The Underpainter Page 3

  It was late January. I was nine and in school by then, but that didn’t prevent my mother from insisting on the walks; often she would be waiting at the gate when I emerged from the school door. But this was Saturday, a holiday from that particular humiliation, a day that I would have preferred to spend drawing my now fully fleshed-out soldiers waging their fully fleshed-out battles. And colouring them. Poster paint had entered my life.

  The previous night an ice storm had coated everything in silver and we had awakened in the morning to a tinsel world.

  When we left the house my mother exclaimed at the beauty. “This is what happens,” she said, “when you live in the north. Everything can change in the most magnificent way, completely, overnight.” We were walking slowly because of the ice underfoot. “We live as far north as possible,” she said. “Aren’t you glad?”

  She had either forgotten, or was choosing to ignore, Canada.

  “We are northerners,” she said proudly. “We like the cold.”

  Huddling in my woollen coat against the increasing chill of the wind, I wasn’t quite sure that I agreed with her, but I dared not voice my opinion.

  “Our river runs north,” she announced as we inched our way over the slippery footbridge. I was trying not to think of the river, the long, deep distance between me and its swift current. “The north is the birthplace of spiritualism,” my mother continued cheerfully. “The north is where spiritualism lives.” She paused, admired the view from the end of the bridge, then added, “Thanks to my great-aunts, your great-great-aunts, the famous Fox sisters.”

  I was treated to a full description of the Rochester Rappings, the knocking and pounding from the beyond that, according to my mother, had visited these ladies at all times of the day and night. Mourners lined up for blocks to keep appointments with the famous Fox sisters because they could put absolutely anyone in contact with the spirit of absolutely anyone else, provided that the person to be contacted was thoroughly dead. I imagined white ghosts with hammers lying beneath wooden floors, angrily demanding attention from the living. But my mother corrected me when I told her this. The mourners, she said, cherished such bangs and thumps, such requests for attention. And the ghosts themselves would knock and rap only if one or more of her great-aunts were present in the room. The ghosts, she assured me, were very fond of her great-aunts, who were dead themselves now and had been for some time.

  “Do they rap?” I asked. “Does everyone?”

  My mother laughed then, put her arm around me and pulled me close. “I’ve never thought of that,” she said.

  I loved her. I remember loving her. I think. No, I’m certain of this. In my early childhood she was my whole world.

  By the time my mother and I had reached the graveyard it had begun to snow for the second time: soft, gentle flakes, large enough to be examined on a mitten.

  “No two are alike,” my mother said. “But then no two of us are alike either, even if we are related.”

  Later, Rockwell would develop the same theme. He was a great believer in the relentlessness of character, of originality. You could not get rid of it, he once told me, even if you wanted to.

  There have been times when I have wanted to.

  As we moved deeper into the graveyard, my mother reminded me that her great-uncle, the Reverend Pharcellus Church, delivered the inaugural address when Mount Hope Cemetery was opened in 1830, praising its magnificent views, its “bottom lands” and “abrupt declivities.” It had been his favourite spot for a stroll in his declining years, and now, seventy years later, it was ours.

  “He was an admirable man,” she told me. “You should be proud to be related to him. I was going to name you Pharcellus when you were born, but your father wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted something more southern, so we settled on Austin.”

  Even at nine years old I was grateful for this.

  We watched the bottom lands and abrupt declivities fill with snow for quite a while, long enough to see the slate and stone roofs of house tombs in the valleys become covered with white as we crept along the icy paths above them. Then, just as we reached the centre of this fearsome place, the old oak trees began to whine and creak as the wind shifted, increased in velocity, and stirred up a blizzard more blinding than any I had experienced in my short life.

  “I think we’ll have to wait this one out,” my mother sang above the storm. “I believe we will have to take shelter.”

  We were standing near a mausoleum that looked like a miniature cathedral. My mother squinted at the lettering above the door and said, “I’m certain cousin Slattery won’t mind.” She scraped the snow from the threshold with her boot, pushed open the protesting wrought-iron doorway, and beckoned me inside.

  No one had been to visit cousin Slattery for a long time, I decided, when my eyes had adjusted to the gloom. His checkered marble floor was neither swept nor washed, all his flowers were dead, and Jesus, who had fallen from the cross, lay smashed upon the altar. A pointed stained-glass window at the rear of the room was broken and missing one or two panes; a good thing, I thought, since this allowed some light and air to enter the structure.

  “It appears,” my mother said disapprovingly as she looked around, “that cousin Slattery was a papist.” We were Episcopalian, a denomination whose name I had never been able to pronounce. I had no idea what a papist was, and when I asked, my mother’s subsequent descriptions of saints and martyrs led me to believe that the famous Fox sisters must have been papists as well. We had settled ourselves down on prayer stools, the needlepoint upholstery of which had decayed long ago, and dried bits of straw were pushed out of them by our weight. My knees came up to my chest in such a position, my mother’s almost to her chin. Outside, the squall wrapped itself around our little dwelling, and I imagined it flinging itself into the declivities we could no longer see.

