The Art of Keeping Cool

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “When can we go to the beach?” Carolyn was always asking my mother. “You promised we’d go swimming at the beach.” She was too little to care anything about the war. Periscopes coming up out at sea didn’t faze her one bit.

  “Can’t we get you interested in anything but the beach?” my mother would say. She wasn’t too excited about Carolyn playing down there, even if it did get warm, with all that was going on.

  “No you can’t! You can’t!” Carolyn would scream. Little kids have a one-track mind when they’ve decided on something they want.

  We’d been in our rented cottage for three months by then. It was rough and plain, but we liked it all right. There was no telephone or radio, like we’d had at the farm, but Mom said we’d get them as soon as we could. She’d found a good job at the Naval Torpedo Station in nearby Newport.

  “I’m learning to spot weld,” she said. “They needed welders so I signed up. Why not? It pays double and it’s no harder than making buttonholes.”

  It was pretty funny to think of my mother manning a blow torch, walking around in workmen’s overalls making torpedoes. I kept my mouth shut though. I could see how seriously she took it.

  “Don’t bring it up with your grandparents,” she told me. “They’ve got old-fashioned views of where women belong. It’s bad enough that Nan and I are out working for wages at all.”

  Gasoline was expensive—soon it would be rationed for the war—so she and Aunt Nan drove to Newport with some other women every weekday morning, leaving Carolyn with Grandma Saunders. Since they usually didn’t get back till after seven at night, I had my suppers with Elliot and did my homework in Elliot’s attic room.

  I’d entered the local school in Elliot’s seventh grade class, and gotten to know a lot of other kids. I didn’t spend much time with them, though. Elliot, being the odd kind of goose he was, hadn’t made many friends over the years, and in fact was down to really none when I got there. So I hung around with him. I didn’t mind. We’d hook up at the end of the school day and walk home, talking or not talking, depending on how Elliot was feeling about things.

  It was on one these walks that Elliot introduced me to the man he’d told me about on the day of the big guns, the tall man in the blue cap whose name was Abel Hoffman. Maybe “introduce” is the wrong word, because Elliot no sooner saw him coming up the road, than he jumped into the bushes and dragged me in after.

  “Elliot! What’s the matter with you?”

  “It’s him, Mr. Hoffman! Don’t let him see me.”

  “But why?” I peered down the road. The man in the blue cap hadn’t noticed us yet. He was walking slowly, staring into a field he was passing. He wore foreign-looking, dark leather boots that laced high up his shins, and had a walking stick that he swung forward and touched to the ground every few steps.

  “I can’t speak to him!” Elliot whispered. “He’s in a book.”

  “In a book! I thought you said he was a painter.” I tried to stand up but Elliot yanked me back down.

  “He is a painter. That’s why he’s in the book.”

  “Well, I’m getting up.”

  “No! No!”

  “I’m getting up and you are, too . . .”

  “No!”

  “Because if he’s a painter you should meet him,” I said. Elliot was terrible about meeting people. That was one of the reasons he didn’t have any friends.

  “But I have met him,” Elliot cried in a sort of wail. I was already pulling him out of the brush, though. I got him back on the road just in time for Abel Hoffman to more or less run right into us.

  “Ah! Pardon!” He stopped in his tracks. He had a knapsack on his back with a lot of rags and paintbrushes sticking out of it. Some kind of a collapsible stool was tied to the back. You could see he’d probably been out painting somewhere.

  “So, you!” he said to Elliot. He seemed pretty happy about running into him. “But how are you? How is your hart? You are never coming to see me.”

  Elliot looked off nervously into the distance and tried some fake manners.

  “Well, hello Mr. Hoffman, so nice to see you again. This is my cousin Robert from Ohio. We’ve been really busy and I didn’t have time to . . .”

  Abel Hoffman put out his hand to me and dipped his shoulders, very polite and courtly. He was tall and really thin. His clothes flapped around whenever he moved. Under his pants, his legs looked like sticks.

