Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

“You remember that picture, Deposition, ” Garrett said, leaning against the car beside her.

“Naturally,” Polly replied irritably, jolted out of her mood.

“You’ll recognize that hollow in the dunes, then, and the shack over there with the purplish roof. Might have thought it would’ve fallen down by now, but these old Cape buildings are tough.”

I’m old, but I’m tough, Polly heard him say; don’t think you’re going to put anything over on me. It occurred to her that his phony old-salt costume had the same message. It also said: I am at ease here, in control; Cape Cod belongs to me.

“I’d like to get a photograph of this view, if you don’t mind.”

“Good idea.” He moved aside, allowing her to open the door for herself this time.

“ Deposition, ” she said as she returned the camera to her tote bag. “Tell me, do you happen to know why she gave her painting that name?”

“No idea.” Garrett Jones grinned. “You know, Laura always had trouble with titles. When she got stuck, she would shut her eyes and open some book. Just the way my Aunt Mabel used to consult her Bible for spiritual guidance. Only with Laura it was usually Webster’s Dictionary: she’d open it and put her finger on a word, or maybe a couple of words, and that would be it. I figure this was one of those times. It needn’t mean anything.”

“It seems pretty appropriate to me,” Polly contradicted, quoting from her notes: “ ‘Deposition: A statement under oath, taken down in writing to be used in court in place of the production of the witness.’ Isn’t that what a painting is, too? Or should be?”

“Uh, yes, perhaps.” Garrett Jones gave her a surprised, shrewd look. Score another for me, Polly thought. In her mind she ran over her list of Lorin Jones paintings, wondering which had been named at random from a dictionary. Pigeon Hawk. Carbon Dioxide. Goatfish. Perispheres. Go. Yeah, maybe. But not Though They Know the War Is Over, They Continue to Fight.

“Of course, one could read that title in other ways,” Garrett added, recovering. “You could think of a ‘deposition’ as simply something that is set down, deposited. Or as referring to the time of year the painting was done, the end of summer. It could mean a kind of abdication of nature’s power, as in ‘The king was deposed.’ Isn’t that so?”

“Mm,” Polly conceded.

“We’ll never know what it meant to Laura, though.”

“I suppose not.” You’ll never know, anyhow, she thought silently.

By the time the car turned, onto Marsh Road in Wellfleet, Polly had seen four presumed sites of Lorin Jones’s paintings — none of them as obvious as the first, since during the years Lorin lived on the Cape her work had become steadily more abstract — and had photographed them all. Her digestive system had returned to normal, more or less, and her mood was greatly improved. Not only the places Garrett Jones had pointed out, but everything she looked at seemed to bring her closer to her subject: the clear cool light, the spare oriental shapes of dune and pine and reeds, the muted colors, the greenish black calligraphy of the bare trees. She was possessed by a kind of euphoric déjà vu: at every other bend of the road she saw something magically familiar.

“Fine view, isn’t it?” Lorin’s former husband roared against the wind as they passed a sweep of grassy marshland faded to buff and divided by a shimmer of choppy bay. “Ah, I should tell you. Abigail is awfully sorry, but she can’t join us this evening. She has a crisis over some article about houseplants.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Polly replied vaguely and insincerely, not turning her eyes from the landscape. She had nothing against Abigail Jones, a pretty, faded woman in her fifties who was a freelance women’s-magazine writer, with little to say for herself and nothing to say about Lorin Jones. But if Polly had to confront Abigail’s husband, it would be a lot easier and more pleasant if she weren’t around.

“So seeing as how I’m not much of a cook, I thought we might go out for dinner. There’s a pretty good seafood place in Eastham that’s still open this time of year. How does that sound to you?”

“Oh, fine,” Polly said, thinking that it might also be strategically to her advantage to face Jones on neutral ground.

“Good. Well, thar she blows.” With a crunch of sand and gravel, he turned into a driveway between browned lilac bushes.

In spite of the implication of this announcement, Garrett Jones’s house, once also Lorin’s, was in no sense a whale. It was larger than Polly had expected from the photographs, and instead of standing in open fields was surrounded by carefully tended shrubbery.

Inside, the place seemed to have little to do with either art or Lorin Jones. There were a few good small contemporary pictures, including one of Lorin’s that had been in Polly’s show, but the rooms in which they hung were unnaturally neat and overdecorated in conventional Early American Colonial style, presumably by Abigail Jones, for they looked exactly like one of her color features in Homes and Gardens.

“The sitting room ... the dining room ... the study ... our bedroom.” Garrett Jones led Polly through the downstairs.

“Very nice,” she felt constrained to say. “It’s not at all what I expected, though.”

“Well, of course it was very different when Laura lived here. The house was damn near falling apart when I bought it back in nineteen-forty-nine, and there was no garden then, just long meadow grass right up to the walls. And of course the new extension wasn’t built. We didn’t even have electricity for the first few years. Abigail’s done wonders. ... Now let’s go upstairs, and I’ll show you Laura’s studio.” He led the way, rather slowly and heavily, up the steep, narrow staircase.

“Here we are. Rather small for a studio, but it’s the only place in the house with unobstructed north light. Nothing much left from Laura’s time, I’m afraid. This is Robbie’s room now, our younger son, but he’s away at Choate, of course. Sorry about the mess.”

By Polly’s standards, the mess was minimal. This room at least looked as if a human being lived in it; there was a reassuring clutter and shabbiness about the shelves of books and airplane models and shells and sports equipment, the posters of yachts and tennis stars tacked to the sloping wall beside the long dormer window. As if drawn by a magnetic force, Polly crossed the floor, pushed aside a gray corduroy curtain, and gazed out through the faintly green, bubbled old panes of glass, toward the misty sea.

“You recognize the view?” Garrett Jones’s voice sounded close behind her. “Laura painted it over and over again, of course. It’s in Pigeon Hawk and Strata and a number of her other pictures.”

“I recognize it,” Polly said, moving aside.

“She made a lot of sketches from these upstairs windows. I still have a few of them; I’ll show you later. If you’ll come out here in the hall, for instance, you can see —”

Reluctantly, Polly followed Garrett Jones and allowed him to demonstrate the scenes of various paintings, meanwhile wishing that he would go away so that she could be alone with them.

“And now let me show you where you’ll be bunking.”

Garrett tossed Polly’s bag onto a double four-poster in a painfully tidy guest bedroom full of antique prints and spool tables and hooked rugs. “Here you are. If you want to wash up, it’s right across the way.” He pointed with the full extent of his arm, like a captain indicating something on the horizon. “Oh, incidentally, I’ve put out a few more old photos I found. They’re here on the desk.”