Men and Angels (28 page)

And it meant, perhaps, that she was sending him back to his lover. She wanted to run after him as he entered the airport gate to ask him just as he was leaving. But that would be unfair; he wouldn’t have time to explain, to defend himself, or to accuse her of injustice. It was certainly possible that she’d made everything up. And as it was, they’d had a good holiday. If she spoke, she’d ruin everything in a minute.

Now he was gone she could get back to work. In the New York Public Library, she tracked down the issue of Stephen’s magazine that Caroline’s article was in. The magazine was called
The Expatriate
, and it was meant to be an outlet for those writers and painters—not only American—who had left home to live abroad. There were distinguished contributors—Ford Madox Ford, Gerald Brennan, Cecilia Beaux—but the magazine had had only two issues. The theme of the first was “Can We Ever Leave Home?” Each of the contributors was supposed to take a position. The universal answer was no; each of these people, English, Russian, Spanish, American, felt himself formed and stamped by the native land he found unlivable. Caroline’s essay was entitled “Memory and Inspiration.”

I believe that everyone learns everything important to him by the age of six. This is especially true of the artist, and since I think it the height of modern vulgarity—old-fashioned as I am—to pick at one’s past as if it were a fascinating sore the public longed to have exposed, I will speak only of my work.

Memory is the great taste maker: what we judge in later life to be excellent is only the refinement of some scene or image pressed into the molten wax of early life. The child has no word for beauty; he early accepts a miracle and has no sense of being “marked for life by it.” Having no word, he carries with him only the deep impress, which when touched in later life, makes the heart cry out, and the adult voice finds the word “beautiful.”

The artist is always painting the same five or six scenes cut into his heart so deeply he no longer feels the wound. For myself, three events, all taking place before my fifth year, have charted my artistic course.

The first was an accident which happened in my father’s house when I was four. Some careless person had left the cistern uncovered and I, heedless as always, stepped unknowing into that great square of darkness. Someone entering the room saw fluttering petticoats in the black abyss and put down the long hooked stick used for drawing up rainwater by bucketfuls. My memory of the incident has nothing in it of fear; it contains only enchantment at the square of light I saw overhead and the black and gold of the disturbed waters. I remember, too, a strong sensation of the group I had just left: my aunts and cousins, seated on the grass, reading aloud and working at embroidery. I saw a wide leghorn hat, flowing skirt of white or pale colors, and one very smooth dark head.

The last two memories are of my grandmother. The first is of her person. I asked to be allowed the privilege of observing the end of my grandmother’s toilet, the point at which she braided her fine, abundant hair and pinned it underneath her cap. She was a Quaker lady in her late sixties when I was a child; she never wore anything but white and gray and black. All her clothes were beautifully made; what she lacked in color, she made up for in needlework; her linens were perfect, and highly wrought. It was shocking in so meek a person, whose hallmark was a now-incomprehensible modesty, that her hair had never grayed. At seventy it was a remarkable chestnut. Oh, she was vain of it, although she could not have admitted it. I would sit at her feet and watch her brush her wonderful hair, then pat it to a satin smoothness. Then she would adjust her cap and pin it to her hair with small gold pins, which shone for a moment against the fine white lace, then disappeared. I have always loved to paint women at their toilet, but they must be American. The Frenchwoman before the mirror exudes pastel or smoky colors: the American woman flashes out; her stuffs, her bottles catch the light, as if to challenge all the Puritans who settled that cold country. Now I paint my daughter-in-law in front of the mirror. She is the flowering of all that is beautiful in American womanhood. She brushes her hair, the same shade as my grandmother’s (only Americans have it). It pleases me, of course, that on the Rue Jacob I re-create the scenes I loved of my otherwise detested Philadelphia.

In that city, which admits only dull monochrome into its atmosphere, my grandmother’s garden was a righteous thumbed nose of color. And she cultivated weeds—cornflower, milkweed, tiger lily—along with the fat, full-bodied flowers she preferred. Her prize was a blood-red peony around which bees buzzed, quite transfixed. The greens in her grass were American—without the smallest touch of blue. I asked M. Matisse when I worked with him if he had clear memories of gardens as a child.
Bien sûr,
he said, he, too, had had a grandmother. Away with fancy theories of the Fauve palette!

