Saturday Night Widows (17 page)

“
Psyche
, of course, means
soul
,” Katie informed us. “And Cupid is love. The reciprocity of their embrace is the recognition of love and soul coming together.”

Harder than it looks
, I thought. Not everyone comes equipped with wings. I could tell there was more that Dawn wanted to say,
but we continued through the galleries, finding more parallels between art and our own circumstances, notably at a familiar water lily painting by Claude Monet. I had thought there would be little new to say about this much-reproduced work, but Katie found a way to rivet our group. Not only did the painting depict the lilies, close cousins to our friends the lotus blossoms, floating in some serious purplish depths, but Katie’s story of its creation lent itself to reflection, too.

She explained that after Monet’s first wife died, he remarried and moved in 1883 to Giverny, where the new couple blended its two families and built a house and water gardens, the subjects of his most acclaimed work.

“In this second part of his painterly career, he focused on what really moved him as a painter, which was on painting exactly what the eye sees,” Katie said. She pointed to the complexity of the images, how the viewer couldn’t be sure whether some green tendrils were willow tree branches reflected on the surface of the water or lily stems growing up from beneath.

“How old was he when his first wife died?” Lesley asked.

Everyone hung on the answer. “I think he would have been around forty.”

“So he was a
young
widower.” We exchanged looks.

“Yes. With a young son. His first wife had been the model for many of his paintings, so it was a devastating moment. He had to reevaluate what he wanted as an artist and as a parent, but it let him get to where he wanted to be.” I saw the others pondering this progression of events.

“Beautiful,” said Marcia.

Our next stop proved more polarizing. A small terra-cotta
sculpture from Mali depicted a seated figure the color of clay, a man, I assumed at first, curled in on himself, his head resting on his knee. His eyes were downcast, his mouth slightly open, curving down. Katie didn’t need to tell us—he was in mourning. He looked as if he were rocking himself, comforting himself. I found him eloquent, dignified.

“This sculpture is from the thirteenth century, but it looks very modern to me,” Katie said. “We’ve been looking at a lot of things about strength, but this one is resolutely about grief and nurturing one’s self. The shaving of the head is part of the mourning ritual in this part of Africa, so it’s not clear whether this is a man or a woman. The face and positioning of the body are so expressive that it doesn’t look like a particular individual so much as an evocation of sorrow.”

Lesley and Dawn backed away from the glass case as if it held a live grenade, while Tara drew her face close and pulled on her reading glasses. “It’s extraordinary how well preserved it is.”

“The protective posture really protected the sculpture, too, as an object,” said Katie.

We went quiet as some of us circled the figure with respect and others pulled farther back.

“I’m not comfortable looking at it for too long,” Lesley said, “because …”

“Well, look at that face,” said Marcia.

“I want to give him a hug,” I said.

Dawn kept her distance, shaking her head. “How many times a day have you felt like that yourself? I mean, that is grief, right there in front of you.”

“I feel voyeuristic,” said Tara, still peering through the glass.

“There’s something about it that seems really private,” Katie
agreed. She led the group deeper into the African galleries, while three of us fell behind.

“That really traumatized me, that grief thing,” said Lesley.

“What traumatized you, sweetie?” Tara asked.

“Didn’t you two do that at some point? Get into the fetal position? When you were just too sad?”

“Sure,” I said. “The fetal position is a very comforting little position.”

“I rocked,” Lesley said. “Rocked and rocked. It was the rhythm for me.”

So the sculpture had been a zinger for Lesley, but not for Tara, apparently. “It had a powerful effect on me, too,” she said in her sonorous voice. “It was a human being with elemental, fundamental, primal grief … but it was strong, too. Think about it … seven hundred years old, and it didn’t break. Dawn and I were talking about this.” She paused. “Sometimes, in order to get strong, it’s necessary to … face the pain.”

Lesley wasn’t buying it. “It gave me a feeling I’d forgotten—that I didn’t want to remember.”

“Then why go back there?” Tara said.

I hadn’t been able to read Denise’s reaction to the work—her expression was as opaque as usual. But when we caught up, she was intent on an African mask, demonstrating more enthusiasm than I’d ever witnessed before. Worn by women in Sierra Leone when they initiated each other into a society of healers, the mask had idealized feminine features, wide-set eyes, and a small, composed mouth—very much like Denise’s face, I suddenly recognized.

She declared it her favorite piece of the day, and I asked why. “See? This is how
I
feel,” she said, pointing to the enigmatic expression. “Pretending everything is normal for the benefit of others.”

Our tour had achieved its goal. Each woman was finding insight through the idealization of art, sharing it with the others. Perhaps it was fitting that the final stop spoke most to me and my aspirations for the group itself.

“I thought we would end with a celebration of beauty and the giving and receiving of gifts and favors, which is something that all of you do for each other,” Katie said as she steered us toward
The Three Graces
, a Roman marble sculpture from the second century. The piece depicted three women, handmaidens to the goddess of love, in a dancelike pose. “They are known as beauty, mirth, and abundance, and the interlocking of their physical forms is also about the interlocking of these ideals.”

The Graces were missing their heads and a few arms, too—they’d been through it—but their sisterly affection and camaraderie remained. Our group had yet to forge such a fond alliance. I wondered if we would.

“You won’t believe this,” Dawn said, by now accustomed to coincidence. “I have a statue of this at home, too.”

Figured.

D
AWN, YOU SEE
, believed in fate rather than happenstance, that things were meant to be, that she was following a path, that the world, in short, made sense. This system of belief, rooted in her Roman Catholicism but fed by an embrace of all things spiritual, granted her such an outlook of optimism that her friends called her Sunshine.

