Forgetfulness (17 page)

The Department of the Army, Thomas said, dropping his voice. Russ had told him that the Department of the Army was their official cover until they finished training at the place everyone called "the farm" and then sent abroad to work in a friendly advertising agency with offices in all the European capitals. They were NOCs, Russ confided, meaning they would be living under non-official cover, pronounced
knock.
But this information was strictly hush-hush. NTK, Russ explained, available only to those with a need to know.

His father pulled a face. He said, That's just the damnedest thing I ever heard of. Why don't they simply enlist?

It's a different kind of army work, Thomas said lamely.

Are you putting me on, Tommy?

No, he said. It's all arranged.

I suppose this was Bernhard's idea.

Russ, too, he said.

Strange boy, Bernhard, his father said. He's a snooper. He pokes his nose into places it doesn't belong. I always thought you and Russ were at a disadvantage with Bernhard. He grew up awfully fast, too
fast. And his father was no help. Hardheaded German, wasn't good with his wife or with Bernhard, either. But I think Bernhard gave as good as he got. He was a forbidding presence, even as a kid. That hair, like an animal's pelt. Thickest hair I ever saw, like a Labrador's, tight against his scalp. That strange golden color.

Bernhard's all right, Thomas said loyally, turning from his father to listen to an especially silky Hodes riff. But he had a point about Bernhard's hair, woven as tight as a rug. Women liked it, according to Bernhard, when they weren't frightened.

I hope those boys know what they're doing, his father said.

It was impossible for Thomas to explain to his father how Bernhard had found his new purpose in life. The gears were set in motion by his German professor, who suggested that Bernhard meet an old friend, a historian who did special work for the government. I've told Mr. Green about you, the professor said, and he wants to get together for a chat. Bernhard agreed and when he asked what time, the professor said that very afternoon. He's eager to watch your match. Bernhard was a wrestler, heavyweight division, and the captain of the Wisconsin team. Hard to miss Mr. Green, Bernhard told Thomas later, he wore a Borsalino hat and a bomber jacket that looked as if it had seen thirty missions over Tokyo. He was big as a horse with hands the size of pie plates, bigger even than mine, Bernhard said. So I made short work of my opponent and went to meet Mr. Green. He wanted to speak German, so we spoke German while he asked me about myself, my family, my friends, my interests, and finally he asked me what I intended to do with my life. He said he could offer interesting work—second time that day I'd heard the expression—if I was willing to go to Washington for an interview and a psychological test, nothing very demanding but a necessity. Expenses paid. All this was in German, Bernhard said. Naturally I mentioned Russ and you, too, Thomas, but when I said you were an artist at heart he seemed to lose interest. Hell, I thought they could use an artist. But I guess not. Funny thing was, Mr. Green really was a historian, except his histories are all classified. But he liked the cut of Russ's jib—his phrase—so we're going off together to work for the government. Wish you could be with us, Thomas. They want us for overseas work and in the meantime we have a little apartment in Georgetown, around the corner from Kennedy's old house, arranged by Mr. Green.

That aroused Thomas's envy because he was so taken by the romance of the Kennedys, the thrilling rhetoric, the campaign that promised a new kind of government and a new generation to run it. Kennedy's people were idealistic but they were tough, too, animated by a kind of European fatalism. The other important thing was that they weren't from Wisconsin. They were eastern men from Boston and New York, widely traveled, cosmopolitan even, an altogether different milieu from provincial Madison with its earnest protest marches and student manifestoes. Kennedy's people were coastal as opposed to inland-bred, familiar with boats and oceans. They knew how the world worked but in their dissatisfaction were determined to change the rules. And there was one final important thing. Thomas had seen a magazine photograph of the president and his beautiful wife at a dinner party in New York. On the living room wall of the apartment was a portrait of a woman, a nude unmistakably drawn by the hand of Henri Matisse. Kennedy seemed to be looking at it out of the corner of his eye, a rapt sidelong look of admiration and deep respect. So the president-elect was an art lover as well, Matisse no less, the century's greatest artist.

You're being evasive, Tommy. It's not like you.

Thomas looked up from his reverie. Evasive about what?

