9
“I had an uncle once who was blind,” Henry’s mother said, “and I swear he didn’t go by touch as much as that child.”
The child she referred to was her grandson, John, and she remarked so frequently on his propensity for feeling his way through the world that his mother was driven to concocting little tests to verify her son’s sight. Sonja would wiggle her fingers before his eyes, or hold his favorite toy just out of reach. She would wave a brightly colored cloth, or—once, and she was immediately ashamed—flare a match at the edge of his vision just to watch him startle. Of course he passed every one of these tests, as Sonja knew he would, yet he was so precious to her that she could not keep from worrying at the least suggestion that something might be wrong with her child.
And certainly it was true that from infancy, John House seemed to rely on touch more than any other sense. He liked to lay his cheek against his mother’s hand for comfort, an action that reminded Sonja of how, when she nursed him, he wanted to remain pressed against her breast even when he was no longer suckling. He ruffled the dog’s fur endlessly, feeling the hair rise and fall under his fingers. When he lay in bed at night, he ran his knuckles back and forth against the cool sheet. Summer or winter, he would press his forehead against a window as though he were gauging the weather by the feel of the glass. Occasionally, his hands would happen upon something—the crenellated base of a floor lamp, the tufts of chenille on his parents’ bedspread, the carved wooden leg of the couch, a stone, a handkerchief-size square of tanned deer hide—whose feel would put him in a reverie. The deerskin he found on his father’s workbench— Henry thought that he might stitch it into a pouch to hold June’s ball and jacks—but when it became apparent that no use that patch of leather could be put to would match the pleasure that John House got from folding it over and over and brushing its nap, Henry decided to give it to the boy. In truth, anyone who observed John House in one of his brown studies of touch might believe the boy was blind; his eyes would glaze and he seemed unable to move until he had taken in all the knowledge and satisfaction his fingers could bring.
So sudden and complete were these spells that as John grew older Sonja worried what would happen when he started school. He was a bright child and a ready learner, but suppose he became so taken with the texture of the paper on which he was instructed to draw a tree that he never touched pencil to paper. For that matter, the grain of the pencil itself might engross him and keep him from his arithmetic.
Sonja’s fears were not without basis. When John was three years old and his sister was five, their father lifted them both onto Buck’s back. Henry told Sonja to stand next to the children, and he made sure their house was in the background. Henry had a new box camera, and that day he planned to capture on film what he loved most in life.
John had never been on Buck before, and the horse’s textures—the short hair growing tight against the skin, the fluttery softness of the ears— were almost too much for the boy. June sat behind her brother and held him tight, but John was supposed to hold on too. Henry showed him how to twine his fingers into Buck’s mane, but John could not keep his hands still. He was patting and stroking Buck everywhere, searching for that spot where he could lose himself in feeling.
Henry hardly had time to step back and line up his family in the viewfinder when John disturbed the composition. He leaned forward and to the side, probably in an attempt to lay his cheek against Buck’s long, muscular neck, so sleek in the sunlight it looked wet. June scooted forward, trying contradictorily both to tighten her grip on her brother and to allow him to go where he wanted to go. She must have dug her heels into Buck’s ribs in a way that made him wonder if he were being spurred, but to the horse’s credit, he did not step forward with his riders. He turned his head as if to ask June if she was sure of her command. The horse’s great head looming toward him startled John and caused him to jerk back, and that movement was probably enough to keep him on Buck’s back for another instant, time enough for Sonja to grab her son and keep him from falling.
Henry scolded his daughter, and she began to cry. John held back his tears, but he clung to his mother and buried his face in the hollow of her neck. Sonja wouldn’t put him back on the horse, and Henry gave up on his family portrait.
