The Underpainter Read online

Years later, on a winter night, I would drink whisky from it while Augusta Moffat and I waited for George to walk in from the cold.

  But George first drew my attention to it on this summer evening in 1914, after he had closed the shop. He stood right in the centre of the China Hall holding a common bread-and-butter plate, handling it with such care I assumed that it was a valuable antique. He would not yet have met Augusta, though physically they might have been less than ten miles apart. I imagine she might have been standing in a kitchen doorway on the farm watching her brothers wrestle on the lawn, watching them train for the violence no one knew they would encounter. Or maybe she was walking through the evening light into the village, talking in her mind to an imaginary friend. I will never know. AU I was able to see then was George’s two pale hands and the piece of ordinary kitchen china they held.

  “It’s all there,” he said. “The two birds with their wings outspread. Its as if they are preparing to enter an embrace. And then there is the path, the bridge ….”

  I saw only a kitchen dish.

  “A world … a complete world.”

  In the slanting light of the June evening, I could see that George had changed over the period of the preceding fall and winter. There were dark circles under his eyes and fine lines over the tops of his cheekbones.

  “And loss,” he said. “The landscape of the Willow pattern is one that speaks of absence.”

  At that time I had not often thought of landscape as a code for something else. “What is absent?” I asked, peering at the plate. “How can anything be missing from a scene this crowded?” I was convinced that the picture on the plate, with its laughable pagodas and improbable bridges, was created in direct opposition to the laws of composition.

  “The lovers,” he said. “The lovers are gone.”

  “Dead, I suppose.” I was child enough of my mother, and of the nineteenth century, to be able to interpret willows.

  “No,” said George quietly. “They are just gone; gone from each other and from everything else”

  How terrible, I thought suddenly, is the grinding dailiness of George’s life. How pathetic that he should have to spend his days contemplating kitchen china. There was a kind of horror in it, a futility. I almost disliked him at that moment, for my own certainty was that nothing at all was ever going to happen to him. The shop seemed smaller, narrower than it had just moments before. I became aware of a staleness in the air.

  Moments before, I had watched George mechanically collapse the striped fabric that protected his store window. Fold after fold after fold.

  When did the awning begin to fray, I wonder, and who, in the end, was instructed to take it down?

  It seems that Sara has left me the contents of the house as well as the log structure and the land it stands on.

  “And the contents,” the document read, “to dispose of as the recipient sees fit.” Those words — “contents, sees fit, dispose of” — have been rattling around in my head all day, plaguing me, tumbling about with images of the objects they refer to. I imagine auction sales, Sara’s belongings displayed, picked over, taken away by strangers. This legacy was a deliberate act of cruelty on her part, I’m convinced of this. She knew I would be unable to cope, that I would drown in the vast sea of the past imprisoned by that house; Sara’s past and that of her father.

  I have not thought about the objects in her house for a long time; not since I painted several of them some years ago in a series I entitled North Shore One, North Shore Two, North Shore Three, and then one large single painting I called Coastlines: Land’s End and Cape Cornwall It always intrigued me that in her memory Sara carried impressions of the geological formations of that distant country’s edge. Though she had never left Canada and had rarely, for that matter, even ventured as far as Port Arthur, she could describe the coastal paths of Cornwall as if she walked there daily, as if she had inherited a complete map of memory from her father at birth along with the shape of her hands and the colour of her eyes. And when she spoke about the ragged cliffs, the engine houses of the mines, the church in the village of St. Just, I could see every pebble on the track, each cog on the wheels of the hideous machines, though I had not yet developed what would become an almost prurient interest in the freight of her father’s experience, the sad history of a transplanted Cornish miner.

  There was little enough of Cornwall in the log house on the shore of Lake Superior, and yet Sara insisted that its coastline had been around her always as long as her father was alive and even, it would seem, after he was dead. Though I never asked her to, she detailed his walks each day to Botallack Mine, his descent into the underworld on the strange lift they called the man engine, various appalling accidents, the countryside littered with standing stones and chimneys and pierced over the centuries by thousands of mine shafts. The little grey houses in the villages. The fishing boats offshore. She spoke about all of this when she was posing and I was rendering the shadow of her instep or following the line of her neck with my pencil or the edge of a piece of charcoal. At the time, I hardly believed that I was listening, and yet here it is now, this distant, unseen country in my mind.

  The unfairness of this, the unfairness of me having to keep these images, these crashing waves, these bursting churchyards, these rituals of farewell, as young men like her father departed for the New World. As if in revenge for my selectivity as a taker, Sara always gave me everything when all I really wanted was the colour of her skin, the shape of her flesh on the canvas, and any extraneous information that would make those shapes, those hues more resonant. And pleasure too. Yes, I wanted that as well.

