Authors: Joy Williams
Mrs. Morgan said, “It’s for both of you, of course, but we would like your father to be here for the moment of its unveiling.”
“But he’s not here now,” the child said sensibly. “He’s resting and thinking. I can understand that perfectly, can’t you? I understand everything he thinks. Later today, the two of us will open this together. I wouldn’t care to see it by myself. Father and I will look at it together, at the same time. I know that would be best. I hope this isn’t valuable. I mean, I hope you didn’t spend a lot of money on this. True value lies in self-knowledge. All else is rust and rot. You must excuse me now. When you leave, please don’t slam the door because then it won’t catch. I have a fever. When you have a fever you should get ten or twelve hours of sleep a day. I haven’t begun any of them yet.”
She pirouetted around the corner. Mrs. Morgan pursued her appointed course doggedly. “You’re a little young now, dear, but we’re sure as you grow older, you’ll see the pricelessness of this portrait. And we were so happy to be able to do it. Though the price was considerable, for we dealt with no sign painter, we dealt with a real artist, an artistic, creative person. And how could the price be too great in this case? For in its way, this will live right along with you. We’re sure you will dwell on this portrait often. And may your hearts be glad! Do not sorrow any more!”
And here she dropped her voice for there had been disagreement among the congregation whether this should be
said. “Who knows the joys of heaven? I wouldn’t dream of saying anything out of place, but who knows the arrangements the Lord has made for our everlasting peace? For Time is only here on this sad earth, isn’t it? Another example of man’s ignorance? For in God’s Love there is no Time! There is no East or West!” The lilt of the hymn caught her up. Once her future had been bright, so bright. Beside her photograph in the high-school yearbook so long ago they had said
a girl with her eye on the stars who will go jar
. And what had happened? Where had she made her errors? “For in heaven,” and she smiled bravely, her voice rose again, “beyond the limitations of our poor lives, will not all promises be kept, will not all our dreams become real? And will we not all sit at the Lord’s table and rejoice, with all our lost loved ones restored to us, with the moments that were and the moments that could have been at last One, Triumphant and Complete!”
She stopped. Mrs. Morgan felt that she had never been so eloquent in her life. She had tapped a new and wealthy source within herself. She moved her hand up to her breast and the fluttering of her heart. He eyes descended onto her husband. There he was, quite fat; Mr. Morgan, with a look of wonder on his dumb and dumpy face.
The child danced around the corner again. The robe had slipped down over one shoulder, exposing her thin flat chest. “I hate to say it,” she muttered sadly, “but I think I know just what you’ve got in there.” She tipped her head far to the left and then far to the right as though she were shaking water from her ears. She left them all again, and this time did not return.
Those present agreed that they should unwrap it. They carried it into the room that seemed most lived in and hung it on the wall, on a conveniently placed nail.
“It certainly does become the focal point of the room,”
said the wife of the man who sharpened blades, as the painting was going up.
High above them, in the sunroom, the child was dancing with her father. They moved with measured slowness across the wide pine boards of the long room. They danced to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor as played by Albert Schweitzer. The music is inventive and bold. It is known that Bach composed most of his religious music as he played it in the little and large churches of his youth. The music was created as it went along. As is the dance in this cold and endless room. As are the dancers.
THE PAINTING
was, as is to be expected, of a family grouping. It is done in oranges and yellows, shrimp and sun colors. Most of it was copied from an old photograph, taken a year and a half ago, in the garden. The garden, at the time, was quite spoiled and brown. It was not the season for a garden. The mother and the girls, Kate and her sister, are seated on a little wrought-iron bench. The bench is too small for them all. The child, Kate, is turned sideways and it appears that she is giving more room to the others. The Reverend stands behind them, wearing a white coat which is also out of season. Somewhere, beyond the picture, there must be a stiff wind blowing, for the mother is holding her skirt down across her knees and laughing while the sister seems to have just returned from a motion of brushing back her hair. Kate is wearing a pullover sweater and shorts. She is not smiling, for she has lost her front tooth. She fears that she will never get another one. There is a great deal of foreground. The sky is not even visible.
