Parachutes and Kisses (6 page)

“He did them on bits of paper (for he sketched constantly, everywhere) and he had masses of them, in yellowing envelopes, in stacks in closets, fluttering up like moths when the door opened.

“A few years ago, I gave him a small blank notebook and bid him fill it for me, as a gift of love. Whenever he had an idea, a dream, a vision, he would paint it in the book. His dreams must have been terrifying. The frontispiece of the little book is a staring demon such as might guard the gates of hell. (Or is it merely a Hassid staring at his would-be assailant on the streets of Brooklyn?) A lion falls on the neck of a terrorized horse and blood flows down the page. Two Jews in wash and india ink hold tablets heavenward. A man runs with (or from?) a pack of wild dogs. Bloody-fanged dogs howl through the forests of the book. His mother's ghost floats through the pages-green-faced, black-wimpled. People dance to expel a dybbuk. Soldiers from his youth march to the Mongol border. A man slouches through the blue-black streets by moonlight. A dark sun explodes over two prisoners who flee in the blue-washed night. An old woman kneels, begging for bread. And again the mad dogs, the mad humans metamorphosing into dogs. And so on. The vision is bleak yet there is color in all the suffering, all the skies. He rejoiced with his pen and brush even while he spoke of gloom.”

“But he did not die then, when I began this memoir, despite the fact that it was a night of great agitation in the spheres. I began frenziedly to write this at three A.M. on the night of December 8, 1980, because I felt him dying. I felt his soul slipping from us; but ironically enough it was John Lennon who died that night (though I did not know till the following day). Meanwhile, as the radios all over the world played Beatles tapes, Papa lingered for two weeks past his ninety-seventh birthday. Driving out to see him in the ghastly old-age ‘home' in Spring Valley, listening to Beatles songs being played obsessively, in
memoriam,
I did get to ask him where he was born. 'Diatlovo, in the Government of Grodno,‘ he said, but that was just about the last rational thing he communicated. At the end, he issued paranoid warnings to us all ('They don't know poetry, they don't know painting, they only know money‘), made me promise to lock up the baby (to keep her safe from kidnappers), failed to recognize his own children and grandchildren, and finally slid into the other world on January 6, 1981, just barely two weeks after his ninety-seventh birthday. He was born on December 24, 1883 and died on January 6, 1981. (It is somehow comforting to write down these 'hard' facts. They moor us to ‘reality' when all else seems shaky.)”

“Unlike those pasteboard nonagenarians of pop fiction (who are born with the century and conveniently die with it), he was eyewit ness to
none
of the great tragedies of his age. During the Russian Revolution, he was in England, then in America. During the Holocaust, he was painting movie posters and posh portraits in New York. When Eliot was writing The
Waste Land,
he was reading
The Rubáiyát
of Omar
Khayyám.
The month before he died, he was still reading it. Besides
Eugene Onegin,
it was the only poem he really loved. I think he was proud of my poems in his way (certainly he inspired them from the first), but Omar
Khayyám
he read and read —even to the end. He would not hear of my literary argument that the poems describe the Sufi process of enlightenment, masked in the conventional language of romantic love. He read The
Rubáiyát
literally and loved it no less for that. He read me this verse (perhaps for the thousandth time in my life) before he lapsed into his last incoherence.

“At the end there were horrible things—horrible because so ordinary: the old age ‘home' with no cars in the parking lot, where no one came to visit because it was so sad. The refusal to use the walker, the falling, the outbursts, the desperate mumbles of 'I have to make a living' and ‘There is a law in the United States that you cannot keep someone against their will.' ‘Was he a shoemaker?' the pretty young student nurse asked, hearing him constantly mutter: ‘I have to make a living.' She wore a gold Star of David, but other than that looked quite as goyish as the Draw Me girl.

“ ‘He was a great painter,' I said.

“ ‘Oh ...' said the nice student nurse to be polite.

“One night, his regular nurse called me in Connecticut. I had driven hours on snowy roads to get to him and then driven back, but he didn't even remember I had been there. He wanted me to come at once, or to come get him—it wasn't clear which.

“ ‘Send a car for me,' he said.

“I promised I would.

“ ‘I love you, Papa,' I said.

“ ‘I love you
more,'
he said, competitive to the end.”

“His nurse, a lovely woman with the unforgettably ornithological name of Lola Falcon, took the phone then.

“ ‘He's agitated and he can't rest. Tell him to rest.' She put Papa back on the phone.

“ ‘I have to make a living,' he croaked in that fading voice that sounded like a toy whose battery is going dead. ‘I have to make a living.' (I was reminded of how my grandmother used to say, ‘make a leeving'—her Russian accent much stronger than his). I spoke slowly and steadily, feeling in my heart that I had to give him permission to die.

“ ‘Papa,
I
will make it now,' I said. ‘I will make it. You can rest now.'

“ ‘Take care of the baby,' he said, trailing off to a groan.

“His nurse's voice came back on the phone. ‘I think he's dropped off now,' she said.”

