A Special Providence (15 page)

Crouching low, for he was a tall man and all the doors were short, he followed her into the creaking silence of the living room, where he joined her in a respectful scrutiny of the Dutch oven.

“It’s quite a place,” he said. “How much you paying for it, Alice?”

And when she told him the rent he was astounded. “Can you
afford
that much?”

She gave a nervous little laugh. “Well, just barely. But it really is a bargain, when you think how few of the old Colonials are available at all. Over in Westport they’re a lot more expensive.”

“Well, but that’s Westport,” he said. “That’s fashionable. This is kind of out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Well,” she said, “anyway, we like it.”

“It certainly is – attractive; I’ll say that for it.”

“And the main advantage,” she said, brightening again, “the main advantage is the studio. It’s really just an old barn, but I remodeled it and put in a skylight. Come and look.”

Then he was following her out into the sunshine, across the expanse of unmowed lawn that led to the barn.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she demanded. “Look at all the
space
I’ve got.”

“Not bad,” he said, pacing the rotted wooden flooring. “Not bad at all; I can see you’ve really fixed the place up. Must’ve been a lot of work.”

“Oh, not really; the skylight was the main thing, and I had a carpenter do that. All I really did was clean it out and paint it, and fix the door. And I got electric wiring put in from the house, so I can work at night sometimes.”

Most of the sculpture was hidden under muslin cloths, which spared her from showing it to him. The only exposed pieces were two lifesize garden figures – the Goose Girl, which she had recently cast into plaster, and the one she was currently working on in clay, the Faun.

“I’m afraid the Goose Girl isn’t at her best,” she said. “She really shouldn’t be seen until I get her painted. She’s going to be green, you see, to look like bronze.”

“Looks fine to me.”

“Well, but they always look so garish and chalky when they’ve just been cast. Anyway, I think it’s a nice composition. But the one I’m really excited about is this new one, the Faun. I’ve done quite a few of these garden things and they’ve all been girls, because I guess girls are more traditional in garden sculpture, but then it occurred to me to do something with a boy. It suddenly struck me that I’ve got this wonderful little
boy
for a model, and I’ve simply been letting him go to waste.”

“Mm. I can see that. I mean, I can see where you’ve put a lot of Bobby into it.”

“Well, I wasn’t trying for a likeness in the face. I wanted the face to be sort of – well, elfin, and
you
know, like a faun. But it’s Bobby’s body. It’s Bobby’s little arms and back and tummy. Of course it’s still unfinished – here, look, you can see what I’m getting at in some of these drawings.” And she showed him her sketch pad, where her conception of the Faun was complete: a boy of Bobby’s age from the head to the thighs, holding a bunch of grapes in one arm and eating an apple with the other hand; but from the thighs down his legs were an animal’s, with fetlocks and cloven hoofs.

“Do you like it?”

“Well, you know me on the subject of art, Alice,” he said. “I mean I’m certainly no judge or anything. It looks fine to me. It’s very – fanciful.”

“Oh, good. That’s just what I was hoping you’d say. And I’ve got a wonderful idea for the next one: the next one’s going to be Pan. Let me show you.” And she turned a page to reveal a drawing of a little boy kneeling in shrubbery, playing the pipes of Pan.

“Well,” Harvey Spangler said. “That looks fine, Alice.” A bumblebee was trapped inside the skylight, buzzing loud and frantically against the brilliant pane, and Harvey stared up at it as
if in the hope that it might excuse him from looking at any more sculpture or making any more comments. Then he said: “Well, I guess I’d better be getting started, Alice; it’s a long drive.”

Back in the kitchen he gathered her up in a cozy, awkward embrace, kissing her hair and the tip of her nose, and she rested her head against his chest for a moment; then he stood apart from her and straightened his clothes. “Take care of yourself, now,” he said.

“I will, Harvey. You too.”

She walked out to the car with him and stood watching while he got it started and backed it out into the street. A little group of neighborhood children stood watching too, with wide-eyed, expressionless faces, and one of the smaller ones was Bobby.

