by Ward Just
That time I visited you in the hospital, she said, your face wrapped in bandages. You had trouble speaking, remember? You were out of it, not yourself. I had never been in a hospital before, the antiseptic smell, the nurses so brusque. You had the pallor of a prison inmate. I hated it. That was the worst until now.
The Hyde Park community rallied round, bringing books, bringing meals, looking after the cat, cleaning the house. The Niemans and Lee were invited to dinner any time they wanted to come. Colleagues taught Harold's classes. Laura was given the semester off, her fellowship postponed until she felt able to take it up. Still, Laura believed things were out of control. She and her father had managed to survive the tempest but only barely, and who knew when it might return and carry them all away.
Laura was living in a steady state of uncertainty, even peril. For a time she visited one of the many Hyde Park psychoanalysts, this one trained by Herr Freud himself, but the psychoanalyst was mainly interested in her dreams whereas Laura was interested in her mother's dreams. Where in the world had the acrobats come from? And who summoned Mr. Justice Holmes? Nothing Laura had read in four years of inquiry into the work of philosophers had prepared her for the emotional turmoil caused by her mother's illness, not even the great Stoics. And, she added with something approaching contempt, especially the great Stoics. The truth was, no one knew anything of value. The philosophers, in their preoccupation with the mind, had neglected unruly emotions. Her life had been turned upside down and she had no idea when it would right itself, if it ever did. She had lived in a beautiful world and now that world was gone and replaced by something ugly, menacing, and negligent. The doctors were no more help than the philosophers.
In the last analysis, she said to Lee, you have only yourself and your family to rely on when you're waltzing with the unknown. You've been wonderful. I feel closer to you than I ever have. You have such patience. You're never rattled. Does that come from working with heavy stone? Maybe that's why you work with marble.
You bet, Lee said.
Only promise me one thing. You'll never get sick.
I promise.
You've got to mean it, she said.
I'll never get sick, Lee said.
I couldn't bear it, Laura said.
You could. But you won't have to.
How do you know? she demanded, suddenly near tears.
Goodells know, he said. It's a family trait like blue eyes or a clubfoot. We Goodells have second sight. Lee was smiling as he said this and when he was finished Laura was smiling too. That night she turned a corner. Soon after, her mother did also and by Christmas her health returned for good and life resumed its normal pace, more or less.
NEW JESPER AND OGDEN HALL were much with me at this time. I was conscious of having entered a wider world, Chicago and Hyde Park and the university together with my studio. There were many like me at the university, small-town boys good at studies, very good at examinations, not experienced in the world. The world was the classroom, its maps and histories, its novels and poems and plays, its sciences and religions, the facts written in chalk on a blackboard. Shakespeare, Copernicus, Hegel, Luther. Master Shakespeare and you mastered the world, at least the British part of it. Reading Shakespeare, you knew where you stood in the Elizabethan scheme of things, the specific identities of the rulers and the ruled. How difficult it was translating Shakespeare to New Jesper, where the rulers were identified only as "they."
I understand they're floating a new bond issue. Sewers, I hear.
Have you seen the new stoplight up New Jesper Street? When did they decide to do that?
They're not saying much about it but there was a bad situation at the high school the other day. Some poor girl assaulted. They're expecting an arrest any day now...
I was different in my view of the order of things, owing to my father's position in our town. To me, they were not "they" but something approaching "we." I was an accomplice of "we." I think at a very early age I understood the American system, the country so various, so large and unruly, poised to fly apart at any moment. The system was founded on compromise and reconciliation, an infinity of checks and balances but always the willingness to look the other way until the world forced close focus. The states passed a constitutional amendment. The nation went to war. The small towns of America played no role in this except to supply the votes and the armies. Really, the decisions were made elsewhere, by others who were better educated and better informed. They were authorities. They held the high cards. I thought of them as Homer thought of the Fates, entitled to make any decree they wished (and in due course a notice appeared in the World). Laura said to me once, You have such patience. You're never rattled. You—she laughed here—never give instructions. I suppose she was correct. I think I never wanted to make the choices my father was obliged to make—indeed was eager to make—to keep the lid on lest, lidless, the pot boiled over with unforeseen consequences. People had to be protected from themselves, and my father along with the publisher and the bank president and the others were the self-appointed protectors. They had tremendous confidence in themselves and a shared view of the world, its surfaces and undercurrents, its caprices. Someone had to decide. They decided, for the good of the community, its morale. Of course at the bottom of it, the foundation of it, lay the enigma of class in America. But of that they never spoke.