Sonja struggled with
the urge to push the boy’s hand away every time he fell into one of his tactile trances. She hated to see him let the world slip away while he rubbed his thumbnail along the hem of his sweater, yet he obviously took in such pleasure through his fingertips that it seemed equally wrong to stop him. The dilemma was difficult because her love for her son was so great—yes, greater than the love she felt for her daughter, but June didn’t depend on her mother’s love the way John did—and Sonja wanted what was best for her son. But, paradoxically, this problem caused Sonja to turn away from him at times. When he sat at the kitchen table worrying the frayed corner of the oilcloth with an enraptured but witless look in his eyes, she was so uncertain of what to do that she pretended not to notice him at all. Occasionally she would leave the room altogether, thereby absenting herself voluntarily from the person in this world she cared most about.
That pain could result from being a mother came as no surprise to Sonja. Her own parents, after all, had sent her away from home so that Sonja might have what they believed would be a better life in America. Whether anguish had to be a part of all love, Sonja was not sure, and she did not care to speculate on the matter.
10
There was a knock on Weaver’s studio door, and when he opened it, she said, as if months had not intervened between his proposal and her reply, “I’m here to pose. For money.”
Weaver did not hesitate. “Two dollars an hour. But I’ll seldom need you for the entire day.”
“How many days a week?”
“Perhaps as many as six, depending on what I’m working on. Some weeks perhaps not at all.”
“Daylight hours?”
Weaver had tried different combinations of blinds and shades on his studio’s many windows until he finally found the coverings that allowed in as much or as little light as he desired. “All right. Daylight hours.”
She hesitated, and Weaver could see in her eyes that she was making the final computations. “Yes,” she said. “I agree.”
“And you’ll begin today?”
“Yes.”
Weaver wanted her, to be sure, but he would forgo any physical contact if it was the only way she would pose for him. If he had to choose between her being available to his sight or his touch, he would choose, as always, his eyes and his art. If he were patient, however, if he did nothing to offend, frighten, or anger her, he might one day have her for both. Therefore, on that first day, Weaver would not even allow her inside his studio. He made her wait outside while he gathered his pencils and a sketch pad.
He led her a half mile away to a hollow between two hills, a tree-ringed grassy area not much larger than a small room. The spot was so secluded that Weaver always felt, as he pushed aside the branches of a stunted birch and stepped forward, that a curtain closed behind him. The grass was soft enough to sit or lie in, and a fallen tree gave him a place to arrange his materials. Only at high noon did light flood this space; at every other hour, the sun shone fitfully through the leaves, shadows blinking first from one direction, then another.
It was in this little vale that Weaver fucked the sharp-faced slattern he’d picked up in the Lakeside Tavern. He had scarcely asked her if she would be willing to pose in the nude and she was stripping off her clothes. On that autumn day he had her lie on her back in a pile of fallen leaves. In the painting, he wanted to make it seem as if she had risen up through the earth, but right from the start he had trouble making reality match his vision. He could not find the right arrangement of leaves on her naked body, and her expressions were wrong—either she looked blank, so it seemed as if she were a corpse partially buried, or she looked coy, a stripper working on a new outdoor-themed routine. When Weaver tried to brush the leaves from her small hard breasts, she misinterpreted his action and reached for his fly. Soon Weaver was thrusting into her, and as he did the leaves under her crackled and the smell of tannin and leaf mold rose to his nostrils. She did not model for him again.
Today, however, he asked Sonja House to do nothing more than lean back against a tree and tilt her head up as though she were searching for a bird whose song she heard in the highest branches.
He made two sketches, and when he stepped back, he said, “You can relax. Move around if you like.” Weaver had marked by eye a knot on the tree so he could duplicate the pose exactly.
She knelt in the grass.
“You know, don’t you, that the day will come when I’ll ask you to disrobe?”
“Yes.”
“I have to make certain you understand what you’ve agreed to.”
“I understand.”
When he asked her to resume her pose, Weaver did not have to align her with the knot on the tree. Without direction, she posed precisely as before.
Weaver was accustomed to working quickly, and he had not yet learned of Sonja’s ability to hold a pose, so he sketched rapidly that first day, concentrating on the lines and proportions—the distance between her eyes, the height of her cheekbones, the width of her jaw, the length of her neck, the asymmetry of her lips—that he would have to get right if he was ever going to reveal her character and her beauty and still convey the mystery of both. As soon as he set his pencil down, the question that always troubled him and his art came back to him: Must one understand an enigma in order to portray it to others?
