The Underpainter (27 page)

Thayer snorted, glared at Rockwell, and once again turned to me with a smile. “I paint winged beings,” he said. “The larger ones are angels, the middle-sized ones are portraits of my
children, who are angels but whose wings are cleverly disguised by concealing colouration, and the smaller ones are of birds … some concealed, and some, though it grieves me to say it, hopelessly exposed. Might your father be interested in any of these?”

“I’m afraid he is no collector,” I replied.

“Might he then,” Thayer persisted, “know anyone at the War Department? Would my theories of concealing colouration interest your father, do you think?”

“No, they wouldn’t,” interjected Rockwell. “Capitalists have no imagination, Abbott.”

“Neither do dogmatists,” retaliated Thayer. “There is nothing winged about them. Dogmatists never hang large, expensive angels in their homes. They will not admit that a zebra’s stripes were made by God to conceal the beast in long, thin weeds.”

“Hold it,” said Rockwell. “I helped you paint that invisible snake, remember?”

“That is true, Kent,” said Thayer. “I really wasn’t referring to you … yet. And, as you may gather, I am unwell. I am torn to pieces,” he lamented. “I am tied in knots. Why, why am I in this overheated bar? Why, why am I in this city?” He rose to his feet. “I must conceal myself in the country in the company of my winged creatures.” He placed his bowler hat upon his head. “Goodbye, gentlemen.”

“I love you, Abbott,” said Rockwell, leaping from his chair and embracing the older man.

“I love you too, Kent,” said Thayer, “but you are never again to visit my home.”

“I suppose it must be so,” said Rockwell.

“Yes, it must,” agreed Thayer. And then, after shaking my hand, he left McSorely’s Ale House, and not too many hours later I assume he left the city of New York.

“Well, aren’t you the fortunate one,” said Rockwell after the door had closed behind Abbott Thayer.

“How so?” I asked. I handed Rockwell a cigarette, lit one myself, then passed the lighter to my friend.

“God, I really do love that man. He introduced me to the Nordic sagas and God knows I love the north. But it was one of the happiest days of my life when I was banished from Thayer’s house. To be a bona fide member of the Thayer school, you realize, it is mandatory to visit his house … often. Now I am a man who loves the snow, the cold. Can you think of anyone who loves it more?”

I could not.

“Well, I can,” continued Rockwell. “Thayer loves it even more than me. Aren’t you the lucky one that he didn’t invite you.”

I wasn’t so sure of this. I had been drawn to the eccentricities of the man. “What’s the problem with the house?” I asked.

“The problem is, it is completely unheated. Thayer doesn’t believe in any form of artificial heat. Thinks it’s unhealthy.” Rockwell laughed. “I was there once in winter and almost died of pneumonia! Each morning when I woke, my chin was frozen to the blanket, my shoes frozen to the floor. The family sleeps outdoors year-round under makeshift lean-tos. Guests are permitted to bed down indoors. Not that it makes much difference;
all the windows are left open. For ventilation! Thayer says that if the men and women of the sagas could live without artificial heat, then so should we. He also says that angels waste away in artificial heat, and Thayer believes that all of his children are angels; though few of them are children any more.”

Rockwell described his first indoor blizzard. He had been sitting in a wooden armchair — Thayer did not approve of upholstery — talking with the man, when a sudden hard wind from the east had brought driving snow and sleet directly into the room. “Feel it!” Thayer had enthused. “Experience it! Thoreau should have known such indoor weather. He should be here with us.” They had been discussing Waiden at the time.

Rockwell walked up to the bar and ordered another beer.

“So, I suppose he is insane,” I said to him when he returned.

He looked at me with astonishment. “Insane? Absolutely not. He is himself … relentlessly himself. Not a man to change either his art or his character as a result of, for example, a show of contemporary European cubism.”

His reference to the Armory Show, which had taken place the year before I came to New York, was not lost on me. I myself, influenced by those who had been influenced by it, had attempted one or two cubist nudes.