Anne turned the page of the magazine, looking for an ending, some sense that Caroline would bring her essay back to its topic. How like Caroline it was: exuberant, quick, passionate, arrogant. How she must have irritated the editor. But the editor was her son.

She sat in the living room of Jane’s apartment in New York at four o’clock, drinking coffee with her. Jane had told Anne that Stephen had destroyed all the copies of the magazine in his possession, but she gave Anne access to Stephen’s papers when Anne asked if perhaps some correspondence might have been retained. Jane handed her the files and left the apartment, suggesting that Anne work in her study.

It was pleasant there; Anne liked working in places where people she admired had worked. Their imprint was on all their books and papers, on their desks and pens. Working in Jane’s study was like borrowing the clothes of a successful, glamorous, beloved older sister, it inspired confidence and ease. She had spent the afternoon going over
The Expatriate
’s correspondence. It was thrilling to come upon famous signatures: Edith Wharton, Man Ray, George Balanchine. It was heartening and sobering to see they signed their names, wrote letters. That’s why people collect autographs, she thought; it’s proof that their idols inhabit the world, that the miracles they love are not their own invention.

“Tell me about
The Expatriate
,” Anne said to Jane.

“It’s distressing to remember those times,” she said. “Poor, dear Stephen. Such a good idea, like most of his ideas, and it came to nothing, as all of them did. It was Caroline who spoiled it, probably with the most excellent of maternal intentions. You see, she knew everybody. She was fascinating and brilliant and argumentative, and Stephen was so very retiring. So people wrote for the magazine as a favor to Caroline. You can see that many of them addressed their letters to her. And then some people like Gertrude Stein wouldn’t support the magazine because they hated Caroline.”

“Why did Stein hate Caroline?”

“They had a fight over Jane Austen. Jane Austen was terribly important to Caroline, and Gertrude said she was the greatest bore of the last two centuries. They went on arguing, and Caroline became agitated. She told Gertrude she couldn’t understand Jane Austen because she wasn’t a lady. Gertrude threw her out.”

Anne laughed. “A lady.” That was a concept that had vaporized. “Act like a lady,” she had been told as a child. But she wouldn’t dream of saying it to Sarah—it would sound ludicrous. Yet she could see it had meant something and, vestigially, meant something still. Jane was a lady, and Anne was not. It was something about walking through the world assuming things—which no one of her generation, she thought, could now do. Everyone wore jeans and did housework. But to call someone a lady or to assume someone would be insulted—someone like Gertrude Stein, of all people—by being called “not a lady” would never happen again.

“Caroline was humiliated that that had slipped out, and Gertrude was, of course, shrewd enough to see she had uncovered something rather nasty—and she pounced upon it. Caroline made a great thing of not being class-conscious. She smoked the cheapest cigarettes and dressed like a beggar. Nonetheless, it was there in her, all that she came from, and she couldn’t weed it out entirely.”

“How exciting it must have been for you. Paris in the twenties. Everybody dreams of it,” said Anne.

“Actually, I was studying at the Sorbonne, and I felt much more comfortable among the medievalists—who were like monks. All that talk about art bored me to tears. I’m not much interested in painting, you know. Caroline’s work interests me, but that’s because she did it. But all those others gassing on about volume and the picture plane—I couldn’t have been more bored. And then they put all the pretty girls together, so I was always having to sit next to someone’s mistress who bathed once a month and couldn’t read. I kept disappearing with my books. Of course some of the people who came round were great fun. There was one young man, from Ohio, named Jake Golden. Some kind of journalist. He made Caroline laugh, all of us, really. He went home to New York and started a girlie magazine. Then he went far right. Supported Franco with a vengeance. Had a dramatic conversion to Catholicism at the feet one supposes of the Generalissimo. Caroline broke with him over that.”

“Over the politics or the religion?”

“Oh, both, really. She thought religion was for fools and cowards. I often wonder what she’d say to me now of my religious life.”

Anne hesitated for a moment. She and Jane were alone. Jane was telling her things that could be considered intimate. She thought she had a right to ask about something in her friend she didn’t understand.

