We sat there in silence, holding hands. I was tired and sore, but the ride had sweated all the bitterness out of me. It was just beginning to get dark, a sunset starting over the World Trade Center, the sky turning rosy. I didn’t know exactly what time it was, whether I had missed my train or not. I didn’t care. I was so glad to be with Patrick, nothing else mattered. I leaned my head on his shoulder.
“Wynn,” he said.
“Mmm.” I was half-asleep.
“I’ve been thinking. These weekends are killing me. Me commuting up there, you coming down here, everything revolving around the train, or what the traffic is like on I-95. It’s not a healthy way to live—I don’t think I can take it any more.”
I raised my head and looked at him, my heart pounding. “What does that mean?” I dreaded hearing his answer, but I was ready for it. I was ready to fight. I had no intention of letting him go again. But, to put it bluntly, he owed me one. I knew that if he wanted to be gone, there was no way I could hold him. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I don’t want you to leave me.”
“I’m not going to leave you, Patrick.”
“I mean ever. I mean Sunday nights, Monday mornings.” He put his arms around me. “I guess I’m saying let’s get married. Let’s quit talking about everything and just do it. Now. Soon.”
We were married six weeks later on his rooftop terrace. Patrick wore a dashing white suit, I wore a silk dress that matched my turquoise beads. A goldsmith friend of Patrick’s made rings for us. The Italian restaurant on our corner catered. It began to rain right after the ceremony, and we had to grab everything and dash inside, but it didn’t matter. There weren’t many of us, but nearly everyone we loved was there—Kathleen and Nick, Mark and Annie, Henry and Suzanne, Patrick’s old pals Clem and Richie from art school with their wives, his good friend Wayne who has been his assistant for all these years, Santo and Doug, a few friends of mine from Boston. Our old pals Gwen and Andrew came from San Francisco. Uncle Austin traveled down on the train, almost unrecognizable in a suit and looking reluctantly pleased. Marietta flew in with her husband, Gregory, the winemaker, on his private plane. Hannah and Jay drove up from the Cape bringing flowers from their garden.
Kathleen stood beside me as I had stood beside her, and when the ceremony was over, first I kissed my husband, and then I kissed my daughter.
Only Rachel and Will couldn’t come, but after the wedding Patrick and I flew to London for a week; it was Patrick’s first real vacation since his long-ago trip to Mexico. We stayed with them and their children for a few days at their house in Chelsea, off the King’s Road. It seemed fitting to have a honeymoon in the city where I had fled to escape my sorrows. We visited St. Clement’s, and Patrick’s gallery on Blenheim Crescent, and the pub where I learned to play darts—how charmed all my old haunts seemed now, suffused with happiness—and we went to the zoo and saw the lions, but they refused to roar while we were there.
“You’re an amazing woman,” Patrick said. “You have even tamed the wild beasts.”
We stood there on the grass with our bag of popcorn, kissing like teenagers.
• • •
We live together, Patrick and I, in what I think of as passionate contentment. It has been hard-won. We still have rough times, when the old resentments and failures of trust return; I never, ever take what we have for granted. I find myself stunned sometimes by the simple happiness of a normal life. But, just as I’m learning, at last, to paint in a way that satisfies me, I think I’m also learning what happiness is made of. It’s not crazy euphoria, and it’s not an impossible ideal, and it’s not self-sacrifice. It’s just this, the days passing, work being done, quiet affection that grows and becomes a habit. It’s a framed photograph on a wall, it’s a particular shade of ochre, it’s a dog asleep under a table, a hunk of rusted metal, a box of old toys addressed to Portland, Maine. It’s lying in my husband’s arms at the end of a full day—tired, hopeful, alive.
Sometimes I have a need for my daughter that can’t be satisfied with phone calls or letters or visits. Patrick and I talk sometimes about moving to Maine, maybe in a year or so. We’d keep an apartment here in the city, but pack up most of our goods, our work, Dougal and Spark, our double lifetimes of memories, and head for those cold mountains and pine forests, maybe up near Sebago Lake, where Mark says we can probably find a few acres, and Patrick can build the giant factory of a studio that he craves, and Kathleen and I can make up for the lost years.
