The Art of Keeping Cool

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  He led me off the road to a path I hadn’t noticed before. It headed into a forested area that people in Sachem’s Head called “the back woods.”

  “You’ve been coming here? Nothing’s here but a lot of swamp maples and mosquitoes.”

  “Abel Hoffman is here,” Elliot said, with a careful glance at me. “I’ve been visiting him in the afternoons. I thought you’d like to see where he lives. It’s in a boat he’s fixed up, a boat in the woods.”

  “You’ve been visiting him!”

  “Don’t be mad. I wanted to go by myself first, to see what it was like.”

  “You are the biggest liar.”

  “I know,” Elliot admitted, “but I have to be.”

  He’d told me he was being kept after school by a teacher who was unsatisfied with his work. It had sounded true. His teachers were unsatisfied with him most of the time. To them, he was a goof-off with no ambition to improve. As far as I could see, they were right. He had his own interests, things so different from anything the teachers were trying to teach that he wasn’t ever going to get along with any of them. Elliot needed another kind of teacher.

  “Has Abel Hoffman been letting you use his paints?” I asked, as we walked along. You had to watch where you put your feet, it was that dense.

  “Yes, he has.”

  “Have you been going to the bay beach?”

  “No.”

  “So he’s not painting the ocean anymore?”

  “Yes, he is, but he doesn’t go there anymore. Since he got attacked.”

  “Did he say who did it yet?”

  “He knows, but he won’t tell. He won’t go to the police, either. He doesn’t trust them. Where he came from in Germany, the police were dangerous. If they didn’t like you, they could have you arrested. They’d break down people’s doors when they weren’t home, smash their furniture, steal things.”

  “Did they smash up his house there?”

  “His apartment. A couple of times.”

  We followed the forest path until it crossed a fast-running brook, then we veered off and walked beside the stream. The water made a loud chatter as it ran beside us over rocks and fallen trees. Elliot had to lean over and shout in my ear.

  “Abel’s still kind of beat up, but pretend you don’t notice, okay? He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  We came to a small field, well shielded on all sides by trees and undergrowth. At the far end was something that looked like an overgrown haystack. When we walked nearer I saw it was a boat, a big old round-bottom sailboat that somehow must have been dragged up through the fields from the shore.

  It was set in a low ship’s cradle and rode as upright on the field as it must have at sea. But around and over the cockpit, a small house had been built with pine plank walls and a broad thatched roof, glass-paned windows and a door that opened and shut on real hinges. Out of this door, Abel Hoffman came in his blue cap.

  “Cheerio! Cheerio! With great pleasure I am to see you!” He rushed toward us, waving his good arm. The other lay in a sling against his chest, set in the plaster cast Grandpa must have made for him. More than a week had passed since the attack, but Abel’s face was still in bad shape. His eyelids were dark and puffy, his lips were cut, a purple and yellow bruise ran all the way down one side of his head to his neck. He was limping, too.

  The broken arm was his right, a lucky thing, Elliot had told me, because he was left-handed and his work hadn’t been interrupted. He couldn’t shake hands though. Instead he politely touched my shoulder, and gave Elliot’s a friendly pat.

  “So! You have bringing your cousin! At last! Vel-come! Please, I show you.”

  He walked me around his encampment, very proud. You could tell he’d been there for awhile. There was a good-size stack of chopped wood by the house, a vegetable garden fenced off with wire mesh, a water hole dug in the side of the brook that ran through the woods behind, paths leading in different directions. A beautiful red-tailed hawk was sitting on a tree limb near the boat. When we went by, it didn’t move, just stared straight at us as if it owned the place. “My always friend,” Abel said.

  Far off, through leaves, I caught a glint of water.

  “What’s there?”

  “It’s the bay,” Elliot answered. “Were closer than you’d think after coming through the woods.”

  Abel Hoffman began a scrambled explanation that completely lost me, so Elliot translated. He was a lot better at understanding Abel’s English than I was. It made me wonder how long he really had been coming here.

