Astray (21 page)

“Hell, no,” says Queenie feebly.

I laugh out loud. “That’s right. She won fifteen thousand dollars in damages and went off to study her art in Europe!”

But Queenie’s face is blank, like a block of marble that’s never been touched by the chisel.

I will not feed my soul with sorrow,
that was her favorite line in all my poems.

Some dates are so clear in my head it’s as if they’re chiseled there. We came to Toronto in 1913. Canada was a young country; there seemed infinite room. But we only really got established after the Great War. The towns needed so many memorials, they had to stoop to hiring women! Queenie used to say that her career was built on dead boys.

Sculptors, we called ourselves from the start. The word “sculptress” sets my teeth on edge. Work like ours called for sensible clothes. We took to trousers, as early as the twenties, plus men’s shoes and baggy jackets.

I’m not allowed to wear my old gray flannels here. I suspect they’ve been thrown in the trash. Well, they were a little decrepit, I admit. Instead, the nurses give me housecoats to put on, pink or orange: hideous. “Blue was my color, Queenie, do you remember?” I usually wore a touch of pale blue.

Queenie was always the more bohemian dresser. At our studio parties she’d appear in purple velvet with a gold fringe, or a green satin cape. I told her once she looked like something out of the comic strips—the Caped Crusader, or the Emerald Evil—and she wasn’t too pleased. There was always a trail of ash across her front because she was too busy talking to remember the ashtray. They keep her clean and tidy here; that’s another reason she doesn’t look like herself. And you can’t get hold of a cigarette for love nor money.

I am lost in this forest of days.
I can’t remember when I wrote that. I go through a sort of checklist of names in my head, in case I’m forgetting anything. Our dogs were Samson and Delilah. (Delilah tore our neighbor’s fur coat, but it served her right for wearing such a thing.) We had two motor cars, first Susie, then Osgoode. (Queenie always drove, and never got any better at it; I read the maps.) Some of our sculptures were—are, I mean—
Dream Within a Dream, Women War Workers, Torso, Girl with Fish, The Goal Keeper, Negro Woman, The Rites of Spring, Derelicts, Eskimo Mother and Child, The Miner, Sea and Shore, The Key.
There were others, I know there were others, but I can’t recall their names just now. Some are sold, some are scattered, the rest are under dust sheets in our cold locked-up
studio in Toronto that was a derelict church until we moved in. I don’t have any of them here, but I can see them more clearly than my own mother’s face.

The thing about sculpture is, it’s always a risk. It costs money to model it, cast it, carve it, even transport it. Clay’s bad enough; bronze is terrible; marble’s ruinous.

All this week Queenie’s been yapping away in her head to old friends, dead or alive or who knows. Sometimes if I listen closely I can pick up hints of who it is. Yesterday I could tell it was A. Y. Jackson, because she was thanking him for taking us out to dinner the day he sold his first picture. He and she seemed to be having a grand old time.

She always did like parties better than I. We had forty-eight artists for Christmas one year, as well as three beggars from the neighborhood. Six turkeys got eaten down to the bone. In the evening there was chamber music, and I drank too much wine and was persuaded to show them all how to do an Illinois hog call.

“Remember Liz Prophet, Queenie?”

“Mm,” she says, ambiguously.

“That awful gallery in Rhode Island, they said they had nothing against showing a black girl’s sculptures so long as she promised not to come to the opening. Barbarians! Do you remember what she did, Queenie?”

Silence.

I fill in with barely a pause. “Ran away to gay Paree.”

“That’s right,” whispers Queenie.

“That’s right,” I repeat. “Lived on tea and marmalade.”

“Stole food from dogs.”

This detail cheers me immensely. Her memory’s still in there, like the shape locked inside the marble. “That’s right, my dear, Liz Prophet had to steal food from Parisian dogs. What was it you used to say to me in our bad winters?
No one’s got a right to call herself an artist until she’s starved a little!”

Her eyes have gone unfocused, milky blue.

She still keeps that photograph on her bedside table, the one of Charlie Mulligan, who taught her marble cutting back in the 1900s. “Isn’t he a fine fellow?” she’s taken to asking the nurses, sometimes four times a day. I bet she doesn’t remember his name either.

“Was he your young man, Miss Loring?” one of them said this morning, to humor her.

