The Underpainter (3 page)

As a young child I was always looking down into landscape, never across it or along it. In church the congregation droned, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” I had never looked up at anything, except for architecture,
and even that was mercifully low in those days. Moreover, the depths into which I would have had to descend in order to watch rocks and vegetation climb skyward were filled with tombstones, on the one hand, and murderous rapids, on the other. The Genesee River rampaged angrily through the centre of town generating the power that drove the industries of our prosperous city fathers. Darkly romantic pillared and gargoyled tombs created valleys of death out of the series of ravines that became Mount Hope Cemetery. The long footbridge crossing the Genesee and the serpentine avenues that wound around and above the huge, deep graveyard were my mother’s favourite destinations. I feared and hated both places. I was certain I would be drawn down to death one way or the other as, holding my mother’s hand and decked out in my sailor suit and straw hat or wrapped in layers of quilted clothing, I approached these lofty spots.

When I mustered the courage to complain, my mother assured me I was fortunate to have access to such spatially interesting scenery. Daughter of a market gardener from Hilton, a hamlet situated in the uncommonly flat lands ten miles or so from the centre of town, nothing, she maintained, could please her more than to look from on high into landscapes both wild and dangerous. A fear of heights, she told me, was nothing more than a fear of depths. She, however, feared predictability, boredom, and certain distant, fixed horizons. Flat land, she said, was like a dull story; one where you were able to determine the middle and the end right at the beginning. Large bodies of water were different in that you never quite knew what they were going to do even when they were frozen, and that alone made them
interesting. We talked about such things on our promenades, or rather she talked about them. I said very little. I was just a child.

I now realize she was quite a lot like my friend, the painter Rockwell Kent. She should have been given a boat and a sail and set adrift to bump up against one steep, forbidding shore after another, though the monotony of the long journeys from departure to landfall might have put her off his style of adventure. Still, they had much in common and, had they ever met, Rockwell might have fallen in love with her. He was a man obsessed by dangerous landscapes, by women, and the north. He stopped travelling only long enough to begin painting; he stopped talking only long enough to start writing; he stopped womanizing only long enough to attempt to repair his disintegrating marriage. His brain, like his painting, was controlled by polar forces. The north was with him always, regardless of where he hung his hat. By the time I was nine and setting forth on what would turn out to be my last series of walks with my mother, Rockwell would have already survived the vagaries of the eccentric Abbott Thayer’s freezing outdoor school, would have been enrolled in Robert Henri’s life class for two or three years. Having been born at the tail end of the century, it seems to be my destiny to walk into the finale of every drama I encounter. By the time I met Rockwell, by the time I met Robert Henri… but I am getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say that I missed the Armory Show, modernism’s notorious début in North America, by one year, though now I don’t regret this for a minute.

My father left our ordinary house on Atkinson Street each morning promptly at 8:15 in order to walk to George Eastman’s State Street factory where he worked as a clerk. As a child I was quite taken both with the factory itself — seven storeys high! something to look up to — and with the objects that emerged from it. Cameras. Photographs. Images still and calm and dependable. I assumed that my father was responsible for these reliable pictures, despite the fact that there were only two photographs in our house: the first showed my parents thin and grim in their wedding clothes; the other was of me as a baby, silly and girlish in my christening gown. We owned a Kodak Brownie camera — everyone in Rochester did — but my mother forbade its use. “They stop things,” she would announce whenever the subject of cameras arose. “They interrupt the normal flow of events. Furthermore, they eliminate things. If I take a photograph of this,” she would say, pointing to a beer factory across the Genesee River, “I obliterate this and this.” Even now I can see the way she gestured as she spoke, her arms sweeping back and forth, conjuring the rest of the world, the world that a photograph might have obliterated, the world of the stampeding river, the world I was afraid of.

Father told me much later that she had begun her walks to the river and the cemetery while I was still in my pram. In the beginning these outings were, as far as he could remember, sporadic and made some sense to him in that babies should be “aired.” By the time I was six, however, the journey had become a daily routine. Regardless of the weather, pressing household chores, invitations to ladies’ teas, my own feeble objections, we set forth. If it were raining, my mother would carry a huge black
umbrella. If it were snowing, she would bundle me, and herself, in scarves and mitts and quilted coats. Only severe illness, hers or mine, could keep her home. I was severely ill as often as possible, loving the quiet of my room, my books and toys spread around me on the pale-blue blanket, the “Land of Counterpane” so gorgeously described by Mr. Stevenson in my favourite poem. Essentially, my greatest ambition at the time was to be a sickly child, as sickly as the author in question had been. But just as soon as the thermometer from Mr. Taylor’s instruments factory indicated that I was well again, off we went, over the roaring river, to the edges of the valley of the shadow. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” the congregation chanted, “I will fear no evil … thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” I was convinced the revered rod was Mr. Taylor’s thermometer, comforting me, keeping me from shadowed valleys, causing me to love the word “fever.”

Mother claimed we were related to Mr. Taylor, but then Mother claimed we were related to all of Rochester’s prominent citizens. “Just you and me,” she would say conspiratorially, “we are related by blood to Mr. Taylor. Not your father, he is not related to anyone.”

I was too young at the time to remind her that my father was, of course, related by blood to me.

