The Underpainter Read online

  Immediately after my mother’s death, my father moved out of the bedroom they had shared, slept instead in a small, cell-like room at the far end of the hall. I had always believed that the large bedroom was my mother’s place anyway — her dressing table, her wardrobe full of long, dark-coloured clothing — and so my father’s change of sleeping quarters had little effect on me. For a while, when I was still quite a young child, and when I was certain my father was not near, I would quietly enter the abandoned room, approach the dressing table, and play with my mother’s music box. I would twist the metal key at the bottom of the small instrument, listen to the Minuet in G until the music slowed, then began to falter, then ceased altogether with one last, sad plucked note. Once, just as I carefully folded down the hinged lid of the box, I felt two large arms encircle me. My father lifted me away from the dressing table and collapsed on the bed with me on his lap. I looked in the mirror, the same mirror that had so often held my mother’s image, and watched with a kind of horror as my usually restrained father wept awkwardly into my neck. I knew better than to try to squirm out of his embrace at this moment, but as I felt tears stinging my own eyes, everything in me wanted to do so.

  My father released me eventually, rose and, without saying anything at all, walked quickly from the room. We never spoke of the incident.

  Years later something else remarkable and disorienting happened. I returned one day from high school to find my father pacing like a penned dog across our small entrance hall. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and he was never back from the office before six: routine, of course, was the engine that drove our lives. But his presence in the hall at such an hour shattered all that; it was completely out of character. I was as shocked as I would have been had I found him standing naked on the lawn.

  When I asked him why he wasn’t still at work, he looked up in a startled sort of way, as if he were surprised at my appearance, or as if he didn’t recognize my voice, my face. He opened one hand, palm upwards, shrugged and said, “No more work for me, I … we are ridiculously rich. I won’t ever need go to work again.”

  We stood facing each other in a small, square, useless space, physically closer than we had been since that afternoon in my mother’s room, staring into each other’s eyes as we never had before. I remember he held his hat in his hand, as though not quite sure whether he was arriving or departing.

  The word “rich” was so foreign to me I barely understood its implications. “Are you certain?” I stammered.

  He nodded slowly. I noticed his mouth was quivering, his skin ashen. The pattern of his life, I realized even then, had been smashed. He had the appearance of a man in the midst of a great emergency. I half expected him to call an ambulance, or the police.

  “Silver,” he said. He was still looking directly into my eyes, his expression almost angry. “Some godforsaken place in Canada called Cobalt.”

  “Cobalt,” I echoed. All I could see was a particular shade of blue.

  If I had been, at the time, interested in portraiture, I should have wanted to capture my father as he looked then. Much later Robert Henri would teach me that the features of a face incline towards the one expression which “manifests the condition of the sitter.” But there was more than that in my father’s face. Instinctively I knew that I was seeing him on the brink between all that he had been and all that he would become. It was there with us in that modest hall, balanced between us for a moment in the late part of an autumn afternoon.

  It was very quiet. My father passed his hat from hand to hand, and, once or twice, he opened his mouth and cleared his throat as if there were something else he wanted to say to me. Then the angle of his vision altered slightly, almost imperceptibly, and I realized he was withdrawing, looking past my shoulder towards his new life.

  “I have school work,” I muttered.

  I became terribly aware that I had no idea what we would say to each other in the hours between four and six, hours during which I had, until now, occupied the house alone.

  “Of course,” he replied. He placed his hat on the hall table, then shuffled aside to let me pass. We separated to go to other rooms in the house. As I climbed the stairs, I could hear his footsteps in the kitchen. It seemed to me then that my father had taken the decision to keep walking, walking away from his previous self.

  There are any number of ways to lose the people who make up the fabric of one’s life. Sometimes the alteration is slow, internal, almost invisible, so that one does not notice until years later that the other has been gone for half a decade. Sometimes the person one has become attached to changes so radically it is as if he or she has died, to be replaced by someone else altogether. In the next few months my father’s personality altered dramatically, and permanently, as he burst into a world I would never understand. He spent his days in the offices of brokers and promoters; the serenity of our evenings vanished as his non-business hours became filled with committee work relating to hospitals and museums. Women entered his life, coaxed him away to lengthy dinner parties in the neighbourhood where I now live. He started to purchase expensive clothes.

