Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  My father was a gentle, inward man—a carpenter who scraped out a meager living remodeling people’s kitchens, occasionally making a piece of furniture or a wooden toy. Both my parents were determined bohemians who believed in supporting themselves by doing what they loved and would have considered steady jobs a curse. I was only vaguely aware of how hard up we were, but I recall intense discussions about whether it would be cheaper to put up our own vegetables for the winter or to buy frozen ones, and the crisis when my father’s truck needed a new transmission and he had to ask my Uncle Henry for a loan.

  Then, when I was ten, the toys my father had always made for fun, as presents for me, and that he sometimes sold at a shop in our small Maine town, were suddenly discovered—featured in magazines, sought out by stores in Portland and Boston and New York. Those beautifully simple wooden boats and cars and rocking horses, with their bright-painted wheels and knobs and pegs, that began to be made later in the sixties by woodworkers all over New England: my father’s were the first of them. A sign went up on our barn—West Dunster Toy Works—and we became, rather suddenly, prosperous. Neither of my parents had a head for business, so we were never wealthy, but the anguished financial discussions came to an end. We actually paid someone to paint the barn, my father bought a bright red Ford pickup, and my mother acquired not only the 5 x 7 Rolleiflex she had been craving but a new Nikon with all the gadgets.

  My mother was a photographer. She produced artful black-and-white images for Haskell Graphics, a small Boston card company, driving all over Maine in her ancient Volkswagen Beetle—gone for two or three days at a time while my father and I tried to pretend we didn’t absurdly, desperately miss her—looking for what she always called “pretty pitchers,” returning home with stories of terrible back roads, a flock of wild turkeys, a motel keeper who was a dead ringer for Norman Bates. She refused to take her work seriously. The truth was she had started out as a painter, and she had failed. I can barely remember her paintings—mostly quiet watercolor still lifes, I think. She didn’t talk about them, but I was aware that she had destroyed everything after a show at a gallery in Portland that had been a disaster in some way I was never clear about. What I remember is that her determined cheerfulness was dimmed for a while, and that one night I was shocked from sleep by what sounded like hysterical laughter from my parents’ bedroom down the hall, but which, as I listened in puzzlement, I recognized as sobbing.

  But it was not like either of my parents to give in to disappointment. I don’t think my mother ever got over the wreck of her artistic ambitions, but she set herself briskly to the task of becoming a photographer, and her photographs were extraordinary. Pretty is the wrong word for them: they were stern, witty, elegant, controlled—a lot like my mother herself. When she began, we probably just plain needed the money: photography paid, painting didn’t. In the end, I know she grew to love what she did, though it was hard to get her to admit it.

  I grew up living with those two artists, my father working in maple and birch, my mother in silver nitrate and acetate. How could I help but become an artist myself? I was to be a real artist—a painter. Not a Sunday painter, not an illustrator, not a teacher or someone who painted just for fun, but a serious professional who was represented by a good gallery, whose work was collected and bought by museums, who was given solo shows and retrospectives. My parents looked at me—at seven, at twelve, certainly at sixteen—and that was what they saw.

  • • •

  When I surfaced again, I was still in the recovery room, and my mother was still there. She was smiling; her eyes weren’t even red. Had I dreamed her tears? “You came through beautifully, Wynn,” she said, squeezing my hand. “You’ll be up and about in no time.” She kissed my cheek. “I’ll be back in an hour. I’m going down to get some coffee.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Just after sunrise,” she said. “A beautiful, sunny morning.”

  I was wheeled into the private room my parents had paid for. My head pounded. I sucked down a glass of ginger ale through a straw, and took aspirin. A nurse came in and gave me a sponge bath and helped me put on my nightgown—a new, pretty one my mother had brought for me. I realized I was bleeding, hooked up to thick sanitary napkins. I had had stitches, and they hurt. When the nurse helped me out of bed and to the bathroom, I cried from the pain. “You’re all right, honey,” she said. “This too will pass.”

  The effort of emptying my bladder wore me out, and I dozed off again. When I awoke my mother was back, and there was breakfast on a tray. I ate a bite of cold toast, took a sip of tea. My mother bustled around the room, doing God knows what. I saw a pile of magazines, a vase of white roses.

