The Underpainter (14 page)

“I’ve been waiting,” said the grey girl, “for a long, long time.”

“All day long,” said Augusta.

“Longer than that.”

“For two whole days?”

“Longer than that,” said the grey girl. “I’ve been waiting for twelve years. I may have to wait for ten more.”

Augusta said nothing. The grey girl’s voice seemed to be scolding her in some way. But when she looked into her eyes, which were more blue than grey, she saw they were filled with kindness, happiness.

The following week the snow softened and Augusta was able to construct some additional furniture for her house. The table, the bed, a second chair facing the first, which allowed for conversation, and one side table on which she placed a solid white vase. Sometimes the grey girl was there, sometimes she was not. Often she did not appear until Augusta had stopped working and had collapsed into her own chair.

“I’ve been here all along,” the grey girl would say as she came into focus in front of Augusta’s eyes.

One day when the snow was soft enough for Augusta to be able to make several bowls and even a sort of teapot for the grey girl, a robin perched on the outside of the window ledge and looked inside inquisitively. And then, the next Saturday as she approached the snow house, Augusta had to admit to herself that it had begun to lose its shape.

“Don’t worry,” said the grey girl as Augusta entered an interior filled with a kind of slow rain, “one or the other of us will be back. Maybe both.”

The following week the snow house collapsed. Two weeks later there was not a trace of it left.
Augusta turned thirteen, just a few weeks later, in May of that year. On her birthday her father gave her a gold locket with the initial “A” engraved on it. After she had opened the gift, thanked him for it and gave him a formal kiss, he ordered her to remain inside from then on, to help her mother and to concentrate on her school work, housework, and needlework.

“In case you think I have changed my mind,” Edward Moffat said to his daughter, “you are entirely mistaken. You are a young lady now and young ladies don’t play. If you were still a child, you would go outside on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.”

For just a moment Augusta envisaged her own thin reflection in the circular lake that had been left behind for several days after the snow house had melted. Clouds mirrored there had sometimes taken on the shape of the grey girl, but the image had dissolved as she looked at it.

“I didn’t think you’d changed,” she said, then paused. She was going to add the words “your mind” to the sentence, but in the end she let them go. “I didn’t think you’d changed at all,” said Augusta to her smiling father.

“Did you ever see the grey girl again?” I said to Augusta. I could hardly believe that I had asked the question without irony, but there it was.

She had moved down to the front of the China Hall while she was talking, was now searching the dark, empty street, looking, I thought, for some sign of George.

“Yes,” she said, “but not until the war.”

“Was she a ghost, was she someone who was haunting you?”

“Yes, no …. She was someone who was going to haunt me. For a time, though, she was very real.”

By now I was genuinely astonished. “She was
going
to haunt you?”

“Look,” said Augusta, walking back towards me and holding on to something near her throat. “Here is the locket. I have worn it every day since my father gave it to me. There is a picture of my father inside, if you’d like to see it.” She slipped a thumbnail into the seam at the edge of the tiny golden heart.

He didn’t look at all the way I’d imagined him from Augusta’s story. His face was narrow. He looked thinner than I expected, less sure of himself.

“He was thinner and less sure,” said Augusta when I remarked on this. “The photo was taken after the war.”

I
won’t let Mrs. Boyle anywhere near the collection. She has been forbidden to set foot in the end of the room where it is kept, ever since the day I found her pawing through it, a large plastic garbage bag close at hand, disapproval written all over her face. “You’re a grown man, for Gods sake,” she said to me. “What on earth do you want to be doing playing like a child with pieces of china?”

I told her it was absolutely none of her business how I spent my time.

“None of my business, is it?” she retorted. “And me the one that keeps you going day after day. You’re such a strange one, you’d lose the power of speech if it weren’t for me coming in here every morning. And praying for you. Oh, yes, don’t look at me like that. You are exactly the kind of person I feel compelled to pray for.”

I explained that I’d much prefer that she would do no such thing. “If there is a God,” I said to her, “which I seriously doubt,
then I’d much rather not be brought to his attention. And as for the china,” I said, “I want you to leave it alone altogether.”

“I’m the one,” she said, “who cleans the room”

“And I’m the one,” I replied, “who pays your salary. From now on you will clean only the end of the room where the china is not.”

She looked hurt then, sniffed, and left. But she has stayed away from the shelves ever since.

Each day I try to spend an hour or so working on the collection, even though the colour and the clutter of it sometimes disturbs me more than I can say. Also I resent enormously having to spend time in shops searching for the correct kind of wire contraption for wall hanging, or for those balsam wood easels used for shelf display. To find these items I must visit the pathetic tableware sections of large department stores because, like so many other things, the China Halls of the past have all but disappeared from the planet. As I pick my way through the merchandise, the salesgirls eye me suspiciously and are only very occasionally able to supply the required object. Robert Henri would have wanted me to paint these young women, to abduct for the canvas their expressions of ennui in the face of materialism. But my own ennui now will not allow their faces to come into focus, and they are lost to me before I reach the escalator that leads to the ground floor and the street.

This afternoon I placed on the shelf a Tower Blue Willow plate — one only superficially like the common Blue Willow that George showed me all those years ago. As I looked at the tower in its improbable, cerulean landscape, I knew that the lovers had not fled those hills and streams, but rather that they
had never been there in the first place. Only the tower — broken, decrepit, uninhabited — has a role to play in that scene. Stark in the daylight hours, its window grimly unlit night after night, it neither protects the territory around it nor sends messages to any other territory. Having no history, it is instead a comment on stasis. Nothing has ever happened to this tower, or because of it, except its own slow, sad decay; that, and the inching up of ivy.

