Her father was no less remarkable. Gaunt and sunburnt, he wore a faded cotton shirt, khaki pants and sandals, and Mayan bracelets on his wrists. He was as brown as his daughter, and his face and bearing suggested he might be a member of a missionary sect just returning from the Amazon. But he was no missionary. Tough and serious he may have been, but there was no piety there; he was cursing as he dug through his bag for cigarettes, and in the few moments I watched him, trying to see him with the eyes of a stranger, I found myself suddenly deeply impressed at what he’d become. I felt love, admiration—envy, even—with the recognition that he had held to his commitment and become an artist. Suddenly my own placid existence seemed a safe and cautious thing, altogether lacking in the fervour that burned in this tall frowning man who stood oblivious to everything in the arrivals hall of LaGuardia Airport and fired up an unfiltered, foul-smelling, crumpled Mexican cigarette.
It was May, the weather fine and warm, and we took a cab into the city. Peg had her head out of the window the entire trip. Jack was quiet. He must surely have been thinking about the last time he was in New York, when he and Vera were newly in love, and it could only have saddened him. There were times, he told me later, when he quite simply ached for the woman. Where was she now? He didn’t know. He’d had a postcard from Mexico City, that was all. The house on West 11th Street is a narrow brownstone on a quiet block, with a steep flight of steps to the front door, and three floors plus an attic. It is a house I love, for it has been my haven and sanctuary, and Jack’s as well, eventually. This was the first time he had seen it, and he walked inside with his arm round my shoulder, looking rather apprehensive, Peg struggling behind with the suitcase. What did he see? Sanded floors, a few framed posters, Mexican rugs, large cushions, flowers, ferns, books everywhere, wicker furniture, sunlight, cats. Lingering smell of incense.
—Lot of rugs.
—I love rugs, I said defensively.
He said nothing more, but for the first time I found myself unsure about my rugs. Peg meanwhile had made straight for the fridge and found the ice cream. I showed her the garden at the back of the house, but she wasn’t impressed. She wanted to see the river, so I promised her we’d walk down to the Hudson before dinner.
It was a happy visit. We went to the Museum of Natural History, Central Park, the Bronx Zoo, the Empire State Building. Jack had never taken the boat out to Liberty Island, though he certainly had strong associations with the statue, having spent long hours staring at it from a bench in Battery Park. We went to the art museums, and I was aware of the intensity with which he inspected the recent American work. He later spoke dismissively of almost all of it. It was not a good moment for painters, he said. Not propitious. But he was deeply impressed by Rothko’s work. Those great gloomy paintings held his attention for many minutes, and so fierce was his concentration that I did not dare speak while he stood frowning at them, and led Peg away so he wouldn’t be disturbed. Afterwards I tried to discover what he thought of them, but he wouldn’t tell me, and it was only much later, after he’d moved back to the city, that one night after a few drinks he said that he’d been humbled by Rothko. I never heard him say that about any other contemporary artist.
One evening during that first visit we were sitting over dinner in a quiet restaurant in the Village. We had emptied four bottles of wine between us. Peg was fast asleep in her chair. I had suggested to Jack that they come live in New York but he said no, that wouldn’t happen until the work was right.
—And her, I said, indicating the sleeping girl.
—Why would I want to move her?
—She can’t stay down there all her life.
—Why not?
Jack was unconcerned. He thought that if Peg ever wanted to go live in a city she would figure out how to do it for herself. But for now, why disrupt the girl’s life? And as for him, when the time came he would know. Another five years, he thought. He knew he had to come back eventually. Wasn’t that the point of Port Mungo, to paint in peace until the work came right and then bring it to New York? That had always been the plan.
We fell silent, we smoked, we were comfortably drunk. I was startled by the simple clarity of his commitment. Neither his own comfort nor his child’s future, apparently, would change the course he had chosen. Perhaps he was a kind of missionary after all: a priest of art.
A day or two before they were to leave I asked him if he had everything he needed. He thought I meant art supplies. No, I said, had he bought any clothes? I smile now when I think of it. He was startled by the question. I think the idea of spending money on clothes had simply not occurred to him. He was a very frugal man, but then he had to be. He had no source of income other than the allowance I gave him, the drip-feed, as he called it. Perhaps, I said, we might go up to Bloomingdale's? Brilliant idea—why hadn’t he thought of it?
I knew then that my brother was becoming a genuine eccentric. We went to Bloomingdale’s and got him some jeans and shirts—he only wanted clothes, he said, that could take the smear of paint. Peg came along and soon disappeared into a changing room with a miniskirt and a few other items, and when she emerged Jack and I were astonished: only eleven years old, but she was a mere whisper away from womanhood. And what an actor she was! Far from feeling shy or uncertain in such unfamiliar garments, she minced up and down in front of us, pouting and preening and swinging her little bottom, and not for the first time I was struck by how much of her mother was in her, the performance was pure Vera.