  “How’s the food?”

  “I don’t want it,” I said, and my mother obligingly pushed the tray out of the way.

  “How are you feeling?” she patted my arm. “Still a little dopey? It will wear off. You’ll be back to normal by morning. I’ve brought you some reading matter, and tomorrow I’ll bring you some real food. How would that be?”

  “Great.”

  “You should be able to leave the day after tomorrow, or the day after that. Depending. They’ll want you to get out of bed tomorrow, walk around. That will help you feel better, too—more like yourself.”

  She chattered on. I didn’t listen. I had never been in a hospital before. Lying in the metal bed, drugged and achy, with the blood leaking from between my legs, was even more disorienting than being pregnant. I had wanted to experience it—something—and all I could remember clearly was Natasha and that awful Denisov, then the quick knife in my gut. The rest was a far-off dream: the ambulance, the cold air, the anesthesiologist making me count backwards from twenty, the bright lights. I lay there dozing, waking up to my mother’s hovering presence, the chatter of voices in the hall, the occasional pinging of a bell, the loose skin of my belly under the new nightgown. Where was it all? What had happened? Who was I?

  • • •

  Thinking back now on my childhood, I can see how strange it was—how what I took for granted was in reality very unusual, the kind of upbringing that’s usually given to athletes or dancers. With me, it was art. Art was what my I did, talked, breathed, dreamed. It was what was expected of me: I would win the contests, get the prizes, go away some day to a good art school, become famous. The space behind the kitchen at our house, an airy sunroom, was officially designated my studio—mine to do with whatever I liked, as long as I kept the place neat and organized. “You are an artist, Wynn,” became my parents’ mantra, beginning when I was very young. “And an artist can’t work in chaos.” It took me years to learn that chaos can be the artist’s oxygen.

  I’m not sure how my parents would have coped with a child who didn’t spend long hours absorbed at her easel. What of Kevin and Jeremy, I wondered when I got older: what if either or both of those phantom brothers had loved only biology, or been color-blind, or thought putting colors on canvas was a silly waste of time? It was a question I never thought to ask my parents. And I had another one: Which came first, my talent or their hopes? I won an art contest when I was five: The local drugstore presented me with a ten-dollar bill and a box of chocolates for the best drawing of a Christmas tree in the five-to-eight age group. I still have a finger painting of our cat Snarly dating from soon after my third birthday that perfectly captures his odd little face and oversize ears—obviously a fluke, but there’s no denying it’s a fresh and funny image, one of the few of my own creations that I’ve kept through the years. I can imagine my father seeing it, projecting a proud future for me, and my mother sensing that she had produced a true artist, one who would succeed where she had failed.

  • • •

  My mother supplied me with light reading matter while I was at Edna Quinlan—in case the classes and activities and long gloomy novels didn’t quite do the trick. She would bring me murder mysteries, and The New Yorker and Glamour, a magazine she normally disapproved of as frivolous but now thought would
do me good. “Life after pregnancy!” she said—her theme song—opening it to a picture of a hollow-stomached girl in a bikini. Or she’d hold up a New Yorker cartoon. “That’s a good one, isn’t it?” she’d ask, peering at me hopefully. If she got me to laugh, it made her day. I knew this, and so I tried to laugh as little as possible. It wasn’t difficult.

  She had a gift for providing me with exactly the wrong thing. Once, she brought a folder of paintings by Millet—at the time my favorite artist—and, from behind her back, presented them to me as if they were a magic charm. “I know how much you love these,” she said, her eyes shining. “So I went over to the museum and found this for you.” Then she set the folder on my lap, smiling her wise-mother smile. I looked down at it dumbly, not touching it. Her smile faded only slightly. “I think you’ll enjoy looking at it later,” she said. “If you should get bored.”

  When she was gone, I opened the folder, and the paintings leapt out at me. At first they gave me comfort, those badly reproduced but still powerful images of noble French peasants idealized in golden fields. They were so familiar, so beloved. But the longer I looked at them, the worse I felt. Life wasn’t noble, or simple. The paintings made me think of my childhood, a bygone world that seemed as distant as the world in the Millets, when happiness was as natural to me as my frizzy hair.

