“Well, I certainly don’t think everything’s so fine in the Soviet Union.”
“That’s right. Win the argument by calling me a commie.” He made a vigorous stroke now, as if he were slashing a line through my countenance. But he wasn’t. A model was a model, however much of a fascist.
“Well, aren’t you a socialist?”
“Never you mind what I am, sonny. I told the headmaster when I came here that I wasn’t going to be political, and I shan’t be. But that doesn’t mean I can’t prick an occasional bubble of self-satisfaction.”
I was thoroughly angry now. If he wasn’t to be “sirred,” he could take potluck in the dialogue. “If anyone pricked yours, it might blow up the campus!”
Stair threw back his head at this and emitted a roar of laughter. “So you can bite back. Good. There may be hope for you yet.” He paused, his head to one side as he contemplated his work. “Well, I guess that’s it,” he said in a milder tone. “Want to have a look at it?”
That look may have changed my life. For what I saw in that dark, brooding, huddled figure, drawn with amazing power in so scant a number of strokes, was something more than the fear and the resentment in the features. These emotions I had known about. What I saw for the first time was the intensity of concern in the eyes fastened on the painter. The boy was alive! Alive as the painter was alive! It had never occurred to me that I was alive. And it had certainly never occurred to me that a painter obsessed with geometrical figures that were never completed, lines that went nowhere and dots that floated in limbo, could be the one to prove my existence. “I am in a Stair drawing,” I could murmur after Descartes, “therefore I am!” I knew then and there that I was in the presence of a great artist.
From now on I attached myself, as much as the school schedule permitted, to Eric Stair. Perhaps because he regretted the harshness of his strictures on one so young, perhaps because every man has a corner in his heart for a worshiping slave, a devoted spaniel, he tolerated me. He even allowed himself at times to be amused by me. And he gave me serious instruction now in my art.
The headmaster, the angels, the glory of God, disappeared in a clap of thunder like Kundry’s castle in Parsifal. I made desperate plans in my mind—not daring to tell my family—of skipping college and going straight to art school. And then there came a chance of actually introducing my new hero to my family.
Mother and Father never came up to school, but in the Easter vacation of that year they had received the loan of a large apartment in New York from a cousin of Mother’s, and all the Abercrombies moved joyfully into town. I had a room with two beds, so I could have a guest, and when I heard that Mr. Stair had no place to go over Easter and was planning to stay at the school, I made bold to invite him to come to us. He accepted, with evident surprise, but with alacrity. I did not know at the time that he had a girl friend in New York.
He and Mother hit it off immediately. I was rather disgusted to note that she seemed to be actually flirting with him! They both showed me sides of themselves I had not seen before: Eric lost his sardonic, superior, detached school air and was full of chuckles and slightly off-color jokes, while Mother showed a concern about modern art and letters that I had not previously suspected.
“Your ma likes a man around,” Eric told me one morning when we were alone at breakfast. “She hasn’t totally forgotten she’s a woman.”
I was a bit shocked. “Why should she? She has Father.”
“What is it they say? Thirty years is a long time with the same piece of meat?”
“If you’re implying, Mr. Stair, that my mother—”
“Isn’t dead below the waist? Yes, I am, my friend. Of course, no son can abide the idea that his mother is subject to sexual urges. But that doesn’t mean she’s neuter.”
I was startled by this idea of Mother, so stout and matronly. But my respect for Eric was all-encompassing. What I minded far more than the impertinence of his suggestions was the ease with which Mother had taken him away from me.
He was not, however, as it turned out, discussing sex—or even the fantasy of it—between himself and Mother. He was discussing sex between himself and somebody else. What Mother was doing, incurable romantic (like so many gossips) that she was, was persuading him to marry his girl friend then and there and present the headmaster, at the beginning of the spring semester, with a fait accompli. And she succeeded. One morning at breakfast, as she beamed at him down the table, Stair announced to my bewildered and disapproving self that he and I and Mother would be going at noon to the Municipal Building, where he was to be joined in wedlock to a Miss Janice Hart.
Mother had not met Miss Hart, and even she was a bit disillusioned when we encountered this handsome, marble-faced, raven-haired, and only too evidently efficient and officious young woman in the little lavender room where the godless marry without benefit of clergy. Miss Hart would have given the back of her hand or worse to a priest. She greeted Mother and me in a clipped, perfunctory manner and proceeded to take over Eric and instruct him on what had to be done as if he were a tousled schoolboy and she a matron who could spare little time with recalcitrant pupils. When we repaired to our apartment afterwards to drink a bottle of champagne, she offered a mock toast to the school whose faculty family she was about to join.
“To St. Lawrence’s Academy for conspicuous consumers!” she announced in a loud clear tone. “May we help to move it into the twentieth century!” Then she turned to Eric. “Or must we get it into the nineteenth first?”
