Pretty Leslie (18 page)

From a small town in Indiana, son of “the superintendent of schools, which means he taught everything they couldn't hire a regular teacher for,” he had gone to study at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1909. The high point of his time there had been his study with George Bellows. “There was a
man
,” he said, tapping his sombrero for emphasis. “I don't know what you think of his painting or if you've even ever heard of him—”

Leslie said she had, of course she had.

“—but I'm not sure the painting was the most important thing he did. He had an idea of what it means to be an artist, and an
American
artist. Woops, did anybody hear me say that? They'll get the counter-FBI down on me, some of these radicals, though I'll tell you, young woman, I was a Wobbly myself. No joke. Anyway the thing about Bellows was he wanted to come at things the way they really look, out naked in the sunlight, and that means the way the sun shines here, not some imitation of the effects that old Cézanne got down there at Aix and L'Estaque or Monet got in Normandy. It was a generation. It was a time. Like Wright trying to think out what it meant to have an American building. Wright with all his bow ties and poses. Those were dust in people's eyes. And Bellows didn't think you even had to do that. Well, I was sold. I was really sold. You couldn't have told me I'd end up a commercial artist and a capitalist, and you know, a man who's halfway afraid to go to the museum downtown for fear some smart high-school kid will give me some kind of catechism on what I like and flunk me if I don't think their new Guston or de Kooning is just the hottest little piece of wallpaper this side of New York, New York. Why, goddamn it—”

“Do you still paint?” Leslie asked breathlessly, drinking it all in, dead dog and all, like a bewitched daughter.

“Me?”

“I'll bet you do.”

“I don't paint, but I'll tell you, goddammit, I'm as much a devotee of the good, the true and the beautiful as any of these assy women on the board of the museum. Why am I not on the board? Because I run a lowbrow commercial art studio?”

She nodded yes. He shook his head no.

“There's no justice.”

Bieman said, “I'll admit I've let it be known I think the director is a fag with fag tastes, and that may set some people against me.”

“How
could
it?

“Yeah. All right. I'm a rough old cob.” He smirked like the greatest virtuoso slicker between the seaboards. “I do not kiss nobody's ass.”

“Daddy!” Mother Bieman cautioned. She had moused up to where he and Leslie were talking. But instead of coming to exert her wifely prerogatives, it rather seemed that she was there to pander them to each other if she found a way. “Daddy's bark is worse than his bite.”

“I got some pretty big yellow teeth,” he offered. “But look, Mrs. Daniels, I came to this town full of zeal. I starved in my garret—down where the colored used to live by Water Street. I'll show you someday.”

“Have him show you his old studio someday,” said non-jealous Mother Bieman.

“I taught Saturday classes at the YMCA, YWCA and for kids when there was hardly a person in the city that knew anything more modern than, let us say, Rosa Bonheur or Corot.”

“Corot's Italian landscapes—” Leslie started to tell him how she liked them, but she remembered all those fuzzy, buckeye trees that Corot had painted and nodded her disgust.

“Why did I pick this lovely city? Bellows said to us young fellows, ‘Go out in
America
. Don't go to New York and hang around all the perverts and unreconstructed European quacks.' So I believed him. I tell you I was a Wobbly at heart. I starved for twenty-five years here in Sardis trying to make them look at their own backyards. And I'm known here. When Mother and I were on the WPA I thought I was beginning to get a reputation. The museum owns a couple of my things. They'll never hang them now because you can see a face in them. You know that's how these assy women tell a good painting nowadays. If they can recognize any of the shapes in it, it spoils it for them.”

“If I saw an abstract painter here, I'd shoot him like a yellow dog,” Leslie said. If she didn't mean that literally, she meant it nonetheless. It seemed to her that she and Ben had been listening to George Bellows's advice when they moved out of New York. She felt, with the sun hot on her adorable skin, that she really had been cheated by not being allowed to starve in a garret or model for a WPA painter. She stretched like a nude pioneer wife and looked as regional as she could. Mother Bieman (and others gathering round) appreciated her act.

