by Anna Shapiro
Mrs. Herrick was working on a still life: a piece of Imari china, so that you would have to render not just the light and shadow but the pattern and shaded colors. This was next to an old pink doll, maybe once Weesie’s, with macabre holes where its arms had been and one eye crazily half closed, the other staring open. The doll rested on a garishly embroidered shawl; and behind the doll, a box of detergent, the kind of ugly thing one instinctively looked away from, so that it looked like What is wrong with this picture? But in Mrs. Herrick’s rendering, with its frankly evident, confident brushwork and naturalistic tones, the box was shadowy, and then you saw the joke: the way each object had some of the same colors. It was unclear why this should have the effect of a joke, but you looked at the picture and felt yourself smiling; then felt as if you had grinned at a skeleton or corpse.
But it was a studenty thing, a naturalistic still life. It wasn’t part of the dialogue of contemporary art. Anybody knew that. Maude looked at fuzzy-leafed, profusely blooming African violets, gloxinias, the downturned kisses of cyclamen faces pushing through jungley fronds. Down among the pots and pot stands were paintings leaning on the low wall, in danger of water damage. “Can I look?”
“Certainly.” Mrs. Herrick had turned back to her little picture.
There was a whole stack of portraits of Weesie. So many it would have been like stop-action photography of the growth of a child except that each was so psychological a study too, the moods and angles too different for continuity. The chubbo, relaxed Weesie around ten, not posing, sprawled out reading, tumbled with a patchwork quilt whose floral colors had the synesthetic effect, as pattern and color often do, of melody. Though splashy and loose, the picture was detailed enough to capture the morsel of flesh that fascinated Maude in class, or catching Weesie’s face in repose, the bud at the center of her upper lip, at the end of the deep groove, which could give Weesie the baby innocence of a prattler but could also look beaklike and predatory in ways Maude thought the person behind the face would not feel.
There was even a picture of baby Weesie, no more than a little bunched ham, an uncooked veal roast—fists, open mouth, closed eyes. A portrait, if such a thing were possible, of love.
“My father painted me once. It looks like a bunch of sticks. I mean, you can’t tell at all! He calls it ‘Study.’ ”
“You know, it’s never occurred to me to name my pictures,” fluted Mrs. Herrick, as if Maude’s father were a wonder.
Maude could not express the immediate and secretly formed wish that Mary Jane Herrick should paint her. Because she wanted it she couldn’t say it.
Weesie proposed their outing, and Mrs. Herrick’s face cracked into its wedge to say, “We’d be delighted, Maude Pugh.”
“I—but—the thing is, I was going to go to the Whitney. With my father.”
“Oh, the artist himself. Well, we could join you. Would that be all right—do you think?”
The way she said this, with a clear display of consideration but also certainty that it would be all right, made Maude believe that there was something to the term “good breeding.” It made her wary of making a misstep, and oddly mistrustful. Parents always liked well-behaved Maude, but Weesie’s mother was too emolliently warm. She treated Maude as an equal. It couldn’t be real.
They agreed they would meet at the museum, unless Mr. Pugh objected, and then the girls could go off and take the train home when they wanted to. The parents would fend for themselves.
5.
IT WAS A giggly business for the girls, meeting under the auspices of one of each set of parents, in the city, and had necessitated dozens of preliminary phone calls as to clothing and such pressing transient states as “I’m depressed,” which both considered an enticing opening gambit, leading away to happy hours of expressed longing or character analysis.
Maude wore a high-necked ochre jumper seamed from bust to hip so that it emphasized her fairly emphatic waistline, under-stated and expensive-looking, though it was from Ohrbach’s, a store Weesie would be unlikely ever to have entered. Weesie, in what Maude would come to understand as a certain high-WASP carelessness, was the one in something cheap-looking, a pastel-flowered miniskirt with a low-riding white patent leather belt, which went all too well with her pearlescent white lipstick. Maude had circled her dark eyes like a raccoon’s. Despite the infantine, mod, modish white tights both wore, Maude, with her dark, straight hair, looked like an expensive French hooker, and angel-haired Weesie like a runaway on Forty-Second Street compelled to turn tricks.
