by Kent Wascom
November saw them take possession of the place and brought days of dust and rags and housepaint. They rode into town and bought a bucket of blue Climatic, and the next morning Isaac set about painting the ceilings of both porches. On the ride he’d started to explain the significance of the paint, but Kemper knew already. Said, I’m from here too, you know. Flies and ill-intentioned ghosts, mistaking the blue for the true sky, would rise upwards and miss the door. She knew this, and just as she knew that neither of them believed in spirits, nevertheless she was comforted by the blue sky overhead and the idea that the past could be confounded, turned away.
He woke her in the mornings when it was still dark, before he would go out on the water, because he couldn’t stand the thought of her waking alone. She would come awake the same way each day, or so he would remember it, her arms curled at her sides, hands reaching out, while he spoke to her, saying where he’d go and when he would be back. As she fell back asleep he would dress and gather his things and take the boat out from the dock he’d built at the mouth of the creek, rowing as the sun rose, and daylight would find him beached on one of the barrier islands, lying in the lee of a dune, sketching, or waist-deep in a marshy pond making studies with the watercolors he’d lately adopted, painting on pasted sheets of typing paper held in a clipboard, cleaning the tip of his brush in the water at his hip, the colors draining into the colors of the world. He would return around midday and in his studio pin the detailed studies and the sketches to a clothesline, and these images would reappear on canvases in careful strokes forming the illusion of an unbroken motion.
They made trips to New Orleans in the runabout and returned with the backseat filled with bolts of canvas and other art supplies, with things she missed like loaves of bread or good sausage, and especially bottles of whiskey and wine (unavailable in dry Mississippi), which lent trips a criminal tinge, and they joked, over the roaring engine, of being on the run. More often than not Isaac seemed glad to go, but he had to be convinced to attend the opening of the exhibition at the Museum of Art. He refused for a week leading up to the event, retreating into himself, and, when she pressed him, gave increasingly frantic reasons why they shouldn’t go. She tried her best to be gentle, but it didn’t matter, and one night in late December, when she asked again, he was on the verge of panic. A different person, or rather a person burrowed deep in the one she knew.
She saw the fear in his eyes, heard it in his voice, learned its timbre and the signs of its arrival: his sudden need to flee or to never move (which itself was a form of flight), the self-sabotage. The strange, almost petty refusal to acknowledge his own work in public, she would come to understand, was as much a part of him as was the art. At first she thought it nothing more than ego or the fear of being criticized, but then she saw it came from a darker place than that. Like a child’s wince at an upraised hand. She would fight against this burrowed self for as long as they were together, always the one who fought and soothed and urged when the fear or whatever it was had him. And even though she was not one of those indomitable props for an ever-faltering man, and even though these times were tortuous, she would go on fighting it, hating the responsibility his panic placed on her, but then there were times more numerous and true that she saw him overcome, paralyzed, and weak, and she hoped that what she did, urging him out, was slowly, drop-by-drop, changing him for the better.
♦ ♦ ♦
She did, finally, convince him to attend the opening. They arrived hours late, dashing up the museum steps with the night of City Park singing all around them, the Packard parked aslant. Then, and to her great surprise, his panic fled. Maybe it was relief, or maybe the presence of his parents, who hugged him and then kept a beaming distance for the rest of the night, but he was happy. Taking Kemper’s arm, Isaac led her through the gallery, pointing out details in others’ work, got a little drunk but didn’t rant or sneer, let alone tear down canvases or challenge another painter to a fight (all of which she imagined to be commonplace at art events, which she quickly discovered were in fact muted, nervy affairs). He introduced her to people he knew and she saw how they brightened in his presence, and in a way it was like watching sparks of her own love floating round him. One of them, a painter called Guillory, whose work was not on display, clung to them early on and stayed stuck until the end of the night. He and Isaac had been students together in the class of a New Orleans tutor years before but their paths had diverged radically from there (no eastern art school for Guillory, who painted portraits and nursery walls for money), crossing only at such events. Guillory’s latest project, he said, was a cycle called The Suffragettes, nudes and voluptuaries in the Pre-Raphaelite mold, but each of them in some way defaced. He used his shaving razor, he used paint, he used liniment, he used a brick, a garden trowel. So far he had four mauled beauties.
