J. D. Salinger
De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period
IF IT MADE any real
sense--and it doesn't even begin to--I think I might be inclined to dedicate
this account, for whatever it's worth, especially if it's the least bit ribald
in parts, to the memory of my late, ribald stepfather, Robert Agadganian, Jr.
Bobby--as everyone, even I, called him--died in 1947, surely with a few
regrets, but without a single gripe, of thrombosis. He was an adventurous,
extremely magnetic, and generous man. (After having spent so many years
laboriously begrudging him those picaresque adjectives, I feel it's a matter of
life and death to get them in here.)
My mother and father were divorced during the
winter of 1928, when I was eight, and mother married Bobby Agadganian late that
spring. A year later, in the Wall Street Crash, Bobby lost everything he and
mother had, with the exception, apparently, of a magic wand. In any case,
practically overnight, Bobby turned himself from a dead stockbroker and
incapacitated bon vivant into a live, if somewhat unqualified, agent-appraiser
for a society of independent American art galleries and fine arts museums. A
few weeks later, early in 1930, our rather mixed threesome moved from New York
to Paris, the better for Bobby to ply his new trade. Being a cool, not to say
an ice-cold, ten at the time, I took the big move, so far as I know,
untraumatically. It was the move back to New York, nine years later, three
months after my mother died, that threw me, and threw me terribly.
I remember a significant incident that occurred
just a day or two after Bobby and I arrived in New York. I was standing up in a
very crowded Lexington Avenue bus, holding on to the enamel pole near the
driver's seat, buttocks to buttocks with the chap behind me. For a number of
blocks the driver had repeatedly given those of us bunched up near the front
door a curt order to "step to the rear of the vehicle." Some of us
had tried to oblige him. Some of us hadn't. At length, with a red light in his
favor, the harassed man swung around in his seat and looked up at me, just
behind him. At nineteen, I was a hatless type, with a flat, black, not
particularly clean, Continental-type pompadour over a badly broken-out inch of
forehead. He addressed me in a lowered, an almost prudent tone of voice.
"All right, buddy," he said, "let's move that ass." It was
the "buddy," I think, that did it. Without even bothering to bend
over a little--that is, to keep the conversation at least as private, as de bon
gout, as he'd kept it--I informed him, in French, that he was a rude, stupid,
overbearing imbecile, and that he'd never know how much I detested him. Then,
rather elated, I stepped to the rear of the vehicle.
Things got much worse. One afternoon, a week or so
later, as I was coming out of the Ritz Hotel, where Bobby and I were
indefinitely stopping, it seemed to me that all the seats from all the buses in
New York had been unscrewed and taken out and set up in the street, where a
monstrous game of Musical Chairs was in full swing. I think I might have been
willing to join the game if I had been granted a special dispensation from the
Church of Manhattan guaranteeing that all the other players would remain
respectfully standing till I was seated. When it became clear that nothing of
the kind was forthcoming, I took more direct action. I prayed for the city to
be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone--a-l-o-n-e: which is the one
New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at
all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness. Mornings and early
afternoons, I attended--bodily--an art school on Forty-eighth and Lexington
Avenue, which I loathed. (The week before Bobby and I had left Paris, I had won
three first-prize awards at the National Junior Exhibition, held at the
Freiburg Galleries. Throughout the voyage to America, I used our stateroom
mirror to note my uncanny physical resemblance to El Greco.) Three late
afternoons a week I spent in a dentist's chair, where, within a period of a few
months, I had eight teeth extracted, three of them front ones. The other two
afternoons I usually spent wandering through art galleries, mostly on
Fifty-seventh Street, where I did all but hiss at the American entries.
Evenings, I generally read. I bought a complete set of the Harvard
Classics--chiefly because Bobby said we didn't have room for them in our
suite--and rather perversely read all fifty volumes. Nights, I almost
invariably set up my easel between the twin beds in the room I shared with
Bobby, and painted. In one month alone, according to my diary for 1939, I
completed eighteen oil paintings. Noteworthily enough, seventeen of them were
self-portraits. Sometimes, however, possibly when my Muse was being capricious,
I set aside my paints and drew cartoons. One of them I still have. It shows a
cavernous view of the mouth of a man being attended by his dentist. The man's
tongue is a simple, U.S. Treasury hundred dollar bill, and the dentist is
saying, sadly, in French, "I think we can save the molar, but I'm afraid
that tongue will have to come out." It was an enormous favorite of mine.
