The Underpainter (21 page)

Just then a customer walked into the China Hall. She was looking for a teapot, she said, having broken hers that morning while washing up after breakfast. I was thinking that it was just as well that George’s “beautiful, fragile” objects were no longer being made, believing that, had I seen them I would have found them to be in questionable taste. I had looked at George’s radiant face when he described them, but, as always, I had been suspicious of the light.

George had told me, but only when I asked him, about his visits to the museums I cared about in Paris, how he had been overwhelmed and exhausted by the quantity and the size of the pictures in the Louvre — the Delacroixs, the Géricaults — how he recalled the violent subject matter of the larger paintings, but couldn’t say specifically what form the violence had taken. Everything in them, he said, seemed to be in conflict with everything else. And yet his visual memories of the Musée des Arts
Décoratifs, which was still bravely mounting temporary exhibitions as well as keeping open their permanent collection, were surprisingly vivid.

There was, he said, a heartbreaking exhibition relating to the Cathedral of Rheims right after that building was bombed, which included medieval drawings, plans for sculptural friezes, baptismal fonts, capitals, and the like. He was very moved by the fact that most of the artists who had worked on these were unknown, and that many of them had not lived to see the cathedral in its finished state.

At the time, I blamed his lack of regard for the great paintings I was familiar with on his inadequate formal education.

When George finished with the customer and turned to me again, I saw that all of the light had gone from his face. “I’ll never forget the moment in Lambert’s atelier,” he said, “when I realized there were two worlds of art. One up there,” he pointed towards the ceiling again, “and one down here, a little closer to earth.”

I said nothing. I waited.

“It made me very happy,” he added, “to be able to understand this.” Some crates had arrived earlier in the day and George sighed and began to unpack them. I thought the design on the dinnerware was quite striking and I told him so. The pattern was geometric, with triangular shapes painted in bold colours. It caught the eye, made a quick, forceful statement.

“Mass-produced,” he said to me. “It’s all anyone wants any more.”

I was preparing to leave. It was June and I was, as usual, on my way to Silver Islet Landing. George reached behind the counter and handed me my overnight bag.

“There is only one world of art now,” he said. “The war finished the other one off.” He was walking me to the door. “Only one world of art,” he repeated. “Yours.”

We shook hands and said goodbye. I left the shop and walked up Division Street towards the train that would take me to Toronto and from there to Port Arthur. As always, I passed that sad asylum on my route. It was a warm day; some of the inmates were seated in canvas chairs here and there on the lawn. They were in stark sunlight and threw odd shadows. I wondered about George’s friend Augusta, whom I had not yet met, wondered how a girl afflicted with shell shock would behave. There were both men and women on the lawn, far back from the fence I was walking along. They were sitting so still they might have been monuments. I kept on walking, past the brick façades of tidy houses towards the station.

I didn’t think much about what George had said to me just before I left the China Hall. It would be years before I would interpret his last statement as anything other than a compliment.

W
hen I had known her for about a decade, Sara told me that profound sadness affected her physically in an unusual way. It caused her wrists to ache. “I didn’t understand it,” she said, “until I realized that the wrists are connected to the heart. The wrists are where the echo of the heart lives.”

Her wrists had ached for months after her father had died; the largest loss she had ever had to contend with. She didn’t remember her mother at all. Apart from what her father had told her about his young Scandinavian bride whose own father had worked alongside him in the mine, she didn’t know much about her. He had been much older than she was, had almost given up hope of marrying altogether, had been stunned when this girl accepted his proposal. There was one small, stiff photo of her mother, which rested on Sara’s bureau. A blonde, delicate-looking woman with Sara’s frank expression.

“She died having me,” Sara confided. “I always wondered when I was a child whether God intended me to be her replacement, and if that meant that I would die in childbirth too.”

There was an uncomfortable silence after she said this. We both knew that Sara was, even then, almost too old to have children.

