Everything and More (27 page)

Without Roy Wace, Althea’s loneliness had been an actual illness at first. She had stuck in her room, shivering with a subnormal temperature, too disconsolate to read, playing the same records until they were malevolently scratched, emerging only to take her lessons from the whispery old Bostonian who had tutored Archie Coyne’s children. Roy, whom she had trusted absolutely, Roy, her mainstay, Roy had deserted her—and because of that nonentity, that square, that
cripple,
Dwight Hunter! Those occasional Saturdays with Roy were torment. When they were over, Althea would succumb to fits
of animal trembling. Finally, with surgical precision, she cut off all contact, refusing to take Roy’s telephone calls.

The misery of those winter months proved to Althea what she had always known: people were her nemesis.

Since she had entered the institute, though, her life had begun to take on logic and meaning.

Not that the drawings she produced pleased her—Althea possessed the misfortunate faculty of overdiscriminatory self-criticism. Yet the end result did not alter the inexplicable, all-enveloping pleasure she experienced as she sat on her canvas stool holding her drawing board tilted against one knee. Drawing was not a new thing to her. She had enjoyed it as a small child, before she knew it was shameful to enjoy a solitary pastime.

She waited in Henry Lissauer’s office nearly a half-hour before the door opened. “I am sorry to keep you so,” he said in his halting Teutonic voice. “A few countrymen were celebrating with me this great victory.” Evening gatherings were
verboten
by the curfew, so other exiles sometimes dropped by the institute in midmorning or late afternoon to talk of intellectual matters while sipping strong, brandy-laced coffee from thin Meissen cups. “Hnn, so on this occasion you forgive me?”

“Everybody’s been going wild,” Althea said with a smile.

Though Lissauer’s baffling artistic selectivity maddened her, he had somehow gotten through her armory of defenses and she trusted him. Possibly she was disarmed by his unprepossessing, near-comic appearance. With his small, thin body clothed in a neat, foreignly narrow dark suit and overbalanced by his massive head, he reminded Althea of a large balloon on a string.

Still smiling about the defeat of those Nazi scum, Henry Lissauer sat behind his desk inquiring about Althea’s week of work.

Encouraged by the shy benevolence of the eyes behind thick spectacles, she volunteered how much she enjoyed drawing and sketching.

“Do you have perhaps some charcoals to show me, then?”

She unzipped her portfolio, hesitantly bringing out a single sheet. This week, stationing herself in Belvedere’s fountain-centered French rose garden, she had turned out at least fifty sketches. Although this rosebush was far from the technical best, as she had worked she’d felt a spontaneous, urgent knowledge of the leaves, the blossoms, the thorny stem that grew from the yellow California adobe rather than the softer, older soil of France.

Henry Lissauer peered at the sketch, laying it above the clutter on
his desk, pressing his bony fingers on either side as he bent down, scrutinizing. He raised his pale, large face. “Hnnn. Hnnn. This you really
felt.
There is a quality here, a sense of being . . . How do you say it? Of not belonging.”

She blinked in surprise. “That’s it exactly.”

“This I should like to keep, if I may?”

“Of course, sure.” Althea leaned forward, not attempting to hide her pleasure as the oddly proportioned little German made space and tacked up her rosebush.

He stepped back, nodding.

Now, her goal attained, Althea felt a faint jolt of disappointment that intensified as she glanced around at the other work. The longed-for honor was tarnishing swiftly. In a few moments she was thinking: Oh, God, one more daub.

“Please take it down,” she said in a clogged voice.

He turned to her. “Hnn?”

“If that’s where you intend leaving my sketch, I want it back.”

He looked at her, his eyes seeming to radiate beams through his spectacles. “You feel the other work is not good, and that makes yours not good also?”

He understood her.

Being understood presented dangers from which Althea could not protect herself. Her affection for the exile flickered like a light bulb during a power dim-out. Hunching her shoulders, she thought her old litany: there are enemies, only enemies.