Both parents felt misgivings about the plan to let the girls go off afterward on their own.
The girls meanwhile were preoccupied with ecstasies over each other’s shoes, dancerly and medium-heeled, Maude’s T-straps with the pleasing detail of a triangle that seemed to have been cut off the pointy toe and outlined as a cutout on the instep like modernist eyelet, and Weesie’s glove-soft mauve (which seemed an echo of Maude’s name) laced with olive-green gros-grain ribbon. Like almost everything for them at that age, the shoes had meaning beyond their exquisite prettiness, a meaning like a flag or a club insignia. It said they were citizens of the country of opulent femininity and desirability, of sophistication, of everything they hoped to be. The triangle seemed to mean something jagged and raffish, freer than other people, and the olive bootlike lacings made you someone in a Toulouse-Lautrec poster, pensive and magnified. Even the brand, Capezio, signaled knowledgeability coupled with lyricism.
For the adults, dress was more prosaic. Men did not go without ties or suits, except laborers, and a woman in the city wore stockings. Except bohemians, other artists. Milt was in a turtleneck and a belted Norfolk jacket of a different corduroy from his soft trousers, and his hair, while not as long as a Beatle’s, was not as brutally short as a businessman’s. Unwritten rules are the most powerful, and the girls felt that power. It was exciting to see someone push the rules, nudge them. It wasn’t just a fashion choice, on a par with other consumer choices. It announced your own power and said, I do not recognize the world’s right to judge me. I do not recognize this court.
It was what Mary Jane Herrick, in Maude’s view—and in her own daughter’s—seemed to lack.
Yet it seemed to them relatively just that artists had to live by the world’s judgment in the form of the presence or absence of worldly rewards. They were quite sure that the good art would be recognized.
Mrs. Herrick wore a gray side-buttoned skirt with a black leather belt that must have cost as much as the rest of them put together. In heels, she looked thinner and almost sexy, for someone so essentially over the hill.
Though the new Whitney had been open for a month, none of them had yet been to it. They hung around a few minutes outside, where they had linked up. “It’s horrible,” said Maude, standing in the gloom under the bulging upper stories.
“I kind of like this, you know, like a drawbridge over a moat,” said Weesie, skipping along the entry that bridged the dark troughlike courtyards below.
“Maybe modern art needs a fortress,” said Milt.
“I don’t think so,” said Mary Jane. “It’s won.”
Inside, there was immediately the feeling of expensive flooring, echoey high-ceilinged space, and, above all, wealth. The entry fee was shocking.
Upstairs, the girls were attracted to the trapezoidal windows deeply set into prismlike embrasures, which they tried to sit in, sliding off. “They’re much better than the art,” said Weesie when her mother attempted to call the girls to order, seeing a guard coming their way.
“What art?” said Maude.
And this was something they all felt, with varying degrees of glumness, as they made their way around the grandiose halls sparsely set about with creations that themselves were spare in their aesthetic. “Sometimes,” said Milt, “less really is less.” Not in the case of his own purist paintings, of course.
Lined up in front of what looked like a blanket rack hung with satin ribbons, they stared, wondering what they wer
e not “getting.” Then Maude cried out—she had so long borne the brunt of Milt’s critical nature that she didn’t know how her swift criticisms could cut—“This just isn’t art. It’s the emperor’s new clothes.”
“But these ribbons are so pretty,” said Weesie, as if it were her duty to defend the establishment, of which her parents were so much a part. She had picked up, God knew where, some of the official formalist line, the line to which Milt’s work seemed to conform and of which Mary Jane’s seemed oblivious. Weirdly, it was Mary Jane who seemed to believe in it, sharing in its denigration of her own mode of work. “It’s all about color and, uh, composition. Line.”
Maude snorted. “I expect one of the guards to come over and tell me how much a yard,” she said, fingering a satin strand just to get a guard to move that way. Quickly she removed her hand, though she was tempted: she would have liked the rib-bons to tie her hair.
