Nine Stories (18 page)

Around
nine, M. Yoshoto took off his glasses, got up and padded over to my
desk with a sheaf of papers in his hand. I'd spent an hour and a half
doing absolutely nothing but trying to keep my stomach from growling
audibly. I quickly stood up as he came into my vicinity, stooping a
trifle in order not to look disrespectfully tall. He handed me the
sheaf of papers he'd brought over and asked me if I would kindly
translate his written corrections from French into English. I said,
"Oui, monsieur!" He bowed slightly, and padded back to his
own desk. I pushed my handful of soft-lead drawing pencils to one
side of my desk, took out my fountain pen, and fell--very nearly
heartbroken--to work.

Like
many a really good artist, M. Yoshoto taught drawing not a whit
better than it's taught by a so-so artist who has a nice flair for
teaching. With his practical overlay work--that is to say, his
tracing-paper drawings imposed over the student's drawings--along
with his written comments on the backs of the drawings--he was quite
able to show a reasonably talented student how to draw a recognizable
pig in a recognizable sty, or even a picturesque pig in a picturesque
sty. But he couldn't for the life of him show anyone how to draw a
beautiful pig in a beautiful sty (which, of course, was the one
little technical bit his better students most greedily wanted sent to
them through the mail). It was not, need I add, that he was
consciously or unconsciously being frugal of his talent, or
deliberately unprodigal of it, but that it simply wasn't his to give
away. For me, there was no real element of surprise in this ruthless
truth, and so it didn't waylay me. But it had a certain cumulative
effect, considering where I was sitting, and by the time lunch hour
rolled around, I had to be very careful not to smudge my translations
with the sweaty heels of my hands. As if to make things still more
oppressive, M. Yoshoto's handwriting was just barely legible. At any
rate, when it came time for lunch, I declined to join the Yoshotos. I
said I had to go to the post office. Then I almost ran down the
stairs to the street and began to walk very rapidly, with no
direction at all, through a maze of strange, underprivileged-looking
streets. When I came to a lunch bar, I went inside and bolted four
"Coney Island Red-Hots" and three muddy cups of coffee.

On
the way back to Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres, I began to wonder, first
in a familiar, faint-hearted way that I more or less knew from
experience how to handle, then in an absolute panic, if there had
been anything personal in M. Yoshoto's having used me exclusively as
a translator all morning. Had old Fu Manchu known from the beginning
that I was wearing, among other misleading attachments and effects, a
nineteen-year-old boy's moustache? The possibility was almost
unendurable to consider. It also tended to eat slowly away at my
sense of justice. Here I was--a man who had won three first-prizes, a
very close friend of Picasso's (which I actually was beginning to
think I was)--being used as a translator. The punishment didn't begin
to fit the crime. For one thing, my moustache, however sparse, was
all mine; it hadn't been put on with spirit gum. I felt it
reassuringly with my fingers as I hurried back to school. But the
more I thought about the whole affair, the faster I walked, till
finally I was almost trotting, as if any minute I half-expected to be
stoned from all directions. Though I'd taken only forty minutes or so
for lunch, both the Yoshotos were at their desks and at work when I
got back. They didn't look up or give any sign that they'd heard me
come in. Perspiring and out of breath, I went over and sat down at my
desk. I sat rigidly still for the next fifteen or twenty minutes,
running all kinds of brand-new little Picasso anecdotes through my
head, just in case M. Yoshoto suddenly got up and came over to unmask
me. And, suddenly, he did get up and come over. I stood up to meet
him--head on, if necessary--with a fresh little Picasso story, but,
to my horror, by the time he reached me I was minus the plot. I chose
the moment to express my admiration for the goose-in-flight picture
hanging over Mme. Yoshoto. I praised it lavishly at some length. I
said I knew a man in Paris--a very wealthy paralytic, I said--who
would pay M. Yoshoto any price at all for the picture. I said I could
get in touch with him immediately if M. Yoshoto was interested.
Luckily, however, M. Yoshoto said the picture belonged to his cousin,
who was away visiting relatives in Japan. Then, before I could
express my regret, he asked me--addressing me as M. DaumierSmith--if
I would kindly correct a few lessons. He went over to his desk and
returned with three enormous, bulging envelopes, and placed them on
my desk. Then, while I stood dazed and incessantly nodding and
feeling my jacket where my drawing pencils had been repocketed, M.
Yoshoto explained to me the school's method of instruction (or,
rather, its nonexistent method of instruction). After he'd returned
to his own desk, it took me several minutes to pull myself together.