“Each one of these,” said Henry Lissauer, gesturing, “they represent the proof I am right. I select a student, but unless this student becomes one with the work, I am failed. Some of these works are inept, that is true. But believe me, each shows a breakthrough. The innocent eye. Not copying another artist, but having the courage to
see
reality.”

“May I have my sketch back?” she whispered with stiff lips.

Silently he untacked it, handing it to her.

She crushed the paper, throwing it in the office’s big wire-mesh wastebasket.

“This you should not do,” he reproved with anxious mildness. “You are my most promising student. This is strange to say of a great heiress like you, Miss Cunningham, but you are hungrier. You have more of the hunger for perfection than the others. I think therefore that you will succeed more.”

“Is this the psychoanalytical society in session?” Althea’s smile was wide.

“You will succeed, hnn, but you will never believe that you have succeeded.”

She ran from the office, nausea churning. His kind eyes and perceptive remarks terrified her.

*   *   *

That evening the Cunninghams, as usual, ate in the dining room with its mural of flowers and birds painted
in situ
by Cecil Beaton. The conversation centered on the following morning, when Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham would return to Washington—off and on he performed hush-hush work for the State Department, work having to do with his fluency in Russian. At the German surrender, an urgent message recalled him immediately. Althea sat at the Sheraton table midway between her parents, discussing their trip with casual, tolerant humor.

After the broiled sole was served, Mrs. Cunningham asked, “How is your painting?”

“I don’t paint yet,” Althea retorted, her composure fading. How she loathed her mother’s invading questions!

Mrs. Cunningham drew in her receding chin anxiously. “Mr. Lissauer promised Daddy that you would learn to use oils and watercolors.”

“True, toots, true,” said Mr. Cunningham.

“Then he’s a miracle worker. He can’t even teach me how to sketch!” Althea gulped down a fragment of buttery fish, reminding herself that she was mature enough not to be scrubbed raw by each inquiry her mother aimed at her.

“I have every faith,” said Mr. Cunningham.

“Did I tell you?” said Mrs. Cunningham. “Aunt Edna has heard of Mr. Lissauer.”

“Should I fall on my knees and cry Hallelujah?”

“Now, now.” Mr. Cunningham smiled. “Your aunt’s knowledgeable in the art field—after all, she has what’s considered the best collection of moderns in the country.”

Mrs. Cunningham said nervously, “I only brought it up to reassure you.”

Althea dropped her fish fork loudly on her plate. “Aunt Edna,” she cried, “is a fat, blind philistine who tosses her money around to give herself a big reputation! She doesn’t know real art from a hole in the ground!”

Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham glanced at one another over the length of the table. Mr. Cunningham refilled his wineglass.

*   *   *

The scene rattled Althea, keeping her awake: after turning restlessly for nearly an hour, she went onto her veranda. A sycamore grew so close to the house that one of its branches had attached itself to a point on the veranda rail. On impulse, she clambered onto the limb as she had done when very young—a forbidden daredevil trick—straddling it like a horse, feeling the roughness of the bark through her silk pajamas.

All around, twigs and branches creaked, timpani to the deep croaking of the frogs and intermittent sawing of crickets. Her face hot, she kept going over her juvenile outburst.

The night sounds soothed her, and she began a mental thumb through of her life plan. She would retreat to a small gray wood house in the rugged, foggy crags of Big Sur, and have nothing to do with the rest of humanity, who inevitably hated or despised or betrayed her. She would waste no more of her yearning on people, but would train herself to paint the sunlight shafting through towering branches of the millennia-old sequoia trees, paint the fog lapping over majestic coastal rocks that had been sculptured by eternity. She would live an existence dedicated to art, she would be a pure artist like that divine lunatic Van Gogh, but
she
would not permit herself to be driven bonkers by human indifference. In her lifetime she would allow no showings, but after her death, the world would resound with praises for Althea Cunningham. She smiled as she composed yet another posthumous review redundant with words like genius and magnificent.

