The Lacuna (35 page)

They showed up out there at noon, in a Model T that looked older than God and more likely to drop an axle. The man in the driving seat opened the door to stretch his legs, revealing a beard that reached his belt buckle. Clumped in the back, an old-looking woman and shifting herd of oxlike boys. They sat in the car for hours, until the heat drove them out into the shade of the maple in the front yard. They showed no sign of coming to the door. Mrs. Brown said they likely meant to fetch her back to Mrs. Bittle’s, and were waiting for her day’s work to end.

“Shouldn’t we ask them in?”

“They won’t come.”

“Well then, you should go.”

“I’m not done here. It won’t vex them any to wait.”

“For
hours
?” I peered out through the curtain. “Couldn’t they do some errands and come back, to save their time?”

“Mr. Shepherd, if they had any money or one precious thing, they’d be sure to save it. But time they have aplenty. They like to spend it where they be.”

Realizing they might have come to investigate Sister Violet’s situation, I did insist on asking them in. Elder Sister accepted, eventually, while the males remained outdoors, all of them smoking pipes. Mrs. Brown introduced us but begged a few minutes more to finish the week’s work. The sister,
Parthenia!
What a strange creature, peering about this living room like Columbus among the red men of Hispaniola. She sat in a parlor chair with feet together, hands folded, a black kerchief covering her hair, a lumpish dress covering everything else down to her boots. Not even Frida could have worked this particular peasant style to much advantage. She declined my offer of tea, fiercely, as if accustomed to being poisoned by strangers. We sat facing one another across the shocking silence.

Finally: “Who mought ye all be?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Who’s yer folks?”

“My parents both passed away. I don’t have any family.”

She took this in slowly, like a snake digesting its catch. Then: “How old be ye?”

“Thirty.”

Many other questions stood in line after these, each patiently waiting its turn, each one finally spitting, rubbing its hands, and stepping up to position.

“Violet says ye be from Mexee-co?”

“I lived there. But I was born outside Washington. My mother was Mexican, her father did business with the government here, so that’s how she and my father came to meet. She was too young, the fam
ily disowned her over the marriage.”
Stop
. Filling up a silence with blather, like a radio man. That cannot be what a Parthenia requires.

“Well.” A pause. “What brung ye up this air way off the branch?”

A good question. Trying to steer the conversation onto her family proved difficult, but ultimately yielded Parthenia’s fascinating diagnosis of Sister Violet’s yen for self-improvement: “Our mother read the books. We believe it made her tubercular.”

A long pause.

“Violet be the same.”

Another pause.

“We was all in our family borned with sense. But Violet be the only one to vex herself on wanting to be learn-ed.”
Born-ed, learned
, here was the raw version of Violet’s peculiar diction, without the gloss acquired from twenty years of office work. “We was afeared she would turn out like t’other one. The lady doctor that was born-ed here in the town.”

“Elizabeth Blackwell?”

“That one. Violet readen a book on her. Mother was afeared of her going away to be learned for the doctoring.”

“That would have been an interesting career for your sister.”

“Not hardly, sir. T’would of put her in a hazard of hell’s fire.”

“Medical school?”

“To be learn-ed for the science, yessir. Them men casting aspersion on our Lord’s hand in the Creation.”

In the dining room, visible through the archway, Sister Violet’s lip remained buttoned but her eyebrows nearly reached her widow’s peak by the time she finished filing the day’s mail. Parthenia took her away then, evidently satisfied the new employer would not threaten her sister’s virtue or encourage any interest in the sciences. It explains a good deal about Mrs. Brown: her aloneness in the world, as far from home in this town as any boy from Mexico. Probably farther, given the scalding disapproval of anything “learn-ed.” And yet she does
carry her origins with her, revealed in the rhythms of speech, the talent for keeping counsel. The unusual respect for silence. Parthenia’s silences outlasted her sentences every time, and carried greater weight. How will their tongue survive in a modern world, where the talkers rush to trample every pause?