  “Abel says the bay is about a mile away. In winter, he has a better view. But its an easy walk to the beach, and that’s how the boat must have come to be here.

  “The house was already built on. He thinks another artist had it before, because of carvings that were on some beams inside, and an old case of watercolors he found. The hull had rotted out in places, but he patched it and rebuilt the room inside. The roof is dried cattails. There’s a wood stove inside that was already there. Do you want to look in? He says you can if you want.”

  “All right.”

  I walked up a short ladder and stepped into a tiny room where paintbrushes, rolls of paper, string, tacks, and other painting gear was stored neatly on shelves along the walls. Everything in the whole place was tucked, folded, hung, strung, stacked or shelved away. I saw a fishing rod, an ax and his binoculars, a cooking pot, a kerosene lantern, his thin wood walking stick. Behind some bedding tucked under a long bench, I saw a half-full bottle of whiskey.

  The smell of turpentine and paint was thick but no painting was going on there at the moment. Abel had set up a sort of painting desk outside. When I stuck my head out the studio door again, I saw him standing in front of it with Elliot, shouting and flinging his good arm around. It was an odd thing to see them together like that, one so passionate and excited about everything while the other stood quiet, looking almost bored. Only if you knew Elliot very well could you tell that he was taking in every word.

  “Come! See! I am finish. I mean finish-ed!” Abel called when he saw me.

  I came out and looked over Elliot’s shoulder at his painting.

  “What is it?” I asked. All I could see was a kind of swirl, blues and yellows, greens and pinks. And something dark under the colors, a shadow swimming deep below the surface.

  “Its one of his ocean paintings,” Elliot said. “Isn’t it beautiful? It’s of the bay.”

  “It is?”

  “I paint the ocean! Out of my heart!” Abel shouted. “I see in the ocean. Many things. A storm coming . . . here,” he pointed to his brain. “I paint!”

  “A storm?”

  Elliot jumped in to interpret.

  “It’s not the outer world but the inner world he paints. That’s why you can’t always recognize real things. He’s painting his feelings.”

  I’d never heard of art like this before, and certainly never seen it.

  “Nice,” I told Abel. “Very good.” Really I thought the painting was stupid. The poor guy couldn’t even draw. Everything looked messy, as if it had been flung on in a rush. If Abel’s name and photo hadn’t been in Elliot’s book, I would have thought he was a fraud.

  Abel’s work table had some other things on it. I glanced down and saw a pile of drawings that looked familiar. They were Elliot’s airplane series. He must have decided to bring them to show Abel after all. I recognized my father’s Flying Fortress and a drawing of the crashed plane in Eavesville. Next to that were some of his drawings of the fort, the big guns, and Elliot’s talent just shone out from them. They made Abel Hoffman’s painting look like a little kid’s.

  But in the next hour, I watched how kind Abel was to Elliot. He let him use his brushes, his paper, any paint he wanted. I watched Elliot draw for him, and saw how happy Elliot was when Abel praised his lines. Elliot was drawing the boat-studio, the thatched roof, the tangled forest behind.

  “This is good, so good,” Abel told him. (He pronounced it “goot.
”) He took Elliot’s pencil, added something to the drawing, and handed it back.

  “I see. Like this?”

  “Why not?”

  “So, it doesn’t need to be so . . .”

  “Less perfectness,” Abel Hoffman told him. “More . . .” He didn’t know the word. “More you-ness,” he said finally.

  “You-ness?”

  “Pardon . . . I mean, is coming from you, inside, who you are, here.” He reached out and put his hand over Elliot’s heart.

  • • •

  “Did you really like Abel’s ocean painting, or were you just being nice?” I asked Elliot on the way home later.

  “I liked it. I thought you did, too.”

  “Well, sort of. But it looks to me like he isn’t a professional, yet. Maybe he has a way to go before he gets to that stage.”

  Elliot laughed. “Why would he be in a book if he wasn’t a professional?”

  “I don’t know. Was that really him?”

