After Dachau (9 page)

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s code. Even other people who knew sign weren’t supposed to understand.”

“What do you mean? What ‘other people who knew sign’?”

“People like you, if you happened to know sign. People who could hear normally but still knew sign for one reason or another. We could talk about … we could talk about people like you and only we would know who we meant.”

“But who are ‘people like me,’ Mallory?—or Gloria, or whatever you like. Who are ‘people like me’?”

She said, “People like you are murderers, Jason,” but her rage was spent. “Give me the bottle.”

I gave her the bottle. She took a swig, then handed it back. I took a swig myself, my own mug having gone flying during our brief wrestling match.

She got back up on her stool. I sat down.

“How am I supposed to spend the rest of my life surrounded by murderers, Jason? Murderers with beautiful white teeth and pretty clothes and nice manners and college degrees.”

I gave that a minute’s thought. “Maybe when I understand what you’re talking about, I’ll have some suggestions.”

She smiled faintly and let it go.

Reached out for the bottle.

“I GOT INTO
the art scene in New York as a model,” Mallory said. “I was eighteen and I was hot stuff, baby.”

We’d cleared some ground. Much as she disliked the name, she agreed it didn’t make any long-term sense to call herself anything but Mallory. She wouldn’t discuss her childhood, but admitted she’d lost her hearing at the age of four or five during a bout of scarlet fever.

I asked her how she learned the slang I’d heard her use. She said she didn’t understand the question.

“Did you learn the word
fink
in sign language?”

“No,” she said with a laugh.

“Then how do you know it now?”

She had to think about that. “I picked up slang by lip-reading,” she said finally. “I wouldn’t have known how to
sign it, except by spelling it. Nobody said
fink
in sign, or if they did, I didn’t know it. Nobody said
dig
in sign—not in the slang sense, anyway. Or maybe they did. It was two separate groups I hung out with, deaf-mutes in one group and artists in the other. Fucking Jackson Pollock didn’t know any sign, that’s for sure.”

“Jackson Pollock was one of the artists you posed for?”

“Yeah. It was me in
The Moon-Woman
, a pretty well known painting in the early forties. That was before he swore off figurative work.”

She fell silent, dreams of the past drifting across the surface of her eyes.

“Tell me more,” I said after a while.

She shook her head, not in refusal but in recognition of the hopelessness of getting it all in. But then she went on. “It’s funny, it looks different now, now that it’s all over and locked up there in the past.”

“Different how?”

“We didn’t see it this clearly at the time, but the whole thing was all about these ten or twelve guys. They were the Club—I mean literally they called it the Club—and they had the
word
, y’see, and nobody else.” She paused, chuckling at the memory of it. “There was Pollock and Bob Motherwell and Willem DeKooning and Mark Rothko, guys like that. You had to be one of those guys to belong to the Club, and of course you had to swear off figurative painting forever. You could have the word and swear off figurative painting, but if you didn’t belong to the Club, then you were just derivative, a copycat.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What I mean is, you could paint just like the guys in the
Club, but if you weren’t actually
in
the Club—for example, if you were a woman—then it didn’t count. You were just derivative.”

“I’m afraid I still don’t get it.”

She took a minute to think how to get past my thickheadedness. “Look, the guys in the Club could all paint like each other, and that was okay. It was more than okay. To belong to the Club, you
had
to paint like the guys in the Club. But if a woman painted like them, she wasn’t invited to join the Club, because she was just playing ‘monkey see, monkey do.’ ”

“Why is that, Mallory?”

“Because only
men
know how to paint, Jason. Don’t you know that, for God’s sake?”

It was clear enough she was being sarcastic, but just at that moment I couldn’t think of an exception to her rule. She waited half a minute, then went on.

“I don’t suppose you ever heard of Lee Krasner.”

I admitted I didn’t.

“I met her just a few months after I arrived in New York. I guess she was about fifteen years older than me. Anyway, she’d just spent three years studying with Hans Hofmann, one of the charter members of the Club. She told me he once stood in front of one of her paintings for ten minutes, staring at it and shaking his head. Finally she said, ‘Why, what’s wrong?’ and he said, ‘There’s nothing wrong. This is so good I could almost believe it was painted by a man.’ He honestly thought he was paying her a terrific compliment, as if he expected her to say, ‘Why, I’m sure it’s
very
chivalrous of you to say that, Mr. Hofmann!’ ”

I had the feeling I was treading deep water here. Finally I
asked when she’d started painting herself.