I never met Thayer again and, in the early 1920s, I heard that he had died. I wonder what he would have thought of this cold white barn of a house I now live in. He would have approved, undoubtedly, of the lake-effect blizzards that regularly visit this city, but would he have approved of the effect that his brief
appearance in my life was to have upon my work? For when the idea of
The Erasures
began to take shape in my mind I remembered that afternoon in McSorely’s Ale House; the beads of sweat on Thayer’s forehead, the bartender appearing more like a ghost than an angel behind Rockwell’s left shoulder, the tobacco-stain atmosphere of the bar, as if it were mirroring the varnished image Sloan had made of it. I allowed my memory of that afternoon to slide past my friend Rockwell Kent. I did not revisualize the beautiful, assured gestures his hands made as he talked, gestures that would appear in his drawings of men lashed to the masts of ebony-coloured boats. I had laughed at Thayer, but what I had taken into myself on that winter day near the end of the first Great War was not his commendable qualities of energy and uniqueness but rather the idea of concealment.

Yes, when I began to think about
The Erasures
, it was to Thayer’s
Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom
that I turned for instruction, haunting book dealers until I finally found a copy. I did not know, in the beginning, that mere camouflage would not satisfy me. I had no intention of using Thayer’s theories to protect innocent winged beings. No, even by then I had developed sufficient detachment from innocence to want to protect only one being in the world. Me. Thayer’s peacocks screened by emerald forests and blue jays blending with snow were not enough for me. I wanted total disguise. I was moving towards white.

I
met Sara at the beginning of the summer of 1920 and left her at the end of the summer of 1935.

“Fifteen years,” she said.

“Fifteen summers,” I corrected.

During the time we were together I was moving away from landscape towards the figure. Occasionally the landscape eased its way into the corner of my figurative work, but the opposite was never true. But then what do all these descriptive labels mean anyway? They are nothing but words. Robert Henri had taught me early on that it was the expression, not the subject, that brought beauty into a work of art. And, oh, how I valued my own expression. Perhaps my creative activity at the time was nothing more than a recital by rote of appropriate learned responses.

Still, sometimes standing in Sara’s kitchen when she was not there, drawing the discarded work gloves she had used for gardening, or her father’s oiler hanging on a hook on the back of a door, tears would inexplicably enter my eyes. There was
something touching, I suppose, about the way she wore her father’s clothing for protection, as if she were placing her soft body, on purpose, inside a layer of his skin. But the truth was that the smallest thing connected to her could move me in the strangest way, cause me to experience something like sorrow.

Each autumn in New York, as towards the end of the year darkness folded itself around light, I could feel the bright northern summer begin to evaporate, the candles the sun had lit on Superior’s dark waters being put out one by one by my winter life. Finally, by January or February, I would not, despite the intensity of my visual memory, call that shore to mind at all. By then I would be involved in what, in retrospect, I can only call the promotion of my own career, in submitting my works to juried exhibitions, encouraging my dealer — when I finally had a dealer — to mount one-man shows of my work. As time passed, these activities altered only by virtue of the distribution of power among the players involved. After a decade or so I would find myself sitting on the jury rather than being judged, and my dealer would be urging me to bring together a collection of my paintings, my paintings of Sara.

I had publicly shown my work for the first time just a few years before I met Sara, before I began to spend my summers at Silver Islet. In 1917, I was coaxed by Rockwell to hang two of my New York scenes — one of which looked suspiciously like Sloan’s
Ale House
— in the Independent Exhibition he was administrating, which was to take place in the Central Grand Palace. I was tremendously flattered by his insistence that my pictures should be included, until, when scanning the list of exhibitors and their
works on the day of the opening, I noticed an entry that read, “Kent, Rockwell, Junior,
Nice Animals, Newfoundland”
Then I realized that, true to his principles of socialist democracy and equal opportunity, Rockwell Senior had insisted that absolutely everyone should be included. He had observed, as was his nature, the exhibitions credo “No Juries! No Prizes!” down to the smallest and most subtle interpretations of that phrase.

