Wherever There Is Light (19 page)

“Then there's nowhere for you to pray tonight,” Christina said with a snicker. “All the banks are closed.”

Due to Brig's success, Christina was a celebrity at Chumley's, and she basked in her role as a queen bee among the up-and-comers and down-and-outers. Yet she had no experience with the likes of Julian and mistook his lack of reaction for doltishness.

Kendall looked away, as if she hadn't heard Christina's remark and, with another jovial trill, Christina said, “I was joking.”

“Be better if your jokes were funny,” Julian replied, and when Christina saw his hard blue stare, she took off as if she were late for an appendectomy.

Julian said, “There's never a lemon meringue pie around when you need one.”

Kendall laughed, and they left Chumley's. The streets were deserted, and with the moonlight shining on the ice-crusted snow, the Village seemed draped in tinsel.

“I know Christina's your friend,” Julian said.

“That doesn't excuse her stupid joke. Or that I didn't say something to her.”

“Forget all that. But be careful of her.”

“Why?”

Part of what attracted him to Kendall was her energy and ambition, and he suspected that those were the qualities, along with her youth, that Christina envied. “Because that joke was also aimed at you.”

Kendall didn't reply, but she snuggled close to Julian and leaned her head against his shoulder.

G
arland had purchased Kendall's plane ticket, which evidently granted her the right to harangue her daughter, though she did wait a full two hours, until they were seated on the veranda with tea and banana pudding cake, before asking if Kendall had sold any of her paintings.

“I'm still working on them.”

“Work? Work is what you get paid for. Come home and I'll give you some work.”

“I'll pass.”

“Are you still gallivanting around with that white criminal?”

“Mama, quit.”

“A bootlegger is a criminal, baby girl.”

“Prohibition's over. Julian's a developer.”

“And work's not work unless someone pays you for it.”

“You have your life, I have mine.”

“You do have a life, and I'm praying you aren't wasting it.”

“I think I'll go for a walk.”

For the next seven days, they had this same discussion in a variety of forms. Kendall had expected as much, and she wouldn't have been so annoyed if she weren't worried about her progress as a painter. Novice artists hunger for feedback, and Kendall had assumed that her class at the Art Students League would provide it. Yet whenever Brig stopped at her easel, he paid more attention to her than to her canvas, gazing at Kendall as if he were a big game hunter eager to display her head on his wall. Kendall didn't mention his behavior to Christina, and once she flew back to New York, Kendall lied to her when she didn't reregister for Brig's class, saying that school and the traveling ate up her day. It was then that Christine volunteered to critique Kendall's paintings. Kendall was elated: even Brig relied on his wife's critical skills.

It took Kendall six months to complete a series she referred to as
Sojourn in Bohemia
, and now, on this June morning, Christina came over to Minetta Street to see the dozen paintings, which were on the floor and leaning against the wall under the windows. Kendall sat at her drop-front secretary and watched Christina inspect the canvases, her spirits soaring when Christina paused before the ones Kendall deemed her most adept work: an aging composer and his wife in turn-of-the-century formal wear walking down a slushy Jones Street with an anteater on a leash, and a fiery-eyed bard on Waverly Place nailing one of his poems onto a fence with the religious fervor of Martin Luther nailing up his
Ninety-Five Theses
.

“Your brushwork improves with each one,” Christina said, scrutinizing Kendall's rendering of two men in scally caps arguing nose to nose over a longshoreman passed out under the sign of the White Horse Tavern. “And the quality of your lines is impressive. The light too—you've been paying attention to Hopper.”

Christina wandered over to the cherrywood desk and looked at the framed photograph by Lyonel Feininger above it—a black-and-white double exposure of a German street packed with spectral shadows of women.

“Lyonel's a splendid painter,” Christina said. “Brig's had some epic arguments with him about cubism. But I didn't think Lyonel sold his photographs.”

“I found it yesterday at the Strand. Tucked in an old
Art Studies
magazine.”