  I don’t know how long we stayed in cousin Slattery’s chapel, but most likely, though it seemed like forever, it was little more than an hour. Squalls, such as the one that raged through Mount Hope Cemetery that day, rouse themselves to a great fury, then evaporate, a function in this region of what is now called “the lake effect.” I do remember, however, that at some point I became cold and began to complain. I remember too that when my mother took off her coat and wrapped it around me, the heat of her body was trapped in the cloth, and I could feel this warmth, even through the quilting of my own coat, and it comforted me.

  It was shortly after this day that my mother died of scarlet fever, a disease with a beautiful name. Oddly, there was never a hue with this designation in an artist’s paint box until at least the 1940s, and then it was called quinacridone scarlet, the cumbersome first word smashing the brightness and delicacy of the second. Still, almost any time I used red in a painting I would think of my mother as I uncapped the tube. Cadmium, vermilion, Venetian, madder, alizarin crimson all brought our walks in Mount Hope Cemetery to mind, despite the fact that she is not buried there but sleeps instead in the little graveyard of Hilton.

  It saddens me to think of her in Hilton, with flat fields stretching out on either side and neither marble statuary nor extreme geography to honour her brief life, decorate her death. But Lake Ontario is nearby, and it was of this frozen lake that she spoke as she lay delirious and dying. She believed that she was skating far out on the bay; she believed that there was someone on the shore calling her back. “I can’t come in,” she said over and over. “I’ve gone too far and the ice is turning black.” Filled with energy until the instant of her death, her hands groped among the bedclothes as if she were looking for something in the dark, something she would recognize by touch. I, recovering from scarlet fever myself, was barred from her deathbed, but, looking through the keyhole and listening at the door, I knew she was trying to find me, that I myself was on the shore she couldn’t return to. I called and called, silently of course, though sometimes I whispered her name.

  It is alizarin crimson that I now associate with my mother, her life, the d
isease, her death. A colour so unreliable it could practically be called fleeting, it disappears in less than thirty years. No amount of varnish can protect it. Turn it from the light and it still fades with a determination that is almost athletic. And yet it is the most beautiful of the reds; dark, romantic, and fragile, it is an outburst of joy among the other colours on the palette, though chances are the artist will live to see it weaken, deteriorate, and finally vanish. It is impossible to keep.

  In my child’s mind, the colour of the disease was a band of red on the ice my mother spoke of, and I could see her, actually see her, move across it to the place where the ice turned from grey to black, until finally I could see her enter the inky waters of the Great Lake.

  She had joined all of her relations. She had gone as far north as she understood it was possible to go. She was never coming back.

  Once again it is not far from my door to Mount Hope Cemetery, not far to the ravines and tombs that so fascinated my mother, and, I suppose, it won’t be long before I will join all the other residents of this city who have increased the population of the graveyard’s heights and depths. Returning to Rochester could have been viewed as the initial stage of a journey towards the graveyard gates: the first plodding steps of an old elephant going home to die. But, in fact, it was the availability of a piece of property that brought me back to my native city. Ten years before, I had bought the house built by the famous modernist architect, the house in which I now live. Long and low, spacious and angular, it is completely out of character in this neighbourhood of mock Tudor revival and large, ornate nineteenth-century houses. Like this architect, I find that the upholstered furniture and useless gadgets, the kept things that decorate most houses, depress me. I need space around me, and light. Air. Like him, I want a lot of emptiness between me and any object in a room.

  I am a civilized man by nature. Despite the reality that at my age pure enjoyment seems to require more strength than I possess, I like my creature comforts. A soft bed, a warm bath in a spacious tub; clean, wide rectangular windows, spotless white walls. For this reason I hired Mrs. Boyle, to whom I speak as little as possible, though, unhappily, this does not prevent her from speaking to me. When she leaves in the evening she takes the noise of the world with her, and I find myself alone with one of her casseroles in the kitchen, smoking and swearing and wishing I were in that other kitchen, with the Great Lake thundering outside and me cleaning my brushes near the sink. The kitchen I have just learned that I now own. But I refuse to take anything from the world now. I will continue to live in a modernist work of art with a housekeeper and ghosts; uncomfortable ghosts who form attachments to neither calm white architecture nor quiet residential streets. Ghosts whose only reason for being here is to haunt me.

  Decades ago, between the ages of twenty and forty, I was in the gathering period of my life, filling myself to the brim with subject matter until I was forced to overflow onto the picture plane, onto the canvases Sara so often posed for. I was an accumulator, a hoarder. I trespassed everywhere and thieved constantly. I believed that I would always be younger than those around me; that I was connected to the history of that to which I was related, never to its conception. I was a student of Robert Henri’s at a time when his celebrated career — even as a teacher — was coming to a close, a time when his earlier pupils, or at least those of the much-admired Ash Can School, had become more famous than he, and they, in turn, were being submerged by the advance of cubism after the Armory Show. I met Rockwell Kent when he had already lived the lives of ten men, had fathered children, had had affairs, had lived and worked in the Far North. Even what I was to learn of Sara’s story leaned towards the past, not the present: the mine disintegrating below the lake and everything in her father’s house kept and cherished like relics. As I saw it then, each life I touched had found its focus and was existing in a kind of aftermath. I think of my friend George Kearns when I first glimpsed him. He was hardly more than a boy, but the ease with which he strolled around his shop, his cherished China Hall, gave the impression that it had been, for a very long time, the centre of his world. In contrast, there was me; my relationship to any place, any surroundings, was always awkward and self-conscious. Yes, then there was me, dismissing relationship so casually.