Weeks later they
were in his studio, and the thin steady rain made it seem as though a veil had dropped over the building, and Weaver decided that would be the day he would ask her to undress.
First he posed her, fully clothed, in an old wooden office chair that he sometimes worked from when he did not stand at his easel. The chair squeaked when it swiveled and clattered when its heavy casters rolled over the floor’s uneven planks, but of course she sat so still the chair made no noise. Weaver had her turned slightly from him, a partial profile, with one foot on the seat of the chair and the other leg extended. After a very quick watercolor washed with a pale gray that made it seem as though rain had fallen on the paper, Weaver at last said, “If you would please, take off your clothes and then sit again in the chair just as you are now.” Oddly enough, the chair had inspired him as much as she had. He wanted the contrast between the chair and its unyielding wood—a chair that a lawyer or a bookkeeper might once have sat in before his rolltop desk—and her body, as languid as she might be in her bath. For the first nude studies, he would switch to a new medium—charcoal, in keeping with the day’s somber expression.
Weaver was fifteen years old when his father was killed on a Chicago sidewalk. An iceman became enraged because a hotel doorman would not allow him to park in front of the Monroe House. The iceman drove his wagon around the block for no other reason than to pick up speed; he then jumped the curb and careened down the sidewalk with his brace of horses, driving right into Arthur Weaver and the small group of jurists with whom Mr. Weaver dined weekly. Arthur Weaver hit his head on a fireplug and died soon thereafter; the accident also left a district judge paralyzed from the waist down.
Two of his older brothers woke Ned with news of their father’s death, and then told him to come downstairs to join the rest of the grieving family. Weaver, however, remained in his darkened room, too confused at that moment to face another human being, much less his sisters, brothers, mother, or any of the mourners who had come to the house.
The need to draw and paint had already inflamed Weaver, and while he was determined on a career in art, his father, a practical public man and an enormously successful one at that, ceaselessly cross-examined his son on how art would enable him to make his way in the world. The questioning was good-natured, but rigorous all the same, and as frustrated as Weaver became over these interrogations, he knew their purpose: His father wanted to make certain his son did not answer his vocation halfheartedly. If Weaver could not stand up to his father’s questions, how could he overcome the obstacles that stood in the way of anyone who sought a career in the arts?
So, while his siblings’ sorrow no doubt centered on the deprivation of happiness that was sure to be the result of a life without their father— no more sailing on Lake Michigan, no more endless summer picnics, no more walks on Lake Shore Drive, in short no more of those occasions made memorable and pleasurable by Arthur Weaver’s humor, wit, and generosity—Ned Weaver lamented that his father would never again say, upon viewing one of his son’s watercolors, “Pretty enough, I imagine, but why that line of green at the water’s edge? Will that put food on the table or clothes on your back?” Weaver loved his father, but he also needed him the way an oyster needs a grain of sand.
Weaver rolled onto his side, but before rising from his bed he stretched to his nightstand, and in a fit of anger, grief, and despair, clamped his fingernails into the table’s varnished soft pine. He squeezed down so hard that the wood forever bore the faint imprint of his nails.
Sonja House rose from the swivel chair and walked to the iron cot that Weaver kept in the studio. With her back to Weaver, she proceeded to undress, spreading out her garments from the top of the mattress to the bottom, as if, without having them thus singly arranged, she might not remember the correct order when it was time to clothe herself again.
When she turned, Weaver did not gasp, though he was unprepared for the plenitude and power that he saw in her when she appeared naked before him for the first time. This was a woman in whom he had seldom seen anything far from sorrow, a woman whose careless beauty brought her no joy, a woman whom he felt he had to capture quickly, so inexorably was her vitality draining away. But all those impressions were the result of seeing too much the spirit that held sway over her being. When her body came into play . . .
