Parachutes and Kisses (5 page)

“As I begin writing this, my grandfather is dying in a hospital in Spring Valley, New York, dying alone, with paid nurses to attend him, dying thousands of miles from the town
in
Russia where he was born ninety-seven years ago—a town I do not even know the name of.

“I am writing, fast, my pen speeding over the page, writing in the hopes that if I get it all down, get it right (or as nearly right as an American granddaughter can), it will ease his passage—or mine. I know that death is a movement toward light—or so I said once in a poem-but I also know that to die by inches, and every inch alone, is neither light nor just—though it is common.

“He was a painter. He should have died the minute he could no longer paint, the minute the cataracts, the cancer, the arthritis, the exhaustion, the despair overwhelmed him. But that would be too simple, and just as we do not choose our loves or our children, we do not choose our deaths. I have known a number of men in their nineties who died by inches—Kurt Hammer, Louis Untermeyer, and my grandfather—and each at the end truly wished to die, but his wish was no command.

“I knew him only and always as Papa. My parents were Jude and Nat in that phony thirties tradition of parents-as-pals. We all lived to regret it. But Papa was the patriarch—with all the good and bad that word implies. In a house full of artists, he had the best studio, the only studio. Amongst daughter-painters he held his maulstick like a magic wand (or a bludgeon) over their heads.”

“When I was born, it seems he was already an old man. In fact, he was only fifty-nine. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses and painted in the witch-hatted studio that crowned the triplex apartment on Seventy-seventh Street where I grew up. That curious gothic apartment house terminates skyward in a trapezoidal roof containing a huge northern window which rattled (perhaps still rattles) in the wind that the Museum of Natural History fails to block. The window shades were dull forest green and drawn up on pulleys from below; a trapdoor separated the studio from the rest of the house. On one wall of the studio hung a death mask of Beethoven, as mute in white plaster as his ears became at the end. Only the wind penetrated those ears; and his domed eyes were sightless as well. This blind Beethoven was watched, however, by an open-eyed Voltaire, present in a bust of the same dusty white plaster.

“On Halloween, a sheet would be draped from Beethoven's mask, a candle placed next to a jawless skull perched on my grandfather's heavy, paint-spattered easel, and we children would gather, teeth chattering, for the tale of Dracula, told by my mother in this witchi est of settings. Here, in the heart of New York, was Transylvania—or as near to it as one could get.

“I was too little. My older sister's friends—five years older—were having the party and I was just allowed, as special grace, to creep up the studio stairs, sit upon the middle step, and listen.

“Never have I regretted any grace so much! The stake might as well have been driven through my heart; the bats might as well have flown through my skull. The nightmare galloped through my dreams for years after that fatal story hour! An evil that cannot die indeed!—but my grandfather lives on, being transfused when he wishes to die, being X-rayed when he has no lungs, being spiked through the hand and heart with tubes and needles like the living dead.”

“The skull, the death mask, the bust of Voltaire, the easel—these were my grandfather's artifacts and amulets. In the studio, there were also two damp, domed closets. One contained canvas by the roll and stretchers and tacks (my grandfather always stretched his own canvases and nearly always bashed his thumb), and another contained mysterious clothes left by mysterious sitters. A general's dress jacket, but no pants or hat; an evening gown of a style to do Mme. Vionnet proud (all paillettes and pastel chiffon); a double-breasted blazer which might have been worn to Cliveden by the Duke of Windsor.

“Papa was a portrait painter for a living (in the thirties he'd done movie posters for MGM) and his sitters were all posh, upper-class, and gentile. They rarely deigned to come, but sent instead their photographs, their clothes, a lock of hair, a swatch of fabric.

“ ‘Who's that?' I used to ask about the pink-faced, pinstriped, three-piece-suited man whose glowing oil-painted image (still wet) was perched on the easel.

“ ‘Mr. Johnson,' Papa would reply.

“ ‘Who's that?' I would ask the next day, when the easel bore his white-haired consort in pearls and robin‘s-egg blue silk.

“ ‘Mrs. Johnson,' Papa would say.

“I soon found out the two were no relation. Johnson was simply the most goyish name that came to mind. All the paying customers were Johnson—while the voluminous black nudes who posed at the Art Students League, or the Spanish guitarists lured in to pose for a day, all had their own particular first names. Velda or Luis or Roberto or Geneva. Only the clientele were scorned and nameless —painted for money, not love.

