After the row, the sex. Stripped raw by sleepless nights of ego-battering insults hurled back and forth across a battlefield of broken crockery and beer bottles, apparently they fell upon each other with ravenous appetite. I believe she crawled all over him like a frog on a branch, Jack hinted as much, and several drawings pinned to the wall of his studio suggested that this was how they went about it. A day or two in bed, and then, still smarting from their wounds, they were more or less back to normal. It was during those hours that she’d tell him where she’d been, and out would come the dusty sketchbooks, the tequila-stained notebooks, the photographs, the maps, the stories. He said these were happy hours. He may have hated her abandoning him, but he seized eagerly on the records she brought back of her adventures. Then he would show her the work he’d made while she was away, and how he liked to hear her talk about his painting! I watched his face grow soft at the thought of it.
—What then?
Then she’d remember Peg, and off she’d go to find her daughter, shambling, barefoot, rootless woman, her hair spilling out of her headscarf, and looking in her canvas trousers and bleached shirt like nothing so much as a sailor fresh off a pirate ship and lacking only a parrot for her shoulder and a hoop ring in her ear. A silly fond smile on my brother’s face as he told me this. Off she’d go across the white sand with a bottle of beer hanging from her fist, and despite everything, he said, he loved her.
I let this pass without comment.
So Jack raised Peg almost entirely by himself. He was at the same time pursuing his work with a ferocious discipline, and a pattern emerged: him pouring more and more of himself into his painting, her coming and going and doing less painting with each passing year, and Peg growing up a careless free spirit, running wild.
I have vivid memories of Pelican Road. I was of course very curious to know Peg, having heard so much about her in Jack’s letters. When I was down there she was a shy girl of eight with the long limbs and narrow, pointed features of a true Rathbone, and already quite a character. My first evening, after I’d had a wash and then warily settled myself in an old cane chair on the deck over the river, she hung back in the doorway, peering at me, shifting her weight from foot to foot and frowning.
—You’re very white, she said at last.
I detected the faintest trace of an English accent, but it was almost totally submerged in the lilt of the patois. She seemed to decide I was harmless, and approached me. Gingerly she touched my hair.
—Aunt Gin?
—Yes Peg.
By this point the child had quite overcome her shyness and got herself half seated in my lap, and was picking at my earrings with her long, brown, dirty fingers. I worried there were lice in her hair.
—You want to go out on the water?
She pronounced “water” like “matter.”
Jack appeared on the deck with a bottle of rum and two dusty tumblers.
—Darling child, Gin does not want to go out on the water, in fact I don’t think I want you going out on the water.
He turned to me and said they’d recently lost a child to a crocodile. Peg grew excited at this and with her strong dirty fingers she forcibly turned my face away from her father and towards herself and told me about the boy seized by the croc—“right near this house, man!” Her face was inches from mine, her eyes wide.
—That boy, she whispered, he one bloody mess.
—Peg, why don’t you bugger off now, said Jack.
—Okay, Jack, she said, in a weary tone she must have learned from her mother. I’m going to bugger off now. Later, Aunt Gin.
—Later, Peg.
Then, quite deliberately, watching me as she did it, she took a cigarette from her father’s pack, lit it, and let it hang from the corner of her mouth as she exhaled smoke through her nose. Jack appeared not to notice. She left the deck backwards, still with the cigarette hanging from her lips, holding my eye and making peculiar wriggling gestures at me with the fingers of both hands. Once in the gloom of the house, with a shout she darted off, and we heard her bare feet pattering down the stairs.
—Remarkable child, I said.
—I worry about her in that boat.
We gazed out at the sluggish river, which gleamed in places in the last of the sunlight, and probably harboured hungry crocs at that very moment. I rather enjoyed watching my brother being a father. He seemed good at it, rather like our own father—affectionate, distracted, indifferent to petty matters like smoking, watchful in a vague sort of a way—and Peg, I thought, seemed to require no more than that. Later that same night, undressing for sleep in my shed of a bedroom at the back of Vera’s studio, I suddenly became aware of a figure standing in the doorway. An oil lamp gives out only the weakest illumination, and I was startled to see a motionless figure where a second before there had been none. I gave a little scream. It was her of course.
