Home Schooling (22 page)

He asked if she'd got the picture of Teresa, and Marisa said yes, she had, and Teresa and Pawel looked lovely. How lucky he was, she said. When he got back to Poland, Norman said, he and Teresa were going to get married. “I'd like you to be there, Marisa,” he said. “In fact, you have to be there. I won't go ahead without you.” He smiled.

“At least you're doing all right for yourself,” he said, indicating with a slight nod the room, the frosted pink sconces on the wall, and the little prisms of light refracted through the leaded-glass of the windows. Not bad at all, he said. And Marisa shocked herself a little by taking a cool, considered look around and saying, yes, it's nice, isn't it? Almost discounting her right to be in the house, demoting herself to the position of house sitter, casual but trusted acquaintance of an absent family. It was as if she were striving to remain a little detached, as if she were asking herself: Did she belong here? How could she deserve all this, the beautiful room, the four walls, the splendid old house on its hill above the city?

O
NCE, IN WALES
, a man named Felix Curtis spoke to Alex about the “persistence of vision.” He was quoting Claudius Ptolemy, he said, but he was also speaking of his own view of individual immortality. Did she understand his gist? Yes, she said, although she was, at the same time, trying to hear what Désirée and Robin were saying to one another. Felix Curtis said, an image, a scene, a particular face captivates the mind. For the peace of the soul, it must be preserved; it must be made sense of, however fleeting it is. It must be used in making art. But perhaps she was not interested?

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I am. I'm very interested.”

It was a summer night and it was raining and a coal fire was burning in the hearth. These images, of the fire and the room with its restless shadows along the walls and its more or less static occupants were to remain in Alex's mind over the years, persistently, just as Felix Curtis and Ptolemy before him had said.

In a small art gallery located about a block and a half up from Pier
69
on the Seattle waterfront, on a fine afternoon in early September nearly fifty years later, Alex stands in front of a painting of a picnic. Unharmed by time — looking, in fact, as if the paint has just been freshly applied, as if the artist has just put down her brush and wandered off for a moment of respite — its grandness astonishes Alex. Such effort, she thinks, such a task. Light positively shines out of every object: the purple lupines and the blue delphiniums, the slate roof and narrow green front door of the house. The painting shimmers in the still, cold air of the gallery. Alex waits for a suitable response to occur within her. She waits receptively, as if the painting is an icon she is praying to. What she wants, she thinks, is a powerful surge of memory, an elegiac, romantically vivid memory of that time and place, which is to say the verdant front garden at Grove's End, in West Glamorgan, Wales. In June
1957
.

Désirée's painting of the picnic looks something like this: a luminous blue wash of sky above green hills and austere grey mountains, and in the foreground a garden, and in the garden, spread out on the green grass, a plaid blanket with a group of people carefully disposed on its surface. Désirée, who can't bear, ever, to be left out of anything, has painted herself in next to Robin Pritchard. Her hand is touching his arm, as if she has just thought of something she wants to say to him. Loren, Désirée's daughter, is resting her hand lightly on the back of a small brown dog with a tail like a feather duster. Alex, in the painting, is seated, her legs tucked under her. Like the other figures she appears solid, solemn, yet also languorous, somnolent, and strangely blind, her downcast eyes merely suggested by violet shadows. No one, except possibly the dog, who has a friendly, eager expression, is smiling.

Alex stops next in front of a painting of a young woman leaning against a tree in a grove. I don't want to see this, she thinks. But she
keeps looking. The woman in the painting is her. And yet it is not; she didn't ever look that cowed, that meek, surely? Not even when she was young and unhappy and far from home. What's happened is that Désirée, in the process of painting, has altered her face, pinched it in, made her features appear elongated and neurotic, sulky. (Alex has nurtured, over the years, a small nagging fear that this was done spitefully. Or worse, that the paintings is, after all, an accurate likeness.) In the painting, she has her arms full of lupines and daisies, which she remembers as being dusty with pollen and rank smelling, as if pulled out of a swamp. At the dark centre of each flower is a restless corona of extremely small black insects, some of which had started creeping inexorably up her bare arms. She swore they were biting her. Désirée told her not to be squeamish. Ignore them, she said. She was mixing paints on her palette, absorbed, businesslike, and then squinting at Alex, sizing her up. She began to sing a rousing, martial tune.
Bright-eyed freedom stands before ye, hear ye not her call?
“Man of Harlech,” she said, smiling. Less than a month in a new country and she'd assimilated the culture, the music, the mood and temper of the people, the vagaries of the climate. Whatever was novel and immediate enthralled her, Alex realized. When it ceased being novel, she would yearn for release.

