Кристина Клайн - A Piece of the World

“It makes you happy, doesn’t it, Bets?”

“I like to be busy,” she says. “And useful. I think those are pretty basic human desires—don’t you?”

I have to ponder this for a minute. Do I? “Well, I used to think so. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Idle hands . . .” she says.

“The devil’s playground. Is that what you think?”

She laughs. “My Puritan ancestors certainly did.”

“Mine too. But maybe they had it wrong.” I gaze out the windshield at the fat raindrops that land on the glass only to be whisked away by the wipers.

Betsy glances at me sideways and purses her lips, as if she wants to say something. But instead, with a slight tilt of her chin, she looks back at the road.

OVER LUNCH ONE day—split pea soup with ham, on a blanket in the grass—Betsy tells Al and me that Andy’s father doesn’t approve of her. He objected to their engagement, warning Andy that marriage would be a distraction and babies even worse. But she doesn’t care, she says. She finds N. C. arrogant, bullying, presumptuous. She thinks his colors are gaudy and his characters cartoonish, calculated for the marketplace. “Billboards for Cream of Wheat and Coca-Cola,” she says disdainfully.

While she’s talking I watch Andy’s face. He’s gazing at her with a bemused expression. He doesn’t nod, but he doesn’t protest either.

Betsy tells us that Andy needs to differentiate himself from his father. Take himself more seriously. Push himself harder. Take risks. She thinks he should limit his palette to starker colors, simplify the composition of his images, sharpen his tone. “You’re capable of it,” she tells him, putting her hand on his shoulder. “You don’t even know your own power yet.”

“Oh, please, Betsy. I’m just dabbling. I’m going to be a doctor,” Andy says.

She rolls her eyes at Al and me. “He just had a one-man show in Boston and won a prize. I don’t know why he thinks he’s going to be anything but a painter.”

“I like the study of medicine.”

“It’s not your passion, Andy.”

“You’re my passion.” He wraps his arms around her waist, and she laughs, shrugging him off.

“Go mix your tempera,” she says.

MOST MORNINGS ANDY rows over by himself in a dory from Port Clyde, half a mile away. On the way to the house, swinging a tackle box full of paints and brushes, he ducks into the hen yard and emerges with half a dozen eggs, cradling them in one hand like juggling balls. He comes in the side door and chats with Al and me for a little while before heading upstairs.

Andy’s eye is drawn to every cracked or faded implement and receptacle and tool, objects that once were used daily and now exist, like relics, to mark a way of life that has passed. Through his perspective I see familiar things anew. The pale pink wallpaper with tiny flowers. The red geraniums blooming in the window in their blue pots. The mahogany banister, the ship captain’s barometer in the foyer, an earthenware crock on a shelf in the pantry, the blue pantry door scratched by a long-ago dog.

Some days Andy takes his sketch pad and tackle box to the shed, the barn, the fields. I watch from the kitchen window as he roams the property, loping unevenly down the grass to peer at the words on the headstones in the cemetery, sit on the pebbled shore, gaze at the sudsy waves. When he comes back to the house, I offer him sourdough bread from the oven, sliced ham, haddock chowder, apple skillet cake. He settles on the stoop in the open doorway, cradling a bowl in one hand, and I sit in my chair, and we talk about our lives.

He’s the youngest of five, he tells me, with three doting sisters. A twisted right leg and a faulty hip kept him from walking properly as a child, from taking part in sports; you’ve probably noticed my limp? He was plagued with chest infections. His father was his only teacher. Kept him out of school, apprenticed in his studio. Taught him all about the history of art, how to mix paints and stretch canvases. “I was never like the other kids. Didn’t fit in. I was an oddball. A misfit.”

No wonder we get along, I think.

“Betsy’s told me a lot about you and Al,” Andy continues. “How Al chops firewood for everybody on the road. And you make dresses for ladies in town, and even quilts.” He points to the tiny flowers on my sleeve. “Did you embroider these?”

“Yes. Forget-me-nots,” I add, because it’s a little hard to tell.

“Interesting, isn’t it, what the mind is capable of,” he muses, stretching out his hand and flexing his fingers. “How the body can adapt if your mind refuses to be bowed. Those intricate stitches on the pillowcases you gave us, and here on this blouse . . . It’s hard to believe your fingers can do the work, but they can because you will them to.” He takes his empty bowl to the counter, swipes a slice of apple cake from the skillet. “You’re like me. You get on with it. I admire that.”

IN SKETCH AFTER sketch Andy focuses on the house. Silhouetted against the sky, a blot of smoke rising from a chimney. Viewed from a drainpipe, the cove, the eye of a seagull overhead. Alone on the hill or surrounded by trees. As large as a castle, as small as a child’s playhouse. Outbuildings appear, disappear. But there are constants: field, house, horizon, sky.

Field, house, horizon, sky.

“Why do you draw the house so much?” I ask him one day when we’re sitting in the kitchen.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says, shifting on the stoop. He stares into space for a moment, drumming his fingers on the floor. “I’m trying to capture . . . something. The feel of this place, not the place itself, exactly. D. H. Lawrence—he was a writer, but also a painter—wrote this line: ‘Close to the body of things, there can be heard the stir that makes us and destroys us.’ I want to do that—get close to the body of things. As close as I can. That means going back to the same material again and again, digging deeper every time.” He laughs, rubbing a hand through his hair. “I sound like a crazy person, don’t I?”

“I just think it would get boring.”

“I know, you’d think it would.” He shakes his head. “People say I’m a realist, but truthfully my paintings are never quite . . . real. I take away what I don’t like and put myself in its place.”

“What do you mean, yourself?”

“That’s my little secret, Christina,” he says. “I am always painting myself.”

THERE’S A SINGLE bed with a rusty creaking frame—my old bed—in the room upstairs where Andy has set up his easel. When Al finishes his chores in the afternoon, he often goes up there and watches Andy paint for a while before drifting off for a nap.

One day, offhandedly, chatting in the doorway with Al and me before heading upstairs, Andy mentions that he doesn’t like being observed. He wants to work in private.

“I’ll stop coming up, then,” Al says.

“Oh, no, that’s not what I’m talking about,” Andy says. “I like it when you’re there.”

“But he’s watching,” I say. “We’re both watching.”

Andy laughs, shaking his head. “It’s different with you two.”

“He’s himself around you,” Betsy says when I relay this conversation to her. “Because you and Al don’t need anything from him. You let him do what he wants.”

“It’s our entertainment,” I tell her. “Not much happens around here, you know.”

And it’s true. For so long this house was filled to the dormers. I used to wake every morning to a cacophony of sounds coming through the walls and the floorboards: Papa’s booming voice, the boys pounding up and down the stairs, Mamey scolding them to slow down, the barking dog and crowing rooster. Then it got so quiet. But now I wake in the morning and think: Andy is coming today . The day is transformed, and he hasn’t even gotten here yet.