The Underpainter Page 9

  I was perfectly happy in these early-morning moments at Silver Islet and felt, in some ways, closer to the model — closer to Sara — than I did when she was naked and in my presence. I even began to develop certain theories of association. All of the objects in her house had, to my mind, the potential to be transformed by Sara’s recent handling of them, so I looked specifically for those things she had touched or relocated since I’d last seen them.

  Then, one morning, when I had been drawing a collection of pots Sara had left on the draining board to dry, I became so involved with their shapes, the geometric angles the handles made in relation to each other, that I let her face drift out of my mind. Most of the time, when my eidetic memory was functioning perfectly, this split vision had been easy for me to achieve; I never wanted to lose sight of the fact that it was her coffee cup, her crochet hook. I was insisting that the sketches should be theoretical exercises in intimacy, not anonymity. But that morning anonymity crept up on me before I recognized it. When I realized what had happened and tried to bring Sara’s face back into my mind, I found I couldn’t recall it. It wasn’t that I had forgotten her hair or eyes, or even her strong mouth and the curve of her cheekbone, it was just that I could no longer picture these things with my inner eye, and this frightened me a little. But if I could picture them, I could only see the way I had painted them; the ice-white dot in the middle of the pupil, how this alone makes the eye live, various pale flesh tones, rose and beige, and the yellow ochre of her hair.

  It had been a cold spring, Sara had told me that; though spring is always cold in that country. She had taken me out to see the patch of snow that remained at the bottom of the tall cliff at the end of the settlement track, as if its tenacity proved a point she had been trying to make. It was the middle of June then — I had just arrived — and we were still awkward with each other after my nine-month absence. For a few days I had painted both the cold and the awkwardness into her skin, her gleaming shoulders. Then, finally, I walked across the room and thrust my hands into the warmth of her hair.

  Now, on an early morning in mid-July, I found I couldn’t call up her face. I began to hone my pencil with her paring knife, wanting as always to make the instrument weapon-sharp. Then I left everything — the shavings, the pencil, the sketchbook, the knife — on the table and ascended the dark, enclosed staircase carefully, because I knew Sara would not rise for another hour and I didn’t want to wake her. Her father’s room was full of the kind of shimmering light that was always reflected at this hour from the lake. By nine o’clock a rippling, luminous stream would trickle down the hall to Sara’s room, where it would cross her bed, climb her wall, pulsate on her ceiling. But now, in the early hours, her room was dark, then suddenly lighter, then dark again. As I came to her doorway, I could see that the breeze was pushing through the open window, lifting the shade she had drawn the night before, then slowly letting it drop before beginning the process again. She was lying on her back, her head turned slightly towards the window so that her face caught the light when it entered, then darkened again as it withdrew.

  I stood in the doorway and watched Sara’s face disclose itself and then return to shadow. It was not the face I remembered. It was more transparent; a naked face. I had no desire to render it on paper, on canvas. Its privacy, I knew instinctively, was impenetrable.

  Now, I think, if I had tried … perhaps with something loose and fluid, like watercolour. But how was I to get in the coming shadow? That was the question.

  There was something disturbing, I suddenly thought, about the way the living lay their defences down in darkness and give themselves — surrender themselves — so completely to the awful vulnerability of sleep. Terrible harm could come to a creature in such periods of utter passivity. How badly equipped life seemed to be for survival, how much more opportunity was given to the certainty of death. I could hear Sara’s slow, steady breathing, which seemed to be oddly connected to the lightening and darkening of the atmosphere. She had slept in this room every night of her life, she had been a child here.

  I became embarrassed by my own voyeurism, stopped looking at her face, and began to examine the sheets in which she slept. They were gathered and twisted, contained the full narrative of one night’s dreams, a history of sequential, unconscious gestures. I would draw this bed, I decided, but I would wait until Sara had risen from it.

  I remembered what my teacher had said about drapery, how it was composed of rhythms, echoes, continuations. He hated the word “wrinkled” when it was applied to cloth but, strangely, didn’t mind it when it was used in relation to human skin. It was as though he felt much more affinity for the inanimate than the animate. Once, after listening to him talk about drapery, I returned to my small Greenwich Village studio and spent a full afternoon dropping my handkerchief on the floor and drawing the unusual shapes that it made there.

  In Sara’s hallway, I passed through the trembling light that had begun to move towards her room, and I descended the narrow staircase, gathered my drawing materials together, and let myself out by the front door. Several crows were gliding in the air near the lake, the fringe on their wings like black fingers against the sky. Soon Sara would walk where I was walking. She would be dressed in her waitress’s uniform, ready to serve breakfast to me and to the other guests at the hotel. When she poured coffee into my cup that morning, I felt for the first time ashamed, though of what I was not precisely sure. Ashamed and almost shy.

  I could never bring myself to tell Sara that I had seen her naked face.

  And it would be many years before I was able to understand that all through those long winters in New York, winters when I had convinced myself that I had no wish to see Sara, the truth of the matter must have been this: I did not want Sara to see the man I really was. I did not want Sara to see me.

