Eight days before my father died, I had driven up to Woodstock to see him. Oh, no premonitions; just the routine visit I’d been making every couple of months. Better quickly say Woodstock, Connecticut. He bought there in 1970, convinced it was going to be discovered, like the Woodstocks of New York and Vermont. Certainly it became unaffordable, like everyplace else, but as far as I could see it hadn’t been discovered in the sense he meant. Just another pretty New England town with no reason for anybody to be there.
“So how do things march down there in America?” he said, pouring
a glass of George Dickel for me and a smaller amount for himself. America, in his code, meant New Jersey. The whiskey glugged, as it will out of a new bottle. His face seemed redder than ever, and his belly forced gaps between the pearloid buttons of his denim shirt.
“A lot
you
care, you old beatnik,” I said. “I bet you don’t even watch
Wheel of Fortune
up here. What do you do with yourself, anyway? Read Emerson all day?”
“Emerson?” he said. “What do you think, I’m going native? Emerson tv, maybe. Actually, I was thinking about trying to get my Latin working again so I could read the
Eclogues
. Or maybe it’s the
Georgics—
what the hell am I trying to think of? There’s one about shepherds and one about farming. One I want is the one about farming.”
“Then you want the
Georgics,”
I said. “I think.”
“Let me write this down,” he said. “So you still remember all this business.”
“You can take the boy out of the academy …,” I said. “So what have you been up to?”
“Here you see it,” he said, raising his glass, which was almost empty already. “Nah, I do this and that. Work a little bit. You want to see a couple things? Don’t say yes just to humor an old man. On the other hand, don’t say no.”
“What can I say?” I said.
“And mind you praise ’em up,” he said, getting to his feet and setting down his empty glass. “No matter how much they secretly depress you.”
“This must be hot shit,” I said. “Assuming I’m uncrumpling your ironies correctly.”
“Well,” he said, obviously pleased with himself, “you’ll see what you think.”
I got up and followed him. “Leave it,” he said, pointing to my glass. “House rule. No bringing sauce into the workplace. Unless,” he said, patting his stomach, “it’s already on board.”
The studio had been a henhouse. He’d paid some contractor too much money to move it from up behind the house and attach it to the north wall of the kitchen on a new foundation. Now it had a wall of glass where chicken wire used to be and skylights let into the roof. A potbelly stove sat on a podium of salvaged bricks.
“Looks neater than usual in here,” I said. “I thought the creative impulse was supposed to thrive on disorder.”
Instead of answering—or by way of answering—he laid a hand on my shoulder and turned me around. It was a giant painting of my mother’s face, as it was when I was a child, on a yellow field squirming with brushstrokes. Big: the top of the head was level with the top of my head, the chin down around my navel. And absolutely photorealistic, except for the eyes: like most of his recent people, she had two pairs. And a dagger-shaped piece of paper, a foot or so long, that was glued or lacquered over her mouth. You had to look closely, but you could see it had been ripped out of a blown-up print of the Mona Lisa: you could make out the smile, the chin, an ear, and some of that crumbling landscape. The way it was slapped across the bottom of her face, it looked as if she were being gagged. It looked like a smirk too. Or a scream.
Then I stepped closer: at two feet away I could see that the whole
thing
was painted. At the instant I caught on, he laughed his little two-note laugh. “Trump your oil, did I?”
“You old goat,” I said. “So you can still get it up.”
“Try to,” he said. “Couple more here someplace.” From behind the sort of stand-up screen artists’ models used when they undressed, he carried out five more canvases, all in the same series.
“Jeez,” I said. “Should I try to strike the Greenbergian note here, or just tell you they’re wonderful?”
He shook his head. “Detail,” he said. “Go into a lot of detail about why they work so well. Then I want to hear about how Trina is going to sell ’em for a hundred grand a pop and how that little shit Julian Schnabel is going to get his
ass
kicked.”
“Well,” I said, gearing up.
“And then maybe throw in a word on your own behalf, and tell me what the
hell
you’re doing as an assistant vice shoeshine boy at some outfit that’s doing its bit to help squeeze the working man out of New York City. Not to mention the painting man.”