On the desk Christina saw a copy of Eugène Atget's book,
Photographe de Paris
, and a catalog from the Léo Sapir Gallery on the Upper East Side. Sapir, renowned for his impeccable taste and his affluent clientele, was the first American gallery owner to exhibit the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson: the catalog was from a 1935 show.

“Brig and I were at that Cartier-Bresson exhibit. Walker Evans was also included. Both of them pure artists. You shoot photos, don't you? I'd like to see them before we discuss your paintings.”

Kendall felt her limited supply of confidence shrinking. She opened the bottom drawer of her desk. “These are my best,” she said, handing Christina a black cardboard album with
LOVEWOOD COLLEGE
embossed on it in gold lettering.

“My goodness,” Christina said, studying a shot of Derrick hanging from a limb. “Who's this?”

“My boyfriend before Julian.”

Christina was shaking her head. “This calls for some wine. It's not too early, is it?”

Kendall poured the wine, and they went out the kitchen door to the garden and sat on a bench under the flushed canopy of a Japanese maple. Christina leafed through the album while Kendall sipped from her wineglass and thought about Derrick with grief and remorse rising in her. Kendall hadn't seen those photos in more than a year, but she remembered trying to capture every lurid and banal detail of the lynching—from the bloody tear in Derrick's neck to the dark, phlegmy splashes of tobacco juice staining the dust in the clearing.

Christina closed the album. “Technically, your paintings are terrific. If you showed them at the Washington Square Outdoor Exhibit, you'd sell every one to the tourists.”

“That would make my mother happy.”

“You'd earn a pretty penny too, but no one who knows art would mistake you for an artist. There's an element missing.”

“Which is?”

“You.”

Kendall was stung, yet Christina was identifying something that had gnawed at her as she worked, a feeling that she wasn't the one applying the paint to the canvas: it was her imagined self with a brush and palette—not the woman she actually was. Occasionally—and this panicked her—Kendall even felt the same way with Julian. Like a bird in the water, a fish in the sky.

“I understand this is no fun to hear,” Christina said, and drank some Riesling.

“Wouldn't I improve with practice?”

“Your technique would improve. Not your paintings.”

“Why not?”

“Because your paintings lack a point of view. A depth of feeling. Look, a bohemian is just someone who wants to be different like all the other bohemians. If you were painting that self-deception, that might be art. Have you considered going back to taking pictures?”

“That's more a hobby.”

“Well, these,” Christina said, tapping the album, “are art.”

“Any fool with a camera can sicken you with a lynching.”

“That photo of your boyfriend and his charred feet—it reminds me of the suffering in Velázquez's painting of the Crucifixion. And the ones of the empty soda bottles, peanut shells, and lollipop sticks around the tree—those details elucidate the horror of the event: they hung a man and acted as if they were at a child's birthday party. You saw that, and such a discriminating eye can't be taught. It's the gift that makes someone an artist.”

Kendall lit a Marlboro. “You're saying I should quit painting and become a flâneur?”

“Nothing wrong with wandering the streets and taking photographs. Like Atget and Cartier-Bresson. Both of them started as painters. And Man Ray is a painter and a photographer.”

Kendall sent a stream of smoke up into the reddish-purple cloud of leaves.

Christina said, “I watch Brig and wish I could paint. I read a novel and wish I could write. I see your photographs and envy your eye. I can't do much, but I can distinguish between what's art and what's not. You're a few miles from the most celebrated Negro community in the world. Why not go have a look?”

“Harlem's poverty's been done. Aaron Siskind and the others with their pictures in the
New York Times
and the
Daily Worker
. What am I going to see there?”

“It's not what you'll see, it's what you'll make other people see.”

“Didn't Degas say that?”

“Even if Popeye the Sailor said it, it's still true.”

“But it was Degas, wasn't it?”

Christina, hearing the nervousness in her voice, tried to reassure her, patting her hand and saying, “Don't know. I never met him.”

