by Ward Just
Painters led adventurous lives, bohemian lives on grounds no less dangerous than a battlefield, and when it got dangerous enough you cut off your ear. There was no one around to tell you that you were the oldest god damned nineteen-year-old in Provence and that you didn’t belong in the atelier. You could live outside the norm in Paris or Aries and if you were successful could live very well if not grandly, and whatever the market’s opinion you would always have your work or a father to advance you money. If need be, you could work as a bartender by night and paint by day or the reverse, depending on your own temperament. I sat on the bench looking at the postman, thinking the life of an artist would be wonderful to have. Despite the ear business, van Gogh certainly led a serious and productive life, though turbulent, and well traveled—wasn’t it van Gogh who had gone to Tahiti? I knew nothing about him except for the ear. The postman was drawn with affection and I imagined him delivering the morning mail, handwritten letters filled with encouragement from his dealer and various important patrons, and remaining for coffee prepared by Madame van Gogh. But of course they would not be married, only living together in bohemian fashion. I wondered if van Gogh’s woman looked anything like Manet’s barmaid, and if the artist’s turmoil caused the thousand-yard stare. But she would not have a thousand-yard stare. She would be kindly, humorous, and sexy, on the plump side, excellent with the accounts. Surely it would be thrilling for any woman to live with an artist as great as Vincent van Gogh, knowing that it would only be a matter of time before he was recognized a genius, whereupon they could move to a larger house with a garden, and a servant to prepare the coffee when the postman rang. They would have a pied-a-terre in Paris. And when the conversation of the city closed in, interfering with the artist’s work, they would return to Aries and the house with its garden, and the servant, and the studio with its masterpiece-in-progress on the easel. In such a felicitous environment, Vincent’s work flourished and became more dangerous still, and he was as happy as he had ever been.
There were half a dozen women in the room now, moving from picture to picture in a group. One woman was talking and the others were listening to her as she explained the artist’s technique and what he intended and where the portrait of the postman fit into his oeuvre and the principles of the Impressionist movement generally, though this artist was outside the norm. The women were taking notes as the guide talked, rapt at the explanation of nervous disorders, confinement, and the ear. This was news to me and not especially welcome; so much for the bourgeois milieu of Monsieur van Gogh’s domestic arrangements. Rising from the bench to take a last look around, I imagined each canvas as a miniature civilization, living cities resting on dead ones, and somewhere in the brushstrokes were graveyards and sunshine as far as the eye could see. I was drawn to this Impressionist world, its appetite and sensuality, moments profoundly incomplete, beyond reach, filled with grief. The world was only now catching up to Vincent van Gogh.
I walked from one room to another and discovered Nighthawks, noticing after a moment that the diner had no exit. The patrons were trapped, the coffee growing cold. Soon they would run out of cigarettes and the money to pay for them. Morning would arrive and no one would notice and night would follow and still no one moved. The counterman looked suspiciously like Richard Nixon. Eisenhower owned the place and showed up each Friday to collect the week’s receipts, counting the take down to the last penny, Nixon watching him and scowling. Each time Nixon demanded a raise but Ike refused. He said, Back off, Dick. Have patience. Wait your turn.
Edward Hopper’s other canvases, with their wintry whites and blues, suited my own bleak mood. Lonely lighthouses, women staring at their shoes in a desolate hotel room, a man and a woman together in an austere parlor unable to explain themselves, a solitary house on a bluff high above the sea, and always the same wintry white even though the season was high summer. Hopper’s people were grown-up people, though. If they had had a youth, it was nowhere evident. And Hopper was not interested in work as the French artists were. The men had the demeanor of salesmen and the women of counter girls but work was only incidental to their lives, a means of making ends meet. Hopper’s people were drawn after hours or on weekends, a lonely afternoon or evening, one long motionless moment, time itself as pitiless as a jailer. A minute had the weight of an hour, and all the subject knew for certain was that night would soon fall, and its coming would bring no consolation. I moved slowly around the room trying to understand from the composition of the pictures what had brought these people to their hour of fathomless melancholy. Forces beyond their control of course, the barren landscape, the glare of the light, and the emptiness of the interior spaces. Edward Hopper drew from the middle distance, giving his figures anonymity. The faces were generic, forgettable faces in a milieu of irresolution. The clown, the barmaid, and the postman were specific, recognizable anywhere. Hopper’s pictures asked for your sympathy even as they conceded the futility of sympathy, and so you pulled away, a trespasser.
Pardon me, do you have thé time?
I looked at my watch and said, One o’clock, surprised that I had been in the gallery an hour. But there were no windows to the outside world, and time had slipped by. Chicago itself had vanished.
Thank you, the woman said, and smiled mischievously. She was one of the group of women who had been looking at van Gogh’s postman. She said, That woman’s waiting for a telephone call, wouldn’t you say?
I don’t see a phone, I said.
It’s there, she said. It’s outside the frame.
If the phone rings, she won’t answer.
Why not?
She knows who it is.
And who is it? The woman was looking at me strangely, tapping her notebook into the palm of her hand.