“The museum board knows who I am, even if the young fellows who teach art at the University don't,” Bieman said. “But do you think they'd ask my opinion about what to do with their tax-free dollars? I went to just one of their so-called public board meetings since the War. They had some faggot there advising them what
European
wallpaper they could buy. I stood up and said, ‘I think I'm going mad.' They didn't even have the courage to tell me to get out. They sat there with their mouths open until I left.”

“'Ray,” Leslie said.

“Let 'em buy their abstractions with their inflated, capitalist dollars. I'll sit out here on my farm, and do you know what I'll say to them?”

Leslie bobbed her head to tell him she knew exactly where and how far they could shove it, all those pompous bankers' and doctors' wives who ruled the museum, of whom American Leslie would never be one.

She had a correct impression that her presence had perfected his performance. Her listening had pepped up his oration. As a team they had collected quite an audience before he was through (presuming that he might now be thought to have finished).

Dolly Sellers—who had never heard of Bellows or Guston or de Kooning either—was hanging rapt on the edge of the pool beside Seymour Rife, her small legs fluttering like tendrils as she divided admiration between her boss and her ideal. Three or four fattening customers of the Studio stood in their trunks like Roman senators listening to Cato's denunciations of Carthaginian art. Or maybe they only grinned to see the old boy for some reason lose his usual calm. Mother Bieman swayed eurythmically behind, among, about the chairs where Dolores and her husband sat. From the middle of the pool Don Patch watched and perhaps listened, floating, squirting a fountain of water through his hand, catching it in his mouth, and frowning at the taste. Others, from the fifty-odd guests of the afternoon, were drawing in toward the obvious center of things to hear what they could hear.

“I'll bet you still paint,” Leslie said, looking up with adoration.

Daddy Bieman's eyes gleamed again as he recalled himself to the present scene and counted the house to which he and Leslie were playing. “Secret,” he said. “After a while, when it starts to rain—and it's going to rain yet—I'll take you up in the attic and show you the paintings I've been working on.”

“Etchings,” Mother Bieman said—and giggled, in case anyone had missed the point.

Leslie bounced to her feet and dived into the pool, disappearing in the murky water. She came up near the spot where Don Patch was circling enviously offshore. Her face streamed repugnance. She surface-dived, emerged halfway down the pool. She walked all alone—with half the eyes of the party following her—to the house to change out of her wet suit.

An hour later she was hurrying like a girl on an errand of mercy when Don Patch blocked her way. She felt not merely that she wanted to rejoin the milling herd of guests on the lawn, but that they needed her. She felt this for the good, if insufficient, reason that so many had told her so.

After her poolside success with her host (“Daddy hasn't told anyone about studying with George Bellows for years,” Mother Bieman said. “He's been hurt. Pride, you know.”) she had swung up and up like the star aerialist swung toward the peak of the circus tent by a series of partners on a ladder of trapezes. Lester Glenn, who'd brought his Rollei, set her up for a bunch of pictures at various photogenic corners of the lawn with different groups who'd be flattered by picture souvenirs and by appearing with such a vivid girl (though her hair was still plastered wetly to her skull after she had dressed). With somebody's wild scarf tied around her head she had sat on the barnyard fence while Bill Barnard (of Barnard's Better Foods) and Tim Somebody (who had the Blatz agency in four western Illinois counties) steadied her, one on either side, from the ground.

With Bill Barnard still in tow, he having merely changed his purchase from her calf to her upper arm when she hopped down from the fence, she went to the shelter near the lily pond to be photographed with String Bieman and Mr. and Mrs. Krotz (Krotz Optical), and it turned out that String was maintaining a kind of auxiliary bar in the shelter, and presently they were singing loudly enough (the old songs) to lure in a dozen others of the straggling pack.

