However, at this stage no one was going to push him around. There were rules he was prepared to trample, and food rules were some of them; they were his damn rules after all. L’état c’est moi, said Louis XIV, and Cromwell had said it better the year before to the Rump Parliament: “Ye have sat too long for any good ye have done, in the name of God now go”—as fine a run of monosyllables (all but one word!) as there is in the English language. Burke could not have written that sentence. When you start a century with Shakespeare, you definitely have a leg up on strong language. After that, decay into forced rhythm and flatulence, or as the Greeks called it, “frigidity.” Enough!
Anyway, he was not condoning, let alone advocating, anarchy; he was just bending the rule on food. He knew he had to make himself eat, but he was taking a one-day furlough. Today it would be water, tomorrow he would eat what he could swallow. But meanwhile he was wasting time. He needed to get to work. And in fact, here he should pick up his pace while he could, because the signs were he would not be able to go on a whole lot longer. He needed another character, but he had time for only one more. It would be Tim Callum, the artist whose sketch Braddis had trashed.
Private Tim Callum
ARTIST
Tim Callum, born January 6, 1899, oldest son of Yarmouth fisherman, aspiring, basically untaught painter. Drafted into Norfolks, March 1, 1917. Mother had died when he was ten. Father dour, silent, decent, had struggled hard for the four children. Dour silence passed from father to son, but from the earliest age a crayon in the hand, and an ease in making any shape— shading, perspective, point of view, human figure, animals, landscape, seascape—came to him quite naturally. He could copy anything, and in doing it he could see what the artist had intended and what skills or tricks he had used to get there. The hint of larger dimensions came through for him from an elderly spinster teacher at the local school, Miss Ann Houghton, the year after his mother died. She had marched him off in virtual silence to the public library, where she was clearly a respected figure; she went up to the desk and was handed two books they had been holding for her. She took him over to a table, and opened both books to particular pages: “Here,” she said finally, “look at these. This one is a painting by an American, Fitz Hugh Lane, of a place called Brace’s Rock on the Atlantic coast of Massachusetts. He painted the same scene at least three times in 1864. He was paralyzed in the legs as a boy and often had to be propped up in a boat to paint the sea scenes that he loved. This one is by our own Turner, perhaps our greatest painter; it’s called Wreck Buoy, and he first painted it in about 1807 and came back to it forty years later. Pretty much the same Atlantic water. Do you like them?”
“Yes, I like them both a lot.”
“I knew you would; we both like them a lot. But do they look like any sea you or your father has seen?”
“Not really. This one may be too rough, and the other too flat.”
“Do they look like anything the painters had seen?”
“Maybe something they had seen with a special eye, not an everyday eye.”
“Exactly so. You’re an artist, not just a painter. An artist is someone who makes us see things we wouldn’t otherwise have seen for ourselves. You’re getting old enough not just to copy other painters’ pictures, but to paint your own.”
The next year he had done a pencil drawing of his father at home after the day’s haul, staring into the fire. It was basically a picture of weariness in the bone, one arm hooked and hanging over the top of the cane chair, collarless shirt open and hanging over the pants, neck muscles stringy and corded around the clavicle, boots on the hearth and socked feet extended, eyes flat and staring unseeing into the flames. He took it to school and showed it to Miss Houghton, though she was no longer teaching him; he waited outside her classroom and took it in to her at the end of the day, putting it on the desk without a word. She looked at it a long time, and eventually said, “It’s a wonderful drawing, Tim; it’s everything I hoped of you.”
“Do you think it’s grim?”
“I think it’s sad,” she said.
“I think everything I paint or draw for myself will be hard and grim,” he said, correcting her without emphasis.
“I think it will be for a while,” she said and handed the picture back to him. It’s not just that the boy has grey seawater in his veins, she thought; he has a whole freezing, featureless ocean of it, and he must find a way to let it out.