“Tell me about your mother,” Sara said. She was lying on her father’s bed with her arm flat against her forehead, her face in profile; she was not looking at me. It was late in the afternoon on a calm day. I was, as usual, behind the easel.

“Well?” she said when I didn’t answer.

“What is there to tell?” I said. “She died when I was quite young.”

“But you do remember her?”

“Yes, I remember her.”

“Tell me something about her. Anything at all.”

Silence.

“What colour were her eyes?”

“I don’t know.”

“How could you not know what colour your mother’s eyes were?” If Sara had been able to break the pose, she would have turned to me then with her doubting look. “I wish I had seen my mother’s eyes — my father said they were blue — but I wish I could remember them.”

“Blue,” I said, though I realized that I had never thought about this, and could not really say for sure. “They must have been blue. My father’s were as well.”

“He must have been terribly distraught when your mother died.”

I remembered him shuddering with grief near the music box. I had no wish to re-create that moment, its tenseness. “I don’t know,” I said. I was working now on Sara’s hair, which was spread out like a banner on the pillow.

“You do know,” she said.

“Excuse me?” It had been a moment of botched tenderness on the part of my father. I wanted to forget all about it.

“But you must have known whether or not he was shaken. You just don’t want to tell me.”

I said nothing. One is kept so busy with oil paint. Mixing colour, adding oil, cleaning brushes.

“And what about now, do you see your father often?”

“Now and then, not often.” I had not, in fact, seen him for over a year. He was waiting, I knew, for me to grow up, to give up this nonsense with paints and brushes. What he really objected to was my subject matter. I was unprepared for this prudish side of him. Still, he was somewhat mollified by the fact that I was beginning to make some money. It angered me and I had told him so. I had convinced myself that I was protecting Sara by not telling her this, by not discussing my father at all.

“I suppose that he is embarrassed about you painting nudes,” she said.

I rummaged around in a shallow wooden box, looking for a sepia-coloured pencil.

“Why is it that you’re always asking me about
my
father?” she asked. “You’d rather talk about him than your own.”

“What is this?” I asked. “Psychoanalysis?”

Sara sighed then, most likely with impatience. I saw her ribcage rise and fall.

“He’s more interesting,” I said. “Your father is more interesting.”

“But you never knew him.”

I never knew my own father either, but did not see any point in telling Sara that.

Later, while we were swimming, Sara told me about the Cousin Jacks, a group of miners from Cornwall who would stop at the Miners’ Hotel in Cobalt when they had emigrated from the Old Country, how they would board there for a few weeks before fanning out to the various mines in northern Ontario, or how they would sometimes settle in for a longer period of time if they found employment in or near the town. Her father had maintained that those guests at the hotel who were not miners — tourists and other visitors — would be thrown out in the middle of the night if authentic miners appeared and there was no room in the inn.

This charmed me, both for its clear policy relating to the brotherhood of miners and for the proprietor’s simple loyalty to his chosen clientele. I could imagine weary salesmen and speculators (in my imagination they all looked suspiciously like my father) in striped pyjamas floundering about in the snow under a wintry moon while men in lit hats and overalls slipped into their warm, recently abandoned beds. I knew this wasn’t quite the way the scenario would unfold, but the idea made me laugh, and I resolved to tell Rockwell about it when next we met, though it would be unlikely that I would credit Sara with this story. We had not yet spoken about her. But I had already told him that Cobalt had been the town that had made my capitalist father’s surprise fortune. I knew he would be interested in that.

“Do you know if your father would have stopped at the Miners’ Hotel?” I asked. Sara thought so, but couldn’t say for certain, as it would have been before she was born.

“We’ll meet there,” I told her, “at the beginning of next summer … see if we’re thrown out for not being miners.”

She smiled and dove away from me, swam quite a distance in the direction of Burnt Island. I could tell that she didn’t believe me. I was serious about going there.

