Home Schooling (25 page)

“Yes,” she said. “That is exactly the question. If I weren't here, I wouldn't be working. By now, I would have given up. I wouldn't have produced any work this year. Not a thing.”

“I don't believe that,” said Robin. “I don't believe that for a moment. You're an artist. Artists create as others breathe.” He was sitting at Désirée's side, on a hassock. He had helped himself to a toffee from the tin on the mantelpiece and was unwrapping it thoughtfully. Désirée was half-reclining in a chair, her head back, her legs crossed, one foot swinging. She was wearing sandals and a blue dress, and her hair, which she hadn't had cut since coming to Wales, was held in place with one of Loren's hair ribbons. She put out her hand and Robin caught it in his and as they smiled at each other. Alex felt a disturbance, like an electric shock, pass through her, and, she imagined, through the walls of the house. At the same time she saw the look of surprise, of recognition, on Felix Curtis's face, followed at once by a pleased, and even proud smile, as if he were saying to himself, Well, it is all happening just as I planned.

One day when Alex went to pick up Loren, Mrs. Fradkin told her how much she, and the children, enjoyed Loren's songs.

“Her songs?” Alex said.

“Indeed, yes. Loren invents the loveliest little songs. She sings them for us. But you must know this. The songs are little ballads about Loren's daily life, the little things that happen. She sings about you. And about her mother. She sings about a little brown dog that likes to eat bread.”

Alex bent down and began helping Loren into her sweater. Her cardigan, Loren called it, in her new, shy, quick Welsh voice. She, too, had the gift of assimilation, it seemed. “I didn't know you liked singing, Loren,” Alex said to her. “Is it a secret? Are you going to sing for me and Mummy when we get home?”

Loren shrugged out of Alex's grasp. She wanted to do up her own buttons, she said. She knew how: Mama Clara had taught her.

After school, Loren had lunch and then a nap. When she woke, Alex took her on another walk into the village, this time to a green-grocer's, where the proprietor, a Mr. Jones, let her use the telephone to place a collect call to Tom. This was a clandestine arrangement she and Tom had made. Of course, he also heard from Désirée, but she often forgot to call, and when she did call she didn't seem interested in discussing practical matters, according to Tom. Or anything else. She didn't tell him how she liked Wales or how she spent her days. She didn't tell him what he wanted to hear. Was Désirée working? he said. Was she working better in Wales than at home? He would like to know if this arrangement was of benefit to her or not. Actually, he'd like her to come home. He wished she'd be more specific about her plans. Didn't he have a right to know? Tom asked. Did Alex have any idea?

Alex telephoned at about three in the afternoon, when it was early morning in Washington State and Tom was sure to be at home still. (It took some time for the call to be completed, and while she waited she tried to picture Tom sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee, his eye on the telephone, but instead she'd see him striding happily, purposefully through the glassy humid air of the greenhouse, between flats of recently misted plants, which was how she liked to remember him.)

As soon as Alex heard Tom's voice, she pressed the phone to Loren's ear.

“Say hello to Daddy,” she prompted. Loren became too shy to speak. Her eyes sparkled and she smiled in delight, but she wouldn't say a word.

Alex took the phone back and told Tom that evidently Loren was a singing star. “She's never sung a note of music in my presence, but Mrs. Fradkin assures me she makes up whole songs, long stories set to music. Today at school, she made a puppet out of a hankie. It has wool hair and button eyes, one red and one black. She won't let go of it.”

“That sounds like Loren,” Tom said. And then, “I find this situation intolerable, to tell you the truth. I had it in mind that Désirée would be on her way home by now. Has she said anything to you?”