  “I am most very pleased,” he said, and shook my hand. “Do you also do hart, like your couchen. Er, I mean your . . . cowzen? Well, I mean like . . . this one here?”

  He pointed at Elliot. His English was pretty bad. I could just barely understand him.

  “Hart?”

  “He means art,” Elliot murmured, sounding half strangled.

  “Oh art. No, not me. I can’t draw at all.”

  “Well, well, too bad.” Abel Hoffman lowered his head as if he was actually sorry to hear this, then he glanced at Elliot.

  “So, now, we meet again. You are coming one day to see me, yah?”

  Elliot didn’t answer. He was chewing wildly on his hand. The painter looked at him and nodded.

  “Is okay. Do not bring your har . . . your art. Another time, you bring. This time, you see what I do! I work and work to paint the ocean!” He gestured proudly toward Sachem’s Head Point.

  “The ocean!” Elliot echoed, as if he couldn’t believe it.

  “Yah, yah, come and look. Some afternoon, next week, after school. You know where? In my little studio?”

  Elliot nodded unhappily.

  “Good-bye, then. Cheerio, till we meet!”

  He marched off in time to his walking stick, looking like some kind of crazy insect flicking along. When he’d gone a little way, he turned back with a shout.

  “Pardon! You bring also this . . . this . . . your cousin!” he cried triumphantly to Elliot, conquering the word at last. He made his funny bow and went off again.

  Elliot was in such a gnawing, nervous state after this that I hardly dared look at him. We walked very fast down the road without speaking. After a few minutes, he seemed to be getting back in charge of himself, so I asked:

  “When did you meet him before?”

  “Last summer at the town fair.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What happened?”

  At first he wouldn’t say. Finally he gave in and told me how he’d come across the painter drawing portraits of people for money. Two dollars for a pencil drawing, four for pastel.

  “I’d never seen anybody work with pastels, so I watched him,” Elliot said. “Some other kids were watching, too, and Mr. Hoffman was really nice about it. He set us up with a few of his pastel crayons, and paper, and told us we could draw whatever we wanted. It was just for fun, but afterwards he invited me to come to his house and bring other things I’d done.”

  “He liked your drawing.”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “He did, though. That’s why he invited you. Did you go?”

  “I was going to. Not to show anything, I would have died before that. I wanted to try his pastels again.” Elliot paused. “Then I found out who he was.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I told you! He’s Abel Hoffman, the famous painter. And you better not tell anyone. And don’t tell anyone he talked to us, either, especially not in this house.” We were coming up on Grandma Saunders’ kitchen door.

  “Why not?”

  “They don’t like him.”

  “Why? He seems like a good person.”

  “He is,” Elliot said. “But they’ll be mad. He’s a German, you know, and people don’t like that.”

  “A German!” A kind of freeze went through me. I’d seen he was a foreigner because of his accent, but I hadn’t thought what kind.

  “He’s been living down in the woods since last spring. Everyone knows he’s there. I’m supposed to stay away from him.”

  There was no more
time to talk just then. Grandma was in the kitchen with Carolyn getting supper started. We had to start doing chores. We carried coal up from the cellar for the stove, brought laundry in from the line, and swept off the back porch, which still had leaves on it from last fall. Not till after supper could we get away to Elliot’s room.

  As soon as we’d shut the door, Elliot went over and pulled a cardboard box out from under his bed. It was where he stored the important things he owned, including a crazy collection of wild birds’ eggs that he kept in a bunch of old egg cartons. Usually, he’d have to stop and mull over his eggs, but now he was after something so he moved them aside. He took out a big, flat book from the bottom of the box.

  “Here it is, the book Abel Hoffman’s in. Your father gave it to me for my birthday last year.”

  “My dad?” I was amazed. “Does he usually give you birthday presents?”