“How did it happen, that you became religious?”

Jane looked straight ahead of her. “I had done something unforgivable. I knew that after Caroline died. That both of us, together, had destroyed Stephen.”

Her tone was flat and reportorial. “I had done something unforgivable,” she said, as if she were saying, “My hair is gray, my eyes are brown.” Anne met Jane’s gaze; she felt Jane wanted that.

“I told you, I think, that I fell apart after Caroline’s death. It was the loss of her, of course, that did it, but then I understood that I had taken up with Stephen because I wanted Caroline in my life. I wanted a formal tie with her, since I couldn’t have a blood one, and between the two of us we crushed that poor boy into the ground. We killed him as surely as if we’d poisoned him. The air we breathed was poison to him.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Anne said. “You give him no credit for having control of his own life. He was an adult when he met you, after all.”

“But you wouldn’t run a race against a cripple and then blame him for losing. Or say he simply wasn’t a good enough runner. Anyway, Stephen’s dead now. I shall never know the truth of Stephen’s will, how strong or weak it was. It doesn’t mean it was a creditable thing I did: to marry a man I didn’t love so I could have his mother for my mother. It’s curious, Caroline was a perfectly murderous mother to Stephen, but to me she was a mother made in heaven. Whereas I felt no more for my own mother than I felt for a rather distant cousin.”

“I can’t believe that,” Anne said.

“No, you’re a great believer in the power of blood. A real primitive you are, aren’t you? Perhaps it’s because I never had children. But I am convinced, you see, that some people who are dreadful parents would be divine parents to someone else, perhaps someone they haven’t met. But I’m meandering. To answer your question, I turned to faith because it showed the possibility of forgiveness for the unforgivable. But we were talking about
The Expatriate
and how Caroline spoiled it for Stephen. She would keep coming to the office and commenting on things. So that, as I said, the people who were her friends addressed their comments to her, and the people she didn’t like who’d agreed to write for Stephen—well, she made such fun of whatever they contributed, she would hoot with derision or spit out vitriol. Stephen was quite interested in the Surrealists, and Caroline thought they were beneath contempt. In the end, he just lost energy and gave it up.”

The apartment door opened, and Anne turned to see Betty in the room.

“Come in, come in,” Jane said to her, getting out of her chair. “Sit here. You must be tired to death.”

“I got a promotion,” Betty said, smiling shyly. “Now I’m cashier.”

“How marvelous,” said Jane. “This calls for a celebration. Let’s have sherry.”

Anne raised her glass. Gertrude Stein, Jane Austen, and Betty promoted to cashier. She wondered if one day her encounters with Jane would no longer seem to her like going over Niagara in a barrel.

At ten-thirty at night the doorbell rang. Anne was in the study typing a letter to a woman in Dallas who owned three of Caroline’s late paintings. She was frightened for a moment as she wouldn’t have been if Michael had been there, as she wouldn’t have been before he came for Christmas. Who was ringing the bell this late? It could be a maniac, a robber, someone whose family had just been wiped out in front of her house. A woman alone, she thought, always imagines disaster at the tone of a bell after dark.

She pulled the curtains back and saw Ed Corcoran on the doorstep. Her first thought was that she should change her clothes. What a shame that he would see her for the first time in a month wearing a gray sweater from college full of mended holes. She took her hair out of its clip and let it fall; she hid the clip in her jeans pocket, said hello and gave him her hand. “Come in, come in. It’s terribly cold out, isn’t it? Aren’t you cold? You must need something warm to drink. Shall I make you some tea? Come right in, we’ll have some tea.” She could hear her own voice babbling like the Mad Hatter’s.

“I tried to phone you. I left a couple of message with your baby-sitter. I guess you’ve been busy.”

“I never got the messages or I would have called you right back. My husband left a week ago. I mean, I didn’t see any sense in your working while he was here. We’d agreed to that, you remember.”

“It’s taken me so long to do this job, he must think you hired a real goofball.”

“He didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t say anything about you to him. About the wiring, I mean. I felt it should be my affair. I mean,” she floundered, “I thought I should be responsible.”