Men and Angels (10 page)

“I suppose you want to know why I’m selling the paintings now, after all this time,” she went on.

“Of course she does, darling, being rational, unlike yourself,” said Ben.

Jane’s color rose. “Rational. Send her to that nasty German at the Metropolitan. He was the height of rationality.”

“My darling, that was 1954.”

“You see, Mrs. Foster,” Jane said, “as you know, of course, Caroline died in 1938. Then the war came, and I was in rather a mess about things. I only wanted to do my own work; I lived in the fourteenth century. I tried not to think about Caroline’s death. The loss was too great. She was like my mother.”

“What about your own mother?” asked Anne boldly.

“She played golf,” said Jane.

As a mother, Anne heard the sentence as terrible. Would Sarah or Peter one day tie her up, dispose of her with one dismissive sentence?

“I didn’t try to sell any of Caroline’s paintings until 1948, when the war was well over. By then she had gone out of date. It was all Abstract Expressionism. Caroline was considered an anachronism, an embarrassing one at that. Embarrassing because she was a woman who painted women, children, landscapes. People reacted as if I were offering them dogs painted on china plates. I got so angry that after a while I stopped trying. I gave several oils to Bryn Mawr; I gave one to the Metropolitan. That was disgusting.”

“Disgusting?” asked Anne.

“The man who was in charge nearly sneered when he took it. I’ll never forget his look when he unrolled the canvas. He said, ‘Spare me lady painters with three names.’ He never hung the painting. Do you know about it?”

“It’s in their archives. I haven’t seen it yet. But I expect it will be different now.”

“Perhaps,” Jane said. “But, you see, my dear, I resent almost as much people who want to look at Caroline’s work
only
because she was a woman. She was the greatest painter of the century. She had nothing to learn from anyone.”

No, you are wrong in that, Anne wanted to say, but looked at her coffee cup. Jane would be bound to be disappointed with what she wrote about Caroline. She would not say: “She was greater than all the Fauves, she had nothing to learn from Matisse, Kandinsky.” That wasn’t the truth. In range, in breaking through new ground, she wasn’t the equal of those large men who walked across the twentieth century as if it were Russia. And Anne couldn’t go along with Jane’s fantasies of her mother-in-law: that she was alone, uninfluenced, unaided. She had had warm and friendly correspondences with Derain and Vlaminck. They were helpful in getting collectors to look at her work. To say what Jane believed would be dishonest, and in doing service to the work of this woman whom she honored, she must keep her honor. Perhaps that would mean she and Jane wouldn’t be friends. She had gained Jane’s favor through a judgment Jane thought right; she knew that she could lose it just as easily.

“Enough of this,” said Jane. “This talk about women makes me bad-tempered. Do you cook, Mrs. Foster?”

“Well, of course, I cook a lot, I have a family. But I don’t know how well.”

“This cooking can be a dangerous thing for a woman. I used to tell the people at the college I couldn’t cook; I always took people out to dinner when I wanted to entertain them. It worked very well; it made people think I had resources. You must never cook a meal for your colleagues, my dear; it makes them imagine a chink in your armor. It makes them think you have too much free time.”

“This is all perfect nonsense,” said Ben. “I’ve had meals from Jane for fifty-five years.”

“Yes, but we trusted you. Caroline more than I.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Well, of course, I had reasons she didn’t.”

“You’ve never had a reason to mistrust me.”

“Only in the least interesting, least important ways. But we believed you liked women; we never felt you were trying to prove we were sports of nature for your own comfort. Anyway, Mrs. Foster, will you call me Jane now?”

“And I’m Anne.”

“Anyway, Caroline and I made each other heavenly meals. Then we’d lie to everyone and say we lived on boiled eggs. Which brings me to my point. Will you come to my house on Long Island for Thanksgiving dinner? Bring your children. It will free you from the burden of that burdensome meal, and you can look at the paintings I haven’t been able to part with, even for the exhibit. Ben will be there too, so you needn’t be terrified.”

Anne was so pleased with the invitation that she began to blush. “We’d love to come,” she said.

“And now, Benedict, what time is it?”

“Two-thirty-five.”

