Skinny Island (12 page)

"He wasn't until three months ago. But then he quit college and enlisted. As seaman second class. And do you know
why
? Because of you! Because of you and your murderous committee!"

"You'd better come to my room," Elaine murmured, as the alarmed receptionist arose. "It's all right, Miss Pink. This is my daughter."

"I'm not going a step further into this snake pit," Suzannah ranted on. "You needn't worry, Miss Pink. I don't have a gun or a bomb. I'm going to say what I came to say. It won't take me long." She turned back to Elaine. "My son read about you in the paper. He wrote me that if you could do what you were doing at your age, at least he could join up. And do you know what else he wrote me? That he was doing it to make up for what I was doing! That you and he had to wipe out my shame. My shame!"

"But, Suzannah, what have you heard about him? He's not hurt? He's not—?"

"Dead? Very probably. We haven't heard anything yet. How could we? But whatever it is, I hope you're satisfied."

"Oh, my poor child, how can you go on so? You're hysterical, of course. Let me take you home. Let me—"

"Keep your hands off me! This is what you've been after all my life, isn't it? To sacrifice everything, and everybody—Daddy, me and now Bert—to your bloody France! You might as well have cut the poor boy's throat."

And she was gone. Elaine hurried over to peer through the glass pane of the door into the corridor while Suzannah waited, interminably, ridiculously, for the elevator. At last the doors opened, and she almost jumped into the car.

Elaine went back to her little office and sat at her desk and tried to think and not to think. The boy might not be dead at all. Suzannah was half crazed. Then she shook her head, as if to clear her mind of something that might destroy it if she couldn't. For what sort of grotesque fate was it that made her so fatal to this wretched girl she had never loved? No, no, she wouldn't think of it! Even if Bert were dead, wouldn't many young men have to die? Why should Bert Priest be exempt?

She would go in to see Erica in a minute. Erica would be charming and sympathetic, and there was a war to win, and they were on the side of the angels. Very well, they would act like angels! She should be able to sell a million war bonds as the grandmother of its first victim.

T
HE REPUTATION
of Eric Stair, who was little known at the time of his death in the Normandy invasion of 1944, has grown steadily in the last four decades, and the retrospective show this year at the Guggenheim has given him a sure place among the abstract expressionists, although that term was not used in his lifetime. Walking down the circular ramp past those large imperial bursts of color; those zigzagging triangles of angry red piercing areas of cerulean blue which seem to threaten, in retaliation, to encompass and smother the triangles; those green submarine regions occupied by polyp-like figures; those strangely luminous squares of inky black, I wondered that there could ever have been a time when Eric Stair had not struck me as a wonderful painter. And yet I could well remember myself as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy at St. Lawrence's in 1934 staring with bewilderment at the daubs of the new history teacher from Toronto who had turned his dormitory study into a studio. Nothing could have seemed stranger or more out of place on that New England campus than an abstract painter who was rumored not even to believe in God.

My bewilderment, at any rate, had not lasted long; I had soon become an admirer of the man without whose example I might never have become a professional painter at all. Not that I have become an abstract expressionist. Far from it. What, I wonder, would Eric have thought of my portraits? Would he have simply raised those rounded shoulders and grinned his square-faced grin at the sight of all those presidents of clubs and corporations, those eminent doctors and judges who make up the portfolio of the man sometimes known as a "board room portraitist"? "Jamie Abercrombie," I seem to hear him saying, "may have made it into the world of art, but he has certainly carted all his lares and penates along with him!"

What I suppose I shall never fathom, no matter how deeply I dive into the subaqueous caverns of the past, is the exact balance between benefit and detriment that I derived as a painter from my juvenile acquaintance with Eric Stair. If it be true that his example deflected me from the paths of banking or law, it may also be the case that, discerning early how much he could accomplish in the field of the abstract, I became too fearful of competing with him there. Maybe I slammed that door prematurely. Maybe I was too anxious, in confining my art to portraiture, to hide away in a world where Eric would never seek to follow or humiliate me.

