Life Drawing (6 page)

O
wen offered to go with me but I knew he wanted to be home and I didn’t want to be the cause of his missing a chance for the breakthrough that was bound eventually to appear, so I set off on my own.

I
t was my other sister, my younger sister, Jan, a doctor, the practical one, who had found the place where my father was to dwindle, then disappear. (I sometimes pictured a star doing the same thing over millions of years, slowly, slowly losing its bearings in the universe, finally flickering out.) The home is just west of Philadelphia, not far from where we grew up, about an hour from me, a little closer to where Jan and her partner Letty live. And it was an awful place but also as good as such a place can be. Jan and Letty are generous people. It hadn’t always seemed that way, because Jan has a certain harshness to her, or anyway she does with me; but they were certainly generous financially when it came to
this. Jan chose the place knowing that our father’s schoolteacher pension would never be enough to cover it and that my sporadic teaching income wasn’t worth thinking about, but that they, a doctor and an investment banker, wouldn’t even notice that the money was gone. When Owen and I suddenly became flush, I offered to chip in more, but flush to us was still marginal to them and they were quick to say no.

The drive there always made me feel grateful for where we lived, but also primed me for all the sadness to come. I passed seven strip malls—a number I knew because Owen had counted them. There wasn’t a single one that didn’t have at least one store that was also in another, and a couple of them, the closest to us and the closest to my father, were pretty much identical. This unmistakable decline into homogeneity invariably depressed me. At some point in every drive to my father, I would catch myself thinking:
what exactly is the fucking point?
And maybe I didn’t really plummet because by then I had passed two Bed, Bath & Beyonds, two Lowe’s, two Home Depots, two Michael’s, and three Taco Bells. I know there was more to my despair than that. But I always told myself that the dismal scenery was the cause—every time.

M
y father was in what Owen called his
high-quality science fiction mode
that day, meaning that nothing he said had any bearing on reality but it all made a certain sense. Whatever universe he was in had solid, logical underpinnings. He had been on a sailboat and was angry because the man in charge—“The captain?” I asked as if clarity on this one point might be meaningful—had told him he could drink the ocean water, but it wasn’t true. The man hadn’t been lying, but he was wrong. He was mistaken.

Every once in a while, the schoolteacher in my father would come shining through. Like when he used the word
mistaken
. As in:
I’m afraid you’re mistaken, young man. The American Civil War
was not started by Napoleon
. The schoolteacher, and the father too. As in:
You may think I am going to support you, Augusta, if you leave college to draw pictures all day, but you are sadly mistaken
.

I wasn’t paying the sort of attention I’d paid on the visit before when he’d told me about my long-gone sister’s baked goods. Mostly, as I sat in the small chair across from an identical chair that he barely filled with his dwindling, flickering starlight self, I watched his facial expressions, trying to translate them into something having to do with him. When he got stern like that, was he, somewhere in the folds of his consciousness, actually back in front of a class, giving in to the temptation to make a stupid child look even stupider? Or was he, as his better self, giving holy hell to the bully picking on the skinny kid who at thirteen still had trouble tying his shoes? Could there be this other narrative, the one he’d actually lived, playing out in the core of him? Could the smile he suddenly flashed have sprung from the Father’s Day when all of us, Charlotte, and Jan and I—under Charlotte’s direction, of course, she being the ringleader of all such activities—put on a little sketch, about who knows what? I couldn’t remember. But maybe he could. Somewhere.

“A man in charge of a boat,” he said, “should know about water.”

An old painting of mine hung behind him and I glanced at it while he spoke. A streetscape I’d done in New York, when I was twenty years old. Fourteenth Street. About six months before this visit, I’d found it stuck behind his bed. One of his nurses, not knowing it was mine, told me he’d said it was boring. “Of all things,” she said. “Boring!” But he hadn’t been wrong. It dated from before I had learned to use my natural precision to my advantage and it had that kind of technical strain for correctness that makes just about everything dull. I had been going to take it from behind the bed, bring it home, throw it out, hide it away, but Owen said I shouldn’t. Because what if my father ever wanted
it back? What if he woke up one day and said,
Where’s that old painting of mine? The one my daughter Augusta did?
Which he may well have done, because during the spring the painting reappeared. Though it was also entirely possible that a different nurse had just found it and thought it belonged on the wall.