—Peg! What are you doing there?
—I want to see your white skin.
I was astonished.
—Well, I’m sorry, my dear, but I’m rather modest in that department.
—Can’t I watch? Jack doesn’t mind.
—I’m afraid not.
—Okay. Later, Aunt Gin.
—Later, Peg.
She melted into the darkness. Jack doesn’t mind what? It was another world down here. I had no idea how they lived. I decided to jump to no conclusions about any of it.
The next day Jack took me down to his studio. I remember it vividly. All his work was there and much else besides, all the junk he’d accumulated, plus the work of local painters and others passing through who’d heard of Jack Rathbone’s studio in Port Mungo and come to visit. It was a vast, cavernous space with wooden walls and lofty rafters, and huge doors giving onto the dock through which flooded light reflected off the river, with a wooden scaffold on wheels for getting at the high parts of large canvases. Amid the quantities of stuff in there I remember the jaws of a shark mounted on a beam, and the figurehead of an old sailing ship, the wooden head and torso of a goddess with red hair. In those days it was a social place, Jack’s studio. Local people moored their boats at his dock and squatted in the sunlight, smoking and murmuring to one another as they watched him work. Children scrambled up onto the dock, and clustered dripping and grinning in the doorway. Others came by with objects for the artist, in hopes of earning a few cents. Men he drank with dropped by, and occasionally some grizzled native of the town would approach the canvas, peer at it closely and murmur a word or two about the colour of the sea, or the plumage of a tropical firebird flying over a volcano, or the figure of a lost girl rooted in the trunk of a ceiba tree.
He introduced to me various characters sitting on his dock and then took me to the back of the studio and hauled out the work he’d been making. Dear god they were strange things! Untreated jute or sacking stretched on knotty sticks, the dimensions uneven and the paint itself having a kind of fatty texture, heaped up thickly on the rough surface and the imagery a raw, passionate, primitive response to the world he lived in. Some of them were six feet on a side, and the colours—the greens, the blues, the purply blacks, the orangey reds, the greenish yellows—had a harsh and acid tone, and were all the same weight somehow, so little air seemed to get through. Perhaps it was my own immediate ambivalence towards Jack’s world which shaped my reaction—the jungle, I mean, the sun, the river, the shacks, the sea, the flies, the trees—the light—but growing conscious of these stirrings of bewilderment I knew enough to say that it was strong stuff, although in truth I was profoundly unsure. Later, of course, what had seemed like so much bluster I came to regard as heroic, the sheer scope and ambition of what he did down there.
Years later, when he came back to New York, Jack continued to work out the imagery he first developed in Pelican Road. He told me he would never have worked with such, oh—grandiosity—had he not lived in Port Mungo. He found there a reflection of himself, he said, and the meaning of his life as an artist was the effort to trans
late that identification directly onto canvas. I thought of his repeated motifs, his rain forests and rivers, his serpents and birds, and in particular his gleaming mythic bodies staring into pools—and much as I came to admire the work I never properly understood how he saw himself in those paintings.
It was after Vera had returned from yet another of her boozy journeys—this happened about five years after my visit—that during one of their passionate reunions Peg’s little sister, Anna, was conceived. So I missed the spectacle of Vera Savage, a woman sorely lacking in maternal instinct, and well into her forties by then, giving birth to her second child. Jack had no expectation that her behaviour would be any different from how it was before, nor was it. Once again he took responsibility for the infant girl when, after a few short weeks of half-hearted mothering, Vera became bored with little Anna and began to treat her with what she called “benign neglect.” Jack recognized it as the same wilful disregard to which Peg had been subjected, but this time he made no argument and simply took over. He employed the same wet nurse who had breastfed Peg, a large, calm woman called Dolores, and for the first fifteen months Anna lived in her house, along with Dolores’s seven children. During those months it was Peg who spent hours every day with Anna, and could often be seen wheeling her little sister down to the waterfront in a barrow to show her off to the fishermen. Jack told me all this without any rancour. He said it was not Vera’s fault she had no interest in mothering. Fortunate thing, he said, that he could cope. And Dolores was a treasure.
