All the Finest Girls (11 page)

Hank chewed the inside of his lip. I searched for something to say.

“Well, you look really good,” I finally ventured, trying not to inflame the situation.

“Thanks, thanks. We went over to Korea, Pusan. You know Linda’s family is still there.”

I did not know. Linda had been Dad’s teaching assistant, and he’d moved from our house directly into her apartment. When he left the university four years later, they moved to New York. I hadn’t met Linda more than a handful of times.

“Just got back,” he continued. “The food was extraordinary. Extraordinary.”

“Great, that sounds great.”

My father stole a glance over the cash register and in through the short-order window.

“How’s your work? Still at the museum?”

“Yeah. It’s good, busy. I’m assistant director of paintings conservation now. So. That’s good.”

“You sound like you have a cold.”

I nodded, waved it off.

“It’s really going around,” he said. “Linda’s got it, Dr. Orkin …” My father stopped himself and looked toward the kitchen again. He cleared his throat, adjusted the paper around the flowers. I felt an unexpected wave of dread.

“Who’s Dr. Orkin? Dad? Are you sick?”

“No, no. Dr. Orkin’s a … whatever. He’s a psychotherapist.” He smiled sheepishly, blushed. “Linda thought I might find it interesting. I’ve really just started. I don’t know if I’ll continue. But it’s been … amusing.”

I looked out the window and up the avenue. Shrink Row.

“Wow.”

“Is it so surprising?”

“Kind of.” I imagined my father in a dimly lit room, wringing his hands in a confessional mode, lightening his load. The idea was grotesque, obscene. And I was stung suddenly with a hot flame of envy.

“But I don’t really know you,” I continued, trying to be helpful to both of us by closing the subject, “so what do I know.”

My father grimaced and shook his head.

“What does that mean — you don’t know me?” The woman behind the counter brought out a brown paper bag. He lowered his already low voice. “I’m your father. Jesus, Addy,” he hissed, “that is so like you. Always apart. Always judging.”

A businessman in an overcoat who’d been waiting behind my father pushed between us with an exasperated shove of the shoulder. Hank picked up his bag and clutched the flowers. I felt the blood leave my face.

“You ought to talk to someone,” he said buttoning up his coat. “It can be very instructive.”

Hank backed toward the door. With his hat back on, he looked just as he had when I was small. Cloaked and impermeable.

“I wish …” he began, and then stopped, fumbled with his packages. “In any case. Good to see you. I’ll be in touch.” Before the door shut behind him, he turned around.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I waited till I was sure he was gone, paid for my tea and toast, and headed toward the museum.

The predella was a Flemish work, in tempera and oil, and I’d been restoring it for a couple of weeks. The panel, along with the triptych it fronted for, had survived a major fire that ravaged a sixteenth-century Italian villa. It was a small miracle that the paintings had made it out at all, and at the pleading of the English auction house that had rescued them, our atelier had agreed to make a restoration effort. The work was tough, not only because of the smoke and fatty deposits that obscured much of the painting’s detail, but also because I had no conclusive evidence as to the artist’s identity.

I spent the first few days viewing the panel and doing research. The scene was of a figure at sea, with his sail blowing out in tatters. Taken with the other panels — one of a man on bended knee receiving keys from Jesus, another of a white-haired figure enthroned — I figured that the artist had rendered several images of Peter. In each small painting the sky glowed luminously, even with the smoke damage, and featured a corona of light, a dove issuing forth from the circle’s center. The influence of Van Eyck was obvious, but I began to think that maybe the artist was a closer disciple of Juan de Flandes. The exceptional detail and the strangely unreal quality of the water and sky seemed more in keeping with de Flandes. But there was little to go on.

I removed the frame to study the best-preserved portions. It was immediately apparent that there had been no previous restoration done on the panel. Usually with a work that old, restoration involves as much effort undoing other people’s mistakes as bringing it back to its original state. Inch by inch, I worked on the painting, making use of a new resin developed in Pietrasanta.

