It has the feeling of a nightmare for me now, the hour I spent in that hotel room at the Park Plaza. There is a lurid, unreal quality to it, and I remember it in some detail. Gerald was not surprised to see me. He was brisk and urbane as he met me at the elevator and brought me into his room, and had me sit in a wing chair, while he sat across from me on the other side of a glass-topped table with his back to the window. The room faced north, and I had a fine view of Central Park. The leaves were changing colour, and an endless carpet of red and yellow and gold was spread before me as far as the eye could see. Gerald took control of the conversation at once. He asked me how I thought Jack had changed in the years he’d been away, and I knew what he was getting at; like me he’d realized Jack had deliberately destroyed in himself the forms of polite social behaviour we’d been taught as children. Gerald said that presumably he regarded them as vestiges of the English way of life, and abandoned them so as to embrace—what, exactly?—a pure primal existence which allowed him to fulfil his creative urges? This was how Gerald expressed it, and his words dripped contempt and condescension.
Certainly I had glimpsed something of what he was talking about during my days in Port Mungo, and again when Jack and Peg visited me here in the city. But I’d thought it a matter of manners, merely, and I said this to Gerald: What does it matter if his manners are uncouth? He’s an artist, for god’s sake.
My brother took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. As he did so there was a good deal of frowning, and he asked if I didn’t suspect it went much deeper than that. How, deeper? I said. Oh, this foolhardy adventure of his, this idiotic notion that for his art to flourish he must remove himself to some backward place where he wouldn’t be distracted by the complications of urban life. What a delusion that always turns out to be!
I pointed out that Jack had worked hard in Port Mungo. I found Gerald’s attitude unpleasantly patronizing, and I was irritated. He said he didn’t doubt that Jack had been working hard, but in the absence of institutions and art galleries and museums and so on—in other words, with nothing of the culture to guide him—could he have improved very much? He replaced his spectacles and said: Gin, what nature can teach us is quickly exhausted.
I didn’t believe him capable of judging such a thing. I asked him if he was saying that Jack’s life had been a waste.
—If he thinks he can make worthwhile art outside the Western tradition then yes, his life’s been a waste.
—That’s why you’re taking his daughter away?
Now we’d arrived at the crux of it. He stared out of the window. As with the artist, he murmured, so with the man.
Suddenly I thought of Vera, who early on had recognized the limitations of Port Mungo, its dreary sameness, day by sundrenched day, the utter monotony of the tropical existence and all that that monotony brought in its train. She’d found in travel, in exploration of Central America and the Caribbean islands, an antidote to the lassitude she was wise enough to fear.
Gerald’s thoughts seemed to have travelled in the same channel as my own.
—He couldn’t keep Vera down there.
I watched him carefully. He was coming to the point. He told me then exactly why he was taking Anna away. In Vera’s absence, he said, in his loneliness and frustration, Jack had indulged a primitive physical reflex. A primitive reflex, Gin!
And then at last I saw what he was driving at. With utter disbelief I listened to him saying that Jack had recognized under his own roof a girl just coming to sexual maturity, and had gone to her room at night.
—No, Gerald!
—Listen to me!
He was not specific. He could not tell me when it had begun, but he knew what it looked like once it had begun. He had seen it in his practice, he said. It was not as rare as I might think. A lot of it in Suffolk. The pattern was invariable in such cases. What cases? Paternal incest.
—Rubbish!
—Listen to me, Gin. The girl adored her father. He would have spoken quietly to her in the darkness. He would have made the arguments such men always make: There is nothing wrong with this, it’s nice, it feels good. And then, when it was over: But you must not tell anyone.
I was shaking my head, I denied absolutely what he was saying to me. You can imagine it having the structure of any clandestine relationship, Gin. You can imagine him convincing the child that it was their special game, this secret thing they did, and teaching her how to enjoy it. How could she resist him, what defences did she have, once he had corrupted her? He was her father. He made her. He had the right, or so he would tell himself.
Still I refused to accept it. I stood up and listened with mounting horror as Gerald talked, his tone as clinical as if he were describing the progress of a disease, which I suppose in his mind he was. On he droned, his voice level and cool, explaining that her conscience would disturb her more and more, and yes, she would tell him it was bad, what they were doing. But how could it be bad? he would say, she must not care what other people thought, because other people were stupid, they wouldn’t understand—
—Who told you all this? I cried.
Little Anna looked up in alarm, and I sank to the floor and told her that everything was all right.
—It doesn’t matter who told me.
I suppose I should simply have walked out, but I was strangely transfixed by these lies. I sat down again. She was entirely in his power, he said. Her shame put her in his power. And as the months passed this squalid drama played out perhaps every night, perhaps every few nights, perhaps only once or twice a month, it doesn’t matter, the effect was the same. The girl would have become very deeply depressed indeed. Feelings of utter worthlessness. The sense of being dirty, filthy, all the time. Her mother was present, for part of it at least. She knew what was going on, at some level, so she drank all the harder to keep the knowledge of what Jack was doing well below the surface—
—That’s enough, Gerald!
—That’s why she killed herself. And that’s why I’m taking Anna away. To protect her from him.