And there is another thing. I can face it now I am growing old. Without what happened at that school might I not have painted the nude? When I cast my inner eye over the long gallery of my portraits, it strikes me how covered up the figures are, how draped and buttoned and tucked in, how expensively and colorfully added to, how bolstered and propped! Even my ladies in evening dress seem to reveal to me, in their alabaster arms and necks, in the exposed portions of their breasts and shoulders, how much more they are hiding from intrusive eyes. It has been said of Philippe de Champaigne that, being obliged as a strict Jansenist to eschew the flesh, he limited himself to ecclesiastical or judiciary subjects where all but the face and hands could be enveloped in voluminous robes, white or black or scarlet red. The peak of his great art was in the portrait of Cardinal Richelieu, where the sweeping cassock expresses the power and energy of the ruthless statesman. I have sometimes in preliminary sketches attempted to convey the character of my sitter in the suit or dress alone, as a kind of reverse nude. But that is as near as I ever come to it.

At any rate, all I can do is write down the facts, at least as they appear to me, and see if some kind of answer can be deduced from them.

I grew up with a feeling of "not belonging." Some people claim that this has become so common a social phenomenon that the rare state is that of the child who feels himself a square peg in a square hole, but in my case the psychosis may have been intensified by my being the youngest, smallest and most subdued of a clan of Abercrombies who were generally large and noisy, and by my own uneasy suspicion that even if by some trick of fate I should become a true Abercrombie, I'd still be a fraud. For I cannot recall a time when my family did not seem to be trying to look brighter and funnier and richer and more fashionable than they were. Or was that true of everybody in the years of the great depression?

Mother dominated us all, as a famous old actress will dominate the stage. She was plump and rackety and full of high spirits, and she adored company. Her rich auburn hair, which surprisingly was not dyed, rose in a high curly pile over a round powdered face with small features and popping black eyes. Mother was thoroughly unintellectual and unartistic; she read nothing but detective fiction, and she never tired of cards or gossip. What saved her from being banal was the quality of her affections; she loved people, and she loved to laugh with them and at them. She was the presiding spirit of the summer colony in Southampton; a watering place was her natural milieu. She would amble down the sand to the Beach Club, close to our shapeless, weatherbeaten shingle pile on the dunes, and then back; these two sites made up her summer universe, except, of course, for the houses in which she habitually dined. Poor Mother! When the depression obliged us to give up the brownstone in Manhattan, and she had to spend the winter months gazing out on the tumbling gray Atlantic, it was a hardship indeed. But her spirits never flagged. She always found just enough "natives" for her daily game of bridge.

It sometimes seemed to me, because my siblings so strongly favored Mother, that I should have inherited some of Father's traits, but I could never really believe this to be the case. Father did not seem to have many traits to bequeath; his function must have been completed when the queen bee had been fertilized. Yet he was not subservient to Mother. He acted more like an old and familiar employee, a kind of trusted but peppery superintendent whose management of the household was never challenged. Father was bald and stooping; he would gaze at us with watery eyes that seemed to anticipate nothing but irrational conduct that it would be his tedious task to clean up after. His other children took him entirely for granted; only I made an effort to establish a relationship with him, and here I failed utterly. When I would ask him questions about his boyhood and the problems of growing up, he would look at me as if I had inquired as to the whereabouts of the washroom. Human intimacy must have struck him as a total irrelevance.

I realize now, looking back, that some of my sense of our being on the fringe of society may have been justified. We were as "old" as many other families, but we were a good deal poorer than the average in the world to which we clung. Father, so far as I could make out, had nothing and did nothing, other than to sell an occasional insurance policy, and Mother's trust fund was woefully inadequate to pay the bills with which she was constantly dunned. Of course, our state was a common one in the depression, but when club dues and school tuitions were left unpaid while Mother continued to entertain and gamble, she and Father came in for some harsh criticism. And I was early assailed by the uncomfortable feeling that, because I was plain and unathletic, I could not claim the partial exemption from social contempt that my exuberant, party-loving older siblings, no doubt unfairly, achieved. I deemed myself hopelessly encased in the parental tackiness.