For the first week, I felt confident that I was cleaning back to the artist’s final glaze, preserving the patina while returning most of the contrast and color to its former refulgence. I had removed the top coating of smoke and was beginning to get a fuller sense of the work’s original color and shading. Though slow going, the project was similar to many other restorations I’d made. But one day, coming in as the early morning light was banking off the west wall of the studio, I saw that I’d made a terrible error. A portion of sky, about the size of a dime, was reading much brighter than the rest of the painting. Initially I hoped the difference was caused by the slow drying time of the resin I was applying. But soon I became certain I’d gone too far and removed a layer of varnish. In fact, it seemed that I’d gone straight down to the gesso when I thought I was merely clarifying a section of cloud. If I was right, the area would never age again at the same rate as the rest of the work and would be irrevocably changed.

It’s impossible in my line of work not to make the occasional mistake. One always hopes that it will happen, like this, with a small and unimportant work. Anyone else in our department would have shrugged off the discrepancy, but I couldn’t let it go. The spot had begun to flash at me like some kind of sinister searchlight, focusing on me and my imperfections. I tormented myself with the problem, sat at my desk at night making notes, questioning whether I could do a repaint or whether I’d only make matters worse. My experience had taught me that with rare exception, once you had cleaned a section it was extremely difficult to resurface without treating the whole work as well.

As I walked back to the museum after seeing my father, my mind again fastened on this foul-up. I thought about making a quiet call to an old professor of mine at the National Gallery. My stomach felt unsettled; something in my mouth tasted rank.

When I got to the studio, Emmeline was in her office consulting with Mark, our antiquities man. Through the open door, I could see a bouquet of red roses surely sent by Emmeline’s husband, Felix. On the windowsill next to my easel, I discovered two of the same roses placed in a glass bud vase. It was a gesture typical of Emmeline, simple and thoughtful, of which she would not want me to make much. I moved the flowers aside and looked at the altarpiece. Inches above the sapphirine sea, the medallion of sky glared an unlikely chalky white. Picking up a cotton swab, I leaned in to work a lower corner of the painting but began to feel very strange. All in what must have been a second or two, I was overwhelmed by exhaustion. My hearing went funny, my eyeballs felt covered by itchy wool, and the painted sea I was focused on turned suddenly from green, to gray, to a spangly, dusty sort of nothing at all. Before I fainted, I remember stretching out a steadying hand and the sound of my palette clattering to the floor.

Mark knelt before me, and Emmeline had my head in her lap. I must have been out for at least a couple of minutes.

“Too much naphtha,” I said, trying to pretend that I was not lying on the floor of the studio but actually standing professionally before my incredible fuckup.

“You’re not supposed to drink the stuff, Addy,” said Mark, fiddling with his earring and giving me a gentle wink.

“I’ve ruined it,” I said.

Emmeline laughed softly.

“We all make mistakes, darling. No point in killing yourself over it.”

“Nah. So messy,” seconded Mark.

I sat up and shook them both off, though I felt sweat dampening me from scalp to toe. When Emmeline insisted that I go home and get some rest, I simply didn’t have the strength to argue.

I boarded the crosstown bus, but as the doors began to shut, I felt sure I would vomit. I remember yelling to the driver to let me off. A handful of private school teenagers, trussed up with huge backpacks, lumbered away from me in attitudes of contempt and disgust as I made for the door. Afraid of being trapped again in a closed space, I walked home and tried to calm myself by repeating the words “It’s OK, you’ll be fine.” One more mad person in the park.

What occurred after the first day of my illness was evident to me only in the aftermath, when I began cleaning up my wrecked apartment. But the first stages, though uncomfortable, remain clear enough to recall.

I sat on the floor near the radiator for what seemed like an eternity. My fainting spell had left me feeling numb, evacuated, and as I sat there I had a strange kind of out-of-body experience. Like a pathologist inspecting a cadaver, I could see and feel my body expanding, firing, warming under the blaze of the coming fever. Blood ran slow, molten, through slackening valves. My heart, totally out of sync with my breathing, felt as if it were thudding against the bars of a cage. Each bone in my body hung from its net of tendons aimed toward the floor in a bid for eternal rest. My very scalp felt inflamed.