“I really must go. I haven’t told you all of why I’ve decided to sell the paintings. The climate is receptive now, of course. But, you see, we’re quite old, Ben and I. We’ll probably be dead rather soon. And at least if this exhibit happens while we’re alive and nondecrepit, we’ll have some hand in it. Now I’ve told you that, I really will leave you. You see what I mean, Ben, this meal’s taken far too long.”

She stood up. “Listen, my dear, this is marvelous. We’ll have a wonderful time. I’ll send the letters and the diaries to you as soon as I get back.”

She kissed both Anne’s cheeks, kissed the top of Ben’s head, and walked out of the restaurant. For a moment, Anne was surprised that all the seated people didn’t rise and follow her.

“We’ll have a wonderful time,” she had said. Anne felt her blood lighten; her skin tingled; she wanted to break into a run. Yes, they would have a wonderful time. Jane had said it. She took Ben’s hand and kissed it.

“Let’s have dessert,” she said.

The waiter brought the pastry cart. Anne took a piece of Black Forest cake, ate it, and called the waiter back for a slice of walnut pie. Licking her fork, she laughed at Ben, abstemious over espresso.

“We’re going to have a wonderful time,” she said, as if the words were new to her, a foreigner, learning her first English sentence.

She walked to the Frick, not opening the high, formal doors, not entering the cool rooms with their greenish light, inhabited by people with mere leisure. Like a servant, she rang at the side library entrance, a small door cut in the wall, the door to a children’s garden. Having only three hours, she quickly requested the sales catalogues of exhibitions where Caroline’s work had hung, made notes, and checked her information. It was, as an activity, cool, fast and businesslike, but she had wanted that. Her head was hot from wine in the afternoon, which she rarely had, from meeting Jane, who to anyone, she imagined, was like a series of big waves washing over, sometimes overturning, coating the skin with a cool salt. Yet it was different for Anne: Jane was not only herself, she was Anne’s connection to Caroline. And she was the model, the subject, she was the woman in
The Striped Dress
, in
Woman Reading a Letter.
In loving those paintings, one somehow was loving her. And she had sat across the table, eating lobster, talking about Chaucer, Nazis, her mother-in-law, boiled eggs. It was a relief to sit in this overcrowded room, so bottom-heavy with activity. The earnest, worried, or delighted scholars sat in a horizontal line while above them two-thirds of the room was empty air. And Anne belonged there. She was one of them.

The children’s room of the Selby library was small and square and overheated; the temperature made the children’s complexions look hectic, but they moved in a trance of peace. It was a privilege to be nearly silent there, to look and comment upon books in whispers, to sit at the oak tables turning pages and to smell the smell of paste and crumbling paper. She couldn’t bear to hurry the children, so she knew she would be late for the appointment Laura had made with the electrician. She would have to apologize, and that would start things off on the wrong foot. But nothing was worth introducing any element that jarred; she watched their heads bent over their books and saw her children had found sanctuary and must not be disturbed.

When she arrived home the electrician’s truck was parked in front of the house,
EDWARD CORCORAN, ELECTRICIAN
, it said formally, black paint on white metal. She liked the looks of the man who got out. He was a large, heavy man, almost a caricature of a workman—only, he was dressed exactly like Peter, in jeans, a red hooded sweatshirt and sneakers that had once been white. The contrast between the two figures heightened, comically, each of their natures, Peter so thin, edgy, and electrified, Edward Corcoran so slow-moving and massive. He had thin, uncontrollable hair that sprang out in patches and wanted to clump. There were wood chips in his hair. Perhaps he had been walking in the woods. Imagining this, Anne was pleased; she hated to think that the people she did business with had less enjoyable lives than she did.

A small boy got out of the truck and walked seriously beside the man toward the driveway.

“I hope you don’t mind me bringing my son with me. My wife’s sick,” he said.

“Of course. I mean, of course not. Come in. I’ll make some coffee. The children can have juice and cookies.”

Edward Corcoran’s son stood slightly behind him, peeping out at people to the right of his father’s thigh. She remembered Peter at that age; each time she saw a younger child, she felt a sharp joy, then a loss, as if she had seen a beloved place—no longer open to her kind—in a geographic film.

Anne said to the little boy, “These are my children, Peter and Sarah. They can show you the house and their rooms. Or you could stay with your father if you like.”