Her husband, perhaps her father.
Or her son, the woman said with a smile.
Not her son, I said. Her son doesn’t have anything she wants.
And what does she want?
She wants to feel better. She wants to feel like herself.
Oh, the woman said, that’s harsh. She moved up close to the picture, pulling her eyeglasses to the end of her nose and tapping the notebook against her chin. She peered at the picture a long minute, tilting her head this way and that. Her friends were gathered at the other end of the room, looking at the nighthawks locked up in the diner. She said, I think she’s waiting for a call from her husband. He’ll call to apologize for working late. He wants to take her to dinner when he’s finished. He’ll name a restaurant, a favorite where he’s already made a reservation, the table for two in the corner. She’s had a premonition that he’d call and that’s why she’s waiting patiently by the telephone. See her smile?
That’s not a smile, I said.
Well, what is it?
It’s not a smile. She’s given up.
She has not, the woman said. Definitely not. Why, she has her whole life in front of her. Her husband is working late, trying to get ahead for them. He’s always been considerate. Don’t you see?
The phone won’t ring, I said.
You make too much of things, the woman said.
But she was the one who had conjured a happy couple out of what seemed to me a kind of purgatory. She was staring again at the picture, as if there were an encouraging detail she had missed and could pass on to me as evidence, but apparently nothing presented itself because she pulled back and shook her head, annoyed. The silence lengthened and the woman said, I’ve seen you before.
I looked at her closely for the first time, her hair so straight it might have been ironed, her eyes magnified behind thick-lensed glasses, dimples in her cheeks. She was attractive, not much older than I was, a familiar face from one of the summer dances, one of the young wives whose life seemed so mysterious.
We met at the Oldfields’, she said.
Yes, I said. I remember.
Marnie Russel, she said. I was eavesdropping when you had the argument with Paul Binning. You remember, the argument about the c
olored girl, the one who almost froze to death last winter. Paul didn’t have much sympathy for her, but Paul doesn’t have much sympathy for anyone. Pull up your socks, says Paul. He’s quite crude, you know, especially when drinking. What do you suppose it was about that girl that frightened him so? He took her as a personal affront somehow. And then Louise said that newspapers were vulgar.
She meant subversive, I said.
Vulgar was the word she used. And she wouldn’t allow yours into the house. What a riot.
She didn’t want the maid to see it, I said.
The maid?
The maid might get ideas.
I didn’t hear the bit about the maids.
Mrs. Paul Binning was concerned for them, I said.
What ideas would they get, do you suppose?
Search me, I said. Maybe that all people were not created equal.
CIe-ver, Marnie said brightly. Her friends were gathered in the doorway, ready to move on to Italy. They were waiting for her with a show of impatience, glancing at their wristwatches. The docent frowned in disapproval.
Marnie said, I must go.
Marnie, one of them said loudly.
I said, Goodbye, Marnie.
Your name? she said.
Wils, I said.
Maybe you were right, back there, about the woman in the painting. Maybe it wasn’t a smile. She’s waiting for something important, though. But—it probably isn’t the telephone.
If there is a telephone, I said.
If there is a telephone, she repeated slowly, smiling sadly, and with a wave she was gone. They moved in a group to the quattrocento, the docent already talking about religious art and where it figured in the Italian scheme of things.
I hurried off, back to the reception hall to call Aurora. Her telephone was busy, and when I called a minute or two later was still busy, and five minutes after that was busy still. I stepped outside into the drizzle and lit a cigarette. The sky was leaden but off to the west I saw a break in the clouds. In an hour the streets would be washed with light, though not Edward Hopper’s light. Chicago’s light was earthly, as flat and dusty as the prairie. The drizzle ended and on the sidewalks people looked at the sky and folded their umbrellas. I stood and watched the traffic, moving smartly now. I watched a young woman alight from a cab and walk slowly up the long steps of the Art Institute, her eyes down. When she reached the stone lion she paused and leaned against the plinth. She clutched a man’s wallet and was evidently at a loss because she began to sway as if she were about to lose her balance. I took a step toward her and she raised her eyes, her skin drawn tight across her cheeks and forehead, looking up now and attempting some semblance of a greeting. Until she spoke, I did not recognize her—her look, her walk, the way she carried herself, all of it utterly unfamiliar.
Oh, Wils, Aurora said. Jack’s dead.
10
I HAILED A CAB and we slipped into Michigan Avenue traffic, stalled now. The driver was unhappy because he wanted to travel west, home for lunch with his mother. She was ill. Lincoln Park was out of his way. He slapped the steering wheel, shaking his head and muttering. I observed all this from the corner of my eye because I had my arm around Aurora. She was incoherent, trying one thought after another but unable to complete a sentence. Her face was as drawn as the skin of a drum and when I took her hands I could feel the tremor. She slumped against me, her eyes brimming. The cab moved forward by inches, some tie-up at the Michigan Avenue Bridge. Jesus, the driver said, why does this always happen to me?