She matched limericks with Vincent Coulette and a bosomy Mrs. Jackson while an indefinite number of eavesdroppers echoed laughter at the punch lines. A thirtyish man who said he was a golf pro (and looked like a TV trading card, that handsome and that pasteboardy) tried to persuade her to get back in her bathing suit again, either to swim or to make Lester Glenn's pix “worth while.” When she refused, the pro and Bill Barnard and—somewhat oddly, it would have seemed, at another time or for anyone else—Ozzie Carter's wife and a sunbonneted matron in slacks (one of the neighbors) teamed up to threaten tossing her in the pool as she was.

She escaped dunking to discuss the inadequacies of American high schools with an old party (apparently one of the Bieman accounts) who'd admired some copy he was told she wrote. He admired it, he said, “because it was cute but not full of slang.” He wanted to (and did) toast her for her style. When he went to refill their highball glasses from the verandah, the pack closed in again and she sat in a circle on the grass to reminisce about old movies, old cars, men's clothing of the twenties, college days and the history of Bieman's Studio.

She was on her feet and bringing joy to still other heathen when Mother Bieman and her daughter-in-law and Beth Tremayn closed in on her and absolutely insisted she come with them to the basement to see the day-old litter of basset puppies.

In the gloom and cool of the basement she was not only impatient to get back with her following (to be in unmixed female company had always made her restless) but slightly nauseated.

The newborn puppies looked slimy to her. (“Darling,” she said, “they're just darling. I'm going to
make
Ben let me have a dog. We have room. Aren't they darling? Bassets look so
Roman
.”) These puppies looked like sleeping, boneless reptiles as they dangled by the scruff of the neck from Mother Bieman's experienced hand. Mother Bieman
insisted
she choose one on the spot, though they'd have to stay with the bitch for a few weeks yet. Leslie said she couldn't resist the little male with the pinkest belly of them all, but really was it
fair
to a basset to try to raise it in the city? (And as she was refusing, she thought what a pity that Ben was missing her ovulation period this month because of the conference.) But didn't a basset need
room
and the freedom of the country life?

She was not at all sure by the time they climbed the stairs whether she owned or did not own one of the pups, but when she deftly disengaged herself from the
cuadrilla
of women (by the simple expedient of changing her mind about going to the bathroom, effective since grade-school parties) she headed through the house with a great need for open air.

And there was Patch blocking the passage that ran the width of the house past the stairway to the back verandah. He was lounging against the wall, as if he had heard her coming and stopped to wait, with his extended arm reaching across to the stair banister opposite. He was shaking his glass so the ice cube in it tinkled like a toy bell.

“You really had the boss going a while ago,” he said.

Was there an answer to that? For one thing, he was referring to something that had happened almost three hours ago, carrying his crumpled triviality of observation through the lusty afternoon like a dull boy with a note to pass in school; some stupidly daring, utterly pointless assertion that he'd lacked nerve to give her in the classroom while teacher was watching.

“You had him eating out of your hand.” He laughed. “Your comment about getting a raise in pay, well, now's your time to hit him for it.”

“I very much enjoyed talking to him,” she said levelly—as if a breath of maturity in her tone would blow this obstruction right out of her path, make him give way without requiring more offensive measures.

He nodded. “The first time he's told you about studying with George Bellows? Most people hear that one when he hires them. How the old ladies at the museum won't have anything to do with him? Well, he's right. He's better than they are, at that.”

The passage in which they stood was dim. The sky must have clouded over while she was in the basement looking at the pups. In the dimness she could nevertheless make out that his abnormally pale skin was tinged with sunburn. It glowed with rosy phosphorescence, like a pink, inedible mushroom, and she was reminded unpleasantly of the dogs or maybe something even more disagreeable.

“Excuse me,” she said. When he seemed not to understand, she said, “I need fresh air, I think.”

Still he stood in her way, as if able to measure all too cunningly the degree of her frailty. “Funny to hear you calling him Daddy to his face. All the kids at the shop call him that among ourselves, but as far as he knows, we leave off that last
ee
. Old Dad Bieman. But it didn't make him mad.”

After his swim, Patch's hair had dried in tighter kinks than usual. Now it looked like nasty little roses crowning an infant death's-head. For a moment the association was vile and strong. “Shall we step out in the air?” she asked. Only then he lowered his arm and turned.