“Ho boy,” I said. “Do we have to do this again?”
“I worry,” he said.
“About
what
, for Christ’s sake? The money is fine, as long as you don’t try to live in Manhattan on it. I mean, it beats junior-professor
money. And it’s, I don’t know, soothing. It’s all this
business
that has to get done, you know?”
“It depresses the hell out of me,” he said. “Underneath all those layers of bullshit, what you’ve basically got is a bunch of self-pity. And what you’ve got underneath that, presumably, is rage at
me
for whatever it was you think I did to you.”
Don’t worry, he wasn’t going to catch me that easily.
“Aha!” I thundered, levelling an accusing finger. “All the father’s fault!” I blew on my finger and holstered it. “I mean, come on. Being Francis Jernigan’s son isn’t like you have Down syndrome, for Christ’s sake.” This much was true, no matter how I felt. “If you want to blame somebody, then blame what’s-his-name, Hofmann.”
“What Hofmann? What are you talking about?”
“The LSD guy,” I said. “Somebody Hofmann. Hans Hofmann.”
“Not Hans,” he said.
“Little joke,” I said.
He shook his head. “How anybody could take that stuff
twice,”
he said. “That God damn little pill of yours cost me six months of work.”
“So that was your atonement, okay?” I nodded at the paintings. “So. What did you work from on these?”
“Ah,” he said. “Sheer inspiration. See, she appears whenever I rub the bottle. Those George Dickel ones seem to work best these days. You rub it and …” He suddenly got tired of his
jeu d’esprit
. “Old picture I had around,” he said. “You ever see this one?”
He went over to his work table, opened an Edgeworth tobacco tin and handed me an old black-and-white snapshot the size of a playing card. “I had this blown up so I could see it better, you know? And just took her head off it.”
It was the three of us, in bathing suits, with a lifeguard’s tower in the background. Me standing between my mother and father, holding their hands. I looked to be about three or four, short enough so that to reach their hands my arms were raised like a strongman’s. My mother’s face was the face in the painting, all right. I avoided looking at the breasts. Across the years, her eyes met yours.
“Where
was
this?” I said.
“Florida.”
“I vaguely remember,” I said. “There was a big cockroach or something
where we were staying.” I looked again: all three of us. “So who took this picture?” I said.
“Ah, that’s what makes it so special,” he said. “Jack Solomon.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “He was there with the three of us?”
“Sure. Him and Margaret. Poor old Margaret. You think I look like shit. You ought to see
her
these days. As I remember, we only dug out these bathing suits for the picture so we wouldn’t scandalize ’em back at the drugstore. Most of the time we were running around buck naked. You remember he used to walk out into the water with you on his shoulders?”
I shook my head. “I hope I shit all over his hairy back,” I said.
“Nah, you and he were big buddies,” he said. “Hell, he and I were big buddies.”
“This was before anything was going on? Or don’t you know?”
“During,” he said. “In the middle of. As nearly as I can tell. Six months, a year into it. I suppose I didn’t figure it out because it was so obvious. The Purloined Letter. I can remember just like that”— he made an artist’s half-frame with a right angle of thumb and forefinger—“when this picture was taken. Him standing there naked pointing that big old box camera and his dick hanging down.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Taken me all these years to see that I could just go ahead and use the image and not worry about, oh,
narrative
or anything. I guess I decided nobody gave a shit anymore. Including me.”
“Well,” I said, “it made you a hell of a picture. Hell of a series.”
“And only a part of my long legacy of joy and light.” He opened the door. “What do you say we go in and get pissed? I already gave myself the day off tomorrow to watch the playoffs. That’s what kind of Emerson we got up here. Emerson tv.” He seemed to have forgotten he’d made this joke before.
“Suits me,” I said. “Judith took Danny with her up to her mother’s, so I’m not expected. I can go back down in the morning, if you’ve got a bed for me to pass out on.”
“Couple of ’em,” he said. “So how come
that
old cow gets to see her grandson and I don’t?” He filled his glass, then topped off mine.
“It’s not that he doesn’t like you,” I said. (He’s lying. Joe Isuzu.) “He likes going up there because they’ve got this big music store
around the corner from her house. What do you have around the corner that can compete with that?”