“That’s right.”

“Was he the love of your life?”

“That’s right, that’s right,” Queenie repeats in a whisper, like a child. “The love of my life.”

She doesn’t mean Charlie Mulligan, by the way. That wild German she nearly married back in 1914, he’s the one she used to call the love of her life. Not that I know what that means. Which life is she talking about when she says stupid things like that? As far as I know, the life she had was the one she spent with me.

I will not feed my soul with sorrow,

Not while dark trees march in naked majesty.

When I wrote that, ten years ago, we still had the farm: a hundred and fifty acres of wild quince and poison ivy by the
Rouge River. These days I have a room with a small window facing onto the parking lot. I haven’t seen a tree in a while.

Queenie doesn’t know anyone today. She’s got butter on her double chin.

A journalist once asked her, “Miss Loring, do you specialize in memorial sculpture because of a special sympathy for the dear departed?”

I had to cut in; I couldn’t resist. “No,” I said, “it’s because she likes climbing ladders.”

It was true. She’s always liked to work on a grand scale. She’s built on a grand scale too.

The local children used to call us the Clay Ladies. That was because we showed them how to make things out of clay, of course, but the phrase fitted us too, more and more as the decades went by. These days we look like works in progress, there’s no point pretending otherwise. Queenie’s a vast model for a monument—all two hundred pounds of her clay slapped onto a gigantic wire armature—and as for me, I’m some skinny leftover. Maybe I’m a Giacometti and she’s a Henry Moore! Not that I’m a fan of the so-called moderns; most of them couldn’t draw a human body if they tried, and as for beauty, I doubt they could even spell it. Boring holes in things!—that’s not sculpture, that’s vandalism.

To think she and I used to be something. A unit; a name. The Loring-Wyles.

I’m not saying it was all fun and games. We had a couple of bad years. We sometimes considered suicide, only half joking. But we didn’t think we should depart alone; we wanted to take at least a dozen enemies with us. On dark February
evenings in the studio we amused ourselves by drawing up a list.

But if there’s no heaven, what remains?

All this week Queenie’s been having delusions. She sits up in bed, the sheets draped around her like snow on the Niagara Escarpment. She shakes her fists over her head and pants with effort. The nurses say if she doesn’t calm down she’s going to bring on another attack.

Finally today I figured out what she’s doing. She thinks she’s carving her lion, all over again.

“Why a lion?” I asked her, nearly thirty years ago.

She laughed. “Isn’t it obvious, Florence? A snarling, defiant lion; rising from a crouch, ready for a fight.”

Well, this was 1940.

It was to be a huge, stylized sort of lion, guarding the entrance to the new Queen Elizabeth Way near Toronto, to commemorate the visit of the king and queen. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to do anything new with a lion, but Queenie’s design was a wonder: the beast’s face and ruff and whole muscled body were made up of great smooth arcs of stone.

It was just about the most grueling project Queenie ever dragged us into, and that’s saying something. I say “we,” but I was only doing a bas-relief of Their Majesties on the back of the column. Queenie’s lion had to be carved on site, emerging from the column, as it were. She planned to use Indiana limestone—lovely, flawless stuff—but no, word came down that for patriotic reasons it had to be Queenston limestone, which was twice as hard and pocked with holes. That
was bad enough, but hiring a stonecutter was the worst. The top three men on our list were struck off by government order as “enemy aliens,” even though the German had been reared in Canada and the Italians were the best in the trade. Instead, Queenie had to put up with a true-blue Englishman whose work she’d never trusted.

He couldn’t take orders from a woman, that was his problem, and he wasn’t the only one, let me tell you. We had to scour the country to find a cutting machine for the fellow, and he still didn’t get started till August of that year. When we drove down in November to check his progress, the rough outlines of the lion had only half-emerged from the column. “The fellow hasn’t even started on the hind quarters,” muttered Queenie.

I thought the neck looked a little odd. Queenie asked him about it. “Oh, yes, actually, Miss Loring,” said the fellow, avoiding her eyes, “I changed the line a little, to make it lie better.”

The cheek of the man! I didn’t blame her for firing him on the spot, even with all the horrors that followed.

