Broken for You (40 page)

"Clearly," Margaret said, "you need some help. At the very least we need to put in a second phone line—would that be possible, Troy?— and hire a secretary. Someone to answer the phone, screen calls, field requests, that sort of thing."

"I believe they're called 'administrative assistants' now, dear heart," Gus interjected.

"Well, of course they are. I'll place an ad in the paper tomorrow." Margaret stood to get a notepad. "You shouldn't be tiring yourself with business concerns, Tink."

"I'm telling you," Wanda said testily, to the table at large, "I'm fine!"

Margaret looked hurt. She sat down. Everyone else ducked their heads and tucked into their suppers—except Troy. He was sitting at the other end of the table, staring at Wanda in a way that made her pissed at him and ashamed of herself. She dragged her fork through her mashed potatoes and waited for someone to send her to her room.

Instead, Troy made an announcement: "I think we should start offering classes." Around the table, necks lengthened and faces began to reemerge, slowly, warily—as if summer had suddenly arrived at a turtle pond in Antarctica. "In mosaic technique," he went on, "laying tile, design. We have the resources and the space."

"Tell us more, lad," Gus said.

And so he did, outlining ideas for weekend workshops, community classes, collaborations with vocational programs and high schools. Wanda was stunned. He must have been thinking about this for weeks, maybe longer.

"But those are just rough ideas," he concluded, shoving his dishes aside and taking up pencil and paper. "What do you think? Can we raise this barn?"

Wanda watched as Troy drew everyone into the discussion. They continued to brainstorm well into the night. With Troy as leader and facilitator, they planned classes, delegated responsibilities, designed marketing strategies, and composed a simple statement that clarified their goals: the establishment of a nonprofit teaching facility dedicated to the art and craft of making mosaics, with the broader mission of fostering community through artistic collaboration. It would be called the Crazy Plate Academy.

As if Troy's vision coincided with some deep, unmet collective need, the academy was instantly, eerily successful. Students streamed in. Word spread. Classes filled quickly. Anyone who had difficulty paying benefited from another of Troy's ideas: Free instruction was offered to any student who could volunteer his or her time sorting pieces and assisting in the assembly of Wanda's larger works.

In effect, by starting the Crazy Plate Academy, Troy had not only birthed a teaching facility; he'd seen to it that Wanda had all the help she would ever need—without the humiliation of having had to ask for it.

"Hello, Robert."

"Hello, Margaret. Alone today?"

"Yes," Margaret said, settling her pocketbook on her knees. "I thought I'd give Susan and Gus a reprieve for once."

"Ah," Robert said. "Beautiful fall we're having, isn't it?"

"Yes. Beautiful."

He nodded. "Well," he said with a sigh. "Here we are." He flipped on the lights. "No change." He pointed to a few images, made some perfunctory comments. His lectures had become shorter and shorter, which was somewhat disappointing to Margaret, since she never tired of hearing about The Star or being reminded of its presence.

But, of course, her relationship with it was quite different from anyone else's. To Margaret, The Star was a perfect physiologic manifestation of her life's preoccupations. The Star caused her pain, as it should, but the pain was manageable. The Star necessitated procedures and medications, but that, too, was bearable. A whole society had sprung up because of The Star's presence. A community. Maybe it would stay this way forever, never changing, never growing. Just a reminder, a cautionary tale—like the raised, white, scallop-shaped scar on her right knee from that time when she was seven: Running too fast through Volunteer Park, she'd slipped on wet autumn leaves and fallen on a nail.

"Until next time, then," Robert concluded.

"See you in the new year!" Margaret replied.