  This large, famous white house in which I live — this house that suits me so well — was neither built by me nor for me. Now, in its open spaces, behind its oversized panes of glass, I am haunted by robbed histories, stolen goods. Each day in the studio I play with colours, build up textures, experiment with white, distort the subject matter underneath, while the ghosts press their faces, their lives against the doors and windows, trying to make me stop.

  I missed the Armory Show by one year.

  I participated in neither war.

  I never travelled farther north than the opposite shore of Lake Superior.

  I avoided love.

  Eventually all of my work, even that which is now in private collections, will go to institutions where it will be consigned to walls or banished to basements. It matters little to me which location posterity chooses. What matters is the China collection; the bright objects gradually filling the glass shelves on the south wall of this otherwise mostly empty room. Who will want it? Who will treasure it? Who will place it in the correct light? It has taken so much time to put even part of it together, so much meticulous effort. A task not made any easier by Mrs. Boyle nattering about the probability of my eyes being ruined by too much close work and too much reading. I have a small library, just a few shelves of books, really, books containing information about manufacturers, marks, certain celebrated potters and designers. Sometimes I remove a volume from the shelf for no particular reason at all, let it fall open on my lap randomly, and stare at a photo of an eighteenth-century piece, a piece so rare that George Kearns could never even have imagined possessing it. Sometimes in my mind I see myself presenting it to him. A gift. I never, in all the time I knew him, gave George a gift.

  Perhaps it could be a wedding present, for him and Augusta. Ghosts at a ghost wedding. And me the wedding guest who slew the albatross.

  But I accept no invitations of any kind, am visited only by the past. And George and Augusta were never man and wife.

  “You should get out with people more,” says the socially minded Mrs. Boyle. “Stop fussing around with all those poisonous paints. You only keep starting over again anyway. If you saw people once in a while, maybe you wouldn’t make so many mistakes. Maybe you’d actually finish one of those pictures.”

  Pictures. Mistakes.

  As I said, I take nothing from the world now.

  All the water in this city runs urgently towards the north, hurries towards the Great Lake with the name of a Canadian province. The city itself, however, looks east and west from the two sides of the Genesee River, as if its citizens had one day decided to curl inward rather than admit to the existence of another land, an opposite shore with rivers and farms and cities of its own.

  The country across the lake never really takes shape in the collective imagination here. Cold, distant, separated by enough water that the curve of the earth makes it invisible, the far shore disappears swiftly from the memory — despite excursions, or even complete summer vacations there — as quickly as a trip to an amusement park might, after daily life is resumed. The impression left behind is as vague and fleeting as the various intensities of light over the lake, which change before they fully register in the mind, before anyone with watercolours and a brush is able to capture them on the paper in his hand.

  I was seventeen in 1912, when my father made enough money on Canadian mining stocks to begin to take more seriously the country that the lake concealed. An acquaintance, a section manager at the Eastman factory, had persuaded him to invest in a property north of Lake Superior, and, unlikely as this may seem, his money doubled and then tripled. My silent, sober father, much, I think, to his own amazement, proved to have financial talent. He had not remarried. For a time a
fter my mother’s death he had no social life to speak of, and was therefore able to spend his evenings poring over his accounts and stock-market quotations — his own special game of solitaire. Often at night I would fall asleep listening to him add sums aloud as he sorted papers filled with numbers, papers which themselves made a comforting sound when he moved them, like a soft breeze in a grove of maples.

  Ours was a tidy, ordered, and not unhappy existence. The interior of the house seemed to have physically changed with my mother’s absence, the warm, sometimes claustrophobic quality I associated with my early childhood having departed with her, even though not a single piece of furniture, not a curtain, not a doily had been changed or removed since her death. My father and I moved in our separate predictable orbits, and trusted the regularity of each other’s habits. He did not inspect me as my mother had each day before I left for school, and rarely commented on my behaviour or my achievements. He would scan my school reports in the most cursory of ways, was neither pleasantly surprised when I was at the head of the class nor greatly disturbed if my grades began to falter. He did not, you see, insist upon relationship. Emotion was almost entirely absent from the contact we had with each other — which is not to say that he was unkind to me or that we had no feelings for each other. I, in turn, was comfortable with his lack of intrusion. It seemed to me that the rooms we lived in had become spacious, that light and wind entered easily through the windows. Occasionally sounds reached us from the outside, from the real world. My father liked birds, I remember, was glad if an unusual species appeared in our yard; a Baltimore oriole, for instance. Sometimes we talked about things like that.