—Why? Kemper said.
—Up in London they’re defacing paintings by the dozen, the suffragettes are. Anything too saucy and they’re on it with claws and cleavers.
Kemper, who’d done some suffrage work herself, at least up to the point of attending lectures, laughed as Guillory went on:
—They say they want to draw attention to how women are portrayed, are seen, but that’s just focusing on the object. What I’m concerned with is the subject.
Isaac listened as Guillory went on describing his series, watched Kemper nod and laugh at the appropriate times, and felt cold clenching fingers of a familiar guilt—for the wasted education and the connections to eastern art circles thrown away, and, more, that despite his failure he’d been given a place here in the exhibition, and that Guillory, whose work excited and troubled him, had not.
Just before the end of the night Isaac was approached by the owner of a new gallery in the Quarter, a small man dressed as though he were clinging desperately to a new social height and who, handing Isaac a flute of champagne, told him exactly what he wanted to hear about his work. The gallery owner talked about a solo show in the spring, and Isaac hastily agreed, seeing over the little man’s shoulder both Kemper and Guillory listening. Guilt and triumph like mating hawks soaring and falling together inside him.
At the end of the night the three of them—Kemper, Isaac, and Guillory—celebrated in the only open café they could find nearby. A German place, a kind of brasserie with ranks of small iron tables crowded with others their age as well as dancers draped with overcoats like hastily wrapped parcels and old men in eveningwear paired in debate or the solitary contemplation of a coffee cup. Overhead a dozen wicker ceiling fans whirred. They found a place near the long cypress bar where, past the taps, three men who looked like brothers shucked oysters and set the halves in a bed of steaming ice. They drank lagers, tooth-cracking cold, which had been brewed in cypress tanks so that the beer had the faint taste of a fall breeze at the edge of a bayou and was perfect with the oysters and the chilled shrimp they ordered. They tipped oysters back and drank and talked, smoking all of Guillory’s cigarettes. When the subject of her family came up, Kemper was not so much surprised that Guillory knew who they were but that he was so forward about it.
—So, he said, is the rumor true?
—Which one? she said, lifting an eyebrow as Isaac laughed.
—Oh, that you’re secret blacks, Guillory said quickly and half under his breath.
Now it was her turn to laugh, the beer softening what would normally be annoyance.
—Every family in New Orleans says that about every other family, she said, if they’re pissed or jealous enough.
—That’s true, Guillory conceded. Everyone’s worried that if they tap their toe too much to a band on the streetcorner they’ll be—whoosh—transported straight back to darkest Africa. Undone. He leaned to Isaac. So what do you think?
—I’m not much on family histories, he said.
—If you must know, Kemper said to Guillory, it is true.
Guillory’s eyes widened, straining to maintain the urbane look of a savorer of scandals.
