Skinny Island

by Louis Auchincloss

  “And how did you interpret that?”

  “Well, the men were dead, and the women survived; that I must have noted. It was dangerous to be a man and perhaps an unholy thing to be a woman. There was safety only in the erect, black-garbed figure of the Queen Mother.”

  “But wasn’t she responsible for the massacre? Wasn’t she a fiend? Surely you didn’t accuse your poor mother of that?”

  “Who knows what my subconscious may have accused the poor creature of? All I knew, deep down, was that she was on my side. That with her was safety. That is how I feel about you, too. And so it was that when I went to boarding school and was tempted to do those things with other boys, the image of Mother always kept me from it. Fear kept me from the girls; fear, or respect of Mother kept me from the boys. At this point, ten years after Mother’s death, I am not sure which had the greater, or the less, attraction. All I know is that I have always been a monk and will now remain one.”

  “But, Manny, what a tragic story!”

  “It’s not tragic at all. I’ve been a jolly monk. Millions of men and women have been celibates by choice. I have lived as fully as most of the people we know. As Alice Nicholas, for example.”

  For the first time she caught the note of antagonism in his tone. Manny was not quite as dispassionate as he liked to think. He despised Leslie, but he hated Alice. Frances sighed and closed her eyes. She was going to have to choose between her two friends. And it was bitter evidence of how frail a creature Stuart Hamill’s God had made her that she was going to find that choice so hard a one.

  “Pray for me, Manny,” she said with a wry smile. “Pray for me…” She closed her eyes as she made the ultimate effort to bring out the detested word. “Darling.”

  The Reckoning

  ROSA KINGSLAND was the same age as the century; she had just passed her sixtieth birthday when she received the final verdict from the Dunstan Sanatorium about her son.

  “We are sorry to inform you that not only is there no immediate prospect of Meredith’s being able to resume a normal life, but, in the opinion of at least one of our medical staff, it may be years before it will be advisable to release him from the institution. And we are afraid that we cannot advise your further visits while his resentment against his family and home is still so intense.”

  Rosa stared at the letter, wondering stonily if she were inhuman to see only a bill in its terms. But thirty thousand a year, that was what it added up to, not to mention the other fifteen just to keep her husband in his wheelchair on the floor above. At last slowly, ineluctably, the tears began to bubble up in her resisting eyes. Did tears matter? Did they make her any more absurd than she always had been: a stout Chinese Buddha with a round face and short gray curled hair? But a weeping Buddha—how ridiculous.

  Calm again now—as calm and stolid as she usually managed to be—she rose and went to the wall to take down The Betrothal, one of Gorky’s earlier versions. What should she put in its place? Why, what but what had been there, forty-odd years before, in her grandmother’s day, and which was still presumably in the attic with the others of the old lady’s collection, its face to the wall, the very dearest of dear little Tuscan peasant girls, a pitcher balanced on one shoulder, painted in Florence by Luther Terry in 1876. God.

  She turned her reading lamp full on the Gorky and sadly studied it. She knew about the “biomorphic” images drawn from sexual organs, but she had suppressed them. It didn’t make any difference what she thought so long as she kept it to herself.

  What she saw in her Arshile Gorky … ah, that was what made the difference. It was simply the most beautiful picture in the world—except for the Resurrection of Piero della Francesca that she and Amory had seen at Borgo San Sepolcro and which Aldous Huxley had called the greatest painting ever painted, so that was that. But the Gorky, a symphonic poem of light gray, dark gray and black, with flashes of yellow and red and soothing traces of pale green, evoked for her a fashionable ladies’ store on Madison Avenue with round glass-topped tables, lamps on tall steel poles, elegant high-heeled slippers and the suggestion of beautiful women, soft-skinned Circes, worldly-wise, corrupt, stonyhearted. Yet broken up as they were into bits and pieces, their menace was muted and their loveliness intensified. It was always so in a world that concealed beauty behind every horror if you could only pull it out. Her imagined ladies made Rosa think of the answer of the Abbé Mugnier to a leering anticleric who had surprised him admiring a painting of nudes bathing: “C’est un état d’âme, monsieur!”

