After Dachau

by Daniel Quinn

  “Perhaps we do, Mallory. I wouldn’t know. I know absolutely nothing about art.”

  Out of all the hundreds of statements I’d made to her, this was the first one she could swallow without a moment’s hesitation.

  TO PRESERVE its bohemian ambience, Mallory had outfitted her studio with a few sticks of furniture from something she called “the Sally.” There was a high stool, a straight-backed chair, and a wobbly table covered with brushes, rags, and tubes of paint, but nothing like any traditional easels, which I gathered were only for sissies and wouldn’t have accommodated her enormous canvases anyway. In a corner at the back there was a mattress and some pillows on the floor—“just for naps and things,” as Mallory was still spending her nights at the condominium.

  One of the rags on the table seemed familiar. I picked it up and turned it around in my hands till it came to me that it had been torn from the dress she’d worn home from the hospital. I put it back where it belonged and took notice of her work clothes for the first time—dungarees and a heavy, dark sweater. With her pale hair and pale face, she looked like a shipwreck survivor picked up from the North Sea.

  We sat, I on the chair, she on the stool.

  “I don’t need much down here,” she said, explaining the absence of amenities, “since I decided to keep the apartment for the time being.”

  I told her I thought that was wise, then, hearing myself, suddenly felt middle-aged and stuffy. “Let’s go out and get some lunch.”

  “I don’t eat lunch.”

  “Then some coffee.”

  “I’ve got gallons in a thermos.”

  She slid off her stool and sixty seconds later returned with two steaming mugs. It was like nothing I’d ever tasted, and Mallory said, “I hope you like chicory. It wasn’t easy finding any in this fucking town.”

  “It’s an experience,” I told her. “Rather like what I’d expect asphalt to taste like if you heated it up.”

  She laughed and slid off her stool again. This time she returned with a bottle of bourbon. “This’ll help,” she said, adding a dollop to each mug. “Or at least it’ll cut it.”

  It did that. We sipped, waited.

  Finally I said, “You know I want to ask you some questions.”

  “Go ahead, ask.”

  “What year was Gloria MacArthur born?”

  “Nineteen twenty-two,” she replied promptly.

  “A.D.?”

  “Of course A.D. Do you think I painted at the court of Cleopatra?”

  “Don’t get huffy. I’ve talked to Nefertiti’s hairdresser.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean I’ve talked to a woman who believes she’s the reincarnation of Nefertiti’s hairdresser.”

  She glared at me. “And you’re putting me in with her?”

  “Why? Do you automatically assume she’s deluded?”

  After pondering that for a moment, she said, “I suppose I’d better not. But do you really believe her?”

  “Should I believe you?”

  “Yes. But that’s different. I’m not claiming to be Madame Pompadour’s manicurist or anything like that.”

  “You mean I should believe you because you’re not claiming to be Somebody, with a capital S.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But what if you’d lived a little longer and gotten married to a Somebody—or become a Somebody in your own right. Would you expect me to scoff at you then?”

  She gave that some thought. “I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if you scoffed.”

  “Nefertiti’s hairdresser isn’t surprised when people scoff at her either.”

  This silenced her for a bit. Then she looked up and said, “But in spite of all this talk, you don’t actually believe she’s Nefertiti’s hairdresser, do you? Admit it.”

  “No, I don’t believe it. But that’s not because she claims a famous connection. Someone was Nefertiti’s hairdresser, after all. William Shakespeare had a housekeeper. Marie Antoinette had a manicurist. Napoleon had a valet. These were all perfectly ordinary, real people who were born, lived, ate, slept, worked, and one day died. Is there some reason why they should be barred from reincarnation, if such a thing exists? Should being someone famous or knowing someone famous blackball a person from the same process that put Gloria MacArthur in the body of Mallory Hastings?”

  “Then why didn’t you believe this woman?”

  “Because she couldn’t give me a credible description of the tools and materials hairdressers used in Nefertiti’s time. Because she was completely up to date on who was sleeping with whom but had no idea what anybody ate for breakfast.”

  “Oh. I see. Yes.” She sat there for a moment looking dazed. Then: “I remember once we had chicken necks.”

  “Chicken necks?”

  “We were poor.”

  “This was when you were growing up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where was this?”

  “In Cleveland.”

  “Do you remember the address?” She shook her head vaguely.

  “You don’t remember it?”

  “I don’t want to remember it.”

  “Why, Mallory?”

  She winced. “I can’t stand being called Mallory. What kind of name is that, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. At a guess, I’d say it’s derived from the French malheureux, meaning unfortunate or unhappy.”

  “What could be better? It sounds like it came from one of the knights of the fucking Round Table—Sir Mallory the Miserable.”

  I held out my mug, and she supplied me with a slug of bourbon.

  “Did you like the name Gloria?”

  She shrugged. “To tell the truth, I thought it was vulgar. Common. I don’t know why. It was good enough for the Vanderbilts. Maybe I thought it was vulgar and common because I was vulgar and common.”

  It was beginning to look as if there was a cliff to fall over no matter which way I turned. “Did you have any younger brothers and sisters?”

  She gave me a suspicious look. “Why do you want to know that?”