What did he see in her? Or she in him? I suppose he saw a splendid figure possessed by a woman able and willing to dedicate it to his sexual delight. And I suppose she may have divined in him the artistic genius that she hoped she would one day be able to harness to the Communist cause. For that she was a Communist I had little doubt, even if she did not carry an actual card. She was committed, I felt sure, not only to the overthrow of the government by force but to the overthrow of just about everything else. Certainly she was willing to overthrow Mother and me, bidding farewell to the former with a casual: “Thanks, old dear; you made an admirable Cupid,” while pulling me aside and whispering in my ear an anatomical precaution against the presumed sexual aggression of other boys at St. Lawrence’s.
Mr. Widdell was startled, no doubt, when Eric arrived at school with a wife, but he declined Mrs. Stair’s offer to stay at a local inn while her husband continued to manage his dormitory, and provided them with a tiny vacant apartment in the house for visiting parents, filling Stair’s dormitory position with a bachelor master. The faculty and wives were no doubt astonished by Janice’s personality, but she behaved herself better than might have been expected, was decently civil to all and spent most of her time in her apartment working on what we much later found out was a tract against the crimes of private education in New England.
The Stairs, of an occasional Saturday evening, would ask some of his old dormitory boys to drop in for cider and cookies, and on these occasions Janice showed herself more relaxed. She enjoyed twitting us about our “plutocratic” backgrounds while Eric puffed at his pipe and sardonically listened. With me, however, she was distinctly less friendly, her woman’s intuition having already gleaned that I had the presumption to dispute her absolute ownership of Eric.
One night when she was descanting on the glories of the Russian revolution, I expressed horror at the brutal massacre of the czar and his family.
“Well, you’ve heard about making omelets and what it does to the eggs,” she snapped.
“I don’t see how any omelet could be worth gunning down those four lovely daughters and that poor little boy.”
“Oh, that bothers Jamie, does it?” she asked sarcastically. “It distresses him that four spoiled brats and a hopeless bleeder should bite the dust? I won’t say anything about Papa and Mama, for I guess even you might concede that a couple so bigoted and harebrained as to turn their country over to a crazy monk deserved what they got. Oh, sure, I’d have spared th
e kids. But what the hell difference does it make, weighed against centuries of injustice, starvation and torture?”
My dislike of my rival helped me to say what would most infuriate her. “You believe, then, that two wrongs make a right?”
“I believe that the undesirable classes do not eliminate themselves!”
“And you, I’m sure, would make a clean sweep of everyone at St. Lawrence’s.”
“No, I’d pick and choose. But I think I’d start with a snotty kid from Long Guyland.”
Now her husband had had enough. “Oh, dry up, Janice. That’ll do for Russia for one night. Go home, boys.”
On another evening we had an even sharper clash. It was after a forest fire that had come close enough to the school to necessitate the faculty and students joining the local firefighters and members of the recently formed Civilian Construction Corps in combating the blaze.
It had been a startling experience for me. Never before had I been thrown into the company of a large troop of men, most of whom came from what my father called the “lower orders.” As the area in which we were stationed was not touched by the fire, which had been brought under control after only a few hours, we had nothing to do but stand about and listen to the men talk. Talk perhaps is not quite the term. What I heard up and down the hillside and across the field where we were scattered was the exchange of obscene words, creating a kind of buzz across the countryside, like a swarming of bees. It seemed to me that all the men about me were talking at once, that nobody was listening, that there was no thought to communicate, that it was rather a litany that was being chanted, even a kind of bead-telling, that their sentences, insofar as they were sentences, were only nouns strung together to give a reason to filthy adjectives. At first I thought they were trying to shock the schoolboys, but at last I realized that I was being initiated into the habitual discourse of young male America.
When I told the Stairs about it, Eric, who had been out with us, was amused.
“Come on in,” he grunted. “The water’s fine!”
But Janice was odious. She put her arm over my shoulders in mock sympathy.
“Was little Jamie-Wamie shocky-wocky by bid bad men? Did they talk too dirty-wirty?”
I shook her off, furious. “It’s not a question of being shocked. Although, yes, I was shocked. But what shocked me was how those men stripped every bit of natural color and beauty out of the whole countryside. They turned it all to a revolting brown.”
“If you mean shit, why don’t you say shit?”
“Because that’s just the point! I don’t want to say it. It’s saying it that makes it that, don’t you see?”
“I guess I don’t see, honey.”
“You don’t see anything!” I cried, released at last by my fury. “And you couldn’t if you tried. What a person to be married to a painter!”
“Go home, Abercrombie,” Stair snarled.
“And good riddance!” his wife added.
“Let the kid be,” he told her sharply, and it pleased me, as I left the room, to think they might be going to have a real row.
But if I thought I was going to improve my position with Eric Stair, I had a lot to learn about marriage, or at least about marriage in its first year. Eric, I think, had a certain tenderness for the boy who admired him as I did, but he was not going to allow this to get between him and the angry, passionate creature whom he possessed every night. If Jamie Abercrombie had to be sacrificed to her jealousy, he could only shrug his shoulders and comply. And, after all, Jamie Abercrombie was a bit ridiculous, wasn’t he?
Why did she object to me quite so violently? I suppose because she begrudged the smallest patch of the territory of Eric Stair to anyone else. Had I paid my court to her, had I pretended to be a convert to her radical views, she might have allowed me a few square inches of Eric, provided she could have them back on demand. But she correctly read the resistance, nay, the hate, in my sullen gaze; she wanted to kick me, as a cat-hater wants to kick the small black creature, humped up and staring, that she knows she can neither win over nor fool.
