A Peculiar Grace (7 page)

T
HE LONG HOURS
of night following the afternoon when Hewitt’s father died and he sat with his mother in the basement room next to the wine cellar, the locked room with its old rolltop desk and the wall of wide shallow steel map files, his sister Beth waiting in the Charlotte airport for a flight to New York and the train up from there, Mary Margaret told him all she learned that long-gone night but also of how little; how the stories that came out did so over the next year; of how Thomas Pearce would come into her life for days at a time, then weeks gone, and how she knew even from that first night that it would be this way until one way or another it would not. And she was prepared to await that answer.

S
HE SAT FOR
him and he tried to draw. His studio was a cheap gutted apartment far down on the East Side, work tables of planks on sawhorses with cans and thick tubes of unopened paint, stacks of blank stretched canvases leaned against the wall, a pair of spotless easels. An old worn velvet daybed with a heavy mahogany scroll at one end, a mattress on the floor behind a curtain strung on a wire, a small gas cookstove and a sink. None of it quite new but nothing like she’d expected; the only color, the only pigment, the only paint was not the speckles and smears she’d expected the first time she went there but a broad oval on the plaster wall that even her untrained eye could
see was nothing more than deep blue paint squeezed straight from the tube into a palm and then the hand working in furious swirls streaks and daubs upon the wall. She contemplated it as she sat for him and slowly the obvious rage began to make sense to her; a man had been forsaken by old and trusted tools. Or as he sat perched on a tall stool with a pad on his knees and a handful of sharpened pencils in his shirt pocket and after fifteen minutes or three or an hour and a half would rip the sheet from the pad and hurl it crumpled onto the floor all this wordless unless she moved when he spoke his frequent command “As before, as before.”

He saw her as what might save him long before she understood this. By the time of that comprehension on her part she knew it was true. And believed she would.

In the end it didn’t happen in New York although those years were as necessary as the two visits over two years when they took the train to Vermont to spend unholy weeks of manic infused vacation with his mother where Mary Margaret understood it was the place as much as the woman he wanted her to learn but also knew his mother saw her very differently than Thomas Pearce did and both women knew nothing was to be done about that although Lydia Pearce did outright ask if Mary Margaret was sleeping with her son and why bother with the charade and extra work of separate bedrooms. This over tea and cookies with thimbles of sherry on a summer afternoon when Thomas was wandering the woods above the majestic house.

The summer after that they went to Nova Scotia and the vast pile of the rest of their lives together that she’d seen from the start and held to finally tumbled and came to rest about their feet. Around them as sure as the frothing tide-rise.

But before this, long before this, she learned what had to be learned and then a lid clamped forever, nothing more. There came the dawn they’d been up all night when suddenly the wave of high energy she’d almost gotten used to came over him and he ordered that they dress and go out into the fog-drift of morning and hiked up to the bridge
to Brooklyn and walked across it as the sun began to burn through and he led her up toward Clinton Hill and then down a small side street where they stood looking at a three-story brick building and as they had walked there he told her not only where they were going and what to expect but also where they were going in the past. To that evening distant and immediate as this spring morning. Which did not stop her from sitting on the curb across the street when his account trailed to nothing and he stood gazing upon what was not there, would never be there again, and she left him and sat facedown into the fabric of her gay spring dress and wept.

As if describing events happened to another, he told her. How he’d rented the third floor apartment while still a student at the nearby Pratt Institute and how it was not long after that he met his wife not in Brooklyn but Manhattan, a student of ballet, of galvanic personality and ambition but when the two met both knew their destinies with each other and he knew he was the perfect foil for her acerbic stringent wit and laced fury, believed she was as necessary as oxygen, and it was in these early days when he began to be noticed, to be taken a bit apart from his own crowd—a place he admitted he’d always thought himself to be. And still she danced and he loved that she danced, was happy to see her off mornings to classes and wait expectantly and braced late afternoons when she returned from auditions and what he did not say but the young Irish woman knew was that this woman was lovely and lithe, athletic and demanding and very likely angry also as his recognition grew as hers did not for then there came the baby, the little girl. And it was here and only here that his account faltered before he gathered and went on. How his love for Celeste and hers for him was instantaneous and ferocious but the morning Susan was born and he held the newborn looking down at her he was then and there flooded with a love he’d never dreamed existed, never expected from himself or thought possible in any human being. And how that never changed, as Celeste resumed her now more daunting efforts at the barre, and he took much care of Susan so very quickly a toddler and then a little
girl who was he said in a voice as if recounting the previous day’s weather the only thing, human or otherwise and especially human, who was never ever an interruption to his work, who he’d hold on one hip as he worked on the canvas before him, learning to rethink his actions and speed as a one-handed man. How she knew the names of the colors and could find the right tube by the time she was three. How she’d go with him down to the naval yard or the piers or further south to the leather tanning yards, the boatyards, the ironworks and manufacturing blocks, the warehouses of goods bound for the ships or across the river to Manhattan, or setting up on the rocky shoreline of the East River within view of the magnificent bridge as he sketched boats and barges and tugs and freighters of all manner and size. The little girl leaning against his side so she could watch the pencil work on the paper. How Celeste slowly and without apparent bitterness retreated from auditions but never the classes and how the phonograph was in constant play ranging from the great ballets, primarily the Russians, to swing records but also music Celeste found and brought home and introduced him to—the older Negro jazz and race records of music she called the blues and also hillbilly music or the wild peculiar mixture of western swing and also the food, the food gained and gathered from all edges of the city as if for Celeste learning food was learning languages. And Susan grew and on her fourth birthday they held a party for her that was all adults, all people she knew and how he stood watching these formally attired guests and the poised little hostess and knew those people were here not only because of him but honestly for her as well and how she would lead, was already leading an extraordinary life. Now fully away from Pratt and almost all other formal ties except for the midtown gallery that handled his work as well as the Philadelphia and Chicago collectors, the wooly-haired duke or earl or whatever he was—an Englishman—who sent monthly telegrams and appeared two or three times a year and at the moment was bent at the waist in his tails as he led Susan in a delicate and not altogether disastrous attempt at a waltz. The upswell of cheers in the darkened
room as she blew the candles and opened the pile of brightly ribboned boxes and someone handed her a half-filled flute of champagne and she sipped it as if it were the only reasonable complement to the occasion.

