Men and Angels (16 page)

As they drove up the long pebbled driveway a light above the door of the house switched on. Jane appeared in the light, shielding her eyes; Ben stood behind her. She was wearing a bright blue rough-woven shirt, black corduroy trousers, white socks and black Chinese cloth shoes with straps across the instep. Anne had thought of buying a pair for Sarah, but never for herself. It was partly silly for Jane to wear them: her thick white socks made her feet in those shoes look puffy, like a doll’s or a Japanese painting of a baby. Yet, standing in the harsh light, she struck Anne once again as astonishingly beautiful, powerful in her beauty, single in it, like a navigable river.

“I ought to have put the light on for you earlier, but it’s terrifyingly bright so I can see thieves or marauders coming through the night. I can’t bear to keep it on a second longer than I have to. It costs a fortune. Welcome. How was the drive? And you are Peter and Sarah.”

The children shook hands with Jane and said How do you do.

“It’s a great pleasure to meet you,” Jane said. “Mr. Hardy has said how very nice you are, and your mother of course, though everybody’s mother says they’re nice, you can’t believe
that
.”

The children laughed and looked at Ben. “Actually,” said Peter, “not everybody’s mother says they’re nice. I mean, I have this one friend, his mother always says to my mother when he comes to my house, ‘If Oliver is terrible, I don’t want to know about it.’”

He was imitating Cheryl Jackson. He was showing off. In one minute, Jane had made a conquest; her son was in love.

“Sarah,” said Jane. “I have a room with a beautiful bed in it. It used to be my bed. Do you want to see it?”

“Yes, please,” said Sarah. If only, Anne thought, they would act like this for the rest of the weekend. They all walked into the house. Laura hung back, a few feet behind them. Anne had forgotten to introduce her. She put her arm on Laura’s shoulder.

“This is my friend, Laura, who helps me with the children,” Anne said.

Jane looked at her perfunctorily. “How do you do,” she said, and turned away.

“Just fine,” said Laura, smiling, to Jane’s back.

Peter was jabbering to Jane about his friend Oliver, about how terrible he really was. The children disappeared upstairs with Jane and Ben; Anne put her bags down in the kitchen. It was a wide, high room, painted white, with blue-and-white plates hung on the wall and copper pots on hooks. There was a step down to the eating area, dominated by a refectory table. Places were set for seven, and in the center, yellow chrysanthemums stood in a blue vase. There were skylights in the ceiling and windows above eye level that looked out to the dark garden.

“It’s a beautiful room, isn’t it?” Anne said to Laura.

Laura merely smiled and looked ahead of her. Anne’s heart sank. It was a mistake to bring her. But she couldn’t have been left. How horrible it would have been to think of her alone in the kitchen, eating a peanut butter sandwich while they feasted. It would have been impossible, thinking of her so, to enjoy the holiday.

Sarah came racing into the room. “I get to sleep in a canopy bed like the one in
Snow White
when she’s dead, and it was Mrs. Watson’s when she was
my
age.” Sarah emphasized the
my
as if to indicate a linked proprietary state with Jane.

“And we each have a tin of cookies next to our bed in case we wake up hungry,” Peter said.

“That was Ben’s idea,” said Jane. “That’s always done in English houses,” Jane explained to the children. “Have you ever been in England?”

“Our father’s in France,” said Peter. “He’ll be back on May twenty-second. He’s been gone since August thirty-first.”

“I want to go to England,” Sarah said. “They have the queen there.”

“For now, come and have some ice cream. I suppose you’ve had your dinner.”

“Yes,” said Peter. “We stopped at McDonald’s. I got a cheeseburger, french fries and a Coke. My sister got a hamburger, french fries and a root beer. My mother got…”

“That’s enough,” said Anne. “Keep our nasty secrets.”

“Our mother got a
milk shake
,” Peter said, giggling.

“Traitor, you
swore
,” Anne said.

“Tomorrow,” said Jane, “you children can help me make pies. Would you like that? Your mother and Mr. Hardy will have work to do. We’ll do the cooking.”

“Our mother does the cooking,” Sarah said.