&nbs
p; Kemper drew on her cigarette and the smoke bit the back of her throat. She’d had this conversation, or versions of it, before. Mostly with Angel, who, out of all her family, was the one who felt as she did about this truth. That it was meaningless, fractions cribbed by mad people of a madder time. The fact laid bare in the pages of their grandfather’s (the first Angel Woolsack’s) book, the gist being that their grandmother was however-many-parts-per-hundred black, a descendent of those who’d fled what became Haiti at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The numbers, which had been belabored for the first Angel Woolsack when he made plans to take a young wife in his later years, were so trivial, so faint, the notations of a chemistry experiment. The fact was also that after the suicide of the first Angel Woolsack, in the legal wrangling over his estate, the young wife had sued, been countersued, and ultimately won a case in court that declared her legally both white and wealthy, which meant free. Kemper’s mother had told her this, mistaking the girl’s curiosity for fear. Like her brother Angel, she saw in this fleck of family history none of the menace others did, who feared secrets like cancerous growths which might at any time turn on their host. And when Kemper saw the fear manifested in others or in books (where it was given much store, the lynchpin ruin of proud, aristocratic lines) it struck her as absurd. Certainly it mattered more if it showed in the skin, or maybe if you labored under the delusion that your family line was an otherwise sunlit path strolled by diligent, happy (and thus white) forebears. But in an ocean of so much blood, how could this drop matter except, she thought, as guilt made manifest. Then it seemed even more a conceit. So that to Kemper people like her brother Red, who was haunted by the blood, seemed less a person than an actor struggling with a role. Whenever it had come up between the siblings, it was Red who smarted, who, though he treated as gospel the words of his crazed grandfather, chose to deny, to the point of rage and tears, the few lines that dwelled on this revelation. She could see him now, sweating as he pored over some fashionable current book on racial hierarchies. And this pleased her.
—The thing is, she told Guillory, that’s far from the worst secret we have.
She proceeded to relate a series of killings, revolutions, thefts, usurpations, and iniquities that ran the better part of a century, like someone reading the rise and fall of stocks or the results of horseraces from a rapidly unspooling ticker, until her cigarette was gone and Guillory was shifting uncomfortably in his chair and Isaac put his hand to her thigh, wanting her to stop. He hated these moments, when she sank into her family, punishing herself. Weighing herself down over and again with guilt that wasn’t hers, or shouldn’t be. Whenever she spoke to him of her family, even the brother she loved, he imagined them as figures of cold, sharp stone, with Kemper the lone warm, living thing at their heart. Why, he wondered, did people love dragging out all the bad that had come before them? The same as how country people who rise above their station will joke with others who have done the same about how much their daddies and mamas beat them. What was it for, this continual unearthing, the worrying of the same wounds?
Then she was talking about her oldest brother, the one who was dead. She was telling stories that were still meant to shock, things he’d done, stories of mercenaries and deposed presidents, but Isaac could hear the notes of sadness creeping into her voice. He knew she would pay for this later, when they were alone and her guilt would rear its head, the waves of blame gnawing at her heart and the empty space where Angel’s death should’ve been.
The sun was out when they left the café, promising to see Guillory again soon and have him out to the house. They drove back through morning, heads clearing in the wind, stopping at a deserted stretch of beach where they lay out, talking. About Isaac’s luck, about Guillory, who they would see a few more times before he joined the French Army, claiming familial ties, and whose death they would read about in the paper. They bathed in the cold water, jolting their headaches loose. Kemper felt the city peeling from her skin and looked to Isaac, who’d swum out to a sandbar and was bent, stomach lined in little ridges, splashing his face. He seemed so at home. So right, here.
By mid-February he’d finished Tiger Shark and Lovers and was at work on a series he thought of as The Nests but which would ultimately be renamed at the suggestion of the owner of the Gallery Delpit, who saw them when he visited during the Mardi Gras holidays.
Then it was the season of birds, the islands filling with chattering hordes of migrants building nests of sticks and reeds fixed with their glue-like spit or furrowed in the sand in a patch of sea oat. His series were close visions of these works, the colors of the eggs of gallinules and terns like shadows on the hashwork of the nests. In the afternoons, when he was finished, Kemper might go out with him on the boat, to fish, or to one of the islands where they would drink, eat, fuck, and watch flocks of thousands enact variations of the same. This was the only season in which she would accompany him to the islands, preferring the chill and the wind and the birds to the swarming insects of summer. She liked it now, at the start of the year, walking the beach, hearing the great clamor of the birds on the windward side like a coming storm. A vast, loud presence that made you feel insignificant though it couldn’t hurt you, like the rain on the tin roof of their house and the wonderful deep sleeps it brought.
