The Underpainter (2 page)

All of this is a very long time ago now, forty years at least. A very long time ago and purely hypothetical on my part. I did not see her leave her house, ski towards Thunder Cape, turn to watch the thin trail of smoke emerge from her chimney. I did not see her shake the dust off of her father’s underground clothes or strap the skis to his large boots.

The telegram she carries in her pocket, or has left behind on the kitchen table, or has thrown into the trash, the telegram I never saw but know for certain she received and read, has told her that I, Austin Fraser, am waiting in Port Arthur, in a fifth-floor hotel room, hours of distance away.

E
ach afternoon now, when I have finished with my work, memory beckons me into the street, insists that I walk with her in the snow. These are the things she wants to see: the cloud of my own warm breath obscuring my face, my uncertain steps, the small round wounds my steel-pointed cane makes as it impales the dangerous ice. She wants me moving slowly, feebly, around and around the one residential city block that has become my shrunken world. She wants to see me circling in the cold, going nowhere.

Even though there is nothing in me that wants to court the past, it fills my mind, enters my painting. The
tock tock
of my cane striking ice is like the noise that beads make as they click together on a string. It is the sound of memory at work, creating a necklace of narrative.

There is nothing in passion, really, except the sense that one should open one’s self to it. In many ways it can be as cold as
anything else. Years ago in Silver Islet I would leave the painting I was working on in the upstairs room of Sara’s house, leave it facing the window, hoping that overnight some of the Great Lake Superior might move into it, or some of Sara’s dreams, though she slept in the back room and her window faced the rock, the cliff. Perhaps something of what remained of the offshore mine might make itself felt on the canvas. At the time, I was travelling in my experience along a cusp of acceptance. Being not yet known to myself or others, I continued to be interested in the figure and in landscape. I had been fascinated, you see, by the actuality of the north; its rocks and trees and water. Interested in Sara, the woman who lived there. It was during what would be my final summer at Silver Islet Landing that a stylistic change caught my mind, pulling me from realism towards the concept of formal ambiguity. This freed me, or so I thought, because, unlike a figure or a landscape, a concept can be carried anywhere. So I gathered up the embryo of this idea, along with my clothes and brushes and canvases, and took it with me first to New York and then some years later I took it here, to this vast modern house in Rochester, the city of my birth.

I never saw Sara again after that — except from a very great distance — which may explain why part of me still feels it is possible that she might want to insinuate herself back into my life, my painting. But what an addled old man I am to let such foolishness enter my thoughts. The woman who comes to mind is wearing that short-sleeved house dress with the buttons down
the front and the pockets over the hips. Even in the dead of winter I see her with her legs bare and her dark-blonde hair hanging in a thick braid down her back. And — even more impossible — she is only thirty-five years old, whereas Sara would have been in her seventies. And hairstyles, clothing, fashion have changed so completely.

I myself have not for a long time been prey to the whims of fashion, although admittedly it had some influence over me in the past. Political fashion, aesthetic fashion, spiritual fashion, even, I suspect, emotional fashion; that sense that one should let whatever comes along seize the heart.

The fashionable modernist architect who built the cavernous house in which I live, for instance, believed that absolutely nothing should be added to indoor spaces, nothing at all except light. He wanted everything else kept out: furniture, colour, paintings, fabrics — and even his beloved light was allowed entrance only after it had passed through glass. How he would have hated my shelves of painted china, insisting that all this clutter interfered with the “idea” of his work. He was a great advocate of ideas. I live in the most eastern of his long, spare, prairie-style houses. It suits me very well.

I received the news from Canada last week. Special delivery. The mailman must have knocked — there is no buzzer — he must have knocked, received no answer, slipped the letter through the slot. I am very hard of hearing now, and have few visitors, so I am not attentive to the possibility of arrivals at my door. Who knows how long the cream-coloured envelope had been on the floor of
my vestibule before my housekeeper, the ever-present, irrepressible Mrs. Boyle, emerged from the basement laundry room and picked it up? She had handed me the ordinary mail earlier in the day and I had dealt with it as I usually do by consigning most of it to the trash after setting aside the bills, which I always send on to the accountant. She flung the envelope in question down on the desk that occupies one corner of my studio. “Special delivery,” she said.

I crossed the room. I unfolded the letter, which told me of Sara’s death and the astonishing news that she had left the house to me.

This small log house would have been Sara’s only possession. It seemed impossible that anybody else, even me — no, particularly me — could take ownership. I wanted nothing to do with it.

Mrs. Boyle had been hovering nearby, pretending to dust but anxious no doubt for information I had no intention of giving her. “You’ve gone all ghastly,” she said. “What on earth is the matter?” I assured her that I had certainly not “gone all ghastly,” that I had simply been surprised by a legal letter concerning some property near Port Arthur, a small city on the north shore of the Great Lake Superior.

“I have absolutely nothing at all to do with it now,” I said. “I haven’t been anywhere near the place for over forty years.”

I rose from the desk, left the studio, and walked through the house to the vestibule. From the closet there I removed my hat, coat, scarf, and cane. Then I sat down on the bench near the door and struggled with my galoshes — I am eighty-three years old, and bending in any direction has become a problem.

As I unbolted the heavy front door, I heard Mrs. Boyle shouting at me from the kitchen. Something about cold and wind. I pretended not to hear her and stepped outside.

