Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

Isabel stood in the guest room doorway, wineglass in hand. She looked at Jane with a steady, unblinking gaze and mouthed the words, Stay as long as you want.

Jane looked intently back and nodded. She said to her husband, “Frank, I really don’t know when I’m coming back.”

“That doesn’t sound so good. Is it on account of Isabel, or on account of you?”

She hesitated, then answered, “Both.”

Frank was silent for a moment. He said, “It’s supposed to snow this weekend, according to the Channel Five guy, Tom Messner. Up to a foot. It was minus ten this morning. It’s minus five here at the house right now. ”

“It was eighty here today, and sunny. It’s pretty much like that every day here.”

“Wow. Except for hurricane season, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Except for hurricane season.” She said she had to go, it was time for the movie. She wished him luck tomorrow at his new job. He thanked her, and they said goodbye to each other and clicked off.

Isabel set her glass on the bedside table and sat down beside Jane and put her arms around her. It was almost a motherly gesture at first, comforting, consoling, the kind of embrace Jane had expected to give to Isabel, not to receive from her. It made Jane believe for a moment that she could be fearless, as fearless as Isabel, that she could be reborn as someone else, as someone unformed, and that, like Isabel, she could become an adolescent girl again. She laid her head on Isabel’s shoulder and smelled her perfume mixed with sweat, and a chill like the shadow of a cloud passing below the sun moved over her arms and shoulders, and when the chill had passed, it was as if the sun had emerged from behind the cloud, and a great warmth covered her body.

For a long moment they held their positions, as if each were waiting for the other to decide what they both would do or say next. And when neither woman decided, they both let their arms drop and turned toward the open door and the living room beyond and beyond that the floor-to-ceiling window and the terrace, the bay twenty-two stories below and the city at the far side of the bay and the setting sun bursting scarlet at the horizon like a fireball, painting the ragged gray clouds above the bay with cerise stripes.

For a long while neither woman said anything. Finally Isabel spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. “I would be happy if you stayed here.”

“Until?”

“Until you decide what you want.”

Jane stood and walked slowly to the door. For a second, she stopped at the door. She knew that tomorrow morning she would leave for home, for Keene, for the wintry north, for her husband, the father of her two grown daughters, her dour companion and the permanent witness to her remaining years. She turned around and looked back at Isabel, who was standing next to the bed, watching her, and realized that she had already said to Isabel everything that needed saying.

The afternoon of the day the director of the MacArthur Foundation called to tell Erik that he’d won a MacArthur, Erik and Ellen were scheduled to have dinner in Saratoga Springs with four close friends. The director instructed him to keep the news confidential until it was released to the press, but Erik decided to announce it tonight anyhow to Ted and Joan and Sam and Raphael.

Ellen didn’t agree. “Don’t you think you should wait? Like he asked?”

“Naw, they’ll keep it to themselves if I tell them to.” He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold can of Heineken. “What do you think, Sam’s going to announce it at a faculty meeting? Ted’ll put it in the paper?”

“No, but they might mention it to someone who would.”

“I’ll tell them it’s strictly confidential. Christ, Ellen, I want to celebrate! This is fucking life-changing!” He cracked open the Heineken and knocked back three quick swallows and wiped his chin with the broad back of his hand. “Damn! A fucking genius grant!” He grinned and slung an arm around Ellen and hugged her with it.

She gently pushed him away as if they were dancing and the music had stopped. She switched on the electric teapot and shook out a teabag and dropped it into a mug. “Why don’t you feed the dogs now, so you won’t have to do it in the dark before we go out?”

He studied the two Siberian huskies sleeping by the woodstove. “Yeah. Good idea.” After a few seconds, while she watched her tea steep, he said, “Why do I think you’re slightly displeased by this very good news?”

“No, I’m happy that your life will be changed by this, Erik. Really. It’s what you want and deserve. I’m just not so sure I want my life changed by it.”

“That’s up to you. Nothing in your life has to change if you don’t want it to. In my case, however, in a few days, as soon as the press release goes out, it’s going to be out of my control.”

“Poor guy,” she said. “Poor genius,” she added, and quickly laughed and touched his forearm with her fingertips. “But you deserve it.”

Ellen was not alone in believing that Erik Mann deserved a MacArthur. He was an artist who built elaborate installations the size of suburban living rooms out of American Standard plumbing supplies and kitchen and bathroom fixtures that he bought new in bulk through Spa City Supply in Saratoga Springs. He had taught at Skidmore College for over twenty years and was famous locally. Though his work was little known to the general public and was not collected or exhibited widely in the United States, it was admired by many of his more famous fellow artists and certain respected critics. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, had won prizes and fellowships — nothing till now on the scale of a MacArthur, of course — and had an enviable reputation abroad, mostly in Germany and in Japan, where he had recently been given a retrospective in a jumbo-jet hangar at Narita International Airport. The show had boosted his international standing and the prices his work commanded. Because of the scale and theatricality of his installations, however, few of them were ever actually purchased. Nonetheless, whether exhibited or not, their construction from conception to completion was documented, photographed and filmed, with the materials archived at Skidmore’s Tang Museum, where the archive itself was regarded by critics and scholars as a major work of art.

The award was for half a million tax-free dollars spread over five years. One did not apply for a MacArthur. A layered network of anonymous recommenders and jurors decided whose life and career was about to be suddenly embellished. Based in Chicago, the foundation granted barely a dozen fellowships a year, usually to cutting-edge social scientists and mathematicians, little-known poets, writers of esoteric or experimental fiction and plays, and scholars tilling fields like the history of Paleolithic dance or the hermeneutics of hopscotch, marbles and other children’s games, fields too obscure to have a conventional academic home. They were popularly referred to as “genius grants.”

MacArthurs rarely went to visual artists, and when one did it was usually to a conceptual artist whose work more closely resembled theater or dance than something actually made by human hands in a studio. All the more reason for Erik to celebrate. He built his outsized bathroom and kitchen installations by hand in a vast, high-ceilinged studio on the first floor of a mid-nineteenth-century mill. The factory sat on the bank of the Hudson River in the once-thriving town of Schuylerville, ten miles east of Saratoga Springs. He had bought the building for less than a year’s salary a decade ago when he was promoted to senior professor and given tenure. He had renovated the derelict mill himself, stripping it back to the brick walls, replacing the huge windows, jacking and leveling the chestnut-timbered floors, installing electricity, plumbing and central heat, sanding and varnishing the floors. He viewed the entire renovated building — the first-floor studio and his and Ellen’s living quarters on the second floor and Ellen’s weaving studio up on the third — as perhaps his most ambitious installation. He called the building “the mother of all installations.” By design, the process of constructing this installation was ongoing and endless and, unlike the rest of his work, was without irony. It referred to nothing other than itself.