  She heard the sound of her husband’s wheelchair in the corridor and looked up to see the wizened little man squinting at her from the doorway. His eye took in the painting on the floor.

  “Poor Rosa,” he cackled. “Must that go, too?”

  “What else?”

  “You could put Merry in a state institution, you know. I would, if I were you.”

  She noted his “you.” Meredith was hers now. This was his way of recognizing that his money had been spent and that they lived on what was left of hers. Oh, yes, it was all hers, for whatever good it might do her, the shabby narrow red brick house with the high Dutch gable on Tenth Street that she had inherited from her grandmother, with the late Victorian horrors for which the old lady had unwisely exchanged her Federal treasures; the dwindling pile of securities at the United States Trust Company; Amory, his wheelchair and senile complaints; and Meredith, dreadful Meredith, at Dunstan. And her pictures. Soon enough, no doubt, to be only a picture. She shuddered at the thought of the Max Ernst downstairs in the tiny gallery that had once been the maids’ dining room.

  “He’ll eat us out of house and home, that’s what he’ll do,” Amory continued petulantly.

  “Not so long as I have anything left to sell.”

  “And how long will that be?”

  “A year, maybe.”

  “I must admit that your crazy things have brought more than any rational man could have guessed. Do you suppose you’re selling them too soon?”

  “Oh, much too soon! But I didn’t buy them to make money.”

  “And what will you do when the year is out? Though I don’t suppose it’ll be my problem. I shan’t be around much longer.” If his pause was to give her the opportunity to contradict his prognostication, it was in vain. “I suppose you can sell this house for a bundle. You won’t need more than a couple of rooms then.”

  “I shall need the house when Meredith comes home.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “When the last picture has been sold.”

  “Because he’ll know there’s no more money for his shrinks?”

  “No. Because he’ll have been cured.”

  The most shattering discoveries can come very quietly, perhaps because they are not really discoveries. One has suspected them all along. Rosa helped her husband’s nurse to push his chair into the tiny elevator where it just fitted. The nurse closed the door and then descended the narrow stairway to the front hall to meet him and take him for his morning circumnavigation of the block. Rosa, alone in the house, sat on the sofa before the empty grate and allowed the pallid ghosts of her early years to possess her.

  She remembered the day when she had told her grandmother about Amory. The old lady had been sitting by the fire in the black silk that she always wore, inattentively nodding that handsome head with the fine Greek profile and high-piled, beautifully set white hair. Her head was like a fine piece of sculpture on a black ball; it moved around on top of a motionless body like an owl’s. In her childhood Rosa had used to wonder if she could turn it around entirely and look backwards.

  “I’m engaged to Amory Kingsland, Grandma.”

  “What are you telling me, child? Amory Kingsland? Are you sure you understood him correctly?”

  “Quite sure. He was very plain. And anyway, what else could he have meant?”

  “What will you live on? I hope he’s not counting on me.”

  “Oh, no, Grandma. He says he can support me. We shan
’t need a great amount.”

  Perhaps some memory of her dead son, alcoholic and bankrupt, and of her dead daughter-in-law, victim of an overdose, flickered in the mind of the grandparent. Perhaps even something like remorse. “Well, you’ll have what I have when I’m gone, child. It’ll be something.”

  “Oh, Grandma, don’t even think of that!”

  “I’m sure Amory thinks of it.” The old lady snorted. “He must be your senior by twenty years.”

  “Only fifteen.”

  “Think of it. Amory Kingsland. Well, I suppose it’s better than being the last leaf on the tree.”

