An Enlarged Heart (13 page)

Jimmy explained that this was his father. I had brought in an old fur, and wanted a new coat. I protested. He explained I wanted a new coat made of my old coat. The older man walked over to the table and looked at my mink, and then at me. He disappeared, and came back a moment later, with a coat over his arm. He held the coat open for me to step into, then stepped back. “There. Here is your coat.”

The coat was cut small in the shoulders, and tapered out from a fitted bodice to a slight bell that stopped at the knees. The sleeves were narrow. The coat had a spread collar that could be worn up or down, against the cold. A line of three buttons stopped just above the waist. It reminded me of a coat I had loved as a child, what my mother called a party coat, which had been passed down to me by a cousin. It was made of pale blue tweed, and it had dark blue velvet collar. This was that coat, grown up. Was it possible to buy this coat? I asked. It was. Jimmy looked it up. It cost four times, almost exactly, more than I had ever paid for a car. I shook my head. I explained that this wasn't possible. I had four children, all of whom had to be fed, and who attended school. There was no place in my life for this coat. The older man, who by now I had learned was Jerry, the Jerry of Jerry Sorbara, Jimmy's father, went back over to the table and picked up “my mink.” He turned it around in his hands as if it were a living animal, and I thought again of Mr. Ferri, and my friend I had watched buy a horse. The horse had stood still in the barn, his black coat coal in the sun and shadow, smelling of salt and sweat. The mink smelled faintly, I knew, of Cabouchard. Then he put it down. He looked at Greg. “Get me the pattern for the Audrey,” he said.

“What?”
said Jimmy.

Greg left the room and returned with an accordion fan made out of onion skin paper. When I was a child my mother sewed some of her own clothes from Butterick and Vogue patterns, for herself, and for my sister and me. She had an old-fashioned Singer sewing machine. The machine had been given to her by her parents, my grandparents, for her sixteenth birthday, and part of the story was that the machine was “top of the line.” My grandfather had decided to buy his daughter a machine, but it wasn't going to be “any old machine.” Another part of the story was that they made payments each month for a year, of sixteen dollars each: the real point of the the story was that when my mother was growing up, her parents didn't have enough money to buy the “top of the line machine” “upfront.” That this was the same as buying on credit didn't occur to me.

My mother always told this story with a kind of pleasure, her parents loved her enough to buy her the sewing machine, to buy the machine was a sacrifice, they had to “put money aside,” and inside the story was a complicated kernel, inside an apricot pit: it was a virtue to be poor, to not have enough, to know “what's what.” And then the machine itself, given to a girl one generation away from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, who liked to sew. When my daughter told me this story again, the other night, as it had been told to me by her grandmother, once again, recently, she said, expostulating, “Why did they buy it if they couldn't afford it? Why did they tell her that?”

An argument, biting its tail. The patterns my mother used, in the sewing room under the eaves in the house I grew up in. The house was shaded by tulip trees that shed their long yellowing petals into the ivy beds. The patterns were made of onion skin paper, the color of those flowers. In the summer I found the carapaces of beetles, stiff, amber. The onion skin paper, I knew, was not made of real onion skin. My mother pinned the cloth to the ghostly pattern with straight pins and then cut the cloth. She also knew how to cut out paper dolls, and showed me.

Greg lay the paper pattern carefully on the hardwood floor. Mr. Sorbara pulled a tape measure from his sleeve. As Greg read out the measurements he ran the tape lightly along my arms, across my back and shoulders, and from my neck to the back of my knee. He asked me to hold the tape when he measured the circumference of my hips. The sleeves would be lengthened, he said, one quarter of an inch. “Like this,” he said, and held his forefinger and thumb together, and laid them, as Mr. Ferri had, on my wrist. Perched on the table on the side of the room, Jimmy's face contorted.
“Pop,”
he said.

Mr. Sobrara looked at me. “First we will send out your mink, and we will bring it back to life. Then you will come back in two weeks, and we will try on the coat we will make for you.”

“Dad,”
said Jimmy.

Mr. Sorbara ignored him. I said, “I think we have to talk about what this is going to cost.” I was a person who has been treated with kindness who had offered in return the carcass of a cat.

