The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  * * *

  Mrs. Mehl saw him in the lobby late that Saturday evening and told him a joke. “What do you call a pile of cats?”

  “I don’t know,” Bern said.

  “A meow-tain.” She laughed and laughed, spry old thing. Jacob seemed to be doing her good.

  Bern wished her shuvua tov.

  The following Monday at lunch he checked another gallery on her behalf. Or his—after all, the quest for her nephew gave him something to do. In the guest book by the entrance, visitors wrote to the featured artist, “Always a pleasure!” “Such joy, reacquainting myself with your exquisite compositions!” The work was a series of black and white photographs of an S and M parlor, men and women binding and hitting one another.

  Murphy, one of the firm’s new hires, caught Bern when he returned to the office. “Hey,” he said. Bern’s supervisor had asked him to collaborate with Murphy on a low-income housing project over in Little Italy. “I like your latest sketches,” Murphy said. His hair touched the tops of his ears—shaggier than Bern had seen it. He was working hard, keeping long hours. He won’t rest until he’s nailed my job as well as his own, Bern thought.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “I admire your patience, Wally. Really. Your attention to detail. I’m too restless for my own damn good. More of an ideas guy.”

  “We all have our strengths,” Bern said.

  “Maybe by the time I’ve been here as long as you have, gotten married and settled down … are you married, Wally?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t it funny I didn’t know that?” He fiddled with his hair. “You work with someone for months, maybe even years, and know so little about them.”

  “Yes.”

  Murphy looked at his shoes. “So. I guess it’s been hard on you. I can’t imagine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This thing with Raymond.”

  Bern shrugged. “His productivity had slipped. We all knew it.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “What?”

  “Well, the—”

  “What?”

  “Oh shit. Well … oh shit. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Wally, they found Raymond—”

  Bern groaned.

  “Yeah. In a little B and B over by the Bowery. Two or three days ago. Apparently, it happened in his sleep. Heart attack or a stroke. Maybe the booze.”

  “They? Who’s they?”

  “I don’t know. The owners, I guess.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “Beats me. He was always sort of a loner, huh?”

  “I don’t know,” Bern said. “Honestly. I didn’t see him much outside of work.”

  “He sure talked an edgy game.”

  “He was never the same after his …” Bern touched his chest.

  “Well, anyway. I’m sorry.” Murphy patted his arm. “The sketches look great. It’s a neat little project. How does it feel?”

  Bern glanced at the pencils in his pocket: the erasers he had chewed and chewed again. “Fine,” he said. “It feels fine.”

  He didn’t know Davis well enough to grieve. He didn’t seem to know anyone anymore except Mrs. Mehl. How had he come to this? Had he stopped trying? On the subway he distracted himself eavesdropping on two men sitting nearby. They were discussing a boxer they used to watch on television. “I loved that guy,” one of the fellows said. “He was synonymous with taking it in the face.”

  A Hispanic lady sat beside Bern, her patient expression reminding him of the woman in the Municipal Archives (“no tenemos”) as well as of pictures he’d once seen of the sainted Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi. In Barcelona, years ago, in a perishingly hot museum, Bern had seen some of Gaudi’s models. He had suspended strings, like webs, from the ceiling using weights, and then he’d studied the designs in a mirror he’d placed on the floor, to see how buildings constructed that way might look: as though the structure were suspended from the ground up.

  Strings and mirrors, Bern thought. Simple huts, as spare as Mrs. Mehl’s apartment. Surely there is still need in the world for humble objects, humble surroundings.

  Thinking of Davis—would anyone say Kaddish for such a man?—he remembered the temple in Houston, a modest A-frame, as humble a structure as you could find, where he attended evening services with his grandfather during the Days of Awe. It overlooked a trickle of Buffalo Bayou; amid the singing and chanting, Bern heard water. His favorite part of the service was Ne’ilah, holding hands with others in golden candlelight, asking God’s forgiveness. “The gates are closing,” the rabbi intoned. For Bern, even as a child, this was an architectural detail embodying many thoughts: the past shut away, chances lost, belonging (enclosed inside a sweet, holy space).