Mary Jane fought a desire to tell them that she had contributed money to the building of this museum and collection. Quite a lot. She blinked at the offending artwork, feeling mauled.
Milton put a hand on Maude’s shoulder, quelling her but possibly also protecting her from retaliation.
Mary Jane looked sharply at his self-assured, attractively worn face. You would think they were under attack, she thought, these Pughs. But humbly she told herself that, after all, she couldn’t know what it was to be an artist. Maude’s snort recurred to Mary Jane. What a Tartar that girl was! “No one would ever guess you were fourteen,” she said to her conciliatingly. “You sound like a professional critic.”
“Is that a compliment or an insult?” said Milt, his mouth twisted into an S that was a smile on one side and wryly downturned on the other. This was meant to be a joke, and the well-bred Mary Jane accepted it as such. But it had the element of challenge and contempt that made Maude always fear her father.
They moved on to a lifesize plastic rendering of a young woman rinsing her hair under a shower, realistic in every detail. “Well, Maudie,” said Milt, “you like things to look ‘realistic.’ Any more real than this and it would be asking us for a towel.”
The figure was meticulously explicit. There was pubic hair, there were bumpy nipples, there were red painted toenails. Maude was particularly fascinated, much as she might be in a locker room, by the depiction of tan lines on the plastic skin, so that the figure looked both naked and clothed. She had never seen tan lines on a nude. This was not a nude. It was a naked. “It just—it just doesn’t seem like art.”
The inarticulacy of this made Maude feel feeble and open to attack. The shiny, oleaginous figure seemed to mock the very condition of being female, as if what you saw were really all there was to get.
“It’s too literal,” said Weesie.
“That’s it! That’s it.” Maude clutched her friend’s forearms. She had seen in Weesie’s edition of Long Day’s Journey into Night, which they were reading for lit, her scribble in the margin, where the mother goes back on morphine: “The mother is going into the fog. The fog is a metaphor.” How brilliant! She felt again that same laser that both sliced and illuminated. The fog had just been the fog till she saw this. And that was what was wrong with all these objects at the Whitney. They were just fog, just objects. “It is literal. There’s no—no—”
“Transformation,” said Milt. “No intelligent agency has intervened. It’s just a mechanical translation into different materials.”
They all looked at Milt with respect, Maude with the addition of the helpless love that felt to her like slavery. She wanted to please him. She needed to. It was just that it was never possible.
A wall near the stairs was covered by a canvas that was simply painted red. No brushstrokes, no variation, just red canvas on stretchers on a wall.
“Color-field painting,” murmured Mrs. Herrick.
“Minimalism,” said Milt, whose own paintings could look minimal to the uninformed eye.
“Yup,” said Weesie with droll dryness, “pretty damn minimal.”
She could see Maude struggling to go along with this attempt to lighten things, but Maude looked near tears. “Don’t they see? Don’t they see how they’re wrecking—? There isn’t any room for—” She wanted to say “us” but finished, “anything that matters.” There was no point in being a painter if she had to grow up to do plain red walls. She would never feel moved to do that. She might as well be a house painter. Or live in a cave in the woods and not have to know about any of it. It was hard not to imagine being dazzlingly successful, but in the unlikely event that she wasn’t, that seemed not a bad alternative, being purely at one with nature, in a cave.
Milton brought up a heavy sigh, a puff of the unhappiness and isolation that made Maude his partisan despite herself, protecting him from the shame of his failure. “Aah, well,” he exhaled. “What can you do?”
It took only as long to go through the museum as it took to cover its physical space, and it seemed that the building, for all its jarring architectural distinctness, conveyed nothing so much as the message of costliness. That, as much as the fortresslike air, said Do Not Enter Here.
“An hour later, you’re hungry,” said Milt, lighting a cigarette on the drawbridge. “Let’s hit the Modern. What do you say? Sink our teeth into Matisse.” He had the manner, teacherish, of one used to addressing and leading groups.
