Prochownik's Dream (19 page)

Oriel strode across the clean-swept space of the studio towards the door, calling back over her shoulder, ‘For my money you haven't got her, Toni. You've got her cat.' She laughed again as she went out the door, careless and uncompromising, foisting upon them the humiliating perception that Toni had begun painting again merely in order to fulfil her commission for the island.

Andy put his arm around Toni's shoulders and stood close, steadying the painting with his other hand. ‘Don't worry about Oriel, old mate. She's always doing that. She doesn't like you guys getting too big-headed. This is brilliant. The punters are going to love it.'

Alongside Andy's small frame and tight curly hair Toni felt large and untidy. There was a disarming innocence about Andy Levine that had often led people to underestimate his toughness and the subtlety of his intelligence. Andy could have been his fight trainer here, his pose saying,
This is my boy!
Toni stepped impatiently out of Andy's protective embrace and retrieved his painting from him. He carried it across the studio and set it with its face to the wall, as if to say,
That's the
end of the show for today, folks!

If only!

On the back of the canvas in his bold black lettering,
The
Schwartz Family, 200
×
200 cm. March 2003. AP 17. A homage to Pablo
Ruiz Picasso's
The Soler Family
.

Haine gave a short explosive laugh.

Toni was dismayed to see how immoderate his dedication must appear to Haine and the others. He caught Marina's eye and she smiled and gave a small lift of her shoulders, acknowledging his predicament. In this formal recording of the work he knew Haine must believe himself to be viewing something more private even than the unfinished painting. And it was true, after all, for Toni had not chosen to paint his picture on a cheap pine stretcher with cotton duck but had used a hand-crafted mitred European cedar stretcher with fine Belgian linen. It was clear, even without the dedication, that he had always seen the picture as a durable artifact, a precious object destined for the permanent archive. The bold black lettering on the back was not only a message to Marina, it was an indication of the reach of his ambition.
In art
, his father had once told him,
there can be no such thing as neutral space. In art, as in dreams, to conceal one motive is to reveal another
. He would have liked to tell Haine that most of these people remembered that his award-winning portrait of his mother had been painted on fifty cents' worth of masonite board from the local hardware store.

Theo's chair was suddenly banging and whacking on the floorboards. They turned and looked. Theo was struggling to get himself upright, the chair teetering on two legs and swivelling precariously under him. Was he endeavouring to come to Toni's aid? Toni was closest and he reached Theo and steadied him before Robert got there. Theo looked up at him and grinned. ‘Come and see me. Let's do some talking.' Robert came up. ‘Thanks, Toni. I can manage.' Toni watched father and son falter across the studio and go out the door. When they had gone he turned back to the room. Marina was talking with Haine. He thought of joining them but Haine had his hand on her arm and was intent on sharing something of significance with her, no doubt his opinion of
Chaos Rules
. Toni walked across and stood looking at her picture.

Andy came up and stood beside him. ‘She's good, eh?'

‘She's great.'

‘She's doing a new background for you.'

‘So why shouldn't she?'

‘You're doing it. I just sell pictures.'

The fierce half-naked young man confronted them from the centre foreground of the canvas. The young man's torso soft above tight blue jeans. Something of sex and violence in the image.

Andy said, ‘How's our beautiful Teresa?'

‘Busy.'

‘The travel agency is doing good?'

‘So-so. You know?'

‘I'll call over and have a peek at what you're doing in that studio of yours. Don't worry about Oriel. I'll keep her off your back. Are you going to have a show ready for me one of these days?'

‘I hope so, Andy. I really hope so. Drop in any time. It's been too long.'

They embraced then stepped away.

Andy stabbed a finger towards
The Schwartz Family
. ‘Just keep doing it like that.'

Toni walked over to Marina and Haine and said goodbye. In the passage, Theo's door was open. Toni paused and looked in. Theo was lying back on the pillow, his eyes closed, his mouth slack. The dying man returning to his son to distract himself from his grief.
You won't tell Robert?
It was another portrait study. Haine would never see such a modest arrangement of the human form as a suitable subject for his art.

