The Vagabonds (29 page)

In time to come when they will meet on Main Street or at the post office window he will maintain his silence, his pretense of apartness, and she will remember him sprawled on the floor, her brother standing above him tight-handed. She will remember other things also: the way that he called her Old Glory, his flag, the way he cleaned out the basement and liked it when she sat on him and the rough soles of his feet. When she had needed company he had been her company, and if he chose to talk to her she would have been happy to answer; “No hard feelings,” Joanna would have said.

But Harry is a chapter—she knows this all already—in a story she won’t finish and book she prefers to keep closed. He will be the low she sank to when she was invested in sinking, and she will be the woman in the 2003 Legacy Outback with the leather seats and GPS who leaves all this behind . . .

She and her brother take a walk. They walk down to the dock—its fishing boats on railroad ties, the harbormaster’s door ajar—and past the shuttered theater and the trailer camp and out Chequessett Neck. They walk past Mayo Beach and the snow-submerged greens of the golf course and the frozen expanse of Herring Creek—a trickle of water, a cluster of gulls, men raking for oysters and quahogs—and up to the high crest of Sunset Hill. It’s very cold this morning, but Joanna exults in the chill, wintry air. “How long are you staying, how long can you stay?” she ventures to ask David, and he says, “That storm they’re predicting, I’d either best be gone beforehand or just stick around.”

“Oh do,” she says, “please stick around.”

“Until the storm is over, yes, why not?”

“We’ll make snow angels,” she tells him, and puts her gloved hand out and they walk arm in arm.

David talks about Marconi. “Last night,” he says, “remember, when we were passing the sign for the Marconi Station I found myself thinking about him: that fierce Italian staring at the ocean and convinced he could cross it with wireless calls. The telegraph. So this is where it all began, this thing we’ve made out of modernity that may yet wreck us all. If it doesn’t work it’s madness—crazy old Guglielmo—and if it does it’s called a vision and they salvage the transmitter and call it history.”

Men drive past them where they walk, lifting their hands from their steering wheels, and two of them tap lightly on their horns. Joanna waves back; she tightens her scarf and lengthens her stride while her brother continues to talk. That these
mujahideen
and
mullahs
can reach across the ocean is Marconi’s dream turned nightmare and David wouldn’t mind at all, he says, if we returned to pen and ink and sent letters by Pony Express. Back before the world became a village there was no chance some millionaire ex-playboy Muslim with a kidney problem and a penchant for apocalypse could bring down buildings made of glass and steel ten thousand miles away. Or think of Thomas Edison, our fairy godfather—he laughs—and Ford and Firestone; they did more to change the national landscape than any three men you can name. Lately I’ve been working on this web site—he gestures at the bay—these new design modalities, but now I find myself thinking about egg tempera instead.

“Egg tempera,” she asks. “What’s that?”

“The old way of working, I mean. Real bristle brushes. A blowpipe for paint. The colors that they used to use; you know: vegetable pigments, the white that comes from pulverized bone, the black that’s charcoal—something burned . . .”

“Of the three of us”—she smiles at him—“you’re the real romantic.”

“Touché.”

Near the crest of Sunset Hill they see a red shape flapping like a great wounded bird in the marsh grass and cattails—but the red is unnatural, rising and falling and folding back onto itself. The shape makes no noise she can hear, and Joanna moves closer to see. When she is near enough she sees it is a cluster of balloons—red helium heart-shaped balloons left over from Valentine’s Day. They have floated free or been released but now the air has leaked away, and the Mylar party favors rise a foot or two, then fall back to the cattails. Joanna pauses, watching; I wonder how long they’ve been trapped here, she says. It isn’t a sign, says her brother, they haven’t been
trapped,
it means there was a party and the party’s done.

Leah is in the kitchen, eating a muffin and drinking herb tea. “Welcome back,” she says. “Were you, like, out there
walking
?”

“It’s beautiful,” says David.

“But seriously cold,” Joanna says. “They say there’s another storm coming.”

“You were terrific, Art. I’ve been telling your mother all morning . . .”

“What did you think of Maria?”

“She was terrific also. Except she couldn’t sing. Or dance.”

The girl laughs.

“I take that back,” he says. “She sang, but out of tune.”

“Totally. And Tony?”