“Not tomorrow, Sarah,” said Jane. “Tomorrow she looks at pictures.”

“That’s not work,” Peter objected.

“It’s the most important work your mother can do. She looks at pictures, then she writes about them. She’s very good at it.”

“We don’t know that yet,” Anne said.

“Of course we do. We’re not stupid,” Jane said, leading Ben to the table.

She awoke at six. The light, still darkened, only turning silvery, made her feel at first diminished; she seemed small to herself in the white bed with its gray iron frame. The leaves outside the windows were barely visible; she seemed to exist in space. I am in Jane’s house, she thought; it is Thanksgiving. Yet I am not expected to make a meal. She swung her legs out of her bed as if she were on an ocean liner, feeling the suspension of the rules that governed and pressed down her life into the shape that made it recognizable to strangers.

The walls of the room were completely white. White curtains, moved by a breeze whose source was mysterious, blew in the thin light. She looked around to see the painting on the wall above her bed. Then she felt ashamed, as if she had awakened forgetting that there was a lover in the bed beside her. It had taken her an hour and a half to get to sleep after seeing the painting for the first time. Jane had shown her to the room, and she had found it on the wall, simply there above the bed in its decorative function.

One of the figures in the painting wore a blue dress, the other, a brown with black stripes. They were walking into leaves that would engulf them; the lift of their heavy feet suggested they were ready happily to disappear. Their backs were toward the viewer, so their faces were invisible, clearly unimportant. They were going somewhere, standing for something, for journeys which appeared to be small but which could mean the house unseen again, the town only remembered, the clothes left in the bureau drawers, forever smelling of soap. The women’s heads bent toward each other. Their arms encircled each other. The hands (which were not a success, Anne saw; one hand looked rather like a leg of lamb) were about to meet in the middle of the back of the brown figure. Both women’s hair was greenish blue to complement the green of the background; their boots were blue-black; their stockings bluish gray. The posture of their backs spelled grief, connection. The figure in brown bent toward the blue one as if she were weeping on her shoulder from sheer weariness. Anne looked again at the hand of the blue figure on the waist of the figure in brown. She saw it then: the figure in blue propelled the other slightly forward. In the curve of her body was impatience for the other’s hesitancy—over mourning, memory. The figure in blue wanted to get on: to the woods the color of emeralds. She was not thinking of the town at their backs.

Anne had started when she heard Jane’s voice; she had forgotten there was anybody in the room with her.

“It’s called
Two Women Walking
,” Jane said. “It’s one I would never sell; I can’t even bring myself to lend it for the exhibition. I put in your room for the weekend, so you can look at it. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

And now she could hear Jane stirring in the kitchen; perhaps that was what had wakened her. She could not dress, she feared, without waking someone, so she risked going downstairs in her bathrobe. If Jane was dressed, it would be awkward; it would indicate that Anne felt more intimate with Jane than Jane did with her. Anne feared friendships between women that began in intimacy and played themselves out in small talk. And she wanted Jane to like her in a way that made her feel both young and crude. For women such as Jane, liking, not liking, she imagined, was of little interest, at most a curiosity, like a bargain to the very rich. When she saw Jane in a red woolen bathrobe, she was prepared to read it as an act of the most perfect hospitality.

“Did you sleep all right?” asked Jane. “I hope my puttering didn’t wake you. It’s one of the useless blessings of old age to need almost no sleep.”

“No, I woke before I heard you. I was thinking of the painting.”

“It’s me and Caroline,” Jane said with pride, with a great, sure joy. But was it? It was as much about Caroline’s learning to move her figures off center, about using the Fauve palette but sweetening it, applying what she had learned from the Japanese. Could she say that to Jane? And what was the truth of it? Both were, the memory and the technique. It was possible that Caroline might have seen two other women, complete strangers, in that posture, in that light, and been taken by the accident of shape and color. Yet it was possible that had she not taken that walk with Jane each evening, the idea would not have come to her at all.

Jane was an intelligent woman, but Caroline’s paintings were the work of someone she loved; their meaning to her was singular, refracted. Perhaps the paintings were more truly hers because of that, perhaps she had been right to keep them to herself. But Anne couldn’t help thinking that more people should have seen them. Yet museums were often stupid, prejudiced; without collectors most painters would have starved or died unnoticed.