  “Not usually,” Elliot said. “Just when we moved here with Grandma and Grandpa. I guess my mother must have told him we had to move. He didn’t want her to, I know. They never talked much on the phone, but they talked about that.”

  We sat on the floor, our backs against the bed.

  The book was called “Art in the Twentieth Century.” Each chapter was about a different country in the world, with nice, color photographs of artworks and the artists who had done them. There were chapters on France and Italy, on Spain and Mexico, the United States and so on.

  Abel Hoffman came up near the end of the chapter on Germany. There was even a black and white photo of one of his paintings, which was dark and wild and looked like a bunch of thorn bushes whipping around. A smaller photo was of him—or what he used to look like. He was a lot fatter when he was younger.

  “His name was on a sign at the fair,” Elliot said. “It sounded kind of familiar but I didn’t think anything at first.”

  “Who would?” I said. “The artists at fairs aren’t usually in books.”

  “A lot of people were mad that he dared to come and set up like that in the middle of town. Almost nobody asked him to draw them. Finally some out-of-town guys came and sat for him, but they wouldn’t pay when he finished. They made fun of his English and said he was a fake because he didn’t do real portraits but sort of impressions of people. He was really nice the whole time. People came and watched him work but they wouldn’t talk to him. They just thought, ‘Oh! A German!’, and stared.”

  “Well, we are fighting a war against them. How did you figure out it was him?”

  “I don’t know. I’d been reading this book and suddenly I remembered, I guess. I looked him up and there he was.”

  “It’s so strange.”

  Even stranger was to read:

  Abel Hoffman (1891– ): One of the boldest of the new wave of modernist German painters and abstract expressionists. Since his first exhibitions in the early 1920s, his unusually personal, highly emotional work has exerted an ever-increasing influence on a younger generation of painters. Hoffman grew up outside Berlin, the son of a factory worker. In 1924, after a period of study at the Stadtische Kunstschule (Municipal Art School) in Frankfurt, he set up his own studio and immediately became the center of an important group of young modern painters.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, when I’d finished reading the article. “Why is he over here?”

  Elliot shook his head. “I guess he came before the war started and couldn’t get back.”

  “Well, what’s he doing way out here by himself in Sachem’s Head where no one knows who he is? He should be in New York or some big city showing his paintings at museums if he’s so good.”

  “I guess he should,” Elliot said, “but he’s not famous here. I suppose he’s just waiting around for the war to end so he can go home.”

  “I wonder what he thinks about the war,” I said. “He must be pretty mad we’re fighting his country.”

  “He probably doesn’t think about it that way.”

  “Maybe he does,” I said. “Maybe he hides things. Let’s ask him a few questions when we go see him next week. You know, he really could be a spy over here on a mission.”

  “He’s not a spy, and we’re not asking him any questions because we’re not going,” Elliot said. He looked upset.

  “Elliot, why?”

  “No!”

  “You’re too scared?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “But he thinks you’re good.”

  “He thinks I’m what I am. Someone who can draw a little. That’s it. That’s really all I can do.”

  “He probably has real paint.”

  “What do you mean, ‘real paint’?”

  “Paint!” I said. “He said he was painting the ocean, remember? What would happen if Abel Hoffman let you borrow his paint? Have you ever tried real painting with a brush? I bet you haven’t.”

  Elliot fell into a long silence after this. At last he said, “I don’t know,” in a hollow-sounding voice. His eyes narrowed, then widened, then narrowed again while the thought of painting rattled through his brain. They narrowed and widened again. And again.

  “Elliot, don’t do that,” I said, but it was too late. His tic was taking over.

  “Please stop that! Stop!”

  There was no getting through to him. There never was when he went into one of his nervous shut-downs. He couldn’t help himself any more than anyone could help him, either, so it was a matter of just waiting it out. When my mother called from downstairs that she was back from Newport and ready to go home, I got up from the floor and looked down at him.