Whereas many of us tend to believe that we are, for the most part, at the mercy of the irrational forces of the universe, Dawn
believed that Somebody Up There could have been paying close enough attention to draw up a plan that led me to hire a last-minute museum guide who picked out three works of art that Dawn happened to own in some form or other and that she looked at and drew strength from every day. She was capable of believing that they had been placed in her path now, because that Somebody meant to grant us wisdom and encouragement, not because random luck had brought us Katie, the best possible guide for a group of ladies in our searching state. Dawn believed she inhabited a world of meaning. The coincidence of the three works of art spooked me enough that it seemed worth considering Dawn’s point of view.

But what about the death of Andries? Was that part of Someone’s master plan? I couldn’t accept it, and I wasn’t sure Dawn could, either.

Otherwise, destiny had blessed her with beauty, grace, abundance, and so much more: her sunny nature, her knockout body, her business acumen, her ability to hit the sweet spot between work and family. Which is probably why, when I first met Dawn, I assumed that things would go easily for her, that she would know how to take the conundrum of young widowhood and hit that right down the line, too.

“Wait a minute. This is
not
who I am.” The first time I heard her emphatic voice over the phone, I had just told Dawn that I was interested in talking about her experience as a widow. “Don’t use the W-word around me,” she commanded.

That threw me for a momentary loss, until she rescued me with her full, free-floating, throaty laugh. “Unless you mean the W Hotel. They have the Bliss Spa there, and it is
just
the
best
.”

A few days later, she met me at a screaming-loud Italian restaurant
on the Upper East Side. As she approached the table on high-altitude heels, I immediately realized that here was walking, talking proof that a widow doesn’t have to be the old Italian lady in black in the back of the church, which was how Dawn said she thought of her. A master of the feminine arts, Dawn looked the way all of us think we could look if we quit our jobs, relinquished our family responsibilities, and dedicated ourselves to hair, makeup, nails, the works. It wore me out to realize that she managed all this while running her company, mothering her children, and leading a spirited social life with a passel of girlfriends and, for all I knew, maybe a boyfriend or two, too.

Confronted with this brute glamour, I took stock. Like Dawn, I had blond hair that fell below my shoulders, but hers was screen-siren platinum and perfectly in place. I’ve maintained myself well enough that I’m still game for bathing-suit season, but Dawn’s figure was the stuff of year-round male fantasies, with feminine curves cantilevered over a taut little torso. I believe in maintaining appearances in the limited time I’m willing to allot to the task, but her nails were impeccable crescents of white polish, her makeup airbrushed to a fine glow. I know my way around a sample sale, but Dawn’s creamy white cashmere sweater with a blousy top and trim little waist looked like a full-price find to me—and what mother of young children hazards white cashmere? Please!

It wasn’t all surface sparkle, either. Like a movie star before a camera, she could blaze with an inner light, and she understood her effect.

“I think I’ve challenged a lot of people to look at me and say, ‘Wow, did she really lose her husband?’ ” Dawn said. But she was determined not to let social expectations dictate her script. His death,
she said, left her thinking, “If this can happen in my life, I’m going to live
every single second
. I can almost hear him saying, ‘Dawn, go out and do something fun. What are you sitting there for?’ ”

Yes, I thought: Here she was in the flesh, the ultimate
widow provocateur
.

Dawn had never concerned herself with culturally sanctioned behavior. She filled me in while we split some sautéed shrimp and a salad. “I was a bit of a rebel, right from the beginning,” she said. Her upbringing was Catholic, but she never believed in confession. “It was too dark and scary for me. And what can a seven-year-old child confess?” She told the nuns, “I can just talk to God myself.”

Her self-reliance served her well growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in a mostly Italian American New Jersey town. After her dad left the family, Dawn pretty much ran the house and looked after her younger brother while her mother supported them. She got an associate’s degree in business management, burning to strike out on her own. She baked cheesecakes from her mom’s recipe and sold them to restaurants. Then she and a partner went into a venture together, providing two-way radios to police and fire departments, but with an eye on entertainment events. She became a fixture backstage at concerts, where top rock-’n’-roll acts hired her to manage communications. It was hard, exacting work, starstruck work for some, but the thrill for Dawn was in building her company.

She paid a personal price with the constant travel. In 1996, though, amid the backstage hubbub at the MTV Europe Music Awards, a handsome blond South African who set up the generators struck up a conversation with her. It turned out they had been working the same tours in the same places for years but hadn’t met
before. “As fate may have it,” Dawn said, “when you’re in alignment with the universe and doing what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s almost like the universe paves the way.” This remark, I gradually learned, was what Dawn’s friends call a Dawnism, a statement of such over-the-top positivity that it could only come from her.

She and Andries married, and he left the road after his last tour with the Rolling Stones to run a division of Dawn’s company. They both scaled back their travel as the company grew, especially after they had kids. She savored the memory with a satisfied smile and then came up short. “Yeah … anyway.”

Anyway. Andries and Dawn sometimes went separate ways on weekends. He was a robust outdoorsman, a risk taker, a guy’s guy, whereas Dawn was a girl’s girl, no apologies. “I am not sporty, not an ounce of me,” she said. Which is why she stayed home to host a family party one weekend while he went gunning through the forests of West Virginia on all-terrain vehicles with some friends. One of them called to break the news that Andries had careened over a cliff. He was forty years old. Dawn was forty-four.

“I don’t even try to ask why Andries died, because it will make me crazy.” Dawn’s voice was uncharacteristically soft. “I don’t think I’ll ever have
that
answer.”