I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (10 page)

I walked back into the kitchen and found my father and my little brother sitting on the floor with the Hinds County Junior College notebook in front of them in which I had earlier written the words “BAPTIST” and “METHODIST” and made the
T
s into men and women. I looked down by my father’s side. He had torn out that page of the notebook and wadded it up where it lay next to his pistol on the floor. He handed my brother and me a pencil each he had taken from his desk, then gave us each a new blank piece of paper he tore from the notebook. He opened it to a blank page for himself and pulled another pencil from a pocket of his shorts. He took the Yankees cap from my brother’s head and plopped it on mine.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I said.

“Sorry? For what?” he asked. I wanted to say for being a Methodist now, for quitting the race, for being a sissy. Instead, I once more shrugged. He gave me a hug. “Son, there’s nothing to forgive,” he whispered in my ear. He turned and studied my handiwork. “I see you’ve been in here spelling and drawing today, Kevinator,” he said. “I thought maybe Kimbo and me would join you. Let’s see. What do you want to draw now? How about a landscape? Do you know what a landscape is?” he asked me, and pulled me down to the floor close to him, holding me on one side and my brother on the other. I shook my head no. “It’s a pretty picture of a mountain scene or something like that. Let’s all draw a mountain. I’ll go first and you boys can copy me.”

My little brother and I watched my father draw two mountains with a river running through the valley between them. He then drew some trees around the river.

“Draw some birds in the sky,” my mother said, entering the kitchen and smiling at the landscape of the men in her family before her on the floor. Her freshly washed hair was still wet from the shower and she was wrapped in a towel. She held my little sister, who was just waking up. “Go on, draw some birds. A sky is not a sky until there are birds in it.”

“Birds…,” my father said, staring at the blank part of the paper above the mountains he had drawn. “How do I draw some birds?…” With a flourish, he marked the sky with three or four of the creatures with the simplest of strokes of his pencil. “See that, Kevin? Daddy made birds by just making a flattened-out
M
. Who knew an
M
could have wings, huh? What words start with an
m
?” he asked me, sensing how much I loved my new knowledge of language. “What words have wings?”

“‘Mommy,’” said my mother.

“‘Methodist,’” said my Baptist father, smiling up at her.

“‘Maris,’” I said, trying to please him.

“That’s right, Kevinator,” he said. “Attaboy.”

“And ‘me,’” I said. “‘Me’ starts with a
m
.”

“You,” my father said, shaking his head at the very thought of me and kissing me on my cheek. “Yep, you do,” he said. “‘Me’ does, I mean. You’re my little bird boy, I guess. Go on, draw one like I just did.”

I obeyed him as he watched me draw a flattened
M
all by myself in his version of a sky. We watched it fly on the page before us there in the midst of the flock of
M
s he had drawn. “‘Man’ starts with an
m
,” I softly said.

“Yes, it does,” my father said. “Yes, it does.”

I reached into my pocket and felt the bottle of red nail polish I had hidden there. I knew that later—before I painted the nail on just one of my little toes red to see how it looked, how it felt, before I returned the tiny bottle to my parents’ bathroom—that I would take the polish and paint some red flowers on my own landscape. I would then give it to him the very next Sunday as his Father’s Day gift.

*   *   *

A few weeks before Kim had arrived in New York for our MoMA visit he had sent me some photos of his latest art. I was rather shocked at how different it was from his earlier sculptural work. I just always assumed that he would stick to the calm of realism. But this work consisted of a kind of cacophony that began to harmonize as you viewed it. Many of the pieces were about the juxtaposition of objects. One consisted of a grid of letters on which some were circled and I thought of those flattened-out
M
s our father had fashioned into birds on that Sunday when the concept of conjured landscapes came into our combined life.

I looked at those e-mailed photos for a long time—to appreciate not just the art but also the artist—the brother—who could still surprise me, who could still run circles around me with his accomplishments.