  2

  NIGHT IN THE CHINA HALL

  Many of my most recent paintings, paintings that make up the series now universally referred to as The Erasures, are based on vivid fragments, on ragged-edged episodes from my own life and the lives of the others. Often the making of them is painful to me. The underpainting is inadequate because although the scenes painted within it are powerful, the information contained there is scant. Slicing into the lives of others, I have walked away with only disparate pieces; walked away with both permanent and fugitive colours, with distinguishable and vague shapes. But it is simply not possible to fit everything together with any real accuracy, despite my overdeveloped powers of recollection. Sara always attempted to give me her autobiography — whole. But I tore it apart, silenced her, tossed the parts of her narrative I felt I couldn’t use, like shredded paper, into the wind. I was constructing her, after all, in my paintings. I wanted no interference with the project.

  Augusta Moffat was different. Although there was no attachment between us, I carry the whole of her life with me into every room I enter. I have not recomposed her. What I came to understand of her nature would simply not allow it. She was her own full canvas — we had no relationship. Almost everything I know about her I learned in the course of one long night in the winter of 1937. She unfurled her history in my presence not because she wanted to explain herself to me, or because she was trying to move me in any way, but simply because the story had to be told and there I was. I am certain she would have spilled her words into empty air had there been no one there to listen. When the need for disclosure is that fierce, one’s motives cannot be anything but pure. Augusta’s was the narrative that precedes a private gesture, a kind of review, I suppose, of everything that had led her to that moment.

  It had to be spoken. And it has to be remembered. Entire.

  That night while she talked I could see our dark bodies reflected in the large front window of the China Hall, each of us seated on either side of the counter. My own silhouette something I had come to know in other night windows; hers almost completely unfamiliar but gaining weight, substance, as the hours slid by.

  Augusta was Ge
orges woman. They treated each other with tenderness. One long winter night in the China Hall she told me the story of her life. There is nothing to modify, to obscure.

  She had been raised on a farm northeast of Davenport, the eldest child and only girl in a family made up of what appeared to be a never-ending series of baby boys. Her brothers broke her dolls, soiled her embroidered handkerchiefs, interrupted her studies with their fights, spilled her bottles of rose water, and ate all the chocolates her father invariably gave her for Christmas. As a young child she had had to throw rocks and sticks to keep them from surrounding her on the way to school. Later she had never dared bring a suitor home for fear of the taunts, their tricks and jeers.

  They jumped up and down on her bed, breaking the springs. They left a small pet pig in her closet. They wrestled in the front yard, flattening her first attempt at a flower garden. They caused even the oldest and most subdued of the calm workhorses to run away with her if ever she tried to ride one of them. Once, in her teens, when she had been out later than she ought to have been and was stealing carefully through the dark parlour in an effort not to wake her father, she opened the door to the stairwell and was met with a sudden cacophony. Pots and pans that had been tied together with a string and wound at one end around the doorknob came tumbling down the stairs towards her. Her parents would not allow her out after supper for a month while, night after night, the boys who were old enough to do so swaggered across the kitchen and out the door.

  There was a swift river of male children running enthusiastically through the house all winter long. The younger boys were so dedicated to activity that they literally had to be tied to chairs and pushed towards the long kitchen table in order to finish their homework, while the older brothers were isolated in various rooms so that they would not fight. As the tribe increased, the pantry was locked and the key kept in Augusta’s mother’s pocket, otherwise the cupboard would be bare. For many years Augusta never experienced a full night when her sleep was not interrupted by a baby’s demanding cry.

  And yet her love for her brothers was fierce, bright, and pure. She knew their bodies better than her own, had seen them saw and pitch stripped to the waist in the summer heat or slouch under coats into dark winter dawns towards barns and chores before school. She had sponged their hot skin when epidemics swept through their ranks, had bandaged knees and elbows, had combed lice from their hair. Because of them, before the age of puberty, she had experienced the full range of human emotions: grief, terror, loathing, loyalty, passion, and tenderness. If she had died before the age of twelve, it could have been said that her life had been almost full.

  Although she could not imagine awakening in a house from which chaos was absent, the architecture of her own character in the face of all this was, not surprisingly, built around a desire for order and restraint. Privacy was an alien concept, but tidiness was not, and so the achievability of folded shirts and dusted shelves made her glad, frustratingly short-lived though these things were. Often the results of an entire Saturday of labour were undone in the half-hour before sundown, and she would be forced to watch, unhappy and powerless, as everything she had put together flew apart again.

  Still, the truth was, this team of boys was the energy that drove her self into being, wrenching her out of sleep in the morning, keeping her alert all day, flinging her, exhausted, into bed at night. Unconsciously she attributed all change and each event to her brothers’ existence in her world, believed that without them the crops wouldn’t grow, the animals would not give birth, and that time would be suspended.

  Among them, Fred was the only quiet boy. Two years younger than Augusta, he stayed close to her skirts, eager enough to be near her that he would stand on a stool and slowly, methodically dry the dishes that she had washed, or he would hold the dustpan when she swept up discarded flakes of cedar in the woodshed. Throughout her life she kept a picture of him in her mind; he was standing by her side on the long front porch that faced the gravel road. “That was the road,” she told me, “that would lead us both — all of us, actually — away from the farm, towards brutality.”