He asked me what I could spend. I told him.

Jimmy asked his father if he could speak to him, privately. They left the room. From behind the closed door I could hear Jimmy's raised voice, and an answering, softer murmur. Mr. Sorbara came back into the room by himself. He smiled. He said, “We will see you in two weeks.”

In the end, it was almost two months before my coat was finished. In the interim I made three trips to the showroom. Each time I looked for the door between the kimchi stands, half expecting it to have disappeared, and rode up to the eleventh floor in the Janus elevator. The same woman sat behind the glass partition, and each time I was ushered in by Jimmy, who rolled his eyes when he saw me, and buzzed for his father, who then soundlessly appeared. Once he was wearing carpet slippers. The first time he was apologetic; they had thought the coat would be ready. I was given to understand that my mink, which was now called “the coat,” was a special case. The second time the coat, basted together, was taken in at the shoulders. “Stand up straight, my darling,” said Mr. Sorbara. He put a finger to my third vertebrae and pressed. “Here.” When I raised my chin I heard my spine crack.

The day I went to pick up my coat there was a thin layer of ice on the ground. Steam rose from the vents outside the kimchi shop. In the showroom there was frost on the window. Greg brought the coat out in a garment bag. Did I want to try it on? I did. The fur gleamed. The coat stopped short of the knee, and closed with three horn buttons. Inside, on the lining I had dropped off one afternoon, bought from the same shop where the year before I had found my Japanese merchants, my initials, the initials I had then, were embroidered in lilac thread. The lining was watered silk, pale blue and lavender, printed in marbleized swirls that reminded me of handmade endpapers I had first seen on a trip to Florence, on wooden racks, when I did not have enough money to buy even a single sheet. The print was called “Florentine.”

For once, Jimmy was in the room. He was rolling his eyes. “Do you have any idea … ?” he said to me.

Mr. Sorbara and I looked at my reflection in the pier glass. We saw a woman with her dark hair pulled up and back, in jeans and flat shoes, wearing a narrow dark mink coat that just grazed her knees. He put the collar up. “Very pretty,” he said. In the mirror I gave him an inquiring look. He shrugged, then said, “You are a young woman. This coat looks very nice on you. This is your first fur coat, but it will not be your last.”

In the mirror, Jimmy raised his eyes, appealing to heaven. Then he said, “Be careful of the lining. Fur we can fix, but if you tear that, we'll have to redo the whole thing.”

The fur tore. They fixed it. I am careful when I take off the coat and put it on my lap, when I wear it to the movies, to fold it fur side out. I have not bought another fur coat. I did buy the black fox hat, one September, from Greg, when I picked up my coat from storage. I did not go to see Mr. Ferri for a number of years, and then I read that he had died. The last dress I brought to be tailored was a silk taffeta orange-and-blue plaid evening gown, which I had inherited. Mr. Ferri was ill. Someone else hovered over me, with pins in his mouth, but the project was not a success. It may have been the dress, or my idea of what I wanted the dress to be, or me, and nothing to do with Mr. Ferri's absence, his touch on my wrist, at all. But the years in which I went to see Mr. Ferri, and had brought my friend B——'s coat to the furrier, had been a time in which I was happy to make over what came my way, to make do with what was given to me, often almost by accident, the world opening its arms: jackets, dresses, houses, love. They could be fixed with scissors, glue, cherry twist, pins. In those days I mixed flour and water paste, and the children made collages out of what they found in the woods, and made elevators from cardboard boxes. I bought linings that without my knowing it reminded me of other stories, and I wore them close to the skin. It was a time when I knew what was what. I knew that the thing to do was to avoid large places after dark. When the children had bad dreams at night I put out my hand and asked them to give them to me. I thought that if I believed in what I could dream up the goblin-rat would fall dead. I did not believe that the world was a place where anything could happen. I thought then that it was possible to alter anything.