Waved in on Milt’s member’s card, cheered by the uncon-troversial Matisse, they went up the steps, where that Joseph Stella of the Brooklyn Bridge that Maude never could like, and the it’s-a-tree-no-it’s-children “Hide and Seek” that she used to admire always were, to the members’ lounge.
It may have seemed like her own private club to Maude, but Weesie had never been in. If they had lunch in midtown, it was always that boring French restaurant where she always had boring things like celeriac salad and escargots. Here she could take her own tray, and everything looked bright and exotic. It was a caf-eteria, but a Bauhausian cafeteria, full of foods that were cheap and possibly avant-garde, with white-white walls, not antique white or oyster white, industrial carpeting like the Pughs’, and everything fitting, stacking, slender, streamlined, steely, white or black, as if color took up room or wasted visual energy. And the people—Weesie was sure they were all artists, unless they were folksingers. A blonde woman in a tunic made from a Mexican rebozo looked like Mary from Peter, Paul, and Mary, and half the men had beards. Many wore black turtlenecks.
They all looked as though a secret message passed among them. Milt recognized someone and went over to greet him. The three females watched as the men bared their teeth but stood with wary stiffness, like dogs who may at any moment snarl. Milt came back and named a name they all recognized.
“You know him?” Weesie squeaked.
Milt waved this away. “Aagh, we were in art school together.”
“What’s he like?” Weesie leaned forward over her arms.
Milt looked at her a moment. “He still thinks his shit don’t smell.”
Parents never said shit, at least not to mean, actually, turds. To Weesie’s relief, her mother laughed.
Maintaining his aplomb, Milt cut into a pear, approved its ripeness with a little “mm,” divided it into four sections with the pits cut out, and handed one to each of them. They picked chunks of cheese—cerulean; pock-marked cadmium extra light; and creamy Naples yellow: Roquefort, Bel Paese, Swiss—from a white Arabiaware plate. For the rest of her life, Weesie would consider thick, stackable Arabiaware superior to hand-painted, gilt-edged porcelain from Tiffany’s, whose existence, in any case, shamed her as a mark of privilege.
She sympathized with Maude’s dissatisfactions, out of friendship, but congratulated herself on the luck Maude refused to acknowledge: there would be room for her in the place Maude wanted to vacate. How could Maude not understand that her family knew the true way to live?
The girls were allowed to have coffee.
6.
THERE WERE BOYS at Bay Farm School. Cute boys. B
oys with shaggy hair and a lovely way of tossing it. Inscrutable creatures, louder, bigger, more careless than the girls, they inspected the girls across the tables in class while teachers talked, and looked away if Maude or Weesie caught them gazing, or sometimes smiled back if what the teacher was saying seemed ridiculous enough to justify it.
In a town where Maude was regarded as stuck-up, there was no way for her not to be an oddball: she used arcane words from the nineteenth-century novels she devoured; she was regarded as hoity-toity for going to the library every week to take them out. In this town, it was outlandish to go into the city for entertainment, much less to art museums. But she had grown up wondering, for her part, why her household did not offer such amenities as soft-crusted white bread, grape jelly, a subscription to TV Guide, or a new brother or sister every year or so. She had cried when she couldn’t wear a communion dress, like her best friend—“a bride’s dress,” she had sobbed. She only experienced the cultural divide between them when they got to the age of rock ’n’ roll. It was never heard in her own house, and she didn’t like it.
She so didn’t like it that she didn’t believe anyone she liked could. Her pickup friendships tended to shred away upon the other girl’s first attempt to recruit her to something she recoiled at as alien. She soon learned to recognize its attendant earmarks: teased hair, ankle bracelets, training bras, add-a-pearl neck-laces, and partisanship on such issues as whether you were on Liz Taylor’s or Debbie Reynolds’ side. It would have surprised Maude to discover that Milt or Nina knew who Liz Taylor or Debbie Reynolds was. In the other type of household, they were as passionate about a movie star’s divorce as they were about Republicans versus Democrats.