“I'm not sure,” Alex said. “I don't think so.” This was on a Friday, when Désirée was in fact at Grove's End packing an overnight bag for the weekend trip to Pembrokeshire with Robin Pritchard. Alex thought: I could tell him where she's going, what she's up to. I could say I had no choice but to tell him because I'm concerned about Loren's well-being. I'm genuinely worried that Loren will find out that her mother behaves like a perfect little slut and that she has no respect for herself or for her marriage, Alex thought, tightening her grip on the telephone receiver and glancing at Mr. Jones, who was placing leeks in a tidy row on the counter, and listening, no doubt, to every word. Even without Mr. Jones, Alex wouldn't have the courage to say that there seemed to be a certain amount of creeping about at night, floorboards creaking, doors opening and closing, up on the second floor at Grove's End. Secret (supposedly) kisses on the stairs. Conversations that halted in mid-sentence when Alex entered a room. She stared at a glass jar containing pink rock candy beside the cash register. She was mute. She was weak with anger. She knew she wouldn't say anything. She couldn't hurt Tom or Désirée. Never a harsh or unkind word, she reminded herself; that was her credo.

“Do you want to try talking to Loren again?” Alex said. She put the phone against Loren's ear. Loren pressed her puppet against her mouth and scrunched her face up in concentration.

“She loves hearing your voice, but she just isn't going to say anything, I guess,” Alex said. “She isn't going to sing, either. Well, who knows? Maybe she's going to turn out to be a poet.” She waited, as if Tom were going to be able to pick up on the coded message. Poet, get it? Robin Pritchard? A weekend in Pembrokeshire?

“And how are you doing?” Tom asked.

“Oh, I'm well, thank you,” Alex said. “Homesick, to be honest. I'm looking forward to coming home.”

This art show Alex is attending is being held in a large warehouse-like room that obviously once served as a dance studio, with bars along the walls, springy wood floors, mirrors. There are other people here, a few, women mostly, standing transfixed in front of the paintings, murmuring amongst themselves. They don't see Alex; she has reached an age, she thinks, when she's invisible to the young. She overhears a young woman saying that Désirée's paintings are beautiful, perhaps too beautiful: sentimental. “Well, definitely beautiful, but not sentimental, I don't think,” her friend says, pointing at the picture of Alex languishing in the grove of trees. “She looks scared, to me. Lost. Makes you wonder what happened to her next. Maybe she was running away from some creep. Her husband or boyfriend, maybe. She looks like a victim.”

“No, she doesn't. What makes you say that? Who was she? Does it say?” The other young woman consulted the brochure. “A friend, that's all it says. Painting of a friend. What kind of a friend, I wonder? They should tell you more in this thing,” she gave the brochure an impatient shake and walked to the next painting.

The ceiling is very high. Sound echoes. The wood floor is elastic under Alex's feet. Loren took ballet lessons once. Alex had wanted Loren to have everything: dance lessons, perfect birthday parties, a bed with a white lace canopy, dolls, pretty dresses. On the plane coming home from Grove's End, Alex had tried to distract Loren by drawing stick figures. She tried to draw the Welsh doll, but it ended up looking like Mama Clara with her limp dresses and her pinafores. Her mouth, a smudged pencil mark, spoke clearly enough to Alex:
It is always better if the mother comes for the child.
Loren had tucked her hand inside her cloth puppet and pressed its mismatched
button eyes against the window, so that it too could look out on the featureless grey sky above the Atlantic.

Alex sits down on a bench, facing Désirée's paintings. Now that they are at a distance from her, she feels a little less overwhelmed, although the figures in the painting of the picnic seem to have assumed colossal proportions. They dwarf the sky, the garden, the house itself. The figures tower, strange, surprised, wonderful, above Alex. Why, she wonders, did Désirée choose to do this particular painting on such a vast scale? All of her paintings, the ones here in this gallery, are possessed of such vividness, indeed such urgency, that Alex finds herself feeling oddly enervated. She wonders if Désirée hovers, an unseen yet discernible presence in the room. Or perhaps Alex's sudden discomfiture is simply a result of not being used to art shows. She and Tom didn't ordinarily visit art galleries, even when they were able to get around more than they do now. They used to sail. They loved gardening, of course. She didn't tell Tom about this show. She didn't want to upset him; his health is frail. Even now he can't speak easily of Désirée. It was Loren who told Alex about the retrospective. She had been present at the opening of the show. “I hope you can get down to see Désirée's paintings,” she had said. “I think it would be sad if you missed them.”

