The Violet Hour (29 page)

She would sometimes come over and look after the puppies he was breeding. They would be out on the porch, and Maurice wanted someone to pay attention to them and watch over them. Neither Maurice, a children's book illustrator, or Gene, an adolescent psychiatrist, had much experience actually taking care of children, so for lunch they would give her whatever she wanted. She would wolf down chocolate bars and Tab, and later in the afternoon she would feel sick.

Maurice and Gene talked to her about art and books. She was smart but she was beginning to feel like she didn't need school, a feeling Maurice, who hated school, knew well. She dropped out of high school, but she absorbed the culture of the house: She knew about Blake, Melville, Runge, Ensor, Mozart; she soaked in the casual conversation.

When she was sixteen her brother was moving out, and her mother and brother arranged that she would come and stay with Maurice, in the basement room under the studio. She never left, except for the seven years of her marriage, when she moved to another house on the property but still came and worked in the house all day long, cooking and eating dinner with Maurice. Even after she adopted her son, Nick, she
brought him to live in the house and knock around while she worked. She was a servant and not a servant. She and Maurice would decide together what to have for dinner or what trees to plant. She was a part of the household in a way that could not be defined or pinned down with pedestrian words like “daughter” or “mother” or “friend” or “lover” or “assistant” or “housekeeper.” When Maurice was asked in late interviews what exactly she was to him, he'd say, “She's my best friend. She is my most devoted friend. She sacrificed herself for me,” or “She is the woman in my life,” or “She puts up with my bad behavior.”

In the last few years of Gene's life, when he got sick and stopped working in the city during the week, Lynn ran the house for both of them, catering to them, helping to navigate their moods and negotiate their clashes and misunderstandings, which was, to put it mildly, not an easy job. Was the constant caretaking of larger-than-life, kvetching theatrical characters worth it for Lynn? From certain outside vantage points, it looks as if she was sacrificing a lot, but for her it was not a sacrifice. She was not simmering or resentful. She liked what she got out of this dazzling household, and there is no doubt, with her and her son, Nick, and Gene and Maurice eating at the table on the porch, television blaring, dogs sprawled on the floor, that this was a family.

Lynn talks about what she did as “smoothing things out.” She also talks about it as doing what had to be done so Maurice could work. He once said that working was “the only true happiness I've ever enjoyed. It's sublime…where all of your
weaknesses of character, and all blemishes of personality, and whatever else torments you fades away.” If Maurice found his work to be the gravitational center of his life, so did Lynn.

In fact, her smoothing and straightening and caretaking reached the level of art itself. She says that if Maurice didn't have her, he could have hired someone else to do what she did, but it seems very unlikely that he would have found someone to match the power of her caretaking, the singular grace and intelligence of it.

Part of what made Lynn a superb companion for him was that she didn't try to save him or make him happy or take his unhappiness personally. She respected his moods; she helped him live with them; she enabled his patterns without wanting to change him, or believing change was possible, or secretly hoping for it. This sort of profound acceptance would have been impossible for a lover, or for most people, generally, but she realized that he worked within these swings and that the work was what mattered to him.

Sometimes, late at night, when she was in her room under Maurice's studio, Lynn could hear him whistling a whole opera—he was that talented at whistling—and stomping his feet, and she would drift off to sleep knowing that in the morning something great would be on his drawing desk. “That feeling of waking up and walking in and seeing something wonderful on the desk,” she says. “That was magic.”

Jonathan Weinberg, who usually talks a blue streak, is quiet in hospitals, and Danbury Hospital was no exception. He felt stricken and did not know what to say. “I probably looked like I was the one who was about to die,” he says. Maurice joked about wanting to sleep with the handsome male nurse, maybe to cheer Jonathan up or to somehow say, “I'm still here!”

In a way it was as if Jonathan fell into Gene and Maurice's life in the manner of a character in a Sendak book, as if he flew or floated, arrived by dough airplane or sailboat on a beautiful night with a yellow moon; they did not obtain the boy in the usual way.

Gene had been Jonathan's mother's best friend. When his mother died, Jonathan went to live with Gene and Maurice and spent summers with them once he went to college. They were father figures to him. They taught him a kind of reverence and rigorousness toward art. When Jonathan was little, Maurice gave him his first watercolor set. He taught him to draw trees. He drew him a lion, which Jonathan kept but spilled things on.

For a while, Jonathan, who became a painter and an art historian, lived on the adjacent property that Maurice had bought, and even when he moved to New Haven, an hour away, he and his husband, Nick, went over with groceries and made dinner on Sunday nights.

If Gene and Maurice could have had a biological son, he probably would have been something like the eleven-year-old
Jonathan—funny, brilliant, anxious, artistic, charming, warm, sensitive, not terribly at home in the world—so it is interesting that fate threw him their way.

Maurice once said that if he had a son he would leave him at the A&P, and so the father-ish situation he found himself in with Jonathan was fraught. In interviews he always implied that he never wanted children, because he had to devote himself selfishly to his art, but he also needed too much undivided attention himself to have children around, clamoring for it.

They had a complicated closeness that fluctuated over the years, in the wild terrain of his affections, but Maurice wrote Jonathan once that he was like a son to him.

After the runaway success of
Where the Wild Things Are
, Maurice ran into a friend from Lafayette High School. She was the girl he sat next to in art class. On his high school yearbook page, which was captioned, “Your delightful drawings make us all gay. A famous artist you'll be someday,” he had scrawled to her, “Lotsa luck to a swell gal. Sendak.”

Now she said to him, “How does it feel to be famous?”

He said, “I still have to die.”

Maurice had a passion for ritual. He liked to eat the same breakfast every day—marmalade, English muffin, tea—from nine to eleven, then he would work, then get dressed and walk the dog, then have lunch, then work, then dinner with cake, and then, from about ten to two in the morning, more work. The day was about creating a carapace for the work. In a letter to Minnie Kane, a reader with whom he warmly corresponded for decades, he once wrote that life was good when he was working or getting ready to work.

What is unsaid here is that life is not happy when he is not working. Like his mother and brother, Maurice had always wrangled with depression. The black moods would descend, and he would fight them off with work or, when he couldn't work, with the idea of work. The work was, among other things, a mood stabilizer. It kept him going; it lured and cajoled him back to life.

If Maurice was depressed, Lynn would tell him to get dressed and take the dog for a walk. He would say that he didn't want to get dressed, and she would coax him into doing it. One day Erda, one of the dogs, sensed his mood and wouldn't come near him, which put him into more of a funk.

Sendak often talked about his books as a “battleground” or “battles.” In the hours in his studio, under the cheap white lamp clipped to his drawing desk, he was fighting. The business of creating children's books was not a sweet, civilized occupation;
it was violent, bloody. He was defending or protecting himself.