Twenty -eight

The Unveiling

On October
1
, 1998—not coincidentally, they all learned later, the day after Yom Kippur—a woman showed up unannounced at the Hughes household. She did not present herself at the front door in the manner of a regular visitor; instead, she walked around the north side of the mansion toward the carriage house. Bruce saw her from the kitchen, where he was slicing vegetables for Pumpkin Tortellini Soup. He was sufficiently alarmed by the woman's unexpected presence, her demeanor, her surreptitious approach, and her dress ("How was I supposed to know? She could have had a surface-to-air missile under that cape!") that he impulsively dialed 911—a fact that would embarrass him deeply for years to come, since the visitor was none other than Barbara Cohen, soft-drink heiress, arts advocate and patroness, human rights activist, philanthropist, and the woman known to many sectors of the Seattle community and the world at large as "Babs C."

It was a clear, crisp autumn day. Troy was outside, giving a workshop to a group of vocational students. Wanda was adhering tesserae and tiles made by community volunteers to a memorial obelisk which would stand in the entrance of an AIDS hospice.

The caped woman strode over to her—her coarse salt-and-pepper hair cropped short, her maroon cape billowing like a set of wings—and
clasped Wanda's gloved hands, not appearing to notice, much less mind, that they were gooey with polyvinyl acetate adhesive.

"You're Tink Schultz?" she asked. "I'm Mrs. Cohen. Please call me Babs."

"Hello," Wanda said. "Your gloves are ruined." Before she could get another word in or extricate her hands from the woman's firm grasp, Mrs. Cohen continued.

"I'm wondering, is there a place we can talk?" Wanda got her hands free. They stripped off their gloves in unison; Mrs. Cohen tossed hers into the trash. "We could go into the studio," Wanda offered. She glanced at Troy and nodded, hoping to communicate her gut feeling that this woman, in spite of her strange behavior, was probably not a Ku Klux Klanswoman or professional assassin. He relaxed and turned his attention back to his students.

"You've done a good thing," Mrs. Cohen began earnestly once they were inside. "A mitzvah. And that's mostly what I came here to say to you. All these community projects, this teaching . . ." Pivoting with perfect leading lady grace, she executed a maneuver that stage directors like to call the big turn. It caused her cape to ripple magnificently. "It's wonderful," she said. "Just wonderful . . ." She stilled, and her grave, gray eyes settled on Wanda. "And your other work," she said solemnly. "Your work about the Shoah. Thank you."

Of all the words that had been spoken in reference to Wanda's work, these had never been among them. For the first time since she'd set foot in Margaret's house, Wanda once again broke one of her own commandments and, in the presence of a total stranger, began to cry.

"May I?" Mrs. Cohen went on, gently. "Snoop around, I mean?" Wanda nodded.

Some artists keep their source ideas out of sight and neatly organized—in file cabinets or closets perhaps, or in carefully labeled boxes. These artists are serial monogamists. They take on one project at a time and see it through to its completion. They focus with exclusivity, putting up firewalls that cannot be breached by the incursion of other ideas. If other inspirations whisper to them, they might take notes, but they shelve them. This kind of artist makes her ideas stand in a queue. She
a
sks them to kindly wait their turn. She promises she will get to them,
s
he keeps her appointments, but she insists upon seeing them one at a
time. It is one perfectly viable way of working. It was not, however, Wanda's way.

Besides the works-in-progress that were arrayed around the studio, and the models, boxes of grout, adhesives, mixing tubs, piles of porcelain, and so forth that were the tools of Wanda's trade, there were enormous bulletin boards affixed to all the walls—the kind one sees at community centers or in other public places. Over the years, the bulletin boards had become covered with a thick strata of postcards, magazine pictures, Xeroxes, scribbled words, newspaper articles, phrases, sketches, paintings, lists—any item of interest, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, was tacked up on the studio walls. Wanda kept every token of inspiration readily accessible, if not directly in view. She believed that these neonate ideas and inspirations worked on her, with her, in a peripheral, indirect, and powerful way. They hovered, tangibly. They seeped into her consciousness.

Be true to what attracts you
had become her motto.
Keep it near. Its voice may be far away and faint, unformed and obfuscated, but that's no reason to shutter it in darkness.