The first time I saw Sara she was holding a large broom, sweeping, her body twisting around the object as if she were dancing with it. Later I drew the broom with great care, great precision, right down to the last bristle. I drew even the inconsequential rose on the label that was wrapped around the base of the handle. Sara’s back was to me — I hadn’t yet seen her face — and the curve of her spine was visible through her cotton uniform. She was sweeping the verandah of the hotel that had once housed businessmen and speculators from American cities, but that now catered to tourists who wanted the view from Lake Superior’s north shore. She worked, in season, at the hotel and lived year-round in the small log house that her father had left her.

The house she has now left to me.

Had she not been working at the hotel I might never have seen her at all, though perhaps we would have passed each other on the track they called, and likely still call, The Avenue, when the lake, the vast inland sea, would have had all of my attention. Or she might have been walking behind me as I strolled towards the end of the settlement — a crescent moon of mostly uninhabited miners’ houses around a subtle bay — and would have slipped inside her door, disappeared, before I turned around.

As it was, I was sitting in one of the wooden rockers on the verandah, drawing the offshore mine situated on the island for which the townsite was named. It was 1920, the first and last year
of my father’s connection with that fundamentally extinct operation, just before he took himself and what was left of his money permanently back to the States. I was drawing the mine for my father, the last resident American speculator in the hotel, though I would rather have been concentrating on the rocks, the trees, even the hotel itself. But he had asked this one favour of me and I had agreed.

Through the cotton of her uniform I could see her strong, slim back, her shoulder blades shifting as she moved the broom. As her head was held in a slightly tilted position, I could see the long tendon on the side of her neck and one vein there, pulsing. She appeared to be trying to cover every square inch of wooden floorboards with the bristles of the broom, but there must have been a narrative running somewhere in the back of her mind, a narrative that did not, as yet, involve me. What was she thinking during those last few moments of innocent labour before I disturbed her life?

I could see the slight curve of muscle in her upper arm, could imagine the sharp edge of a graphite pencil capturing the motion, the gesture. Freezing it.

And yet, watching her, her unselfconscious grace, I wanted to interrupt the task, to add my own presence to the image. I wanted to hear her voice, and I wanted to hear it speaking to me.

“Would you like me to move?” I asked, already rising from the rocker. I wanted her to turn around, to face me.

She stopped sweeping then, pivoted, pushed a strand of hair back from her forehead and regarded me with surprise, as if she hadn’t known that anyone was there at all. Her eyes were on me now. I could see her prominent cheekbones, her expressive mouth.

“Oh, no, sir,” she said, “you can stay right where you are for as long as you like.”

Each day now, when I return to the house after my walk, the letter is lying, just as I left it, folded neatly on the table in front of the chair, glowing in a shaft of the famous architect’s authorized light. I do not pick it up to finish reading it. I refuse to know the details of her death, how long it took to find her, whether there was pain. No one but Sara, you see, could have lived at Silver Islet year-round any more. The old government official must have died years ago, and now, at the end of each summer, there will be no one out there at all.

Tomorrow I will begin the underpainting for my next picture. I will paint Sara, the inherited house, the fist of Thunder Cape on the horizon, the frozen lake, her hands, the Quebec heater, the slowly fading fires. I will paint the small-paned window, the log walls, a curtain illuminated from behind by winter sun, the skein of grey I never saw in Sara’s hair. Then carefully, painstakingly, I will remove the realism from it, paint it all out.

This afternoon when I left the house there was fresh snow, few footsteps on the sidewalk, and only one set of parallel lines left by a car that must have passed less than ten minutes before. I began to walk, as I always do, around the block. When I had completed this tour six times, I noticed that my tracks in the snow made it look as if a number of people had been walking
behind me, following me on my promenade. I did not miss the significance of this.

I have travelled this route many times before. By the time you have reached my age, everything has repeated itself at least once. The Silver Islet house was not my first inheritance, for example. And Superior was not my first north shore.

I
was born in 1894, in Rochester, New York, a city of ravines and canals, rivers and waterfalls, inventors and industrialists, preachers and psychics; a city so chock-full of the turmoil connected to rampaging waters and vicious cycles of weather that the Gods sought revenge by making it, ultimately, famous for giving almost everyone the ability to create fixed images, the ability to stop action in its tracks. George Eastman had already opened his State Street factory by the time I entered the world, and, by 1900, he was distributing his Kodak Brownie camera from coast to coast: a fitting beginning to the current century.

At the tail end of the last one, while I played on the floor with my toy soldiers and tried to avoid outings with my mother, my future teacher, Robert Henri, returned to America from France. According to my friend Rockwell Kent, Robert H. burst into the studios of New York City, preaching the idea of visual art as a response to the life and to the energy of the world, shouting the names Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro as if they were vegetables he was desperately trying to sell at market.

My own artwork at the time focused on a series of military campaigns waged by stick soldiers wielding stick swords. America, I believe, was at war with Spain; there must have been talk of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. And then there was my Louisiana-born grandfather, on my father’s side, who had fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War and who visited us for a week or so once a year. Sometimes, to my great delight, he would deliver the “rebel yell” at the dinner table in our otherwise dark and solemn household, between courses, making my mother jump in her seat and causing my father, who was not the least bit inclined towards spontaneous outbursts, to swear under his breath.

While Robert Henri was for the first but not the last time hectoring his students, insisting that, like his adored Cézanne, they paint the landscapes of their own continent and the streets of their own cities, I was attempting to discover a way to avoid contact with the streets and landscapes of my own neighbourhood. My mother was unusual; a gifted Gothic narrator and not at all interested in facts. But she was strictly accurate when it came to setting, and researched her material well. Drawn to the sublime in nature, she particularly admired high vantage points — look-offs, I called them — and, as a result, she was impressed by the great number of chasms and gorges that cut their way through the city we lived in. It was her fondest wish that I be delighted by these geological oddities as well.