The Underpainter Read online

  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.

  As a young child I was always looking down into landscape, never across it or along it. In church the congregation droned, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” I had never looked up at anything, except for architecture, and even that was mercifully low in those days. Moreover, the depths into which I would have had to descend in order to watch rocks and vegetation climb skyward were filled with tombstones, on the one hand, and murderous rapids, on the other. The Genesee River rampaged angrily through the centre of town generating the power that drove the industries of our prosperous city fathers. Darkly romantic pillared and gargoyled tombs created valleys of death out of the series of ravines that became Mount Hope Cemetery. The long footbridge crossing the Genesee and the serpentine avenues that wound around and above the huge, deep graveyard were my mother’s favourite destinations. I feared and hated both places. I was certain I would be drawn down to death one way or the other as, holding my mother’s hand and decked out in my sailor suit and straw hat or wrapped in layers of quilted clothing, I approached these lofty spots.

  When I mustered the courage to complain, my mother assured me I was fortunate to have access to such spatially interesting scenery. Daughter of a market gardener from Hilton, a hamlet situated in the uncommonly flat lands ten miles or so from the centre of town, nothing, she maintained, could please her more than to look from on high into landscapes both wild and dangerous. A fear of heights, she told me, was nothing more than a fear of depths. She, however, feared predictability, boredom, and certain distant, fixed horizons. Flat land, she said, was like a dull story; one where you wer
e able to determine the middle and the end right at the beginning. Large bodies of water were different in that you never quite knew what they were going to do even when they were frozen, and that alone made them interesting. We talked about such things on our promenades, or rather she talked about them. I said very little. I was just a child.

  I now realize she was quite a lot like my friend, the painter Rockwell Kent. She should have been given a boat and a sail and set adrift to bump up against one steep, forbidding shore after another, though the monotony of the long journeys from departure to landfall might have put her off his style of adventure. Still, they had much in common and, had they ever met, Rockwell might have fallen in love with her. He was a man obsessed by dangerous landscapes, by women, and the north. He stopped travelling only long enough to begin painting; he stopped talking only long enough to start writing; he stopped womanizing only long enough to attempt to repair his disintegrating marriage. His brain, like his painting, was controlled by polar forces. The north was with him always, regardless of where he hung his hat. By the time I was nine and setting forth on what would turn out to be my last series of walks with my mother, Rockwell would have already survived the vagaries of the eccentric Abbott Thayer’s freezing outdoor school, would have been enrolled in Robert Henri’s life class for two or three years. Having been born at the tail end of the century, it seems to be my destiny to walk into the finale of every drama I encounter. By the time I met Rockwell, by the time I met Robert Henri… but I am getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say that I missed the Armory Show, modernism’s notorious début in North America, by one year, though now I don’t regret this for a minute.

  My father left our ordinary house on Atkinson Street each morning promptly at 8:15 in order to walk to George Eastman’s State Street factory where he worked as a clerk. As a child I was quite taken both with the factory itself — seven storeys high! something to look up to — and with the objects that emerged from it. Cameras. Photographs. Images still and calm and dependable. I assumed that my father was responsible for these reliable pictures, despite the fact that there were only two photographs in our house: the first showed my parents thin and grim in their wedding clothes; the other was of me as a baby, silly and girlish in my christening gown. We owned a Kodak Brownie camera — everyone in Rochester did — but my mother forbade its use. “They stop things,” she would announce whenever the subject of cameras arose. “They interrupt the normal flow of events. Furthermore, they eliminate things. If I take a photograph of this,” she would say, pointing to a beer factory across the Genesee River, “I obliterate this and this.” Even now I can see the way she gestured as she spoke, her arms sweeping back and forth, conjuring the rest of the world, the world that a photograph might have obliterated, the world of the stampeding river, the world I was afraid of.

  Father told me much later that she had begun her walks to the river and the cemetery while I was still in my pram. In the beginning these outings were, as far as he could remember, sporadic and made some sense to him in that babies should be “aired.” By the time I was six, however, the journey had become a daily routine. Regardless of the weather, pressing household chores, invitations to ladies’ teas, my own feeble objections, we set forth. If it were raining, my mother would carry a huge black umbrella. If it were snowing, she would bundle me, and herself, in scarves and mitts and quilted coats. Only severe illness, hers or mine, could keep her home. I was severely ill as often as possible, loving the quiet of my room, my books and toys spread around me on the pale-blue blanket, the “Land of Counterpane” so gorgeously described by Mr. Stevenson in my favourite poem. Essentially, my greatest ambition at the time was to be a sickly child, as sickly as the author in question had been. But just as soon as the thermometer from Mr. Taylor’s instruments factory indicated that I was well again, off we went, over the roaring river, to the edges of the valley of the shadow. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” the congregation chanted, “I will fear no evil … thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” I was convinced the revered rod was Mr. Taylor’s thermometer, comforting me, keeping me from shadowed valleys, causing me to love the word “fever.”