Alex remembers how, while she was posing for this painting, a shiny green beetle with long, delicately jointed legs plopped onto a leaf right in front of her face. There she was, pressed up against the rough, raw bark of a tree, a woodland nymph undergoing a painful metamorphosis into a more rudimentary, natural state. While all she truly wanted, or so she remembers thinking, was to go back to the house for a nice hot cup of tea. She felt awkward, self-conscious, alternately too hot and too cold, and Désirée had skilfully caught all this. She had portrayed with great precision the splotches of colour on Alex's cheeks, the agitation in her eyes, even the thirst in her throat. She made Alex look as if she were about to run away or go mad or make, suddenly, a strange appalling confession. (Which,
in Alex's case, would go something like this: I am in love with a man, another woman's husband. I dream of him. I have carved his name into the trunk of a tree in this very grove and I did it with such precision, in such a fine script, that no one will ever discover it, least of all you, Désirée.)

Désirée said that she'd just realized that when she was painting someone, she understood that person better than anyone else did. Better, in fact, than the subject understood himself, or herself. For example, everything Alex thought and felt was clear to her,
at that very moment.
“It's true,” Désirée said. “I see all your most secret thoughts.”

“Then I guess you know,” Alex said, “that I'm hungry and bored and I want a cup of tea and I want to sit down. I want to go back to the house. But you didn't know, did you, until I told you? Because no one can read minds.”

“Oh, you'd be surprised,” Désirée said, unperturbed. “You'd be surprised at what I can do.”

Désirée's art has the power to supplant memory, Alex now realizes. Or at least to recast it in a new form. When she looks at these paintings, she is seeing the past through Désirée's eyes, not her own. Alex thinks the daisies were crawling with insects, but maybe they weren't; she thinks she felt the tree pressing uncomfortably into her back, but was that true? She thinks she saw a beetle on a leaf. How far can she trust such evanescent minutiae? Not very far, she decides. She can't even be sure if she looked like the young woman in the painting: petulant, cross, tired, homesick. She hopes she didn't. It is Désirée's memory, not hers, that is present in each painting, like some kind of fixative applied to the surface. This is the artist's power, solely, Alex thinks, as she stares at herself, the self she may or may not have been at that time.

In
1957
, Alex, Désirée, and Désirée's daughter Loren, then four years old, travelled to Wales, so that Désirée could stay at Grove's End, which was a kind of retreat, or refuge, for artists, owned by a man named Felix Curtis. This Felix Curtis — Alex was never comfortable calling him either Felix or Mr. Curtis — had set up Grove's End as a place where artists of all kinds — painters, writers, poets — could work in peace, without distractions, for a certain amount of time. They paid for room and board, and were expected to contribute toward housekeeping, but the costs were reasonable and there were funds available from various foundations and patrons, Désirée explained. Felix Curtis had been a successful businessman, in some unspecified enterprise, and had inherited money, she believed. Perhaps he was a lord of the realm in disguise, she suggested. Anyway, she'd been writing to him. He'd mailed her a printed list of references, testimonials. Some of the artists on the list had amazing reputations, Désirée said. Their work sold for thousands of dollars. Or thousands of pounds, she should say. In the brochure, these artists, and others, as yet not so famous, praised the salubrious atmosphere at Grove's End. She handed the brochure to Alex. “See what it says about the home-like environment, the pastoral setting? Fields of grazing sheep, the mountain paths, waterfalls, wild flowers. Go on, read it.” Obediently, Alex read the brochure. Désirée said she saw Grove's End as her salvation. She needed time to paint every day, without the constant interruptions of having to look after Loren and be a good wife to Tom, or try to be a good wife, not to mention doing the shopping and cooking and laundry. She spoke in such a dispirited tone that Alex had to laugh. What else could she do, with Désirée, but laugh?