As roommates, Bobby and I were neither more nor
less compatible than would be, say, an exceptionally live-and-let-live Harvard
senior, and an exceptionally unpleasant Cambridge newsboy. And when, as the
weeks went by, we gradually discovered that we were both in love with the same
deceased woman, it was no help at all. In fact, a ghastly little
after-you-Alphonse relationship grew out of the discovery. We began to exchange
vivacious smiles when we bumped into each other on the threshold of the
bathroom.
One week in May of 1939, about ten months after
Bobby and I checked into the Ritz, I saw in a Quebec newspaper (one of sixteen
French-language newspapers and periodicals I had blown myself a subscription
to) a quarter-column advertisement that had been placed by the direction of a
Montreal correspondence art school. It advised all qualified instructors--it as
much as said, in fact, that it couldn't advise them fortenwnt enough--to apply
immediately for employment at the newest, most progressive, correspondence art
school in Canada. Candidate instructors, it stipulated, were to have a fluent
knowledge of both the French and English languages, and only those of temperate
habits and unquestionable character need apply. The summer session at Les Amis
Des Vieux Maitres was officially to open on 10 June. Samples of work, it said,
should represent both the academic and commercial fields of art, and were to be
submitted to Monsieur I. Yoshoto, directeur, formerly of the Imperial Academy
of Fine Arts, Tokyo.
Instantly, feeling almost insupportably qualified,
I got out Bobby's Hermes-Baby typewriter from under his bed and wrote, in
French, a long, intemperate letter to M. Yoshoto--cutting all my morning
classes at the art school on Lexington Avenue to do it. My opening paragraph
ran some three pages, and very nearly smoked. I said I was twenty-nine and a
great-nephew of Honore Daumier. I said I had just left my small estate in the
South of France, following the death of my wife, to come to America to
stay--temporarily, I made it clear--with an invalid relative. I had been
painting, I said, since early childhood, but that, following the advice of
Pablo Picasso, who was one of the oldest and dearest friends of my parents, I
had never exhibited. However, a number of my oil paintings and water colors
were now hanging in some of the finest, and by no means nouveau riche, homes in
Paris, where they had gagne considerable attention from some of the most
formidable critics of our day. Following, I said, my wife's untimely and tragic
death, of an ulceration cancgreuse, I had earnestly thought I would never again
set brush to canvas. But recent financial losses had led me to alter my earnest
resolution. I said I would be most honored to submit samples of my work to Les
Amis Des Vieux Maitres, just as soon as they were sent to me by my agent in
Paris, to whom I would write, of course, tres presse. I remained, most
respectfully, Jean de Daumier-Smith.
It took me almost as long to select a pseudonym as
it had taken me to write the whole letter.
I wrote the letter on overlay tissue paper.
However, I sealed it in a Ritz envelope. Then, after applying a
special-delivery stamp I'd found in Bobby's top drawer, I took the letter down
to the main mail drop in the lobby. I stopped on the way to put the mail clerk
(who unmistakably loathed me) on the alert for de Daumier-Smith's future
incoming mail. Then, around two-thirty, I slipped into my one-forty-five
anatomy class at the art school on Forty-eighth Street. My classmates seemed,
for the first time, like a fairly decent bunch.
During the next four days, using all my spare time,
plus some time that didn't quite belong to me, I drew a dozen or more samples
of what I thought were typical examples of American commercial art. Working
mostly in washes, but occasionally, to show off, in line, I drew people in
evening clothes stepping out of limousines on opening nights--lean, erect,
super-chic couples who had obviously never in their lives inflicted suffering
as a result of underarm carelessness--couples, in fact, who perhaps didn't have
any underarms. I drew suntanned young giants in white dinner jackets, seated at
white tables alongside turquoise swimming pools, toasting each other, rather
excitedly, with highballs made from a cheap but ostensibly ultrafashionable
brand of rye whisky. I drew ruddy, billboard-genic children, beside themselves
with delight and good health, holding up their empty bowls of breakfast food
and pleading, good-naturedly, for more. I drew laughing, high-breasted girls
aquaplaning without a care in the world, as a result of being amply protected
against such national evils as bleeding gums, facial blemishes, unsightly
hairs, and faulty or inadequate life insurance. I drew housewives who, until
they reached for the right soap flakes, laid themselves wide open to straggly
hair, poor posture, unruly children, disaffected husbands, rough (but slender)
hands, untidy (but enormous) kitchens.
