The Underpainter (26 page)

A medic touched Maggie’s wrist. “She’s alive,” he said.

The tune stopped playing in Augusta’s mind. Fred was dead.

The surgeon looked directly at Augusta. “Anesthetize her,” he ordered, anger in his voice.

“This can’t be Maggie,” she whimpered. “I don’t want to touch her face.”

The nurse on the other side of the table was crying, her sodden mask hanging heavy around her neck.

The doctor shook Augusta’s shoulder. “Anesthetize her!” he commanded.

Wincing, she brought the mask down over the broken face. For a fraction of a second she was back on the dunes at the moment when Maggie first emerged from the fog. That odd combination of greyness and radiance. Then she heard the sound of the saw. When the skull had been opened for some time, she touched the surgeons sleeve. “Doctor?” she said.

“I’m trying to save her,” he responded testily. “Though God knows why.”

The moon had gone down by now and the room was filled with the golden light of candles. A banquet hall. A basilica. Maggie’s blood made a sucking sound beneath Augusta’s sand-filled shoes.

Doctor?
she had asked.
God knows why
, he had replied.

No one noticed when Augusta turned up the dial, causing the amount of diethyl ether to rise well above the level of safety. But by then, Augusta had redefined safety.

After that it seemed to Augusta that she was a child again standing in the slow rain of the interior of her snow house waiting for the grey girl to appear. The world she had so carefully constructed was dissolving around her and no golden light poured through the window. Shrinking before her very eyes, the white armchair remained cold and empty. The ice walls were streaming with moisture and the snow was soiled by mud.

I couldn’t even remember what she looked like,” she told me. “I had lost both the premonition and the memory of her physical presence, as if she had never existed, as if I had imagined her completely. This terrified me even more than the fact that she was dead. Everything about her was lost, utterly.”

Augusta had anesthetized two more boys and then, just as the dawn broke, the surgeon had made her leave the operating theatre.

“I’m sorry your friend died,” the doctor had said to her as she was untying her mask, “but there was nothing anyone could do.”

“No,” Augusta had agreed, “there wasn’t anything that anyone could do.”

D
uring that same spring of 1918, I was attending Robert Henri’s classes intermittently — he himself was often not there — and I was working on a more or less permanent part-time basis at the advertising firm of Carter and Fielding, making drawings of carpet sweepers, kitchen ranges, wringer washers, and the smiling, improbably glamorous women who stood beside them. I had a decent flat in Greenwich Village and was able to set up a reasonable studio there. Despite the fact that my father regularly supplemented my income, I believed myself to be, in what I called my “real” work, an authentic painter of the people — as was the fashion then — and so I spent a great deal of time under the bridges, down on the docks, and in the bars near the waterfront. Sometimes I visited brothels, having convinced myself that it was necessary to do so in order to better understand certain aspects of my subject matter. The girls loved to pose, and as I was often able to be there in the afternoon, I wasn’t keeping them from their more lucrative nighttime activities.

He who had introduced me to this particular side of life had set up housekeeping with his wife and family on Staten Island. This, of course, meant that there was a convenient stretch of water between his responsibilities at home and his questionable though more interesting conduct in Manhattan. This is not to suggest that Rockwell did not love Kathleen and the children; he loved them deeply, wanted nothing more than their happiness. Years after he and Kathleen had separated forever, he would speak of her with such tenderness it was possible to believe that she had stepped out of the room, out of his embrace, just minutes before. In his exuberance, his enthusiasm for everything that existed in the world — at least everything he considered to be innocent — the focus of his affection would shift and change, was capable of being multidirectional. Sometimes it even attached itself to the inanimate.

Once, when we were walking behind a tenement on the Lower East Side, Rockwell spotted an abandoned sawhorse in a heap of trash. He stopped in his tracks and shook his head sadly. “The poor darling,” he said. “A fate like this after selflessly committing his body to a lifetime of helping carpenters.”

He was not joking; his eyes were filled with tears. “We must take him away from here,” he insisted. “We must take him to a better home.”

