Onion Songs (13 page)

“
Here, Mom.” Charles walked awkwardly into the room with a cup of steaming tea on a small metal platter along with what appeared to be a spotless plastic ashtray with a single cookie resting inside. He went over to a large chest in front of the single window and set it down. “You can feel the wind when you sit in front of the window. I always like feeling the wind on my face. I don’t have any chairs. Do you want to sit on the floor?”

“
That will be fine. Your floor is—very clean.” She sat down on the floor by one end of the chest and he sat down at the other. She started sipping her tea, which had a dry, dusty flavor, but she smiled and nodded at her dead son as she drank. The cookie was stale and hard, but at least the ashtray it sat in appeared quite sanitary.

Charles watched her as she consumed these things, occasionally peering out the open window, his eyes fixed and distant. Finally he said,
“Mommy.” He stopped, closed his mouth and began again. “Mom, why aren’t I—” He closed his mouth again.

“
Why aren’t you lying in some grave somewhere?” she prompted.

He nodded.
“I want to know. Do you know?”

She was grateful for an excuse to put down that awful tea, even though her hand was shaking
as she returned it to the platter. “I can’t tell you exactly,” she began, “because I don’t exactly know myself. We had the funeral, and it was very sad. I thought I would die, too, or that at least was what I deserved.” She paused then, looking for some reaction from him. As there was none, she continued. “For the next few days I stayed in bed while your father went to work. I knew he was suffering greatly, but I was in no condition to help him.

“
At the end of a week, perhaps two—I really have no idea—I got up and made breakfast. Your father joined me at the table. No words were said. Then, after a few minutes, you walked in, much slower than normal, as if you had awakened from a hard sleep, and sat in your usual chair.” She stopped and looked at him. “Do you remember any of this?”

Without pause he replied,
“I don’t remember. Was Dad surprised?”

“
I thought he would have a heart attack.”

“
Were you surprised, Mom?”

“
No. No, I was not.”

“
I think I knew you weren’t surprised.” She nodded. “Were you happy to see me?”

His mother did not know how to answer that question, and so she said other things she knew to be true.
“For the first half hour or so your father cried and hugged you to him and told me how wonderful this was and what a joyful, joyful, thing it was that had happened to us that day, a true miracle. You, however, acted as if there was nothing unusual going on. You looked from one of us to the other, as if you hadn’t the faintest idea what we were talking about. Your father wanted to call your grandparents and all our friends and even neighbors who we didn’t know all that well.”

“
Did they all come?”

“
I wouldn’t let him call anyone. And just as I knew it would happen, over the second half hour or so, your father stared at you, and stared at you, until he became terrified of the sight of his own son, and he wanted to call the police and the doctors, but most of all he wanted to call our parish priest. But again, I would not let him. And though he said he could not bear it, he agreed to do what I wanted, and he did not make those calls.”

“
What happened when our neighbors saw me?”

“
The next day I got you up before dawn. I had packed some essential things, including a bag of your toys, even though you appeared uninterested, suddenly bored with everything you had had before. We left just before daybreak. I left your father a note, telling him the city I would be taking you to, to start a new life. He was welcome to come join us later, I said, but for the time being I didn’t trust him.”

“
Did he come?”

“
He did. After three months he got himself together, and one night there he was on our doorstep. But he was never the same, we were never the same, nothing was ever the same again. That’s not your fault, I want you to know that. That’s just the way it is sometimes. He couldn’t live with the change. And so he died.”

Charles didn
’t ask how, as she had known
he would not. Some things she understood instinctively, but there were so many things she did not understand at all. Charles stood quietly and took the tray with the cup and ashtray into the kitchen. She could hear water running, the sounds of vigorous scrubbing.

She looked at the trunk they
’d been eating on. It was spacious and sturdy—she thought she recognized it as one they used to have at the house. Everything in the room was plainly displayed—there appeared to be no other containers than this. She pushed up the lid.

She recognized most of them—the few toys and books he
’d owned when he died. And mixed in with these all the toys she had desperately given
him after. All these toys for a child who would no longer play. But she thought about the toys shoved under the bed, and knew he had been playing, in secret perhaps, but playing just the same. She gently shut the lid, determined not to think of these toys again.