But all loves have their dark corners, and if his was panic and isolation, hers was this: Like her country, she didn’t know what to do with peace. She might enjoy it for a time, but always at hand was rage, which only grows less explicable in disuse. Urgent as air when you’re holding your breath, the emotion that had served her well in her time of growing up, that bound her to her kin, was there, waiting. So she got too drunk with him and the anger would return to her. No slow gathering of hurts, the traditional squabbles and resentments, these outbursts were spontaneous and when they held her there was nothing he could do. Nothing he would do—his passivity driving her to further heights of fury as (she later realized) she tried to urge the same rage out of him. He would be crying, clawing at himself, trying to find something to be sorry for, which there often was but not to scale with her anger. He would remember each time he felt the sickening release of fighting back, confirming to her every awful thing she suspected about herself and which, perversely, she wanted proven. You are cruel. You are spoiled. Then he would feel more shattered than if he’d said nothing at all. He began to think of these times as visitations of her family ghosts, the past she both wanted to own and be absolved from. And a part of him wanted them, the rages, longed for the hours they would spend in bed afterwards, whole days of healing. Then, as it happens, the healing overtook the rages and the outbursts grew fewer and farther between. Of course, we’re never rid of darkness, and she’d suffer from bouts now and then over the next few years, before he was taken from her, and when they came and she could find no word or action to relieve them, Kemper would go out into the yard and he would hear a sound not unlike that of a panther—not a wounded call, but a sound that claimed the space in which it could be heard, a cry given back to all the others that rose up to surround them of a night, when the voices of the creatures in the reeds, the grasses, and the trees joined like pieces of a wall, and he alone on the porch or adding kindling to the fire in the range would hear her calling out to everything.
“… and she began to learn the life of the coast.”
A line Kemper found in a novel that she borrowed from Isaac’s mother, who read for illumination and instruction, keeping little sheets of notes and underlining passages she liked. For his mother, books existed as companions, enriching reality. Kemper thought of her own mother, who loved books as descents, surrenders, and was herself freer in the suspension of reality than when she was forced, by a child’s tugging hand perhaps, to rejoin the waking life. Kemper remembered how her mother would (and likely still did) blink and stare when she was forced to look up from whatever pages she had at hand, like an intended suicide hauled from the water by well-meaning strangers. Kemper read the line in the
novel, which was not marked or underscored, over and again, and felt it was a sign, something meant for her. She read it aloud to Isaac and would say it sometimes, unbidden, like a chant—when they were on the water and the green back of a sea turtle swept past, or when the surf was roiling phosphorescence, or a swarm of sea life flopped and crawled onto their shore at the sign of certain moons, when the strangeness of the wild, everything new and yet unimaginably old, overwhelmed her. And she began.
Two
The Gallery Delpit, where Isaac’s solo show was held in April 1917, was located at the edge of the Quarter in the shabby first floor of a building whose upper stories housed a miracle cure concern. The smell of sour herbs bitter as false hope wafted down through cracks in the ceiling, giving everyone light heads. Kemper held Isaac’s arm (it had taken a week to work him out of his panic, and she had suffered many weeks before that of mania and doubt as he finished his series), watching as the light of attention fled him as the guests—his parents, game as ever, some old teachers—petered out and the wine was gone, and by the end of the night he was like a burnt-out filament beside her. What he still thought of as The Nests hung together on one wall, the individual pieces opposite, all unsold.
Money was the least of this. The shares she’d come into at the age of twenty-one, whose yield Kemper had diverted into stocks, assured they would be free to live however they liked. And she kept to herself the dread that all the joy of their idle, beautiful life together, every loveliness she found in the tasks of their day—washing eggs at the pump or laying bedding for the birds—existed only because of the money. That if they had to do these things in order to survive, that if, like their neighbors, there was consequence pulsing in the stalk of each plant, in the red heart of each egg, then necessity would grind joy down to dust. She didn’t share with him the typed reports she received twice a year from an attorney in New Orleans, her proxy in all dealings as a shareholder in Gulf Shipping, and the guilt, which was of course not strong enough to make her give the money up. It held her as it did all her family, like the gravity of the world the money gave them.