The man who took the picture was the sexton. He had not taken many pictures but he had recently bought a camera at a pawn shop and he was trying it out on everyone. He also bought a lie detector and four metal ornaments that
had once been fitted to a Japanese sword hilt. His wife said he’d gone soft as a sneaker. The sexton thought the lie detector would be a nice way to pass an evening with people if his wife ever had anyone over for coffee and cake. His wife was not a hostess. The lie detector went its way. Little Kate wanted it, but it passed into other hands.
So the sexton took the picture and in time it was developed and printed. And it was this picture that was brought to the lady painter on the mainland with the artistic personality. She could not be reached on the phone or in person. She had to be dealt with by correspondence.
The painting was large. The likenesses were not excellent but they were good enough. That is, no one would mistake those who were being represented for others, who were not being represented at all. License was taken with the land. It is covered with flowers. A dress has been put on Kate and she has been turned around to face the others. Everyone’s hand seems vaguely on top of everyone else’s hand, as though there was a mallet between them and they were determining who should be first at croquet. And before them all, his own little hands resting on his mother’s knee, is a standing infant. His back is to the viewer. He wears a charming, common smock and his head is covered with tight blond curls. His head is tipped slightly toward his mother’s lap. And everyone’s head seems slightly tipped toward him. The expressions on the faces of the mother and her oldest daughter are marked by a tight-lipped calm, as would befit those, we might suppose, who have passed on. Entwined in the lower windings of the iron bench is an empty nest.
The father has told the child that those who have loved become a single angel in heaven or a sole beast in hell.
They sit in front of the fire, the father and the child. The wall is empty, as it has always been, except for a little while that morning. The child says, “I think that that thing should
have a name, like graves have words. What do you think, Daddy? Of course it’s a foolish thing, it almost makes me want to laugh, Daddy.”
“Some things don’t have names,” he says. “Many things.”
“I think that maybe if it had been done another way I couldn’t stand it. But nothing was right, was it, Daddy? The eyes or anything. It won’t be like that, will it? We won’t be all together again? It would make Mother so unhappy. You know, sometimes she comes back to me just before I fall asleep and her face is like a movie star’s, but I know it’s her because that’s the way dreams are. She’s sad and pretty, Daddy, like once you said she was, and she holds my hand like she used to, Daddy, remember she was always interrupting me and holding my hand and I would be busy but she would hold my hand and hold me back and say, I just want to know that you’re here beside me for a moment, Katey. I just want to know that I’m here with my little girl. And I would say, Yes, Mummy, but we never could give her what she really wanted, could we, Daddy? And now when she comes to me at night, she’s sad but not crying and she doesn’t say those terrible things any more. She doesn’t say anything for a long long while, but then she always says, please don’t ever bring me back again. That’s what she says. That’s all she ever says.”
The Reverend is silent and the child shyly drops her eyes.
GOD IS IN HEAVEN AND THOU UPON EARTH THEREFORE LET THY WORDS BE FEW
. Ecclesiastes 5:2 or 2:5, she thinks and begins to chew nervously on her nails. She keeps forgetting things. Sometimes she trembles because she can never seem to keep things straight in her head.
“Don’t do that, sweet. You’ll spoil your pretty hands.”
Her hands are freckled and yellowish. They were always being scratched or bumped or squeezed. She puts them away.
“I think a nice title for that thing, that painting, if it ever
sees the light of day again would be
Mortals prepare for you must come and join the long retreat
,” the child says.
He looks at her gently. “Where did you see that?”
“I heard it one day, from you.”
He has a cold blister at the corner of his mouth. He touches it with his tongue. “There is no retreat,” he says. “Words are often a presumption and a sin.”
The child knows all about words. And sin. She knows that even a baby is polluted in the eyes of the Lord. She knows that every person who has ever been born had been born bad. Everybody living is sinful and everybody dead and everybody quick. The baby that had died in her mother’s stomach, that had killed her mother, had nothing on any of them just because it had never been born. It was only twice gone, that’s what it was.