Charles returned and stood looking down at her.
“I’m getting married tomorrow, Mommy. Are you going to be there?”

“
Do you remember any of these things I have told you about?”

He was looking out the window again, distant, as if they were in two separate locations, but he said,
“I remember riding my tricycle down a long sidewalk, except it was longer than just long. It never stopped. And I was thinking ‘I can’t ride a trike. Mommy says I’m too little.’ You said I couldn’t have one until I was at least five, remember? But there I was in my memory, riding the tricycle better than any boy ever rode a tricycle before, down that brand new sidewalk and by the trees and these great big houses, these huge houses that I’d never seen before. But that’s all I remember, Mom. Did I ever go to
elementary school?”

“
You went to elementary school and junior high and high school—you did all of that.”

“
Did I have many friends?”

“
No, I’m afraid not.”

“
Did I have girlfriends?”

“
No, but you did lots of things—you watched television and you took the dog for walks—remember Corky, that spaniel I got you?—and we sat on the porch, and I played records for you, so many records—we had so much
music
in our life. And I told you so many things—I
encouraged
you. I told you how you would have a great career one day, and get married, and that you’d have many children of your own. You’d be a wonderful father. You’d make me a
grandmother
. I—we talked about all that. Tell me you remember at least some of that!”

He looked at her with what might have been a smile—it was hard to tell in that soft, doughy face of his in the failing light.
“All I remember, Mom,” he said, “is riding that tricycle, and how good I was driving the tricycle, and how good it made me feel. That’s all I remember.”

She looked down at her hands.
She’d been picking at her nails. It was a terrible habit—now her fingers were bleeding. “I’m sorry.”

“
Don’t be sad, Mom,” he said, but she didn’t think he really meant it, or knew how to mean it. “I’ll have kids. That means you’ll have grandkids. You wanted that, didn’t you? Isn’t that great?”

And she did smile.
She said, “That’s great, honey. Sometimes we do get what we wish for,” and closed her eyes. And went to that place where she had not been in many, many years. And when she opened her eyes again, her lovely boy Charles was gone.

She sat alone in a dusty
, dry box of a room with no furniture, with much of the window boarded, with trash on the floor and the remnants of numerous fires set for warmth or cooking or perhaps just for mischief. The door was off its hinges, lying in the corner, smeared with a variety of dark substances. She had never been in such a place in her lifetime, although she had heard of such places, seen them in movies and on television. One thing she did know about them was that a woman such as herself did not belong there.

On her slow journey down the stairs she passed a young woman with dark, sad, so terribly sad
, eyes. They nodded but did not speak.

THE FIGURE IN MOTION

The majority of his days he had nothing useful to do.
At one time he imagined that was what he’d always wanted. In fact, they had planned their mutual retirement around that simple idea. They would read books. They would go to movies. The staffs of the local parks and museums would know them by their first names. He’d had this vivid image of himself strolling the sidewalks arm-in-arm with the love of his life, making but the slightest, almost immeasurable, ripple of forward motion as they walked together through their remaining days. No one would notice the nearly invisible wake of their passage, but that’s what he thought they’d wanted. At some point all motion would stop, and even the memory of them would fade from the world forever. There was a simple dignity in the idea to which he was fully committed.

But then his wife was dying, a terrible disruption so unexpected at first but then gradually inevitable as her illness progressed.
During her last few months on the planet he’d attempted to fill himself only with good memories of their life together, a cushion against the crushing loss to come, but he was quickly overpowered by events, and instead was forced to retain a series of images of her passing: her head bowed in burdensome fatigue, sitting shakily upright for a long stare out the window, her face at last too sad for tears, and then that final full day when she insisted on walking by herself across the field of powdered snow.

He
’d watched her struggle across that brilliant emptiness, a lone figure changing shape, her shadow altering as sun and clouds moved, lines broken and ragged as she pushed forward into her future, her body so thin and her old dress so tattered she looked as if her skin were shedding while she prowled nervously through the whiteness of that late afternoon.

She left clear marks in the snow, gray holes descending into darkness and a wide scraping across the crystalline surface
, making a pattern like angels’ wings, which gradually melted, filled and blended, until that world below his window was clean, untroubled, and unoccupied again.

