“Me?”
“I’ll bet you do.”
“I don’t paint, but I’ll tell you, goddammit, I’m as much a devotee of the good, the true and the beautiful as any of these assy women on the board of the museum. Why am I not on the board? Because I run a lowbrow commercial art studio?”
She nodded yes. He shook his head no.
“There’s no justice.”
Bieman said, “I’ll admit I’ve let it be known I think the director is a fag with fag tastes, and that may set some people against me.”
“How could it?
“Yeah. All right. I’m a rough old cob.” He smirked like the greatest virtuoso slicker between the seaboards. “I do not kiss nobody’s ass.”
“Daddy!” Mother Bieman cautioned. She had moused up to where he and Leslie were talking. But instead of coming to exert her wifely prerogatives, it rather seemed that she was there to pander them to each other if she found a way. “Daddy’s bark is worse than his bite.”
“I got some pretty big yellow teeth,” he offered. “But look, Mrs. Daniels, I came to this town full of zeal. I starved in my garret—down where the colored used to live by Water Street. I’ll show you someday.”
“Have him show you his old studio someday,” said non-jealous Mother Bieman.
“I taught Saturday classes at the YMCA, YWCA and for kids when there was hardly a person in the city that knew anything more modern than, let us say, Rosa Bonheur or Corot.”
“Corot’s Italian landscapes—” Leslie started to tell him how she liked them, but she remembered all those fuzzy, buckeye trees that Corot had painted and nodded her disgust.
“Why did I pick this lovely city? Bellows said to us young fellows, ‘Go out in America. Don’t go to New York and hang around all the perverts and unreconstructed European quacks.’ So I believed him. I tell you I was a Wobbly at heart. I starved for twenty-five years here in Sardis trying to make them look at their own backyards. And I’m known here. When Mother and I were on the WPA I thought I was beginning to get a reputation. The museum owns a couple of my things. They’ll never hang them now because you can see a face in them. You know that’s how these assy women tell a good painting nowadays. If they can recognize any of the shapes in it, it spoils it for them.”
“If I saw an abstract painter here, I’d shoot him like a yellow dog,” Leslie said. If she didn’t mean that literally, she meant it nonetheless. It seemed to her that she and Ben had been listening to George Bellows’s advice when they moved out of New York. She felt, with the sun hot on her adorable skin, that she really had been cheated by not being allowed to starve in a garret or model for a WPA painter. She stretched like a nude pioneer wife and looked as regional as she could. Mother Bieman (and others gathering round) appreciated her act.
“The museum board knows who I am, even if the young fellows who teach art at the University don’t,” Bieman said. “But do you think they’d ask my opinion about what to do with their tax-free dollars? I went to just one of their so-called public board meetings since the War. They had some faggot there advising them what European wallpaper they could buy. I stood up and said, ‘I think I’m going mad.’ They didn’t even have the courage to tell me to get out. They sat there with their mouths open until I left.”
“’Ray,” Leslie said.
“Let ’em buy their abstractions with their inflated, capitalist dollars. I’ll sit out here on my farm, and do you know what I’ll say to them?”
Leslie bobbed her head to tell him she knew exactly where and how far they could shove it, all those pompous bankers’ and doctors’ wives who ruled the museum, of whom American Leslie would never be one.
She had a correct impression that her presence had perfected his performance. Her listening had pepped up his oration. As a team they had collected quite an audience before he was through (presuming that he might now be thought to have finished).
Dolly Sellers—who had never heard of Bellows or Guston or de Kooning either—was hanging rapt on the edge of the pool beside Seymour Rife, her small legs fluttering like tendrils as she divided admiration between her boss and her ideal. Three or four fattening customers of the Studio stood in their trunks like Roman senators listening to Cato’s denunciations of Carthaginian art. Or maybe they only grinned to see the old boy for some reason lose his usual calm. Mother Bieman swayed eurythmically behind, among, about the chairs where Dolores and her husband sat. From the middle of the pool Don Patch watched and perhaps listened, floating, squirting a fountain of water through his hand, catching it in his mouth, and frowning at the taste. Others, from the fifty-odd guests of the afternoon, were drawing in toward the obvious center of things to hear what they could hear.
