The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (15 page)

As she walked Rachel was trying to think of someone to talk to James about. He had standards so high that few people could come up to them. Rachel was aware that she had no standards at all; but for James she would have let herself like just anybody. So she mentioned names to him, hoping always to have luckily hit upon a person really worthy. She said cheerfully, “I saw Martha Phillips this morning, James.”

He sighed. “Drunk as usual, I suppose.”

“Drunk?” cried Rachel. “Why, I never knew Martha drank. Martha Phillips, James?”

“Phillips, yes. That's what she calls herself now.”

“Now? What do you mean ‘now'? Why, I've known Martha Phillips for …”

“Yes—many people have known Martha. Many people—and many places.”

“Martha
Phillips
, James? Why …”

“Well,” he said, “you've got to give the old girl credit. She's managed to keep her many lives pretty well apart all these years. Not many people know about that old Mexico City business.”

“Many lives?” gasped Rachel. “Old Mexico City business? Why, James, you simply take my breath away.”

“So what did she have to say?” asked James. “If it's fit to repeat.”

“You've got me so confused I can't remember. But she laughed when I told her about John Daniels.”

“One is bound to laugh, Rachel, at anything about John Daniels. Exactly what do you mean?”

“Why, Martha said if anything Mary beats him.”

“You didn't know that?” asked James.

“But, James,” she cried. Her head was reeling. “You told me …”

“Why, on Saturday nights you can hear them all over town. She ties him to a bedpost and beats him with a coathanger and shouts filthy names at him while he cries, ‘Harder! Harder!'”

Rachel stood shaking her head and gasping.

“If she didn't satisfy him that way,” said James, “God knows what he'd be out doing.”

“Really, James?” said Rachel.
“Really?”

James sighed. “Rachel,” he said, “do you have to believe every word I say?”

“You mean it isn't true?”

“Of course it's true,” he said.

They walked on, Rachel still trying to think of someone worth mentioning to him, but afraid to mention anyone now.

James was thinking about himself. He pictured himself walking into the Artists' Association meeting. During the three months between these meetings he saw little of the other artists in town. Since the last one many things had happened. David Peterson had won five thousand dollars at the Carnegie International. The Cleveland Museum had paid two thousand dollars for one of Carl Robbins's watercolors. Most everyone had had exhibitions.

The faces of the people he was about to see came into his mind, and as they did he seated them one by one around a banquet table. It was a surprise party. On the walls of the room his pictures were hung in thick gold frames. A toast was proposed. To James Finley Ruggles! Everyone drank. Then the table fell quiet. A page boy entered and approached James, bearing a tray on which lay a book. The title was
James Finley Ruggles: A Tribute
. He looked around the table, remembering the struggle he had had, the years of working and waiting. Yet he felt no rancor toward these men, each of whom had been so slow in recognizing his superiority. A lump came into his throat. “Open it!” a shout went up. He read the table of contents: “My friend Jim Ruggles” by Pablo Picasso; “To JFR from H. Matisse: Greetings”; “James Finley Ruggles, the First Thirty Years” by the Staff of the Museum of Modern Art; “Ruggles and Cézanne” by Sheldon Cheney.…

In the book was a biographical sketch.

James Finley Ruggles, the fourth to bear that name, was born in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on the night of September 22, 1904. The doctor gave no hope for him. The nurse, not so easily discouraged, blew into the infant's lungs time after time. That nurse blew the breath of life into American painting.

The Finleys were descended from a charter member of the Harvard Corporation. They were a family of doctors and brokers, shippers and tea importers. General Isaiah Ruggles was with Washington at Valley Forge.

To the public school teachers of Wellfleet the future artist seemed backward. He drew pictures on the pages of his arithmetic text. Plate 10 is a copy of a Raphael drawing that Ruggles made at the age of eight.

His was the classic story of the misunderstood artist. His father insisted that he enter the family insurance firm, badly in need of new blood. James was sent to Bowdoin, where all the Ruggles had been educated.

His legacy upon the death of his father in 1925, though not as large as he had expected, was enough to take him to Paris, where he studied for two years.