During the course of June Nieman's illness I spent nights in my studio, determined to finish the three pieces that would give me the hoped-for baker's dozen. When I had them, I would have a show. One gallery on the South Side and two downtown had expressed interest on no more faith than rumor generated by Laura's father, who was widely acquainted with Chicago's art world, then a small but lively place given to sudden and often inexplicable enthusiasms—the French expressionist Bernard Buffet, for example, who for a time was as ubiquitous in fashionable living rooms as the Social Register. Buffet was a North Side phenomenon. Hyde Park leaned more in the direction of the anguished German expressionists, Beckmann, Dix, and Kirchner, altogether more strenuous, more disturbing, than the Frenchman. However, the North Side was where the money was, and the North Side was always eager to support local talent. Harold Nieman said I could forget about the North Shore. Except for a very few very well-heeled and very cultivated merchant princes and their wives, the North Shore was a wasteland. Stay away from it, Harold said. Republicans lived there.
Graduation came and went. My father agreed to continue my allowance while I finished the three pieces, which I was working on simultaneously. I had never done that before and I have never done it since, but in those months I was filled with a fanatic's energy, sleeping no more than three or four hours a night, eating infrequently, slowly losing confidence that this work would amount to anything. Laura spent one or two nights a week at the studio and the other nights in our apartment or at her parents' house or, when her mother was in a bad way, in the waiting room of the hospital. By that time I had acquired a telephone and Laura called every night with a medical report on her mother and whatever other news she had gathered. She knew enough to let the telephone ring and ring before she hung up, knowing that I was so absorbed in my work that I often did not hear the ringing. I was always happy when she called, her voice so soft and seductive. We would often spend thirty minutes or more on the telephone. She was clever the way she went about the calls, the first few minutes a slow recitation of the mundane details of her day, aimless chitchat while she waited for me to arrive in her world from my own and turn my back on Number Eleven and, as she said, join the party—meaning, listen to her voice as opposed to the voices in my head. I thought of it as akin to the crafty opening of a novel, setting a false scent, lulling the reader, encouraging the reader to enter an unknown house; don't worry, everything's going to be fine.
I was happy too when she dropped in at the studio, though twice she quietly slipped through the door and went straight to the couch and to sleep before I even knew she was in the room. When you are twenty-one years o
ld your powers of concentration are formidable, and later the power of concentration can be translated to absent-mindedness. I would step back from Number Twelve and light a cigarette while staring a hole through the marble, determined to discover the nature of the interior, look left, and there she'd be, eyes closed, breathing softly. I thought there was something miraculous about it, as if she were delivered to the couch by some supernatural agency. How did she get inside without my noticing? I always worked better when she was in the room despite the temptation to join her on the couch; the temptation easy to yield to. At any event, I always yielded. I had an idea that if we were ever rich enough to afford a house we would buy one with a full basement, a large basement with room enough for my table and marbles and of course a couch big enough for two. Laura would have a spacious room upstairs for her own work, and that room too would have a couch beneath a big bay window, and beyond the window a street with serious high-crowned trees. Both the basement and Laura's study would have telephones, each phone with its own number so that we could call when the spirit moved.
One night she said, When will you be finished?
Soon, I said.
How soon?
Maybe next week, I said, gesturing around the room. Numbers One through Ten were arrayed on pallets along the wall, numbers Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen on my long worktable. There was almost no free space except for the couch. The floor was thick with marble dust and I knew I would have to set aside some time for housecleaning, though not just yet.
That soon?
Maybe, I said.
You're holding something back, she said.
I've lost confidence, I said. That's what this is, a confidence game. You have to have an iron belief that what you're doing is good. Your best. The best you can do, and if you lose that belief it's chaos.
I don't believe that, she said.
It's true, I said. It's the worst feeling imaginable.
Listen to me, she said and embarked on a kind of soliloquy on the emotions of low moments and high, as difficult to decipher as the Tractatus. Think about it long enough and you'll be as crazy as Wittgenstein. She said, Think only of the work. Not your own relation to the work but the work itself as if it were being composed by someone else, a separate mind inside your own mind. Do you see? Step back. Concentrate only on the matter at hand. Keep your emotions focused on the matter. You keep thinking of it as a confidence game you'll lose and we cannot allow that to happen. Do you believe that?
Yes, I said. I like the use of the word "we."
We're together, she said. Go back to work now.
I believe I will, I said.
One last thing, she said. Harold has a friend he wants you to meet. His name's Alvarez. Alvarez and his wife own a gallery up on the North Side. They like new work and they want to see your marbles.
HAROLD NIEMAN was as good as his word. The gallery was located off Michigan Avenue not far from the Drake Hotel, a second floor space with dead-white walls, perfect for my black marbles. The owners were enthusiastic about my pieces but warned me at the same time not to get my hopes up. New work was difficult to sell and an unknown artist was a dubious, not to say reckless, quantity and a tremendous amount depended on luck, the right crowd, the right setting, the weather, what the headlines said that morning. News from Korea, news from Wall Street, news about the election. Mim Alvarez said, We want them in a good mood. We want them upbeat and confident. We want them to walk into the casino feeling lucky, as if they could successfully draw to an inside straight. We want them thinking that their lives won't be worth turds unless they have one of your marbles in the parlor. We want them thinking about peace, progress, and prosperity—especially prosperity in the form of lower taxes. All these things are beyond our control except for the drink and there'll be lots of that. And one more thing. They'll want to like you. They'll want to see an artist with a great future ahead. They'll want in on the ground floor. They'll be sizing you up, Lee. Put on a good face. Make nice to them.