  “It’s not inconceivable that they might still be alive. If they were born in the 1930s, they’d only …” My train of thought was interrupted by a heavy ceramic mug whizzing past my right ear at fifty miles an hour and smashing on the wall behind me.

  “They’re dead!” She popped off the stool and lunged at the bourbon bottle in a way I didn’t like. I grabbed it myself and twisted it out of her hands. She turned to me with bloody murder in her eyes.

  “You killed them, you fucking cocksucker!”

  As I stood there with my mouth hanging open, she started to look around for something else to throw.

  “I didn’t kill them,” I said firmly. “I didn’t kill anybody. I’ve never killed anybody.”

  “You killed them, you fucking—” She paused, speechless, then made a rapid sign, snapping her fingers together in front of her eyes, then flicking them away. “That’s you,” she said darkly.

  “What does it mean?”

  “That’s what you are.”

  “Yes, but what does the sign mean?”

  This question seemed to interest her, to calm her slightly. She repeated the sign thoughtfully. “It means … blind.”

  “Blind?”

  “No, that’s not right. Blind is this.” She crooked two fingers in front of her eyes and then pulled them down as if dragging her eyelids closed. “This”—she repeated the gesture of snapping her fingers together in front of her eyes and then flicking them away—“this is a kind of shorthand or code word. It means … someone who’s thrown sight away. Someone who refuses to see.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s code. Even other people who knew sign weren’t supposed to understand.”

  “What do you mean? What ‘other people who knew sign’?”

  “People like you, if you happened to know sign. People who could hear normally but still knew sign for one reason or another. W
e could talk about … we could talk about people like you and only we would know who we meant.”

  “But who are ‘people like me,’ Mallory?—or Gloria, or whatever you like. Who are ‘people like me’?”

  She said, “People like you are murderers, Jason,” but her rage was spent. “Give me the bottle.”

  I gave her the bottle. She took a swig, then handed it back. I took a swig myself, my own mug having gone flying during our brief wrestling match.

  She got back up on her stool. I sat down.

  “How am I supposed to spend the rest of my life surrounded by murderers, Jason? Murderers with beautiful white teeth and pretty clothes and nice manners and college degrees.”

  I gave that a minute’s thought. “Maybe when I understand what you’re talking about, I’ll have some suggestions.”

  She smiled faintly and let it go.

  Reached out for the bottle.

  “I GOT INTO the art scene in New York as a model,” Mallory said. “I was eighteen and I was hot stuff, baby.”

  We’d cleared some ground. Much as she disliked the name, she agreed it didn’t make any long-term sense to call herself anything but Mallory. She wouldn’t discuss her childhood, but admitted she’d lost her hearing at the age of four or five during a bout of scarlet fever.

  I asked her how she learned the slang I’d heard her use. She said she didn’t understand the question.

  “Did you learn the word fink in sign language?”

  “No,” she said with a laugh.

  “Then how do you know it now?”

  She had to think about that. “I picked up slang by lip-reading,” she said finally. “I wouldn’t have known how to sign it, except by spelling it. Nobody said fink in sign, or if they did, I didn’t know it. Nobody said dig in sign—not in the slang sense, anyway. Or maybe they did. It was two separate groups I hung out with, deaf-mutes in one group and artists in the other. Fucking Jackson Pollock didn’t know any sign, that’s for sure.”

  “Jackson Pollock was one of the artists you posed for?”

  “Yeah. It was me in The Moon-Woman, a pretty well known painting in the early forties. That was before he swore off figurative work.”

  She fell silent, dreams of the past drifting across the surface of her eyes.

  “Tell me more,” I said after a while.

  She shook her head, not in refusal but in recognition of the hopelessness of getting it all in. But then she went on. “It’s funny, it looks different now, now that it’s all over and locked up there in the past.”

  “Different how?”

  “We didn’t see it this clearly at the time, but the whole thing was all about these ten or twelve guys. They were the Club—I mean literally they called it the Club—and they had the word, y’see, and nobody else.” She paused, chuckling at the memory of it. “There was Pollock and Bob Motherwell and Willem DeKooning and Mark Rothko, guys like that. You had to be one of those guys to belong to the Club, and of course you had to swear off figurative painting forever. You could have the word and swear off figurative painting, but if you didn’t belong to the Club, then you were just derivative, a copycat.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What I mean is, you could paint just like the guys in the Club, but if you weren’t actually in the Club—for example, if you were a woman—then it didn’t count. You were just derivative.”

  “I’m afraid I still don’t get it.”

  She took a minute to think how to get past my thickheadedness. “Look, the guys in the Club could all paint like each other, and that was okay. It was more than okay. To belong to the Club, you had to paint like the guys in the Club. But if a woman painted like them, she wasn’t invited to join the Club, because she was just playing ‘monkey see, monkey do.’ ”

  “Why is that, Mallory?”

  “Because only men know how to paint, Jason. Don’t you know that, for God’s sake?”

  It was clear enough she was being sarcastic, but just at that moment I couldn’t think of an exception to her rule. She waited half a minute, then went on.

  “I don’t suppose you ever heard of Lee Krasner.”

  I admitted I didn’t.