When he was gone, heading back for New Rochelle, there was nothing for Alice to do but sit in the studio and hold her head in both hands with her eyes closed tight. Harvey Spangler! A dull, humorless, middle-aged New Rochelle doctor; a man with a wife and four children! And as if her behavior last night wasn’t bad enough, there was the shame of her performance this morning: running around the kitchen like a bride on a honeymoon, smiling at him while he blew his horrible cigar smoke in Bobby’s face. And taking him to the studio! Showing him her work, asking for his opinions, being pleased – yes, pleased – when he said he liked something. Harvey Spangler! But soon she got up and began walking around smoking a cigarette, trying to pull herself together. It was almost time to go in and fix lunch.

“Where’s Dr. Spankler?” Bobby inquired while she worked at the stove.

“Dr. Spangler,” she corrected. “He went home, dear. He was only here for breakfast.”

“Oh. Where does he live?”

“In New Rochelle, dear. Where we used to live.”

“Did I live there?”

“Of course you did. That’s where you were born.”

“Did Daddy live there?”

“Of course. Hurry and wash your hands, now. The soup is almost ready.”

When lunch was over she went back to the studio and tried to work, but it went badly for nearly an hour before she realized what was wrong: the children were playing just outside the barn door, and the noise of their voices made it impossible to concentrate. She took several deep breaths so that her voice wouldn’t sound shrill; then she went to the door and opened it. “Would you children mind playing somewhere else?” she said.

There were four or five of them. Bobby and one of the little Mancini boys were the smallest, and the older Mancini girl was the biggest, a gangling nine-year-old with a sly, insolent face.

“We weren’t making any noise, Mrs. Prentice,” she said.

“Well, I can’t work as long as you’re playing here. Please, children; I’ve got some important work to do. Just find some other place to play.”

“Can we watch you, Mrs. Prentice?”

“Some other time you can. Not just now.”

“Even if we don’t make any noise?”

“No. Please, now, children. Just do as I say.”

And finally, laggardly, they moved away to another part of the yard. Watching them go, she felt a tremor of dislike for the Mancini girl. The child was too much like her mother, whom Alice suspected of being a malicious gossip, and it was a pity because the father was so nice – a rough, jovial Italian who worked in one of the Danbury hat factories and who’d gone out of his way to be neighborly when Alice first moved in.

There were no more interruptions for nearly two hours and she got some good work done. Or so it seemed, at least, until she
stopped to look at it from across the room. Then, with a terrible suddenness, it seemed that there was something very much the matter with the Faun’s left arm, the one that held the grapes. She had labored too hard over it; it was stiff and lifeless with overwork, and so was the left hip. But it wasn’t hopeless: she could still save it if the daylight lasted long enough and if she allowed herself to concentrate on nothing else. She went quickly out across the yard to where the children were.

“Bobby,” she called. “Can I see you a minute, please?” And he detached himself from the group and walked toward her. He looked reluctant, which prompted her to be especially nice when she got him alone. “Dear, would you mind posing for me again this afternoon? Just for an hour or so?”

He was willing.

“It’ll be just like the other times,” she said when they were back in the studio and she was helping him get undressed, “except that this time we won’t use the apple and the grapes. But if you pose very well, and don’t move, you can have all the apples and grapes you want afterwards. How would that be?”

She took him to the right spot under the skylight and positioned his feet, one a little forward and one back. Then she arranged his arms, one crooked as if holding the grapes and the other raised with his hand to his mouth. “There,” she said. “That’s fine. Oh, this will be such a help to me, if you’ll just hold that pose. You really are a wonderful model.”

The light was perfect, and in a little while she felt she was getting the arm right. “That’s wonderful, dear,” she would say abstractedly from time to time, shifting her gaze back and forth from his sunlit flesh to the clay, and “You’re doing fine,” and “Hold still, now – don’t move.”

What a pleasure it was to work when the work went well! It was a pleasure that took care of everything else, that made
everything else fall away in unimportance, and it always took her back to Cincinnati and to her second year at the Academy – the year she’d abandoned painting and discovered sculpture.

