The Underpainter (23 page)

“The few girls he would get to know,” Augusta told me, “would have to come to him and practically force themselves upon his attention.”

While she was speaking to me about harvest time on her girlhood farm, two pictures of Augusta as a very young woman repeatedly appeared in my mind. In one, she was pulling a wagon full of stoneware jugs towards an empty field; in the other, she was shaking dust cloths and braided rugs from the windows of a north room. In both she seemed to be participating in a strange ritual of farewell.

“I never saw the end of the harvest of 1913,” Augusta informed me, “and I was never home for harvest time again.”

Sometime during the previous winter her father had announced that now that she was finished with her schooling, there were four possibilities open to her. “Four possibilities,” he had said, holding up the fingers of his left hand, “marriage, teaching, nursing, and, as these are modern times, stenography.”

Because some of her brothers had been having trouble at school, Augusta spent the remainder of the winter testing her pedagogical skills by forcing some of the younger boys to concentrate, after dinner, on a series of spellers and readers that she remembered as being far from interesting. The theme of most of the poems the boys were given to read at school, and all of the poems they were required to memorize, was fidelity to the Mother country. Years later, Augusta would dream about this night kitchen, the snow falling outside the window, and the boys, their eyes glazed with boredom, reciting:

In the dream she would try to warn her brothers, but they behaved as if she weren’t there, as if her voice weren’t reaching them. She always awoke weeping.

But while she was attempting to teach them, she felt only the boredom, hers and theirs, and knew she could not devote her life to the passing on of memory work. In the early autumn
of 1913 she enrolled in the Toronto General Hospital School of Nursing.

As George had, I have come to love Augusta’s past. I like to think of her as a child, a child of perhaps eleven or twelve years, just before her brief bout of play was followed by mandatory adulthood. I like to think of her sitting in her village graveyard, surrounded by children, villagers, and farmers on Decoration Day. George wrote to me about this yearly event once, after he had attended the ceremony with Augusta, who had put flowers on her father’s grave and placed a wreath at the war memorial. The church service was held in the cemetery on a Sunday in June, when the blossoms were out and the leaves were fresh. Several wagons were employed to bring the organ from the church, chairs from the parish hall, and benches from the Sunday school. And then all of this indoor furniture was arranged among the tombstones, on the grass.

The graveyard itself, as I see it, would be full of modest white stones, would be surrounded by a white fence, and there would be neither deep ravines nor mausoleums nor vicious weather. There would be enough shade for comfort, but not so much as to darken the atmosphere. The women would be wearing colourful dresses and there would be hats on everyone’s heads, white shoes on everyone’s feet. A breeze in the pines, fresh flowers on the grass, an uplifting hymn on the organ. Song. I like to think of Augusta there on Decoration Day, a warm day in June, the graves of her ancestors suitably decorated, her Sunday-school cards in a little crocheted purse, ribbons in her hair, and the war not yet even a rumour. I like to think of a day like that: George’s beloved Northumberland Hills rolling off in all
directions, the dark trees of the bush pressing down from the north, towards this gorgeous cultivation, this decency.

“I was never home for harvest time again,” Augusta said. “I enrolled in the Toronto General Hospital School of Nursing and then, a few years later, I volunteered to go overseas.”

Beyond the windows of the China Hall an ocean of snow churned in the streetlight.

“What about the boys?” I asked.

Augusta was silent for a long, long time. I began to think she wasn’t going to answer. Perhaps she was never going to tell me what happened to her brothers.

“Some of them,” she finally said, “were too young to go to war.”

I know now that I could have talked to George. I might have told him almost anything. I should have, for instance, told him about Sara. But I didn’t. I recall that when he revealed his relationship with Augusta to me I believed I had nothing similar to confide, despite the fact that I had been painting Sara then for five summers. Also, having years before taken Robert Henri’s admonition concerning privacy to heart, I remained stubbornly fixed in the listening and gathering period of my life, keeping my activities so brilliantly compartmentalized I was called upon to disclose very little of myself to anyone, little beyond a superficial litany of my own questionable achievements. The deeper currents of the world, when I was lucky enough to stumble upon
them, existed, I believed at the time, to be examined by me, then used in my art for my own advancement.

After what occurred on a winter night in 1937, controlling things, ordering them, became untenable. I removed my dangerous self from the innocent traffic of humanity, began to look inward.

I have taken nothing from the world since.

N
ow that I am old, and there is neither the opportunity nor the desire to change the pattern of my life, I am forced to admit to myself how much of my experience has been second-hand. I think constantly about the others: those I knew who entered wars and love affairs, those who, unlike me, let passion break them. George, Rockwell, Augusta. Sara. I cannot forget how they crept near and, like merchants unfurling silk scarves on table-tops, placed narrative after colourful narrative in front of me. I cannot forget how they pulled their knowledge of the world back into their own hearts and slipped out of my line of vision, more interested suddenly in death or fame or the Arctic. All except for Sara, who would have stayed, I think. But who can ever know these things? And perhaps I’m being unfair. God knows I was frequently more interested in my own fame and my own interior Arctic. Unable until now to muster the concentration necessary to report my memories verbally to anyone, all my energies have gone into the past, to exorcising ghosts, to obliterating conscience.

They say that in old age the long-term memory becomes vivid, punches its fist through the skin of the present, insists on being heard and seen and felt. George and Augusta bring their inner landscapes with them into these white rooms of mine, and I feel their sorrows and tendernesses, their resentments and anxieties, in a way that I have never experienced my own emotions. But how crowded and unfocused this looking back is; all these foreign fields, the battles, this china collection. Views of rocks and trees, hills and streams. I scarcely know which images are mine and which have been taken by me, fully developed, from the others, or whether there is, in the final analysis, any difference.

