September Song (19 page)

Exasperated by both the boy's unruliness, his truancy and bad grades, and the parents' unconcern, the school officials threatened to take him from them and place him in a foster home. The father shrugged helplessly, the mother indifferently.

Because of this indifference Auntie's interference was no longer objected to. She was welcome to try her hand at reforming him. Trouble was, her pity for him made her excuse his misbehavior. What was to be expected of the child from a home like his? Temperamentally she sided with him against the authorities. In her own way she too was an outsider, a loner like him. Her halfhearted admonitions were ignored. He was not told that he was bad but that he had cause to be.

At seventeen—old enough to be tried as an adult offender—Evan was arrested as one of a ring charged with an epidemic of recent break-ins, convicted and sent to prison. He was hardly gone when, like a she-bear, which takes a new mate after her cub has been evicted from the den, his mother ran off with another man. The father went west and sank from sight.

When after four years Evan was released on probation, his auntie took him in to live with her.

II

To preserve her independence she had refused marriage. She wanted not to share her neat little nest. Not have to concern herself with another person's wants and ways. Not to wait hand and foot on a man. Now in her old age she had invited disruption into her home, servitude into her life.

The villagers all smirked. Let them. They knew nothing about her that she herself did not know. She was as aware as they were of the irony of her situation, but she now knew the rewards of self-sacrifice and devotion, and the transfiguration that glowed about her like a halo wiped away the smirks.

Around the house Evan was idle, demanding, thankless, often moody. She excused him. He had had an unhappy life. He was untidy. This too she excused. At home he had gotten no training while in prison he had been harshly disciplined. To make up for this she let him sleep late on weekends, she made his bed, she picked up after him, washed his clothes, cooked for him tasty meals. Craving his affection and fearing his resentment, she refrained from criticizing him, from ever complaining. And indeed, happy to serve him, she harbored no complaints.

But about one thing she did nag him, for his own good, and this caused friction. She was worse than his mother had been in keeping tabs on him, in criticizing the company he kept.

He could not leave the house without her asking where he was going nor come back without her asking where he had been. “Out,” was his surly answer to the first question, “Nowhere,” to the second.

“Evan, you didn't get home until two in the morning.”

“So?”

She lived in fear that he would violate his probation, the conditions of which were strict, and be taken from her and sent back to prison. She knew peace of mind only when he was at work, and she often phoned him on the job with such questions as, “What time can I expect you?” and, “What would you like for dinner?” to make sure he was there.

He resented the legal restrictions on his freedom of movement and association, the denial of his manhood. It was as if he were one of those wild animals, trapped then released with a radio attached to him to monitor his every moment. She pitied him and was pained to feel that he looked upon her as his jailer.

“Where were you last night, Evan?”

“At the Upshaws'.”

The probation officer had called to check on his whereabouts. There had been some trouble in the area. She feared that if she were to say he was there with her he would be asked to come to the phone. It was to the Upshaws that she knew to go in search of him.

“What time were you there?”

“I was there all evening.”

“You were not there when I was.”

“Well, Auntie,” he said impudently, “that's my story and I'm sticking with it.”

And those Upshaws he consorted with would swear to it on a stack of Bibles.

She who had always been so self-sufficient and had never needed friends now solicited the sympathy of mere acquaintances: postal clerks, checkout women, mechanics, the new generation of tellers at the bank where she went to cash her pension checks.

“Here,” she lamented, “is a young fellow. Well, so he made a few mistakes as a kid, but he's served time for that and now he's going straight, keeping his nose clean (she had picked up her jailhouse jargon from Evan), trying to make a fresh start. Still they watch over him every minute like guards. Any little two-bit break-in anywhere in the county and that probation officer is at the house grilling him. Car theft, arson, shoplifting—you name it, there's nothing but what he's number one on the suspect list. He's free to go to work but his free time isn't his. Can't have a friendly drink in a bar. Can't keep company with anybody who's ever had so much as a parking ticket. They keep him on a leash. It's not fair.”