Upon returning to this country he lived for a while in New York, then went to join the artists' colony at Redmond. There he entered upon his Modified Fauve period, producing his first major works.

In Redmond, fame and money came to the third-rate all about him while Ruggles struggled against poverty and neglect. The epoch-making
Still Life with Pineapple
was rejected by every major exhibition jury in the country. But though accustomed to ceremony and tradition, to ease and gracious living, Ruggles bore his poverty lightly. A gay and colorful figure, he brought to Redmond the charm and gallantry and the cultivation of his aristocratic background. His wit was legendary and—

“James,” said Rachel, “where are you going? Here we are.”

His wife Rachel, née Ravich, was the eighth child of Solomon and Sarah Ravich, of Delancey Street and Brownsville, Brooklyn.

The doors of the meeting hall were not yet open, so everyone was gathered in the gallery lounge to chat. A heavy layer of smoke hanging just above their heads rocked lazily each time the door was opened. People drifted from one group to another as though they, too, were stirred by the wind from the door. The talk rose and fell.

How fat they were all becoming, thought James, how bourgeois. The men in double-breasted suits and suede shoes, the women with Florida suntans gave it the look of a convention of fashion buyers.

The Ruggles stood while James singled out someone to approach. An aisle fell open revealing David Peterson at the end of the room. But before they could reach him they were stopped by Mary McCoy.

“Mary, you've done something to your hair,” said James. She certainly had, and Rachel was alarmed at his drawing attention to it. “You always did have the prettiest head of hair in town, and now it's even nicer.”

The truth was, her hair was probably the least attractive of poor Mary's features. It was James's way with women always to flatter them where they most needed it. No harm was done if, on the side, it amused him to do it.

“It's a regular rat's nest,” said Mary.

“Well, of course,” said James, “you may be right. I'm no expert,” and having spied an opening to Douglas Fraleigh he left her to regret not leaving well enough alone. When he offered to flatter someone he did not like her to try to draw more out of him. Besides, he really enjoyed flattering only people who did not need it, who were indifferent to flattery.

Douglas Fraleigh finished the story he was telling and left his listeners to laugh while he turned. “Oh, hello, Ruggles,” he said.

“That's a nice suit,” said James.

Fraleigh thanked him, making little effort to suppress a smile over James's garb. But it was lost on James. He was fascinated by Fraleigh's suit. He reached out his hand and Fraleigh suffered him to finger the cloth of the lapel. It was soft, dark flannel, glowing brown with a tasteful light stripe. The sight and feel of fine cloth brought to James's eyes a glossy, vacant look. As he fingered it he could feel the cloth upon his own skin. He was born for soft, luxurious fabrics.

There came to his mind the image of himself in the rags in which he stood. James had suffered at being Bohemian when everyone in Redmond was. Now that he was the only one he suffered intensely.

Douglas Fraleigh gave a twitch, a cough. James recovered himself to see one of Fraleigh's knees twitching with impatience inside his trousers. There was a tolerant, bemused smile on Fraleigh's lips.

James drew himself up, proud of his rags. He had known the best. He would rather know the worst than this tawdry in-between. Thank God he didn't look like Fraleigh and the rest of these parvenus! He promised himself to dress even more outrageously from now on. He was the only one in the room you would have known for an artist. And what suits he would have someday! So tasteful, of such elegant simplicity.

“Nice,” he said with a gesture at Fraleigh's suit. “Just be careful not to let it get wet.”

James drifted about. Time was running out and here he had alienated somebody, when he had meant to do just the opposite. He could not settle on the one person most worth his efforts.

It was growing hot in the room and the restraint wearing off. The little groups were dissolving, melting together, and the conversation becoming general. It took a while for these people to warm up to each other. No doubt they had all known each other too well in their days of communal poverty and Bohemianism. More than one was resentful that to those close to him he was not as legendary as he had become to the world at large.