  I had discovered Millet in the days when my mother and I used to drive to Boston, and she would drop me off at the museum—the only place she considered safe—while she did business with Haskell Graphics on Marlborough Street. I remember how long those afternoons seemed, how I would wander around the museum in a fog, overwhelmed at first, confused, bored, before I found the Millet room and settled on a bench in the middle as if I’d reached home at the end of a journey. I would look at the paintings, drinking in the gentle light, the muted colors, the emotion. I couldn’t have explained why I liked those little landscapes, the peasants in the fields bending to their work, and why I sat there at times in a state of barely suppressed excitement. To me, those work-roughened faces were beautiful, like the faces of people I knew. They were company. Then my mother would pick me up, and on the way home I’d describe to her what I had seen. This was a ritual, part of my relentless artistic education: What did you like and why did you like it? What were the colors? Describe to me what it looked like.

  There in the Edna Quinlan Home, in another part of Boston, in another world, those innocent little paintings of honest country people were a joke. I leafed through them once, until sadness overwhelmed me, and then I put them away.

  • • •

  My parents were in their mid-forties by the time I was born. I know I was spoiled—they even admitted it, with a kind of pride: Our spoiled only child, they called me with a smile. But my mother always added that I wasn’t “spoiled rotten,” a subtle distinction that apparently meant I wasn’t a hopeless brat. All my life people have told me I’m like my mother, Molly Tynan, not only in looks but in manner. I know I inherited her coloring, her triangular face, her pouty lips and stubborn chin and her wild mop of dark, frizzy hair. I know our voices and our laughs were eerily similar; people were always telling us that. As for the rest of it, even after all these years, I can’t really judge. Certainly, parts of my mother live on in me—maybe not the best parts. Isn’t our whole life an attempt to find out who we are? And in the end doesn’t the self that emerges often turn out to be all too familiar? Aside from her formidable chic, her fashionably toned body, my friend Marietta in middle age is a recognizable version of her mother, right down to her contempt for politics and her forthright laugh and her melodramatic way of sneezing.

  Marietta had been my best friend since we were toddlers. She and her family lived down the road in a rambling ranch house full of children, dogs, a ne’er-do-well uncle, and what I saw as devilish, fascinating untidiness. At my house, Marietta and I would sit together reading on the long modern sofa my father had built, feet to feet, with the sweet, docile cats curled up on our laps. Or we’d head for my father’s workshop and build imaginary villages out of scrap wood and shavings. He always listened to a classical music station from Boston, whistling along softly through his teeth as he worked. He taught us, patiently, to play chess and to use the lathe. My mother would bring us just-baked cookies and mugs of cocoa.

  At Marietta’s we fought over Barbies with her sisters Carrie and Pat, listened to tales of Uncle Al’s buddies at the unemployment office, gobbled down potato chips and Oreos and endless pitchers of Kool-Aid, played softball in the scruffy backyard, wrestled with their mutts Bruno and Bessie. Marietta’s father taught math at the high school, and he graded papers at the kitchen table, yelling at us from time to time to shut the hell up so he could hear himself think. Her mother was a skinny, red-haired dynamo, opinionated, intrusive, full of jokes, unrattled by the demands of five children. A household more different from mine was hard to imagine, and yet I was at their house almost as often as I was home, and my parents and Marietta’s were old friends.

  From the time I was eleven or twelve, I had adored Marietta’s older brother David. He was a tall, serious boy, freckled and red-haired like all the Donnellys—and, to me, devastatingly handsome. For a while, the summer I was fifteen and he was seventeen, he used to take me to movies and afterwards, in the front seat of his old Valiant, he taught me how to French kiss. In the fall, he went away to the state college, and it was abruptly over. I wrote him long reckless letters that he wisely didn’t answer. By Thanksgiving I heard he had a new girlfriend. My heart was officially broken, though I think what I minded most was the end of the cozy fantasies I had spun with Marietta, of being sisters-in-law, of our children being cousins, of living on the same street forever and ever.

