by John Metcalf
Only make me over, April,
When the sap begins to stir!
Make me man or make me woman,
Make me oaf or ape or human,
Cup of flower, or cone of fir;
Make me anything but neuter
When the sap begins to stir.
Forde caught the pressed-glass vase and the plastic orchid as they fell under her outflung gesture.
“Who went, did you say?”
Forde nodded.
“Rich young women. Boston. Connecticut. New York. Lifwynn and Hengsthall were in the Catskills. About twenty-five of them, thirty at a time. Endless salad and exercise and brooding about their severely limited Personalities.”
“No men being Personally Harmonized?”
“Just Bliss, if you can count him. And Childe. My grandmother said they called Childe ‘our faun among the nymphs.’ They twinkled at him.”
“That’s where he met her?”
“None twinkled brighter than she.”
“So they wore toga-things, Greek things, and danced?”
“Danced!” Dear Boy! Not dancING. DANCE. We are talking of Plastic Motion, of Motor-Mental Rhythm, The Expression of Inner Being, Harmonizing of the Personality, Interpretive dance!”
“Right,” said Forde, “so they draped themselves in toga-things and danced about.”
“Yes, and heaved vast medicine balls at each other round the circle. And singing roundelays and part-songs. And Spontaneous Clubs.”
“Clubs?”
“Indian.”
“Ah,” said Forde.
“Not togas. Tunics,” said Mrs. Tresillian. “Practically starkers.”
“Hmmm,” said Forde, picturing this.
And sipped at the fresh martini, luxuriating in a vision of scant and gauzy tunics and unrestrained floppiness.
“And Miss Bentley—Good God! I’ve even remembered her name. Miss Bentley wound up the Victrola and played records of Beethoven and Brahms for the interpretive dancing. She wore enormous straw hats with streamers and floral clumps on them and screamed at the girls “Let go! Let go! LET GO! MELTING. MELTING. Soft, soft, like timid bunnies.”
“Shsss,” said Forde.
The waiter was eyeing them.
“You see, I remember it all. All that chubby sweating and writhing about and girls staggering and falling under the reception of medicine balls and Indian Clubs whizzing spontaneously through the air and Miss Bentley screaming and the Beethoven record with a scratch going scritch-scritch at great volume… It was,” she said, “like a war zone.”
Forde smiled at her, at this vigorous vision.
“I feel so ashamed,” she said.
“Of what?”
She shrugged.
“Implicated,” she said. “I know it’s silly but, I don’t know, tarred with the same brush, I suppose.”
“Why would you feel that?”
“Well,” she said, “I am closer to them than you are.”
Forde made a dismissing face.
She laid her hand on her heart.
She declaimed.
But there be others, happier few,
The vagabondish sons of God,
Who know the by-ways and the flowers,
And care not how the world may plod.
They idle down the traffic lanes,
And loiter through the woods with spring;
To them the glory of the earth,
Is but to hear a bluebird sing.
She reached across the table and gripped his hand.
“So humiliatingly third rate,” she said.
He stroked the back of her hand with his forefinger.
“But not you,” he said, “not you.”
“When I was growing up,” she said, “I was pleased to discover that Isadora Duncan had been strangled to death by her own scarf. It was immensely long and she was dramatic with it. Such a tiresome woman. Caught it in the wheels of her car. I imagined her pulled out horizontal, like an Edward Gorey cartoon. I thought it funny. I hope you won’t think ill of me.”
“Not at all,” said Forde, “perfectly reasonable. I’ve always loathed Jean-Paul Sartre and wished upon him death.”
Had he just said ‘and wished upon him death’?
Her mode was catching.
“Harold,” she said, “put it all rather well.”
“Sorry?”
“Harold is my younger brother. Harold… Harold is never seen without a tie and a tiepin in the form of an aeroplane, a blue enamel body with sparkly bits in the enamel. Quite a large tiepin.”
“You mean?”
“Exactly.”
“Go on.”
