ever did at school.”

  Early September was often the hottest time of the year; the autumn sun burning into the earth; creeks and rivers shrinking in size. The boys would be out in the fields from dawn until dusk, and her mother would be busy with the large market garden directly across the lane, so Augusta, the daughter of the house, would be left indoors alone to clean the kitchen and bedrooms.

  The four oldest boys slept in what the family referred to as the “north room” at the top of the stairs. Situated over the kitchen and the parlour, it was the largest space in the house, incorporating four windows and a snakelike stovepipe, which thrust itself up from the kitchen woodstove and entered the room through the floor, travelled across the ceiling, pierced the wall overtop the door frame, and continued down the hall. This leviathan distributed a surprising amount of warmth in the winter, but would seem cold, useless, awkward in a season of heat.

  Each morning during the harvest, Augusta would pull a child’s wagon laden with stoneware water jugs out to the fields, which had become golden and lush with mature grain or which had transformed themselves into forests of tall corn. As they filled their cups, her brothers would sometimes talk to her about whether the work was going well, and this would please her. After this she would walk back, past the place where her almost forgotten snow house had been, return to the house, and climb the stairs to sweep the floor, to remove the cobwebs that would have formed on the stovepipe overnight, and to make the beds in the north room.

  Even though it was not yet ten o’clock in the morning, the heat was often terrific, the room stained yellow by the sun beating against drawn blinds. Evidence of activity was everywhere, making the absence and the stillness more profound. Flies, drunk with sunlight, buzzed now and then in the corners of windows, but apart from this, Augusta told me, the silence was almost palpable.

  The room was like a memorial to animation. Each bed that Augusta straightened seemed to have been the site of a skirmish, each garment that she lifted
from the floor was like something that, moments before, had been filled with energy and motion; something recently killed. A pleasant languor would start to envelope her as she moved slowly across the floor, stooping, smoothing, stretching sometimes, to hang discarded overalls from a hook or a nail on the wall. Flies continued to buzz drowsily in the heat. The smell of sweat — hers, her brothers’ — was always present. Occasionally Augusta would find herself standing perfectly still with a pillowslip, or a shirt clutched in a ball near her stomach. She could never remember what it was she had been thinking about.

  This was the time of the year when the boys became particularly glorious. Their skin was darkened, their hair bleached by sun. Augusta said they looked to her like the apostles, or the muscular male angels she remembered from her Sunday-school cards. Calmed by labour, they were gentle, quiet, grateful at suppertime. Augusta could never understand how she, a girl with such dark hair, could be a sister to boys so blond. But the blood they all shared was the central river of her life. She adored them.

  During the early autumn evenings of 1913, while George and I were dancing at the pavilion ten miles away, some of the boys would go into town while Augusta and Fred sat near the open kitchen window to catch the night breeze. Augusta would sew while Fred carefully buttered their mother’s flat oatmeal cookies, and, between bites, read passages from The World’s Great Exposition of Civilization. When he came across something he knew would make Augusta laugh, he would read it aloud to her. “Psychological Discoveries in Vegetables” was a popular section (“Plants Can Think!”), as was the chapter on the great subway tunnel under New York City or the illustrations and instructions for spying by kite. Fred was interested in the “Careers at Home” section, interested in raising silkworms or frogs. Of all the boys he was the most shy, too timid to go into town in the evenings to look for girls.

  “The few girls he would get to know,” Augusta told me, “would have to come to him and practically force themselves upon his attention.”

  While she was speaking to me about harvest time on her girlhood farm, two pictures of Augusta as a very young woman repeatedly appeared in my mind. In one, she was pulling a wagon full of stoneware jugs towards an empty field; in the other, she was shaking dust cloths and braided rugs from the windows of a north room. In both she seemed to be participating in a strange ritual of farewell.

  “I never saw the end of the harvest of 1913,” Augusta informed me, “and I was never home for harvest time again.”

  Sometime during the previous winter her father had announced that now that she was finished with her schooling, there were four possibilities open to her. “Four possibilities,” he had said, holding up the fingers of his left hand, “marriage, teaching, nursing, and, as these are modern times, stenography.”

  Because some of her brothers had been having trouble at school, Augusta spent the remainder of the winter testing her pedagogical skills by forcing some of the younger boys to concentrate, after dinner, on a series of spellers and readers that she remembered as being far from interesting. The theme of most of the poems the boys were given to read at school, and all of the poems they were required to memorize, was fidelity to the Mother country. Years later, Augusta would dream about this night kitchen, the snow falling outside the window, and the boys, their eyes glazed with boredom, reciting:

  “‘England, England, England,

  Wherever a true heart beats,

  Wherever the rivers of commerce flow,

  Wherever the bugles of conquest blow,

  Wherever the glories of liberty grow,

  ‘T’is the name that the world repeats’.”