The following afternoon I walked over to a wall in the upstairs room and wrote “Meet Austin, June 6th, 1933 at the Miners’” in large charcoal letters on the cracked plaster surface. Then I pulled out my wallet and gave Sara ten Canadian dollars for the train fare.

She looked at the money in her hand. “I’ve never been to Cobalt,” she said, “though I think I heard the hotel owner has died.”

“The hotel is still there?”

“I suppose so.”

“Let’s meet then,” I said. “I want to see this legendary place. Maybe we’ll encounter some Cousin Jacks.”

“There aren’t so many now. And it’s two hundred miles from here.”

“Ever since you taught me that song I’ve wanted to go there.” I picked up a brush, pretended to conduct an imaginary choir, and sang, “Oh, we’ll sing a little song about Cobalt. If you’ve never lived there it’s your fault.”

Sara did not laugh. I could tell by the expression on her face that she thought I was toying with her.

“Wasn’t it you who told me that at the bottom of every hole in the world you could find a Cornishman?”

“My father used to say that.”

“Let’s meet there,” I said.

The following June I appeared at the Miners’ Hotel, having spent my customary two days with George in Davenport before heading north. Even as the train approached the grim little mining town, I was filled with ambivalence and waited to pull my luggage from the rack until the conductor had shouted the word “Cobalt” three times and the station came into view beyond the windows of the coach. I left my bags, my canvas and art supplies, at the small wine-coloured station, jumped down from the platform, stepped across the rails, and walked towards the unpainted frame hotel on the opposite side of the tracks. Some of its windows were lit. In one of them I could see a woman walking away from the view. It took me a moment or two to realize that it was Sara, that while I was storing my baggage she had been watching the passengers emerge from the train, and that, unable to see me, she had concluded that I was not among them.

When Sara opened the door of the hotel room she smiled, but there was still anxiety in her eyes. I stepped over the threshold, did not embrace her, but walked instead over to the window and looked out into the darkening sky. When I turned around she was sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I didn’t know how long to wait,” she said. “I’ve been here for two days.”

It was only then that I remembered that I had promised to arrive at the hotel two days earlier.

“You and the miners.”

“Me and the miners.” She ran her hand through her hair, a gesture I was familiar with. “I saw some of them at supper in the dining room.”

I remember now in detail the simple metal bed, the sink in the corner, the dirty window propped open to let some of the night air into the room, the overwhelming sound of a passing train interrupting whatever it was Sara was trying to say, the tension we both felt while the racket dominated the atmosphere.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said when the noise had abated somewhat. “Or that I had missed you somehow.” She moved across the room to me and placed her cheek against my chest. “I was afraid to leave in case you came and found me gone.”

“I have been working like crazy in the past few weeks,” I said. “I actually lost track of the days of the week.” I did not tell her about Davenport, about visiting George. “And then, of course, there was getting ready to leave, getting everything I needed to come here.”

Silence.

“To come to Silver Islet, that is.”

In that room Sara’s clothes looked shabby and worn, her hair dull, her face strained. It pains me now to remember this, but for just a moment I thought her foolish for arriving early or on time, for taking me at my word. As the previous year had unfolded, the idea of this excursion had seemed more and more like a silly
whim, the few times that I thought about it at all. What I felt standing in that room, forty-eight hours late for our appointment, was not shame but rather a vague irritation at the stirrings of guilt. I had passed an eventful winter. By the time I left New York I almost didn’t care whether Sara would meet me in Cobalt. I had lost, as I did each winter, my connection to her world, her father’s world, my interest in this faded hotel. By the end of May, as I organized my art supplies, I would have convinced myself that what was luring me to the north was the knowledge that it was there, and only there, that I was able to begin another year’s worth of art.

Through the walls that night I could hear the snores of the miners, their coughs, and the bedsprings shifting under their weight. Sara said that in the dining room in the evenings, the hotel keeper walked through the room handing men letters from home, and that on both nights she thought there might have been a message from me.