There seemed, at any rate, just enough cash (plus a partial scholarship) to send me to St. Lawrence's, and I entered that school with a sense of profound relief. Here, I hoped, I would not stand out as the child of my parents; I would be on my own. The whole tightly organized academy, with its ringing bells and hurrying boys, with everything happening at exactly the time it was supposed to happen, struck me from the start as a welcome proof that a world existed outside the papier-mache one of the Abercrombies, a "real" world, properly possessed of order and neatness, of heaven and hell. I found absolution in its regularity and blessing in its very sternness, and I became an overnight convert to the conservative social values that it enshrined. Even today, when I visit the school and behold the tall dark Gothic tower of the school chapel rise over the trees as I approach it from the railway station, I feel that actuality, even if it be a rather grim one, is taking the place of illusion.

St. Lawrence's was considered architecturally a handsome school. Some four hundred boys slept and worked and exercised in long Tudor buildings of purple brick picturesquely situated along a creek that wound its snakelike way through the landscaped grounds. Sometimes, particularly in spring, the place seemed to exude a rich, throat-filling emotion, but in winter, under rapidly dirtying snow and a hard pale sky, it took on a somber gloom, and the narrow mullioned windows put me in mind of Tudor prisons, of Tudor discipline, of pale, tight-lipped Holbein victims and torturers, of the ax and stake. Emotion was never light at St. Lawrence's; life was always earnest. I thought of Christ, as the near-mystic headmaster evoked him, the Christ of the passion, whose nails and thorns were far more than symbols, an elongated tortured gray body hideously twisted on the cross and illuminated by streaks of lightning against a weird, flickering El Greco background.

There was some hazing in the first year, but being small and inconspicuous and having learned early the art of protective coloration, I passed largely unnoticed and was able to make my early peace with the school. I became fascinated with the figure of the headmaster, Mr. Widdell, a tall, bony, balding, emaciated man, himself a bit of an El Greco, who preached sermons with such intense zeal that he alarmed some of the parents. It began to seem to me, listening to him, awestruck, on Sunday mornings, that he was the nearest thing to God I should ever experience, that for me it would be enough if he
were
God. And I rightly inferred that in his capacity of deity, as opposed to that of a busy and overtaxed headmaster, he would have as much interest in the one as in the many, that his love (yes, his love!) could include me as well as the faculty, the student body, the harassed Irish maidservants and the grave, slow-moving old men who took care of the grounds and were known to the boys as the "sons of rest." I had the nerve, or the inspiration, to take my doubts to Mr. Widdell himself.

"Yes, Jamie, of course, you can ask me any question you like. That is what I am here for."

I sat, a huddled little bundle of nothing, across the great square desk from the aquiline nose, those huge, glassy eyes. Between us was the white stainless blotter of his total attention.

"It is the commandment about honoring my father and mother, sir. I wonder if I can honestly say that what I feel for them is honor."

Mr. Widdell's gravity did not seem to deepen at this, and my confidence grew with this further assurance of omniscience. "Let me ask you just one thing, Jamie. Do you love your father and mother?"

"I love my mother, sir. My father doesn't seem to have much to do with love."

"But you have no aversion to him?"

"Oh, none, sir."

"Well, then, your case may not be as bad as you fear. Love of one parent is a good start. Can you tell me why it is that you feel you cannot honor them?"

"It does not seem to me, sir, that they lead lives that I can honor. My father is occupied with very small things, like winding clocks and seeing the oil is changed in the car. And my mother plays cards and gossips. I mean, sir, that is
all
she does."

"But the commandment is not to honor their conduct, Jamie. It is to honor
them.
"

"No matter what they do?"

"No matter what they do."

"Even if they're thieves and murderers?"

There was a gleam of something like a smile in those glistening eyes. "Hadn't we better wait till we get to it before crossing that bridge?" The total gravity, however, soon reestablished itself. "Seriously, my boy, you must consider that God expects of his children only what they can give and only in the way they can give it. Your father, in his daily maintenance of the household, and your mother, in the cheer that she imparts to others, may be doing more for God than you suspect. In any event, it is not for you to judge them. And not judging them, you will find that you can and indeed will honor them."