“I want you to come with me,” she said to Alex. “I can't leave Loren, she's not old enough. Tom wouldn't know what to do with her. And anyway, he wouldn't be able to leave the nursery. Summer is his busiest season. Without you, Alex, I won't be able to go.
Please say yes, Alex. It'll be a holiday for you. And we'll be together.”

Once she was there, once they were settled in at Grove's End, Désirée did begin to work. She poured over art books Felix Curtis supplied her with, books on technique, biographies of artists; she went out in the morning and sketched landscapes in charcoal; she experimented with watercolours; she did as she pleased, as she said, from morning until night. And because this was also meant to be “like a holiday,” she planned picnics, like the one in the painting.

On that day, Alex remembers — and she does remember this, it is her own memory, she is sure, not Désirée's — Désirée woke up very early, before it was even properly light, and ran downstairs in her dressing gown to put a chicken in the oven to roast. Then she ran back upstairs and rapped sharply on Alex's bedroom door, and on Robin's bedroom door, which was at the end of the hall. “Come on, you two, I need help,” she was saying. “I need a picnic brigade, on the double.” By the time Alex dressed, and got Loren dressed, and the two of them went down to the kitchen, Désirée had scones baking in the oven. She put Alex to work chopping up potatoes to boil for potato salad and preparing the devilled eggs. Loren wanted to help, so Alex let her kneel on a chair at the table and sprinkle paprika on the eggs. Robin came downstairs and poured himself tea and sat at the table and moaned, “Look at the time. It's dawn. I am not at peace with this savage hour, Désirée.”

“That's too bad,” Désirée said. “Too bad for you. It is the best time. I love morning.” In passing, she touched the back of his neck with her hand, leaving a floury mark. She never missed a chance, Alex thought, marvelling. Her own hand, stirring sugar into her tea, was only a few inches from Robin Pritchard's hand, but she would never, never. However, if she did, if she felt capable of being that bold, she could well imagine the sensation: a fine tingling warmth along the skin, her pulse racing. A hotness, in her face, betraying her. Désirée wasn't shy, she never blushed, her head was not foolishly transparent, like Alex's.

Although not apparent in Désirée's painting, a white mist, caused by the warmth of the sun on the wet ground, had been rising from the grass that day. It made Alex think of souls, the souls of the wild flowers, perhaps, rising toward heaven. (Being at Grove's End encouraged such images, it seemed.) The effect of this mist, gauzy and indeterminate, was lovely, as was the softly filtered sunlight in the grove of ancient oak trees — there really was a grove at Grove's End. Birch trees, white-skinned and stately. Oaks and mountain ash trees. Robin told them one of the ancient Welsh gods, none other than Gwydion, god of the arts, he believed, slept curled around the roots of the trees and would one day awaken and make everyone at Grove's End immortal. Robin lay on his back on a plaid rug Désirée had spread on the ground, his head propped on his arm, and smiled up at Désirée. He had a book with him and he put it face down, open, on his chest. That morning, he told her, he had written two fine long poems. Later, he would read them again, he said, and undoubtedly discover — to his sorrow — that they were rubbish.

The grass, as Alex could feel through the soles of her shoes, was damp. More than damp — soggy. Not surprisingly, since it had been raining for days.

“It isn't really a lawn, is it?” Désirée said. “It's more of a bog. Never mind, at least the sun is warm.”

Désirée opened the wicker basket and took out a plate of chicken. She said it would taste better chilled, but without a proper refrigerator what could you do? She set out bowls of green salad and potato salad and devilled eggs, crimson with paprika, and also not quite cold enough for her liking. “What lovely red eggs!” she said to Loren. She unwrapped a loaf of crusty bread and passed it to Robin, who tore off a piece and put it on his plate. When the dog, a great scrounger who had managed to insinuate himself into the picnic, began to whine, Robin broke off a few more pieces and tossed them to him. Loren then wanted to do the same.