All
three students assigned to me were English-language students. The
first was a twenty-three-year-old Toronto housewife, who said her
professional name was Bambi Kramer, and advised the school to address
her mail accordingly. All new students at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres
were requested to fill out questionnaire forms and to enclose
photographs of themselves. Miss Kramer had enclosed a glossy, eight
by ten print of herself wearing an anklet, a strapless bathing suit,
and a white-duck sailor's cap. On her questionnaire form she stated
that her favorite artists were Rembrandt and Walt Disney. She said
she only hoped that she could some day emulate them. Her sample
drawings were clipped, rather subordinately, to her photograph. All
of them were arresting. One of them was unforgettable. The
unforgettable one was done in florid wash colors, with a caption that
read: "Forgive Them Their Trespasses." It showed three
small boys fishing in an odd-looking body of water, one of their
jackets draped over a "No Fishing!" sign. The tallest boy,
in the foreground of the picture, appeared to have rickets in one leg
and elephantiasis in the other--an effect, it was clear, that Miss
Kramer had deliberately used to show that the boy was standing with
his feet slightly apart.

My
second student was a fifty-six-year-old "society photographer"
from Windsor, Ontario, named R. Howard Ridgefield, who said that his
wife had been after him for years to branch over into the painting
racket. His favorite artists were Rembrandt, Sargent, and "Titan,"
but he added, advisedly, that he himself didn't care to draw along
those lines. He said he was mostly interested in the satiric rather
than the arty side of painting. To support this credo, he submitted a
goodly number of original drawings and oil paintings. One of his
pictures--the one I think of as his major picture--has been as
recallable to me, over the years, as, say, the lyrics of "Sweet
Sue" or "Let Me Call You Sweetheart." It satirized the
familiar, everyday tragedy of a chaste young girl, with
belowshoulder-length blond hair and udder-size breasts, being
criminally assaulted in church, in the very shadow of the altar, by
her minister. Both subjects' clothes were graphically in disarray.
Actually, I was much less struck by the satiric implications of the
picture than I was by the quality of workmanship that had gone into
it. If I hadn't known they were living hundreds of miles apart, I
might have sworn Ridgefield had had some purely technical help from
Bambi Kramer.

Except
under pretty rare circumstances, in any crisis, when I was nineteen,
my funny bone invariably had the distinction of being the very first
part of my body to assume partial or complete paralysis. Ridgefield
and Miss Kramer did many things to me, but they didn't come at all
close to amusing me. Three or four times while I was going through
their envelopes, I was tempted to get up and make a formal protest to
M. Yoshoto. But I had no clear idea just what sort of form my protest
might take. I think I was afraid I might get over to his desk only to
report, shrilly: "My mother's dead, and I have to live with her
charming husband, and nobody in New York speaks French, and there
aren't any chairs in your son's room. How do you expect me to teach
these two crazy people how to draw?" In the end, being long
self-trained in taking despair sitting down, I managed very easily to
keep my seat. I opened my third student's envelope.

My
third student was a nun of the order of Sisters of St. Joseph, named
Sister Irma, who taught "cooking and drawing" at a convent
elementary school just outside Toronto. And I haven't any good ideas
concerning where to start to describe the contents of her envelope. I
might just first mention that, in place of a photograph of herself,
Sister Irma had enclosed, without explanation, a snapshot of her
convent. It occurs to me, too, that she left blank the line in her
questionnaire where the student's age was to be filled in. Otherwise,
her questionnaire was filled out as perhaps no questionnaire in this
world deserves to be filled out. She had been born and raised in
Detroit, Michigan, where her father had been a "checker for Ford
automobiles." Her academic education consisted of one year of
high school. She had had no formal instruction in drawing. She said
the only reason she was teaching it was that Sister somebody had
passed on and Father Zimmermann (a name that particularly caught my
eye, because it was the name of the dentist who had pulled out eight
of my teeth)-Father Zimmermann had picked her to fill in. She said
she had "34 kittys in my cooking class and 18 kittys in my
drawing class." Her hobbies were loving her Lord and the Word of
her Lord and "collecting leaves but only when they are laying
right on the ground." Her favorite painter was Douglas Bunting.
(A name, I don't mind saying, I've tracked down to many a blind
alley, over the years.) She said her kittys always liked to "draw
people when they are running and that is the one thing I am terrible
at." She said she would work very hard to learn to draw better,
and hoped we would not be very impatient with her.