This is what I wrote in my e-mail to him in response:

Kimbo:

I love that you are continuing to explore what being an artist means to you. I think a lot of your early work was all about the very frightened little boy inside you who saw the world as a chaotic place—so chaotic it could kill one parent in a moment and move on to claim another one just in case you didn’t grasp how cruel and chaotic it could be. Somehow though that little boy peering out from your man’s eyes could stare at a canvas or a lump of clay and create order. Your early work was all about healing yourself. Your gift to translate so precisely what you saw was God’s answer to a little boy’s prayer: a way to preserve life without killing it. This new work is not an answered prayer. You have evolved enough maybe—do any of us really ever heal in life?—so that the work itself is now the prayer.

*   *   *

My little brother—the one in that Yankees uniform who could so effortlessly please our father—grew up to be a father of four children. Kim created a life for himself in Mississippi that I could never create for myself. He always felt at home there. I never did.

He has his successful medical practice and lives in a beautiful antebellum home. He built himself a tennis court. He put in a pool and a pool house. He even expanded one of his guesthouses into a modernist studio and gallery to create and display his art. The gallery/studio stands now, a sleek rebuke to the main house, which was built in 1840, with its antebellum specifics—the portico, the porches, the columns.

Is that studio standing to the side of his home what I have become? Am I but a gallery? Is my life the sleek rebuke to his?

FIVE

The Mentor

In many ways Andy Wyeth was my brother’s mentor even though Wyeth only spent a couple of days sitting for Kim. Once my brother as a boy had been shown a book of Wyeth’s work by a family friend he had studied everything he could about the man and his art. Wyeth was as much a phantom presence around our childhood home as our parents were. My brother had written a letter to Wyeth—one he’d been in a way composing his whole life—when he sent him the photos of the preliminary studies of the bust he had been working on. He really just wanted the man to know what he had meant to him. But even before he read that letter and had only looked at the photos of the studies, Wyeth must have instinctively seen with his keen eye that the man who had shaped him with so much feeling and understanding had somehow been shaped in return by Wyeth himself in some deeper way. I’ve always thought that had been—more than the artistry he saw in the bust itself—what had triggered his impulse to issue such an invitation to my brother to pay him a visit and put those finishing touches on the sculpture.

My first mentor when I arrived in New York City, Henry Geldzahler, was not an artist, but he was certainly a part of the art world. Once the curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum (where he had been no fan of Andrew Wyeth), Henry, when I met him in 1978, had recently been appointed New York City’s commissioner of cultural affairs by Mayor Koch. I had been having lunch with a mutual friend of Henry’s at One Fifth Avenue when Henry joined us. Henry was bearded and jovial and was wearing a bow tie made of porcelain, which he proved by grabbing my fork and tapping the bow tie’s sculpted knot. I knew the moment the fork’s tine took clinking notice of that bow tie that he was someone I needed to know. He took my measure as well to see if I, all of twenty-two years old, could keep up my third of a One Fifth lunchtime conversation. Would I get his jokes? Make a few of my own? Take his handoff of some offhand cultural reference and run with it? All curators and art world arbiters have the instincts of sheepdogs as, sniffing about, they tend to the talent they gather around them. That day Henry decided to cut me out of the herd so I could be a part of his much smaller, more finely honed drove.

Henry didn’t think of himself as a mentor to me, even though I certainly did. I even mentioned how grateful I was that he was playing such a role in my life when I stopped by his place on West 9th Street one Sunday on our way to brunch and waited for him to finish the crossword puzzle in
The New York Times Magazine
. “I’ve never met a boy in less need of mentor than you, Miss’sippi,” he told me, having nicknamed me that when I told him that was the way we pronounced it back home, my Mississippi roots, which I had always been rather embarrassed by in New York, making me exotic in his discerning eyes. “In many ways you have mentored me,” he said. Never looking up from the puzzle, he reached over and cupped my face in his hand, which had become his sign of affection for me. An important part of it was his not having to look at me when he did it, as if he were presenting his latest discovered exotic treasure for the world’s edification so that it could see what he had already seen. “You’ll understand one day when you’re my age,” he said.

