Impossible Views of the World

by Lucy Ives

  “Was that how it was with the two of them, do you think?” I wanted to know.

  Fred blinked. “I have no real way of knowing, of course. But it is hard to say if they ever stopped being together, is what I believe.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it seems like it can be that way.” I changed tack. “Do you know if there will be a memorial?”

  “Oh, I should think so,” Fred said. “I imagine we will hear about that later today. Will you attend?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You and Paul were close, I thought.”

  “It’s funny,” I said. “I was about to say that I’m not really close to anyone, but then all of a sudden that just seemed totally untrue! Yes, we were close. I just don’t know anymore what that means.”

  “That you were close?”

  “No, I mean, I guess, to be close to anyone.”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  I found Fred’s remark extremely annoying. “I’m glad you have such confidence in me!”

  “I always have.”

  “Thanks, then.”

  “Yes,” said Fred, drawing himself up in the fragile chair that loudly protested his maneuver. “Well, I’m glad we could talk.”

  “Of course,” I told him. Then, in an attempt at levity, “I’m almost always here!”

  Fred performed another strangely sad smile. “So am I.”

  [ 24 ]

  I just sat still at my desk for a little while after Fred left. I felt I held my own well enough in these encounters, but this was really the best I could hope to do, as I couldn’t set my own terms, the way that things between us had been constructed or come to pass, depending on how you thought about it. I just kept trying to catch an edge of some kind. I wanted to be able to see underneath this thing, to recognize the way in which it was fundamentally unsound, but for whatever reason I seemed completely unable to do this. Or, everywhere I checked, things appeared to be in basic working order. Fred and I just seemed not to be having the kind of relationship I’d imagined I would have with someone I felt this way about. And apparently I was the only one who was totally, or even in part, dissatisfied.

  Maybe I was even fascinated that something like this could be possible, that you could be willing to alter your life for someone, and it just would not matter at all. I am not talking, by the way, about anything having to do with Whit. This really has nothing to do with Frederick, either. What I am talking about is the rest of my life, going forward from this point on, the self I wanted to reproduce, perhaps in gorgeous aquatint, standing before the sea in a light, high-waisted dress a year from now, myself a sort of Étoile, because this was all I felt I had to offer anyone. And this self seemed not to matter to Fred, and this was what crushed me.

  I tried to rouse myself. I mean, how many times was I going to rediscover the impossibility of this relationship before I learned my lesson? More than anything I wanted to learn from it, not to feel merely laid low. It just made me so incredibly angry, was the thing. I mean, at myself.

  In a fit of pique, I logged into my email. It was my go-to in all moments: joy, sadness, arousal, ire, whatever. It had nothing I needed, but it had in the past made me promises that had changed my life, and now I wanted to read new vows addressed to me, swearing that I would be liberated from my current condition. I mean, in the present the inbox never had anything I needed. It was only in retrospect that I realized how this or that message had changed my life. And maybe what I wanted, even more than to receive a message that told me that now, again, everything was different, was to be able to know what I was reading when I saw it. I wanted to learn to know when my life was about to change. I mean, probably everyone wants this. I just didn’t know how strong a wish like this can get.

  For now the inbox was arid. It offered fulfillment of Fred’s prediction (a gathering scheduled for the coming Sunday afternoon), as well as a message with an attachment from someone named “Kotz, Ona,” directed my way from “G County Hist Soc.” In fact, this was something. In fact, there were several attachments. One of these was an invoice for twenty-one dollars for scanning services. The other two items were PDFs. One was a history of Greene County and the other seemed like a cheaply made booklet, published in 1803, with the intriguing title Elysia, Town of Unexampled Prosperity. Including a Map There Of. The email itself contained the message “Trust you will find here what you need. All best, O.K.” These last two letters were, by the way, presumably the initials of the sender.

  I downloaded the two documents.

  The history had already been abbreviated for me. On the three pages “O.K.” had seen fit to scan and email me, she had also digitally highlighted several key passages. These sections explained the existence of a member of the Wunsch family named Wilhelm Wunsch, who had lived at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth. He was not born in the New World, but rather ventured over to join prosperous relatives when he was in his early twenties, and his major claim to fame was his education in the art of engraving, something he had completed just before his passage.