The child knows all about faith too. She knows that punishment doesn’t have the slightest relationship with what you do or don’t do.
They go into the kitchen for dessert but there is nothing sweet in the house. They settle for a wedge of cheese.
“This is very sophisticated,” the child says, not enjoying it much.
The two of them sit side by side at the table in the position they had always held.
FOUR OF THEM
had been at the table not so long ago. It is the Fourth of July. The Reverend Jason Jackson is at the head, a handsome man, wearing his hair a little long, a little out of style. There is one eye, his left, that he cannot close. The nerves are severed in the lid. An old injury. He is thirty-one. No one is aware that his eye is curious. It can only be noticed when he is sleeping.
To his right sits Katey. She hums and stares past the worn window sill toward the sea. She has thick dark braids, tightly knotted. Her hair troubles her. She feels it is a vanity
and is afraid that some day when she is riding the neighbor’s great bay horse, she will catch it in an oak tree like Absalom and die.
Opposite her is her sister, a round and freckled girl of eleven. From her schoolmates, she has acquired a flat New England accent that no one else in the family has. She is energetic and affectionate and studies her mother shamelessly, trying to detect how to be a lady.
Kate has no desire of becoming a lady. She wants to be sexless, like an angel.
It is the Fourth of July and they are eating salmon and peas. The mother insists that they adhere to the tradition of each holiday. Shrove Tuesday there are pancakes, every Easter a ham. Each Christmas there’s a pudding with the beef.
The mother does favors for them all. She likes nice things. She has learned of nice things in the state of New York where she tells the girls she was born. New York seems to Kate as distant and as cheerless as the desert. She tells the girls about New York. She tells them that Dewey was not elected President because of his mustache. She tells them how to eat an artichoke should they ever be offered an artichoke. She instructs them in the writing of thank-you notes. Kate receives this information mutely as though she were accepting punishment.
The day is incredibly white. Sailboats with striped spinnakers rim the island. A blueberry pie bakes in the oven. It is taken out too quickly. The bottom crust is thick and underdone. The mother cuts huge wedges for everyone and puts them on old pewter plates. She pours out glasses of milk for the girls. On the bottom of Kate’s glass is a picture of Charlie McCarthy. She is a child and this is her glass. Each time that she lags in drinking her milk, her mother urges her on with the promise that there is a surprise at the bottom. Kate has seen the picture a hundred times and loathes Charlie
McCarthy who even in real life is only made of wood. She thinks her mother is simple-minded.
The mother and sister are talking to one another. The girl is speaking of a friend’s dachshund on the mainland. It’s slipped a disc and is in a pet hospital.
“They’re not made properly.” The mother laughs. They chuckle and chat.
Surely this is not what is actually being discussed. Kate is so little, beautiful and glum. She is constantly trying to hear. She can hear perfectly but she doesn’t believe any of it. Her mother has expressed concern over her vocabulary which is rigid and obscure. Sometimes the mother wants to hug her or slap her because Kate turns eyes upon her that are totally passionless and without mercy.
Kate takes the filling out of the pie and spreads it across her plate in an unpleasant paste. She is thinking about a little book that she has in her room on the Ten Commandments. It is a Golden Book of crummy construction. Each commandment is accompanied by a picture depicting what is going on. Opposite
THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY
there is a drawing of two little children running away from a house with a broken window. Kate can’t understand this and she asks her father to explain it to her. He does, the mother believes, a little too explicitly. He does not comment on the picture which is so subtle that it suggests the workings of a truly erotic mind, but he speaks of everything else. Kate sits with her mouth ajar. Her sister starts to cry. The mother is furious and the meal is a shambles, the pie forgotten by everyone except the Reverend. He finishes his portion, oblivious to the commotion around him. He wipes his mouth with a napkin and then makes a steeple of his hands. He looks at them.