  “Yes it was. He was a teacher, remember? His paintings were in museums, until the Nazis came. They hate modern painters and don’t want them around. He told me he was lucky to get out. Some didn’t.”

  “What do they do, put them in prison?”

  “I guess so. He won’t say what happened. He doesn’t like to remember, that’s why he drinks.”

  “I saw his bottle. So he gets soused all the time?”

  “Not all the time.”

  “Have you asked him why he’s living here yet?”

  “No! Come on, Robert, don’t be so suspicious. He came here to work. What’s wrong with that? He’s going to let me paint with him all summer.”

  It was a bad idea, I knew it right away.

  “Elliot . . .”

  “Abel invited me,” Elliot said. “He thinks I have talent.”

  “Well of course you have talent! But when people find out you’re visiting him all the time . . .”

  “They’re not going to find out.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “I’m being careful.”

  “It’s not safe for Abel either, you know. He’ll get it again.”

  “He’s being careful, too.”

  “That’s so stupid! This is a small place. Everyone finds out everything. Anyway, Abel is nowhere near as good as you are already. You can draw ten times better.”

  “No I can’t.” Elliot looked at me, shocked. “Abel’s fifty times better. He doesn’t want to draw like that, that’s all. Drawing isn’t anything. He says anyone can do it if they practice. It’s not important. Abel knows what’s important. He’s going to show me stuff I would never get to know otherwise.”

  “Elliot, this is nuts.”

  “I wouldn’t. Because who else would ever come here and show me? Nobody else,” Elliot said. “Nobody else is ever coming here like him. He’s the only one and this summer, he’s going to teach me.”

  8

  THE DRY SPELL in my fathers mail lasted until the final days of June. Then, like a bad joke, the mailman delivered three letters at once to our old mailbox on the lane. My mother had to sit down to recover after she came in the house. Afterwards, she opened them one after another, and read out parts to us, and we were all happier than we’d been in weeks.

  “Everything is all right! He sounds fine, doesn’t he!” she kept saying, as if she didn’t quite believe it. You could see how far down she’d been without news. Meanwhile, I noticed something about these letters. They had all been forwarded from the farm, not addressed to us in Sachem’s Head. I didn’t bring it up right then. I waited until later, after my sister was put to bed, and my mother was back downstairs. Then I said:

  “Dad still doesn’t know we’re here, does he?”

  She was folding laundry and didn’t look up.

  “He wrote his last letter May 25th, and he still didn’t know,” I said. “Does that mean he hasn’t gotten any of our letters since we moved?”

  “I guess it does,” my mother said, avoiding my eyes.

  “But that’s four months!”

  “Maybe he didn’t get the letters that told him.”

  “Well write him again,” I said. “He should know.”

  My mother nodded and we said no more.

  I’d been wondering right along why my father was taking so long to hear about our move. After this, I began to suspect my mother of not telling him. I knew from the way she skipped around when she’d read from the new letters that she was keeping something back. Not just the usual blood and war stuff she thought we couldn’t handle. Something else. Starting right then, I watched for a time when I could sneak into her closet and read the letters for myself. It didn’t come up for a while, though. Life got busy all of a sudden.

  After school let out for vacation, Grandpa was worried we’d get into trouble without a job, so Elliot and I were set up to work for Grandma around the house. We had to hoe and water the vegetable garden, prune the privet hedges, weed the driveway. We raked out the hen house, cut the grass, and every day we had some special job assigned to us that Grandpa thought up. This was light work for me compared to what I’d done at the farm, but to Elliot it was murder. He wasn’t used to outdoor labor.

  Too much sun gave him headaches. He got dizzy when he had to stand up on a ladder to clip anything. If he pushed the grass mower for more than ten minutes, he’d start staggering around like a sick mule. I was the person who did most of the work. After a week or so of this, Grandma began to feel sorry for me, and even sorrier for Elliot who looked so miserable. She’d let us off early in the afternoons so we could go swimming.