September 14

Mr. Lincoln Barnes, my Mr. Lincoln. He means well. A second novel makes me “a novelist,” says he, and therefore duty-bound to meet my editor in New York. He can’t know how entirely it’s out of the question. He should invite me to dance with angels on the head of a pin, I’d sooner try, if I could do it from home. But my failure will mean conceding every battle. Beginning with my title,
Where the Eagle Eats the Snake
.

“Wrong,” he pronounced yesterday on the telephone. “People hate snakes.”

Well then, wouldn’t they be happy to see an eagle tearing one to pieces, sitting on a cactus plant? The dust-jacket art seems ready made.

He is keen to call it
Pilgrims of Chapultepec
.

Americans take “pilgrim” to mean the fellow in buckled shoes with hands folded in prayer. And the unpronounceable remainder, as dubious as Brand X soap.

Mrs. Brown suggests that for the next one I ought to turn in the manuscript with a title I despise. That way, she says, they’re apt to change it to something you favor. A trick she learned while working for the U.S. Army.

September 26

The exhibit,
Advancing American Art
, is advancing at this very moment toward the National Gallery, packed up on the train with Tom Cuddy as its Shipping Shepherd. And still I have no answer for him. Tommy the golden boy, with the good looks of Van Heijenoort and
a better idea how to use them—it’s possible he has never been turned down before. On the telephone, he coaxes. Says I have to be there in D.C., he’s desperate for backup, certain there is trouble afoot. Congress has called a special hearing to discuss the exhibit after they’ve had a look at it. And what Tommy said about the Hearst Press is true, Mrs. Brown brought in one of their magazine ads today, a reproduction of one of the “ugly” paintings with the caption “Your Money Bought This!” They suggest a foregone conclusion among soap-buying housewives: your money would be better spent on soap. But with Mrs. Brown their propaganda failed: she is now intently curious about the show.

Paris with Tommy, dear Lord what a vision. (He was dazzling enough in a dim boxcar.) But surely he’ll understand there is too much to do here, revisions and galley proofs still ahead. He’ll be less willing to understand why Washington is out of the question. To have a look at those modernists, have a drink with old Tom, help him ship out the paintings. Patiently Mrs. Brown waits to send an answer: yes or no. Probably she has already drafted both letters and only needs the word. Such is her efficiency.

We discussed it again this afternoon, or rather I talked. Justifying my absurd fear of travel and exposure, despising it all the while. My face must have been the Picture of Dorian Gray. At the end, when he goes to pieces.

She used the quiet voice she seems to draw up from a different time, the childhood in mountain hells, I suppose.

“What do ye fear will happen?”

There was no sound but the clock in the hall:
tick, tick
.

“Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.”

October 2

The matter is settled, the letter sent. Mrs. Brown provided the solution: herself. She will go along on the trip, make all arrangements,
reserve the hotel rooms for both of us in names no one could recognize. No girls in short socks will gather in the halls. We will take the Roadster, she’ll carry the money-purse and purchase the gasoline, no strangers need be addressed on the journey. Only Tom, once we arrive at the gallery.

Indispensable Mrs. Brown. She has known all along the problem is not the grippe. But couldn’t know how her firm hand on my arm could make many things possible, including walking out the door onto that swaying bridge.

“It appeared you needed steadying,” was her diagnosis.

October 12

Poor Tom. And also the forty-odd artists who will suffer from this, but somehow I worry most for Tom. He believed in
Advancing American Art
, and not just the free ride to Europe. Now he has to hang his head, call Paris and Prague, and explain the show isn’t coming. They will dismantle it, sell off these treasures to the first low bid so the Department of State can recover the taxpayers’ cash. The boss will make Tommy do the worst of it. The O’Keeffe already went for fifty dollars he said, salt in the wound.

Mrs. Brown and I were more than ready to put miles between ourselves and that debacle. But the journey home was long. The mountain parkway is a strange passage from city into wilderness, hundreds of miles of forest and vale without habitation. Occasionally an apple orchard, fenced by a zigzag of split rails, like a piece of green calico cut with pinking shears. Driving along high ridgetops is like being a bird on the wing, with slopes dropping steeply away from the roadsides, and views opening out to rumpled, hazy horizons. The leaves were crimson, auburn, jade, and gold, lying together in patchwork against the mountainsides. “God’s hand bestoweth beauty on the advancing trial of winter,” Mrs. Brown quoted. But it looked as if God had turned over the job to a Mexican muralist.