“Althea?” Her father’s slurred, questioning voice came from inside her room.

Startled, she caught her breath. Her fingers and toes went cold as a corpse’s. Oh, God, God, she thought, please not that.

“Where are you? I want to say good-bye to my toots. . . . Althea . . . ?” There was a coaxing tenderness in his drunken voice.

She clung to the sycamore branch as if pressing herself to become living wood. The sound of her own heart banged loudly in her ears.

“It’s your daddy.” Raspily hoarse, yet wooing of tone.

She heard shambling footsteps retreating through the room.

The door opened. A final, “Toots?”

She sprawled there like some boneless sea creature, not moving.

The door closed.

She waited a full minute; then her held-back breath burst out in a long, sobbing gasp. She swung her leg over the tree branch, climbing off shakily. Inside the dark bedroom she locked the window and ran to the door to press home the dead bolt.

It was then that the drunken laughter sounded.

She saw the big, weaving shadow. “Fooled you, fooled you, toots. . . .”

She cowered against the door. “Go away. . . . Daddy, please don’t. Please . . .” Her whisper shook.

But he was roughly jamming her to himself in the strong, inescapable embrace of a drink-demented man, shuffling with her toward the bed, his breath hot and boozy around her. This horror had occurred infrequently, maybe a dozen times at most since she was ten, yet it had blighted and colored her every mortal response.

“Don’t!” she cried hoarsely. “No!”

Even as she struggled, she was remembering herself as a small child, ill in that bed and being soothed by these strong hands with fingers elegantly tapered like her own. The bedside chair crashed over. He shoved her backward on the mattress.

She gave up.

When the crushing, thumping assault on her body had ended and he had staggered from the room, she buried her face in the pillow, which smelled of liquor, of his sweat and hair lotion, and smothered her storm of childish sobs.

*   *   *

The following morning as she drank her orange juice her father came downstairs carrying a gray topcoat over the arm that held his briefcase. Her mother, shoulders rounder than usual, followed a step or two behind him.

Mrs. Cunningham hugged her good-bye, and Althea searched the timid, homely face, wondering for the thousandth time if her mother could possibly be unaware of the indefensible, unbearable secret.

“Well, toots, it’s good-bye time again,” said her father, smiling with fresh-shaven pleasure.

To even mentally question what he recollected of the previous night brought a strangling tightness to her chest. “Have a good trip, Daddy,” she said, smiling back with the same innocence.

“What would you like us to bring you back?” he asked.

“Oh, the National Gallery,” she said.

*   *   *

There were no spaces remaining in back of the institute, so she parked on Brighton Way. She closed the front door of the wagon, her palm covering the ghostly remnant of the scraped paint: “The Big Two.”

As she reached the institute’s back steps, Henry Lissauer emerged to meet her. “Miss Cunningham,” he said, the apologetic kindness in
his eyes magnified by those thick spectacles. “I have been thinking about our interview yesterday. This is important, that you must learn to see your work exhibited.”

Anger, inexplicable, sudden, and consuming, forced tears into her eyes. “I don’t like my sketches made fun of,” she said through clenched teeth. “That’s hardly the way to help a student, is it?”

“I assure you I had no intention of ridicule. Believe me, nothing . . . I have every respect for you.”

“It’s a piece of cake for a famous teacher to poke fun at a novice. That’s what makes it so rotten.”

His scrawny body seemed to shrink inside the dark suit. He swallowed rapidly.

Seeing him like this, cowed, she felt her abrupt anger fade. “Then you really liked my rosebush, Mr. Lissauer?”

“It was good work, excellent.”

“Truly?” she asked in a demure whisper.

“Again I say, you are my most promising student.”

“I believe you,” she said, resting her finger on his black serge sleeve.

His arm trembled.

She preceded him into the institute, feeling young, clean, inviolately strong.

  
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