“I’ll bet you still paint,” Leslie said, looking up with adoration.
Daddy Bieman’s eyes gleamed again as he recalled himself to the present scene and counted the house to which he and Leslie were playing. “Secret,” he said. “After a while, when it starts to rain—and it’s going to rain yet—I’ll take you up in the attic and show you the paintings I’ve been working on.”
“Etchings,” Mother Bieman said—and giggled, in case anyone had missed the point.
Leslie bounced to her feet and dived into the pool, disappearing in the murky water. She came up near the spot where Don Patch was circling enviously offshore. Her face streamed repugnance. She surface-dived, emerged halfway down the pool. She walked all alone—with half the eyes of the party following her—to the house to change out of her wet suit.
An hour later she was hurrying like a girl on an errand of mercy when Don Patch blocked her way. She felt not merely that she wanted to rejoin the milling herd of guests on the lawn, but that they needed her. She felt this for the good, if insufficient, reason that so many had told her so.
After her poolside success with her host (“Daddy hasn’t told anyone about studying with George Bellows for years,” Mother Bieman said. “He’s been hurt. Pride, you know.”) she had swung up and up like the star aerialist swung toward the peak of the circus tent by a series of partners on a ladder of trapezes. Lester Glenn, who’d brought his Rollei, set her up for a bunch of pictures at various photogenic corners of the lawn with different groups who’d be flattered by picture souvenirs and by appearing with such a vivid girl (though her hair was still plastered wetly to her skull after she had dressed). With somebody’s wild scarf tied around her head she had sat on the barnyard fence while Bill Barnard (of Barnard’s Better Foods) and Tim Somebody (who had the Blatz agency in four western Illinois counties) steadied her, one on either side, from the ground.
With Bill Barnard still in tow, he having merely changed his purchase from her calf to her upper arm when she hopped down from the fence, she went to the shelter near the lily pond to be photographed with String Bieman and Mr. and Mrs. Krotz (Krotz Optical), and it turned out that String was maintaining a kind of auxiliary bar in the shelter, and presently they were singing loudly enough (the old songs) to lure in a dozen others of the straggling pack.
She matched limericks with Vincent Coulette and a bosomy Mrs. Jackson while an indefinite number of eavesdroppers echoed laughter at the punch lines. A thirtyish man who said he was a golf pro (and looked like a TV trading card, that handsome and that pasteboardy) tried to persuade her to get back in her bathing suit again, either to swim or to make Lester Glenn’s pix “worth while.” When she refused, the pro and Bill Barnard and—somewhat oddly, it would have seemed, at another time or for anyone else—Ozzie Carter’s wife and a sunbonneted matron in slacks (one of the neighbors) teamed up to threaten tossing her in the pool as she was.
She escaped dunking to discuss the inadequacies of American high schools with an old party (apparently one of the Bieman accounts) who’d admired some copy he was told she wrote. He admired it, he said, “because it was cute but not full of slang.” He wanted to (and did) toast her for her style. When he went to refill their highball glasses from the verandah, the pack closed in again and she sat
in a circle on the grass to reminisce about old movies, old cars, men’s clothing of the twenties, college days and the history of Bieman’s Studio.
She was on her feet and bringing joy to still other heathen when Mother Bieman and her daughter-in-law and Beth Tremayn closed in on her and absolutely insisted she come with them to the basement to see the day-old litter of basset puppies.
In the gloom and cool of the basement she was not only impatient to get back with her following (to be in unmixed female company had always made her restless) but slightly nauseated.