On the front verandah Robert and Oriel were talking. They fell silent when he came out.

He said goodbye to them then stepped off the verandah and walked back along the street to his car. As he turned the key and the VK started with its customary roar, he realised he had his next picture. He laughed. He could
see
it. In his imagination it was already complete. All he had to do was paint it. He did a U-turn and took off with a squeal of tyres, leaving a blue plume of smoke hanging in the air of the quiet street, the VK almost airborne over the speed bump he had forgotten.

twelve

He parked in the lane behind the studio and stepped out of the wagon. He was fired up to begin working on his new picture. He had its title,
The Other Family,
and was visualising himself blocking it in with big confident sweeps of the loaded brush—Oriel's monumental form dominating the centre of the group. He would do studies of them all later; for now, he just wanted to get the strength of the composition down on the canvas before he lost it. He was hungry to be alone and lost in the work.

He opened the back door of the studio.

Teresa was standing over by the red lamp holding up a corner of the drop sheet, as if she had been looking out the window, watching for him to come across from the house. His brother Roy was standing by the plan press, the top drawer pulled out, Marina's island sketchbook by his hand, the small 35 x 60 cm oil of Marina asleep on the island propped on the press in front of him. Roy and Teresa both turned and looked at him as he came through the door from the lane. He noticed Theo's black sketchbook was also lying open on the press.

Teresa let the sheet fall back into place. She was wearing her tailored black suit over a white blouse, the vivid collar of the blouse out over the jacket, her dark hair drifting across her face. After endlessly examining the slight, almost tenuous figures of Marina and Robert and Theo these past weeks, Teresa looked bigger and more robust to him, as if she had grown physically larger. ‘Why aren't you at work?' he asked. He saw then that she had been crying and he felt a touch of alarm. ‘Where's Nada?'

Teresa said calmly, ‘She's at kinder. Roy came over.'

Roy said, ‘How's it going, Antoni?'

Toni stepped up to his brother and they embraced.

Teresa watched them. ‘I'll get us some lunch,' she said. ‘You'll stay for lunch, Roy?'

Roy turned to her. ‘Thank you, Terry. I'd like that very much.' He spoke with restraint, an old-fashioned modesty in the manner of his acceptance of Teresa's invitation. A man in his late forties, who had once been handsome, he was now slightly stooped, his appearance that of someone debilitated by chronic pain or prolonged anxiety. There was a trace of a European accent in his soft voice.

‘So everything's okay?' Toni said, looking from one to the other. He had not seen his brother since the opening of his last installation at Andy's, an event that seemed so long ago now it might almost never have happened, except for the pile of old clothes and racks still cluttering the courtyard to remind him of it. ‘Have you lost weight?' he asked his brother.

‘I'm fine.' Roy smiled and put his hand on Toni's shoulder and squeezed. ‘You're looking great.'

Teresa said, ‘I'll leave you two to have a talk then.' She paused in the doorway, then turned back and stood looking across at Toni. ‘So where's your picture?' She was looking into his eyes as if she were determined not to miss anything, determined to detect the lie or the half-truth as it formed and wavered in his mind.

‘I took it over to Richmond.'

‘So you've finished it, or what?'

‘No.'

She waited for his explanation.

‘I was having a problem with the background.'

She said nothing, waiting.

He drew a breath. ‘Marina offered to do a new background for it.'

Teresa's expression changed and she looked at Roy. Then she turned and went out the door.

Toni said, ‘Shit!'

‘You do these?' Roy asked. He was holding up Theo's sketchbook.

Toni reached and took the book from him. He closed it and replaced the rubber band and put it away in the drawer of the plan press. ‘You think it's okay to come in here and just look at everything?'

‘You've got nothing to hide from me, Antoni.'

‘The book belonged to Robert's father. The drawings are his. He gave it to me. Did Teresa look at it?'

‘She looked at it,' Roy said easily.