I stayed about two hours. I didn’t kiss him goodbye, as I hadn’t kissed him hello. We weren’t a kissing family. Not the three thorny ones of us who were still alive, anyway. My sister Charlotte had spilled over with affection, and I always imagined my mother being the same, but not me and not Jan and surely not our father.

T
he sun was low as I pulled into our drive. There’s a line of tall spruce on the western edge of our front lawn. They mark the place Owen stops mowing, leaving all meadow beyond. When the sun is at a certain point in the sky, summer afternoons, the shadows from those trees lie across the grass like felled giants. “Why not just sleeping?” Owen asked me, when I told him that.

“Because they’re too still for sleep,” I said. “They’re too untroubled.”

All the drive home I had felt age settle over me. No more the daughter. Not even the forty-seven-year-old woman. Certainly not the seductress tossing the bedcovers into chaos with her lover the night before. But an old, tired soul. Aching from the heart outward. I sat in our drive for a few moments after turning off the car. I sighed as I looked at those heavy shadows on our lawn. When I opened the door, creaking my newly ancient body into the day, I found Alison standing in the drive. Her face took in my condition even before we could say hello.

“I’ve been visiting my father,” I said. “I think I told you? He’s in a home. He has Alzheimer’s. It’s been a long day.”

“How terrible. I imagine it has been.” And then, “You look like you could use a drink. Maybe even two.”

I smiled—barely. “I can see you’re going to be a bad influence,” I said. “But I think you’re right.” I looked over to the barn. “Why don’t you come over this time, though. We have a good bottle of red … Let me just tell Owen I’m home, then we’ll go inside.”

She said she would be over in half an hour. She reached over and gave my hand a squeeze before turning away.

W
hen Owen’s work was going well, I would never knock. I’d just barge in. Even when the doors were closed. I knew he wouldn’t hear a knock if he was really absorbed. He would be far, far away, in another place and time.

But I had learned during those months of his frustration to pause at the door and at least give him a warning shout. Not because there was anything happening that I might derail with an interruption, but because he felt ashamed. He needed a moment to arrange his expression or maybe to set himself up at the computer as though he were engaged. We’d never had that conversation, he’d never asked that explicitly of me. But I had learned. And so, that day, at the top of the great wide ramp to the open barn doors, I knocked and I called, “I’m back.”

“Oh, good. Come on in.”

Without question, the barn is the most spectacular space on the property. Cleaned of all trace of the livestock it once housed, all that remained was the shell. Pennsylvania bluestone floors. Wood walls of horizontal planks, heavy beams, a vaulting ceiling into which we had cut four skylights that we’d framed in old weathered barn wood. It had the cool hush of a church.

“How was it?” he asked.

“It was the same. It was sad. I’m tired.” I walked over and touched his shoulder, gave it a quick kneading. I didn’t ask him how his morning had gone. “Alison stopped by,” I said, stepping
away. “We’re going to have a glass of wine. Or something. Two glasses of wine. She rightly diagnosed my need.”

He looked at me, a smile hovering there. “Tell her I said to get you good and drunk. I wouldn’t mind an afternoon like last night.”

“You and me both,” I said. “Feel free to join us. For drinks that is.”

“Very funny. But I think I’ll keep at this a while more.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, never quite sure how to respond when I sensed Owen digging himself deeper into his seemingly endless futile pursuit. And then, “See you in a bit.”

W
e sat in the living room, Alison on the pale, slipcovered love-seat that had come with the house and I on the pumpkin-colored wingback chair we’d chosen from the relics in Owen’s aunt’s home. I poured us each a large glass of wine. Very large.

Alison commented on the beauty of the house, the old random-width floors, the stone hearth, and I thanked her. She asked if the room beyond the French doors flanking the fireplace was my studio, and I said it was.

“I’m sorry if I seem a bit out of it,” I said. “The visits to my father … they never fail to upset me.”