  Mother claimed we were related to Mr. Taylor, but then Mother claimed we were related to all of Rochester’s prominent citizens. “Just you and me,” she would say conspiratorially, “we are related by blood to Mr. Taylor. Not your father, he is not related to anyone.”

  I was too young at the time to remind her that my father was, of course, related by blood to me.

  According to my mother, when she was a child her distinguished relatives had driven her in their magnificent cabriolets to the much more fascinating water and beaches of the Great Lake Ontario, which was closer than you might think to the flat lands around Hilton. They had gone to the lakeshore in all kinds of weather, and it was this that must have instilled in her the idea that outings were good for children. Sometimes there was ice, she explained, and then there would be ice boating and skating. The ice was white near the shore, then grey, then darker grey. It turned black just before it disappeared into the liquid, inky churn of Great Lake water. It resembled an oversized polished ballroom floor and, as one grew older, one danced upon it arm in arm with a partner. I could barely imagine this. For me, ice was something that appeared overnight, startling and silver on the bare limbs of trees near a waterfall, or hung like angry, dripping fangs over the gorge through which the Genesee River tumbled.

  Rockwell Kent would tell me years later that he loved ice, insisting that it was more interesting than mere soil; that it created itself out of available, sometimes invisible materials, then disappeared again; that it had a mind of its own.

  He would have worshipped my mother.

  It is no surprise to me now, given the abysses in the surrounding geography, that men famous for mail chutes and elevators should have flourished in my native city. James B. Cutler and L. S. Graves, respectively. Mother claimed that we were related to both of these gentlemen, as well as to a certain Jonathan West, who had invented a celebrated kind of water meter. The accomplishments of the great men of our city, all of whom were apparently related to us, figured largely in the words my mother chose to describe the landscapes through which we wandered.

  “Down you’d go,” she once said, staring from a bridge that spanned the frothing Genesee. “Down you’d go, just like a love letter in a Cutler chute.”

  Another time, when we were walking around the top edge of the graveyard, she announced darkly, “These paths curve, this way and that, just like one of Henry Strong’s whips flung down in the grass.” I wondered what these long whips would be used for and what kind of large animals they might be meant to subdue.

  At Mount Hope Cemetery we stood under arbours and sat on stone benches. We paused to admire the impressive mausoleums of one alleged relative after another. We examined marble statuary — marble that was sometimes brought all the way from Italy, my mother told me — and which ranged from small urns to realistically rendered life-sized family groups.

  “That certainly is a good likeness of cousin Reginald’s dog,” Mother would say, looking fondly at a marble beast curled at the feet of a bearded marble entrepreneur who was himself seated comfortably in an armchair on his own tomb. “Its name was Mergatroyd.”

  I don’t believe I have ever been intimately involved with a woman as young as my mother was then. She had married my father at sixteen and had been — if one did not take into account our afternoon outings — more or less housebound ever since. As far as I knew, she had no friends; even her own parents, my grandparents, were dim, shadowy people who never appeared in our house and whose small clapboard house in Hilton we rarely visited. Whether they disapproved of the marriage, or were themselves disapproved of by my father, I wasn’t ever to know. His own family was far away in a place called Baton Rouge. I had met only my Confederate grandfather, who came to visit once a year.

  It was a claustrophobic world that, more tha
n my mother’s flat, pedestrian girlhood, may have explained her need for imaginary relatives and dramatic scenery. I remember the darkness of the house during the day, the murky lamps at night, the silent suppers and punctual bedtimes. My mother and I had little in common with my father; as she had said, he was, at least in the metaphorical sense, related to no one. She and I, however, were related to the alternative worlds connected to childhood. Pretty and delicate, bored and prone to fantasy, she was, I suppose, just a little girl. I became her playmate; her sometimes unwilling playmate. By the age of nine I adored her and was perplexed by her; coveted and occasionally felt smothered by her company.

  Most people, I understand, remember only bits and pieces of any particular day in their childhood. Only certain static images, much like the photographs my mother so disapproved of, cut through the recalled atmosphere of being six or nine or five years old. I am not, as I have pointed out, so fortunate. Robert Henri maintained that the wondering eyes of a child see everything, but when childhood has passed, much of what they have seen is lost. I carried everything I saw on a certain day in 1904 with me into adult life, either because of what happened later or perhaps in spite of what happened later. Yet this visual intensity is still only a matter of optics. I can see the way the snow moved through the neighbourhood, the colour that the cold placed on my mother’s face, the icy, shining wires swinging in the wind, snowdrifts against the outer walls of mausoleums, but I cannot see myself, the boy I was then; at least, I cannot see his face. And there are no photographs. My mother would never have allowed photographs.