The newborn puppies looked slimy to her. (“Darling,” she said, “they’re just darling. I’m going to make Ben let me have a dog. We have room. Aren’t they darling? Bassets look so Roman.”) These puppies looked like sleeping, boneless reptiles as they dangled by the scruff of the neck from Mother Bieman’s experienced hand. Mother Bieman insisted she choose one on the spot, though they’d have to stay with the bitch for a few weeks yet. Leslie said she couldn’t resist the little male with the pinkest belly of them all, but really was it fair to a basset to try to raise it in the city? (And as she was refusing, she thought what a pity that Ben was missing her ovulation period this month because of the conference.) But didn’t a basset need room and the freedom of the country life?
She was not at all sure by the time they climbed the stairs whether she owned or did not own one of the pups, but when she deftly disengaged herself from the cuadrilla of women (by the simple expedient of changing her mind about going to the bathroom, effective since grade-school parties) she headed through the house with a great need for open air.
And there was Patch blocking the passage that ran the width of the house past the stairway to the back verandah. He was lounging against the wall, as if he had heard her coming and stopped to wait, with his extended arm reaching across to the stair banister opposite. He was shaking his glass so the ice cube in it tinkled like a toy bell.
“You really had the boss going a while ago,” he said.
Was there an answer to that? For one thing, he was referring to something that had happened almost three hours ago, carrying his crumpled triviality of observation through the lusty afternoon like a dull boy with a note to pass in school; some stupidly daring, utterly pointless assertion that he’d lacked nerve to give her in the classroom while teacher was watching.
“You had him eating out of your hand.” He laughed. “Your comment about getting a raise in pay, well, now’s your time to hit him for it.”
“I very much enjoyed talking to him,” she said levelly—as if a breath of maturity in her tone would blow this obstruction right out of her path, make him give way without requiring more offensive measures.
He nodded. “The first time he’s told you about studying with George Bellows? Most people hear that one when he hires them. How the old ladies at the museum won’t have anything to do with him? Well, he’s right. He’s better than they are, at that.”
The passage in which they stood was dim. The sky must have clouded over while she was in the basement looking at the pups. In the dimness she could nevertheless make out that his abnormally pale skin was tinged with sunburn. It glowed with rosy phosphorescence, like a pink, inedible mushroom, and she was reminded unpleasantly of the dogs or maybe something even more disagreeable.
“Excuse me,” she said. When he seemed not to understand, she said, “I need fresh air, I think.”
Still he stood in her way, as if able to measure all too cunningly the degree of her frailty. “Funny to hear you calling him Daddy to his face. All the kids at the shop call him that among ourselves, but as far as he knows, we leave off that last ee. Old Dad Bieman. But it didn’t make him mad.”
After his swim, Patch’s hair had dried in tighter kinks than usual. Now it looked like nasty little roses crowning an infant death’s-head. For a moment the association was vile and strong. “Shall we step out in the air?” she asked. Only then he lowered his arm and turned.
Fortunately or unfortunately, they met Dolly Sellers as soon as they sounded their footsteps on the floor of the verandah. And very probably she had come looking for Patch. He averted his face and twisted his shoulders away from her while she spoke to Leslie.
“What time’s this shindig supposed to be over? The party, I mean,” Dolly asked.
Patch hummed through his teeth and watched the Negroes clearing off the buffet table.
“I don’t know,” Leslie said, aware that she had been smelling furniture polish and floor wax in the passage, gratefully sniffing the hot moisture now detectable in the open air. A massing of blue-black clouds, densest in the west behind the neighboring farm, had brought a kind of artificial twilight. It must be past four o’clock, and it seemed later than it was. “When I was invited nobody said. How late did it last a year ago?” She knew at least that such parties were annual affairs, in summer symmetry with the Christmas party held in the Studio downtown.
“I was working for him last year but I didn’t come,” Dolly said. “Do you know, Don?”
Perhaps he shook his head abruptly. Leslie didn’t see. But he hummed again instead of answering aloud. Leslie heard a car stop in the gravel around by the garage. “Oh, I wouldn’t think of leaving yet,” she said encouragingly to Dolly. “The party’s still going strong. I think I heard some of them dancing in the parlor. And someone’s just arrived.”
Patch laughed to himself.