  In the dream she would try to warn her brothers, but they behaved as if she weren’t there, as if her voice weren’t reaching them. She always awoke weeping.

  But while she was attempting to teach them, she felt only the boredom, hers and theirs, and knew she could not devote her life to the passing on of memory work. In the early autumn of 1913 she enrolled in the Toronto General Hospital School of Nursing.

  As George had, I have come to love Augusta’s past. I like to think of her as a child, a child of perhaps eleven or twelve years, just before her brief bout of play was followed by mandatory adulthood. I like to think of her sitting in her village graveyard, surrounded by children, villagers, and farmers on Decoration Day. George wrote to me about this yearly event once, after he had attended the ceremony with Augusta, who had put flowers on her father’s grave and placed a wreath at the war memorial. The church service was held in the cemetery on a Sunday in June, when the blossoms were out and the leaves were fresh. Several wagons were employed to bring the organ from the church, chairs from the parish hall, and benches from the Sunday school. And then all of this indoor furniture was arranged among the tombstones, on the grass.

  The graveyard itself, as I see it, would be full of modest white stones, would be surrounded by a white fence, and there would be neither deep ravines nor mausoleums nor vicious weather. There would be enough shade for comfort, but not so much as to darken the atmosphere. The women would be wearing colourful dresses and there would be hats on everyone’s heads, white shoes on everyone’s feet. A breeze in the pines, fresh flowers on the grass, an uplifting hymn on the organ. Song. I like to think of Augusta there on Decoration Day, a warm day in June, the graves of her ancestors suitably decorated, her Sunday-school cards in a little crocheted purse, ribbons in her hair, and the war not yet even a rumour. I like to think of a day like that: George’s beloved Northumberland Hills rolling off in all directions, the dark trees of the bush pressing down from the north, towards this gorgeous cultivation, this decency.

  “I was never home for harvest time again,” Augusta said. “I enrolled in the Toronto General Hospital School of Nursing and then, a few years later, I volunteered to go overseas.”

  Beyond the windows of the China Hall an ocean of snow churned in the streetlight.

  “What about the boys?” I asked.

  Augusta was silent for a long, long time. I began to think she wasn’t going to answer. Perhaps she was never going to tell me what happened to her brothers.

  “Some of them,” she finally said, “were too young to go to war.”

  I know now that I could have talked to George. I might have told him almost anything. I should have, for instance, told him about Sara. But I didn’t. I recall that when he revealed his relationship with Augusta to me I believed I had nothing similar to confide, despite the fact that I had been painting Sara then for five summers. Also, having years before taken Robert Henri’s admonition concerning privacy to heart, I remained stubbornly fixed in the listening and gathering period of my life, keeping my activities so brilliantly compartmentalized I was called upon to disclose very little of myself to anyone, little beyond a superficial litany of my own questionable achievements. The deeper currents of the world, when I was lucky enough to stumble upon them, existed, I believed at the time, to be examined by me, then used in my art for my own advancement.

  After what occurred on a winter night in 1937, controlling things, ordering them, became untenable. I removed my dangerous self from the innocent traffic of humanity, began to look inward.

  I have taken nothing from the world since.

  Now that I am old, and there is neither the opportunity nor the desire to change the pattern of my life, I am forced to admit to myself how much of my experience has been second-hand. I think constantly about the others: those I knew who entered wars and love affairs, those who, unlike me, let passion break them. George, Rockwell, Augusta. Sara. I cannot forget how they crept near and, like merchants unfurling silk scarves on table-tops, placed narrative after colourful narrative in front of me. I cannot forget how they pulled their knowledge of the world back into their own hearts and slipped out of my line of vision, more interested suddenly in death or fame or the Arctic. All except for Sara, who would have stayed, I think. But who can ever know these things? And perhaps I’m being unfair. God knows I was frequently more i
nterested in my own fame and my own interior Arctic. Unable until now to muster the concentration necessary to report my memories verbally to anyone, all my energies have gone into the past, to exorcising ghosts, to obliterating conscience.

  They say that in old age the long-term memory becomes vivid, punches its fist through the skin of the present, insists on being heard and seen and felt. George and Augusta bring their inner landscapes with them into these white rooms of mine, and I feel their sorrows and tendernesses, their resentments and anxieties, in a way that I have never experienced my own emotions. But how crowded and unfocused this looking back is; all these foreign fields, the battles, this china collection. Views of rocks and trees, hills and streams. I scarcely know which images are mine and which have been taken by me, fully developed, from the others, or whether there is, in the final analysis, any difference.

  This is the uncertainty I have been left with. This is the true inheritance.

  Mrs. Boyle is very impressed with the carefully rendered scenes and landscapes of my underpainting, told me so just this morning when I discovered her standing, hands on hips, staring at the most recent work-in-progress.

  “This side is just lovely,” she said, pointing a feather duster towards the least finished area of the painting. “I feel like if I touched that water I’d get my fingers wet, it’s that real.”