T
he first thing Kendall noticed was that Harlem had been constructed on a larger scale than the Village, as if the men who had designed the boulevards, built the row houses, apartment buildings, and theaters had harbored grander dreams than their downtown cousins. And while those dreams of beauty and power, gleaned from European capitals, were gone by this Saturday morning, evaporating with the last notes of the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, some monuments survived: the Savoy Ballroom, Small's Paradise, the Apollo, the Lafayette Theatre, Connie's Inn, the gates and brownstones of Strivers Row; and after three hours, Kendall felt more like a rube sightseer than a flâneur and hadn't bothered to take her Leica out of her satchel.

At the most superficial level, Kendall felt more comfortable here than in the Village. After all, she was the granddaughter of a slave and, at Garland's insistence, no stranger to hard work. She could kill and fry a chicken, muck out a barn, and sew a dress from a flour sack, one of which she was wearing, a lavender number dotted with tiny white stars. So it was no mystery why she felt a kinship to the women shopping in the grocery stores while their children played leapfrog and hopscotch on the sidewalk. Except what did Kendall know of the poverty she saw? The tenements like rows of unfortunate teeth; the dirty windows of the storefront churches; men sitting on crates outside barbershops or staggering out of bars; and the women leaning out of windows to hang laundry on the lines strung between the buildings.

By noon, Kendall wanted to retreat to the Village. All that stopped her was the rumbling in her empty stomach, and that at the corner of 134th and Seventh, she saw Crossroad Bar-B-Q, which Derrick and Otis had often hailed as the restaurant where God sent His angels for takeout.

They might've been right, Kendall thought, as she crossed the white-and-black hex-tiled floor, the air redolent with wood smoke and spices, and sat at one of the tables of varnished pine. The blues played on a jukebox back by the open kitchen, where a man in a puffy white chef's hat was laboring over a grill. A woman with short, iron-gray hair and a face as round and sweet as a pecan pie was darting among the tables in a full-length baby-blue apron, and she brought Kendall a glass of ice water.

“What can I get you, child?” she asked, looking at Kendall as if she recognized her.

“My friends told me to have the short ribs.”

“You got yourself some smart friends. What they names?”

“Otis Larkin and—”

“Lord, I knew it. I never forget faces. You that beautiful child that sang at Derrick's funeral, ain't you?”

“Yes, ma'am. My name's Kendall Wakefield.”

“We be knowing the Larkin family forever. A sin how them ofay fools done that boy.” The woman turned and shouted, “Papa B, come out here with a order a ribs.”

Papa B was the man in the chef's hat. His face, behind a stubbly gray beard, was as kindly as a country doctor's, and his white apron was splattered with sauce. In under a minute, he brought Kendall a plate with a rack of ribs, an ear of corn, black-eyed peas, and a basket of biscuits. “Mama B,” he said, setting the food on the table, “what you hollering for?”

“This here's Kendall Wakefield. The child we heard sing for Derrick.”

Papa B sat across from Kendall. “You one a the prettiest girls I ever seen, with one a the prettiest voices I ever heard. And we got us two boys—”

Mama B said, “Do she look like she need your help finding herself a man?”

Papa B chuckled. “All y'all need help. I had to help you find me. Like I's saying. Our older boy's in the Army in Virginia, his younger brother's in the Navy in Hawaii.”

Mama B said to Kendall, “Sugar, you eat, and I'ma bring you some peach cobbler.” She pinched her husband's cheek. “And you leave this child be.”

Kendall was glad to have company. Her tour had been as disturbing as her conversation with Christina. After months of slaving over
Sojourn in Bohemia
, making detailed sketches in pencil before applying a brushstroke, dismounting every flawed start from the wooden stretchers and cutting up the canvas, it had been difficult enough to hear from Christina that her paintings weren't art. Yet Kendall felt even more dejected that afternoon when she looked at the series again and saw them as nothing more than the exertions of a dilettante. And now, she was unable to spot a picture worth taking in Harlem. If she couldn't be a serious painter or photographer, what would she do? Illustrate Valentine's Day cards for Hallmark? Shoot passport photos? No way. Not this girl. She'd almost rather go work for her mother.