Tell me what happened, I said to Aurora, but she could only murmur fragments. Her father had died sometime in the early morning. Worse beyond imagining. Ghastly. He was so young, not yet fifty. She shuddered and fell silent and I saw the cab driver—his thinning hair was the color of straw and curled over his shirt collar, his eyes were washed-out blue, and the name on the license was Homer Wyse—glance spitefully into the rearview mirror and slap the wheel again, apparently pleased that the young woman in his cab was in distress. I glared back and he averted his eyes and threw the car in gear, the traffic moving at last. Aurora was able to say that she had called her instructor at the Art Institute to apologize for missing class and how strange it was that the most inconsequential matters assumed an outsized importance when you were half out of your mind. The instructor had told her that I had come by. “Your newspaperman is in the building.” So she took a cab and the next thing she knew she was walking up the steps of the Art Institute.
I had to get out of the apartment, she said. I couldn’t stand it another minute. And thank God you were there because I couldn’t’ve climbed another step. I hardly knew where I was.
We were over the bridge now and driving past the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower, the Allerton in the distance, and the deep blue of the lake beyond that.
When I said I had spent an hour with the Impressionists and Edward Hopper, Aurora said that Hopper was apt. To get her mind off things, I made a little story of my morning. When I explained about Marnie Russel, Aurora closed her eyes; she had no interest in Marnie Russel, the docent, Or the quattrocento.
God, Aurora. I’m so sorry.
What will I do now? she said.
What was that address again? the driver said.
I gave him the Lincoln Park number and the cross street.
Jesus, he said, and slapped the steering wheel.
I said, Shut up.
What did you say?
I said, Shut up now.
What’s going on back there?
I said, None of your business. Just drive.
Aurora said, Wils, please.
Move it, I said, but the driver slowed to a crawl and we continued in that way until we arrived at the apartment building on Lincoln Park.
The apartment was crowded with friends and a few relatives. Aurora took me around for introductions, Mr. Uh, Aunt This, Aunt That, people smiling automatically and shaking hands, offering their names to me, murmuring a condolence to Aurora. So sorry, so sorry, we’ll miss him so, embracing her, holding her gaze until turning away with weary smiles. The room was humid from the afternoon rain and fragrant from the flowers placed in vases here and there. We were in the dining room, the round table laden with a coffee urn and cups and plates of dainty sandwiches at one end and an ice bucket and glasses and bottles of whiskey and gin at the other. Most of the men were drinking whiskey, solemn in their dark business suits. They appeared to have come directly from their offices downtown or from the hospital; a number of them were doctors, colleagues of Jack Brule, gruff dark-eyed men who seemed tightly wound. Some of them spoke with foreign accents and wore suits of heavy worsted, cut in a boxy European style. One of the doctors offered another a cigarette with the comment that it was all right to smoke, Jack wasn’t there to give them grief, though if you observed carefully you could find the aura of his disapproval. The doctors used coffee saucers for ashtrays and held their cigarettes ash-end up between thumb and forefinger. When we left them after the introductions, they resumed their conversation where they had left off, something about Dora and a case of hysteria and Fred making too much of Dora’s dyspnea. Fred made too much of things generally because he was afraid to face the truth. Viennese inhibitions; and I understood then that they were talking about Freud.
The doctors Bloom, Aurora said. They’re brothers.
They don’t look like brothers, I said.
Nevertheless, Aurora said.
What’s dyspnea? I asked.
Inability to breathe, Aurora said. I’ve got a case of it right now.
Let me get you something, I said.
Aurora shook her head.
Do you want to lie down?
No, she said sharply, and looked off down the corridor. Will you be all right here for a while? I have to talk to—
Of course, I said.
—some men from the city.
What can I do to help?
Stay here, she said.
I will, I promised.
Maybe you could watch the buffet. Make sure there’s ice. You know where the liquor is. And if anyone wants anything, give it to them.
Don’t worry, I said.
They’ll go in a while, I don’t know when.
I’ll be here, I said. I think you ought to rest.
Stop telling me to rest, I don’t need to rest. You don’t know anything about it, Aurora said angrily, the same tone of voice she had used when she told me her father would never, ever do anything to hurt her. Then a hand appeared on her shoulder and we turned to see Charlie Smithers with a strikingly handsome young man, blue-eyed, golden-haired, tall, bronzed as a lifeguard. Charlie nodded at me and took Aurora’s hand in both of his and murmured something, then moved to introduce the young man, his son, Albert. Albert smiled broadly, a smile that you might see in an advertisement for toothpaste. His smile seemed enormous, larger than life, and he held it until both Aurora and I looked away in embarrassment.
I prefer Al, he said. Al. A1 Smithers. Remember that, please.
Of course, Aurora said.
We’ll only be a minute, his father said. We just wanted to pay our respects. Such a terrible shock—
Let Wils get you something, Aurora said.
No, thank you, Charlie Smithers said. We must be on our way.
Do you have bourbon? Al said.
Yes, I said.
Find me a bourbon, then. No ice. No water. Al’s smile had remained in place, as unnerving as if he had had a knife in his teeth. He looked directly at Aurora and said, I didn’t like him, you know. I didn’t like him one bit.