Very Old Bones (17 page)

“I ain’t been all right in ten years,” Francis said. “Whatcha doin’ down here, keepin’ an eye on me?”

“You left.”

“You figured that out.”

“You left the house.”

“You been watchin’. You both been watchin’.”

“No,” I said.

“No,” Peter said.

“Did ya have a good time?” Francis asked. “How’d I do?”

Only now has it begun to snow

Only now

I remember backing away mumbling scream, I did scream as soon as, and I saw the cat with its front left leg bleeding and the naked doll with both its legs gone now and the dark-eyed child
gone

snow now

now snow

The solidification of my father’s reputation prior to this present hour, the summer of 1958, followed the exhibition of the six canvases and many sketches he made during
the years 1936–1939, the ostensible subject of these works being the near suicide of Francis as witnessed by the artist, by the cruel waif from the carnival, and by myself.

In the wake of the aborted suicide, Peter fell into an artistic silence that persisted for much of 1935. I judge it to have been induced by his guilt over not confronting Francis when he first
saw him beside the tracks, but instead waiting for the train he thought would carry the man away—and thus would Peter have been done with a pesky brother.

But again Francis confounded his sibling, stepped onto the track bed, then stepped off again, a game of perilous hopscotch if there ever was one. And what this did was derange Peter for more
than a year, the greatest thing that had happened to him as an artist up to that time.

Artists, of course, use their guilt, their madness, their sexual energy, and anything else that comes their way, to advance the creation of new art. Peter had fared modestly in his one-man show
in that winter of 1934, realizing some dollars, plus an enhanced (but still marginal) reputation, and proving to the gallery owners that, although he was perhaps not Matisse, he was worth wall
space. But Peter, given this green light, immediately stopped painting, and no one could get him to say why. It all looks crystalline now in retrospect, but it was probably mysterious even to him
for a time. His artistic cycle, as I came to perceive it, was this: profound guilt and remorse, followed by delight with the remorse, for it created the mood for art; self-loathing that followed
being delighted by remorse; boredom with self-loathing; rumination about self-destruction as an escape from self-loathing; resurgence of boredom when self-destruction is rejected; and resumption of
art to be done with boredom, art again being the doorway into the emotional life, the only life that mattered to him as an artist.

He began by objectifying, in segments, the scene as it had been, or as he had transformed it in his memory, revealing all that I saw, even to the cat, the legless doll, and especially the waif,
which surprised me. She disappeared after I screamed at Francis, but Peter had already seen her in the weeds, and drew her peering out at the tracks like a vigilant demon, which is how I thought of
her in subsequent years.

In one canvas he drew the scene from the perspective of Francis, leaving out the tracks, but including the lumber mill, the switch box, even the Phelan house, which he placed on a hill several
blocks to the east and transformed into a place of dark and solitudinous dilapidation. He used the light of dusk, which was when the whole event took place, but he also painted Francis in bright
sunlight, a way I never saw him. He painted the carnival boxcars in the background of one work, its people minimally developed, but busy with violence, copulation, voyeurism, and domestic acts
around an open fire, none of which I had observed.

Peter learned about Francis’s leg wound from me (it was years before we knew how he’d gotten it), for I had seen it at the house when, sitting alone at the table, he wrapped a napkin
around it, then tied it with a piece of string he took from his pocket; and I saw it again clearly when he sat on the switch box and raised his pant leg to examine his lease on death, so to speak.
Peter created one picture in which only that ghastly leg exists on a realistic plane (precisely the repulsive purplish-and-white scaliness as I had related it to him), vividly detailed in drybrush
watercolor. The rest of the scene—the body of the leg’s owner, the sky, the tracks—he rendered with a few pencil strokes and a smear of color. The leg in that drawing appeared to
be a separate being, an autonomous entity. It did belong to a body, but further specifics of that body remained for other drawings to reveal.

I’m speaking now about the sketches Peter drew (he liked to quote Ingres that drawing included three-quarters of the content of a painting, that it contained everything but the hue), to
some of which he added watercolor, most of them in pen or pencil or charcoal, depending on the tool at hand when the impulse came to conjure yet another response to the event. Peter did forty-nine
sketches for the three paintings, which may seem sizable, but is really a parsimonious figure when one compares it to the hundreds of sketches he did for the Malachi paintings.

The Itinerant
series, as the Francis paintings came to be called, was the realization of Peter’s new artistic credo: profligacy in the service of certitude. He came to believe that
he could and would paint for decades to come, and that there was no such thing as too much prefatory creation to any given work. But he did not behave in any way that supported his new flirtation
with infinity. When he removed himself into silence he also began to ignore his personal life. He grew further estranged from Claire, remote from me (which I didn’t understand; and I felt
myself guilty for having done something I had perhaps not understood, or did not know I’d done; but I had
not
done anything except witness his fratricidal behavior), his personal
hygiene deteriorated to the level of the most unwashed of those bohemians in whose midst he lived; his work as an illustrator, more in demand than ever, became loathsome to him, and he did less and
less of it until his income was zero, and in this latter action he achieved a secondary goal: to so impoverish himself that he would henceforth be of no help whatever to Claire in supporting the
house.

He was slowly converting himself into a replica of Francis at trackside: man without goal, home, family, or money, with only his wits to keep him alive. This was art imitating life, artist
imitating man who lives or dies, who cares? Art be damned. Useless art. Pointless art. Now is the time to live or perish.

In this way Peter moved forward, trying to discover how the phantasm of death is visually framed in this life.

Peter concealed his
Itinerant
series for two years after he completed it, his first manifestation of that reclusive temperament that would continue for another two
decades, and sold only three unrelated oil portraits (commissioned) to support himself. His year of silence had obviously fed his imagination, and led to the creative explosion he could no longer
keep to himself. Critics who subsequently wrote about these paintings gave Peter his first leg up to fame, finding in them the originality he’d long sought, and either ignoring his earlier
work or relegating it to the status of preparatory effort. They did not yet see that all six paintings had their subliminal inspiration in one late masterwork by Hieronymus Bosch, even to the name:
The Peddler
, or
The Tramp
, or
The Landloper
, or
The Prodigal Son
, as the Bosch work was variously called.

I doubt seriously Peter ever knew all the parallels the Bosch would have to his own work, his own family. He was not derivative, always argued against emulating the Impressionists who had so
moved the American artistic world in the Armory Show in that year of his arrival in Greenwich Village, 1913. He resisted also the thrust of the Surrealists, who dominated the direction of art in
the 1930s and 1940s. Peter used all these schools in his own way, never fitting any categories; yet the critics, after
The Itinerant
series, linked him to proletarian realists and Depression
agitators, all of whom he might admire in principle, but would loathe in the particular for their politically partisan cheerleading.