Her breasts were round, heavy, her shoulders and hips wide. The shadows of muscles faintly wavered in her arms and legs, and he could see other signs of how a working life had marked her—a V of sunburn at her throat, tanned and freckled limbs—yet when she was naked she looked so eros-charged that any other use of her body—mothering, laboring—any purpose other than the pleasures of love was waste, waste, waste. Reflexively he made a fist, and his nails bit into his palm just as they had gouged his nightstand so many years before.
Once she was seated again, and Weaver’s hand was scuffing charcoal across the paper, he said, “When most people look at one of my drawings or paintings, what they fail to see is the story. They see a scene. Lines and shapes. Something existing in space. A man or a woman. Objects. But everything I draw or paint has its own story. A past. A future. Never only the moment on the canvas.”
Weaver sometimes talked as he drew, using his tongue to occupy his brain and thereby allowing his hand to work free of his mind’s judgments.
“And what”—her speech came slowly, as though the model was concentrating harder than the artist—“is the story you’re telling now?”
Weaver tore off a sheet and began another drawing, experimenting with a change of scale. “This will be the story of a woman who stayed away for a long time, but now that she’s here . . .”
“Yes?”
“Suppose you tell me. You never explained: Why did you finally decide to pose for me?”
“It was as I said. For money. My husband couldn’t work. He had an accident.”
“Is he working now?”
“Some. But not like before.”
“But there are other things you could have done for money.”
“I didn’t wish to wait on people again. And you pay better.”
Weaver ripped away another sheet. Perhaps he would try a series of drawings, all on the same sheet, but in each one she would be turned toward him a bit more. “It’s not that you like posing?”
“I don’t mind.”
“But do you enjoy it?”
“You’ve had such models?”
“Certainly.”
“And what is it they enjoy?”
“Oh, any number of things. Some simply like to be looked at. They might feel that no one has ever taken time to really look at them, to give them the attention that every human being needs and deserves. Some think I’ll make them beautiful, and that I’ll make their beauty available to the world. Some only want their likeness preserved, a record that says nothing more than ‘I was here. This is what I looked like.’ And some pose in order to seduce.”
“Who is it they wish to seduce?”
“Me. The viewer—anyone who looks at their image. It’s a kind of power.” Though her hair hung straight down, Weaver drew strands twining in and out of the slats of the chair back. “And some believe they will become works of art themselves. This has nothing to do with vanity. This is a wish for immortality.”
“And that is not vanity?”
“Could I ask you to turn toward the right a few inches? There. That’s good.” This movement brought the nipple of one breast into view.
“These stories you draw and paint,” she said. “They are yours alone? Is this why you ask me nothing about myself?”
All afternoon the gentle rain had made faint brushing sounds at the window, but now the drops, gathering volume, tapped louder. Weaver’s concentration did not falter. While he drew, her nipple grew erect, and the stiffening did not subside. For the time being, Weaver made no attempt to incorporate this detail into the drawing.
“I could ask you as well,” he said. “Why do you volunteer nothing about yourself?”
For a long time she said nothing. Then Weaver heard what might have been the softest laughter, followed by her voice. “Perhaps I want my story to be only the one you paint.” Then again, the sound may not have been laughter at all but merely rain against the glass.
The father’s lessons
were not lost on the son. As soon as his art began to find favor with the buying public, Weaver never let pass an opportunity to make a sale. He placed most of his work with the Lear Gallery in Chicago, and though Edmund Lear could get top prices for Ned Weaver originals, Weaver eventually opened his own small gallery in Door County. Here Weaver sold the miniature watercolors that Edmund did not care for, as well as the work of a few local artists whose landscapes appealed to tourists.
Not a single work of art by Ned Weaver was on display in the Weaver home, and his paintings and drawings stayed in the studio only until they were complete. Once they were signed, they were for sale, and if they weren’t fit for the market, Weaver destroyed them.
Weaver kept for himself only the images of Sonja House, and these he stored in a trunk in the studio. No one else knew of the existence or location of these works, though Weaver always meant to tell Ed Lear about them. He meant to.