  And the hut … each year, following Yom Kippur, his grandfather took him to a placid bend of the bayou. There, men constructed Sukkot—temporary shelters filled with bread and fruits in honor of the huts in which the Israelites had dwelt in the desert. Some of these huts were made of plywood, some of aluminum, as precise as a Joseph Cornell box; Bern saw tents made of sheets (to evoke the Cloud of Glory in which the Children of Israel were said to have been shielded by God). He prayed with his grandfather and watched men haul water from the stream in ritual echoes of ancient pleas for rain. They quoted Isaiah: “And you shall draw waters with joy from the wells of salvation.” Buffalo Bayou was hardly a Well of Salvation; it was clotted with mud and trash; the scum on its twiggy surface stank of organic decay.

  “According to the Talmud, the minimum height of the Sechach—the covering of the Sukkot—is ten tefachim,” the rabbi told him once. “In terms we understand, that means the height of a man seated at table.”

  From that moment, human scale had been, for Bern, a central design principle.

  “The walls can be made of any material,” the rabbi said, “but they must be sufficiently strong to stand in an average wind.” Average? The bayou was an elm-lined Corridor of Storms. Nothing average about it. Already, as a boy, contemplating the beauty and necessity of shelter, Bern pondered escape hatches.

  Buildings rise. Buildings fall.

  Friends and colleagues come and go.

  But in any arrangement, he thought, there were openings.

  The gates are closing?

  No. Solitude doesn’t have to mean the end.

  On tax day, Bern proved his existence by signing forms and slipping them into an official drop box on the corner of Twenty-third and Fifth. The box slammed shut with a thwack.

  He was on his way to the Larissa Goldston Gallery. Prickly people swarmed the space. On display, a late series of prints by Robert Rauschenberg. The visitors were quick to take offense with one another, grumbling at the slightest nudge or obstructed view. The tax man had crushed everyone’s spirit. Bern felt a draining away of his faith in humanity, but then a stone goat’s head in one of the collages, side by side with a purple lotus blossom and a bright Chinese billboard featuring a smiling mother and her child, charmed him. He stared for several minutes until a woman in a fake fur coat bumped him out of the way.

  The docent, an anorexic named Tamara greeted him at her desk. On the phone, the day before, she had told him she’d known Bob Mehl and owned his most significant paintings. She kept them in a back room at the gallery. Now Bern introduced himself. She tugged one of her earrings, a large gold loop, as though she’d tear her flesh. “I guess you want to see ‘em, huh?” she said.

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  He followed her into the next room and helped her pull two big canvases (as tall as Bern) from a storage closet. On each surface, a yellow bloom of paint spread across three red lines placed vertically in the center. “Yeah, I know,” said the girl, watching his face. “Not bad, but nothing special, huh?”

  “This is it?”

  “Far as I know. The Complete Works. The Mehlian Oeuvre.”

  “But I’ve heard�
�”

  “I know what you’ve heard. We’ve all heard it. For years.” She shook her head. Her slick black hair didn’t move. “It’s why I’ve kept these. If the rumors get frenzied enough, the perception—well, who knows what these could be worth, though frankly I’m not holding my breath. You’re friends with his aunt, right? I’m not in the business of stirring false hopes.” She popped two pieces of Spearmint gum into her mouth. “It’s possible these paintings could bring in some money someday. But it’s not likely. Her nephew was a drunk. And, in my opinion, a middling artist. What he’s got going for him are stories. Buzz.”

  “Radiant genius. Tragic hero.”

  “Right. The art world loves that shit. We all do. But that’s what they are. Stories.”

  “How did they get started?”

  She shrugged. “Isn’t it usually a lover? Trying to make herself feel important?”

  “All right,” Bern said, as weary as he’d ever felt. “I’ll tell his aunt.” In fact, he wasn’t shocked. From the beginning, the excitement generated by Bob Mehl’s name, in gallery after gallery, had a strained and surrealistic quality to it.

  On his way out the door, he jostled a man’s shoulder. “Watch it!” the fellow growled. Bern gave him a goat smile.