I thought of what my father had said to me in the coffee shop, replayed the whole encounter over and over. Backward and forward, slow and fast, I dissected the scene like a film editor making the final cut. I spoke the lines out loud, substituted my wan, stuttering pleasantries with zingers and wicked one-liners. And all the while, I felt a fireball of heat gathering inside of me, a hailstorm of anger and vitriol. I could not have deciphered anymore whether my sickness was physical or mental, but it had soon consumed me utterly. The rage I felt was nearly erotic in its intensity, the flames of it licking at me as I lay there on the worn rug in my clammy little apartment. It had been years since I’d felt anything so acutely.

Some undefinable time later, before night came and threw my apartment into total darkness, I pulled down from the bookshelves a stack of philosophy books I’d acquired in college. Flipping through Durant, I came upon the lines that were flickering around the back of my overheated mind but had continued to elude me. In an angry letter to her son, Arthur Schopenhauer’s mother once wrote:

You are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people.

This struck me as hilarious, and I had to lie down on the floor again from the strain of laughing. I remembered vividly the night I’d first discovered that line.

When I was a sophomore in college, emboldened by the delicious freedom those years give a person to investigate — and cultivate contempt for — one’s parents, I took a kind of antiseptic interest in the subject to which my father had devoted himself. I read Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer’s
The World As Will and Idea.
I enrolled in a couple of courses in the university’s philosophy department, gathering a slow appreciation for the discipline. I thought I might gain some insight into, if nothing else, what I believed was Hank’s impossible nature. I felt very grown-up, investing myself in this analysis. Clearly, however, I was leading up to some far more dramatic effort.

One night, facing finals and stirred by what the psychiatrist at Health Services called my “routine anxiety disorder,” I charged into the university library. During these attacks, I found that light of any kind made my already throbbing head feel as if it were going to implode and so I’d taken to wearing sunglasses until the episodes passed. I can only imagine what kind of lunatic I looked like darting through the dimly lit stacks, squinting behind dark shades as I ran my finger down the titles. I searched out two volumes of my father’s work (noting with satisfaction that neither had been circulated in a half dozen years) and hustled them to a study carrel. I had of course seen the books — his Ph.D. thesis on Schopenhauer and another whose subject I forget — on my parents’ bookshelves for years. But it had never occurred to me before that I might read and understand them. Throwing my coat over my head to block the fluorescent light, I dug into Hank’s works, making angry notes in the margins as I went along.

Dad made a name for himself by anticipating the chaos and violence of the sixties. During the midfifties’ sock hop of optimism, Henry Abraham was crooning gloom and doom, his message amplified by McCarthyism and the country’s combustible racial divisions. His Ph.D. thesis warned against an ahistorical approach to morality, suggesting that mankind would repeatedly commit atrocities against one another because we continued to divide our species into the “subhuman” and the “morally right.” Hank sought to transcend the argument that such a thing as human rights even existed and concentrate instead on our protean ability to become what as a society we deem acceptable or necessary. He made quite a splash; his scholarship and keen intelligence were difficult to ignore. But, in a post-Holocaust world, Hank’s philosophy was ultimately totally unpopular.

It wasn’t until the end of the decade, when black men and women took seats at lunch counters demanding to be served, that Hank was “discovered.” A tiny swell of support moved in his direction, consisting mostly of fellow academics and black intellectuals who foresaw terrible trouble ahead. At Columbia, where he had studied Dewey and stayed on as an associate professor, his colleagues began to talk him up and by 1962 he was hailed as a minor oracle. It was during that time that he and my mother fell in love. An actress with a promising theatrical career, as well as the beautiful daughter of a famous artist, Barbara could by all accounts have had her pick of New York’s bachelors. But at a smoky party on Riverside Drive, she chose Hank and sealed her fate. He was, she once told me, “simply the most beautiful, fascinating man I’d ever met.”