  Wunsch eventually became a merchant and gentleman farmer, like all the males in his family who resided in the neighborhood, therefore taking a step up in the world. In spite of a female child from a previous association, whose mother was apparently lost to polite society, he was given a piece of land and permitted to marry, in order to secure certain local allegiances. But he seemed all his life never to have forgotten his early education and was renowned throughout the area for his strange puttering, business schemes, and small inventions, such as a mechanical bed that allowed the user, by means of a crank attached to the wall, to wind him-or herself into an upright position, thereby enabling the sleeper to simply walk away from bed rather than needing to go to the trouble of getting up out of it. Wunsch was also credited with the invention of several drawing machines, including a mechanical arm that allowed the sketcher to sit in one room while his drawing transpired, if he so pleased, in another.

  But the most famous, or infamous, as the case may be, of Wunsch’s inventions, was a town. This particular municipality was never built, but Wunsch had engraved a map of it. As botanist John Bartram suggests somewhere in his 1751 Observations, it’s a good idea to plan ahead, since “knowledge must precede a settlement.” This was in Wunsch’s profligate early days, and at this time it was apparently his custom to loaf around Lower Manhattan, occasionally traveling to the wharves to observe the progress of immigration, which fascinated him. It was said that in this place and at this moment he acquired a “sultry” female companion, a gypsy, chanteuse, or dancing woman by the name of Étoile, a person of unknown origins and motives, with whom he for some period resided before returning north to the lands cultivated by his relations.

  Wunsch was mildly storied, if not quite infamous, for his hawking of the nonexistent town in print, the beauty of which was also hauntingly—or so the Greene County historian maintained—described in song by his winsome consort, who attracted crowds of the newly arrived by means of her siren voice. I raised an eyebrow at this, contemplating the precariousness of Étoile’s situation. I wondered, for example, if she ever sang in praise of something other than Wunsch’s imaginary conurbation. Étoile and her German lover must have made a pretty pair and probably scraped by for some brief period on the funds raised by means of leaflets and songs, but their attachment was based in fiction, if not fantasy, and therefore could not last.

  The highlight in the PDF ended.

  I turned my attention to the second PDF. O.K. had here seen fit to include the entire publication, which was to say, all four pages of it. Elysia, Town of Unexampled Prosperity. Including a Map There Of. was the most interesting commercial pamphlet on the culture of the dawning of the nineteenth century in the United States that I had never read! Presciently, or exploitatively, or perhaps by way of some combination of the two, it promoted the culture of an intentional community located some one hundred miles up the Hudson River, beyond t
he depraved reaches of the city, a place blessed with the “pleasing uniformity of decent competence,” that would, no doubt, have satisfied the wandering soul of a Crèvecoeur, if not the insoluble melancholy of a Rousseau, with its simple prosperity and promotion of autonomy and personal responsibility. Few details were given, save the promise that the bearer of the pamphlet might make his or her way northward to the town, there to find occupation that would guarantee the “transmission of a glorious inheritance to posterity” by means of exhaustive exploitation of any new American’s “inestimable rights to the wild.” I reflected, frowning, that manifest destiny in miniature was still manifest destiny and therefore pretty nasty stuff.

  On a subsequent page, the purchaser of the pamphlet was informed of the names of several imaginary coach services as well as one “Mister Spheer,” who operated a fictive ferry. Those who wished to travel by foot were advised as to roads and warned of the vagaries of climate, of beasts and bandits. Following this text, there was a muddy map. It showed the grid of a township near a river. Above it clouds parted, revealing the face of a grinning neoclassical sun.

  This con was not, as far as I could tell, my Elysia.

  —

  SO BRUNHILDA’S FATHER HAD BEEN a utopian evangelist of a kind. And a salesman, and a huckster, if not a prodigal son. He reminded me a little of Frederick Lu.