While some expressed a shallow sympathy, others, their patience with her plaint worn thin, told her that if, after a lifetime of freedom, she was saddled with these worries now in her old age, she had only herself to blame.

Some shook their heads in wonder and said, “Comes on like a choirboy.”

It was true, for prison had taught him the benefits of good behavior, but it was not said as a compliment, rather as a comment on the deceptiveness of appearances.

He had inherited his mother's good looks, blond, blue-eyed, open-faced, and sitting across the table from him, delightedly watching him eat the appetizing things she had cooked, she wondered how he could possibly be suspected of any wrongdoing, or not forgiven if he had.

One Saturday morning while Evan was lolling about the house still in his pajamas and robe his probation officer arrived unannounced. The man had been there so many times that now he hardly bothered to knock at the door.

He opened his well-worn Evan casebook and prepared to take down the deposition.

“Where were you at half past ten last evening?” was his question. His look said, “This time I've got the goods on you.”

Before Evan could frame a response his auntie said, “He was here with me. Straight home from work. We watched Buster Keaton on television and then put out the lights and went to bed at just half past ten.”

She had been looking forward to an evening of popcorn and laughter with Evan. She had watched Buster Keaton alone.

The probation officer, a local boy, closed his book.

“If you say so, Miss Rebecca, I believe it,” he said.

Corrupted by love, she had sacrificed a long lifetime of honesty.

When the officer was gone, she said to Evan, who was unable to look her in the face, “Now then. Where were you? You can tell me. I have a right to know. Now.”

Vissi d'Arte

I
T WAS SATURDAY EVENING
. Fun day in the Big Apple. People were returning home at the end of an afternoon of shopping, gallery-going, matinees, exhibitions. It was raining. The only way to have stopped a taxi in mid-Manhattan would have been with a shot. He stood in the flooded street trying to hail one with a hand raised like that of an overlooked auction bidder while Jane sheltered beneath her umbrella on the curb. Behind her a man was trying to steady himself against the wall while taking a shit. The place he had picked, consciously or not, was especially well suited to his purpose, for on the wall in artistic lettering was sprayed,
SHIT PISS FUCK NIGGER KIKE WOP
.

The changing of the stoplight down the avenue from red to green released the stampeding herd of traffic as from a pen. Between times he joined Jane. He was worried more even than usual at this hour over her. She looked so forlorn! In furtherance of her career, they too had done their Saturday gallery-going, always an ordeal but this time devastating.

“Well, Jane, dear,” he said soothingly, “it's nothing new. We've been through it before.”

But today was something new, a turning point, not just more of the same. He, her weeklong art patron, her weekend agent, he their font of faith, had crumbled and had disclosed to them the depth of their desperation.

The day had begun unexceptionally, promising to be nothing worse than their usual weekly draught of wormwood and gall. He breakfasted as always on Saturday on sour grapes, that was to say on the art-show reviews in the Friday edition of the
New York Times
. This he did so as to fortify himself against the snubs and brushoffs awaiting them and to scoff at the trendy world they wooed.

He finished his reading and made like a chimpanzee with his lip and forefinger. Crumpling the paper, he commented, “Wrap tomorrow's fish.” Then, “With today's painting if you're not insulted you've missed the point. The situation has brought me to side with Herman Goering: ‘When I hear the word
culture
I reach for my pistol.'”

From his notebook containing page after page of crossed-out names of art galleries he read aloud those on today's list. Then, color slides in their box, earplugs in place, and after a brief delay on the stoop for the neighborhood thief on his daily rounds to finish ransacking the pockets of the derelicts sleeping there and, finding nothing on any of them, to give the last one searched a kicking for them all, they set forth once again to encounter Saturday and the art world. They were stopped by a young panhandler on the street just long enough for a bill to change hands. It was not necessary to unplug an ear to know that he had said, “Let me hold five for you, buddy.”

By now refusal could take no form not known to them.