When the samples were finished, I mailed them
immediately to M. Yoshoto, along with a half-dozen or so non-commercial
paintings of mine that I'd brought with me from France. I also enclosed what I
thought was a very casual note that only just began to tell the richly human
little story of how, quite alone and variously handicapped, in the purest
romantic tradition, I had reached the cold, white, isolating summits of my
profession.
The next few days were horribly suspenseful, but
before the week was out, a letter came from M. Yoshoto accepting me as an
instructor at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres. The letter was written in English,
even though I had written in French. (I later gathered that M. Yoshoto, who
knew French but not English, had, for some reason, assigned the writing of the
letter to Mme. Yoshoto, who had some working knowledge of English.) M. Yoshoto
said that the summer session would probably be the busiest session of the year,
and that it started on 24 June. This gave me almost five weeks, he pointed out,
to settle my affairs. He offered me his unlimited sympathy for, in effect, my
recent emotional and financial setbacks. He hoped that I would arrange myself
to report at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres on Sunday, 23 June, in order to learn
of my duties and to become "firm friends" with the other instructors
(who, I later learned, were two in number, and consisted of M. Yoshoto and Mme.
Yoshoto). He deeply regretted that it was not the school's policy to advance
transportation fare to new instructors. Starting salary was twenty-eight
dollars a week-which was not, M. Yoshoto said he realized, a very large sum of
funds, but since it included bed and nourishing food, and since he sensed in me
the true vocationary spirit, he hoped I would not feel cast down with vigor. He
awaited a telegram of formal acceptance from me with eagerness and my arrival
with a spirit of pleasantness, and remained, sincerely, my new friend and
employer, I. Yoshoto, formerly of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, Tokyo.
My telegram of formal acceptance went out within
five minutes. Oddly enough, in my excitement, or quite possibly from a feeling
of guilt because I was using Bobby's phone to send the wire, I deliberately sat
on my prose and kept the message down to ten words.
That evening when, as usual, I met Bobby for dinner
at seven o'clock in the Oval Room, I was annoyed to see that he'd brought a
guest along. I hadn't said or implied a word to him about my recent,
extracurricular doings, and I was dying to make this final news-break--to scoop
him thoroughly--when we were alone. The guest was a very attractive young lady,
then only a few months divorced, whom Bobby had been seeing a lot of and whom
I'd met on several occasions. She was an altogether charming person whose every
attempt to be friendly to me, to gently persuade me to take off my armor, or at
least my helmet, I chose to interpret as an implied invitation to join her in
bed at my earliest convenience--that is, as soon as Bobby, who clearly was too
old for her, could be given the slip. I was hostile and laconic throughout
dinner. At length, while we were having coffee, I tersely outlined my new plans
for the summer. When I'd finished, Bobby put a couple of quite intelligent
questions to me. I answered them coolly, overly briefly, the unimpeachable
crown prince of the situation.
"Oh, it sounds very exciting!" said
Bobby's guest, and waited, wantonly, for me to slip her my Montreal address
under the table.
"I thought you were going to Rhode Island with
me," Bobby said.
"Oh, darling, don't be a horrible wet
blanket," Mrs. X said to him.
"I'm not, but I wouldn't mind knowing a little
more about it," Bobby said. But I thought I could tell from his manner
that he was already mentally exchanging his train reservations for Rhode Island
from a compartment to a lower berth.
"I think it's the sweetest, most complimentary
thing I ever heard in my life," Mrs. X said warmly to me. Her eyes
sparkled with depravity.
The Sunday that I stepped on to the platform at
Windsor Station in Montreal, I was wearing a doublebreasted, beige gabardine
suit (that I had a damned high opinion of), a navy-blue flannel shirt, a solid
yellow, cotton tie, brown-and-white shoes, a Panama hat (that belonged to Bobby
and was rather too small for me), and a reddish-brown moustache, aged three
weeks. M. Yoshoto was there to meet me. He was a tiny man, not more than five
feet tall, wearing a rather soiled linen suit, black shoes, and a black felt
hat with the brim turned up all around. He neither smiled, nor, as I remember,
said anything to me as we shook hands. His expression--and my word for it came
straight out of a French edition of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu books--was
inscrutable. For some reason, I was smiling from ear to ear. I couldn't even
turn it down, let alone off.