There
were, in all, only six samples of her work enclosed in the envelope.
(All of her work was unsigned--a minor enough fact, but at the time,
a disproportionately refreshing one. Bambi Kramer's and Ridgefield's
pictures had all been either signed or--and it somehow seemed even
more irritating--initialled.) After thirteen years, I not only
distinctly remember all six of Sister Irma's samples, but four of
them I sometimes think I remember a trifle too distinctly for my own
peace of mind. Her best picture was done in water colors, on brown
paper. (Brown paper, especially wrapping paper, is very pleasant,
very cosy to paint on. Many an experienced artist has used it when he
wasn't up to anything grand or grandiose.) The picture, despite its
confining size (it was about ten by twelve inches), was a highly
detailed depiction of Christ being carried to the sepulchre in Joseph
of Arimathea's garden. In the far right foreground, two men who
seemed to be Joseph's servants were rather awkwardly doing the
carrying. Joseph of Arimathea followed directly behind them--bearing
himself, under the circumstances, perhaps a trifle too erectly. At a
respectably subordinate distance behind Joseph came the women of
Galilee, mixed in with a motley, perhaps gate-crashing crowd of
mourners, spectators, children, and no less than three frisky,
impious mongrels. For me, the major figure in the picture was a woman
in the left foreground, facing the viewer. With her right hand raised
overhead, she was frantically signalling to someone--her child,
perhaps, or her husband, or possibly the viewer--to drop everything
and hurry over. Two of the women, in the front rank of the crowd,
wore halos. Without a Bible handy, I could only make a rough guess at
their identity. But I immediately spotted Mary Magdalene. At any
rate, I was positive I had spotted her. She was in the middle
foreground, walking apparently self-detached from the crowd, her arms
down at her sides. She wore no part of her grief, so to speak, on her
sleeve--in fact, there were no outward signs at all of her late,
enviable connections with the Deceased. Her face, like all the other
faces in the picture, had been done in a cheap-priced, ready-made
flesh-tint. It was painfully clear that Sister Irma herself had found
the color unsatisfactory and had tried her unadvised, noble best to
tone it down somehow. There were no other serious flaws in the
picture. None, that is, worthy of anything but cavilling mention. It
was, in any conclusive sense, an artist's picture, steeped in high,
high, organized talent and God knows how many hours of hard work.

One
of my first reactions, of course, was to run with Sister Irma's
envelope over to M. Yoshoto. But, once again, I kept my seat. I
didn't care to risk having Sister Irma taken away from me. At length,
I just closed her envelope with care and placed it to one side of my
desk, with the exciting plan to work on it that night, in my own
time. Then, with far more tolerance than I'd thought I had in me,
almost with good will, I spent the rest of the afternoon doing
overlay corrections on some male and female nudes (sans sex organs)
that R. Howard Ridgefield had genteely and obscenely drawn.

Toward
dinner time, I opened three buttons of my shirt and stashed away
Sister Irma's envelope where neither thieves, nor, just to play safe,
the Yoshotos, could break in.

A
tacit but iron-bound procedure covered all evening meals at Les Amis
Des Vieux MaRres. Mme. Yoshoto got up from her desk promptly at
five-thirty and went upstairs to prepare dinner, and Mr. Yoshoto and
I followed--fell into single file, as it were--at six sharp. There
were no side trips, however essential or hygienic. That evening,
however, with Sister Irma's envelope warm against my chest, I had
never felt more relaxed. In fact, all through dinner, I couldn't have
been more outgoing. I gave away a lulu of a Picasso story that had
just reached me, one that I might have put aside for a rainy day. M.
Yoshoto scarcely lowered his Japanese newspaper to listen to it, but
Mme. Yoshoto seemed responsive, or, at least, not unresponsive. In
any case, when I was finished with it, she spoke to me for the first
time since she had asked me that morning if I would like an egg. She
asked me if I were sure I wouldn't like a chair in my room. I said
quickly, "Non, non-merci, madame." I said that the way the
floor cushions were set right up against the wall, it gave me a good
chance to practice keeping my back straight. I stood up to show her
how sway-backed I was.