In the course of the years following this inauspicious début, Rockwell cartwheeled in and out of my winter life in the city. After being thrown out of Newfoundland and coming back to New York, he went to Alaska and came back to New York. He went to the Straits of Magellan and returned to New York. He bought a boat, sailed the icy waters of the North Atlantic, was shipwrecked on the coast of Greenland, had great adventures there, and returned to New York. Unannounced, penniless, bursting with enthusiasm, and laden down with canvases, he would reappear in the offices of Chappel and Ewing and, inevitably, George Chappel would give him a job, or the Folio Society would commission illustrations, or his old friend George Putnam would arrange to publish the tales he had written about his most recent travels. At the end of the 1920s, he bought a farm in the Adirondacks and determined to stay there for life, painting views of forested hills. He became sought-after on the lecture circuit. He went to Greenland again. He returned to New York. He withdrew to the Adirondacks. He returned to New York.

Some people walk up a flight of stairs, others trot. Rockwell, a slave to his own boundless energy, galloped, creating such
a singular racket that I always knew it was him. I heard the commotion of his approach for the last time in the winter of 1934.

I was no longer the kid that Rockwell had hauled out of Robert H.’s class at The Art Students’ League. I had, in fact, developed enough of a reputation that I’d been able to survive the worst of the Depression years on the sale of my work. That night I had been preparing for a spring exhibition and had, as a result, about twenty paintings — landscapes and nudes — leaning against the walls of my studio. I liked to leave them like this for the month or so preceding a show so that I could add highlights or finishing touches in a casual way as the days went by.

Quite late at night I opened my door to an uncharacteristically overdressed Rockwell. He said he had been delivering a lecture entitled “In Defense of True Art” to the Whitney Club and had decided once the evening wrapped up to drop by and see what I was up to.

“They were delightful,” he told me, referring to the crowd of people at the club. “Believe it, Austin, there is a lover of art at the centre of each bright human spirit. The problem is that most have been made to feel inadequate, ashamed of their own preferences. Why shouldn’t art serve mankind?”

“You’d better be careful, Rockwell,” I teased. “There must have been a great number of capitalists in that group.”

He waved aside my comment, hung his coat on the doorknob, and crossed the room. “Even the rich can be educated,” he said. “I’m just doing my bit.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Whatever you say.”

He was leaning on one of the window sills in the studio. Two tall, narrow paintings I had done of Sara were reflected in the glass on either side of him, and beyond him I could see the dark shapes of several rooftop water towers silhouetted against a vaguely yellow night sky. I walked across the floor to the old cupboard where I kept the liquor, removed a bottle of scotch, and placed it on a table in the centre of the room. I noticed that the electric light was shining on the top of Rockwell’s head. I realized that in the time that I had known him he had become almost bald, and yet somehow he looked no older than he had in the beginning. I, on the other hand, though a decade and a half younger, was starting to notice of late that there was grey in my hair and that the tired look around my eyes did not disappear after a good night’s sleep.

I went into the kitchen to collect glasses, and when I returned Rockwell was strolling around the studio examining the pictures.

“I should go there,” he said, looking at one of the views of the north shore of Lake Superior. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“Scotch?” I asked.

“Absolutely.”

I poured three fingers in the glass, handed it to Rockwell, and poured another three fingers for myself.

“Why are you so well ordered?” he was asking. “Don’t you just sometimes want to get up and go somewhere else? I mean, just recklessly chuck it all in an inappropriate season… just go?”

“I’m not like you, Rockwell,” I said. “Few people are.”

“I’m not asking you to be like me,” he said, pausing in front of a full-sized nude of Sara. He walked away from it and approached a smaller painting: one of Sara’s house huddled under the rock cliff. “I like Canada,” he said. “I like it up there. ‘With glowing hearts we see thee rise, the true north strong and free,’” he sang.

“Obviously that tune didn’t make it big on Broadway.”

“It’s a Canadian song. Who is this model of yours anyway?”

“A woman I know. She lives there. Her father was a miner… from Cornwall.”

“He worked for your father then?”

“He was dead before my father tried to reopen the mine. What a disaster that was! But short-lived, thank God. You’ll be happy to hear, Rockwell, that my father lost a barrel of money on that one. We went up there together that first summer… but he never went back again.”