It was a bus ride of several miles from Windsor
Station to the school. I doubt if M. Yoshoto said five words the whole way.
Either in spite, or because, of his silence, I talked incessantly, with my legs
crossed, ankle on knee, and constantly using my sock as an absorber for the
perspiration on my palm. It seemed urgent to me not only to reiterate my
earlier lies--about my kinship with Daumier, about my deceased wife, about my
small estate in the South of France--but to elaborate on them. At length, in effect
to spare myself from dwelling on these painful reminiscences (and they were
beginning to feel a little painful), I swung over to the subject of my parents'
oldest and dearest friend: Pablo Picasso. Le pauvre Picasso, as I referred to
him. (I picked Picasso, I might mention, because he seemed to me the French
painter who was best-known in America. I roundly considered Canada part of
America.) For M. Yoshoto's benefit, I recalled, with a showy amount of natural
compassion for a fallen giant, how many times I had said to him, "M.
Picasso, ofi allez vous?" and how, in response to this all-penetrating
question, the master had never failed to walk slowly, leadenly, across his
studio to look at a small reproduction of his "Les Saltimbanques" and
the glory, long forfeited, that had been his. The trouble with Picasso, I
explained to M. Yoshoto as we got out of the bus, was that he never listened to
anybody--even his closest friends.
In 1939, Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres occupied the
second floor of a small, highly unendowed-looking, three-story building--a
tenement building, really--in the Verdun, or least attractive, section of
Montreal. The school was directly over an orthopedic appliances shop. One large
room and a tiny, boltless latrine were all there was to Les Amis Des Vieux
Maitres itself. Nonetheless, the moment I was inside, the place seemed
wondrously presentable to me. There was a very good reason. The walls of the
"instructors' room" were hung with many framed pictures--all water
colors--done by M. Yoshoto. Occasionally, I still dream of a certain white
goose flying through an extremely pale-blue sky, with--and it was one of the
most daring and accomplished feats of craftsmanship I've ever seen--the
blueness of the sky, or an ethos of the blueness of the sky, reflected in the
bird's feathers. The picture was hung just behind Mme. Yoshoto's desk. It made
the room--it and one or two other pictures close to it in quality.
Mme. Yoshoto, in a beautiful, black and cerise silk
kimono, was sweeping the floor with a short-handled broom when M. Yoshoto and I
entered the instructors' room. She was a gray-haired woman, surely a head
taller than her husband, with features that looked rather more Malayan than
Japanese. She left off sweeping and came forward, and M. Yoshoto briefly
introduced us. She seemed to me every bit as inscrutable as M. Yoshoto, if not
more so. M. Yoshoto then offered to show me to my room, which, he explained (in
French) had recently been vacated by his son, who had gone to British Columbia
to work on a farm. (After his long silence in the bus, I was grateful to hear
him speak with any continuity, and I listened rather vivaciously.) He started
to apologize for the fact that there were no chairs in his son's room--only
floor cushions--but I quickly gave him to believe that for me this was little
short of a godsend. (In fact, I think I said I hated chairs. I was so nervous
that if he had informed me that his son's room was flooded, night and day, with
a foot of water, I probably would have let out a little cry of pleasure. I
probably would have said I had a rare foot disease, one that required my
keeping my feet wet eight hours daily.) Then he led me up a creaky wooden
staircase to my room. I told him on the way, pointedly enough, that I was a
student of Buddhism. I later found out that both he and Mme. Yoshoto were
Presbyterians.
Late that night, as I lay awake in bed, with Mme.
Yoshoto's Japanese-Malayan dinner still en masse and riding my sternum like an
elevator, one or the other of the Yoshotos began to moan in his or her sleep,
just the other side of my wall. It was a high, thin, broken moan, and it seemed
to come less from an adult than from either a tragic, subnormal infant or a
small malformed animal. (It became a regular nightly performance. I never did
find out which of the Yoshotos it came from, let alone why.) When it became
quite unendurable to listen to from a supine position, I got out of bed, put on
my slippers, and went over in the dark and sat down on one of the floor
cushions. I sat crosslegged for a couple of hours and smoked cigarettes,
squashing them out on the instep of my slipper and putting the stubs in the
breast pocket of my pyjamas. (The Yoshotos didn't smoke, and there were no
ashtrays anywhere on the premises.) I got to sleep around five in the morning.