They had had too many things in common ever to trust one another. Too many women, for example, such as Bertha Wallace. Bertha had posed for them all, and been the mistress of many of them. She was still far from unattractive. But Bertha was resentful of the men who had painted all those famous pictures of her, and who wanted to paint her no longer. Now that the Redmond Inn was being torn down she needed a place to live. She felt it was up to the painters she had helped make famous to find one for her. She must have been drinking heavily all morning and now as she circulated among them she had worked herself up into the conviction, never far from her at any time, that they owed her not only a roof but a living as well. “Where would you be,” she demanded of Carl Robbins, hanging on to his lapel and thrusting her face up into his, “I'd just like to know where you'd be if it wasn't for
Portrait of Bertha, Bertha in a Yellow Gown, Bertha Reclining”?

“You're right, Bertha, you're right,” Carl Robbins tried to quiet her. He looked about him for help, and all the men who owed Bertha just as much, or as little, as he did, turned away and became suddenly absorbed in their conversations.

James found himself being vigorously shaken by the hand of Sam Morris.

Morris was the town doctor. But he refused to let anyone call him Doctor. “The name is plain Sam,” he insisted. When Morris came to Redmond a few years back he painted only on Sundays. Now, the joke went, he was a Sunday doctor. At first a timid man, impressed into silence by his slavish respect for the artists, he had grown more and more talkative until now he started babbling the minute he stepped up and never let the other person say a word. He had been brought to this by one of the great disillusionments of his life. He had read all the great critics, subscribed to all the art magazines and read each from cover to cover, knew more about the history of Impressionism than any man alive—only to find that the artists never mentioned these things, but insisted on telling him of their migraines, the traces of albumen in their urine, their varicose veins. Now he had come to be suspicious that when they praised his painting they were only working their way around to wheedling some medical advice.

No one praised his art more extravagantly than James Ruggles, nor did Ruggles ever seem to have an ache or a pain. His other reason for liking Ruggles was that he
looked
like an artist.

“You're busy I know,” he said, “but you must take just an hour someday to let me show you what I've been doing lately. I flatter myself that my late work is not without some sign of your influence. It's in the way you handle three-dimensionality.”

As he talked he kept admiring James's clothes with one eye. One could tell he was thinking that but for his wife he, too, would let himself go like that, be really unconventional, really look like an artist. James could not help feeling somewhat flattered, but not enough to overcome his annoyance. James hated anyone who painted, but he hated more someone who spent only part-time at it. Moreover, he considered it a pitiful spectacle, a man who was a member of a solid respectable profession taking up painting.

When Morris finally left him the first person James saw was Max Aronson. Aronson stood to one side, neglected, a sad-faced, nervous little man with his hands to his mouth, gnawing a fingernail. He beamed when he saw James approaching.

“That was quite a spread you got in
Life
, Max,” said James.

“Did you like it? The color reproductions were good, didn't you think?”

James said he thought they were.

“You really liked it, then?”

This little man, one of the most famous painters in the country, did not distinguish among the people who praised him. He lived on praise. Now, praise was the thing that came easiest to James Ruggles's lips. He liked to be amiable that way. But he thought everybody understood that it was to be taken for amiability and nothing more. To find somebody taking his flattery seriously shocked him. He was not giving out art criticism when he praised you. He was being a likable fellow.

“You really liked it, huh, James?” Max implored. “Tell me the truth now. I'd like to know what you really think.”

James could not bear the sight of such naked hunger for praise. “I liked it,” he said, tugging at his mustache. “You understand, of course, that I'd say so whether I thought it or not.”

Max laughed, trying to make a joke of it.

The doors of the meeting hall were thrown open.

Scanning the room, James found the seat next to David Peterson empty. He grabbed Rachel's arm, and apologizing in advance as he pushed people aside, elbowed his way down the aisle. A man was just stepping into the row where Peterson sat. James got behind Rachel and shoved her into the man. Rachel blushed and began stammering apologies. The man glared, then gave a strained smile and stepped aside to let her enter. She started to, but James laid a hand on her arm. With a smile at the gentleman and a nod of thanks, he went in first and walked serenely down to the seat beside Peterson. Rachel followed, upsetting the hats of the ladies in the next row down as she smiled apologies back to the gentleman on the aisle.