  “Hey El, do you mind if I borrow this book?” I asked him. “Just for tonight. I’ll bring it back in the morning.”

  Elliot didn’t answer, so I took it home.

  4

  ELLIOT WASN’T THE only ghost in Grandpa and Grandma Saunders’ house. There was another one, a person so erased and invisible that I almost forgot about him myself when I was there.

  This ghost had left no evidence of himself behind, though he’d grown up in that house and known the people who lived in it now. There was no memory of which room had been his, where he’d sat at the table, how he’d spent his time or which friends he’d brought home for dinner.

  No one ever talked about the sports he played, though I knew for a fact he’d played football and ice skated, because I’d heard stories about this back in Ohio. No one ever said what kind of marks he’d got at school, though he must have gone to the same school I was in now.

  Sometimes, in the middle of a class, I’d think: I could be sitting at his desk! I’d raise the wooden lid and look on the back where kids from the old days had carved their initials. There must have been a hundred initials carved there, but I never found my father’s.

  When we’d walk home from school I’d suddenly start wondering: Did he walk home this same way? It was strange to think of being in the footsteps of someone who’d left so long ago, who maybe didn’t even know yet that his son was here, living in Sachem’s Head, looking into his past.

  “Why doesn’t anyone ever want to talk about Dad?” I asked my mother a few weeks after we arrived. “Whenever I say anything, everybody looks upset.”

  “They’re worried about him, I suppose,” my mother said.

  “But there’s nothing of his around the house,” I told her. “No one will say what room he had. I wanted to see his old bed, but Aunt Nan said they don’t have it anymore.”

  “I’m not surprised,” my mother said. “It’s been a long time since your father was here.”

  I let the subject drop that time. I knew my mother worried a lot about my father. I didn’t want to bother her any more. But another time I said:

  “Grandma has pictures out around the house of Aunt Nan when she was little, but none of Dad. When I asked her where they were, she said she keeps them in a special place.”

  “Then I guess she does.”

  “But doesn’t that seem strange? Why doesn’t she put them where everyone can see them? Isn’t she pr
oud of what he’s doing?”

  My mother turned on me angrily then. “Of course she’s proud! He’s her son, after all. If Grandma chooses not to have his pictures about, that’s her business. And please don’t ask her any more about it. She’s as worried as all of us and doesn’t need a lot of rude poking and prodding to prove it.”

  That set me straight fast. I was sorry I’d ever brought the subject up. From then on, I didn’t talk about Dad. I still wondered about him though, and kept my eyes and ears open around the house for stray pieces of information that might solve the puzzle.

  Elliot’s book was one of these stray pieces, and back in my room that night, I examined it closely. Not for more information on Abel Hoffman. The German artist was interesting, worth a deeper investigation, but he could wait. I opened to the book’s inside cover and read the short inscription I’d caught sight of in Elliot’s room that night. It was written in my father’s handwriting.

  To Elliot, with hopes that this book will present new views and encourage you to travel far in pursuit of your goals. Happy Birthday, Kenneth B. Saunders (Uncle Ken).

  It made me kind of jealous to read that. The thing was, my father never wrote to me from England. Even if I wrote to him, he’d always write back to my mother, with the idea that she’d pass his letters along to Carolyn and me afterwards. I missed hearing from him directly. I knew he was busy, probably thinking of me and wanting to see me, but I wished he’d write anyway so I could be sure. When I saw those private words he’d written to Elliot, I felt sort of depressed. It didn’t matter that they’d been written more than a year ago, before he left for England.

  Of course, my dad had given me plenty of books over the years. They were the kind of present he liked to give. He loved them himself, and would read for hours in the evenings at the farm, or on days when the weather forced him in. But I wondered why he’d sent Elliot this art book if he’d never given him anything before. As far as I knew, he’d never been interested in Elliot up till then. He’d certainly never talked about him. What had made him get so interested all of a sudden?