At six-thirty, M. Yoshoto knocked on my door and
advised me that breakfast would be served at six-forty-five. He asked me,
through the door, if I'd slept well, and I answered, "Oui!" I then
dressed--putting on my blue suit, which I thought appropriate for an instructor
on the opening day of school, and a red Sulka tie my mother had given me--and,
without washing, hurried down the hall to the Yoshotos' kitchen.
Mme. Yoshoto was at the stove, preparing a fish
breakfast. M. Yoshoto, in his B.V.D.'s and trousers, was seated at the kitchen
table, reading a Japanese newspaper. He nodded to me, non-committally. Neither
of them had ever looked more inscrutable. Presently, some sort of fish was
served to me on a plate with a small but noticeable trace of coagulated catsup
along the border. Mme. Yoshoto asked me, in English--and her accent was
unexpectedly charming--if I would prefer an egg, but I said, "Non, non,
madame--merci!" I said I never ate eggs. M. Yoshoto leaned his newspaper
against my water glass, and the three of us ate in silence; that is, they ate
and I systematically swallowed in silence.
After breakfast, without having to leave the
kitchen, M. Yoshoto put on a collarless shirt and Mme. Yoshoto took off her
apron, and the three of us filed rather awkwardly downstairs to the
instructors' room. There, in an untidy pile on M. Yoshoto's broad desk, lay
some dozen or more unopened, enormous, bulging, Manilla envelopes. To me, they
had an almost freshly brushed-and-combed look, like new pupils. M. Yoshoto
assigned me to my desk, which was on the far, isolated side of the room, and
asked me to be seated. Then, with Mme. Yoshoto at his side, he broke open a few
of the envelopes. He and Mme. Yoshoto seemed to examine the assorted contents
with some sort of method, consulting each other, now and then, in Japanese,
while I sat across the room, in my blue suit and Sulka tie, trying to look
simultaneously alert and patient and, somehow, indispensable to the
organization. I took out a handful of soft-lead drawing pencils, from my inside
jacket pocket, that I'd brought from New York with me, and laid them out, as
noiselessly as possible, on the surface of my desk. Once, M. Yoshoto glanced
over at me for some reason, and I flashed him an excessively winning smile.
Then, suddenly, without a word or a look in my direction, the two of them sat
down at their respective desks and went to work. It was about seven-thirty.
Around nine, M. Yoshoto took off his glasses, got
up and padded over to my desk with a sheaf of papers in his hand. I'd spent an
hour and a half doing absolutely nothing but trying to keep my stomach from
growling audibly. I quickly stood up as he came into my vicinity, stooping a
trifle in order not to look disrespectfully tall. He handed me the sheaf of
papers he'd brought over and asked me if I would kindly translate his written
corrections from French into English. I said, "Oui, monsieur!" He
bowed slightly, and padded back to his own desk. I pushed my handful of
soft-lead drawing pencils to one side of my desk, took out my fountain pen, and
fell--very nearly heartbroken--to work.
Like many a really good artist, M. Yoshoto taught
drawing not a whit better than it's taught by a so-so artist who has a nice
flair for teaching. With his practical overlay work--that is to say, his
tracing-paper drawings imposed over the student's drawings--along with his
written comments on the backs of the drawings--he was quite able to show a
reasonably talented student how to draw a recognizable pig in a recognizable
sty, or even a picturesque pig in a picturesque sty. But he couldn't for the
life of him show anyone how to draw a beautiful pig in a beautiful sty (which,
of course, was the one little technical bit his better students most greedily
wanted sent to them through the mail). It was not, need I add, that he was
consciously or unconsciously being frugal of his talent, or deliberately
unprodigal of it, but that it simply wasn't his to give away. For me, there was
no real element of surprise in this ruthless truth, and so it didn't waylay me.
But it had a certain cumulative effect, considering where I was sitting, and by
the time lunch hour rolled around, I had to be very careful not to smudge my
translations with the sweaty heels of my hands. As if to make things still more
oppressive, M. Yoshoto's handwriting was just barely legible. At any rate, when
it came time for lunch, I declined to join the Yoshotos. I said I had to go to
the post office. Then I almost ran down the stairs to the street and began to
walk very rapidly, with no direction at all, through a maze of strange,
underprivileged-looking streets. When I came to a lunch bar, I went inside and
bolted four "Coney Island Red-Hots" and three muddy cups of coffee.