When first I made this drive, the forests were leafless. I told Mrs. Brown about it. Father unexpectedly dead, and then this endless passage into a barren wilderness. I thought I had come to a nation of the interred.

“Then you came to Mrs. Bittle’s,” she said, “and knew it for certain.”

“Old Judd seemed mummified. True enough. But certainly not you or Miss McKellar.”

Each time we stopped for gasoline she insisted we take on coffee and sandwiches as well. “Feed the car, feed the driver,” was her succinct advice. The gray mass of a storm sat on the mountains to the west, waiting like a predator. In the afternoon it pounced, drenching the view and washing the brilliant leaves into matted sop in the road. The rain on the windscreen was blinding. The wiper had to be cranked every few seconds, and it made for difficult, one-handed driving. Mrs. Brown offered to help turn the wiper lever, but its location overhead above the driver makes that awkward.

“Mr. Ford should have thought to put it over here,” she said, “so the passenger could help.”

“He knew better. In life’s dampest passages, the driver often has to go it alone.”

“I ought to know that. Here knitting socks without one child of my own.”

“Is
that
what you have there? I thought it was an indigo porcupine.”

She had a laugh at that. She has eleven nephews and nieces, I learned, and meant to outfit the tribe on this journey, working through socks from top to toe, all from the same massive hank of blue wool. The coming holiday shall be known as “The Christmas of the Blue Socks from Aunt Violet.” She worked on a little frame of four interlocked needles that poked out in every direction as she passed the yarn through its rounds.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll hurt yourself with that?”

“Mr. Shepherd, if women feared knitting needles as men do, the world would go bare-naked.”

What had happened in Washington was an outrage. Yet life goes forward mostly as an exchange of pleasantries on a narrow bridge that hangs above the chasm of outrage. “There’s Grandfather Mountain. See, the shape of it. An old man lying down.”

“Is it too cold for you? We could stop and get the lap blanket from the back.”

“No. I’m warm-blooded.”

“We’re lucky it’s cold. This Roadster overheats famously on hard inclines.”

“You don’t say.”

Grand white clapboard hotels turned up sparsely along the route, their front porches mostly populated with empty rocking chairs. At dusk they began to be lit by the yellow glow of lamplight. Once, just as we passed an inn, a black-skinned man in a red jacket was lighting the porch lanterns one by one, leaning with difficulty around elegant men who sat idle, smoking cigars. Castes of the nation.

Mrs. Brown finally broached the void. “
Indigo Porcupine
, that could just as well be the name of one of those paintings we saw at the show.”

“Yes.
Indigo Porcupine Leaping into the Void
, that might do.”

“Well. I couldn’t make out what all they were meant to be. Truly I’ve never seen the like, Mr. Shepherd. But I’m deeply obliged for it.”

“I wasn’t going to come until you volunteered as escort. So I’m the one obliged.”

“For all, I meant. The paintings and our nation’s capital. Going right straight in the hall where the Congress meets.”

“Had you not been to Washington before?”

“This is my first time out of Buncombe County.”

“Really?”

“Yes sir. I’ve read the
Geographic
s since I was a girl. My sisters could tell you, I strained for travel like a horse fresh to the bit. But never thought it would happen.”

“Mrs. Brown, you make me ashamed. The whole world knocks at my door, and all I want to do is stay home.”

“It’s a wonder,” she said tactfully, working at a tiny sock.

“Well, you’re a worldlier person than most of those congressmen. They want Norman Rockwell and statues of muscular horses and nothing new under the sun.”

“Even still. There was no cause to speak so rudely. What peeved them?”

“Fear, maybe. The foreign element, that’s what Tom thought. They expected to go in the gallery and see old friends, but instead they met strangers. Gashes of color and surrealism. It made them uneasy.”

“They didn’t say ‘uneasy.’ They said ‘un-American.’ I can’t see that. If an American paints it, then it’s American, isn’t it?”