  Without knowing it, I had been waiting for something big, but here was this. Elysia was a ploy, a humbug. I didn’t know what any of this had to do with the beautiful map of the commonplace book, though it did further increase the fascination exercised upon yours truly by that document. I was curious about the origins of that map, who it was who had intervened into Wunsch’s sad little scheme to produce something of beauty.

  This left me with the women. Or, rather, it left me with the ways in which each had left to posterity what she had left. Brunhilda was of course the author of several serious books on the matter of the political future of women in the U.S., and so in some sense she constituted less of a conundrum. I knew I shouldn’t really be thinking like this, but her life felt safe, accounted for, knowable. And perhaps she had also been a novelist. It made some sense. She was energetic and needed a speculative realm to populate with figures who were able to live as she herself wished to live.

  What intrigued me more was her great-granddaughter’s existence, what had transpired somewhat down the line, as it were. Why had things devolved rather than improved? Why had there been so markedly less liberation for Alice than for Brunhilda? Weren’t white women of privilege supposed to have obtained new and exciting forms of agency in the twentieth century? What, moreover, had become of poor Alice—not to mention the Elysia Club collection? If I were understanding the acquisitions records correctly, it seemed as if numerous works of art had come into CeMArt only to disappear.

  Back on the databases, I chipped away at this final question by searching for donations made by Alice Gaypoole Wynne in the catalogs of other major American museums. I found that in the mid-1930s, Alice had made several generous gifts to major East Coast institutions. They were mostly of modernist realist paintings, tough female nudes beside deco furnishings, pale blue smokestacks, gourd arrangements. These could very likely have been materials collected during the Elysia Club years. I Googled a few of the artists in question; a number had been in residence in Greenwich Village at the appropriate time, though I was not sure how much this meant.

  I wanted to know more about what had happened to Alice later on in life, and so I removed Will to Beauty from my desk drawer, picking up where I had left off in the later 1930s. She and Mabel Styke were clinging to each other, or rather Alice was clinging to Mabel, and after the end of the club, Alice did her best to keep busy. She went in for philanthropy, especially around education, and supported the Art Students League. She traveled and maintained her home. She began researching period fabrics and lighting design. She kept a succession of small, anxious canines, memorializing them upon demise in needlepoint.

  Then, just when her life couldn’t seem to get any duller, she was embroiled in scandal. Some fifteen years earlier a close male cousin, Benedict “Benny” Wynne, had married a sensual young woman, one Jane Masters, former cocktail waitress and beautician, thought to be a gold digger by the rest of the Wynne clan. Benny, whose arteries had been rendered impassable by years of delectation of pork products and perhaps also cocaine, upon matrimony could not resist promptly dying of cardiac arrest, but not, it turned out, before siring a daughter. The progeny of this short-lived and importunate coupling, a “plain” child christened Doris Fortunata Wynne, stood to come into a great deal of cash at age eighteen, and the Wynne family did not want her luscious mother, Jane Masters, in the way of so much lucre, for the story was that Masters would surely exercise an unhealthy influence as far as her daughter was concerned. The plan was, therefore, to get Masters declared unfit and Alice, now in her fifties and no longer marcelling her hair, established as the ward of the child of error, thus keeping Jane’s brassy talons off the Wynne estate.

  The Wynnes were an incredibly powerful New York tribe, and they probably shouldn’t have had much difficulty pulling this plan off, but they did not know enough about their own kin. They did not know, for example, about Alice’s storied past with Boy, as well as her ill-advised attempt to be revenged against him. The Wynnes were busy putting the supposed gold digger and woman of loose morals, Masters, in a deleterious light, paying the tabloid press through the teeth, and had simultaneously embarked on a vicious suit to get the woman declared unfit as a mother. Alice was offered up, publicly, I might add, to more serious journalistic outfits as a lonely but happily married woman who had never been able to have children of her own and who had always felt like something of a mother to poor, wayward Doris Fortunata. Likenesses of Alice in full philanthropic mode, rail thin and towering over urban youth in smocks at a pottery class, were disseminated in Time and the Evening Standard. Alice became renowned as a rabid advocate of early arts education as a means to reduce public nuisance. Doris Fortunata accompanied her on staged visits to museums and trade schools. They stood or sat side by side at various benefit galas, in the stands at horse races and at tennis matches, on the deck of a continent-bound steamer as a curtain of confetti fell—in each instance captured in glittering grays for the society pages.