The boys, his father said.

What about them?

It's intelligence work, isn't it?

I don't know what it is, Pop.

Intelligence work, his father said again, and barked a laugh. God save the republic. Then he signaled for the check and after a moment of thought said, All right, goddammit. I'll stake you a thousand dollars. But that's
it,
not another dime.

Good luck, Tommy. You'll need it.

Thomas smiled at the memory of his father's slapping a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, dismounting from the barstool, reaching for his coat, and hurrying into the frigid Wisconsin night.

He poured a thimble of cognac into his glass. Thomas knew he was drinking too much but could see no good reason to quit or slow down. Alcohol was an old and valued friend, most reliable, always ready to jog your elbow, recollecting hidden memories, specifically the pitch and swing of actual language, language as it was spoken:
But that's it, not another dime. Good luck, Tommy. You'll need it,
the old man's voice in his ear, a raspy voice from his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, the vowels as uninflected as the surface of Lake Michigan on a still summer's day. His father's voice brought him out of his Camelot reverie. Probably the old man was reading his mind and that would account for his sardonic smile under the raised eyebrows. You always had the face but the trick was to put a voice to the face, and when you did you had a portrait and a story inside the portrait. Thomas had to know what the subject was thinking and the voice he was thinking in. Was that not the crux of Rembrandt's late self-portraits, the voice inside the rutted and disheveled head? Thomas thought that Matisse's portraits were not really portraits, they were expressions of Matisse himself, his own voice and whatever he was thinking at the time of composition. In the case of the portrait of the nude in the New York apartment, Henri Matisse was thinking what John F. Kennedy was thinking, and rapt would not be the word for it.

Thomas's father had not lived to see his first show at the two-room gallery in Greenwich Village, sparsely attended, no sales, until an unexpected review appeared in one of the afternoon papers, so well written and provocative that people were drawn in. They wanted to discover an artist at the beginning of his career, things not fully worked out but the destination not in doubt. Portraiture was at the bottom of the food chain then, overwhelmed by abstraction and expressionism and finally abstract expressionism. Jackson Pollock was a kind of unruly god, no doubt as unhappy in Valhalla as he had been on Long Island, but still with vast supervisory powers, arbitrarily applied. In the end Thomas sold most everything and his
prices were not low. He would have given anything to have been able to write a check for a thousand dollars and present it to his father right then, so he wrote one to his mother instead and discovered later that it had been endorsed over to her church. She had come from LaBarre for the opening and had been offended by the many nudes and embarrassed when he introduced her to Karen, braless and alluring, already tipsy on Almaden and weed. Isn't it great? Karen said. Don't you just l-l-l-love it to death? Isn't Thomas divine? she added, pointing proudly to the portrait of her own sweet self nude in bed. She had found the most wanton pose, enjoying herself in the voluptuous folds of a chalk-white sheet. My shroud, she said, and laughed and laughed.

Thomas had tried many times to make a portrait of his mother but had never succeeded. He finished the pictures but they were no good because he was never able to see beneath the skin. They were stillborn. He was never able to settle on the expression, although he was attracted to the disappointment on his mother's face when she looked upon Karen's portrait and had pulled back from it as though she had been physically struck, her abrupt motion dramatic enough to have drawn attention from those around her—who leaned in to look at nude Karen to see what there was about her that had caused such a reaction. Thomas had seen the same expression many times, most often when his father had taken one bourbon too many and had said something coarse or unfeeling. Her son was unable to locate his mother in relation to himself or his father. She seemed to be a star in a distant orbit, now bright, now far away. Her orbit had nothing in common with his orbit or her husband's orbit, yet was studied meticulously by both, studied with the care of astronomers—amateur astronomers, it had to be said. Astronomers who reckoned her orbit in relation to their orbits, not as something unique in itself, and no doubt she did the same. Your mother is fragile, his father said to him once, yet to Thomas she did not seem fragile at all. From her distant location she seemed to rule things, though he reached that conclusion years later, when she was gone. The half-dozen times he had tried to paint her portrait he felt as if
he were painting a stranger, but that was no explanation because he had successfully painted many strangers. Strangers were his métier, fifteen minutes' acquaintance and a series of snapshots all he required. But she refused to come to life on his canvas, still a distant star.