Miss Houghton had seen, and could see, a lot, but never anything like this, he often thought, looking out over the desolation of the Ypres salient beyond the Norfolks’ trench. Still, it was not so bad. His father had quietly approved his decision: “Fair enough,” he had said. “Go and do your bit.” Tim had been able to send some money home from his pittance of a pay packet each month—more useful to his dad than the time he had spent watching his younger brother and sisters. He could live here all right. He needed nothing but sketchbook and pencil, and a little set aside in case he got a bit of leave and a chance to go somewhere and paint. In the meantime he was learning things; he had learnt to admire Lieutenant Dodds and to hate Sergeant Braddis.
MacIver now had the players he needed to mount his last movement. He went off to mouth some more toast, and varied the honey and tea with some hot chocolate, dunking the one in the other. Then more of the Oldies and Goodies, music and the single malt. Tonight they played Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, Ax-Kim-Ma. “Seven letters encompassing a trinity of musical perfection,” he announced to the room, as though he were their agent introducing them from the stage. Four movements, not a clunker among them, but the one he would follow closest was the slow one, another instance of hesitancy growing to assertiveness. In this case, the assertiveness came, MacIver believed, from an unusually frequent use of repetition, the same note struck again and again in each stage of the progression of the theme, at first tentatively but building to the point of relentlessness, especially in the piano. The piece is close to the high mark of Beethoven’s best, but MacIver thought it might also be an indication of his growing deafness. When they came to the composer’s rooms after his death, they found amid the general mess that the strings in his piano had been broken and sprung in tangles above the frame, from his repeated hammering on the keys, again and again, to make him hear himself. Might this not be a case where the involuntary mannerism of frustration had been transformed into the device of a musical and moving insistence?
MacIver went to bed, cautiously, and lay there remembering the first time he met his wife, Margaret, that recurrent and time-worn refrain of the war-torn. He met her first at the Gordon Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, in the fall of 1947, his second year as a professor at Columbia after his release from the navy. In a literal sense, he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. A friend had told him about an exhibition of World War I photographs in midtown. There were meant to be some hitherto unknown amateur ones by soldiers serving in the trenches; one of them was said to be a “Wilfred Owen with a camera.” The trouble was the show was over, and it had not been at the Gordon Gallery, as MacIver had been told, but at the Goreham Gallery two blocks farther east.
MacIver had gone first to the Gordon Gallery at twelve-thirty on a Saturday afternoon, and it had been still closed, but due to open at one o’clock. The sign outside had said nothing about photographs; it advertised new paintings by Margaret Westleigh. Looking through the glass door, he could see the paintings on the wall to the right, but sitting on the sofa with her back to them was a high-breasted young woman with a lot of rich brown hair cascading in waves over her shoulders. She was looking up and a little to the right and seemed to be studying another painting on the wall in front of her, which he could not see. But her absorption left him free to study her unobserved. To this day, if he were a painter himself, he could make a completely accurate representation of her as he saw her then. Her legs were crossed, and the light along the line of her raised chin was reproduced exactly on the three and a half inches of trim left ankle showing
below the long, flared skirt. One black leather pump dangled off her toes, the heel pointing at the floor. Perhaps he moved and caught her eye, or else the force of his scrutiny pulled her attention to him, but after what he thought must have been several minutes, she turned and saw him. He could not tell if she was aware of his watching her for so long, but if so, she showed no irritation or surprise. She took his presence in with the same calm consideration she was giving the picture, and instead of waving him away, stood up and moved gracefully to the door.
“World War One photos?” he had asked.
“Photos?” she had repeated. “Not here.” A pause before she remembered. “Ah, yes, I think you want the Goreham show, a couple of blocks down on the right. But haven’t they finished?”
“Quite possibly they have. All my information seems wrong so far. I was told they were here. If they’re still at the Goreham, would they be closed too? I thought they opened at noon.”
“Yes, I think you might be right there. We don’t open till one.”
“Well, I had better go and check them out,” he said a little lamely. “These seem interesting,” he added, nodding towards the paintings on the far wall.
“I hope so,” she said, with only the trace of a smile.