Even though Henry was only forty-two when we met, he did have the appearance of someone much older. His perfect little paunch, the enthusiasm his beard had for its grayness, his bald pate, his signature cigar, and the resulting redolence that nested right along with the gray in that beard, the fedora that often crowned the dandyism below—it all combined to give him the costume of age even as it gave him the image he more desired, that of the Poo-Bah. His pen poised, he peered down intently at the taunt of the remaining tiny empty squares before him, then worked the crossword puzzle some more. “The young mentor the old,” he said. “You? You, Miss’sippi, have taught me that ‘goodness’ can be an eight-letter word for ‘guile.’ But mentor? No,” he said, putting down the pen with a flourish and finally looking my way. “Think of me more as your passport.”

New York did cease to be a big city with Henry by my side and became instead a small town. I gained entry into the Manhattan of private screenings, gallery openings, uptown parties, downtown dinners at Odeon, and many more lunches at One Fifth. It was with Henry I spent my first Christmas Eve away from home in 1979 and it was he, whose family emigrated from Belgium when he was five years old, who made me feel that “from this night forth you are an honorary Jew.”

He took me for a meal at Sardi’s that Christmas Eve, then to see a preview of the Broadway production of Harold Pinter’s
Betrayal
starring Blythe Danner, Raúl Juliá, and Roy Scheider. Afterward Henry and I wandered around Times Square and ended up at the Hay Market bar on Eighth Avenue, which was frequented by male hustlers and their clientele. Henry had an appreciation for such bars and, conversely, I think part of his attraction to me was its chasteness. Just as he cured me of any lingering embarrassment of my Southernness by pointing out to me how it was a large part of my appeal, my presence in his life as a boy he could adore without the need to bed alleviated any guilt he might have had about the ones he bedded but didn’t adore. He seemed to be known by several of such boys that Christmas Eve at the Hay Market who looked me over as their latest competition. That would have normally made me uneasy, but not that night. Let them look at me as the newest boy in their midst, I thought, as I stared them down and stood my ground. Little did they know that this was the night, as the last Christmas of the 1970s approached, I was leaving any semblance of my boyhood behind.

At midnight, the Hay Market bartenders began to shout, “Merry Christmas! Drinks on the house!” and a rash of hustlers rushed the bar, elbowing Henry and me out of the way. Suddenly, as if they’d been waiting for their cue, through the front door of the place burst a bunch of caroling drag queens singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!” We all joined in. When Henry and I made it back to the bar, the bartender did a double take my way and asked, “Who’s this new little present, Henry, ya found under the tree? I’d like to unwrap this one myself.”

Henry, without looking my way, reached out and lovingly cupped his hand around my face, reassuring me that I was not only treasure but also treasured. “This is Miss’sippi,” he said.

The bartender leaned in closer. “And what did you get for Christmas, Miss’sippi?” he asked me. “Lips?”

Henry roared with laughter and for a few weeks afterward my nickname was no longer Miss’sippi. “Lips!” was now what heralded my arrival on West 9th Street before Henry and I would head out to another night on the town for a society function or an arts benefit. One such dinner event concerned the saving of Grand Central Station when it was threatened with being demolished. It was the first time I was in the presence of Diana Vreeland, who was seated on one side of Henry at the dinner. It speaks to what a presence hers was that it barely registered with me for several moments that on the other side of him was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. God knows who and what those two women thought I was, there at their table. A waiter who had the audacity to take a seat? A waif who had walked in off the street? Henry, however, made sure to include me in the conversation, but I was so in awe of my tablemates I barely recall what was said. I do recall his talking to Mrs. Onassis about the “Landmark Express” train they were planning to take to D.C. in support of the Grand Central landmark designation case going before the Supreme Court. They made plans to sit together.

Henry had to get up at one point to work the room in his relatively new role as commissioner. When he got up, Vreeland leaned over to where I was seated and motioned me over to sit between Jackie O and her. I’ll never forget the orders Vreeland issued to me that night. “There is a chasm here, young man, between Jackie and me. Henry’s dutiful departure has left a chasm. Your lot in life tonight is to be a chasm filler. Come keep the couloir warm,” she said, and patted the seat beside her. I did as I was told even though my vocabulary back then wasn’t sufficient enough to understand the pun she had just made. I did instinctively know enough, however, to just keep prompting her and let her talk. Mrs. Onassis kept smiling enigmatically at all that Vreeland had to say. That seemed to be Vreeland’s own duty that night, as official as any Henry was performing around the room: to keep Jackie smiling.