by John Harvey
Valentina, who despite everything else had been working hard to pull together an impressive Board of Trustees to administer the Foundation and its student scholarship scheme, surprised Sloane by asking him if he would like to be a member and was perhaps a little relieved when he declined. What he did urge was that she might like to invite Connie in his place and, in just a few weeks’ time, Connie was flying out so that she and Valentina could talk things over.
When Sloane had last seen Connie in New York, a fortnight before coming to Italy, she had looked thin but strong, determined.
‘You know how close I came to dying?’ she had said, the two of them on a bench in Central Park, near the Hans Christian Andersen statue, birds skimming the small lake before them.
‘Don’t think about it,’ Sloane said, remembering, but Connie had disagreed.
‘I should think about it every day. What I’d come to. What I owe.’ Reaching out, she squeezed his hand. ‘The ugly duckling, right. That’s me. Thanks to you I get a second chance to turn into a swan.’ She kissed his cheek and said, ‘I am grateful, you know.’
And Sloane had laughed and said, ‘It’s what fathers are for, didn’t you know?’
Childlike, she had put out her tongue. ‘Come on, then, Dad. Race you to the other side.’
But they had walked, Connie slipping her arm through his, the most natural thing to have done.
Connie had joined a voluntary dependency group for drugs and alcohol, and was having therapy sessions twice a week to help restore freedom of movement to her face and jaw. As Wayne had put it, ‘Once you can get that mouth of yours open enough to do more than squeak, we’ll get back into rehearsal.’
They had received a postcard yesterday, Rachel and himself, a black and white shot of Billie Holiday. Wayne’s got a gig in London this November and I might come over with him. What do you think?
‘She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?’ Rachel said, setting down her coffee cup.
‘Yes, I think so. I really do.’
‘Proud father,’ Rachel teased him.
‘Balls!’ Sloane replied, unable to prevent himself from smiling.
Catherine Vargas took a month’s sick leave, which extended to two. When the worst of her injuries were healed she flew out to Denver to stay with her parents, but rapidly her father’s questioning looks, the things he had no way of putting into words, made it impossible and she went back to New York. Friday evenings she and John Cherry, and sometimes Cherry’s lover, would take in a first-run movie and then have dinner.
By the time she returned to duty she was still seeing a counsellor, still suffering from migraines, still sleeping with the lights on. When the lieutenant suggested she might confine herself to desk work for a while she didn’t complain.
Out of the blue she received a brief letter from Sloane in London, asking how she was, hoping she was on the mend. She kept the letter, but didn’t reply.
As part of their American Piano Festival, Wayne played three nights at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho, just up the street from Ronnie Scott’s.
‘Next time,’ Wayne said to Connie, pointing across to the Scott Club, where Georgie Fame was the main attraction, ‘that’s gonna be your name up there, right?’
‘Is that above yours,’ Connie asked, ‘or underneath?’
Wayne grinned his wicked grin. ‘Whichever way you like it best.’
‘That’ll be on top then,’ Connie said and gave his arm a playful punch.
After Italy, Rachel had suggested to Sloane that he might like to fly back to New York with her and stay for a spell, but by then he was itching to get back to work and opted for London instead. In less than six weeks he had three more finished canvases, and was hoping to persuade one of the smaller galleries to offer him a show the following spring.
When he phoned Rachel to tell her this and she asked if she could handle him in New York, all she got was a dirty laugh and a promise that he’d see.
So it was that Rachel came over for the last night of Wayne’s brief London residency and ended up sitting round the table in Sloane’s place the following evening – Wayne, Connie, Dumar, Dumar’s daughter, Olivia, and her friend, Nicky, Rachel and Sloane himself – all there to celebrate Dumar’s successful application for asylum and to enjoy the feast he had spent the last day and a half preparing.
Two-thirds of the way through dinner, amidst much laughter and many conversations, Sloane excused himself and went outside, which was where Rachel found him ten minutes later, leaning back against the wall and staring up into the faint orange glow of the sky.
‘All that happiness getting to you?’ she asked, sliding her hand in his.
‘Yeah. Not sure I can stand it.’
Pivoting smartly, Rachel kissed him on the mouth. ‘Try,’ she said. ‘Just try.’
Acknowledgements
For background information about the heady mix of art, poetry and jazz in New York City in the 1950s I am indebted to the following books, the nucleus of which was suggested by the poet and commentator, William Corbett, to whom go especial thanks.
William Corbett, New York Literary Lights (Graywolf Press)
Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life & Times of Frank O’Hara (Knopf)
John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (Viking)
David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde (Anchor Books)
Fred McDarrah, The Artist’s World (Dutton)
——, Greenwich Village (Corinth)
S. Naifeh & G. White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (Potter)
Frank O’Hara, Art Chronicles 1954–1966 (Braziller)
Lisa Phillips, Beat Culture & The New America 1950–1965 (Whitney Museum/Flammarion)
——, The American Century: Art & Culture 1950–2000 (Whitney Museum/Flammarion)
Larry Rivers with Arnold Weinstein, What Did I Do? (HarperCollins)
James Schuyler (ed. Simon Pettet), Selected Art Writings (Black Sparrow Press)
Dan Wakefield, New York in the 50s (Houghton Mifflin)
One of the great pleasures in writing this novel has been the excuse it has given me to spend more time than usual enjoying the paintings of many of the women artists who first came to prominence in America in the 1950s, notably Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. For particular insight into their work and the process of painting, I am grateful to the following:
After Mountains & Sea: Frankenthaler 1956–1959 (Guggenheim Museum)
Judith E. Benstock, Joan Mitchell (Hudson Hills Press)
Robert Doty (ed.), Jane Freilicher (Taplinger)
Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (Da Capo)
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