He had thanked her, and dutifully gone down to the Goreham. She was right: no more World War I photos, he was a week late. They had moved on to a gallery in Washington. Maybe he could pursue them there? Very possibly, he had said. At the moment he found himself more interested in the show at the Gordon. But first he would get a beer.
The door to the Gordon Gallery was open when he returned, and the young woman still had the place to herself. She was busying herself at the desk in the alcove, and looked up when he entered. Try as he might, then and later, he could not read anything into her pleasant greeting.
“No World War One?” she asked.
“No, apparently it’s started a new campaign in Washington. But I thought I would come back here and look at these paintings a little closer up.”
“The Goreham’s loss is our gain,” she said, but not flirting; she was already back among her papers. There was nothing for it but to look at the paintings.
He thought that the paintings, now that he attended to them properly, were very fine. They walked a slightly discomforting line between the inside and outside worlds. The viewer was always outside, looking into a room, or some kind of inhabited space. There was sometimes a stone wall or mullioned window alongside him, on two or three even a climbing rose or creeper, but the view of the picture was always into an interior, where, however, the light was never directed for the viewer’s benefit. There were shadowy figures, sometimes, in the inside space, not necessarily in the background, but the band of light looked past them, just as it did past the photograph or small figurine or bowl of flowers on the table against the wall. The effect on the viewer was of being excluded from a life being lived; when he later read the blurbs on the brochure, he found that a distinguished critic had said that “the paintings are of deeply haunted spaces, where figures and objects have their own full sense of belonging, which the viewer, however intently he looks, can never completely enter: we are always being tactfully reminded that, in any complete sense, we are outside ‘true’ history. . . .”
MacIver went to the desk and asked for a price list, and some information about the artist. The young woman handed him the two brochures with a smile. There was one recent small painting entitled James Merrill’s Birdcage and Ms. The shadow of a bird in its cage fell across the open page of the book, on which verses, phrases, and half lines were written in the young poet’s beautiful handwriting at apparently haphazard angles to one another. The composition of the whole page made a kind of mosaic of poetry. Surprisingly, MacIver knew the photograph from which the painting had been made. He had given a talk at a university in the early spring on oral history and its limitations; James Merrill, maybe still an undergraduate, had attended the talk and come up to speak to him afterwards, and followed it up, with his lovely courtesy, by sending the photograph he had taken, a set of variations on the theme of the fleeting held captive. What had struck him was MacIver’s insistence in the course of his talk that we must not assume that oral history ever gives us the whole history, “any more than the ornithologist, who records a snatch of birdsong, has caught the bird.”
The painter had honored the theme, but not in any slavish way. The translation from black and white to color had allowed the artist to play further with textures. The light from the open window was filtered through a fold of lace curtain, whose swaying shadow played with the others on the book and the table. It was a lovely, devoted piece of work; and looking for the ominous red dot on the price list, he saw that it was still available and that he could just afford it. He was very excited about it, and turned for the first time to the brochure to find out more about the artist. Before he could start reading about her, he was pulled up short by another photograph on the front page: the young woman behind the desk was Margaret Westleigh. He got past the first irrational flicker of indignation (had he not been duped in some way?), and read on for the conventional facts (Slade School of Art in Oxford; exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, Zurich, New York, Santa Fe, etc.; works bought by National Portrait Gallery, London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Harvard University . . . ). Plenty of discriminating buyers, but not many large corporate ones; her works may have been too intimate and on too small a scale for the boardroom. Their loss! Well, now he would be a discriminating buyer himself.
He went to the desk, and said, trying to keep the note of accusation out of his voice, “You’re Margaret Westleigh.”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “I would like to buy number fifteen, if it’s still available. I have the photograph, and I’d like to mate it with the painting. I think it’s an extremely loving and imaginative extension of it. How did you get it, by the way?”