According to my mother, when she was a child her distinguished relatives had driven her in their magnificent cabriolets to the much more fascinating water and beaches of the Great Lake Ontario, which was closer than you might think to the flat lands around Hilton. They had gone to the lakeshore in all kinds of weather, and it was this that must have instilled in her the idea
that outings were good for children. Sometimes there was ice, she explained, and then there would be ice boating and skating. The ice was white near the shore, then grey, then darker grey. It turned black just before it disappeared into the liquid, inky churn of Great Lake water. It resembled an oversized polished ballroom floor and, as one grew older, one danced upon it arm in arm with a partner. I could barely imagine this. For me, ice was something that appeared overnight, startling and silver on the bare limbs of trees near a waterfall, or hung like angry, dripping fangs over the gorge through which the Genesee River tumbled.

Rockwell Kent would tell me years later that he loved ice, insisting that it was more interesting than mere soil; that it created itself out of available, sometimes invisible materials, then disappeared again; that it had a mind of its own.

He would have worshipped my mother.

It is no surprise to me now, given the abysses in the surrounding geography, that men famous for mail chutes and elevators should have flourished in my native city. James B. Cutler and L. S. Graves, respectively. Mother claimed that we were related to both of these gentlemen, as well as to a certain Jonathan West, who had invented a celebrated kind of water meter. The accomplishments of the great men of our city, all of whom were apparently related to us, figured largely in the words my mother chose to describe the landscapes through which we wandered.

“Down you’d go,” she once said, staring from a bridge that spanned the frothing Genesee. “Down you’d go, just like a love letter in a Cutler chute.”

Another time, when we were walking around the top edge of the graveyard, she announced darkly, “These paths curve, this way and that, just like one of Henry Strong’s whips flung down in the grass.” I wondered what these long whips would be used for and what kind of large animals they might be meant to subdue.

At Mount Hope Cemetery we stood under arbours and sat on stone benches. We paused to admire the impressive mausoleums of one alleged relative after another. We examined marble statuary — marble that was sometimes brought all the way from Italy, my mother told me — and which ranged from small urns to realistically rendered life-sized family groups.

“That certainly is a good likeness of cousin Reginald’s dog,” Mother would say, looking fondly at a marble beast curled at the feet of a bearded marble entrepreneur who was himself seated comfortably in an armchair on his own tomb. “Its name was Mergatroyd.”

I don’t believe I have ever been intimately involved with a woman as young as my mother was then. She had married my father at sixteen and had been — if one did not take into account our afternoon outings — more or less housebound ever since. As far as I knew, she had no friends; even her own parents, my grandparents, were dim, shadowy people who never appeared in our house and whose small clapboard house in Hilton we rarely visited. Whether they disapproved of the marriage, or were themselves disapproved of by my father, I wasn’t ever to know. His own family was far away in a place called Baton Rouge. I had met only my Confederate grandfather, who came to visit once a year.

It was a claustrophobic world that, more than my mother’s
flat, pedestrian girlhood, may have explained her need for imaginary relatives and dramatic scenery. I remember the darkness of the house during the day, the murky lamps at night, the silent suppers and punctual bedtimes. My mother and I had little in common with my father; as she had said, he was, at least in the metaphorical sense, related to no one. She and I, however, were related to the alternative worlds connected to childhood. Pretty and delicate, bored and prone to fantasy, she was, I suppose, just a little girl. I became her playmate; her sometimes unwilling playmate. By the age of nine I adored her and was perplexed by her; coveted and occasionally felt smothered by her company.

Most people, I understand, remember only bits and pieces of any particular day in their childhood. Only certain static images, much like the photographs my mother so disapproved of, cut through the recalled atmosphere of being six or nine or five years old. I am not, as I have pointed out, so fortunate. Robert Henri maintained that the wondering eyes of a child see everything, but when childhood has passed, much of what they have seen is lost. I carried everything I saw on a certain day in 1904 with me into adult life, either because of what happened later or perhaps in spite of what happened later. Yet this visual intensity is still only a matter of optics. I can see the way the snow moved through the neighbourhood, the colour that the cold placed on my mother’s face, the icy, shining wires swinging in the wind, snowdrifts against the outer walls of mausoleums, but I cannot see myself, the boy I was then; at least, I cannot see his face. And there are no photographs. My mother would never have allowed photographs.

It was late January. I was nine and in school by then, but that didn’t prevent my mother from insisting on the walks; often she would be waiting at the gate when I emerged from the school door. But this was Saturday, a holiday from that particular humiliation, a day that I would have preferred to spend drawing my now fully fleshed-out soldiers waging their fully fleshed-out battles. And colouring them. Poster paint had entered my life.

The previous night an ice storm had coated everything in silver and we had awakened in the morning to a tinsel world.

When we left the house my mother exclaimed at the beauty. “This is what happens,” she said, “when you live in the north. Everything can change in the most magnificent way, completely, overnight.” We were walking slowly because of the ice underfoot. “We live as far north as possible,” she said. “Aren’t you glad?”

She had either forgotten, or was choosing to ignore, Canada.

“We are northerners,” she said proudly. “We like the cold.”

Huddling in my woollen coat against the increasing chill of the wind, I wasn’t quite sure that I agreed with her, but I dared not voice my opinion.

“Our river runs north,” she announced as we inched our way over the slippery footbridge. I was trying not to think of the river, the long, deep distance between me and its swift current. “The north is the birthplace of spiritualism,” my mother continued cheerfully. “The north is where spiritualism lives.” She paused, admired the view from the end of the bridge, then added, “Thanks to my great-aunts, your great-great-aunts, the famous Fox sisters.”