Two Pictures

W
hen I was a small child I went on many Saturdays with my grandfather to the Museum of Modern Art. The museum was located where it is now, on Fifty-third Street, but then it was a different place. It was small, and intimate, and it was a place you went to look at pictures. In some ways the museum felt to me like an extension of my grandfather. My grandfather (he was my father's father) was a man of medium height, whose red hair had turned white by the time I knew him. He wore a small mustache. Though I know I saw him frequently in other seasons, I think of him wearing a gray overcoat and a black beret. He was a great reader, and a devotee of Spinoza, particularly. Later, when I was about twelve, and he was dying but did not know that yet, he told me that his favorite book was
The Magic Mountain,
and he gave it to me to read. His childhood, first in Russia and then in New York, where his stepfather was unkind to him, was repressive. He ran away, and then came back. He was a lawyer, but sometime in his middle years he became a painter. The room in which I stayed when I spent the weekend at my grandparents' apartment was his studio. It smelled of oil paint and turpentine.

On Saturday mornings after breakfast we took the E train to the museum. This was a convenient train, because the stop was directly outside my grandparent's building, in Chelsea, and it stopped on Fifty-third Street and Fifth Avenue. Often, in my memory, it was snowing. Because this was the early sixties, when little girls did not generally wear trousers, I wore heavy black serge tights, a smocked dress with a knitted cardigan, black patent-leather Mary Jane shoes, and a wool coat that pinched my neck when the top button was closed.

My grandfather was a member of the museum: he showed a little card and we were ushered in with a bit of ceremony by the guard. This was in the days when the museum was almost empty on a Saturday morning, and because of this, often our mornings there felt like private visits. My grandfather sometimes had a picture in mind that he wanted to look at. He was drawn, always, to the pictures by Braque, and Cézanne, which were on the second floor. These were the paintings of his youth, and they excited him. He liked to look at pictures for a long time, and he showed me how to look, too. Sometimes he would take me, as on a journey, from one corner of the painting to another, explaining how the light and color were talking to each other. If he was feeling lighthearted he gave the blue, or the red, something to say, like “Hello” or “Do you think it will rain?” I was perhaps five or six at the time, and this never failed to amuse me.

When my grandfather was through looking, and we had passed through and said hello to a few friends,
The Starry Night
and Matisse's blue and green dancers, on the stairwell, which I loved with my whole heart, it was time for my paintings.

There were two. We visited each one, in turn, and as I had stood with my grandfather without tugging at him, or hopping on one foot, or saying that I was hungry, he stood and waited until I was finished looking. The first picture was
Guernica.
Later I heard it said about
Guernica
that when you look at it you know all there is to know about war. No one, certainly not my grandfather, said anything like that to me, at the time. At some point I think he explained the circumstances of the picture to me, while we stood in front of it. Picasso had painted it after the German and Italian forces had bombed the town called Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. I knew Picasso from the other pictures he had painted that hung in the museum, of blue clowns and a girl with a flower.

This picture was not like those pictures. It was huge. The impression, looking at it, was that it was three dimensional: the painting was a room, and you were inside it. I remember it as the biggest painting in the museum but that may not be true. It looked so to me. It was hung on the third floor, between the elevators. It was then, at that time, the most violent image I had ever seen. I was not as a child allowed to watch much television; then, though, violent images were not usual fare for children, nor for anyone else. There was, as compared to now, a dearth of images.

My method for looking at the painting was the one I had learned from my grandfather. I looked at one corner at a time. Here in this corner was a woman screaming. Below her, a little to the left, a horse was screaming. What were they saying to each other? I couldn't answer. A woman's face came out of cloud. A flowerpot lay in shards. I did not, and do not, even now, have the vocabulary. Perhaps there is none, for those screams.

Sometimes I stood at one end of the picture, and just looked, close up, at a little patch. From the little patch, it was hard to see what else was going on. On other visits I walked from one end of the canvas to the other, my head slightly averted, as if I weren't really looking. It was, I think, my first experience of voyeurism. Every time I returned to look at the painting I was surprised to find that it was painted in shades of black and white and gray. In my mind it was red. I was always careful not to look at the baby.

When I was done looking we went back through the galleries to see my other picture. Sometimes we had seen it already, because it was hung in a hall, on a separate, small wall, in the permanent gallery my grandfather liked to visit first. When this happened I simply took my turn looking, or sometimes I pretended not to see it, depending on my mood, and then we went back.

