Restoration (6 page)

Mom had plenty of friends, and she had her church, but I was her only child. I took care of the yard work, brought her car in for servicing, changed out the air-conditioning filters. Every Sunday I drove
her across Lake Pontchartrain; she liked the water and the smell of the air. Other days we cooked supper together in her little kitchen, and ate on trays in front of the TV. My visits cheered her up, and I always left feeling as though I’d accomplished something. Besides the help, I’d given her what she needed most, that being family.

It was Tuesday night and trash collection came in the morning, so I dragged her cans out to the curb for pickup. Next I helped her rearrange the furniture in the living room. She wanted her favorite chair situated closer to the bay window in front so she could read her paper by the morning light, rather than by the floor lamp she had me place in a guest bedroom. “I don’t like the paper as much without you in it,” she said.

“It’s not any good anymore, is it?”

“No, it’s not, Jack.”

“I was the only writer there who could write. There isn’t a good writer left.”

“That’s what I said when I called and threatened to cancel my subscription unless they hired you back.”

“They really should hire me back. Pay me a lot more money.”

“You said you wouldn’t go back for any amount of money.”

“Then I guess it’s their loss, isn’t it?”

“You’re a young man, Jack. I don’t understand you. Your father and I did not bring you up to be this way. You need a life, something to do with yourself.”

“I have plenty to do with myself.”

“Oh, do you? What?”

“Whatever I feel like,” I said. “It keeps me hopping.”

And so went another day at Mother’s. We drove over to Foodies on the avenue and bought takeout and ate directly from the paper cartons while watching reports about Tom Cruise’s latest love interest on
Entertainment Tonight.
Dad had kept one of his Drysdales behind the TV, and my eyes traveled from the screen to the shadow of a rectangle that still remained on the wallpaper. I glanced around the room and counted half a dozen other places where his beloved Drysdales
had hung, each of them a shade lighter than the wall surrounding it. I could’ve become awfully depressed had I let myself, but now we were learning about the rash of pregnancies among Hollywood starlets, and my mother was saying, “Oh, how fascinating,” and I understood that I had no reason to despair. If everything wasn’t right with the world at least it was the same as it had been the day before, and as it would be tomorrow.

I waited until a commercial came on before I told her about Patrick’s Asmore. “Your father would be so jealous,” she said. “And to think of all the times we pulled into the parking lot at the Salvation Army and he said, ‘Today we find one.’ And you say your friend had never heard of him?”

“He never had.”

“Why couldn’t your father have discovered one?”

“I’ve wondered that myself and I’ve come up with an answer. Dad never found one because we would have lost him earlier than we did.”

“I don’t think that’s it at all. How ridiculous.”

“It kept him alive, Mom, kept him searching. Without the Asmore to dream about the cancer would’ve taken him much sooner than it did.”

“I’d rather think he fought so hard because he didn’t want to leave you and me behind.” She settled in deeper in her chair. “Jack, the man liked paintings but they were only
things.
He didn’t take any with him, did he?”

She was sad most of the time but she still had a way of making sense. I brought our cartons to the kitchen and folded the trays and put them away. When I returned to the living room I sprawled out on the sofa and closed my eyes and shut out the TV. He had wanted me to be an artist and enrolled me in a drawing class, but I’d shown not a whit of talent and he’d grudgingly let me drop it. One didn’t have to understand how a picture was made to appreciate it, he said, almost as an apology to the world for producing a son so devoid of creative talent. Dad had the good sense to marry right: he not only loved his wife but he loved a woman who inherited a big house and enough money
to let him have a go at being an art photographer. He followed in the tradition of N. M. Swinney, C. Bennette Moore and Eugene Delcroix, shooters from the first half of the century whose romantic images of the Vieux Carré made for popular souvenirs. Dad never hung any of his own pictures in our home, and he was always embarrassed when he found them among the offerings at weekend garage sales. One usually could be had for ten cents or a quarter, framed. The hardest I ever heard him laugh was when he found one marked for a dollar. It also was the only time I ever knew him to buy one of his pictures, but then he threw it away before we got home, stopping by a can in Audubon Park. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, a warning I had to listen to almost every day of my childhood.

“Don’t tell her you paid a dollar for something and then put it in the trash?”

“No. Don’t tell her your father is such a failure he’s turning up at yard sales.”

I opened my eyes and she was still watching TV. She didn’t look at me, but she somehow knew I was awake again. “Do you remember the day… God, when was it?”

“When was what?”

“When your father drove us across the bridge trying to decide on the spot where Levette had gone to jump. Do you remember that?”

“Sure do. I was in the backseat, scared to death. That was a traumatic thing for a young kid. I thought Dad was going to stop and jump from the span himself.”

“It wasn’t traumatic, Jack. It was educational. You learned that there’s nothing wrong with being sensitive and loving beauty.”

“I’m glad one of us remembers what I learned.”

To show that she was enjoying my silliness, she tossed a copy of
Reader’s Digest
at me. “You didn’t cry when you first saw your friend’s Asmore, did you?”

“No, I didn’t. I was being very brave.”

“The only reason your father cried in front of great paintings was because
he felt
more than other people do.”

“I’ll give him that,” I said.

I got up and kissed the side of her face. The tears had started to fall again, but I pretended they weren’t there as I headed for the door. “Call if you need anything, Mom.”