It had surprised him that he wasn
’t tempted to go help her. But that’s not what she wanted—this journey was completely hers to do.

And so through the long years of his retirement without her
, it had been these images that had occupied his time. He did manage to read the newspaper and the occasional magazine, to skim volumes of non-fiction, to catch the odd movie, now and then to attend a lecture or museum exhibit, but the main focus of his final years had become memories of her decline, or—when he forced himself to think generously—her radical transformation.

Certainly it must have been some sort of fantastic rationalization
that began to let him think of this collection of memories as art.

“
I’m too late, aren’t I? I knew I would be—traffic was so bad, and I drive so poorly in bad traffic.” He knew he was saying too much, but he’d lost the ability to edit his speech some time ago.

“
Sorry? Too late for what?” The young woman looked pretty, and amused. Young enough to be his daughter.

He imagined the heat in his face might be presenting itself as a blush.
“The tour? The Postmodern Figure?”

“
Well, yes. But they just started a tour for one of the local college art classes. You could follow right along. If you stay close I’m sure you could still hear. No one would care, really. I
promise
I won’t turn you in.”

He laughed, but only because he thought he was supposed to. He had no idea why some people thought such dialogs humorous
—he just recognized that they did. He hurried along, his long winter coat flapping around his knees. He’d be too hot pretty soon, he knew, and then he’d have to decide whether to be uncomfortable wearing it, or awkward carrying it around. His wife had always had a good suggestion or two for such dilemmas, but he’d found that the further he traveled away from her, the tinier his ability to make a simple decision. It was a kind of perspective he’d never heard of, and could find no mention of in the volumes of art history he’d bought since her death.

“
After the war the human figure was trivialized in modern art. It was made to appear insignificant, unreliable, and pitiable. Eventually it all but disappeared from the work of serious artists, as if they thought it beneath their notice, that it had nothing significant to say anymore. Art became dehumanized, less emblematic. As the prime emblem of our daily experience, the figure had to go.”

He wanted to protest, to argue with the young guide, but of course she was only doing her job, and
, as far as he knew, was completely correct. But he still found it humbling to hear, and was it just his imagination or did some of these students shrink back a bit from her words, become smaller, a bit self-conscious? He himself became more aware of the size of these canvases, many times human size, so that they seemed architectural, part of the walls, which he now realized were of varying heights, many several stories high, making triangles with the sloped ceilings, which swooped down overhead at times, threatening the heads of the patrons with sharp corners and unfriendly windows. He thought those windows were the kinds of windows an angel might use, or some other holy and invisible creature, and considered this an alarmingly odd perception, although perhaps one not so surprising to have in an art museum.

It was at this point, or so he would conclude later, that he first became aware of the figures in the next room of the gallery, beginning to emerge from hiding, just their outlines peeking from the corridor, but when he turned and tried to take their measure, they were gone, and although he stood and waited, they did not reappear.

By the time he gave up looking for them the tour had moved on without him, and he had to hurry to catch up, feeling hot and uncomfortable as he did so, and wishing he had made the decision simply to carry his coat. He was always conscious of perspiring heavily inside his clothing, and, although he bathed regularly, worried about smelling.

“
Eventually traces of the human figure began to appear in these huge, near-empty canvases. Perhaps not the figure itself, not at first, but the effects of its presence. It was coming out of hiding, it seems, but you might say it was being very cautious about the entire endeavor. The figure became tool and material, and eventually it became battleground.”

At the guide
’s invitation the students spent some time with these images. Some nodded agreeably with what she had to say, and some had a skeptical air about them, but appeared careful to keep their own figures neutral, betraying no opinion. He dutifully traveled from painting to painting, and sometimes it felt like a journey of years. He had not heard of most of these artists’ names, but tried to memorize them so he could look them up later, find out what else they had done, read what they had to say for themselves.

Still, he felt an urge to leave the tour and seek out a Chagall, or a Soutine, one of the Jewish painters he liked so much, or even an expressionist like Robert Beauchamp, whose figures
, with their nervousness and agitation, had become almost cartoonish in their attempts to recede and hide inside the paint. As for his own shy figures, he could still feel them lurking nearby, but thought it non-strategic to seek them out.