Queenie couldn’t find another qualified cutter in Canada. She consulted the union, who told her that only their members were permitted to cut stone for sculpture. She told the union to go to hell, she’d finish it herself.

Neither of us had ever used a cutting machine. The December winds howled in off the lake. I remember craning up at Queenie on the scaffold, which we’d swathed in tarpaulins as a feeble shelter. She was fifty-two that year, and already a huge woman. Her hands were swollen with arthritis.

“Queenie!”

“Don’t you fret, Florence,” she shouted down.

“It’s not worth it,” I bawled. “Give it up!”

She pretended not to hear. I could tell, from the way she handled the machine, that she was in pain. The planks of the scaffold buckled under her weight. Specks of snow fell on her head.

I cursed her, but the wind ate up my words. “What if you fall?” I screeched.

She peered over the tarpaulin, her face drawn but hilarious. “I’ll probably bounce!”

She didn’t fall. Next day she abandoned the machine and picked up her biggest chisel and hammer. If I’d been a praying sort of woman, I’d have prayed then. As it was, I stood and shivered and watched, week after week. I remember wondering what would happen to us all if Hitler won the war.

The snow held off just long enough. The lion crawled from his block, metamorphosing like something out of Ovid. By the time Queenie dropped her tools, her hands were like claws but the lion was magnificent.

On his pedestal, in deep-cut letters, it said something about “the Empire’s darkest hour” and this work having been done “in full confidence of victory and a lasting peace.” I remember it because it was on the day of the highway’s official opening, as we stood below the lion with the lake wind lashing our scarves against our numb faces, that it occurred to me that I was a Canadian. Not that in thirty years I’d ever got around to filling in the forms; on paper I was—as I am
still—a U.S. citizen. But sometimes things about you change without you noticing.

So that’s how the story ended. Only for Queenie, I see now, it’s not over. It’s 1967 but she can’t be convinced her war work is done. She still straddles the scaffolding, high above Lake Ontario. Her hands grip huge imaginary tools. “Just another quarter inch,” she mumbles hoarsely.

“Lie down, now,” I tell her. “Nurse says it’s time for your sponge bath.”

“In a minute,” she says, austere. Her arm moves as if to hammer the air, and she speaks to me as if I’m a stranger. “I don’t think you appreciate the urgency of my work.”

“Of course I do,” I murmur.

Then her head turns, and her blue eyes bore into mine, and her voice rises. “It may have escaped your attention,” she roars, “but there’s a war going on!”

“But, Queenie,” I say for the hundredth time, “your lion’s finished.”

She gives me a weary look, as if she sees through all my wiles.

“Everyone loves him! They say he’s the finest monumental sculpture in Canada.” Well, that’s not quite a lie; some people did say that, once.

She shakes her head. “I still need to do his ears. And his back paws, and his tail.”

“No, he’s all done. I’ll prove it,” I say rashly. And then it occurs to me that I can.

I’ve struck a deal with the Home’s handyman. But the head nurse says she’ll have to speak to the authorities. “On
the Queen Elizabeth Way, Miss Wyle?” she repeats, unconvinced.

“Just at the entrance.”

“A lion?”

“You must have seen it,” I tell her. “You couldn’t miss it if you’ve ever driven down to Niagara.”

And then it occurs to me that she thinks I’m the one who’s gone gaga. Delusions of lions. “It’s a stone lion,” I clarify coldly. “You may not know that Miss Loring and I are sculptors. Our work is to be found in many cities and galleries across Canada.”

“Yes,” she says, as if placating me.

“Besides,” I snap, “as far as I am aware, we are voluntary residents here. If we choose to be taken on a drive by a kind young man on his afternoon off, I can’t see that you have any right to object.”

She butts in. “Miss Loring isn’t strong—”

“My friend is well enough to sit in a motor car. It’s her mind that’s troubled. And what I propose to do will set her mind at rest.”

I sound more sure than I am.

The air smells clean. The May sunshine dazzles me. I cover my eyes.

A Bug, the young handyman calls it. Looks like a Henry Moore car to me; all bulges and holes. He lifts me out of my wheelchair and puts me in first, then I help to tug Queenie in through the other door. Occasionally she laughs. It takes us a quarter of an hour. I can tell the boy’s surprised at my strength. My legs may be kaput but my skinny arms are still a sculptor’s.