  Rosa thought that it was a good deal better. She knew that tree. It was true that Amory was a fussy, dyspeptic, excitable little man, sputtering with ideas and theories that nobody listened to, and that he had a mincing manner, round soft cheeks and short hair, brushed close to his scalp and parted in the middle, that looked like a wig. And he was always the first on his feet at a banquet to offer a fulsome toast or tribute. But he was harmless and kind, and she fancied that he would not be difficult to live with. He had no job, but he belonged to enough clubs and patriotic societies to ensure his being out of the house a good part of the day.

  What was the word for it—symbiosis? If she needed to get away from Granny, he needed a wife to make him look like other men. He was no more attractive to women than she to men. To find a mate, other than each other, they would have had to fish in lower social pools. And she had been right. It had worked.

  The only times in the early years that she had found herself impatient with Amory was in their trips to Europe. He fancied himself a connoisseur of the arts and loved to quote John Addington Symonds on the Italian Renaissance. At home Rosa had trained herself not to hear him except for certain phrases that gave her a cue for rejoinders such as: “Really, dear?” or “Amory, you are extraordinary,” but when they were actually in the presence of a masterpiece she found him tediously distracting. Pictures had always stirred a chord within her that was unlike any other vibration, and she hated to be talked to while viewing one.

  On a visit to the Sistine Chapel in the hot summer of 1938 his chatter became suddenly intolerable. He was hopping briskly about, pointing upwards to illustrate the “tactile values.”

  “But all those terms came later. This was a church, Amory. People came here to worship.”

  He tittered at her insularity. “Really, Rosa, do you think Michelangelo believed all that rubbish? He only painted religious subjects because the pope made him.”

  “Exactly. He didn’t believe in anything. One doesn’t have to believe in anything.”

  Amory blinked at her. “And just what, pray, do you mean by that extraordinary statement?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. And I don’t care.”

  “Maybe the heat’s too much for you, my dear. We’d better go back to the hotel.”

  “I’m going to sit right here. Let me be, please, Amory. For half an hour, anyway. Go look at the Raphael portrait of Leo X. That’s your favorite, isn’t it?”

  The next day, in a modern gallery, she bought her first painting. It was a lyrical abstraction called Hills and Ocean, a study in pallid, fragile blues and pinks and darker greens, done with thin paint. It made Rosa think of a summer trip that she had taken as a child with her father to Mount Desert Island in Maine.

  “Bar Harbor?” Amory inquired with a snort when she showed it to him at the hotel. “It looks more like an old rag the artist used to rub his hands with. May I ask what you paid for it?”

  “Two hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “My God, woman, are you out of your mind?”

  But he thought she was even more so the next day when she received a polite note from the artist, a young American, asking her to come to a party at his studio. She informed Amory that she planned to accept.

  “But we don’t even know him!”

  “We will when we get there. He’s very pleased at my purchase and would like me to see some of his other things.”

  “How did he get your name?” Amory demanded suspiciously.

  “From the gallery, of course. You don’t have to go. I’m perfectly all right by myself.”

  “In Rome? With a crowd of artists? All Fascists, or maybe even Communists? Of course, I’ll have to be with you.”

  “That’s up to you. But in any event I’m going.”

  The studio was six flights up, on the top of an old house, and Amory protested bitterly at almost every step. They were greeted at the door by the young artist, George, who was small and dark and charming and made Rosa think of Little Billee in Trilby. When he handed her a drink and took her to a window to overlook the busy rooftops of the neighborhood, she had a moment of intense pleasure and almost forgot about Amory. In a short time she was actually telling the nice young man what she fancied she could see in his painting. Was it the gin?

  “But you must think my approach is hopelessly subjective and sentimental,” she exclaimed ruefully.

  But he was nice. “Not at all. It’s always allowable to see something organic in my work. You should never be ashamed, anyway, of what you see in a picture. It is the creation, after all, of two persons.”

  “Wouldn’t that mean it’s not one but several things? Or as many as there are viewers?”