He had resolved not to paint his father until he himself was sixty-seven, the old man's age when he died. He wanted to see his father through mature eyes, remembering his voice and his manner when speaking to his patients, his voice so soft it could barely be heard. His voice was his manner. No one delivered more bad news than a doctor, bad news a part of the day's portfolio. At the end of the day his father's voice was wan, used up and wrung out, the wrinkles in his face so deeply etched they might have been carved in stone. At the end of a very long day at the easel Thomas's own face had a similar look, not quite a thousand-yard stare but close to it, the day's events pressing in, the details clear but soon to fade. The day's bad news always lingered but it was his own bad news, not another's, and he was under no obligation to share it, still less an obligation to cure it. Of course a portrait never captured a single moment but an accumulation of moments, and the older the subject, the greater the accumulation. Thomas could begin his father's portrait any time now but he knew he would wait until his own life was more settled, equilibrium achieved, so that he could recollect with confidence. If he attempted his father's portrait now he would end up with a self-portrait disguised as his father's portrait. To some degree all portraits were self-portraits, as all novels were to some degree autobiographical. Trouble was, the artist could never calculate the precise step on the ladder, the exact degree of separation; and the viewer knew even less. That which appeared true was false, and vice versa. A visage was sometimes true and false at the same time, the natural effect of a hundred brushstrokes or a dozen rewrites. Autobiography resided in the style of composition and from that the viewer could conclude whatever he wished or nothing at all. The possibilities were nearly infinite. Thomas thought he would wait before attempting his father's portrait. The old man was entitled to a picture that was his
very own. His mother deserved her own, too, but that would have to wait a little longer.

Thomas covered the billiards table and extinguished the bright, green-shaded overhead light. He put his empty glass in the sink, then thought again and fetched the cognac bottle and poured a generous measure, all the while sensing a shudder of disapproval in the room. He took a swallow, allowing the disapproval to gather. That was Florette, glaring at him from her space above the fireplace, irritated that he had drunk something before dinner and one bottle of wine during dinner and was finishing now with cognac, one, two glasses, and, still not satisfied, a third. This was insupportable. Drinking after dinner was dangerous unless you were entertaining guests. After-dinner drinking was unwholesome also, an unfortunate indulgence, in no way comme il faut. Florette was sympathetic toward the bored or the lonely or the melancholic, but not toward drinking as a solution. He tried to explain to her that drinking usually increased loneliness or melancholy but was a specific against boredom because alcohol cast a cockeyed light on your surroundings. That which was dull became vivid. That which was static became a whirlwind. Grief became hilarity because the world was skewed. Thomas turned his back on Florette's portrait and sipped his cognac. The time was midnight. He finished that glass and poured one more, turning now to give a sideways look at Florette, glaring back at her with what he hoped and believed was a rapt expression of admiration and respect.

The room was in near darkness and he was happier now, filled up with cognac, living inside himself, his ghosts gathering around. Florette was there and Granger and the Slovenian bears and the appalling Victoria Granger, a repertory company obliged to follow an unfamiliar script. Thomas was writing it now as he sipped his cognac in an enviable zone of well-being, snug in a well-made house, at that moment without a worry in the world. Something came into his mind and went out again, a fugitive thought that made him smile and then laugh out loud in the empty room. The world was elsewhere and might not exist at all, an incoherent VSOP-cognac milieu
majestic in its carelessness. He tasted cognac and blew an imaginary smoke ring from an imaginary cigarette. The wind had come up, whistling loudly in the eaves, perhaps the signal of another storm, most likely not. No storms tonight. The wind produced a strange sharp sound and that was what came from living alone in an old farmhouse, ominous sounds that could put your nerves on edge if you listened carefully enough and paid attention, something he had no intention of doing, conjuring trespassers in the shadows—and then Thomas understood that the telephone was ringing, one bleat after another, six, seven, eight bleats, and sudden silence as the answering machine connected and he heard his own voice and after a pause the voice of another, not at all welcome at this hour. He had not received a telephone call in days.