“Oh shit,” she said, taking another swig of bourbon. “It was all true of me—all ‘monkey see, monkey do.’ I was no painter. These guys had all
studied
, you know—the Art Students League, the American Artists’ School, the National Academy of Design, places like that. These were professionals. I was just a fucking ‘primitive.’ I didn’t know anything, but I watched and I learned the moves.” With her head tilted to one side, she peered at me and said, “You know?”

“No,” I confessed, “I don’t know.”

“This is all absolute horseshit,” she said, gaily waving the bottle at the collection of paintings around us. “Trust me, it is,” she added, as if anticipating some dissent from me.

“Then why did you paint it?”

“I was lonesome,” she said simply.

I spent some time looking at it in the growing twilight. By some unknown magic, it was beginning to make a sort of sense to me. “You really think it’s horseshit?”

She shrugged. “It has its moments, but they’re scattered around too much to be of any use. That’s what Abstract Expressionism was all about. Getting all those moments together and hitting you right in the middle of the forehead with them all at once. Some of those paintings had moments that’d knock you fucking down.”

As I watched, astonished, tears filled her eyes, spilled over, and coursed down her cheeks, carving white valleys in the dust. Unlike any woman I’ve ever known, she didn’t seem the least self-conscious or apologetic about it. She just let them flow.

After a while we had another drink.

Then, after another while, we agreed we were getting sore
sitting on those goddamned hard chairs. The mattress was there in the corner, and we didn’t think anything of transferring our tortured bones to it—didn’t think anything of it or mean anything by it. Mallory was in the middle of a story about her and another painter I’d never heard of.

To be blunt about it, she slept with them all. She figured this was bound to bother “a prissy-assed character” like me. I told her I could always cover my ears if it got to be too much for me.

We were getting pretty drunk.

We went on handing the bottle back and forth.

It wasn’t very comfortable just sitting on the mattress. Before long, without thinking about it or meaning anything by it, we were stretched out with both our heads on her one pillow. But since there was just that one pillow, it was eventually more comfortable for us both for me to slide my arm under her shoulders.

And so on.

I woke up
in the middle of the night, got dressed, and used a sketch pad to write a note saying some things I was glad to say to her and telling her I’d be in touch in a day or two.

FOUND

It is much easier to dig one large grave than to dig many small ones.

IN MY NOTE
I didn’t try to explain why I had to leave—or even that I did have to leave. I can’t imagine how I could have.

At some point during that long, boozy evening, it all became clear to me—but not in a dazzling flash that had to be acknowledged and dealt with right away. It was rather more like a dull, echoing thud, almost a groan, that could be ignored for the time being, because, after all, it wasn’t going to go away.

No, it certainly wasn’t going to go away.

I had to go home. Home was where I had to be in order to figure out what to do next. I needed a place where someone would cook me things to eat without my asking for them or deciding what they should be. I needed a place where someone
would open the drapes in my room in the morning and close them at night while I sat there slack-jawed, staring into the middle distance.

It took me a day and two nights to come up with a solution. It was a solution that seemed almost ridiculous, though it did (or might do) what it had to do, and I could ask for no more than that. After breakfast I invaded Mother’s study, interrupting the writing of one of the dozens of charmingly intelligent letters she seemed to produce every day.

She looked up and with all the noblesse oblige of a royal instantly gave me her full attention.

“If I’m not mistaken, we own a school,” I stated, knowing she would understand this shorthand, which meant that there was a school singularly in our debt owing to our generous contributions.

“Yes,” she said, “a very swank little establishment for young ladies. Somewhere north of the Catskills.” Bless her, she didn’t add (as many a mother would), “Why do you want to know?”

“I need an extraordinary favor there. I need to borrow a class for an afternoon.”

This was not shorthand, so she had to ask what I meant by borrowing a class. After I explained, she said, “I can’t imagine why you’d want to do such a thing, but I’m not the person who needs to be persuaded.”

Taking a sheet of notepaper from a drawer, she jotted down the name and number of that person, and that was that.

I phoned and spoke to the director, a Dr. Alwyn Reese. Like Mother, she couldn’t imagine why I wanted to do such a thing. This wasn’t resistance. We both knew there was practically
no request from the Tull family that would have been denied, provided it wasn’t manifestly illegal or immoral. She was rather in the position of a parish priest receiving a request from an archbishop fresh from a personal audience with the pope. All the same, she wanted to understand and deserved to understand.

I explained, knowing how bizarre it must sound and knowing that the entire explanation would have to be repeated at least twice more.

She listened, she paused, she thought. At last she said that Miss Crenevant’s class would be the best for my purpose. Miss Crenevant taught a world history class for seniors—seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Dr. Reese said she’d have Miss Crenevant call me, unless I wanted to have her dragged out of class while I waited. I said it would be fine if she called at her convenience.

She called during the luncheon break.