We were sitting in their gallery, Laura and I, and Mim and her husband Jason. Jason was explaining how they began in the business. I inherited some money from my aunt, Mim put in. That started it, Jason said, but I was the one who got to know Herr Mackel just at the time he wanted to sell and return to the old country and a farmhouse he owned near Seebüll, almost at the Danish border. So we bought the gallery, Herr Mackel retaining a percentage—for his retirement, he said. He died last year and the percentage died with him. And here we are. Why are you shaking your head, Lee?
Did he handle an artist called Tommy Ogden?
He did. We have half a dozen of Ogden's pieces. Decent work. Hard-edged, quite original in composition. I think he had no formal training at all. He began with hunting sketches, then turned to brothel scenes in the manner of Toulouse-Lautrec, except with Ogden the scenes were more domestic than erotic. Herr Mackel was a friend of Ogden's and swore the brothel was somewhere in Chicago but he never found out where. I had the feeling he knew much more than he was saying. Strange thing is, Ogden's prices keep going up. Have done ever since his death. It's too much to call him a cult figure but he definitely has an audience. Do you want to see the ones we have?
We walked into the print room and Jason Alvarez pointed at the side wall, six sketches grouped around the sign tommy ogden. They were all of women—women painting their toenails, reading, knitting, washing their hair, resting, looking into a mirror. On careful inspection each drawing contained a jarring object, a small revolver on a nightstand, a porcelain tiger, a compass, a man's bow tie, binoculars, a rifle's telescopic sight. The composition was dense in the German manner, most carefully drawn. It was hard to imagine Tommy Ogden's heavy fingers executing such meticulous work. But there was no denying the emotion that went into it.
I think the brothel is called Chez Siracusa and it lives to this day, I said, and that was all I said.
Mim Alvarez handled the art and her husband dealt with the money. It was his idea to put a high price on my pieces and the same price for each, except for Number One, which was listed at fifteen hundred dollars. The others were set at one thousand even, a very high price in those days. If we are going to fail, Jason said, we might as well fail big. The gallery took fifty percent. They would expect a guest list from Laura and me and another list from Harold and June but the bulk of the guests would come from their own client list, proven buyers whose checks always cleared the bank. Jason Alvarez would romance the press, meaning the five daily newspapers and the two or three radio stations that might mention the opening. Posters would be prepared and distributed widely but mainly in Hyde Park and the Near North Side. The piece Mim chose for the poster was, naturally, Number One, with a smallish photograph of me, lower left, in profile, which seemed to emphasize the scar that ran from eyeball to chin. The photograph of Number One was shot in such a way that a careful observer would notice the perpendicular cut in the marble and associate the two. Laura was skeptical of this project, believing it an unfortunate "signature," as she called it. She compared it, not very favorably, to Dalí's mustache and Picasso's bare chest. Also Al Capone.
Mim had asked, Will you please think of titles that are not so blind? I mean something more descriptive.
I said, No.
I think the titles should be rethought, she said.
No, I said again, and that was that.
The vernissage ran from six to eight, a full bar and a buffet table crowded with canapés. I suppose at the height of it a hundred people were in the room, young and old, North Side and South Side, and my parents as well, at first ill at ease in a room full of strangers and then more relaxed when June Nieman took them in hand. Harold took great pleasure in introducing me to his downtown friends, the ones whom I had never seen at Sunday lunch. Many of these were bankers and brokers, and I learned then that Harold was a director of one of the small downtown banks, a position he took seriously. He was one of the few Chicago economists asked to join a bank's board, his specific task to explain
the present in order to forecast the future. I attempted affability but my eyes always wandered to the marbles to see who was looking at them and I tried to judge from the expressions on their faces whether they were intrigued or bored. In the beginning this was discouraging. I saw weary, puzzled faces, fingers scratching chins. The weariest face of all belonged to Dr. Petitbon, who stood with a glass of scotch in his hand looking skeptically at Number One; and then he turned and saw me and gave a wintry smile, more grimace than smile, and I was left to wonder whether it was a comment on me, my work, or the company he found himself in. But he had thought to come, and when I sent him the invitation I was doubtful that he would.
Then, sometime around seven-thirty, the first red star went up. That was followed in a few moments by another, and a third. The room was aroar with conversation and laughter, two bartenders doing their dance behind the long table, Mim and Jason Alvarez in continual discussion with one or another client. A fourth and fifth red star went up. Number One was still unclaimed, but in a few minutes it too was sold. I shouldered my way through the crowd to my parents, to see how they were getting on.
My father asked, What do the red stars mean?
Sales, I said.
They're buying them? Your sculptures?
It seems they are, I said.
My God, Lee, these things of yours are expensive.
I think so too. But I guess it doesn't matter.
Congratulations, my mother said. They're lovely, your marbles.