Dolly had been grossly misunderstood. “I wasn’t going to leave yet,” she said. She seemed almost shocked at such an idea—as if Leslie wanted her to go. “I have to call my mother is all, and tell her when I won’t be home.”
Now it dawned on Leslie that the girl was trying to get an answer from Patch, was using her as a backboard for a question that only he could answer: when would he be ready to take Miss Dolly elsewhere and then home?
“Sure people are just coming,” Dolly said while she waited in vain. “I think it’s the Bieman’s friends who are beginning to pile in now. String’s even got a bunch of them out in the dairy. And they don’t mix much.”
“It will probably go on to the wee hours,” Patch said, refusing to give any comfort to Dolly’s anxiety. And then Leslie realized that Dolly must think she was in the competition to leave with him.…
“Tell your mother not to wait up,” she said firmly to Dolly. “Excuse me.”
She almost ran down the verandah steps and down the lawn. She did not slacken her pace or lift her head to greet all her new and old friends until she had come to the sling chair where Dolores Calfert still sat beside the pool.
The older woman sat silent as someone asleep, like a dumpy monument against the mysterious shadow of the grass, turning blue and dark now under the blue of the approaching thunderstorm. She was no longer at the center of things. The flood of the party had long since moved away from its concentration around the pool, and she seemed not so much lonely as deserted. But what stunned Leslie most was the blaze of sunburn like paint sprayed from a single source on one side only of Dolores’ head, arm’s, and legs and across the broad neckline of her dress.
“Honey, you’re cooked,” she said with a low moan of compassion.
Dolores raised the great curves of her eyelids. “Am I? I thought I was stewed.” She managed a chuckle that was only faintly mournful. “Boy, I’ve been dreaming I was on an ocean voyage, sitting in a deck chair, and the steward kept fillinerup, fillinerup. Maybe I did doze off. There were people here?”
“They’re still here.”
“Maybe I’ll see them again if I look hard.” She took Leslie’s hand and squeezed.
“I shouldn’t have left you,” Leslie said. “You probably wanted to go home hours ago. Shall we?”
“Who wants to go home when they’s no man there?”
Leslie clucked. “I know. I know. But Ben’s only away for three more days, goody.” But should she have said that? Was it, after all, a delicate enough way to express how she had grasped what Dolores was feeling? “Maybe he’ll cr
ash and drown,” she said with a grimace, wondering if Dolly Sellers could really be so asinine as to believe she had been with Don Patch by choice. “Then we’d both be widows; ah, Lucy, what if she were dead?”
“What?”
“A poem,” Leslie said. “Honey, I am worried about your sunburn and about your being a poor old widow and my being a poor young.… Let’s go home now.”
Dolores brushed at her sunburn as if it were dust that could be fluttered away. “Not,” she said firmly, “at your hour of triumph.”
“Triumph!” Leslie said. She grimaced, more or less sincerely. She did not so much dispute the correctness of the word as lament it as a reminder that the reality was already gliding away. How silly that the waning of a modestly triumphant afternoon could so much resemble a girl’s growing older. But four-thirty (or was it five now, already five?) brought the same emotional quandary as remembering she was twenty-seven now and that the best promises had already been defaulted. “Ah,” she said gloomily, “I was just a prelim. I’m told the party may run for hours yet.”
“We’ll run with it.”
“We mustn’t stay. You’re tired and awfully sunburnt. Doesn’t it hurt? Only when you laugh? Well, it will later. Ben will be angry at me for not taking better care of you. He’s really fonder of you than you could think.”
“He likes me?”
“Mmmmm.” The impulse was strong in Leslie to pull out all the stops and gush. There must be times when gush, like other sorts of lies or fantasies, was a better way of coming at the truth than conventional reticence. And she had imagined that Ben, against all conventional likelihood, had fallen romantically in love—not exactly with the real Widow Calfert, but as one falls in love with a character in a book, whose faded lips he will never have to kiss. She thought they had known each other without the annoying limitation of an exact relationship like mother to son or lover to lover—something vague and therefore better than the common run of things.
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