We were both suddenly drained, shocked, shamed by what he’d said. It was hard for us to look at each other, as though we too had been contaminated. I stared out of the window at the rotting, dying leaves.
—Who told you this?
He would not say. Then all at once I had the answer.
—Johnny Hague told you!
His eyes flickered to mine and I knew I was right. Oh thank god. I was flooded with relief. Oh thank god. I tried to explain to Gerald that Johnny Hague was not to be trusted, that all this poisonous stuff issued from a love affair gone bad, that Johnny hated Jack and had spread malicious rumours about him, there wasn’t a grain of truth in any of it—Gerald wouldn’t listen! He had no more time, the car was waiting downstairs, they had a plane to catch. I implored him to hear me out. No, he would not discuss it any further. He had told me why he was taking Anna away, and now they must leave.
So I sat in that hotel room high over Central Park and watched as he carried Anna off, knowing that it was Gerald’s mistake but that I could never say anything about it to Jack, because he knew it too and yet had done nothing.
The day Jack told Anna that he didn’t believe her sister killed herself, she didn’t come back to the house for dinner. I suspected she was staying at Eduardo’s place. Jack and I sat in the sitting room that evening, the pair of us deflated and depressed. All at once Jack stirred, and stood up, and told me to come upstairs with him, he was going to show me the portrait. Strange, he said, as we climbed the stairs, how it had begun to draw him back at night, this was not the first time, despite his having concluded the painting was turning out a failure. He felt a rare ambivalence towards that painting. It was all wrong, so why did he keep going back to it? He did not turn it to the wall, or destroy it, but kept it out, rather, and chalked up its attraction to some mystery of the art-making process, and god knows, he said, he had not come to the end of mysteries in that department, no artist does.
&nb
sp; We reached the studio. I have said that Anna was beautiful. But at the same time she was gaunt, and gauche, and it was all there in the picture. And it occurred to me, as Jack carried it to the window, and stood it on the sill, so it was framed by the night sky, that the power of the painting had its source in the very contradiction that rendered the girl beautiful—her beauty only apparent, I mean, because it was conflicted, because the glacial stagnation of a classical kind of beauty was here disturbed by subterranean clashes and fissures: Anna, in crisis, became beautiful, when otherwise she would be merely gawky—was this it? I said this to Jack as I gazed at the painting, and he said he wished he could ask Vera the question, no doubt she had already thought the same thing about someone else and reached conclusions for which he would spend five years groping.
It was an unfinished full-length portrait of Anna standing against a hanging drape of black velvet. It reminded me of a Venus I once saw in the Louvre, a Cranach I think. Her body was slightly torqued from the true, one bent arm lifted, pressed close to her head, the hand clamped to the back of the neck. The other hand was pulled behind her back as though chained or cuffed to the wall. Jack turned off the lights and we moved to the other side of the room. The low glow of the city created an atmosphere in which the pallor of the painted skin seemed to absorb what little illumination spilled in from the outside, then gave it back into the ambient dusk with an effect not unlike moonlight, a cold, pale radiance. Naked, she was like a long white flower, a slender androgynous creature straight out of the pages of romantic mythology.
And I remembered a night in Port Mungo. Jack and Peg loved the wild weather, and this one night we heard the wind rising offshore, and by the time we had made our way to the beach the palms were already flapping and flailing, taking the brunt of the gale not with their trunks but with their leaves. Peg flung off all her clothes and ran into the surf, where she tossed and plunged like a dolphin. It was midnight. The wind died as suddenly as it had arisen, and then the moon emerged from between high clouds pushing west towards the mountains. The sea slackened to a light chop which broke foaming on the sand as the night sky turned dark blue and filled with stars. Peg rose up in the shallow water and waded in towards the shore, lanky slim-hipped creature with her skin bleached out by the moonlight, and it was the same body I saw in Jack’s studio that night.
Chapter Fourteen
It had been raining steadily for two days. The sky was dark, and small lakes had formed in the streets, forcing pedestrians to pick their way along the sidewalk with some care so as to avoid being befouled by passing traffic. My cab splattered along Houston Street like an amphibious landing vehicle. I had him make a left on Lafayette and put me down at the door. How pleasant to get out of the filthy weather and into the wood-panelled warmth of a familiar cocktail bar. Eduardo was already there. A warm embrace, a tender kiss: I was fond of that man. I had loved him once. He had money now but the manner in which he lived had not changed at all, his loft was part lumberyard, part body shop, and a Franklin stove his only concession to comfort. He had long since left Mercer Street and now occupied the ground floor of an ill-serviced building next to a garage on a forgotten street south of Canal, close to the Holland Tunnel, within earshot of the West Side Highway.
—So, I said, as I struggled out of my raincoat.
—So.
My old friend was unshaven, in a creased leather coat and a baseball cap, having come from his loft where his work, he said, was going as well as could be expected considering he had an important show next month.
—How are you feeling?
He spread his arms wide and his shirt stretched taut across the bony chest, the hard belly.
—Never better.