“A Professor had arranged to visit the house, an Assistant Professor, somewhere in Massachusetts I believe it was. Wanted to ask us our recollections of Bliss and Childe, and Harold wouldn’t speak at first but then said ‘He was a Kangaroo.’”
And the Professor said, “Bliss Carman, do you mean, Harold, or Childe Chauncy?”
She paused.
Head turned away from the Professor and, staring fiercely at the floor, lips scrunched, she did Harold.
“And the Professor prompted him, ‘Harold?’ And Harold glared at the floor and said —”
She giggled.
“What? What?”
“And said—”
“Stop it! Tell me.”
“And said, ‘He was a Kangaroo and he was a Kangaroo.’”
*
They ate lunch in the cavernous and nearly deserted hotel dining room.
“Pointless trying to find anywhere better,” said Forde. “Sorry. Unless you like Chinese things in red sauce.”
Obtrusive French service by a youth not long out of high school, a slatternly girl from the kitchens in pumps mashed down at the heels, dumping plastic buckets of washed cutlery onto the rear service station tables; her feet, Forde noticed, were bare.
With lunch they drank a bottle of Croze Hermitage, which Forde found too thin, too acidic, though that might well have been the martinis. Thin or not though, he thought it probably preferable to Hairy Belly.
During dessert, Berries from the Boscage? Feuilleté Drizzled with what?, the safest bet being Homemade Apple Pie à la Mode, they settled on visiting the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.
Forde described to her the immense and stupendously awful Salvador Dali in the Gallery’s entrance hall, Santiago El Grande, Saint James on a bloody great horse giving the Risen Christ a bunk-up into Heaven.
The calvados was pleasantly fortifying and the more pleasant in that the President was paying for it.
“I remember,” she said, “a man I knew in London, Brian… Brian Sewell! He’d known Dali—Dali lived in one of those Robert Graves-sort-of-places, an island, Spain…” She waved her hand impatiently to fill in the detail. “He was unnecessarily vivid about Dali’s homosexual practices. They were, apparently, of an assembly-line frequency and involved photography.”
The hotel foyer was deserted.
Mrs. Tresillian, passing by the bell on the counter, struck it a flat-palmed bling, and continued “… if you remember it on the radio, they were always playing it, a song about suburban houses, Little Boxes I think it was called, somesuch name and it had the lines,
and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
and they all look just the same
...and I’ve been thinking that what my grandfather and Bliss were all made out of was plinky-plonky.”
Pulling on his arm to stop him, she acknowledged an audience and, striking a pose, declaimed
Shrilling pipe or fluting whistle,
In the valleys come again;
Fife of frog and call of tree-toad
All my brothers, five- or three-toed,
Wit
h their revel no more vetoed
Making music in the rain…
The desk clerk emerged from his cubbyhole, eying Mrs. Tresillian. He wore his black suit with the unease of a costume. His white shirt was uncrisp and his tie a throttled knot, reminding Forde of ties in his youth called Slim Jims. He coughed apologetically into his fist. Smiled. Laid his finger across his lips.
“Don’t shsss me!” said Mrs. Tresillian in a voice projected to reach the rearmost stalls.
“Grasp,” she fluted…
She held out beseeching hands to the clerk almost as if in prayer.
“Grasp gaiety.”
They emerged from the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel onto Queen Street, sudden daylight, cars honking, a heaving mob of young men milling with a Montreal Canadiens banner and drinking beer from bottles, whoops, shouting; it was cold.
“What is it?” said Mrs. Tresillian.
“Hockey probably. No idea. It’s usually hockey.”
“Oh, look!” she said.
Roped to the top of a car was a moose, one stiff hind leg angled at the sky. Closer, they could see the dopey face masked in dried blood, teeth, coarse hair in stiffened clumps, the matted flank, dung.
“On the radio some mornings,” he said “there are moose warnings. They wander up and down Queen Street looking in shop windows.”
“But why have they tied it…?”
“There’s a wildly popular lottery to win licences to kill them,” he said.
“Yes, but why….”
“They parade them around.”