The Williams Research Center stands on Chartres Street adjacent to K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in the heart of the French Quarter. It houses the bulk of the Historic New Orleans Collection’s curatorial archives, including photographs, microfilm and clip files for artists, writers, architects and others who contributed to the city’s history and culture. Today the doors to the old Beaux Arts structure were locked, so I rang a bell for admittance. Several minutes passed before a receptionist buzzed me inside. Without once looking at me, she instructed me to fill out a form stating the purpose of my visit. “Asmore,” I wrote, and left it at that.

I climbed a broad flight of stairs to the second-floor reading room. It was a cool, vast space with a high glass ceiling and shelves crowded with books bordering the dozen or so cherry tables occupying the center of the floor. Each table came equipped with writing pads and cups holding pencils. On one end of the room there was a wall of enormous multipaneled windows looking out on the old district, on the other a desk staffed by a research assistant. “I’d like to see any materials you have on the artist Levette Asmore, please,” I said to the woman.

When she hesitated before responding, I wondered if I’d said something wrong. I nearly sniffed the body of my sweatshirt to make sure it was clean. She allowed a smile, but not after first giving me a look over her reading glasses. “Did you say Asmore?”

“Yes, ma’am. The artist.” Then for some odd reason I added, “The one who jumped from the Huey P.”

“Is today his birthday?” she asked. “Or perhaps the day he died?”

Even as I tried to stare it away, she would not quit with the condescending smile. “I don’t know much about him,” I answered. “That’s why I’m here.”

“I haven’t pulled the Asmore file in months and already you’re the second person this morning who’s asked for it.”

I wheeled around and immediately spotted her. She was sitting alone at the opposite end of the room, photographs and news clippings and other ephemera spread out on the desk in front of her. “Thank you,” I said to the librarian.

Head lowered in a pose of intense concentration, Rhys apparently hadn’t noticed me either. I pulled back a chair and sat across from her. “Mind if I join you?” I said, and leaned forward on my elbows.

She still seemed loath to acknowledge me. She glanced up, then hurriedly scribbled on one of the writing pads,
“Jack, are you following me?”

“God, no,” I replied, my voice loud enough to lift heads in the room.

The librarian rose to her feet and glared in my direction. I mouthed the word “Sorry” and lowered my head.

“God, no,”
I wrote on my own pad. I showed Rhys, then added,
“I wanted a look at the Asmore file. My father used to come here.”

She looked at me.
“Huh?”

“He had a small collection of southern paintings, swamp scenes mostly, and liked to read about the artists. Look, I will leave now and come back later if you like.”

She seemed to be trying to decide whether to send me off. I pointed to my chest, then the door, to show that I was prepared to leave.

“No. Just keep quiet. They’re real funny here about talking.”

“I promise.”

Another nod. And a smile, or the cool, quivering fragment of one.

The first thing I reached for was a photograph. It was one of those soft-focus portraits that cast the subject in a veil of gauze—the sort of high-handed, diaphanous treatment Hollywood used in the old days to glamorize movie stars. It was my first glimpse of Asmore, and rather than provide understanding it added to my confusion about the man. He had a thick sweep of dark hair and dark eyes that stared intensely rather than simply looked out at the world. His face possessed a feminine aspect in that it appeared carefully tended to, carefully
fussed over: the eyebrows, for instance, were so perfectly straight they might’ve been plucked with tweezers, and his mouth was full and expressive, the lips perfectly formed. It was a mouth you wanted to kiss—or rather the kind someone else might want to. Boys this pretty catch hell growing up and spend much of their time brushing the dust off their jeans; bullies, finding them easy marks, take it upon themselves to teach them that not everything will come easy. From the photograph you never would’ve imagined the terrible end that awaited Asmore. You’d have thought, rather, that the future would run on forever and deliver nothing but the best: the best wife and kids, the best house in the neighborhood, the best galleries to support his career, the best collectors to pursue him, the best seat in the museum hall at the banquet honoring him for a lifetime of achievement.

A block of ecru matting had been fitted over the photograph, and it bore a photographer’s stamp. “Whitesell,” it said. It was a name I recognized. Crossing over the stamp was the photographer’s signature with a bouquet of flourishes.

“Levette was quite the dreamboat,”
I wrote on my notepad.

Rhys smiled and wrote,
“Yes, but strongly resented emphasis on looks.”

She slid another photograph across the table and turned the page on her pad.
“Asmore with the artist Alberta Kinsey, his friend and teacher at the N. O. Art School. Like a mother to him. Called her Miss Bertie.”

It was a small snapshot showing the young man and older woman painting together on location in the French Quarter. In the photo the artists are sitting on campstools with paint boxes open on their laps. Each has an arm extended with a brush in hand, as they appear to be painting the same view. Asmore is wearing a white shirt and white pants and dirty half boots without socks. He is painfully thin, his face gaunt with shadows around the eyes, hair tortured by a breeze. He is situated a few feet behind his mentor. The brim of a straw hat partially obscures Kinsey’s face, but she looks old enough to be his grandmother.

There is a third figure in the photograph. It is the blurry form of a young woman standing just over Asmore’s shoulder. Is she a curious onlooker? Yet another admirer? Because her face is too distorted to
make out, she would have spotted the photographer with camera raised and turned away just as the frame was being shot.

When I finished with the picture Rhys was waiting with another notation:
“Who do you imagine the girl is?”

“Could be anyone.”

She shook her head.
“Don’t think so.”

“Another Aunt Dottie?”

“Lover,”
she wrote, pressing the point of her pencil down hard on the pad. She leaned across the table for another look at the photograph.
“Notice the old car with the La. license plate?”

I smiled and nodded and she shook her head again.
“Look!”
And then I saw what she was getting at. The plate was dated 1941.
“He died in September, same year. Age twenty-three!!!”