  * * *

  Businessmen rushed up the streets, waving sharp envelopes high above their heads. Their nefarious schemes calculated to the penny. Bern dodged them, to keep his bones intact.

  What would he tell Mrs. Mehl?

  My feelings! he cried in his head. What earthly good do they do? For me, Bob Mehl? Anyone? Day after day, this whipsaw submission to moods! Now I’ll go to work (passing Raymond’s empty office); I’ll smile and expect smiles in return. Too much!

  Isn’t solitude a preferable mode of being?

  Yes. Believe it.

  Walking swiftly, he passed an internet café. Grimy. Newspapers piled on the floor. Chaotic images inked on wrinkled paper. Not a single female in the place. Pale, underfed boys hovering around clamorous screens. The room smelled sweet: stale aftershave. I am your future, Bern thought, staring straight at the kids. To buoy himself, he stepped inside the open doorway and bought a bar of chocolate.

  That evening, tired of his self-burden, surely the price of his solitude, he entered the lobby of his building and ran into Ryszard. He snapped apart the chocolate bar and handed half of it to the mumbling old grump. Ryszard leaned on his broom.

  Bern told him about Bob Mehl.

  “Well, now the Queen will have something else to bellyache about,” Ryszard said.

  “Admit it,” Bern said. “You kind of like the old girl.”

  “No. Absolutely not. Anything that is going to outlast me gives me the shivers.”

  “You may be right about that.”

  “Trust me. My grandchildren will be feeding her cats.”

  “How long are you going to sweep these floors?”

  “It’s true, my tochas aches every night,” said Ryszard. “But, you know, this is my home now. I must say, it’s been a good life, all in all. My father was a fruit peddler in Poland. Cold winter mornings. Second-hand wagon. Always a busted axle. The horses had pleurisy. Me, I guess I can manage a cranky old woman. Speak of the devil …”

  Mrs. Mehl bumped through the door grappling a grocery sack. Lettuce and turnips. Bern hadn’t seen her up and about in a week. He rushed to help her. She relinquished her grip and the bag fell into his arms. Without a word she waddled to the elevator. Then she stopped, turned, and said, “Mr. Ryszard, you have a disgusting and childlike smear of chocolate on your upper lip.”

  He covered his mouth. “Sorry,” he whispered.

  “You may take Jacob for his evening walk in half an hour.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Suppressing a smile, Bern followed her into the elevator, clutching her groceries. He still wasn’t sure how to broach the topic of her nephew, but he would find a way. There was always an opening. Mrs. Mehl seemed to thrive on this certainty, and had for many years.

  “A brandy, Mr. Bern?”

  “Thank you. I’d love one, Mrs. Mehl.”

  She pushed a button. The building engaged pulleys, cables, and gears to lift them.

  II

  Signs

  I hitched to Port Arthur on the advice of an art professor, convinced I wouldn’t stay long. At the time—1970, my sophomore year—I was thinking of becoming a painter. “In our day, the central principle of art is collage,” the professor said. “Image-bits. Like a series of little road signs reflecting our country’s fragmentation.” We were sitting in his tiny office at UT. He pulled a book from his shelf. “Currently, our finest collagist is this man, a former Texan named Robert Rauschenberg. Ever heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “Well then, son, you need to patch some holes in your know-how.”

  The collages consisted of ordinary objects: pieces of cardboard boxes, bus tickets, laundry lists, newspaper clippings.

  “He’s mostly in New York now—where you’ll have to go if you want to make it in the art world—but you’d do well to breathe the air he did as a pup,” my teacher said. “Go to Port Arthur. Find the heart of Texas. Its uniqueness. Its peculiarities.”

  Port Arthur was a gob of mud. Crooked houses sank into bayous. Silkworms—“tree devils,” in the local patois—slithered up mossy trunks. Refineries ringed the town: roaring fire-tongues.

  I checked into a “Monthly Rates” motel. The Wayfarer. Hookers hung around the parking lot. Petroleum tankers pulled off the highway onto a gravel shoulder underneath the motel sign (“Heated Pool / Cable TV”). Their brakes hissed. Catcalls in the dark. The girls, in gold sequined skirts or purple hot pants, ran to the trucks and hopped inside.