“
There’s still some jokiness about the figure’s re-emergence, don’t you think? A kind of coyness that invites us in. I find that refreshing, don’t you? Art needn’t be so stuffy. It can look at itself with good humor.”

Perhaps he had no sense of humor when it came to art.
Perhaps he was too serious about most things and that was his problem. His wife used to complain about his inappropriate joking, but she also understood that impulse of his came out of a belief that the world was a grim and serious place.

He felt a bit of palsy now in his right hand, and stared at it with eyes
that did not focus well anymore. Between the two tendencies he was presented with an image of his hand with no clear lines, nothing firm to hold his flesh in. He felt his tears approaching, and stopped them by grabbing the hand firmly with its left partner, which held it decisively but tenderly in check.

He distracted himself from this localized drama by looking at the largest painting in the room. He didn
’t recognize this part of the gallery and wasn’t aware of when the tour might have advanced here. At first he could see no figures in the painting, but then he found the one wavering line suggestive of a hesitant forward motion.

“
For years the figure practically vanished from contemporary art.”

He continued to stare at the wavering line in the right third of the painting.
He didn’t care for this kind of scraggly, wiggly art. He never had, except where someone like Beauchamp was concerned, who had this indefinable knack. For the most part, he could never find the emotion in this kind of work. But for some reason he
felt
this particular painting—in fact he found himself almost moved to tears. He saw more motion in that wavering line in the canvas than in his entire life, as it left its trace in the chaos, as it made its mark.

He looked at the artist
’s name. Daniel Richter. A German. The name wasn’t completely unfamiliar, but it was still one that hadn’t been on his radar. As he walked among the other Richter paintings, most of them larger-than-life size, he was impressed by their colors, explosive and alive with blood and neon, living now, and not in some memory of days before, and as more and more of the figures began to appear, coagulating out of the aggressive paint, but still hiding, or attempting to hide, it struck him that so many of the figures weren’t much more than outlines, really, and inside those recognizably human outlines floated pools and bursts of color. But it wasn’t a portrayal of exterior resemblance on these canvases, but of a peculiar sort of interior, the interior a medical technician might see in an MRI, or the auras of variously colored heat observable by means of some sort of specialized surveillance equipment, or from the cold and inhuman sensory apparatus of a heat-seeking missile now rapidly advancing on its all-too-vulnerable human targets.

For now he did not sense the shy figures he had encountered earlier—perhaps they were wandering the other galleries, reluctant to enter this one, as if worried they might dissolve within the intense colors and the brilliant lights.

But he had no time for this kind of fantastical speculation in any case. He was too busy examining the figures trapped within these paintings, or if not “figures,” the evidence that figures had once been there, and now these were the prints their bodies had left behind upon impact with the world, or, looked at another way, their medical records, and the documentation of their trauma.

Of course no one had asked him what he was doing here in the art museum.
No one had spoken to him at all. But he had been formulating an answer. He really had no idea where his wife had gone. All too quickly the traces of her outside their small home had been erased. He had no idea where to find her, so he was looking here, examining these paintings for clues. It made no sense, but he was convinced it was the right thing to do.

When he returned home that evening he fixed himself a sandwich and carried it into the living room, and sat with it on the palm of his hand and did not eat it.
He could feel it drying out on his weary, outstretched palm, but he could not bring himself to take it into his mouth. Eventually he laid the uneaten sandwich onto a side table alongside several books his wife was never able to finish reading, and sat some more, gazing around the room, trying to find additional traces of where she had been, what she had touched.

He remembered she sometimes sat in this chair and knitted at odd times during the day and night.
Sometimes he would awaken in the middle of the night and her side of the bed would be empty. He would come downstairs and discover her sitting here knitting squares, putting together blankets and sweaters and various indecipherable soft objects. She said she just couldn’t sleep anymore. She said she had simply lost track of things and now had to figure things out.

After she died he had tried to learn how to knit without any success.
He simply could not see how to create patterns, then recognizable objects, out of piles of seemingly limitless string. Instead he had sat here gingerly cupping a ball of yarn in each hand, as if he were holding eggs, as if showing some sort of reverence for the act would bring him understanding. But it never had.