It was now that I developed my theory that Janice Stair was a fatal presence in her husband’s artistic career. If she had originally conceived the idea that she might convert his brush and palette into tools to further the proletariat revolution, her jealousy now saw in them mutinous soldiers conspiring to thwart her absolute rule. I had noted her hostility to abstract art. Of course! How can one arouse the downtrodden with dots and lines? I began to indulge in fantasies in which I would bravely face up to Eric’s fury and denounce her machinations to him, confident that after the raging storm was over, the broken bedraggled man, a drowned Lear or fool, would seek the humble hut of Jamie’s forgiveness, clasp one of my hands in both of his large ones and murmur: “You’ve been a good friend, my boy. I see it now. Oh, I see it all!”
And then came the terrible time when a quirk of fate placed it in my power to convert my fantasy into a grotesque reality. God knows how different my life might otherwise have been. Or does he?
Our dormitory, placed in what had orginally been intended for a large attic, had a curious zigzag shape, and my cubicle, at the very end, had a window that looked out, as did none of the others, on the visiting parents’ house, so that the window of the Stairs’ bedroom, on the same level, was only some sixty feet away. One night after lights, just as I was dropping off to sleep, I heard a step on the floor by my bed and sat up quickly to make out a pajama-clad figure standing there. I was about to hiss an angry “I don’t play dirty games, thank you,” for I was intensely puritanical about certain boarding school practices, when a voice whispered:
“Let’s see if we can’t see Mrs. Stair’s bare ass.”
It was Tommy Agnew, our dormitory prefect, a sixth former and captain of the football team. He sat down in the chair by the window to stare into the lit but empty interior across the way, and I sat up politely for a time with him. Any interest in female anatomy was considered sacred, and besides, he was a prefect. At last, however, I grew tired and fell asleep.
The next morning, in the washroom, while brushing our teeth, I asked Tommy if he’d had any success.
“Well, not for hours,” he complained, as if he’d suffered an actual injustice. “I thought those people would never go to bed! But when they did, yes, it was worth it.” Agnew paused to expectorate into the basin. “That woman doesn’t even use a nightgown. Or at least she was bare-assed when she came to pull the shade. Jesus, what tits! And before she pulled the shade down, she gave a sort of sexy twitch of her ass. I think she may have suspected some boy was watching.”
“That was generous of her,” I observed sourly.
Tommy’s information agitated me greatly. All that day I was in a kind of fever. How did that slut dare to intrude her naked loins and breasts and buttocks into the sanctity of a male church school? My mind fulminated with biblical anathemas, and I heaped logs on the crackling fire of my fantasized plans to rescue Stair from his whore of Babylon.
That night I anticipated a flood of visitors to my cubicle to share in Tommy’s discovery, but there were none. The sole sixth former in our dormitory, he must have disdained to share his confidence with juniors, and his own form mates were not allowed in our quarters after lights. Tommy himself, presumably exhausted from his vigil of the night before, did not appear, and I sat by my window in the dark alone.
I think it must have been midnight before she appeared. I had not really thought she would. But she did, and I was choked with hatred and a kind of dizzy lust. When she raised her arms to the shade her fine, large firm breasts jutted at me like two celestial cannons, and, distinctly, before she pulled the curtain she twitched her marble hips. I felt she was looking at me directly, defiantly, imperiously, devastatingly, destroyingly. Then the black shade descended.
That morning I awakened an hour before the rising bell and sketched my memory of that nude figure framed by the window. I worked furiously for the sixty minutes, and I wonder t
o this day if it wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever done. At the sound of the bell, which almost terrified me with its harsh, jangling, puritanical interruption of my heated and frenetic endeavors, I rose and placed it in my sock drawer. There it was almost sure to be discovered by the snoopy and prudish bachelor, Mr. Morse, who had taken Stair’s place as our dormitory master and who was known to investigate both our beds and our bureaus.
Mr. Widdell did not delay in doing what he had to do. He reached into a manila folder, pulled out my drawing and laid it on the desk so that it faced me. “We won’t play games with each other, Jamie. Mr. Morse discovered this in your cubicle and thought he had better bring it to my attention. It shows, I believe, a considerable talent. But the subject is not one that I feel is suitable for your art work. Perhaps later, when you are an adult. I believe there are such things as ‘life classes’ where you can draw unclad models. But this picture seems to me to have emanated from a fevered imagination. If you have such thoughts, I think you should take more physical exercise. I should like your permission to destroy the drawing, and your promise that you will not reproduce it.”
“But it didn’t come from my imagination, sir.”
“How could it not have? You can’t mean that there was a model in the school? And I cannot believe that your parents would have permitted you to attend a life class in vacation.”
“No, no, sir, it was something I saw, here at school.” I leaned my head over the desk, staring down at its surface, as if struggling with a terrible embarrassment. “I hate to say it, sir, but I don’t want you to think that I have a fevered imagination.”
Skinny Island Page 11