The boy disappeared behind his father.

Peter and Sarah went in first. Peter held the door for everyone, as if the occasion called for his best manners. Behind them, Laura walked into the kitchen, smiling.

Anne knew she had to be businesslike and efficient. She wondered if she had made a mistake. Perhaps she shouldn’t have offered this man coffee until he had looked around the house. The point was, she knew, not to entertain the man, but to get him to give a fair price, do a good job. Michael always did this sort of thing; she felt on shaky ground; she felt she could be easily cheated. She saw once more that it was nearly impossible as a woman without a man to act on impulse and feel safe.

She decided to speak to Barbara Greenspan. Barbara had recommended him, and Barbara was impossible to cheat. She put the coffee cups in the sink and, showing the man to the basement, walked next door.

“I’m a bit miffed with you,” Barbara said, after agreeing to come over. “It’s been two weeks since I’ve had a minute with you. Just the occasional communication from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm on the state of your wiring.”

Anne felt her shoulders give once more into the stoop of apology. She loved Barbara, but it wasn’t always easy, for Barbara was perennially frustrated and ready to see each of Anne’s victories as an offense. Their friendship had started in the first years she and Michael had lived in this house; Anne’s children and Barbara’s were close in age, and neither she nor Barbara was working. Both could think, lingeringly, resentfully, about their Ph.D.’s—Barbara’s in comparative literature from Stanford was even more useless, they’d both agreed, than Anne’s. Languorously, inefficiently they’d lived their mornings, letting the children stay in pajamas while they drank coffee and cleaned, bundling them up for errands or excursions in the afternoon, trading baby-sitting in the evening or hiring one baby-sitter while the four parents went out. Then Anne had got the job at the gallery, and the balance shifted. Resentment took the place of mutual complicity, apology stepped in where partnership had been. But they still had that rare, valuable thing: they knew each other’s children intimately; they could talk to each other about them, respecting each other first as women with good minds. So they got through difficult patches; they were friends. Anne loved Barbara for her dependable generosity, for her mocking wit, which, she felt, could cut through the haze she often slipped into. It was worth the hostility, because with Barbara she always felt at the edge of some thing.”

Barbara hummed with unused power like a machine left to run. She wore her hair long; it was prematurely gray, and you could see she meant her hair to be defiant, as if her mother had always told her that past a certain age women cut their hair or pinned it up. She applied for every job that came up in the town or at the college and got none of them; she bristled with hostility at every interview, and even before she got there, the fame of her rough tongue had preceded her. She was always thinking up plans for herself and her retraining. She would go to dental school; she would become a CPA. She kept saying that she had to do it soon because the median age at which academics left their wives was forty-five and she had only seven years to go with Howard.

But no one was more impossible to imagine leaving his wife than Howard Greenspan. Small, four inches shorter than his wife, looking as if he’d been born in glasses, brought up the only Jew in an Oklahoma town, and a most brilliant mathematician, he thanked fortune every day that a woman like Barbara had seen fit to marry him. He adored his wife, his children. He’d move in a minute, he said, if she could find a job she liked. But nothing ever seemed worth it to her, and so they simply went on, living in Selby next door to the Fosters.

When Anne apologized for her neglect, Barbara said quickly, “Okay, cut the Hester Prynne look. I can’t stand it. You shouldn’t listen to me, I’m jealous.”

“No, you’re perfectly right. I just need a little rope.”

“To hang yourself? Watch it, you’ve been talking to children and idiots too much today. Speaking of whom, why don’t you get Laura to sit for all the kids tonight, and Howard and you and Adrian and I will go to a movie. Adrian feels quite abandoned since you’ve taken up a productive life. He’s shifted his allegiance to me, and you can imagine what cold comfort that is.”

Anne hesitated a moment. She had wanted to use the night to read some of Caroline’s letters. But there was Barbara standing in front of her, Barbara whom she had neglected, who was just now doing her a favor, whom she had shared all her time with when time was open, vacant, threatening to swallow them in. She couldn’t say no to Barbara. She would try to have them all make it an early night and read the letters when she got home. She could sleep late in the morning; Laura would get the children breakfast. It was the kind of luxury, she knew, that Laura’s presence in the house allowed her.