And yet it is a beautiful piece, a prized addition to any collection. Josiah Spode had perfected this type of blue underglaze painting when the East China Company reduced its imports of dishes to England. George told me this, said that over the centuries thousands of ships had carried china around the world and that many of them had ended up on the bottom of the ocean. Some, he claimed, had been sunk by the storms of our own Great Lakes. As for the Blue Willow, George could draw from memory the design of each of its variations: Chinese Plants, the Lyre pattern, Ruins pattern, Old Peacock, Sunflower, Indian Sporting pattern, and so on. He told me that, at the porcelain museum in Sèvres during the war, he had seen a blue porcelain violin, about which the director of the museum had written a complete novel, a novel George had been trying to get someone, anyone, to translate for him.

I have never been much moved by music.

Hills and Streams. Skies and lakes and distances. Each summer I removed myself from
cities
and travelled north in search of
landscapes. Although I loved the look of the vague fog produced by long views and the use of aerial perspective, I nevertheless painted the horizon in a crisp, possessive way, as if, having chosen to render it, I felt I must bring it up close for inspection. That which was not in my line of vision at any one time did not interest me for the simple reason that I was not looking at it. My life was that compartmentalized.

I will admit now that it is impossible to master skills utterly foreign to one’s character.

For years George and I would often make day trips along the shore, away from the sands that stretched in front of Davenport to beaches made of round stone. It was here that he found the best shards, their sharp edges dulled not only by water but also by being sifted through pebbles. He always claimed, when he took me to these places, that he wanted to paint seascapes, or the view of Davenport’s lighthouse from a new vantage point. And once we settled ourselves down on a log or a boulder he would begin a couple of half-hearted sketches. But in no time at all he would remove his shoes and socks and begin to walk slowly along the water’s edge, looking for lake-worn fragments of china. Once I tried to search as well, regarding the whole thing as a game, but I never saw anything but stones.

One early-summer afternoon George put an oval-shaped shard in the palm of my hand. It was well worn; only a bit of the glazing remained and under it two small figures.

“The lovers,” he said. “They sank to the bottom of the lake.”

Now that we were adults, I was uncomfortable when George spoke about things of a romantic nature, when his manner became earnest. Often I would try to lighten the atmosphere by making some clever, usually cynical remark. But that afternoon I gave the shard back to him without comment and he dropped it into one of his bulging pockets with the rest of his finds. We began to walk in an easterly direction down the shore, clambering over fallen, water-logged trees and crunching across sloping banks of stones. This was after the war — I would have been on my way to Silver Islet — after the war that George so rarely talked about. I’m quite certain it was the same day that George found the button from an officer’s coat among some seaweed near a group of boulders.

“Poor bugger probably drowned himself,” he said, laughing. Then he tossed the bright brass circle, like a coin, into the waves.

“Or threw his uniform into the lake as soon as he got back,” I offered.

“If he had any arms left to throw with. Or any legs left to get him down to the shore.” Then he paused. “But he was an officer, he probably drowned himself. From guilt.” He smiled.

“That bad, eh? Real bastards?”

“No,” said George, “not really. At least they were out there with us. And plenty of them are growing poppies now. My high-school English teacher, for example. Only five years out of the teachers’ college and then off to France. Dead in two weeks.”

“He should have stuck to books,” I said. I had just found a fossil, a stone snail. I slipped it into my pocket.

“He had no choice,” said George. “He wasn’t married. He would have had to go.”

Each piece of china I put on the shelf seems to bring me back to painting. I began to work on a canvas at seven this evening, working for four hours straight until I sat down to write this. Weeks will pass while I paint the stones, the water, the sky, the worn pieces of broken china whose delicate patterns are themselves being erased by the lake — the whole world of a summer afternoon.

And then, when it’s all there, as bright and clear and clean as I can make it, I will take two weeks more to add the patina, the glazes, the semi-transparent layers.

T
he more that admiration is withheld, the more we desire it. And then when it comes, plentiful, unconditional applause, we turn from it in disgust, knowing ultimately that praise is the last thing we deserve. Oh, the fatal quest for the approval of the current authority!

We were really just children, those of us who began our careers in visual art during the teens of the century under the tutelage of Robert Henri. We were street urchins let loose to run with our crayons into bars and alleys and tenements, as if New York City were one large playground. And Robert H., the father of us all, lecturing about theory, arranging our exhibitions, encouraging our natural inclination to rebel (as long as he was leader, and controller, of the rebellions). There wasn’t a young painter north of the Mason-Dixon line who didn’t wish to be in some way associated with this man. We all wanted the touch of his hand on our shoulders, wanted to rise like butterflies to be collected in the net of his praise. Kent, Luks, Bellows, Sloan, Hopper had all preceded us as his students — we
were the second generation — and we wanted our predecessors’ notoriety. The attention, even the condemnation, of the press they received.

The patriarch, the prophet Robert Henri stood over us all. Theorizing, expounding — manipulating us. More than we knew. Or more than we wanted to admit that we knew.

There were times when the tension created by trying to please this much-respected master would break. If he left the studio for a few moments, for example, a kind of insurrection would often explode among us, as if we were primary-school children who all morning had been desperate for contact with each other and who, now that the teacher’s gaze was averted, were going to make the most of the interlude. We would waltz with the model or with each other. From the broom closet someone would remove the skeleton used for anatomy lessons and set it on his lap, feigning a passionate embrace. One or two of us could tap-dance, and did so. Only the few women in the class kept on working after Robert H. had left the room, pausing now and then to give us looks of disapproval mixed with amusement.