“My parents have a house next to his parents in the south of France. We were both visiting at the same time, and we met there. He seemed to me the most remarkable man, and scarily bright. Afterwards, he sent me a postcard of the photo with a reference to something he thought I would enjoy. I forgot the reference, but I loved the picture and thought I would do this small painting of it in his honor. And you, how did you get yours?”
MacIver explained, and went on: “But it’s a private thing. Perhaps you want to keep it.”
“No,” she laughed. “I just want to keep the postcard. But I’m glad you like the painting so much.”
“I’m delighted with it,” he said. “Do you own this gallery, too?”
“Good heavens, no! It’s Sally Gordon’s. Her assistant is getting married today, and Sally’s at the wedding, so I said I would mind the store. I wanted to take a fresh look at some of these pictures hanging here in neutral space; I’m considering letting in more light on my next crop.”
He was shocked. “Why change anything?” he said, instantly regretting the heavy note of Caledonian gallantry.
She was amused at his fervor, but he was looking at her very straight.
“My name is Robert MacIver,” he said, handing her his check. “Would you allow me to celebrate this big event for me, by having dinner with me tonight?” His eyes never left her face, and the truth was she had no plans.
He had taken her to Arcadia, and they had had a wonderful evening.
CHAPTER 6
Trophies
Like an enemy that has bombed its weaker opponent close to final submission, MacIver’s illness could now dispense with any distinction between daytime and nighttime activities: there would be insignificant resistance at whatever hour it struck. He had felt awful when he woke up, the fever not ebbing one jot at dawn; he had become light-headed in the shower stall, and after apparently bouncing off the walls on his way down, he had found himself on all fours on the floor, with the water obliviously pounding him from above. It seemed unsafe to try and stand up in this confined space, but he had manag
ed to butt the door of the shower open with his head, and then crawl out onto the bath mat. He had pulled towels off the racks to dry himself and keep warm, and, feeling a little better, he had crawled to the toilet and managed to climb up and sit on it. Finally, his head seeming steadier now, he had stood up, returned to the shower stall, turned off the water, and closed the door. He judged his performance during this episode undignified, and probably comical to any observer, but in the circumstances resourceful. He felt he had, over about the same time period, recapitulated the essential progression of evolution: the aquatic animal coming onto dry land, then achieving four-legged locomotion, and finally standing as Homo erectus on two legs. Impressive. For breakfast he had bread and Tawny marmalade, pausing with each mouthful, allowing himself to relish the taste of the Tawny, and then sipping the warm water and preparing to pay the cost of the swallow. By the end, he felt he had defeated heavy odds and was ready for work. Today he intended to bring Simon Dodds and Tim Callum together.
Lieutenant Dodds had asked Private Callum to come and see him in what passed for his office in the company headquarters. It was his habit to spend more time in the trench with his platoon than most officers found necessary, and on one occasion he had noticed Callum sketching, after he had been relieved from his watch on the fire-step. Dodds had asked politely if he could see the book, and Callum had passed it over, he thought, resignedly, as though this would mean more trouble. The drawings struck Dodds as very powerful—some of men sleeping, men cleaning their kit, men horsing around on their weekly visit to the bathhouse, and one ferocious cartoon of Sergeant Braddis apparently playing with his bayonet. The quality of the work seemed so obvious to him—but what did he know?—that he wanted to encourage Callum. He had heard that the Artists’ Rifles, a pretty wild bunch by all accounts, whose sector of the trench system was less than four hundred yards from theirs, held what they called soirées at a local estaminet behind the lines, at which there was a lot of bad wine, some poetry reading, some holding forth, but also some sharing of thoughts on work they were doing or planning. An arty officer of the group had told Dodds of these occasions, giving time and place, when he had mentioned Callum, and conveyed that he would be entirely welcome (“God in heaven,” he had actually said, “half of them are so far gone, they couldn’t recognize their own platoon mates”). “You should go,” Dodds said, “and take that book with you. I hear they occasionally have famous artists, or at least Official War Artists, soaking up the atmosphere, and spreading their wide culture for the rest of us poor fellows, for our morale.”
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 7