They visited me again a year later and that was the last time I saw Peg. How sad it was. Her brief moment of grace had vanished. She had become a lanky, sullen adolescent. Things remained unstable at home. Vera was as rootless as ever. Jack had come to accept that she was flawed, irredeemably so, and he no longer held out hope of her amounting to anything as an artist. He had lost her, he said, not so much to alcohol as to a kind of chronic restlessness, an inability to stay in any one place for more than a month or two; she even found it hard to stay in bed all night, and would wake in the small hours and pace about the house, the insomnia eventually provoking the need of a drink and thus compounding the sorry cycle. He said he thought it must be an organic disorder of some kind, but she wouldn’t do anything about it.
—I can’t kick her out, he said, it would break Peg’s heart. She worships her. She wants to be just like her. I’m the villain now.
I saw this during the time they were with me. It was not a successful visit. The tension between father and daughter was palpable from the moment I met them at the airport. Since I’d last seen him Jack had decided that he must soon move back to New York or he would sink into a kind of terminal stagnation, and all the work he had done would count for nothing. At the time it did not occur to me that he was frightened of New York, but of course why wouldn’t he be? He had more than enough imagination to realize that for a painter like himself, already in his thirties, to gain a toehold in this most competitive of art worlds would not be simple. But the idea that he might have become fearful, working in the obscurity of Port Mungo—and obscurity brings safety in its train, and breeds rigidity—this I didn’t consider, I suppose because I had never imagined him afraid of anything. I wonder now whether Rothko was the inciting agent.
Peg’s feelings on the face of it were less complicated. She simply didn’t want to be here. She was twelve now and had too much going on in Port Mungo to want to accompany her father on this trip. But it seems Jack had insisted, I assumed because he didn’t want to leave her unsupervised at home, which I could well understand after seeing how the girl behaved. She got drunk several times, and affected the kind of bravado I recognized as a copy of one of her mother’s performances. She was angry, she was rude to both of us, she was uncooperative, sulky and disobedient. Her moods were erratic. For the ten days they stayed with me I never knew when she came down in the morning if she would be elated or depressed. This I took to be the standard stuff of growing up, and I wondered how Jack coped, given his sustained focus
on his work. It could not have been easy, having this volatile adolescent under the same roof.
Then I saw how he coped. Or I should say, I saw an ugly exchange between the two of them which at the time I dismissed as atypical, a response to unusual stress in an unusual situation rather than an instance of how they normally related to each other. We were sitting in a restaurant one evening. Jack had been silent for most of the meal, as had Peg. Each of them was preoccupied, or angry, or both, I didn’t know why, nor did I particularly want to find out—I had discovered early in the visit how unrewarding it was to attempt to winkle out the cause of a malaise that one or the other of them might happen to be entertaining at any given moment. It never cleared the air, the reverse if anything, and they didn’t thank you for trying. So we’d eaten in silence, and drunk several bottles of wine, though this had had no perceptible effect on anyone’s mood. When the main course was cleared away Peg abruptly rose to her feet. Jack seized her wrist.
—Where are you going?
—To meet someone.
—I don’t think so.
Peg tried to shake free of her father’s grip.
—Let go of me, Daddy, you’re hurting me.
Still Jack held tight to the girl’s wrist, with an expression I had never seen in him before: face set hard, like bronze, jaw clamped tight and eyes wide. Peg was a tall girl, lithe and strong, but her father was stronger. Heads had turned in the restaurant.
—Jack, I murmured.
—Shut up, Gin.
—Daddy!
—You’re not going anywhere, you’re coming back to the house.
—You’re hurting me.
Then Peg suddenly stopped squirming and pulling. She was still. She was stiff. She stood silently staring down at her father—the whole restaurant riveted on this drama now—the pair of them like statues. The moral advantage swung decisively in Peg’s favour: no longer the unruly child, she was the victim of her father’s power. Jack flung the girl’s wrist from him with disgust, and turned away.
He uttered a coarse epithet.
Peg stood there a moment longer as her father’s ugly word fell into the silence their conflict had created in the room. I could hardly believe what I had just heard. This was Jack, my brother, voicing such bitter contempt for his own daughter! Peg allowed just enough time for the import of what he had said to register on everyone who’d heard him, and then tossed her mane of black hair and strutted out of the restaurant.
—Get the check, Gin, said Jack.
I was on the point of telling him to get it himself, and walking out after the girl, but I did not. It would not have done any good. As I say, I thought this was just an appalling aberration that had come about because he was stressed and Peg was being difficult. But I thought later: What if it was not unusual? What if their relationship had deteriorated to the point where shabby power struggles like this occurred routinely, with Jack using physical force to subdue the girl, and snarling at her, as he had in the restaurant? It occurred to me that I had perhaps glimpsed the reality of their life in Port Mungo, where Vera’s constant absences had created a kind of hell in which my brother habitually indulged his anger at his daughter’s expense.
The next day she came home with her head a mess of tufts and spikes, having had all her lovely hair cut off by a kid she’d met in Washington Square Park. I was very shocked by it. I saw in this angry gesture a violent rejection of her femininity, as though she was excising the part of herself that possessed the capacity to love. So much rage in that ugly gesture!—I would almost have said it was an act of injured sexuality, had she been a few years older.