  Rauschenberg had cleared out of here as a young man. What remained of the places he knew, soda fountains and dance halls, had been eaten by the petrochemical air. They were barely recognizable as human habitations. Texas was no place for a painter. I’ve got to get to Italy, I thought. How do I get to Italy?

  My love of portraiture had solidified in middle school when my English teacher, Mrs. Hollins, introduced us to Botticelli during our reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Botticelli had illustrated scenes from the poem. I cherished the artist’s name. Sandro Botticelli. Saying it was like singing opera.

  Mrs. Hollins showed us black and white slides of Dante’s lady spirits. They looked like spider webs freshened with dew. With one line, Botticelli could evoke a person’s history. His illustrations gave me a glimmer of what preachers meant, in their sermons, by “Grace.” My favorite was Piccarda Donati, a former nun forced by an evil brother to leave the convent and marry against her will. Dante meets her in Paradise, on the moon. Though her soul has been saved, an air of defeat clings to her. Botticelli posed her with a slightly upturned face, a leaflike gown, a modest, prayerful attitude. Her sepia eyes were tightly contemplative, her hair a brush-back of two or three pencil lines, and her mouth a dark dab welling up from the page like a wayward drop of ink. This is how I tried to draw the girls I liked.

  Now it was eight years later and I was casing Port Arthur for signs I was meant to be an artist. Each evening, I’d grab a burger or some soup in a twenty-four-hour café and retreat to my room, sketching things I’d seen: tractor tires, antique lanterns, mailboxes made out of irrigation pipe.

  One night my mother phoned me from the Panhandle. “You okay?” I asked. In the parking lot just outside my room, the sequined ladies huddled.

  “Same old six and seven,” Mom said. I pictured her standing on the scuffed red linoleum in our boxy old kitchen.

  “Dad?”

  “Sits in his study, staring.” Two years earlier, he’d suffered three hemorrhagic strokes. He didn’t say much now. Once or twice a month he’d claim he’d got a visit from an angel. In that part of Texas—the northwest, blustery winds, blistering sun—it took massive infusions of faith just to get through the days. We had almost as many churches as bars. But angels? Dad sa
id they looked like Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. “Frankie, I’m sending Mildred to you,” Mom said. “I don’t know what else to do. She’s adrift here.”

  I closed my sketchbook. “Is she sober?”

  My sister had dropped out of high school, senior year.

  “About half the time,” Mom said. “It’s too depressing here. She has to get out, away from your dad, get a fresh start. Look after her, son.”

  Through my dirty window I watched a girl in the parking lot toss a busted shoe at a tumbleweed tangle. “Mom, right now, you know, I’m not really in a position to—”

  “Frankie, don’t do this to me again. Okay?”

  Nothing to say to that. She blamed me for Dad’s angelic silence.

  2.

  On a late Monday evening, a week later, I met Mildred at the Greyhound station. People rushed off the bus, glancing back, as if to escape something. And then she appeared. The last to get off. I remember she tripped on the bus steps, catching herself on the door. What did she wear? My memory isn’t clear, and I can only see her now as she looks in this sketch on my desk. I made it a few weeks after she arrived in Port Arthur: purple bell bottoms, a paisley see-through blouse, a feather boa around her neck, and a black felt hat whose floppy brim hid her eyes.

  She smelled of rum and Coke. That I recall.

  “Frankie!” she croaked. She flipped off her fellow passengers. “Goddamn prigs! Let’s get a drink.”

  I took her to a place called Derrick’s next to a Texaco natural gas plant and a meat-packing outfit employing Vietnamese refugees, probably illegally. In the old days, I’d heard, Derrick’s was notorious for bar fights: on Saturday nights, the Baptists and Catholics went after each other. In time, Derrick’s customers learned to self-segregate and drink in relative peace. In this boisterous crowd even Mildred in her getup might slip by unseen. On the sidewalk she stopped to light a cigarette. “This fucking air,” she said. She stared at the flaming orange sky. “It’s like eating burnt matches. Kind of interesting, really.”