“No, I’m so sorry,” Alison said. “It does seem like a terrible … passage. A terrible way to travel through the final years.”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

I asked her how her morning had been; but then, as she answered, I felt her words floating all around, not quite finding their way into my consciousness, my attention riveted elsewhere, a million miles away, back to my father, back to my childhood—and then finally fixed on a painting of mine above our mantelpiece, an oil of an old milliner shop in South Philly, facing out from inside, looking through the window filled with finished hats on mannequin
heads. The first painting I did after Bill. The painting that marked the true start of my recovery from all that heartache. I stared at it as if it might steady me, like a spinning dancer finding a single focal point.

“Is that one of yours?” Alison had followed my gaze.

“Yes. I’m sorry. Yes. From a few years ago. But I don’t mean to zone out … I’m afraid I really am tired.”

“I like it very much. And you should just relax. Don’t mind me. Unless you’d like me to go …”

“No, no, not at all. I’m just sorry to be a bit out of it. But very glad for the company.”

“I love the hats,” she said. “Every detail is so … so vivid. Even the netting. You must use a single-haired brush.”

I laughed. “Not quite, but close. I thought I might paint just the window, from the outside, I mean. It was so … so beautiful and I’ve always been drawn to exteriors. But then … then I ended up not finding the hats as interesting as the scene behind them. Also, it was very cold outside.”

Cold outside. And cold inside of me. A full year after Bill. Eleven months after my confession to Owen. My heart like a single tooth, sharp and useless; my ability to paint, frozen, perhaps forever stilled. I’d found Steinman’s one afternoon on a directionless, miserable walk that had promised nothing beyond freedom from the frustrations of my studio. I had stumbled across this tiny store, a bright red door, gold lettering, the elaborate hats, beautiful, fantastical against the dingy gray of Fourth Street.

“It seems like a long time ago.” That wasn’t entirely true. At moments, it seemed like I could stand up, turn around, and walk right back into that time. “I loved it there,” I said.

That part was true. The place had been run by an older pair, a brother and sister, Len and Ida Steinman, both in their early seventies. Neither had ever wed and they had an intimacy like that of a couple, so at first I had thought them married. He was tall, taller
than Owen—which, coming from my family of short Jewish men, surprised me. She was tiny though. Birdlike. And beautiful. She had such an elegance to her. The shop itself was a mess, the sort of chaos only the owners of such a workshop could navigate; but she was anything but. A polished gem among the filmy fabrics and odd forms on which the hats were built, she was breathtakingly complete in a sea of aspiration.

“The light is incredible,” Alison said. “Why am I sure it was winter?”

“It was. Winter light. It’s got a certain clarity. Also, through the window, see? That tiny tree way down the street is bare. It doesn’t jump out, but it registers, I think.”

I’d sat in that store for weeks, doing sketches, then setting up an easel, bringing in paints, hoping no one would complain as the air took on the new smells. Neither Len nor Ida appeared in the painting—except for one of Ida’s arms. I’d wanted to paint all of her, a rare impulse for me. But I had felt too daunted to try. Even apart from my poor portrait skills, I was sure that her essence contained an element of perfection I had no right to try and channel. Me, in my fallen, repentant state. So I spent all those weeks with my eyes on the rolls of tulle and the fabric flowers, the light slipping around the gold lettering in the window; and I stole long, inexplicably hungry looks at Ida Steinman. I could detect it in the painting still, the way that she was neither in nor out, that navy serge jacket sleeve, child-sized, hovering at the edge of the canvas, at the edge of my consciousness.

“It isn’t one of my favorites,” I said. “Owen loves it though. He more or less insisted we hang it there.”

But I didn’t want to discuss the painting anymore. It was like hearing the ocean, waves crashing, the memories beginning to pound against my thoughts as we spoke. How often had I sat with Owen just like this, in the aftermath of my time with Bill, my heart breaking, my energy all directed toward hiding that fact? I
had been well practiced then at secret oceans, secret waves, adept at splitting myself in two. Now I just wanted to move off that subject, that time.