This picture was by Pavel Tchelitchew. It was called
Hide-and-Seek.
It was a painting of a green tree. The tree was green, and the sky around the tree was also green, and inside the tree, there were tiny faces of children. These children were trapped, and trying to get out. I could tell they wanted to get out by their faces. It was a nightmare tree. But if you knew to step back a little from the trunk of the tree, the arms and twigs of the tree were really capillaries, and the tree was inside the head of a girl. I think it was my grandfather who pointed this out to me. The girl was about my age. She had dreamed the tree, but the tree had taken root. What were the faces saying to each other? What was the girl saying to the tree? This picture so frightened me that when we were in the gallery and came upon it suddenly, I turned my back to it and looked down at my shiny shoes.

T
he other day—it is almost half a century later, and it is late afternoon—I was walking up from the beach, in late August. I was on the path set into the high dune, with my children and the children of my friend, and when we got to the top, the path and the parking lot were alive with huge dragonflies. The sky was a black whir. Because my children are older than the last time the dragonflies came around, when they were frightened of them (the dragonflies emerge on the dune every few years, as part of a mysterious cycle, like cicadas) one of them said, “Oh, they won't hurt you,” and their little convoy passed under the hum to the car.

Most of the dragonflies were congregated on a path that runs to the right of the parking lot, if you are facing the beach. The path is smothered in June by beach roses, and in August, by rose hips. When I was a child there was a sign on that path, painted with a skull and crossbones. Under this sign a legend read,
NO
ADMITTANCE
. Across the path was a piece of chain. The road then led to an air force radar station. The station, its headlight sweeping the beach at night, kept watch for enemy missiles. One day, we knew, missiles would be launched toward us by the Soviet Union, but these would be stymied by radar. Now the sign is gone, and people climb up the path a little way in order to get cell phone reception.

I stood on the dune for a little while longer, watching and listening to the dragonflies. The last time I they came they had almost driven me mad; I think now they were indicative of a frenzy I sensed but knew nothing about, inside myself, the way the endless wind, a few days before, the back side of the hurricane, seemed a slow slithering fuse on the sill, electric on my skin. But last month I was happy to see the dragonflies, if only because it meant that time had passed.

Behind me, a little girl came up the dune, following her mother. She was wearing a pink two-piece bathing suit that was falling down, and her head was huge on a neck that almost could not support it. She was dismayed by the dragonflies. Her mother, who had two older children, dragging towels and pails up the hill, took one look at her and said, “Oh, Annie, it's Dragonfly Alley.”

That art can transform a whir of black wings, burnish and give it back, is something we know, but what finds a home in the mind is a mystery. At the top of the dune the girl and her mother and I smiled at each other, at the edge of the parking lot: we knew all about wands, and wizards, and Diagon Alley. In Diagon Alley, does the wizard choose the wand, or does the wand choose the wizard? That my grandfather countenanced these visits to the two pictures, which I see now, from this distance, as morbid and obsessive, remains a mystery to me, but when I was a child it was with my grandfather that I felt safe.

Although both times I have been married it was to men to whom painting was important—one, like my grandfather, is a painter, and one is in the business of art—I know next to nothing about painting. Draw a house, my children say. My drawings look like hen scratches, my houses have lopsided windows. Smoke comes out of the crooked chimneys like pigs' tails. But that these two pictures no longer hang in the museum is something I find difficult to hold in my mind.
Guernica
was returned to Spain in l997, although, a life-size needlepoint replica hangs in the United Nations.
Hide-and-Seek
is out of fashion: when I called the museum I was told it was in storage. That neither of these pictures is there may be a reason that I don't like the new museum, which is cold and too big and has too many things to buy, like a department store. Both pictures were landscapes of terror. At the museum, I knew, you couldn't stand too close to the pictures, or touch them. I shifted from foot to foot, holding my grandfather's hand.
You are here,
the map said.

How can that be? I thought. But I knew it was true. The world was a glove, it could turn inside out. The pictures were about what I knew, and what I didn't know yet, but would. I knew that too. They were one way I learned about these things.