  I was not unaware of her daily life, but felt it prudent to keep myself as far from it as possible. She rose at six and, after drinking coffee from the aluminum pot that I would find on the stove when I arrived at eight, she would leave the house and walk to the hotel to serve breakfast to the tourists. Naturally I saw her there — often she served me — but I paid no more attention to her than I would have to any other waitress. I had assigned this woman in her yellow uniform and white shoes the remote lodgings in my psyche reserved for her unknown (at least to me) winter self. I was courteous and formal and, after the first few encounters, she was as well. After breakfast, she and the other waitress cleared and washed the dishes, swept the dining hall and porch, and began to prepare for lunch. The cook’s name was Sammy. He had worked in lumber camps and mining camps and his father had known Sara’s father. But everyone knew everyone else in that part of the north. It was nothing special. I was never in the dining hall at lunchtime, having taken a picnic with me to Sara’s house or sometimes to the shore in order to sketch. By the time she had served lunch and washed up afterwards it was about two o’clock. Then she untied her apron, hung up her uniform, and returned to the house.

  I must have watched for her from the kitchen window because there she is in my eidetic cinema walking away from the hotel towards the row of miners’ cabins. Her hair, her skirt, and a thin silk scarf she has tied around her waist are all being tossed to one side by the breeze from the dark lake. There are the poplar leaves shivering in the sunlight, and sun candles on the water. Dust. It must have been a dry summer. And a warm one. Her arms are bare. She is wearing delicate sandals.

  I had approximately three hours alone with her (except on her days off, when I had all day), three hours only before she stepped out the door again and walked to the hotel to serve dinner; to serve dinner to me and the other paying customers. Very, very occasionally we met at night, but there didn’t seem to be much point to this as I rarely painted in artificial light. Usually I stayed in my room and read, or I wrote letters to my friends in New York. Sometimes I dropped a card to George, who had returned to Davenport after the war and who still kept the China Hall. I went to bed early and slept well, except during those nights of high winds and large waves. Lake Superior, a huge inland ocean, really, could work itself up into a terrible commotion, a commotion that entered my dreams. Once I dreamed I saw Sar
a’s body revolving in the foam beneath unfamiliar cliffs and, believing she was dead, I woke up weeping like a child and hating myself. I stood up then in utter darkness, left the hotel, and walked beside the thundering water to the log house, used my key, and crept into her bed. She knew who I was, even in her sleep. I don’t like to think of that now; my name on her lips, the sound of it so near. It was one of the few times we’d awakened together — mid-morning — on a day when she wasn’t working. I remember I said, “We have slept for a long, long time.”

  She laughed and rolled towards me, hugging me with her arms and legs. The uproar had passed and sunlight from the water was trembling on her ceiling, her walls. There was something remarkably fine and strong about her. The shadows that muscle definition created on her arms and inner thighs and along her abdomen when she lay on her side, these small basins were regions where I often rested my hand, my cheek. And now, late in the morning, the watery sunlight ran down and across the geography of her body as if she were lying in a bright, shallow river. Me swimming there beside her. I was not fully awake. I broke open in the face of this vitality, this brilliance, the shining strength of the beautifully constructed bones of her face. I could scarcely look at her. Finally, the room, my own body, my own language disappeared, and all I was able to do was say her name.

  I was shaken by this, so shaken that I dressed soon afterwards, walked into the room where I normally worked, and began to collect my sketchbooks, my pencils. Claiming that I wanted to work outside on drawings of the shoreline, I left Sara alone for the remainder of the day. Robert Henri had said to me that what one was after when drawing or painting the figure was not so much the particular characteristics of the model but rather what the artist’s visual sensations were when looking at her. He insisted that one should take from the visual that which attracts the actual eye, and then the mind’s eye. I was becoming a master of selectivity. I was able to discard frivolous stimuli at will.

  Sometimes I find that I am angry with poor old Robert H., though he was never in his life as successful as I have been and he has been dead for a very long time. Sometimes I find myself walking through the bright, empty rooms of this house, cursing him aloud as if he were standing before me and I were preparing to confront him. He had never been to Canada and yet carried on about the north as if it were alive in him, as if he were an authority. I have notebooks and notebooks full of the things he told me. What a public speaker he was, what a pontificator!

  “Art is a result!” he announced glibly once. “It is the record left by those who have truly lived their lives. Those who have genuinely lived their lives will leave behind the stuff that is incontestably art.”

  He once told me — or told the class, I can’t remember which — to be wary of too much talk. Talking almost incessantly himself, he nevertheless instructed us to keep our innermost thoughts private until they could be expressed visually. Silence, he maintained, preserved the deeper current of the personality, “and the deeper current,” he said, “carries no propaganda: the shock of surface upheaval does not deflect it from its course.” That being the case, I asked him — I’m fairly certain it was me who asked him — what difference could our talk, our own variety of surface upheaval, make to these more profound currents? He replied by saying that he was referring to the noise of the world. It was enough, he said, to have to penetrate the noise of daily life; God forbid that we should add to it. He pointed towards the street. “Running beneath all that daily life,” he said, “you will find the deeper current, but only if you are quiet and still and wait for it to reveal itself. The same for the deep current you carry in here.” He thumped his chest with one fist, somewhere near where his heart should have been.

  This would have been sometime in 1915 or 1916, when George was already away at war. But then it wasn’t my country’s war, was it? It wouldn’t be my country’s war for another two years and, even then, only the adventurers would choose to go overseas.