  In the end, it seemed to her, that the road itself was a kind of weapon.

  By the time she was ten, in 1905, Augusta’s domestic abilities were better than those of a female three times her age. Her skills with a needle, for example, or with utensils in the kitchen, were breathtaking. I could imagine that each task she undertook was completed with the same earnest serenity, her small face calm, on occasion, radiant.

  In early morning, while the boys were hollered at and often shaken from their beds by their father, Augusta would already be downstairs with her mother, her dark hair combed and pulled straight back from her forehead, her two braids tracing the curve of her back as she kneaded dough or bent over the oven to remove a loaf of bread. I imagine she would have loved the talcum texture of flour, how it would make her pale hands paler and cling to the seams of her fingers; this and the brightness and sharpness of needles entering, and emerging from, cloth.

  Sometimes her mother, Kaziah Moffat, would allow Augusta to pull shirt after shirt from the perilous rollers of the wringer, while she herself cranked the handle round and round. Then Augusta would take the damp garments out to the platform her father had built beside the clothesline and pulley, pin the clothes to the rope, and run them out to dry in the wind. Occasionally one or two of her own cotton pinafores or dark calico dresses would appear among the more masculine laundry, and Augusta would like the look of this; her ghost family performing in the air, the landscape of her own farm as far as she could see.

  Her father barely noticed her, she was so quiet, so predictable, and he so busy moulding his battalion of rowdy boys into dependable farm hands. Once in a while he would stop and look at her and his expression would be one of surprise, as if he had forgotten, or couldn’t quite believe, that he had helped to bring something this feminine into the world. Then he would speak to her respectfully, as he might have spoken to a stranger whose good opinion he sought, asking her about her school work or about the Bible passages he insisted all his children memorize. He would sometimes praise her, but not lavishly for fear of encouraging vanity, and two or three times a year he would take her hand and press a dime into her cool, dry, curiously unchildlike palm.

  She loved him, of course, though she would never come to really know him. When she was twelve she gave him a cross-stitch sampler she had made for Christmas. It was decorated with rigid flowers, a perfectly symmetrical house, the alphabet, the numbers one to ten, and a verse she thought he would approve of:

  “Fragrant the rose is but it swiftly fades in time.

  The violet sweet, but quickly past its prime.

  White lilies hang their heads and soon decay,

  And winter snow in minutes melts away.

  Such and so withering are our early joys,

  Which time and sickness speedily destroys.”

  On Christmas morning, Edward Moffat held the piece of unframed fabric in his large, calloused hands and read all the words of the verse, his mouth silently forming each syllable. Then he looked at his only daughter, glanced in the direction of her mother, who was pregnant with their seventh child, then stared at his daughter again. Augusta met his gaze with solemn expectancy. It had taken her two years to complete the picture and the words. There was not a tangled thread among the stitches. Her own name was at the bottom with her age and the date, Xmas 1907, and then the message, “To Father.”

  This was not an unusual gift, nor was the cross-stitch an unusual pastime for girls (though its popularity had waned somewhat with the advent of the present century), and thousands of these projects hung, proudly framed, on parlour walls all over Ontario. The verse was taken from a booklet entitled “Sayings Suitable for Samplers,” which could be got, along with “The Women’s Institute Cookbook,” from the Methodist Church at any bake sale or bazaar. Yet when Augusta’s father read it, then read it again, the fog of habit and toil was swept from his m
ind and it seemed in its bleakness to carry with it a vague, but nonetheless terrible, portent. Life’s something miserable for girls and women, he thought, for the first time in his life.

  To Augusta, at whom he was still staring, he said bluntly, “Thank you for this, you have done it well.” Then he cleared his throat and announced, “You will go outdoors, for two hours a day, twice after school and once on Saturdays.” He paused, then added two more words, though they probably sounded foolish, even in his own ears. “To play,” he said.

  “What shall I play at?” asked Augusta gravely.

  “That,” said her father, glaring at the boys who were noisily demanding equal privileges, “you must discover for yourself.”

  “I was not at all happy with this decision,” Augusta said to me, “but my father prided himself on never changing his mind, and his word was law. It would have been pointless to argue and, besides, it would never have crossed any of our minds to be that impertinent.”

  She told me her father, Edward Moffat, was known as a taciturn man but was, nevertheless, much given to the telling of family legends during the evening meal and had often explained at his quiet table (the children were not permitted to speak unless spoken to) that no Moffat within living memory had ever changed his mind. The children knew that it was the Moffat men he referred to and that this statement included all of their uncles, their great-uncles, their grandfather, and their withered and aged great-grandfather, all of whom lived on the Moffat farms sprinkled liberally throughout Northumberland County. Because Augusta had told her mother that she had no wish to go out to play, and Kaziah Moffat had passed this information on to her husband, Edward Moffat felt compelled to remind his children about the Moffat men.