“Face it, darling,
you’re
the one.”

“I always think,” Joanna says, “that I can tell the parents by the angle of their vision. The way they’re looking only at their own child in a tutu or playing the tuba or being a sailor. But you were
different,
Li-li, you were the one we all stood for and applauded. And not just me and David,
everybody
knew how good you were . . .”

“We missed a chorus of ‘America.’ Like, totally. Did you notice?”

“No,” David says. “You covered just fine.”

“We’ll get it right tonight,” she says. “Maisie and Tom called. They said they want tickets.”

“We might make a foursome,” says Joanna. “We might just see the show again. Or maybe the matinee tomorrow?”

“What happened to Harry?”

“Gone. He’s gone.”

“He left early,” David says.

The girl is inattentive, unconcerned. She finishes her muffin and stands and yawns and stretches so her sweatshirt rides up and reveals the tattooed dolphin on her hip. Then she turns to her uncle—half-solemn, half-flirtatious, perfectly poised between adult and child—and says, “I’m wizard glad you saw the show. I’m wizard happy you came.”

He bows to her. “I’m glad your mom invited me. And very damn pleased to be here.”

XVII

2003

H
e has told Leah the truth. He feels at home with his sister and niece, these members of his family, and tries to be of use. David quizzes the girl for her history test and helps with the pronunciation of her first-year French. When she asks him if he’s been to France he tells her he spent time there when he was trying to paint.

“How old were you?” she asks him, and he says, “You’ve got
years
yet. Twenty-five.”

“Were you alone?” she asks him, and David says, “Most of the time.”

“Tell me about it, OK?”

Again she seems poised between grown-up and child, and he cannot decide if her interest is real or, as he half-suspects, feigned. Leah stares at him, expectant, and David says he’s grateful for her company but will keep the lecture brief. “No,” Li-li insists, “I want to
know,
” and he thinks maybe she means it and does begin to talk. At Williams he had majored, he tells her, in art history; he wrote his thesis on the use of furniture—chairs and tables mostly—in portraits by Vermeer and, later on, van Gogh. It had seemed a good idea, a linkage between generations of Dutchmen—the sort of half-assed declension-connection you write about in college—and he loved the Clark Art Institute.

“What’s that?” she asks, and he explains: a museum in Williamstown, not the college museum, but near where he lived, and a wonderful place to get lost in. I’ll take you there someday, he promises, you and your mom and you’ll see what I mean, we’ll look around . . .

Leah props her chin on her closed fist and leans forward, wide-eyed, an ingénue auditioning for the role of confidante. Then, after Williams, David says, I moved to the city—Manhattan—and held two gallery jobs. This was, what, 1989. I had some friends in the city and we shared a loft on Grand Street; Soho was on a roll back then and everything was—it’s the word we used—copacetic,
cool.
The girl touches her nose ring and smiles up at him, indulgent. He has no way of knowing if they still say “copacetic” or if when she said “wizard glad” she had been making a joke. You call yourself Artemisia, he says, and she was the hell of a painter, but Ms. Gentileschi had a time of it too; it isn’t easy, Art.

And when you’re in the business—David shifts position on the couch—of trying to sell paintings it occurs to you, sooner or later, that maybe you too ought to paint. You’re just as good as—maybe better than—those attitudinizing clowns who show up in the gallery, and it doesn’t occur to you, didn’t occur to
me
anyway, that I was as half-assed as everyone else and following their lead . . .

So I went, he says, to France. Van Gogh himself had gone to France, and it seemed like an omen. He tells her how he started off in Paris,
everyone
starts off in Paris, or at least they used to, but it was lonely and expensive and dirty and too cold. He didn’t drink absinthe or cut off an ear but spent six months going to museums and trying to learn how to paint. Then he met a girl whose family invited him south to their villa for Christmas, and though it didn’t work with her he did fall in love with Provence.

“Provence?” she asks, and David says
provincia,
the wedge of France that’s on the sea and in the winter relatively empty and, by comparison, cheap. Then he reminds himself that Leah’s fifteen and has barely left the Cape, and he’s been talking about Williamstown and Paris and New York and Provence as though she too had traveled; he says again, I’ll take you there, I promise, sometime soon. He talks about the
mas
he rented near the village of Valbonne, the brilliant sky and olive trees, the museums he would visit and the drawing class he took from an American in Grasse.