Chapter Nine
It was not many months after this visit that Anna was born. I tried to discover whether Vera’s pregnancy was having an effect on Peg at this time, perhaps contributing to her anger towards the world, and towards her father in particular, but Jack was not forthcoming, he didn’t like to speak about the period between Anna’s birth and Peg’s death. But I have always thought how desperately sad it must have been for him, that he should have lost his daughter before they had come through this difficult phase of her growing up, and how predictable, in a way, that he should feel responsible for her death, as though the anger he’d felt towards her had caused actual harm to befall her.
I worried at it often, over the years, but for a long time it seemed it was to remain unknowable, what happened in the mangroves, at least to me—a mystery, although I hate the word. There are no mysteries, only people who conceal: only secrets. And certainly the immediate circumstances of Peg’s death were a secret, Jack’s secret, possibly Vera's, and that was how it would stay unless one of them chose to divulge it. In the end Jack did tell me, but for several years, in our times of greatest intimacy—late at night, in drink, typically—we could talk about anything but that. He would mention his own stupidity, his failure to prevent her death, always in such a way that it roused me to tell him not to blame himself, he wouldn’t have let it happen if he could possibly have prevented it. But he never mentioned the details of the thing. I used to think: What did he have to hide? He was not by nature a man to withhold his thoughts, no matter how complicated, or absurd, or shaming they were, certainly not with me, who knew him so much better than anyone. Was I hurt at his withholding? I suppose I was, also concerned, inasmuch as I disliked the idea of the thing festering in him, and I am enough of a Freudian to believe the mind must discharge toxic materials or become infected by them. I assumed Jack’s silence about Peg’s death indicated some malignancy, or some guilt, rather, though whether his own or another’s I didn’t know. There had been hints, if that is not too strong a term for the odd muttered half-sentence—again, late at night, in drink, when the talk had veered in that direction—such muttering at once cut off, lips sealed, shake of the head, the disinhibition brought on by copious alcohol no match for the powerful engines of repression at work in him.
One night, I remember, we sat up late in the big room downstairs—he was still in the loft, we had been out to dinner and come back to 11th Street for a nightcap—and the talk shifted to Port Mungo. Jack had a way, when a conversation which had begun to languish then took a turn that seized his attention, of coming up out of his long-legged sprawl across a chair or a couch and sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, back bent and chin cupped in his palm, the other hand hanging in the air, with a finger lifted—or drumming his fingers on the table—I think I had said that the biggest problem faced by artists in cities was light—and all at once he saw something, he came up out of his chair and spoke as if responding not to what I’d said but to the chain of association it had started in his mind.
—It was the light!
—What was?
—It woke her up.
At which point he became aware that he was talking not to himself but to me. He rubbed his eyes, finished his drink and left soon after.
On three or four occasions he let slip similarly oblique remarks, but they made no sense in and of themselves, or in any combination I could make of them. Another time—and we were very drunk that particular night, I forget why, so drunk in fact that I have lost the context of the conversation—he said that she got it wrong, and all I knew, when I woke the next morning, was that this too referred to Peg’s death, though who got what wrong I didn’t know, nor did I imagine that Jack made it clear when he said it. I once asked if I would ever be told what happened to Peg.
—One day, he said.
—What day would that be, Jack?
—The day I die.
His face split open and out leapt a wheeze of sulphuric laughter. That was Jack. That was my brother. But try and deny the imagination its creative imperative—you cannot. What I did not know I could not help but attempt to imagine. I thought about the mangrove swamps of the western Caribbean, and what I had seen of them during my visit to Port Mungo. There was an old, white-planked skiff moored to Jack’s dock which he’d picked up cheap soon after coming to Pelican Road, and in it he and Pe
g had explored the coastline north and south of the town, the waterways of the Mungo drainage and the inshore lagoons.
A couple of days after Vera showed up during my visit to Port Mungo, she suggested that Peg and I go out in the boat with her. Jack of course would be working in his studio all day. So we set out at dawn, the three of us. We crossed the bay and came out into the open sea, where Vera opened the throttle and the boat shot forward, creating a great wash behind us and shattering the trembling stillness of the early morning. I was far from easy with the speed of the boat, not least because Vera was red-eyed and unsteady, having been up till all hours drinking. The sun was just over the horizon, a pair of pelicans drifted by and Peg was hanging over the bow raking the water for dolphin and manatee. Twenty minutes later Vera swung the boat back towards the coast. The narrow fringe of white beach and palms had given way to a dense hedge of tangled mangrove. We came in fast towards it, the bow lifting and the keel bumping, and it was only seconds before we went in that I saw the channel through the mangrove opening before us. The two of them were grinning at me, this an old joke apparently, and though I’d kept my mouth shut my white-knuckled grip on the seat told them of my mounting apprehension as we hurtled towards what looked like certain destruction.
The channel was narrow and serpentine, but Vera slung the boat through it at speed and our wash went lapping through the mangrove and raised heron and ibis, which flapped off languidly from the canopy. For a few hellish moments a thick cloud of mosquitoes blotted out all vision and had me dementedly flapping at my face, much to Peg’s continued amusement. The channel grew more narrow still, and Vera at last slowed the boat and cut the motor. All at once the humidity descended on us like a warm wet blanket.
Port Mungo Page 10