She had stopped and was staring at the carcass.
“So it wasn’t hockey,” she said. “It’s…” pointing.
“Think ‘tribal,’” he said, thinking of the sweatpants boy in Creative Writing One and the girl with the carabiners and Garfields and the glinty thing in her nose,” think National Geographic.”
“It smells,” she said.
He hurried her towards the Gallery entrance, past the snow-spattered, forgettable statues after Watteau. Christ! such pretentious drivel, “after,” after my arse, he thought, and of all bloody excruciating painters the fête galante Watteau, Christ! past a statue of a leopard about to leap from a tree WHY past the grotesque Santiago El Grande and into the heated hush where Mrs. Tresillian undid her coat and sat heavily on a padded bench and slumped rather, presumably recovering from the Croze-Hermitage and the moose.
The room they were in was brown. Forde wandered away. It was a brown room. Windsor soup brown. Nasty mastic. Windsor soup pictures. He peered at informative labels.
George Romney (1734-1802) Charles Lennox, later 4th Duke of Richmond, Duke of Lennox and of Aubigny. Particularly nasty brown dog.
Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) A Portrait Group of Mrs. John Thomson and her Son Charles Edward Poulet Thomson, later Baron Sydenham etc. Charles Edward, of indeterminate sexuality, standing on a meticulously rendered brown chair.
John Constable (1776-1837) Scene of Woods and Water (c. 1830). Forde glanced at this preposterous brown daub in disbelief. He checked in the paperback guide to the Gallery he’d lifted from the front desk on the way in. This Constable, and the adjacent Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) The Fountain of Indolence, were both “later proved not to be autograph.” Forde took this example of curatorial bafflegab, well-buried in the guide text, not to mean “unsigned,” but rather “not by the hand of,” which translated as “fakes.”
He could imagine the oleaginous Bond Street and West End dealers battening on Lord Beaverbrook’s pretensions: Knoedler, Agnew, Leggat Brothers, Spink, Marlborough, Wildenstein, Gimpel Fils, Alex Reid and Lefevre, Arthur Tooth and Sons, Sotheby’s, Christie’s; the Beaverbrook Art Gallery put him in mind of poor Isabella Gardner and her tatty palazzo on Boston’s Fenway. Berenson and Duveen had plucked her in much the same way Bond Street had probably plucked Max Aitkin of Newcastle, New Brunswick, the Lord Beaverbrook.
He wondered why these fraudulent canvases hadn’t been relegated to basement storage.
John Constable.
He smiled with sudden affection and pleasure at the thought of Gulley Jimson, the painter in Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth. How many young hopefuls that book must have lured into a life of art and penury.
She asked me twenty pounds for a Constable, two trees, four clouds and a little piece of dog-shit in the foreground.
His mind was full of such sentences lodged completely without effort and lodged exactly. Full, too, of word placements, poniard verbs, punctuation points. Such sentences needed no rehearsal, no learning by heart; the second he read them they registered indelibly. Mined from hundreds of books, they had somehow over the years cohered to become his palette, his signature line.
Gulley, that lovely old visionary, haggling for cheap, crappy canvases to paint over.
Every junk shop in England has two or three Morlands… Ikey had two. Nice brown ones. The first had a horse, stable, dog, man and tree. The second was more important. It had a stable, a dog, a horse, a peasant, a tree and a gate.
“What are you smiling at?”
He turned to look at her.
“Farting Annie Laurie through a keyhole.”
Raised eyebrows.
“So,” he said, “ready for the fray?”
“it’s all…” she said, “rather dispiriting, isn’t it?”
Trudged on through The Kreighoff Collection (pried by Beaverbrook, according to the Guide, out of mining magnate James Boylen and press baron Roy Thompson and out of the corporate assets of the Canadian International Paper Company and Royal Securities); through an exhibit of Inuit Prints—temporary, Forde could only hope, but probably, he thought, not; through bits and bobs of Pre-Raphaelite flotsam; through distressing canvases described as belonging to The School of Incident:
The Slide by Tomas Webster (1800-1886)
When the Day is Done by Thomas Faed (1826-1900)
CHRIST!