“The trouble is, the trouble
was,
I thought I had some talent. And they made it look so—well, not easy,
possible.
Cezanne’s house with his brushes—or at least
somebody’s
brushes—and apples on display, all that pottery in Vallauris, the Picassos in Antibes. And they did seem so, so
casual:
those artists of the southern light—Bonnard, van Gogh himself in St. Remy, Gauguin. I learned I wasn’t good enough, is what it all came down to . . .”

James Belton was his teacher’s name, and he smoked a pipe while painting; he said tobacco is good for the paint. He had a mane of flowing white hair and a flamboyant impatience with the world of the bourgeoisie; he made long complicated pronouncements about sculptural mass and the reticulated line, the plane of the drawing and the shit storm that was capitalism. He said, money is the
death
of true expressiveness, expression, because as soon as you have something to protect you can’t be truly free to paint—to draw that hydra-headed dog, for instance, or deal in figure-ground . . .

Yet Belton was the well-heeled son, as David came to understand, of a doting father on Wall Street who funded his expatriate life and paid for the gallery shows. His own compositions were blockish, thickly mottled, and one night over too many bottles of wine he said, “I’ve pissed it away, I pissed away my talent; boy, don’t let it happen to you.”

“Mom says you do karate . . .”

“Used to.”

“She says you were a black belt once.”

“Not quite.” He shakes his head. “I gave it up at brown.”

Abrupt, inquisitive, Leah asks, “Why didn’t you love Paris?”

“I told you; it was cold, wet, dark . . .”

“I have an Edith Piaf CD. ‘The Little Sparrow,’ is that what they called her?”

He nods.

“Why?”

“She was about this big around”—he makes a circle with his fingers—“and they say she could warble all night. But as long as we’re speaking of names,” David says, “that cat of yours? Mungo Park?”

She nods.

“Why did you two call him that?”

“Mungo Park was an explorer.”

“Right. But he was a Scotsman, and always getting lost, and he died in Africa . . .”

“It’s his
name,
” says Li-li, and the French lesson is over, and she laughs.

When Claire calls to tell them what happened to Jim, it is Wednesday afternoon. She has been to Florida and flown back with the body, she says, and that’s why she hasn’t been home. I can’t believe it, says Joanna, and Claire repeats she can’t believe it either, two deaths in the same week. It’s been a shock, she confesses, a total shock, the reality hasn’t sunk in; she got to Ann Arbor on Thursday, and the next day he left on a business trip and by Sunday Jim was dead. What can we do, how can we help, asks David, and their sister says she’s been coping but will need them later on. The two of them offer what comfort they can, and she thanks them and tells them she’ll call.

David helps Joanna, shopping. They drive to Provincetown or the Stop & Shop in Orleans and range the aisles—he pushing the cart, she checking her list—like a couple starting out together on shared domestic life. She tells him which cleaning supplies she prefers, what variety of bread to buy, and they discuss the quality of cheese and fish for sale. He extends the term of rental for his car. David understands he’s marking time, deferring decisions as to what comes next, but there’s no urgency, he tells Joanna when she asks, and digs out the path to the porch.

His sister has a whole network of friends; she seems to know all the people in Wellfleet and greet them each by name. She introduces him as “My kid brother,” and he makes the acquaintance of doctors and fishermen, cooks and carpenters and divorcées, the man who owns the boatyard and the tellers at the bank. While they drink coffee at The Lighthouse or he drives her to The Bare Necessities David sees how seamlessly she fits into the fabric of the town. They loiter in the parking lot or at the restaurant counter and talk about the weather or the prospect of war in Iraq and whether or not we are fighting for oil; they talk about the dead whale and bottle-nosed dolphin that washed up on Tuesday afternoon and where their children and grandchildren are. They talk about the building boom, how it seems unstoppable here on the Cape, and if and when it will stop.

David tries to paint. He buys art supplies in Provincetown and visits the few galleries that remain open in winter; he studies what they show. Joanna says, “Use Harry’s room,” and he sets up an easel and fashions a draftsman’s table from a plank door and old sawhorses he salvages from the garage. Although he had made light of it, talking to his teenage niece, he feels the old desire: to capture the visible world in a line and fix what’s transient, fleeting . . .