“Thank you.” (This after a perfunctory glance at half a dozen of the slides.) “Interesting, but not for us, I'm afraid. Now if you will excuse me …”

Or:

“Sorry, but we are not able to take on any new artists at this time.”

Or:

“We're booked up with shows for years to come.”

“But don't you even want to look at the slides?”

“Sorry. Now if you will excuse me …”

He always crowned their Saturday with a visit to one or another of the big-time international galleries. So often had they been to some of them that they were known there by name. She felt this was a waste of time; he did not feel it was a waste of time, he knew it was. She felt it was humiliating to be turned away again and again by the same people. He felt those people were storing up humiliation for themselves. When discovery caught up with her, and the question was asked on all sides, why had it taken so long, they would be flushed from their corners by the searchlight of revelation and stand naked, blinking and stammering in the glare.

His reading was all but confined now to the biographies of artists. It was like for a Catholic the lives of the saints and martyrs. Van Gogh's lack of funds for a postage stamp to send his brother one of those precious letters of his, poor Pissarro's struggles to feed his large family, Sisley dying of malnutrition only to begin selling for thousands while still warm in his grave: all this sustained and uplifted him. Her time would come. Meanwhile, crossing off each gallery in his notebook added another notch to his gunstock.

Not for a moment did he believe that his persistence would wear down or enlighten these art establishment mafiosi. A survey of the smears and daubs on their walls was enough to convince him that they were beyond redemption. It was not their acceptance he sought, it was their unwitting self-condemnation. He relished their fatuous superiority, almost twitched with glee when one of them said, after glancing at the slides, “Not for us, I'm afraid.”

“Not for you.”

“I'm afraid not.”

“You're afraid not.”

“Afraid not.”

“Well, Jane,” he sighed, “looks like you'll have to go on starving in your garret for a while yet.”

He jigged in the street afterwards and sang, “So we'll put them on the list and they never will be missed. No, they never will be missed. No, they never will be missed.”

On the sidewalks of New York no nut was noticed.

Sometimes he fantasized having one of these
machers
suddenly see the light, say, “Where have I been all this while? Why, these are marvelous! A whole new vision! Just what the world is waiting for! We'll show them,” and he gathering up the slides and saying, “You'll lick spit before we let you have them. Come, Jane.”

After one of these interviews he would say to her, “I wouldn't want you to be represented by those people.”

There was a time when she had agreed, but now if she said anything it was a wistful, “I wouldn't mind.”

Now on this day in late afternoon she plucked at his sleeve. To hear what she had to say he steered them into a store, for in addition to the pounding of tires in potholes and the rattle of vans a woman was crying, “Shithead motherfuckers,” as though she were vending them.

When he had removed an earplug Jane said, “Allen, let's not go to the Melrose today. I'm so tired. And it will only be the same as always.”

“Oh, yes! We most certainly are going to the Melrose. It's their turn. Of course it will be the same as always. That's the point.”

It would go like this:

“But, Mr. Sanford, Ms. Randall (her professional name), we have seen your slides.” (Sigh.) “Many times.”

“Not these latest ones, you haven't.”

“Sorry.”

“How do you know you're not overlooking the next Cézanne?”

“Ah, yes.” (Sigh.) “Every dealer's nightmare. Chance one must take, I'm afraid. One of the risks of the trade. Now if you will excuse me …”

These days, what with the astronomical rise in art values—and the consequent rise in thefts—you did not just walk into a picture gallery from off the street. Not those where the likes of Jasper Johns were hung. You rang for admission, and through the thick glass door you were inspected before what he called the Sesame button was pressed. It had not yet gotten to speakeasy ways; you did not have to say through a peephole, “Joe sent me”; you had only to look respectable, or if not respectable, rich. Any art thief with the braces off his teeth would have gotten past this barrier by dressing himself out of Dunhill's, renting a Rolls-Royce and having his liveried chauffeur and accomplice double-park it as though immune to meter maids and traffic tickets.