  Grandpa protested whenever he found out. He said Grandma wasn’t doing us any favors by letting us skip out. Hard work was good for us. It built up a sense of responsibility. He said it was especially good for Elliot, who had no clear idea what hard work was. In fact, Elliot owed him a day’s labor for all the food he ate, free of charge, and for the laundry that Grandma did for him, and the bed he slept in.

  “Everybody does their part in this house, whether they like it or not,” I heard Grandpa roar at him more than once. “I’m not in the business of housing freeloaders!”

  Elliot must have felt insulted by all this, but he never showed it. He’d hang his head guiltily and even nod in agreement. The first chance he got, he’d scoot like a rabbit and get away.

  “Don’t run off like that. It makes you look bad,” I said one time. He didn’t get it, though. His idea was the less fight you put up, the better.

  “I let the wind blow through,” is how he said it to me once.

  “I let it blow and when it stops, I get up and go on.”

  “Well, at least you don’t have to nod and agree all the time while the wind is blowing!” I told him. “Don’t you get mad?”

  “It wouldn’t help.”

  “I know, but don’t you anyway?”

  “The thing is, I have to live here.”

  I was glad I didn’t have to live there. Much as I tried, I could not let Grandpa’s wind blow through. Something always snapped and I’d end up fighting back, especially when Elliot was the target. To watch how Grandpa treated him made me furious.

  “He worked all yesterday on the turnips!” I’d yell, even if it wasn’t strictly true. Or, “No one can push that mower. It needs a grease job, that’s what!”

  Grandpa would swing his old nose in my direction and take me on at full blast. Then, if we were lucky, Grandma would rush in with her “Now, now, Harvey. You let the boys go about their business.”

  If we weren’t lucky, I’d be left manning the fort alone, so to speak, because Elliot would slip away the minute Grandpa’s eye was off him. It wasn’t his fault. He just couldn’t take the heat.

  You had to be pretty tough to face the old man by yourself. By the end of our battles, I’d usually feel I’d held my ground with him, or if not, that at the least I was recognized. More than once, he asked again if I’d like to come back to visit his office. But I always got out of this somehow.


  It was an afternoon after one of these stand-offs that Grandma Saunders beckoned me down the hall to the spare bedroom and quietly closed the door behind us.

  “You’ve been asking for a picture of your father,” she said. “I have one here.”

  She opened the drawer of a tall bureau and took out a photograph in a silver frame. We sat down on the bed and looked at it together. A dark-haired, serious-faced boy in long pants and a hunting cap stood in a field with a shotgun in his hands. A spaniel sat by his feet, its tongue lolled out.

  “He was about twelve, I think,” Grandma said. “That’s his dog, Baron. They’d go off together and come back with a duck or some grouse. He got us a thirty-pound turkey for Christmas one year. I’ll never forget the size of that bird.”

  “He never told me he hunted. We didn’t have a gun at the farm.”

  “Oh, he was a good shot,” she said. “Your grandfather had him out hitting cans off a log before he was ten. He must have given it up when he went out to Ohio.”

  “You know, you can tell it’s my dad,” I said. “He looks like himself. Just younger, and his leg is right.”

  “What’s right about it?”

  “Well, you know, it’s kind of bent a little now, from the plane crash. They never did get it put back together the way it was.”

  “I didn’t know he was in a plane crash,” Grandma said. “Was it after you were born?”

  “Oh no. Way before. Before he met my mother, even. He was flying for the mail service. He said it was his first job, before he got the hang of things.”

  Grandma was quiet after this. We both looked at the photo some more.

  “My father didn’t keep very close contact with you, did he?” I asked finally.

  “Never has,” she said. “That’s why I’m so glad you’re here. You’re like him, you know.”

  “I am?”

  “You look like him a bit. And you’ve got his hardworking spirit. He was always a great help to me around this place, just like you are now.”

  I felt pretty happy hearing this, after Grandpa. “I bet you’re just trying to make me feel good.”

  Grandma smiled and shook her head, then looked serious again.