How he worked. From noon until three in the morning and back up two hours later to work again until sunset. Then dinner and a short exhausted sleep on the sofa trickling in and out as Celeste read to Susan and bathed her and put her to bed and then came to him and slowly woke him and they would sit talking quiet, or loving, and then she’d go to bed as he brewed a pot of coffee and went back to work. How this would go on for days at a time, weeks even, and then he’d fall apart and sleep three or four days around the clock waking only to eat once or twice, then always beefsteak and nothing more with a tumbler of whisky and back to sleep. And how sometime during this wonderful catastrophic haze he lost sense of things, lost track of himself and of his two girls, as he thought of them.

That night two years ago. The second autumn after the war. A soft evening when he’d finished a marathon of three linked paintings, of days and days he couldn’t count and so kissed his daughter and spat a No at his wife with her offered dinner and walked out and down the block around the corner to a bar because his head was blistered and reeling and he needed not quiet so much as nothing demanded or wanted or hoped of him for a few hours and how he sat there into the dark hours and even heard the sirens and saw the window-speckle of racing fire engine lights and pushed his glass across the bar for another drink. And was sipping that down when a man, a neighbor he knew only by face, was pummeling his shoulders and shouting at him and Thomas Pearce knocked over his stool and ran out and up the street already seeing the fire rising above the buildings, already knowing what he was heading toward.

And stood at the inner edge of the great circle of watchers, the inner circle a snake nest of canvas hoses and huge puffing pumper trucks and the useless ladder extended toward an empty flame-licked blackness
of night, held back by men sanctioned to be within that circle from which he was excluded, the firefighters and the nervous less well-protected police as the top half of the building spewed upward and as he knew he would Thomas Pearce heard the popping explosions of jars of turpentine and thinners within the abhorrent tornado of fire and standing there, held there, restrained, he saw clear as if he was within the leaping orange fluid structure, the pile of rags soaked with spirits and gum and turpentine that had accumulated to the side of his big easel, into the corner to rest and ferment and foment.

To be picked up and discarded another day.

Last thing he said to Mary Margaret Duffy before she sank backward to the curb and cried as he stood silent before the rebuilt building, arms strapped across his chest was, “Once it sank in there was no hope I pulled away from those men. Of course they needed to talk to me, wanted to talk to me. But I got free and walked away. I walked for days. Days and nights. It was both of them, I want you to understand that. It was all of it. But what comes back over me again and again, what I do not understand and never will was Susan. She was not just another person. She was her very own self all ways but she was part of me. She came from part of me. Where did she go? Where did my Susan go?”

H
EWITT COULD LEARN
nothing more. There were no photographs, no letters, no papers left behind. His mother would not or could not recall his father’s first wife’s family name or where she came from. She did not know where they were buried. His father, if he ever visited those graves, did so alone on one of his occasional trips to New York. Or wherever they might be. So he had two names and the enormity of what his father silently lived with. All those winter evenings with a big fire popping in the old fireplace in the living room how often had his father stared deep into those flames and considered those other greater malignant flames? Twice a year birthdays came and went
unnoted. And two anniversaries. The one in stark counterpoint to the other but both annual bookends of a sort.

And now, at three in the morning, older than his father not only when he lost his first family but gained the strength and courage to try again, Hewitt Pearce stood at his night window and looked out on the summer starlit land and was most amazed by the love that pierced the brooding man. He wondered at the struggles held silent in his love for his family. For the love between his parents had been a visible thing, a vivid living presence that enveloped them all. A strong man, Hewitt thought. Trying to determine the difference between the passion of one’s life and the love of one’s life. And could not. Yes, a strong man. Stronger than himself.

Two

Despite his restless night he was up early. He was always up early. Winter mornings he slept in, sometimes until six o’clock. When summer days were longest he might lie in bed past four listening to the birds rioting over the pleasure of a new day for as much as half an hour before rising. The house this morning was cooled down but the kitchen held a touch of warmth from the range. A thick fog from the branch of the river ran along the valley but by ten it would be gone and the day would be warm, dry and clear. A slight breeze perhaps. Well up into the sixties, perhaps low seventies.

He’d heard nothing from upstairs and wouldn’t be surprised if Jessica slept most of the day. He still wasn’t clear where she’d come from or how long she’d been on the road. He didn’t even know her last name.

He went into the fog already backlit with the faintest of yellow glows and down to the Volkswagen and made a slow trip around the car. The inspection sticker was current, with seven months left. The tires were in bad shape but he already knew that from observing the tracks on the woods road the morning before. At the rear he eased down to kneel. The plates were current as well. He popped open the back, feeling this was not invasive but mechanical and his intent helpful. The little engine seemed in good enough shape, reasonably clean with cables and even the dinky heater tube was solid. Finally he lifted the dipstick but even that was better than it could be—the oil was perhaps half a quart
low and thick and black as a skillet. So it wanted an oil change. Everything else looked good to go. He rocked back on his heels and quietly shut the compartment door and pressed until he heard it latch. Somebody had watched over this car and Jessica was the obvious caretaker.