A curious figure he cuts, then, my brother, this fiercely driven artist, this latter-day Gauguin, stimulated by the wealth of form and colour in the natural world down there, also by its fecundity, its exuberance, its violence—yet at the same time displaying a maternal solicitude towards his two daughters while their mother was off doing whatever she liked, mostly, it appeared, drinking and chasing men. And it occurred to me that it was perhaps because of this sustained immersion in nature and mothering that he was losing the civilized reflexes. And he was losing them, of this I had no doubt at all, and I can remember various occasions when the fact was vividly brought home to me. Once, towards the end of my stay, we were sitting out on the deck at sunset, having the first drink of the day, when we heard from inside the house a series of groans and a slow, uneven tread on the stairs. We turned towards the door. It was Peg, and she was in pain: always barefoot, she had trod on a thorn of some kind and could put no weight on her left foot. In she hopped, and Jack briskly told her to sit on the deck in front of his chair, and had her lift her leg. He leaned forward to examine the sole.
—This it? he said, prodding the ball of her foot, and Peg let out a scream.
—Oh don’t be such a baby.
He then seized her slim brown ankle and, with his other hand gripping the foot tight, applied his mouth to the sore place, and began to suck. That foot was filthy! She’d been all over town, god alone knows what she’d stepped in. I offered to go fetch the disinfectant but he said it wasn’t necessary. He sucked lustily at the dirty foot, sucked and spat, and every few seconds he lifted his eyes and grinned at her. Peg grinned back as she wriggled about on the deck on her bottom. After a minute or two he sat back, picked at her foot with a fingernail, then extracted the thorn with his teeth. He held it up for us to see, tossed it over the railing and wiped his hands on his paint-smeared trousers.
—All right now?
—Thank you, Jack, said Peg.
But before she limped off, he had her stand with her back to the railing—and urinated on her foot! To disinfect it, he said. Then he sat down again, grinning at me, as he pushed himself back into his trousers.
He enjoyed my snort of disapproval, and I was on the point of telling him what a primitive he was becoming when we heard a scream from the staircase.
—What is it now? he shouted, turning towards the house.
—Mummy’s home!
Port Mungo boasted one grand establishment, a sagging relic of the town’s former glory which despite its flaking paintwork and spreading mildew—its cellars were flooded on a yearly basis—did maintain certain of the old amenities, in particular the large rooms on the upper floor which got the breezes off the sea. For this reason the Hotel Macaw was favoured by those of the townspeople who at midmorning or twilight liked to take their rum in the relative comfort of large rattan chairs, beneath ancient ceiling fans, in the spectral presence of dead banana moguls who drifted along the verandahs with the proud ghosts of exotic Creole women on their arms.
Jack and Vera took me there the evening she turned up at Pelican Road after an absence of several months. When Jack heard Peg’s shout he was out of his chair and down the stairs in a second, himself shouting as he went. I waited on the deck, not wanting to intrude. A minute later Peg appeared at the top of the stairs.
—Mummy says why don’t you come down and say hello, you rude cow.
So down I went. There she was, sitting cross-legged in the middle of her studio amid bags and baskets, rummaging about in a battered rucksack. There was a young black guy in cut-off jeans bouncing on his haunches nearby, rolling a spliff, and Jack stood at the table pouring rum into tumblers. He turned with a smile as I came into the studio.
—Here she is! cried Vera, rising from the floor.