To most visitors, Wanda's studio looked like a colossal monument to detritus and disorganization. But she could pinpoint the location of every scrap. She remembered what lay at the bottom of every box. She could document the identity of every layer. All of it had meaning.

Mrs. Cohen stopped suddenly at a place near a dim corner. "Huh," she grunted. She started peeling apart the sketches that were thumb-tacked there, squinting at each one in turn.

Wanda's breath quickened; Babs was excavating the whisperings of ideas that were farthest from view and closest to her heart.

"Do you mind?" Mrs. Cohen murmured vaguely, but she didn't wait for an answer. Carefully, she took the sheaf of sketches down, separated them, and then tacked them back up on the wall, side by side. She hinged forward on her fashionably booted feet so that her nose practically rested on one of the sketches, and the toe-to-crown line of her body made a perfect scalene triangle with the floor and the wall. She emitted a quiet symphony of nonverbal responses which seemed to reflect a mixture of surprise, amusement, relish, pathos, and discovery. Finally she turned and regarded Wanda with the unblinking expression of a benevolent raptor. "Why are you hiding this?"

"I'm not hiding it, Mrs.Cohen—" Babs seemed about to say something; but then she changed her mind. "It's just a completely different kind of work."

"Personal, you mean?" Mrs. Cohen looked strangely troubled. "Yes. Personal."

"I see." Wanda's visitor was obviously wrestling with something. "I'm Jewish, you know," she said with a slow emphasis—as if this information was neither self-evident nor a non sequitur. She considered Wanda for a moment or two longer. "We must talk more," she concluded. "Now, where's Mrs. Hughes? I must see her as well."

There was a Seattle police car in the driveway, its cherry-top flashing. Two grim-faced officers stood side by side on the carriage house path in a stance suggesting a kind of athletic readiness. Behind them on the patio, Margaret, Susan, Bruce, Troy, and the vocational students were gathered in a tight clump, their expressions reflecting everything from mild concern to feverish trepidation. Bruce looked as though he might faint.

In little time the police officers were convinced that Mrs. Cohen did not pose a criminal threat. Bruce was mortified, especially since he was the one person who knew Babs by reputation ("If Jews had saints," he'd say later, "she'd be one!"). But Mrs. Cohen took it all in stride. "I've been mistaken for a lot of things," she quipped, "but never a soldier in the army against artistic expression. Senator Helms will be thrilled."

"Now," she said, once the officers were gone. "Will someone please introduce me to Mrs. Hughes?"

Margaret emerged from the crowd. "Here I am." "It's an honor to meet you." Mrs. Cohen pronounced. Then she confounded them all by pulling Margaret into a lengthy, impassioned hug, as if they'd known each other forever. "I'm so sorry for not coming to see you sooner. Please forgive me. What you've done is a goodness beyond belief."

Wanda's first full-scale installation—commissioned by Mrs. Barbara Cohen—was a project which would take over a year to complete; the planning phase alone would take weeks. Wanda and Troy labored extensively on the technical demands of creating and—equally important—transporting the finished work; it would be traveling to museums across the country. Keeping construction on schedule would also require the help of hundreds of Academy student and community volunteers.

Wanda began training everyone in her methods for transferring designs. She and Troy schooled them in the application of sealants to the various substrates she'd be using for the two-dimensional components. There were lessons in mixing adhesives and grout.

They kept Mrs. Cohen apprised of their progress; she listened and nodded and wrote checks. A filmmaker from New York was given permission to document the construction process, so that even before its completion, the project referred to in shorthand as "M.K." had the art world buzzing.

Margaret had another unremarkable CT in early January. She commemorated the occasion by presenting Robert with a bottle of French champagne.

"What's this for?" he asked. "Our two-year anniversary."

"Thank you, Margaret. I don't know what to say." "You don't have to say anything, Bob. I'm just glad to still be here." "It's not as if you've just been waiting around, is it? There's been quite a tizzy about you and that boarder of yours who breaks things, what's her name?"

"Tink. Yes. She's an artist." "Tink?" Dr. Leising was at a loss.