• • •
One of the first things I did when I returned to New York was to lug my portable easel to Cornelia Street in the Village, to my grandmother’s old building. The candle shop was gone, replaced by a Moroccan restaurant. Anna Rosa’s windows were curtained in white, and the name on the doorbell was now BRADDOCK. As I stood there, a red tourist bus came down the street, and I could hear the loudspeaker giving the history of the neighborhood, something about Cornelia Street in the twenties, the jazz club on the corner.
I set up my easel. Except for the details, the building was unchanged. I had no trouble remembering it as it had been forty years ago, when my father had lifted me up so I could ring the bell. “It’s us, Anna Rosa!” I would cry, and she would call “Us? Who on earth is us? A pack of wild dogs?” and buzz us in. I smiled, recalling a winter day long ago, one of our Christmas visits, when my parents and I had been out somewhere, at a museum, most likely, or ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, and we were returning to my grandmother’s place at dusk. The street was magical then, the street-lights golden, Christmas carols piped from some store or other, my parents on either side of me holding my hands. I remember my mother looking up at my grandmother’s windows and then bending down to hug me, holding me tight, kissing my cheek. “Remember this, sweetie,” she said. “Don’t forget one single thing. This is the way life should be. Remember it forever.”
Her words came back to me while I painted. The years fell away, and the rest of the street, the passersby and the cars, the sirens and car alarms, the noise of the traffic over on Sixth Avenue, the people who stopped to ask me questions. I painted all day; toward evening I stepped back from my easel and looked at what I had done. And there it was: my grandmother’s apartment building in all its homely glory, the light falling as I remembered it, the melancholy beauty of the scene intact. There were no people in the painting, but somehow they were all present: my grandmother with her arms outstretched, my father’s tall presence beside me, and my mother with her face alight, telling me to remember it all, remember everything, keep it forever.
• • •
And so who am I now?
I am Wynn Tynan, the wife of Patrick Foss. I’m the mother of Kathleen Erling Hayes, and—soon—grandmother of the baby she and Nick are expecting. I still teach, and I hope I always will—at the moment, I work a couple of days a week at a school in the Village, teaching painting to children with behavioral problems. I live with my husband on Mercer Street, and I work at my paintings in a corner of his mammoth studio downstairs on the first floor. We’re not a logical pair of artists to share a space: a sculptor who works noisily, on a grand scale, often with a team of assistants, welding enormous chunks of metal together, making pieces that have to be lifted on cranes and taken out on a truck—and a rather demure oil painter whose largest work has been, perhaps, two feet by three.
When the dust and the din drive me crazy, I retreat upstairs or take the dogs out for a walk. But Patrick doesn’t like to be away from me, even while we work, and I love it that I can look up from my canvas and see my husband across the room. I was right, he’s no longer working in copper and steel, now he’s combining steel with wood, welding the pieces of metal together, then incorporating smooth wooden shapes to create large, complex forms that suggest monolithic figures, gods or apes, or whatever the beholder wishes them to be. An artist’s mission is to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations. That is what he still believes, and tha
t’s what his work says to anyone who looks at it.
Who am I? It’s the last, the most important question, the one with the best answer, and now that I’ve written it all down, it has come clearer—just as you said it would, Kathleen. I’m a woman who took a wrong turn, then another—an endless highway of them, God knows—and who, miraculously, found her way back home. I’m a woman who has taught herself how to ask questions, and to answer them as honestly as she can, and to forgive herself when she gets them wrong, and to forgive the past when it threatens to take over. I had to learn all that, but I think most of all I had to teach myself to separate love from grief, and to believe that, while it’s true that sorrow can reveal to us who we are, sometimes happiness can, too.
Epilogue
Molly Erling Hayes
Born April 3, 1999
This story is for your mother—and for you, Molly,
with love.
Five Questions Page 27