  “Well, what’s the harm in that? Anyway, I think your eye is a good one. It saw something good in me.”

  This was delightful, but his friends were bound to spoil it. One of them, a large, unshaven, hirsute man, spoke to her with a rather abrasive assurance.

  “Don’t believe George, Mrs. Kingsland. He’s always trying to appease people he suspects of being antiabstractionists. He thinks, if he allows them their fantasies as to what his lines and squiggles represent, that they will buy his daubs. But some of us are made of sterner stuff. I’d be happy, ma’am, if you’d buy one of mine, but I’m not going to let you think I approve of your finding it ‘organic.’”

  “Well, I’m sure I shouldn’t,” Rosa said hastily. “And, of course, I’d love to see your things. What do you try to depict in them?”

  “If I could tell you that, ma’am, I wouldn’t have to paint them.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  The laughter of the little group seemed more mocking than friendly. One of the girls, who had long straight hair, bold eyes and a sacklike dress of dull brown, now asked her in a voice that seemed poised on the impertinent:

  “Do many of your class back home still like pictures that tell a story?”

  “My class?”

  “You know. Society people.”

  Rosa decided that she had better not be offended. “Well, even if we liked them, where would we find such pictures?”

  “She’s got you there, Carol,” the big man said to the brown dress in a tone that almost made Rosa think he was taking her side. “Those people have been frightened out of their natural tastes. We’ve browbeaten them into thinking if they dislike something, it must be good.”

  “Anyway, I don’t care for pictures that tell stories,” Rosa affirmed.

  “Even if you make them up yourself?” the tall man asked with a laugh that was almost a sneer.

  Rosa was wondering if she might not find the courage to take him on when she heard her husband’s shrill voice across the room addressing another group:

  “Well, say what you will, I’d take the Sargent gallery in the Tate for all the modern art on this planet!”

  In the silence that followed this she knew that her plight was hopeless. Even if by some miracle of effort she was able to establish a thin line of communication between herself and these young people, Amory would be there to sever it. Never the twain would meet.

  In the taxi returning to their hotel Amory rattled on against young “anarchists” and deplored her getting involved with them. She waited for an appropriate pause and then put in firmly:

  “It’s all right, Amory. You needn’t worry. You will never have to go to a party like that again.”
<
br />   “You mean you’ll go without me?”

  “No, I shan’t go either. It’s not seemly. We don’t belong there.”

  “Well, I should hope not! And while you’re making good resolutions, how about promising me not to buy any more of their crazy pictures?”

  “No.”

  “No?” He glanced at her quickly, surprised at the metallic quality of her tone. “You mean you’re going to throw good money after bad? And get more of that junk?”

  “Yes, I think I may, Amory.”

  “And do you expect me to finance this new craze?”

  “You needn’t. I have my own money now.” Grandma had died the year before, having held out till ninety-six and spent most but not all of her principal.

  Amory was used to directing even the minor events of their domestic routine, but he knew that on the rare occasions when, for reasons incomprehensible to him, she took a stand, she was unbudgeable. Indeed, she knew how to make him feel at such times that he did not exist as a force in her life. He could then only retreat into sulkiness.

  “You’d better hope I don’t go mad, too. You’d better pray that our joint exchequers don’t founder in lunatic collecting.”

  “But I should love to see you collect, Amory. You might even find you had an eye for it.”

  In the decade that followed, Amory never altered his attitude of contemptuous disapproval, but he learned to confine his opposition to that. The years of the second world war were important ones to Rosa because she made friends with a gaunt and taciturn gallery owner near Washington Square who knew some of the painters who were refugees from France and Germany, and was able to introduce her to the school that became known as abstract expressionism. Silas Levine seemed to understand her intuitively; he never talked technically about pictures, but simply showed them to her. If she liked one, he would nod and show her another. He made her feel that if two people were lucky enough to share a discriminating taste, they had no need to discuss it.