  I loved West Dunster. Despite the fact that, eventually, I thought only of escaping it, part of me, even now, is really content only when I’m in Maine, in the midst of those vast pine forests and the endless frigid winters. The place is in my blood, like it or not. But from the time I was little, the biggest treat in my life was to be taken to a city, any city, but if possible to New York, where my only surviving grandparent, my father’s mother, lived in Greenwich Village. I adored New York, revered it, thrilled to the color, the glitter, the noisy uncertainty of the crowded streets. It had everything our Maine town lacked.

  We never stayed in hotels, of course; we squeezed in with my grandmother at her tiny apartment on Cornelia Street. Her name was Anna Rosario Tynan, and I called her Anna Rosa. She had been widowed for many years; I never knew my Grandfather Tynan, who had married Anna Rosario, a smart young immigrant girl working as a tailor at a shop in Portland, where he was carrying on the family hardware business. My grandmother must have been an exotic addition to the stolid, old–New England Tynan family, bringing not only homemade gnocchi and a tomato sauce that started with beef knuckles roasting in the oven, but a wild, gutsy glamour. I saw pictures of her when she was young—short and plump and pretty, vivid in a picture hat and a coat with a fox collar, or in a sundress holding my Uncle Henry on one hip, my father on the other, her head thrown back in laughter. There’s one great shot of her wearing a low-cut gypsy blouse standing beside my gaunt, bearded grandfather against the backdrop of Tynan & Sons hardware store on Main Street. She looks like someone who has been cut out and pasted in.

  When her husband died and her sons were grown, Anna Rosa surprised everyone by moving to New York, where, until her eyes began to fail, she supported herself again as a tailor—she loved the work—for a shop on the Upper East Side. She used to make dresses for me when I was small, beautifully smocked, silky things that in rural Maine I had no occasion to wear. My mother folded them away in white tissue paper in a dresser in the attic. I used to beg to be allowed to put them on, and once or twice my mother let me dress up in one so she could take my picture: a little barefoot princess—barefoot because I had no shoes that matched the elegance of those dresses. Then they went back into the drawer, while I sulked and, one horrible afternoon, threw myself do
wn on the attic floor in a full-fledged tantrum that my parents still talked about with awe when I was in my teens.

  It was a tight fit for all of us at Anna Rosa’s apartment, but I would have been as upset as my grandmother if we had stayed at a hotel. Incredibly—she was well into her seventies—she lived in a fourth-floor walk-up. Her back windows looked out on the garden of a restaurant around the corner on Bleecker Street. She liked the romance of that: she used to take me out with her to sit on the fire escape where we could gaze down on the red umbrellas and white tables while the laughter and chatter of the diners floated up to us. There was a dry cleaner on the first floor, and the steamy smell of perchlorethylene used to make its way upstairs, especially in the summer. I can’t pass a dry cleaner now without a vivid memory of my grandmother’s firmly permanented gray hair, her closet with its bright dresses, her tiny refrigerator crammed with food.

  When we visited, my parents slept on the pull-out sofa in the living room. I slept with Anna Rosa in her lumpy iron bed, and she would talk to me until I fell asleep—rambling, half-whispered tales of her girlhood in Naples, her life back in Maine, her job at the tailor shop. She had a gentleman friend named Roy, a shy, pudgy, retired butcher with a thin gray mustache, who lived on the third floor. He had a passion for musicals, and when Anna Rosa and I sat on the fire escape we could hear his hi-fi downstairs playing Oklahoma! and Guys and Dolls. For my fifth birthday, he treated us all to a matinee of My Fair Lady. Sometimes he took us to dinner; he always wanted to go to the restaurant around the corner, the one with the garden, but Anna Rosa refused to eat there: She said it would spoil it.

  We spent nearly every Christmas in New York, and always went uptown on the subway to High Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the color and the lights, the incense, the Latin, and the choir all exhilarated me. Once I became so excited it made me ill. I turned green and broke out in a cold sweat; my grandmother saw it coming and, for some reason, grabbed her handbag and held it open: I threw up directly into it, an event that Anna Rosa recalled for years afterward with helpless laughter.