The Night Stages (22 page)

He said nothing while he showed the five glass slides, paused, and then showed them again, finishing with a scene where two groups of slim, elegant young adults were surrounded by foliage on the left and enclosed by architecture on the right. There was something poignant, Kenneth thought,
about the curve of the women’s necks and the folds in the drapery of their long cloaks. But it was the expression on the face of the central man under the arch in the right of the picture that he was drawn to. It was disturbingly tender, caught in a moment of inexplicable helplessness. “What kind of an artist could capture such transience, such fragility, in something as fixed as a mural?” the teacher was saying. “It is something we must learn if we are to paint murals; how to make fragility – be it benign or manipulative – how to make a moment, a series of such moments, how to make that, and the human life that beats there, permanent.”

Not much later Kenneth would learn that Harding himself had designed and painted murals in the 1930s, when the government’s Works Progress Administration had hired artists to paint the walls of public buildings. And after he learned this, he would walk through the low, slanting light of a late September afternoon to the Central Philadelphia Postal Station to take a look at the two works he knew Harding had done there. The bigger mural was soft in colour and seemed to be pregnant with the same kind of dusty sunlight that fell through the upper windows of the public room that held it. Roads swerved up and out of the composition in the right corner and plunged like waterfalls out of the bottom at the left. Horses, men, pieces of parchment, then paper, a wagon filled with parcels. Lone men bent over letters as if worshipping the handwriting of a distant loved one, a woman clasping an envelope to her breast. Clouds,
weather, winter. Horses stumbling through snow. All of the cumbersome, necessary machinery, and all of the difficulty of human communication. In the centre there was a large figure standing alone, his expression one of exhaustion; the entire story, whatever it might be, hanging heavily in the account book he held in his hand.

On the wall to the left of the postage counter was the other mural. Smaller, darker, and even more captivating, it depicted miners walking to work. Here there was the movement and vitality, the angry tension of men trapped by industry. Kenneth moved as close as possible to the surface so that he could determine exactly how his teacher had applied the paint, and how he had used light and shadow to bring out the men’s expressions, their collective anger. He read the title on the plaque.
Anthracite Coal
, it said. The miners and the superstructure of the mine appeared to all be a part of the same river, almost as if the crowd had a liquid life of its own. A sluice of movement flowed around the architectural structures, the head frame of the mine, columns of miners going to and coming from work.

When Kenneth spoke to Harding about the second mural, the teacher said that he himself had been more satisfied with it. “More important than the big one,” he said, “less historical.” The WPA had given the artists a list of subjects appropriate for public consumption, he told Kenneth. “We all tried to break away from those prescriptions, eventually,” he said. “My God, man, half the country was spending the day standing in breadlines! We needed to get hold of our own subjects.”
He began to walk away. Then he turned back. “We all want to believe that we are originals,” he said.

Kenneth began his classwork with a scene from the Eddy Match Factory, which stood on the edge of a river near his home. With faint pencil lines and geometric washes of watercolour, he blocked out the composition on a long, narrow piece of paper. The group of men approaching the factory was just a vague grey column at this point, the shape of it echoing the curve of the river below. But he would somehow put the anger into the next version. He didn’t know how, but he was determined to do it.

By early the next week Kenneth was working on a thin, plywood panel, three feet long and one foot high. The factory itself had become a solid geometric cube reminiscent of Piero della Francesca, and not unlike the head frame of the mine in the second mural. Harding, making his rounds, stopped behind him for the space of several minutes but said nothing. By the end of the following week Kenneth had painted the factory, the smokestack above it, and he had attempted to catch the anger, as Harding had done, in the gestures of the men, the set of their shoulders, and in the line of their strong, bent necks. Then he began to render the exquisite light he had intentionally memorized, as best he could, while he stood in front of the Post Office murals. He was pleased with the tenacity of his own visual memory, and with the results.

Later that week, Harding stopped for a considerable time behind Kenneth’s easel. Then he put his hand on his student’s shoulder. “Let’s go for a drink after,” he said. “There is a long, sad story that I want to tell you.”