“Paradoxically, his obscurity made my fame possible, even
compulsory.
Not only was my first real poem about him, my first novel dedicated to him, but it was the seething sense of bitterness he had communicated about his own lack of recognition that spurred me on to write it. So what if the world's applause meant nothing in the light of eternity; the lack of it could embitter the soul in the here and now, especially when you knew you had the goods. Papa's example made me vow never to permit myself the luxury of being publicly unsung but self-bemoaned. For a person who lusts desperately after fame, the getting of it may lead to growth beyond it, but the neglected artist is trapped always (if he is ambitious) in a fury of denial.”

“I determined on fame at an early age, determined on it partly because of all the hugely talented people in my family who seemed determined upon self-sabotage. I saw that talent—even great talent —was not in itself enough. The world
never
wanted any new talent, however arresting; it had to be
made
to want it. It was not enough to prepare the feast; one must also create the appetite for it, cut the meat, pour the wine, butter the bread, and spoon-feed the guests.

“My grandfather's colossal vanity (as well as, perhaps, his deep terror of success) precluded this. He expected to insult the world and have it love him. He expected to scatter his paintings to the four winds and have someone else catalog and preserve them. He did not know that even the calculated pranksterism of a Picasso or a Dali has its own particular methodical madness, that it seeks to titillate not alienate the public (or at least that private public which constitutes the art world), that it is playing a very special public-relations game—no less ambitious for being so outwardly hostile to fame.

“Yet when I think of Picasso's children and
their
problems living with his legend, I know more than ever that the very obscurity of my grandfather made my free use of my gifts possible in a way it would not have been had he been a living legend.”

“My family had talent to burn; and they burned it. I was the only conservationist among them. They taught me—indirectly if not directly—that talent was not a thing to waste, that wasting it was to dishonor the gods who gave it, that wasting it was to dishonor the self.

“The night I learned of Papa's death, I suddenly panicked about his obituary. What if there were no obituary in the
New York Times?

“ ‘People live and die, whether or not the
Times
records it,' my sensible husband said.

“But I was obsessed with the lack of ‘hard' information my grandfather had left. Art medals he had won, but lost them; clippings he had had, but lost;
Who's Who
had listed him, but he gave away the copy; his paintings he had given away to any admirer who asked, not even keeping a slide or a list of owners.

“Through a series of frenetic telephone calls, the morning after his death, I was able to assemble some sketchy data, in which the
Times
city desk seemed to have little interest. Finally, no obituary appeared.”

“But my true obituary for him was a poem I wrote on his last birthday, the day before Christmas 1980. It was a day I spent away from him, unable even to pick up the phone and call his nurse. But all day, I carried him in my head and heart.

“Finally, this poem emerged, as if from the depths of a dream. Initially the inspiration for it came aslant—as beginnings of poems often do. I was trying to write the first chapter of my new novel (which I had determined would be about him) but I found myself blocked, hopelessly fidgety and upset. I listened for the doorbell, my daughter, the postman—wishing for some interruption, some distraction, to kill the working day for me. My mind wandered. I opened a book of Neruda's which lay on my desk.

“ ‘Dream Horse' was the title of the poem on the page it opened to. I read:

“And then suddenly the scribbling fit overtook my right hand and I wrote, as if by dictation, this poem to Papa.”

“A dream of fantastic horses
galloping out of the sea,
the sea itself a dream,
a dream of green on green,
an age of indolence
where one-celled animals
blossom, once more, into limbs,
brains, pounding hooves,
out of the terrible innocence
of the waves.

 

“Venice on the crest
of hell's typhoon,
tsunami of my dreams
when, all at once,
I wake at three A.M.
in a tidal wave of love & sleeplessness,
anxiety & dread ...

“Up from the dream,
up on the shining white
ledge of dread—
I dredge the deep
for proof that we do not die,
for proof that love
is a seawall against despair,
& find only
the one-celled dreams
dividing & dividing
as in the primal light.

“O my grandfather,
you who painted the sea
so obsessively,
you who painted horses
galloping, galloping
out of the sea—
go now,
ride on the bare back
of the unsaddled horse,
who would take you
straight to hell.

“Gallop on the back
of all my nightmares;
dance in the foam
in a riot of hooves
& let the devil take you
with his sea-green brush;
let him paint you
into the waves at last,
until you fall,
chiming forever,
through the seaweed bells,
lost like the horses of San Marco,
but not for good.

“Down through the bells
of gelatinous fish,
down through the foamless foam
which coats your bones,
down through the undersea green
which changes your flesh
into pure pigment
grinding your eyes down
to the essential cobalt blue.

 

“Let the bones of my poems
support what is left of you—
ashes & nightmares,
canvases half-finished & fading worksheets.

 

“O my grandfather,
as you die,
a poem forms on my lips,
as foam forms
on the ocean's morning mouth,
& I sing in honor of the sea & you—

“the sea who defies all paintings
& all poems
& you
who defy
the sea.”