I wanted to talk to him about Anna, of course. After the last session with Jack she had left the house and not come back. That was three days ago. We assumed she was with him, and he confirmed that yes, she was. This arrangement was far from ideal from our point of view, but there was nothing to be done. I tried not to show my concern, though he must have been aware of how we might feel. I think he simply didn’t care. He began to pick away at this aspect of the girl being here, that her inquiries into her history should bring her to America. That traffic, he remarked, normally goes the other way. I was not sure what he was getting at, Eduardo’s mind had at times a labyrinthine cast to it, but there was meat enough in the subject of Anna in America to keep him rumbling and mulling for the duration of a dry martini. It occurred to me that he was avoiding the conversation he knew we must have, so I interrupted, and asked if she ever talked about Peg; and to bring the girl’s sister into the conversation like that was to startle a man who could spend an hour thinking about the contents of a pocket of an overcoat not worn since the previous winter.
—You are looking after her, aren’t you? She’s become very fond of you. I think she rather depends on you.
—Oh sure.
—We just found out Gerald told her that Peg killed herself.
He frowned. He picked the olive out of his glass and put it in his mouth. Then, with his eyes on me, he slowly chewed the olive. I felt my words disappearing without trace into the voluminous folds of his mind.
—Did you know that?
He nodded.
—How does she feel about it?
—She doesn’t talk about her feelings.
—Not even to you?
He shook his head. There was something he wasn’t telling me, and I wanted to know what it was. I leaned across the table.
—Eduardo, I said in a low voice, she’s a good girl.
He lifted his big bull head and wiped his mouth, nodding very slightly. I sat back in my chair. Now I understood what was going on. Eduardo was attracted to trashy women, this I had always known. Anna had a loose, louche way about her but she was sound all the way through, not a trashy bone in her body, or not, at least, that I was then aware of. He must have discovered this too late. He’d made a mistake, that’s why he’d agreed to come out and have a drink with me.
—So what happened? Something’s happened.
A quick furtive movement from those bagged and tired eyes. I was right. I suppose I should have been angry with him but what good would that have done? I had no illusions about Eduardo Byrne. I had never approved of this affair with Anna, nor had Jack, but we had not been asked what we thought.
—I’ve got a problem.
—I thought so.
—It’s this boy.
This was exactly what I’d been afraid of. Eduardo was a goat.
—Go on.
—He might show up in the loft.
—And what if Anna’s there?
—That’s the problem.
For a moment he assumed such a hangdog expression that I couldn’t help but laugh. Men are pathetic. So canine in defeat. Either they whimper or they bark and snap. Not Eduardo, though, or not for long. Up came his head, faint gleam of—what, lecher triumphalism?
—Eduardo, come on. You want to hurt her? You know what she’s dealing with.
—But I cannot control him! I never know what he will do next!
A smile darted across his face at the thought of this uncontrollable boy of his, and I realized that my old friend had not changed. I should have known this, and been more strenuous about keeping Anna out of his clutches, for clearly she was only one of several lovers Eduardo was currently fielding. This we didn’t need. At such a delicate juncture in the unfolding relationship of Anna and her father, with the crucial question of Peg’s death having just been broached, this sort of sexual complication was the last thing we needed. I was feeling very cross with him now but I didn’t let him see it, I wanted first to understand the situation. So I ordered more drinks and drew it out of him as you would a splinter from an infected wound.
A month ago he’d met a boy who worked in a restaurant near his building. The boy would come to the loft any hour of the day or night, and if Eduardo didn’t open the door he threw stones at the windows and shouted details o
f their sex life, demanding to be let in for more of the same. All of which was nothing to me, other than that Anna might be there, and given what she was going through I didn’t want her damaged. She was vulnerable, I told him. She was coming to terms with a traumatic event in her early childhood, one that had had the most serious consequences. Besides, she trusted him. Eduardo thought I was being overprotective, but all the same he was worried: not because she was fragile, rather the reverse. He had recognized a steely quality in Anna, he said. She was like her father, she had the seeds of a fanatic in her. It was a Rathbone thing and it made her dangerous.
—Dangerous!
He nodded. I was astonished. I had gone to Eduardo intending to urge him to do no emotional harm to the girl, and here he was telling me that she was the dangerous one!
She was reading in the big room when I got back to 11th Street, and I was relieved she was in our house and nowhere near Eduardo’s loft. I realized that her movements would now acquire a heightened importance for me. When I told Jack my news later that evening he absorbed it wearily. His contempt was withering. His opinion of Eduardo had never been high, and now he condemned him out of hand, not for what he was doing but for the harm it could do to Anna. He said nobody had the right to a pleasure which if discovered would damage another person. I said practically every adulterer in the United States fit that description. Marriages and families were routinely destroyed in just that way.
—Quite, he said.
But it was one thing to make these judgements, another to see your daughter being drawn into a situation of deception and betrayal which had the potential to devastate her, and be unable to do anything about it. We had both intuited this much at least about Anna, that she was not yet a hardened and cynical player, and though Eduardo might have detected steel in her she was not in his league. She may have drowned her puppies, as she’d told Jack a few days earlier, but neither of us believed she was grown up yet, not in matters of sexual love, and still less in the kind of complicated maneuvers with which Eduardo Byrne had long been amusing himself.
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