The bar was dark and empty, apart from the bartender who sat on a stool beneath a shelf filled with glassware and who was looking intently at a small radio from which came the faint noise of a sports event. Behind his teacher’s head Kenneth could see that a green light hanging over a pool table was moving slightly in an unnoticed draught, though the air of the place seemed stale and trapped.

After they had removed their coats, Harding went twice to the bar, returning with four pints of draft beer. He reached forward and put his hand on Kenneth’s arm when the younger man removed some bills from his wallet. “No,” he said. “It’s on me. And it’s going to take some time.” He swallowed a substantial amount from one glass, then sat back in his chair.

“Why am I telling you this?” he asked.

Kenneth knew he was not required to respond.

“Well,” the teacher said, “mostly I suppose it is because you are not painting your mural, you are painting my mural.”

Kenneth was mortified, realizing there was truth in the statement. “I didn’t mean …” he began.

“And it’s not that I haven’t seen this before,” Harding interjected into Kenneth’s not very strong protestations, “I have seen this
many
times before. The thing is that I have not
seen an attempt that is this successful. At least not with the appropriation of my own style
and
my own subject matter. Appropriating both style and subject matter requires a brilliant species of skill. And that species of skill I’ve only seen once before … and it didn’t involve my work. But it did involve me.”

Kenneth wished he were anywhere but in this bar in the company of this man. He had no idea what to say. Should he apologize? He was filling up with shame. He could feel the colour of it squeezing out of his heart and darkening his neck and face.

“A form of counterfeiting, I suppose, but not quite the same. As a matter of fact, during the war I got to know a counterfeiter.” Harding smiled. “A great guy, actually … a wonderful guy. And very generous.” He began to unbutton his old tweed jacket. “But I am talking about something different here, more serious.” He looked around the room and leaned toward Kenneth in a conspiratorial manner. “I’ve never told anyone about this,” he said, “and I am counting on you not to tell anyone else, and I firmly believe, though I don’t know you at all, that I
can
count on that. You have a prairie boy’s honest face, in spite of what you’ve been up to.”

“I’m from Ottawa,” Kenneth said, “but you can count on me anyway. And I was only trying to –”

The older man silenced his student with a wave of his hand. “When I was younger I was in love with a woman who was married to another painter.” He fumbled in his pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes. “She still is. And,
as you may or may not know, so am I. Married that is, though not to another painter.” He shifted in his chair. “Thankfully,” he added.

“I am not going to tell you her husband’s name, but be assured you would recognize it if I did. She is not unknown, either, for her early work. There was something between them about her doing better, but I could never really get her to talk about it. Still, this was several years ago, and it, our affair, had gone on for three years before that. A good deal of that kind of stuff in this world.” Harding drew a circle in the air with his left hand. “But this was the real thing. I was in love with her and she knew it. And I knew how she felt about me, though we very seldom talked about that. We were both very attached to our families, and we knew that too. We
did
talk about that.” Harding was silent for a moment. “It was agonizing,” he said. He looked directly at Kenneth from beneath the two messy nests of his eyebrows. “Never, if you can possibly avoid it, get involved in something like this.” A fat worm of ash fell from his cigarette, rather emphatically, Kenneth thought. “The trouble is,” he continued, “you can’t avoid it. It’s like a chronic, debilitating disease, something that arrives in the night. It can’t be cured. Only managed. For a while. In our case it was a long while.”

He had continued to see this woman, Harding confessed, through waves of guilt, anxiety, paranoia, jealousy, desire, joy, and unceasing pain on both their parts. They had tried to stop, several times, without success, and the pain of that was unceasing as well. “She and I were painting a lot
and exhibiting fairly constantly at the time and we would be at the same openings – sometimes our work was in the same group show. We didn’t sell much, either of us, but we always submitted our paintings to juried exhibitions, and more often than not they were accepted. At the time,” he cleared his throat, “her husband’s work was rarely, if ever, included.” Harding slid an empty glass to the edge of the table. “I have to confess I was not entirely unhappy about that.” He paused. “But
she
was – and I hated this – she was unhappy about that and, as I was to discover,
he
was distraught.” Harding began to work on the second glass of beer. “I was to discover how much, how completely, only later, and in the craziest of ways.” He smashed his cigarette into an ashtray.