  For a brief period at the beginning of all this, he began, inexplicably, to speak. As if money were the key he needed to unlock language, he confessed details he had previously withheld. He would climb the stairs late at night, shake me awake, and talk about the past: his childhood, his journey from the south to the north, his first glimpse of Mother, their marriage, her increasing strangeness after they had set up housekeeping. He remembered the oddest things: how the roped wood of a banyan tree trunk outside his childhood home interlaced like the decorated borders of a medieval illuminated manuscript; a Pullman porter he had spoken to on a train called The Orange Blossom Special; the mauve hue of gaslight in the fog outside the Rochester Temperance Hall where he and Mother had met. She had been working, he said, for less than a year in a garment factory near the river, and he prided himself on having rescued her from all that. I was hungry for the information he was giving me, and often, after he had padded away to his own room, some of it would work its way into my dreams, where the stiff young couple in my parents’ wedding photo would relax and laugh and embrace.

  Then, as abruptly as it had begun, this interlude ended, and although my father continued to talk, it was only of the present. I came to understand that by telling me about the past, he had been removing it; that I had been a kind of receptacle into which he discarded his old self so that there would be room for the new person he was becoming. A well-swept, clean, and empty space for the present, for the dinners and meetings and boardrooms, the new world to which I had no access.

  I hated this. I wanted the familiar routine, wanted my father to leave the house promptly at 8:15 and return promptly at 5:45. I wanted his quietness, his solitary whispering, wanted either the comforting rustle of his papers or his words about the past just as I was sliding into sleep. As he spun noisily away from me, I gradually began to distrust entirely the motivation behind the delivery of words. I stopped talking, responding, dove deeper and deeper into myself, the world of my drawings, until I was out of the house as often as possible, recording waterfalls and ravines on pale sheets of paper, just as I believed my mother had hoped that I would.

  My father, in the middle of his life, was transformed from a shy clerk into a jolly, boisterous, and, in the end, overconfident, almost foolhardy entrepreneur. He who had never related to anyone was suddenly relating to everyone. Except me. I related only to the paper, to the pencil in my hand, to the tangle of lines that trapped a sampling of energetic water under my fingers, the contour following the edges of rock.

  At the beginning of the summer of 1913, my father told me we were heading north to spend the summer on the other side of the lake, and, for the first time in our lives, he and I stepped on board the ferry that travelled, weather permitting, back and forth across the forty-mile distance from shore to shore. He had bought, sight unseen, a small lakeside summer property in the Canadian town of
Davenport. The air, he had been assured by the realtor, was much purer there, the water cleaner and more suitable for bathing. Moreover, the summer social life, the parties held by wealthy Americans in large lakeside summer homes, would be, my father believed, my ticket of entry into that world. I had completed my first year of classes at the Rochester Art Institute and was making some casual friendships among the painters, musicians, and actors who were part of the limited cultural élite of my city. Rather than Canada, I would have preferred New York, or Chicago, or a trip to Europe. Or, failing that, I would have preferred to remain in Rochester. Still, I boarded the boat with as much good nature as I could summon and, once we had cast off, walked moodily around on deck in a manner I thought suitable for a person of artistic temperament.

  Ten years later, Rockwell Kent and I would discuss the glamour of a north shore, how everything opens and clears there, sky, various winds, water; how light lingers long after it should in summer, as if trying to announce something vital that has been overlooked or refused. But none of this came to my eighteen-year-old mind as I attempted a watercolour of the pastoral, lush Ontario shoreline. What intrigued me instead was how a landscape could look both manicured and uninhabited at the same time. There was something in me then, some love of both solitude and order, that responded immediately to what I was seeing. But as we drew closer to Davenport, my elation began to diminish. Stilted and small, the town seemed to be lacking in potential. Lining the shore were huge, white American summer homes, perfect examples of the kind of immodest display of wealth that I, an art student with socialist leanings, felt ought to be disapproved of. I decided right away that I would have nothing to do with the mannered society that would undoubtedly fill the drawing rooms and croquet lawns of such places. I would stand alone, endure the summer.