She thought of all the different ways a painting—one of Caroline’s paintings—could exist: as an object, decorative in its function, pleasing, not pleasing to the eye of the innocent stranger. The same painting was to Anne completely different; she could guess its history, it spun out from itself, like a spider, lines growing forward, backward. To Jane the paintings were themselves and Caroline; they didn’t spin out lines to other paintings, other painters; they spun, like a disk of sunlight, from the life of a beloved woman. And there were the collectors, for whom paintings were a different kind of object, an investment or a curiosity, a sign of something: power, taste, discernment. A painting was almost never itself. Yet it was her job to look first at each painting as if it were the only painting in the universe, then to trace the lines backward and forward. Only then could she think about the woman holding the brush, taking experience and making this of it, that of it: beauty that would endure, that would say to life, stop here, now; that would hold life, thicken it and make it valuable, enduring, hard.

And what she would say about the paintings—would it influence the men with money, coming to these objects to secure a name, a safe old age, a shelter against ruin? And here was Jane at the stove, her back to Anne, the back which, in the painting, leaned toward another woman as they walked into the wind.

Anne looked out the glass door. A small brown bird came dipping, pecking at the feeder on the porch. Stairs led down to the garden. Only the chrysanthemums were bright there. The brown leaves fell into dry, dull grass; a yellow maple leaf dropped into the birdbath, floated, and then disappeared. Juniper berries hung, opaque and rich among green needles. Jane handed Anne coffee, standing beside the door.

“It’s a lovely house,” Anne said, “it must give you great comfort.”

“Great comfort. I used only to be able to come here in the summer, but now I’m retired, I come here nearly every weekend.”

“When did you buy it?”

“In 1950. I was in a bad way when Caroline died, for quite a few years. Most people would call it a depression, but my family never went in for that, so it was said, ‘Jane is rather not herself.’ I was told this house would be good therapy.”

What did Jane want her to say? Was she one of those people who thought politeness consisted of asking the right questions, or of asking no question at all, of saying something about oneself, or keeping oneself completely out of the picture?

“What was the house like when you got it?” Anne asked.

“Rather a wreck. This kitchen was two rooms, a kitchen and a dining room. I had a wall knocked out. Come around and I’ll show you.”

She walked around her house as her ancestors must have walked around their estates. The living room, narrow and irregularly shaped, had four small windows and one large bay. Jane explained why she had decided on the bay, the window seat, had had the beams exposed. She spoke of doors and insulation, furniture and curtains, with the same familiarity. She had the androgyne’s pleasure in her dwelling: decisions of structure and of decoration both had been all hers. Anne thought with shame about her own fears in relation to getting the wiring fixed. But she was married, and she wasn’t rich. She could never inhabit a house with the singular freedom and mastery of Jane.

The house was squarish, solid; the furniture, with its bright slipcovers, the lamps with their cream silk shades, the Indian rugs, the absence of photographs, the walls full of books, the shameful lighter patches where Caroline’s paintings had lately been taken down, showed a calculated mix. The rooms were both austere and welcoming; one could work there or read for pleasure. One could come into these rooms quite properly and speak of the death of a son, killed in a war or on a motorcycle. One could get drunk here and talk of the betrayals of a business partner or a wife or husband, but it would not be imagined that one could be sick on the rug, or move, unconscious, to the sofa to find one’s way home in the morning. It was a house in which Anne felt she need not fear for her children; it was one she hoped they would remember when, in middle age, they thought about the houses of their childhood.

Jane led Anne into the kitchen. “Now, tell me what you really want to know about Caroline. You didn’t need me to tell you about Grünewald; you knew all about it, much more than I. You were merely being polite, or perhaps my letter frightened you.”

“Perhaps,” said Anne. “You see, I don’t know what I have a right to know. I don’t want to seem intrusive or to offend you.”

“My dear, I have the skin of a rhinoceros. I’ve been told a thousand times.”

“Still, she is yours in a way that she’s not mine. And certainly not mine to give to strangers, opened up and cut to pieces.”