After we dug the sawhorse out of the trash pile, Rockwell caressed it, wept over it, praised humanity in the light of it. While he expounded on its service record, its long, patient hours in the company of labour, he ran his fingers gently over the hundreds of saw marks on its battered surface. He was quite sober at that moment, but was determined that we should take
the sawhorse with us on our tour of the bars, where he would use it as a point of departure for various lectures of a socialist nature. How vividly I remember the last glimpse that I caught of him that night. He was standing on the deck of the Staten Island ferry, singing “Solidarity Forever” and waving goodbye, with the sawhorse — now called Dobbin — tucked protectively under one arm.

Much later I would paint the dark water with bright-blue lights reflecting on it, and I would use the same shade of ultramarine blue to illuminate the life buoys on the ferry and Rockwell’s kind face. I would paint the angular form of the sawhorse in lamp black, and, for the first time, I would put myself into the underpainting, almost a silhouette, shown from the rear.

Oddly enough it was this dark figure, this witness to departure, that was the most difficult to transform, that bled through the subsequent layers of paint, and finally had to be scraped off with a knife.

One afternoon, sometime during the previous winter of 1918, I had returned from class to find a note from Rockwell pinned on my door. “Be at Sloan’s Bar, 5
P.M
.,” it read. “There’s someone from upstate I want you to meet.”

I opened the door, tossed my portfolio inside, and clattered back down the narrow stairwell that led to the street. It was already after five. Rockwell’s energy made him a restless man with a tensile attention span. He might not still be there.

But he was, and in the company of an older man, wonderfully dishevelled; a man who gave the impression that, although
sitting reasonably still, he was nevertheless being buffeted by invisible forces. He was sweating profusely and kept mopping his wet brow with a large, stained pink handkerchief.

“Austin,” said Rockwell, “meet Abbott Thayer. He hates this bar.”

Rockwell had called the establishment Sloan’s Bar ever since the painter John Sloan had made a picture of the place. It was, in actuality, named McSorely’s Ale House, as was the work of art.

“I do not hate this ale house,” said Thayer. “I hate no place on earth. But it is far too warm and there are no angels here.”

I looked at Rockwell. He was listening attentively to what the older man had to say. “You hate Sloan’s painting,” he said to him.

“The painter has depicted only that which is here, not what might be here, not what should be here. Why, why,” demanded Thayer, “why would he want to do that?”

“He has painted the dignity of the common man, Abbott.” Rockwell motioned in the direction of one of the bartenders. “Look at him, Abbott. There he stands in his long white apron. He probably is an angel, and if not now, he will probably become an angel”

“There are no animals here either,” said Thayer, ignoring altogether Rockwell’s fantasies about the bartender. “There aren’t even any concealed animals here”

“Thayer here,” explained Rockwell, “has written a most scholarly volume entitled
Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom
. Tell Austin about the blue jay, Abbott.”

“I don’t want to talk about the blue jay,” said Thayer. He looked around the room suspiciously. “The enemy might be
listening. One can never be too careful.” He rose to his feet, approached the potential angel, and ordered another glass of water.

“Thayer is in town,” Rockwell told me, “because he is trying to encourage various and sundry worthies to take his theories to the War Department. He’s had a hell of an ongoing row with Teddy Roosevelt about birds, concealing colouration and all that.”

“Teddy Roosevelt?” I choked on my beer. “Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. They’ve been battling it out for over a year.” Thayer returned to the table and slumped dejectedly in his chair. “How many letters has Roosevelt written to you, about the blue jay?” Rockwell asked him.

Thayer drew his chair closer to mine and whispered, “The blue jay is invisible in snow. He is coloured blue and white precisely so that he will blend with the snow. I have made a painting entitled
Blue Jay in Snow
in which the bird is entirely invisible, cant see him at all.” He loosened the dirty, faded cravat at his throat. “Mr. ? Roosevelt refuses to accept my incontestable proof of this, to the great peril of the war effort. What was the point of us entering this godforsaken war if concealing colouration is not used to our advantage?” He thumped his forehead with his handkerchief, attempting to capture various beads of sweat.

“I helped this man do a painting once of a snake moving through leaves,” said Rockwell. “And when we were finished, the snake had completely disappeared from the canvas.”