  My teacher taught us to stand in wonder in front of the world while overlooking altogether the world’s response to us; unless, of course, that response were an acknowledgement of our own innate superiority, our special vision.

  Lake Superior. How strange that Sara lived beside a body of water, a body of deep currents, bearing that name.

  Robert H. taught us, taught me, that unless it could be turned into art, absolutely nothing was worth my time. “Art is a kind of mining,” he said. “The artist a variety of prospector searching for the sparkling silver of meaning in the earth.”

  I think of my own father, and men like him. Men whose wise investments tore open the wilderness, penetrated the earth, moved mountains, and who ultimately were responsible for creating the furious machines that would eventually be used in the wars.

  How right Robert H. was. About art. About success, ambition. The greed. The exploitation at the expense of nature and humanity. And, in the end, sometimes the beauty.

  He was a wonderful teacher.

  There is always a moment of wholeness, recollected when the world is torn, raw-edged, broken apart, a moment when the tidiness, the innocence of landscape — sometimes of the society that created the landscape — allows you to predict with accuracy the discord to come. The flawless summer of 1914 presented just such an opportunity for this kind of prescience. But in Davenport, the world around me was concentrating on its own freshness, its own youth. A sense of heightened animation was everywhere. People laughed and embraced on street corners, the beach was full of visitors, weather did not interfere with the growth of crops on the surrounding farms. Business, according to George’s father, had never been as brisk.

  From Dominion Day onwards, the ceiling of Davenport’s dance pavilion was tented with flags — the Union Jack, the Red Ensign — and the talk before, during, and between dances was always of war. A forty-mile excursion across a shared Great Lake had brought me so close to Europe and its conflicts that, at times, even during my hours of withdrawal, it was difficult to remember that that particular continent and its adjacent imperial island were still thousands of miles away. George and his friends began to appear in uniform on Saturday nights, looking smug and mature after hours spent marching with their militia units. Words like Serbia and Belgium, places I barely recalled from grade-school geography, sprang easily to their lips. Girls with bright eyes, shining hair, and crisp new dresses were as restless as the young men they danced with, anxious for a declaration of open hostilities abroad, confident that their opinions were shared by the crowd.

  Vivian was nowhere among the dancers. I had not seen her once since I’d returned.

  When I asked about her, a shadow trembled briefly across George’s face, as if a swift bird had passed between him and the sun. Then his expression became absolutely neutral. “She’s gone,” he said. “She left for Europe with her mother. They sailed months ago.”

  “Ah well,” I said, wanting to reinstate an air of complicity between us, “if you’re sent over you’ll be able to see her. Though I suppose if it comes to that, her mother will have brought her back by then.”

  “There is no fear of me seeing her,” he said. “I don’t want to see her.”

  “What about fate … destiny?” I was almost teasing, then saw his face darken, but not soon enough. I was drawn to the minor drama of the oblique relationship, was using words as if they were cheap, lacking in power.

  It was a gorgeous day. George and I were walking on the diagonal path that bisected Davenport’s lakeside park into two neat isosceles triangles. The lake was gleaming, a hundred bright sails on its surface. “I expect I’ll be killed in the war anyway,” George said. “I expect that is what will happen.” He spoke these words almost cheerfully, as if he did not wish to disturb the lightness of the day, the beauty of the morning.

  Everything around us was in perfect bloom; everything had been raked and swept and cultivated by people devoted to horticultural societies and town fairs where glossy vegetables and sleek horses won blue ribbons. Nothin
g had yet disturbed this picture. No one had the slightest understanding of irony. There was no need for it. In the decades that approached the summer of 1914, honour and loyalty had yielded satisfactory rewards. If you fed and groomed the horse, hoed and watered the garden, in all likelihood at some time or other you would be presented with a prize. I refused to take seriously George’s statement about death. The only drama I could imagine for him would be romantic in nature, minor; interesting only in the vaguest of ways but, above all, well ordered.

  “This war may never happen,” I said. “And if it does, it will end almost immediately. You’ll be back in no time.”

  We were almost at the King Street end of the park when George stopped, turned towards me, and announced that he had made out his will, that I was to inherit his china collection.

  The half-painted vases and urns that stood on the shelf behind his counter came instantly to mind. I laughed and thanked him. There was irony in my voice, but as I’ve said, this was a place where irony was not understood. Yet.

  “You could finish painting the vases, I suppose,” he said, “but it would be best if you saw the whole collection so that I could explain it to you.”

  “You’re not going to leave me with everything in the store?” I said nervously. I envisioned an entire afternoon in the shop, George enthusing, pattern after pattern.

  “The store is my father’s,” he reminded me.

  All along King Street we walked in the shade of the large old sugar maples that have now all but vanished from towns and roadsides on both sides of the border.

  “I’m talking about my own collection — you’ve never seen it — I keep it in my room.” George paused then, waiting for some comment from me, I imagine. When I remained silent, his voice softened, became almost apologetic. “I suppose,” he said, as tentatively as he might have had he been going to ask me to make a large sacrifice on his behalf, “I suppose you really should see it.”