  There was something else. Until that moment, turning north had involved lake and sky and emptiness for me, but now I was under the impression that everything was askew — the shore, the sun, the hills all appeared to be facing the wrong direction, and my mind kept wanting the trees that climbed the slopes behind the town to be submerged, the breakers to roll away from the beach. In later years, as I have intimated, it would be the north shore of any body of water that attracted me, but, at eighteen, I was still innocent of the kind of obsession that attraction demanded. I spent my first few days in Davenport sulking on the porch of our summer house, staring out over the lake towards my abandoned city, and resenting my father’s repeated and unsuccessful attempts to get me involved in badminton parties and other such nonsense. Sometimes I walked on the beach, but the sand filled my shoes and socks, and I was too self-conscious to remove them, so I plodded back to the house and closeted myself in my room, which, compared to the golden light on the vast expanse of water, seemed dark and small. I tired of such behaviour eventually — I was eighteen after all — and when my father finally left me alone to pursue his absurd badminton parties, I walked out the back door and began to explore the town.

  How to describe the colonial world that flourished in the streets leading away from manicured American lawns? Union Jacks heaved in the wind from the lake, Queen and King streets intersected in the centre of town, Victoria Hall and Albert Street celebrating the intersection. The British Hotel looked imposing and prosperous. The first bank I saw was called The United Empire, and the moving-picture theatre went by the name of The King George. There was often a concert in progress in the band shell in the town park given by what I would later come to know as the Davenport Garrison Artillery Band. Their uniforms looked like a cross between those worn by soldiers during the Boer War and pictures I had seen of English policemen.

  I have lived for years in two large American cities. I have spent winter vacations in French and Italian villages, and fifteen summers on Lake Superior’s north shore, yet few of these places impressed themselves on my visual memory to the extent that Davenport has — a place where I spent only two summers, a place to which I returned less than a dozen times in the years that have followed. If I close my eyes I can see even the most irrelevant details of the summer town: the weeds in the kitchen garden that my father and I neglected. Places in the park — near the band shell or the dance pavilion — where the grass was worn thin. A striped awning shading a shop entrance. Lit windows viewed from the beach at night. But my mother was right about the danger of fixed images. I want none of this. A pebble from a Great Lake shoreline, a coin with a leaf and a king embossed on either side, a shard of porcelain — the smallest thing is capable of driving you mad if you are unable to forget it. I am like an old museum filled with relics no one is able to identify any more. But there it is. George Kearns is a particularly tenacious ghost, and Davenport was George’s home town.

  I went back to Davenport a few years ago, slipped into town like a thief. I hadn’t been there since a brief and, in the end, brutal visit in the winter of 1937. and yet it was the memory of the serene summer of 1913 that afflicted me: a reflexive, backwards glance to the time when I was eighteen and George was twenty, and both of us were innocent.

  Little had changed in the town. No, if I am to be truthful, I must say that everything had changed. The ferry terminal was abandoned. Neither The Maple Leaf nor the Northern Star travelled the waters back and forth to Rochester: the country where I lived was apparently seeking its playgrounds elsewhere. Kearns’s China Hall had also vacated its premises, and, when I looked through what had been George’s shop window, I saw coils of rope, boxes of nails, cans of paint. Not that it made any difference. Cursed by recall, I could bring to mind every shining piece of precious bone china George had lovingly placed on the shelves of the China Hall during the course of that long-ago summer. That and how my own face and body had looked then, reflected in his window glass.