“(What I learned from this was: always write for love not money, but try to be paid for it, too.)”

“He passed his legacy on to me—he who painted at the top of the house (as I now write above the family roar). I was never banned from his studio; nor is my daughter banned from mine. ‘I am writing a novel, Mommy,' Amanda says, at two—as I, at two, painted ‘Mr. Johnson' and ‘Mrs. Johnson' alongside my grandfather.

“ ‘Who's in your novel, Mandy?'

“ ‘Kermit the Frog an' Mickey Mouse, Mommy, Daddy ... But not Lucinda.' (Lucinda is the little girl Amanda loves to hate, her best/worst friend in the world.)

“The smell of oil paints and turpentine so infused my childhood that I've only to pass an artist's studio to be plunged back, through the infallible offices of that Mnemosyne who lives in the nose, to my childhood.”

“The tools of the painter's trade are as familiar to me as the tools of my own trade—and as precious. The sable brushes: Papa always washed them in the kitchen sink, at five each night, by painting them against a wet block of Ivory soap; the colors swirled in the soap, merged to become a muddy brown, then drifted away down the drain, leaving the soap white again. The turpentine: a smell of trees and forests; the primal smell of nature becoming art. The golden linseed oil: its sheen on the canvas when wet, and its strange gelatinous drops when it fell upon the easel and congealed. The Windsor and Newton paints in silvery cylindrical tubes, with their poetic names: alizarin crimson, cerulean blue, rose madder, vermilion, burnt umber, zinc white.”

“ ‘A good painter never uses black,' Papa would say, ‘only
shmearers
use black.' Since black is all the colors put together, it was an article of Papa's faith that you made black yourself with hues of your own choosing. And you looked for the special colors in the black—the plums, the aubergines, the sea-floor greens. Black was not black, but dark violet or murky green. Nor was white white. It was ivory or eggshell or bluish or iridescent pearl. Once, when I was thirteen and already at the High School of Music and Art, Papa made me attempt a still life of eggs and onions, cut crystal and white satin, just to prove to me how many colors were in ‘white.' It was a lesson I never forgot.‘

“Nor was there such a thing as ‘flesh color'—whatever my Crayola box might say. Flesh was pink or ocher, ivory or greenish blue, brownish gold with umber shadows. Caucasians might be pinkish, yellowish, greenish—but never white; and blacks (Papa would have objected to the term black not because he was a racist, but because of its color-blind inaccuracy) were brownish, creamy, even purplish where shadows were cast upon their faces. Orientals might be amber, golden, green—but never ‘yellow.' The world of race was a world of multicolored shadows; Papa taught me about dapple long before I read Gerard Manley Hopkins.”

“If the world was truly multicolored for him, then why was it so black? For one cannot write about Papa without chronicling his depression. A chronic and contagious depressive, he spread such gloom to his children and grandchildren that often they wished to escape him. ‘Life,' he said, ‘was pointless' ('till the end—when his tune changed). His philosophy, often stated—until it made us furious—was that the artists and intellectuals of the world carried the ‘dead weight' along. We made life; they ate it up. We created light; they muddied it into darkness. I had a vision of my grandfather's beautiful white cake of Ivory soap, turning to mud under the mingled paints from his brush. That was what the world did to artists; that was how
they
treated
us.

“Papa's bitterness had, like all bitternesses, a personal foundation beneath the lofty generalization: he was unsung. Through no fault of the world‘s, really, but only his own.

“True, he had had the ill luck to be born in the era that saw the birth of ‘Modern Art.' True, he was painting figuratively when Cha- gall and Picasso were in the saddle. True, he emulated Rembrandt and Vandyke in a world that emulated only Picasso—but still, his very eccentricity might have been turned to advantage—had he not been so eager to stand in his own light. For he had an absolutely unerring knack for alienating anyone who might do him good. Art critics, collectors, gallery owners—he would alienate with a swift insult, like a knee to the groin! Art critics he pronounced blind, and gallery owners venal (with which many artists would heartily agree —but not to their faces). As if this weren't enough, Papa steadfastly and resolutely concealed the very best of his work from public view. The stiff, formal portraits he exhibited; the dream sketches (as he called them), he hid away. These sketches—done in india ink and watercolor, fountain pen and pencil—are to me his best work. They are also astoundingly original and ‘modern' in a timeless, untrendy way.”