“Why did the
Titanic
meet with disaster?” Thayer demanded of me, as if I were a schoolboy and he the master.

“Because it hit an iceberg.”

“And what colour was the iceberg?”

“White.”

“Well, there you have it.”

“Thayer says,” Rockwell clarified, “that a white object floating on a dark sea at night is invisible. And since Roosevelt himself has had white ships under his command, Thayer believed he might have been a kindred spirit.”

“What does this have to do with the blue jay?” I asked with as much gravity as I could muster.

“Nothing,” said Rockwell.

“Everything!” thundered Thayer, the possible presence of the enemy evidently forgotten. “The blue jay is blue and white in order to make itself invisible in shadowed snow, whether Mr. T. Roosevelt believes it or not! That means that anything may appear to disappear!” He had attracted considerable attention in the bar. He pulled out his handkerchief again and mopped his brow. “Forgive me,” he said to the dozen or so curious faces turned in his direction. “I have a nervous disposition.”

“Henri always says that brilliancy is moving towards colour, not towards white,” I told Thayer, who immediately became even more agitated.

“You should have a beer,” said Rockwell.

“I have never touched alcohol.”

“I’ll bet there is beer in heaven,” said Rockwell. “I’ll bet the angels drink beer. I’ve never seen even a hint of a nervous disposition in your angels, Abbott.” He turned to me. “Thayer paints angels as well,” he said.

“In 1912,” Thayer said to me, once again ignoring Rockwell’s
remarks, “well before the outbreak of the war, I invited Mr. T. Roosevelt to witness the disappearance of the blue jay in the shadowed snow of Central Park. Three or four of the birds had concealed themselves beautifully there in full view of the fifty witnesses who had accompanied me to the spot the week before. The blue feathers are for the shadows, and the white feathers are, of course, for the snow. The smaller, darker markings are there precisely so that you will confuse them with twigs — the markings, of course, not the jay — though there
are
birds that look exactly like twigs all over and that conceal themselves in dead bushes and the like. Do you know what he wrote to me?”

I did not.

“He wrote to me that my experiments with the blue jay and snow have as little relation to real life as would such experiments with ‘a blue-rump baboon by the Mediterranean.’ The audacity! The pomposity! Oh, I am certain he has spoken to the War Department and that is why they ignore my theories of concealing colouration! Why, why are we in this war?”

“My sentiments exactly,” said Rockwell.

It had only been three years since Rockwell, his wife and children, had been turfed out of the British colony of Newfoundland. Rockwell could never understand why his singing of German lieder from a cliff edge at dawn, and at the top of his lungs, should have so upset the authorities. He offered lessons in music appreciation, and when those were refused, he painted a large, fierce German eagle on the outside door of the little building he used as a studio, partly as revenge and partly as a sign of respect for the northern Europeans whose culture he so loved. This was the final straw. He was
given notice to leave immediately, though permitted to delay his departure by two weeks when he explained that his children had the measles. He had loved Newfoundland. This war meant that he couldn’t be himself and remain there. He was disgusted when America entered the fray.

“I’ll tell you why we are in this war,” Rockwell was saying now. “We are in this war so that fat capitalists, like the father of Austin here, so that fat capitalists can get fatter.”

“Your father is a capitalist, sir?” Thayer looked at me for the first time with genuine interest.

I felt my face grow red, but said nothing.

Rockwell assured him that such was the case. “One of the worst,” he said. “Exploits miners, ruins pristine northern landscapes, slaughters virgin forests.”

Thayer smiled at me. “I have never,” he said, “approved of Kent’s socialist politics.”

“I’ll say!” said Rockwell. “He threw me right out of his house! Never let me back in the door! Now he only sees me in New York.”

“A terrible influence on the children,” Thayer confided. “Couldn’t have him spouting all that nonsense in front of the children, and other winged beings.”

“Look at that bartender,” Rockwell said. “Look at the small dark wings of his bow tie. In his own simple dignity, his ministrations to the tired, decent, honest, working men who visit his establishment, is he not also an angel?”