  The ground floor of my father’s house on the beach was now being used as the office and the dining room for the unattractive modern motel that filled the space where the garden had been. Orange plastic chairs stood in front of sliding-glass entrances. Disgusted by the sight of these, I walked towards the lake, turned my back to the water, and stood for a few minutes on the sand, looking up at the miraculously unaltered verandah, remembering the young man who had brooded there. Then I left the place and walked across the park.

  The dance pavilion had been torn down years before, and I was almost relieved at first to discover that I could not remember where it had been situated. A large expanse of grass where there were no mature trees, however, disclosed its site, and as I walked towards this place I recalled views of the night lake from windows and balconies, the music of The Baltimore Rhythmaires, youthful couples gliding over a hardwood floor. The irretrievable prewar calm.

  We believe that the whole planet rotates at once, but, in fact, it seems to me each entity in it turns on its own private axis, independent of the larger dawns and sunsets. I wondered about this vanished building. How and when it had begun to depart from the forward momentum of social history. I wondered how many sad old musicians had picked out the tune of the last dance, and when and if they knew that they, the dance floor, the scattered dancers, had all become irrelevant.

  As I have become irrelevant.

  Then I walked back to my car, climbed in, and drove east on the King’s Highway Number Two, towards the end of the lake, towards the bridge that would take me back to my own country. My own state.

  It wasn’t long after that I added a canvas to what the critics would later call my Erasures series. It was the third painting I had attempted in my new style, the first two being entitled Concealed Animals and The Sawhorse, respectively. By the time I was finished, there was just the faintest trace of a building in it. A year later, I noticed that the shape of the roof and the dark blue of the lake were coming through the layers of white, but I solved that problem by scraping and repainting. I always wait at least two years before releasing a painting, placing it in the public eye, so that I am able to correct chemical impurities such as the one I’ve just described. It’s rather like wai
ting for cement to harden, or for a newly constructed house to settle.

  The summer of 1913 in Davenport, Ontario, Canada. The chalky vermilion of the brick walls I passed when I walked, the bubbles in the clean, bright glass of the small-paned windows, and all the gardens but ours weeded, raked, perfect. As I said, I began to explore the town, and I met George Kearns.

  It was a hot afternoon, the park and the beach were full of noisy children, their mothers and aunts; the main street was practically deserted. I was walking west on King Street, the central thoroughfare of the town, when I saw a young man in a long white apron leaning in the doorway of a shop on the opposite side of the street. I noticed him first because he was about my age and then because of his extraordinary beauty, his blond hair shining like a lamp under the sun, the relaxed curve of his body against the door frame. Then I noticed that he held a sketchbook in one hand and a pencil in the other.

  Even a person totally uninterested in art will approach another who is making a drawing, as if this strange activity of attempting to reproduce the perceived world is one which needs to be supervised, monitored. Or perhaps it is the intensity of the draughtsman’s focus that lures complete strangers to his side; some kind of primitive desire to impede a relationship this intimate between subject and renderer. Having myself been the object of such interference, having felt the drawing dissolve beneath my touch at the approach of an observer, I nevertheless crossed the street and casually broke the young man’s concentration. Smiling, puzzled, he looked up. He never did manage to master the distancing skills I had developed early in life; he never could keep the world at bay. How young and fresh his face was. Perhaps mine was as well.

  He had been drawing Victoria Hall, he told me, because he wanted to paint it on a china vase. Beside him was that window I’ve spoken of, the window of the China Hall. He explained he was wearing an apron because he was sometimes called upon to help out in his father’s neighbouring grocery store, which he could enter by passing through a door in the east wall of his own china shop. I felt that this white apron separated him from me entirely; as indisputably as the fact that he painted on china, a pastime of which I, a serious student of art, disapproved. I leaned on the other side of his door frame and we began to talk. I imagine it was a summer choice between George and his world and the superficial world my father was trying to coax me into that determined our friendship. But that day we spoke only about the heat, about drawing pencils and watercolour paper, about sable and camel-hair brushes. In the course of the following week I stopped at the China Hall to see George whenever I was out walking.