“You never, ever know in these things, you never know what it is that will come along to end it. And, believe me, there is a part of you that is always,
always
looking for some event, some overriding circumstance, or a betrayal, that will do the job. Let me assure you, this is the thing you most fear and at the same time the thing you most long for. What you don’t imagine is whatever ends it will be something you never could have thought of. Still, as the bard said, ‘All’s well that ends.’ ”

“All’s well that ends well,” Kenneth corrected earnestly.

Harding was silent for a bit, seemingly absorbed by fingering the buttons on his tweed jacket. Then he looked up. “You’ve heard of the painter Alexander Gentleman? Active around the turn of the century?”

Kenneth shook his head.

“I thought not. But you should have. Someday perhaps he’ll get his due, but so far, no luck. Night scenes, mostly, sometimes interiors, often involving water in some way or another, seen from a window or, if they are landscapes, there is always a pier or another point of embarkation. Sometimes there are scenes in badly lit bars not unlike this one. But even if you can’t see the water you always sense it is there, just beyond the door, vast and unreliable. These are not large paintings, and there are only two or three of them in public collections, but they are important in ways I can barely describe. They draw you in and in. Then they inhabit you.” He paused. “Completely. And the figures in them” – he searched his pockets for matches – “the couples in these paintings are caught just on the edge of something. They are turning toward each other. Or” – he struck a match then blew it out – “they are turning away. And even if there is only one figure in the painting, the sense of relationship is palpable.”

“So you have only seen one or two of these?”

“No … no. Many more than that. I knew Gentleman. God! What a name! A ridiculous name for anyone, never mind for such a dark painter! I knew him when he was very old. He lived in a basement: not far from here, actually. One day, just walking down the street, I came across him. His arms were full of his paintings and he was heading for a trash barrel. As I said, he was old, talking to himself. But it was drink, I could smell it, not dementia. I walked him, and his paintings, back to his basement, which was full, absolutely full, of these remarkable works, which, as I was to discover, he flatly refused to sell,
even to show. I stacked the pictures he was aiming to throw away in a corner. By the time I left he was snoring. I went back two days later. He didn’t recognize me, but he let me in anyway when I said I wanted to see the paintings. This time he was completely lucid, completely sober. A binge-drinker, so the drunkenness came and went.” Harding lifted his glass. “Unlike some of us regulars.”

Having said this, Harding walked over to the bar and returned with two more pints. He pointed to Kenneth’s only partly finished first glass. “Drink up,” he said, placing the full glasses on the table.

He sat down. Kenneth noticed that his teacher’s overcoat had slipped from the back of the chair to the floor but he said nothing.

“I offered to buy a couple of the paintings, though where I thought I would get the money at that stage God only knows. He refused. But he wanted me to talk about the ones I had chosen. He wanted me to tell him a story about what was going on between the man and the woman in the paintings, was adamant. She has this anger in her – I remember saying that to him – she is torn apart. This about a woman serenely looking out a window toward water while a man sits far from her gazing at the wall, He is addicted to her, I said, and he resents this. Pain – no, hopelessness – is everywhere. I never talk this way, by the way, never. But on I went. They are both, I said, searching for a betrayal on the part of the other and yet they are fused together in some impossible way. It wasn’t long before I was describing my most intimate moments with the
woman, the joy of those moments, and then the awful chill that followed. The ambivalence, the wanting it to end, and then the terrible fear that it would.” Harding slapped his palm on the table. “Never, I tell you, never get involved …” He turned his hand over and examined the palm. “But I’ve already said that,” he added quietly.