“See how you like it.” Willard Slade! Sometimes she could go through whole weeks without thinking of him, but he was always there to remember at times like this. And that was what he’d always said – “See how you like it,” in a casual, offhand way – when he introduced her to something that would enrich her life forever.

The funny part was that she hadn’t even liked him at first: a sarcastic, unkempt, and almost loutish young man, with his hands usually dirty from working on his dreadful motorcycle – not at all the kind of boy her parents would have liked. She couldn’t understand why all the other boys either despised or admired him, and why the boys she liked best were the ones who admired him most. He never seemed to pay attention in class and he made fun of most of the instructors. She thought him rude and spoiled, and she didn’t like to be around him for fear he might say something awful; but that was before she’d begun to learn what everyone else seemed to know instinctively: that Willard Slade was a genius.

It wasn’t that he was always brilliant. Sometimes he would work and work over a piece and it would turn out to be as dull and forced as everyone else’s, and he’d throw it away. But there were other times, and they’d begun to happen more and more frequently – times when, as he would have said, he was feeling right – when what he did was apparently effortless and was much, much better than good, and the teachers would look at him in open envy.

He was wonderful. “See how you like this,” he’d said to her once and handed her a copy of Keats’s poems, and she’d taken it home and studied it for days, memorizing several of the more
obscure poems so as to be able to surprise him; and in the end, when she went carefully through her recitation of one of them as they sat in Lytle Park, he said, “Yeah, that’s nice, but it’s one of the sissy ones. I like the later stuff better. Try this one.” And he handed the book back to her, open at the page of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which she’d skipped because she’d thought it was too famous to bother with. “Read it out loud,” he said, and so she read it, really read it, for the first time:

And when she got to the end, to the overwhelming final two lines, she started to cry.

Oh, there had been nothing at all she wouldn’t do for Willard Slade. He asked her to marry him, and her life took on an unbelievable richness until October 8, 1914, when Willard Slade ran his motorcycle into a trolley car and was instantly killed.

It was years before she got over it – years spent first back in Plainville, then breaking into the advertising business in Cleveland, and then in New York, where Willard Slade had always wanted to go – and sometimes, like this afternoon, it seemed that she hadn’t gotten over it yet and never would.

“Mommy?”

“What, dear?”

“My nose itches.”

“Then you’d better scratch it, silly boy. I’ll wait while you do.”

He scratched it and then resumed his careful pose.

“Move your hand just a little higher, dear – no, the other one; there. That’s fine. You’re really helping your mommy a lot. Would you like to talk while you’re posing?”

“All right.”

“Fine. Why don’t you tell me about what you did in Atlantic City.”

“I
told
you.”

“You didn’t tell me hardly anything at all. You told me about the big waves and the saltwater taffy, and that’s all you told me about.”

“And I told you about the chairs on wheels.”

“Oh, that’s right, you did.”

“And I told you about me and Daddy and Uncle Bill getting up on each other’s shoulders.”

“That’s right.” A small, querulous part of her mind was annoyed that George had taken his brother along on the trip: Bill Prentice was loud and coarse and drank too much, and she hated him.

“And Uncle Bill was so funny, we kept laughing and laughing. And Irene said Uncle Bill was the funniest man she’d ever met in her whole life. And then me and Daddy and Brenda and Irene covered him all up with sand, so just his head was sticking out.”

“That must have been fun. And who were Brenda and Irene? Were they some children you met on the beach?”

“No, Mommy, they’re
ladies
. They’re the ladies we
stayed
with.”

“Oh. I see.” She was at a difficult place now, a juncture of arm and shoulder on which there was a subtle play of light, and she allowed herself to think about nothing but that.

“And we kept covering Uncle Bill up with sand and he kept saying ‘Hey! Let me
outa
here!’ and we kept covering him and covering him.”

“Hold still now, dear. Maybe we’d better not talk any more for a little while. This is a hard part.”

The ladies they stayed with! She was doing her very best not to think about it, to think only of the tip of her modeling tool and the clay, but it was impossible.