This is the uncertainty I have been left with. This is the true inheritance.

Mrs. Boyle is very impressed with the carefully rendered scenes and landscapes of my underpainting, told me so just this morning when I discovered her standing, hands on hips, staring at the most recent work-in-progress.

“This side is just lovely,” she said, pointing a feather duster towards the least finished area of the painting. “I feel like if I touched that water I’d get my fingers wet, it’s that real.”

“You would get your fingers wet,” I told her. “The paint is not dry yet.”

“You know very well what I mean,” she said. “But what have you gone and done with those wonderful stones over here that you spent all last month exhausting yourself by painting, one by one, at any hour of the day or night, that’s what I want to know?
You’ve gone and smudged them up so that you can’t tell any more what they are at all.”

“Mrs. Boyle,” I said, feigning both gratitude and surprise, “I didn’t know you cared. You’re becoming a real art critic.”

“Oh, I’m no art critic,” she said, “but I know when you’re having trouble. You start smudging everything up when you’re having trouble, then you call up some truck to come and take the paintings away.”

“That truck, Mrs. Boyle, comes from the art gallery in New York.”

She looked at me with great scepticism. “You can’t fool me,” she said. Then she told me something very odd. “I’m very fond of places,” she said. “Which is why I like your paintings so much before you smudge them up. I always pray for my three most special places — Cappangrown and Mastergeeha in Ireland, and the small house on David Street.”

“I wonder what you hope to accomplish by praying for a place?” I was really quite taken aback by this.

“The farm in Kerry where I grew up, the farm we had to leave to come here, and the little house we have now. I pray for them every night.”

“Well, I suppose you should pray for this house then, rather than the owner of it.”

Mrs. Boyle looked around her uneasily. “Who’d pray for a great cold barn of a place like this?” she said. “Begging your pardon,” she added, as if my feelings might have been bruised by her statement. Then she offered me this advice: “If you’d just leave those places you’ve painted alone when they’re all filled up with those lovely trees and water and people and houses, then
everything would be fine. You always come back and muck around afterwards and ruin them. If you’d just let them alone, they’d be the most wonderful paintings in the world.”

I rarely completed pictures while I was at Silver Islet Landing; my time was mostly given over to drawing and oil sketches. But each summer I began three or four large figurative canvases, which I shipped to New York a few days before the end of the summer. I cannot now recall where those paintings might have gone after they were finished, exhibited, and sold. Collectors. Galleries. If I knew, and had I the courage, I might make the journey to look at one or another of them, to look at Sara. It seems fantastically odd to me now that I spent all those winters apart from her, meticulously colouring her flesh, and never once wanted to know what she might have been doing at any given hour, as if during those cold months she had ceased to exist, except on canvas, had become merely a composition. And what had I become to her? A ghost, perhaps, a shadowy figure. Why did she allow me entrance summer after summer, her face welcoming, exposed? I think now of the life she chose, the isolation, the huge lake pounding mere steps from her door, the world she had known in childhood diminishing and then gone for good with her father’s death. I think of her living through the harshness, the loneliness of those winters, living on her summer wages. I once asked her how she managed, thinking I could contribute something if she was in need. She looked at me with that frank gaze of hers and said that she stockpiled what she got in
summer, preparing for the inevitable return of winter. I was aware that she was referring to more than money, but I let it pass without comment.

“You and the fox,” I said.

“Me and the fox,” she replied.

Nothing in her voice suggested that she had ever felt sorry for herself; she was too proud for that. There was a kind of dignity, a stateliness to the rhythms of her life, and I think in some deep way she was aware of that. She insisted that she was never really unhappy in the winter. “I chose this,” she would say. “I could go somewhere else if I wanted to, but I chose this. Hasn’t that ever occurred to you?”

It hadn’t. I was so involved in trying to direct my own life, my own work, I took it for granted that others must necessarily be victims of circumstance.

I had learned that if we removed ourselves from the subject, if we used a combination of sketches and memory when we were working on a painting, we would be more likely to put our true feelings into the work. I removed myself each year from the subject, there is no question about that. But did I ever put my own true feelings into the work? Might I see some evidence of them now if I were to look at one of the pictures of Sara? Would I recognize my emotions if they were there? What the hell do they look like?

And how did I appear to Sara? Who did she see when she looked at me?

A man in love with the stifling order he had imposed upon his own life.

“May you get what you wish for,” Mrs. Boyle always says to me when she is finished for the day and preparing to leave the house. “May you get what you wish for and may it be what you meant.”

The problem as I began to see it towards the end of my attachment to realism was that I had lost sight of the necessary interval on the picture plane, the visual pause that had happened quite naturally when I still worked with landscape, still worked with the spatial interrelation of rendered form. There was always a break in detail of rocks, say, or foliage, an unencumbered space that pushed forward from distance, something large and unmeasurable, like sky or water.

When I painted Sara now, she filled the picture plane, her body spilling forward as if she were about to separate from the surface of the painting and enter an embrace. She would be trailing behind her the light of northern summer afternoons. Her face would be welcoming, disclosed, as if she were about to tell you that there is a source of light out there where you stand, that there is a world beyond this painting. But even so, the brilliance poured from her body, her self, into the viewer’s life. It was relentless. There was no dark pause, no negative space at all.