  “I met her just a few months after I arrived in New York. I guess she was about fifteen years older than me. Anyway, she’d just spent three years studying with Hans Hofmann, one of the charter members of the Club. She told me he once stood in front of one of her paintings for ten minutes, staring at it and shaking his head. Finally she said, ‘Why, what’s wrong?’ and he said, ‘There’s nothing wrong. This is so good I could almost believe it was painted by a man.’ He honestly thought he was paying her a terrific compliment, as if he expected her to say, ‘Why, I’m sure it’s very chivalrous of you to say that, Mr. Hofmann!’ ”

  I had the feeling I was treading deep water here. Finally I asked when she’d started painting herself.

  “Oh shit,” she said, taking another swig of bourbon. “It was all true of me—all ‘monkey see, monkey do.’ I was no painter. These guys had all studied, you know—the Art Students League, the American Artists’ School, the National Academy of Design, places like that. These were professionals. I was just a fucking ‘primitive.’ I didn’t know anything, but I watched and I learned the moves.” With her head tilted to one side, she peered at me and said, “You know?”

  “No,” I confessed, “I don’t know.”

  “This is all absolute horseshit,” she said, gaily waving the bottle at the collection of paintings around us. “Trust me, it is,” she added, as if anticipating some dissent from me.

  “Then why did you paint it?”

  “I was lonesome,” she said simply.

  I spent some time looking at it in the growing twilight. By some unknown magic, it was beginning to make a sort of sense to me. “You really think it’s horseshit?”

  She shrugged. “It has its moments, but they’re scattered around too much to be of any use. That’s what Abstract Expressionism was all about. Getting all those moments together and hitting you right in the middle of the forehead with them all at once. Some of those paintings had moments that’d knock you fucking down.”

  As I watched, astonished, tears filled her eyes, spilled over, and coursed down her cheeks, carving white valleys in the dust. Unlike any woman I’ve ever known, she didn’t seem the least self-conscious or apologetic about it. She just let them flow.

  After a while we had another drink.

  Then, after another while, we agreed we were getting sore sitting on those goddamned hard chairs. The mattress was there in the corner, and we didn’t think anything of transferring our tortured bones to it—didn’t think anything of it or mean anything by it. Mallory was in the middle of a story about her and another painter I’d never heard of.

  To be blunt about it, she slept with them all. She figured this was bound to bother “a prissy-assed character” like me. I told her I could always cover my ears if it got to be too much for me.

  We were getting pretty drunk.

  We went on handing the bottle back and forth.

  It wasn’t very comfortable just sitting on the mattress. Before long, without thinking about it or meaning anything by it, we were stretched out with both our heads on her one pillow. But since there was just that one pillow, it was eventually more comfortable for us both for me to slide my arm under her shoulders.

  And so on.

  I woke up in the middle of the night, got dressed, and used a sketch pad to write a note saying some things I was glad to say to her and telling her I’d be in touch in a day or two.

  FOUND

  It is much easier to dig one large grave than to dig many small ones.

  IN MY NOTE I didn’t try to explain why I had to leave—or even that I did have to leave. I can’t imagine how I could have.

  At some point during that long, boozy evening, it all became clear to me—but not in a dazzling flash that had to be acknowledged and dealt with right away. It was rather more lik
e a dull, echoing thud, almost a groan, that could be ignored for the time being, because, after all, it wasn’t going to go away.

  No, it certainly wasn’t going to go away.

  I had to go home. Home was where I had to be in order to figure out what to do next. I needed a place where someone would cook me things to eat without my asking for them or deciding what they should be. I needed a place where someone would open the drapes in my room in the morning and close them at night while I sat there slack-jawed, staring into the middle distance.

  It took me a day and two nights to come up with a solution. It was a solution that seemed almost ridiculous, though it did (or might do) what it had to do, and I could ask for no more than that. After breakfast I invaded Mother’s study, interrupting the writing of one of the dozens of charmingly intelligent letters she seemed to produce every day.

  She looked up and with all the noblesse oblige of a royal instantly gave me her full attention.

  “If I’m not mistaken, we own a school,” I stated, knowing she would understand this shorthand, which meant that there was a school singularly in our debt owing to our generous contributions.

  “Yes,” she said, “a very swank little establishment for young ladies. Somewhere north of the Catskills.” Bless her, she didn’t add (as many a mother would), “Why do you want to know?”

  “I need an extraordinary favor there. I need to borrow a class for an afternoon.”

  This was not shorthand, so she had to ask what I meant by borrowing a class. After I explained, she said, “I can’t imagine why you’d want to do such a thing, but I’m not the person who needs to be persuaded.”

  Taking a sheet of notepaper from a drawer, she jotted down the name and number of that person, and that was that.

  I phoned and spoke to the director, a Dr. Alwyn Reese. Like Mother, she couldn’t imagine why I wanted to do such a thing. This wasn’t resistance. We both knew there was practically no request from the Tull family that would have been denied, provided it wasn’t manifestly illegal or immoral. She was rather in the position of a parish priest receiving a request from an archbishop fresh from a personal audience with the pope. All the same, she wanted to understand and deserved to understand.