  Perhaps Boy saw his chance, who knew. Perhaps it was Jane Masters herself. The source of the images has never been discovered, but this was how began one of the most notorious, if previously unknown to me, smear campaigns of the midcentury. PATRONESS WAS SOMETHING MORE, ran one headline. Another, weirdly lyric: ECHOES OF BOHEMIA’S SIREN CALL. Franker: PAINTED NIGHTS OF UPTOWN SOCIAL SURFACE, IN SCANDAL. And: FORTUNE WAS HERS, BUT SHE LOVED ART. Today this exposé is forgotten, but back then Alice was described as an indiscriminate adulteress. Candid photographs of her avant-garde turpitude between the wars—Alice leering drunkenly through ribbons of smoke, or writhing in transparent evening wear, or receiving a kiss from a famous lesbian—were published. Anonymous testimonies appeared, about her double life and the depths she had enthusiastically plumbed during those two louche decades, when she, a married woman, passed her time with artists, critics, poets, and philosophers, among other lowlifes, at the Elysia Club. The coup de grâce came when a shockingly intimate nude of a woman who was unmistakably Alice arranged L’Origine du monde style in black and white surfaced. Adding insult to injury, this lover’s-portrait-turned-revenge-porn must have been snapped by Boy himself.

  It went badly for the Wynnes. Maybe some of the allegations were even true, not that anything that anyone wrote even remotely mattered once the photographs came to light, with their ineluctable visual testament. Alice was declared unfit to be Doris Fortunata’s guardian, the case against Masters the supposed gold digger fell apart, and significant amounts of money, even by the standards of the Wynnes, were lost. Alice’s husband did not divorce her, but rather disappeared to Mexico, where he seemed able to indulge certain increas
ingly time-consuming personal habits, e.g., bennies and transactional sex, in peace.

  Alice herself ended abruptly: Even before the close of the scandal, she had begun to exhibit symptoms that we would today associate with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and by 1950 she was delicately institutionalized by whichever relatives had been deputized to keep tabs on her. Though the biography seems to want to portray this as a sort of blessing, that Alice at last forgot her cares and began living in an eternal present before the time in which she had been pilloried, this fate seems pretty terrifying, given her husband’s neglect and her family’s humiliation and hatred of her, due to what the press portrayed as AGW’s sex yen, re: artists.

  I paused in my reading. I was mentally cycling back through various overlords of CeMArt when it occurred to me that there had been a midcentury Wynne trustee. He was not a Wynne in surname, but his mother had been a Wynne. And then I remembered the name, Wallace Wynne Johns! He had been the first curator put in charge of American Objects. And he, of the Pac-Man face, was the one responsible for Jonah Durr Weiss’s eventual hire.

  I was racking my brains, trying to think where I could find the best records to help me out. What I wanted was a copy of the museum’s catalog that would have postdated the gift but predated the scandal. Because the catalog was digitized so much later on, the paper catalog could, of course, have been altered in the intervening years. Anyone could really have done anything they wanted to these records, particularly within American Objects, which at that time had a staff of three, including its secretary, out of which two individuals were probably, if not secret lovers, then best friends. I realized that the missing document in the accessions records could have been removed long, long ago, and could be anywhere by now, if it hadn’t been set on fire, shredded, or buried in Central Park. (It was the fantasy of a simpleton to think it was perched safe somewhere in the apartment of Paul Coral, someone I apparently believed could deliver me from all evil but who I needed to remember was dead!) I therefore had two hopes: One, that Mabel Styke had made scrupulous duplicates of all her correspondence and that this was included in an archive somewhere; two, that I could come up with some bureaucratic notch somewhere within CeMArt that neither the intermedial nature of our institutional memory nor the contrivances of unscrupulous curators had been able to efface.