“Cows,” he said. “Four-footed ones. And a damn sight better to look at. And a lot more useful to the human race. And not a whole lot stupider.”
“What can I say,” I said. “Next time.”
Which turned out to be his funeral. Not the heart attack for which I’d been preparing myself, but a fire that burned the whole place to the foundation. First the studio, then the rest of the house. The oil and the turpentine and the woodstove and him probably in there drunk. At any rate they found a bottle, shattered by the heat apparently.
2
Whatever money Trina could have gotten him for the new work probably wouldn’t have helped much.
The day after his memorial she invited me for a drink. It turned out there wasn’t much business to wrap up. She had a few small pieces she hadn’t been able to get rid of; he’d owed her a few thousand dollars for a few years. My father had distrusted Trina on principle, though she’d been his dealer since his first show, in 1949. I’d always assumed she’d done what she could. It wasn’t her fault the stuff from the early ’50s kept going up every time it got sold again, and she genuinely seemed to admire the post-’65 stuff: she gave a muted wail when I described the paintings destroyed in the fire. “Don’t tell me any more,” she said. Her eyes darted around the tabletop: finally she tapped her cigarette ash into her empty glass. “Ah well,” she said. “At some point they simply weren’t tracking him anymore, and of course what can one
say?”
“He never should’ve stopped with the squiggles,” I said.
“That couldn’t have lasted forever, either, darling. What you’ve told me—I can’t even think about it. And that
stunning
old house.
Though at least you’ll have the insurance. Is that crass of me to say?” She lit another cigarette and raised her hand; when the waiter looked over, she scribbled on a phantom credit card slip with a phantom pen.
His lawyer called the following day. How much had I known about, ah, “the situation”? I said I hadn’t known there
was
one. Hmm, he said, how shall I begin? Seemed my father had been days away from being turned out of the stunning old house. He’d taken out a second mortgage to get the henhouse converted and, apparently, to get money to live on and to keep up the payments on the original mortgage. When the money he’d borrowed was gone, of course, he was left with even higher monthly expenses he couldn’t meet. After the insurance company cancelled his homeowner’s policy—they’d been dunning him for three months—the bank had been forced to step in.
Judith took the news like a champ.
“It’s a relief, sort of,” she said. “Isn’t it? I would never have known how long a face to pull while we were going through the money, you know?” She laughed. “God, listen to me.
The
money. There never
was
any money, right? Isn’t that the gist?”
“If not the gist,” I said, “certainly the bottom line.”
“Well,” she said, “we can still be happy.” This was 1982. “Probably more happy, don’t you think? In the long run?”
“Quién sabe?”
I said. “And on the other hand,
que será será.”
“Kissez moi,”
she said. One of our better days.
3
When I got around to telling Martha the story—it wasn’t until we’d been together for a couple of months—she was angry that my father hadn’t, as she put it, provided for me.
“Christ,” I said, “he provided for eighteen years. Fuck was he
supposed
to do?
Plus
four years of college. I mean, at
some
point, you know?” The rest of the thought was something like, Sons have to take responsibility for themselves. Not exactly the way I felt, as a son,
but the way you ought to feel. As a father, on the other hand, I was all for sons getting their shit happening at their earliest convenience. All for it some of the time.
She picked up something in my tone. I was learning that you had to watch yourself around Martha. Assuming you had stuff you didn’t want picked up. Though really, how intuitive did you have to be to pick up something in somebody’s tone when he starts yelling at you?
“I didn’t mean to touch a sore spot,” she said. “It’s just that all that money could’ve changed your life. I hate to see money that could really, really help somebody just go up—”
“In smoke?” I suggested.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.”
“What nobody seems to understand,” I said (meaning her: Judith had understood), “is that this money never fucking
existed
. I mean, he was Francis Jernigan and everything, but all the real money got made off of stuff he’d let go for a couple of thousand dollars in like 1952. My mother split in ’56, he boozed from then until ’64 or ’65…. You know, what can I say? By which time it was all Andy Warhol or something, or whatever it was after Andy Warhol. Believe me. There was … no … money.”