She stood before me, grinning broadly, her arms wide, and there was the empty slot between her teeth. Same old Vera, only more so, this was my first impression. Into her forties now and it showed, for the ravages of weather and drink were evident, but somehow, at the same time, she glowed. There was more than a little of the hippie earth mother about her—the brightly coloured headscarf, the flowing cotton garments—but more, I think, of the Gypsy queen, for her skin was tanned a deep brown, and there was much silver on her person. She took me in her arms. Her physical presence was overpowering, and I found myself hugging her close and enjoying the smells that came off her, patchouli oil, marijuana, citrus, I don’t know what else. I didn’t want to let her go. When we broke apart she gazed into my face with glistening eyes and told me it was a beautiful thing I had done, coming all the way down from New York to see my brother.
—And me! shouted Peg.
—And my Peg, said Vera, holding my hands and squeezing them tight. Then she turned away, abruptly dropping my hands.
—Where’s the rum, Jack? she shouted.
It was not a typical homecoming, I believe, for the simple reason that I was there. I saw none of the resentment, none of the animosity which according to Jack usually accompanied these reunions. It was all very warm and cheerful, my brother resembling not so much the stern paterfamilias as a fond old hen with a lost chick back under the wing. Soon we were all upstairs on the deck, including the young black guy, and quite who he was I couldn’t figure out. Peg was sitting on her father’s lap and gazing intently at Vera while Jack asked questions about her trip, and as she told her stories I began to form a very different picture from the one Jack had given me. Instead of the restless, irresponsible creature he had described, what I saw was a woman with a genuine curiosity about the world beyond this obscure little river town, and it was an artist’s curiosity, for it was as an artist that she spoke about what she’d seen. And I glimpsed, too, her courage in setting out into that world—no simple thing for a woman alone, not in Central America—so as to know it better. I am no sort of an explorer, or even a good traveller, I am a woman who likes to sit in a room in a city—preferably New York City—with a book in my hand, and travel in my own imagination. So what Vera did, what she had been doing for years, was impressive to me.
And what of Jack? He had come to life with Vera’s return, animated for the first time since I stepped off the ferry, and all at once I was struck by the thought that for all his dedication and self-sacrifice and seriousness, and oh, the ponderous nobility of his artistic endeavour—for all that, every day of the past week he had been extremely anti-social, buried in his studio from dawn to dusk. He appeared only briefly at lunchtime, with paint on
his hands and nothing to say beyond a grunt or two, and it took a couple of large rums at sunset to tease a human response from him. Imagine that every day, for months on end, for years on end—and all at once I understood why Vera wandered, and with that realization my moral understanding of the household tipped on its head, and I saw Jack’s formidable discipline as a kind of silent brooding ingrown negative energy which must have sapped the vitality of a woman like Vera and driven her wild with frustration. No wonder they fought! No wonder she left home for months on end, and took lovers, how else could she live with my brother, whose single conversation in life—and this I had seen for myself—was with himself? One of the paintings he had shown me was called Narcissus in the Jungle. Now I understood what it was about. It was a self-portrait.
Vera soon got restless in the house and wanted to go out. She wanted to go to the Macaw, so after supper the three of us set off into town. Close to the dock we turned onto a street of large wooden houses which with their columned porticoes and broad staircases must once have resembled the plantation mansions of the American South. Each of these buildings, peeling and sagging now, sheltered numerous families. Washing lines and hammocks were slung across verandahs where rich men had sat smoking large cigars and pondering, presumably, the price of bananas. Near the end of the street, set back from the seawall, the lamps of the hotel spilled out onto the water. We climbed its wide stairs to a pair of double doors folded back against the wall. We stepped into the hallway, aware of voices in the bar to our left, and the desultory tinkling of a piano.
Our appearance roused the company. Stout men struggled up from the depths of wicker couches and rattan armchairs and waved cigars in our direction. Desiccated women fluttered their fans. There were bluff cries of welcome as we made our way across the room to the bar: this was the bourgeois element of Port Mungo, and it had seen better days. And here was Ector, the bartender, in a short white jacket, idly turning the pages of a month-old newspaper. He looked up and put away his paper.
Port Mungo Page 8