‘I'm sorry,' Toni said. ‘I didn't mean to speak to you like that. Have you been ill or something? You don't look the best.' Roy had always seemed indestructible to Toni. A man of iron or stone who would never grow old or falter. Today he saw something vulnerable, something almost fragile about his brother that alarmed him.

‘I had a bit of an operation,' Roy said. ‘It was nothing. I'm fine now.'

‘What sort of operation? Mum never said anything.'

‘I told her not to worry you.'

‘Jesus! You didn't tell me about it? Come on, what was this operation? I need to know.'

‘It was nothing. Minor surgery.' Roy laughed and gestured around the studio. ‘You're doing it!'

‘You and Mum still behave as if I'm the baby of the family. I need to know what's going on.'

‘Okay. I'm sorry. It won't happen again.'

‘So what are you and me supposed to be talking about?'

Roy picked up Marina's island sketchbook. He hefted it and looked questioningly at Toni.

‘You can look at anything,' Toni said. ‘You know that. I'm sorry. I'm just feeling a bit touchy. I was hoping to get to work. What's all this about anyway?'

Roy opened the book but did not look at it at once, instead he looked around the studio at the drawings and paintings and the paraphernalia of the craft. ‘Dad should see this.'

‘You mind if I set up a stretcher?'

‘No. Go ahead. Do what you were going to do. Don't let me interrupt you.'

Toni did not move. Roy was holding up the drawing of Marina asleep on the island.

‘So
this
is
that
?' he said, indicating the oil on the plan press. ‘I prefer the drawing. I always preferred your drawings to your paintings. I'm not criticising.'

‘It's okay. I feel the same.'

Roy considered the drawing of Marina lying in the shadows of the wattle. ‘This I could live with.' He laughed softly, with pleasure. He jogged Toni's arm with his elbow. ‘Hey! You're not listening to me! You're way off. What's the matter? You want to work? I'm holding you up? Work if you want to work.'

‘No, of course not. It's great to see you. We should see more of each other.' His brother's life was a mystery to him, as remote and sketchy as his father's childhood had been for him.

‘Never mind about that. I'm telling you something. This is a beautiful thing. She sat for you like this? This is what you people do? What a life you have!'

Toni said, ‘You can have it. I'll get it framed for you.' He had refused to give the drawing to Marina, now he would give it to his brother. He reached for the sketchbook but Roy held it out of his way, turning at the shoulder, a minimal movement that reminded Toni of their father, as if Roy had begun to call upon their father's gestures as he grew older.

‘You remember the way Dad used to go on about your gift?' Roy said. ‘
The gift of the line
, he called it. It would bring tears of pleasure to the old man's eyes to see this stuff. Dad was denied happiness.'

Toni could hear a strengthening of the old accent in Roy's speech, the ethnic scar tissue from his early years alone with their parents emerging again, not erased by the passage of the years but subdued, appearing again now that his brother's strength had begun to erode. Like their mother Lola, Roy had remained a Prochownik at heart and, like her, still carried the indelible marks of the displaced. The name-change to Powlett had not taken with Roy or with their mother. With those two it had been a failed graft. Perhaps one lifetime was not long enough to become an Australian. ‘Dad was happy doing his pictures.'

‘That wasn't happiness,' Roy said. ‘That was keeping up a brave front. Dad never found the freedom to be who he was. You were his chance.'

‘I think Dad was happy sometimes,' Toni insisted. It was important for him to believe in his father's happiness. ‘I often saw him when he was happy.'

‘We knew different people. Dad was careful with you. He never let you see what was really going on with him. He protected you from all that stuff.'

‘Like you and Mum not telling me about your operation, you mean?'

‘That's it. It's our habit. The family has always protected you.'

Toni looked at Roy. ‘Do you remember telling me when you came out of prison that no one's protected?'

Roy looked up from the drawing. ‘Did I say that?'

‘You said it as if you'd found the key to everything.'

Roy laughed, pleased. ‘Maybe I had. You remembered it!'