It suddenly occurs to Alex that she's put a lot of energy into her life. In a way, she has been the real artist. Or sculptor, perhaps. She's worked with stone, with the immovable weight of time and circumstance and personality. She has achieved one perfect work of art. That is, she's managed to get what she desired, what she most desired, which is Tom and his handsome white house overlooking Puget Sound. She has been married to Tom for nearly forty-six years, although it doesn't seem that long, it seems no time at all. She has three grown children, including Loren, who is now nearly twice the age Alex and Désirée were when they travelled to Wales. Loren is married and has two children. She is a primary teacher, inspired, perhaps, by the early example of Mrs. Clara Fradkin.

Loren has already visited the gallery to see her mother's paintings. “They're utterly amazing,” she said on the phone. “I was so moved by them. And I kept thinking how hard it must have been for a woman to work as an artist in the
1950
s. My mother must have been an incredibly determined woman to accomplish so much. She must have been very brave.” Had she known how brave she was? Loren asked Alex.

In the late summer of
1957
, when she and Loren arrived home from Britain, Tom was waiting for them at the airport. Alex had impulsively, gently, put her arms around him, in the manner of Mrs. Fradkin comforting one of her baby ducklings. She and Tom were courteously silent with one another; the one subject of consequence between them at that time was Désirée, who had chosen to stay behind. How could they possibly speak of her, how could they mention her name, when they both knew that she was in an openly adulterous relationship with Robin Pritchard? (That was the way people talked in those days; that was the word they used.)

Désirée wrote to Tom asking for a little more time. She told him everything. She said, I don't want to hurt you, my dear, dear Tom. Don't give up on me, please. Tom read portions of these letters to Alex. Sometimes he let her read them herself. Then he took them back and tore them up and burned them.

I'm so afraid, Désirée wrote to Alex, that if I come home I won't be able to paint and I won't be happy ever again. It is too late. I think I am happy here, Alex; I do think I am.

Alex had her own ideas, her own fears, and has them still: that Désirée unwittingly made herself noticeable to one of those incandescent jealous gods, the kind with a keen eye for anyone who dares to set herself apart. Hiking in the mountains of Snowdownia with Robin, Désirée became lost. Or rather, both she and Robin became lost. It began to snow. This was in early spring, the weather cruelly changeable. Robin decided that he would go on alone, in the hope
of sighting the shore of a certain lake, which he thought would help him get his bearings. Désirée must have got tired of waiting, or had begun to feel frightened, desperate, perhaps, and had tried to make her own way down the mountain. The storm worsened. Snow could be completely disorienting; it transfigured the landscape almost at once, Robin wrote. Désirée walked, Robin theorized, until she was more lost than ever and simply too tired to go on. She found a place to rest and in resting was overcome.

Alex knows all this because Robin wrote to her. He wrote several letters, heartbroken and strangely lyrical, full of descriptions of snow and frost. Alex felt as if she were reading a fairy tale.

How can she believe that Désirée's life ended in the monochromatic white noise of a snowstorm, all colour and warmth drained from the world around her? Of course she can't. She prefers to think of Désirée (and why shouldn't this be true?) living under an assumed name in a comfortable cottage somewhere in the Welsh countryside, her vision clear, unclouded, persistent. At the end of each day she cleans the paint from her brushes and sets them neatly aside, in preparation for the next day's labour. The air smells of linseed oil and turpentine and lilac. (A lilac tree grows outside the windows, Alex is sure.) Désirée has given away every single thing that mattered to her so that she can work in peace. She paints from pure memory, her colours light and clear. Outside her cottage is a grove where Welsh gods, all of whom bear a startling family resemblance to Felix Curtis, sleep curled at the roots of ancient trees, clutching to them the gift of individual immortality.

The idea comes to Alex that she and Désirée have shared a life between them. This idea slips perfectly, unexpectedly, into her mind as she walks around the gallery again and looks perhaps for the last time at Désirée's paintings. It is, Alex thinks, as if she has taken up the life Désirée set aside, the life Désirée abjured. She is a practical and, she hopes, graceful custodian. Linked, she and Désirée have
managed to discover joy, more than separately they deserved or could have achieved, its strength and radiance running through the delicate yet reliable veins of one singular form.