Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

“Really?” Mother mused. “Well, anything is possible. But I should say before — quite a bit before.” She was looking off into space, playing with her strudel as if it were a mouse. “Many guests have given us their interpretation, you know. No one ever fails to comment.”

“It’s quite amazing, you know,” Father broke in cheerily. “When you live with a picture, you never really look at it. Because you own it, it ceases to exist. Very strange.”

The Professor was trying to read the artist’s title above the moth. It was either Der Anatom or Der Analom.

“Yes, the moth,” Father said embarrassedly. “Decidedly a false touch.”

“Might I ask which of your guests’ reactions was your favorite?” the Professor asked, now somewhat more detached as he descended the spiral stair, patted me on the head, and resumed his place.

“Oh, yes, it was a professor from Geneva, wasn’t it, dear?” Mother said. “His impression was that it was an up-to-date Dido and Aeneas. She has refused to die upon the pyre. And he has ignored the instructions of the gods to continue his journey, and instead will share their common fate. Very classy, no?”

“Such an idiot,” Father muttered. “He believed that art is something which happens between an accident and its criticism.”

“All very vague and sanctimonious, I must say,” said the Professor, a bit of strudel in his beard.

“And bourgeois?” Father twinkled.

“Even vagueness can be explicit if it’s explained well enough,” Mother allowed. “It was a wonderful evening. He threw himself in the pond.”

“What I like best about the picture is its smell,” Felix concluded. “It has the scent of a couch upon which one has just made love. Must be in the unvarnished pigments. Yes, whatever the story here, it is a scene quite on the verge of chemical collapse.”

“Artists are fantastically good at undermining themselves,” Mother shrugged, “and to be sure, Dido was something of a fool!”

It was well known throughout the countryside that Father had been the only man in modern times to have married a goddess, the only auslander to bed an Astingi since Attila. Accordingly, throughout his adult life, he was subjected to abnormal measures of both envy and sympathy by the ignorant — the only true education in which misconstruction makes the morning coffee.

It was true that Ainoha Aegle Apamea had all the contours and fury of the ideal, a famed beauty reflecting the original Astingi cross of the Viking with the Greek: golden-red hair upon olive skin, ocher eyes, a ruthless décolletage above the rose window of her navel, and below, um, her golden bee. When Mother smiled at you across a room, it opened every wound, and when her voice dropped into its lower registers, men would shake. She had all the devils of the world in her eyes, and hers was the cold laughter of the immortal, softened by an amused, enigmatic, and winsome grin. Father said he never saw anyone sleep so soundly, but when awake she never once blinked. She was a specialist in purdeur , presence, and the discretion necessary to true arousal. At times, Ainoha had a little trouble being human.

Technically speaking, Mother came from the moon: not that her dark side never showed, but often when you looked up, half of her was missing.

More often, she sat on a cloud far beyond the moon combing her hair, dropping her combings into the river, while sifting the mists through a silver sieve. She bathed three times on summer nights and nine times on autumn nights to make me a magician. I was her Fire Child.

The Moon Goddess is faithful, therefore insuperable, but she never lets you forget it. Not much of a hugger, she kissed me only once a day. But that was a privilege and at such times I felt justified in using the royal “we.” However, beauty has its own rhythms; beauty speeds things up and multiplies affect. My mother was made for many loves. Strong in all things, she should have had the strength to live alone.

Ainoha had been a child movie star in the Cannonian silent film industry, which had allowed her to overcome shyness, though she felt the cinema to be an infantile art form. She never once looked at the films made of her, and one could see why. No one ever looked like her, moved like her. She moved like water pours, like a self-excited comet; short hair on the head, long hair otherwise, all dry fire. She had the air of a bloodhorse and walked with a slight tilt, as if she were falling out of a foutée, and when she passed by, one sensed great oceans of air being moved. Like all her people she loved to smoke and loved to dance. Her ballgoing shoes had bells built into the heels, so when she walked she seemed to chime. She was of course a crack shot, as well as a champion swimmer, rider, and sprinter. When she picked up her skirts and remembered to remove her hat, she never lost a footrace. Not exactly a femme fragile or horizontale, trained in gymnastics and ballet, she could kill a man with a single blow of her leg. She trapped falcons, sewing up their eyelids to prevent them from predating, and trolled for pike with her earrings. She galloped after the county dogcatcher, and at point of sword, forced him to release his wretched captives and beg forgiveness. When on horseback on a hunting line there was no shaking her off, you could not ride wide of her. You never escaped her at a single fence. I shall never forget her voice, “Pray, take care of that gate!” And through brake and brier, over ditch and dike, surrounded by a profane drunken crowd of escorts, she permitted no reference to her safety, comfort, or success. And yet as impossible as it was to escape her, it was the same at every gate and gap. “Might I ask you,” she trilled in her pretty voice, head thrown back like an ecstatic maenad, “not to come too near me?” And when in a bad mood, one could often hear her kicking a soccer ball for hours and hours against the granary. She was, perhaps, the world expert on dog fibers and other useful fuzz, knitting many useful items from doghair — scarves, watchcaps, pullovers, and mittens for all of us, as well as full-length traveling jerkins for the dogs, belted across the stomach with a small flapped pocket for a train ticket. Her weaving pins were never far from her hands.

Mother was invariably late for meals, generally sleeping till noon in her darkened room behind heavy damask curtains and carved pillars which kept out both light and air. But she was no neurasthenic. She took to her bed aggressively and made the world her bed. It was from her I learned how to pull the coverlet taut and watch how all difference evaporates. After a hot bath which she took in a thick linen chemise (she could apparently wash without lifting it) she would darken her eyelids with the soot produced by holding a porcelain cup over the flame of a candle, and hurry into lunch absentmindedly, surrounded by an aroma of Turkish tobacco and Houbigant, carrying a bundle of old international newspapers in which she was well-versed. Then, after lunch, gathering up an untender beefsteak for supper and placing it beneath her saddle, she would take her daily horseback ride, jumping over the innumerable crisscrossed sheaves of hay in the south pasture, with its golden apple orchards.

But Mother also lived in that special hell reserved for beauteous women (for only the pretty demand to be valued for themselves) and like Francesca she was caught in a kind of unrhymed poem as well, which charged her monologues with melancholy; the goddess who is herself invulnerable but chooses to be kind, insisting on bestowing gifts even when they were not wanted. She encouraged others to subscribe to her dottiness, a readiness to retreat from the merciless laboratory of history into the blessings and total adulation of pets and family. “Have I missed anyone today?” she would often say into the uncritical love glow of cats and dogs, and during dinner, when Father and I were engaged in some inconsequential argument and looked to her to break the tie, she would fling down her napkin and exclaim, “Oh, you word people, there’s just no getting around you!”