The Crew of HMS ‘Terror’ Saving the Boats and Provisions on the Night of 15th March 1837 by George Chambers (1803-1840), Purchased with funds from Friends of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and with a Minister of Communications Cultural Property Grant.
A James Tissot canvas from which he had to look away.
“Shall we?” said Mrs. Tresillian, gesturing.
Emblazoned above the Gallery entrance:
Marion McCain Atlantic Gallery
“Who is that?” said Mrs. Tresillian. “This Marion McCain?”
“Frozen French Fries,” said Forde.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Tresillian.
“… blah, blah,” he read, “and creates the finest collection of Atlantic Canadian art in the world.”
Slapped the Guide shut.
“Not just the finest but probably the only. No, no, you go ahead. I haven’t the stomach for it.”
She climbed the steps, disdaining the handrail, and stood within the proscenium entrance, which was panelled in sheets of differing, light-coloured woods, lavender trim, four peculiar and ugly pillars lacking bases, capitals or flutes, a pastel place suggesting to Forde an Ikea catalogue.
He stood watching the small black figure in the flooding light.
He had in fact seen her from the corner of his eye while he’d been looking at the “not autograph” Constable, seen her hesitate at the threshold. Thinking herself unobserved, she’d been looking a little weary and beset and he’d known better than to acknowledge her.
Then her voice teasingly accosting him at his back.
What are you smiling at?
This mock-pugnacity, her flirtatiousness, that robin quality, her will, reminded him of Marian Petersen in his Father Would Have Wished, a book now nearly four years old. Reminded him not of the novel’s events, but of the novel’s genesis, the unlikely seed of it all, what he had seen for a few moments from his study wind
ow.
His next-door neighbour’s mother, somewhere near Mrs. Tresillian’s age, came into view around a bulging hedge of cedar trees two houses down. She was carrying two plastic shopping bags. She was walking very slowly. She set the two bags down on the pavement and massaged her hands where the plastic handles had been cutting. Then she just stood. Staring at the ground.
She’d put him in mind for those defeated seconds of a winded horse or a bull in the ring, head dropped, weakened by banderillas and pique, a drool of blood spindling to the sand.
Then, she stooped and picked up the bags, a surge of almost visible will, squared her shoulders, and—what?—as though the band had struck up and she was coming out of the wings into the lights—almost strutting to her son’s front door.
And from that seed had unfolded imagined lives, Maria Petersen’s domination of her middle-aged son and daughter, their emotional and financial dependence, the son’s career undermined by money and his life further anaesthetized by a dutiful marriage, the daughter’s descent into obese alcoholism, Maria’s death by agency of the apartment-size electric kiln in the pretensions of her “studio”.
There had been rumblings of disquiet about the theatricality of Maria’s death but in the main conventional plaudits by ill-qualified reviewers were pronounced: “… dare one suggest the word ‘genius’?”Globe and Mail; “… the magic once again of his old mastery” National Post. Quill and Quire had awarded him a star.
Lifetime (i.e. three years)
Lifetime Sale: 523 copies.
Copies sold since last Reporting Period: 2
He made a snorty noise in his palate and nose.
“So!” he said. “Are we ready to…?”
“Oh, pots!” she said. “British.”
“How do you know?”
“Soft-paste porcelain. European’s hard. At a glance,” she said as they approached, “Worcester Porcelain Works, Barr, Flight, and Barr, the beginning of the Regency—about 1815, somewhere in there. Probably painted by Baxter but I haven’t got my glasses on.”
Forde stopped and stared at her.
She grinned at him.
“Showing off,” she said.
“When he had hoisted his jaw off the floor,” said Forde, “how on earth…?”
“They’re fruit coolers,” she said. “Inside, they’d have had an insert retaining the ice. Some had a fairly deeply recessed lid, too, a sunken lid that you fill with ice. On top of the lid, I mean. When it was on.”