On the way back to Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres, I
began to wonder, first in a familiar, faint-hearted way that I more or less
knew from experience how to handle, then in an absolute panic, if there had
been anything personal in M. Yoshoto's having used me exclusively as a
translator all morning. Had old Fu Manchu known from the beginning that I was
wearing, among other misleading attachments and effects, a nineteen-year-old
boy's moustache? The possibility was almost unendurable to consider. It also
tended to eat slowly away at my sense of justice. Here I was--a man who had won
three first-prizes, a very close friend of Picasso's (which I actually was
beginning to think I was)--being used as a translator. The punishment didn't
begin to fit the crime. For one thing, my moustache, however sparse, was all
mine; it hadn't been put on with spirit gum. I felt it reassuringly with my
fingers as I hurried back to school. But the more I thought about the whole
affair, the faster I walked, till finally I was almost trotting, as if any
minute I half-expected to be stoned from all directions. Though I'd taken only
forty minutes or so for lunch, both the Yoshotos were at their desks and at
work when I got back. They didn't look up or give any sign that they'd heard me
come in. Perspiring and out of breath, I went over and sat down at my desk. I
sat rigidly still for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, running all kinds of
brand-new little Picasso anecdotes through my head, just in case M. Yoshoto
suddenly got up and came over to unmask me. And, suddenly, he did get up and
come over. I stood up to meet him--head on, if necessary--with a fresh little
Picasso story, but, to my horror, by the time he reached me I was minus the
plot. I chose the moment to express my admiration for the goose-in-flight
picture hanging over Mme. Yoshoto. I praised it lavishly at some length. I said
I knew a man in Paris--a very wealthy paralytic, I said--who would pay M.
Yoshoto any price at all for the picture. I said I could get in touch with him
immediately if M. Yoshoto was interested. Luckily, however, M. Yoshoto said the
picture belonged to his cousin, who was away visiting relatives in Japan. Then,
before I could express my regret, he asked me--addressing me as M.
DaumierSmith--if I would kindly correct a few lessons. He went over to his desk
and returned with three enormous, bulging envelopes, and placed them on my
desk. Then, while I stood dazed and incessantly nodding and feeling my jacket
where my drawing pencils had been repocketed, M. Yoshoto explained to me the
school's method of instruction (or, rather, its nonexistent method of
instruction). After he'd returned to his own desk, it took me several minutes
to pull myself together.
All three students assigned to me were
English-language students. The first was a twenty-three-year-old Toronto
housewife, who said her professional name was Bambi Kramer, and advised the
school to address her mail accordingly. All new students at Les Amis Des Vieux
Maitres were requested to fill out questionnaire forms and to enclose photographs
of themselves. Miss Kramer had enclosed a glossy, eight by ten print of herself
wearing an anklet, a strapless bathing suit, and a white-duck sailor's cap. On
her questionnaire form she stated that her favorite artists were Rembrandt and
Walt Disney. She said she only hoped that she could some day emulate them. Her
sample drawings were clipped, rather subordinately, to her photograph. All of
them were arresting. One of them was unforgettable. The unforgettable one was
done in florid wash colors, with a caption that read: "Forgive Them Their
Trespasses." It showed three small boys fishing in an odd-looking body of
water, one of their jackets draped over a "No Fishing!" sign. The
tallest boy, in the foreground of the picture, appeared to have rickets in one leg
and elephantiasis in the other--an effect, it was clear, that Miss Kramer had
deliberately used to show that the boy was standing with his feet slightly
apart.
My second student was a fifty-six-year-old
"society photographer" from Windsor, Ontario, named R. Howard
Ridgefield, who said that his wife had been after him for years to branch over
into the painting racket. His favorite artists were Rembrandt, Sargent, and
"Titan," but he added, advisedly, that he himself didn't care to draw
along those lines. He said he was mostly interested in the satiric rather than
the arty side of painting. To support this credo, he submitted a goodly number
of original drawings and oil paintings. One of his pictures--the one I think of
as his major picture--has been as recallable to me, over the years, as, say,
the lyrics of "Sweet Sue" or "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."
It satirized the familiar, everyday tragedy of a chaste young girl, with
belowshoulder-length blond hair and udder-size breasts, being criminally
assaulted in church, in the very shadow of the altar, by her minister. Both
subjects' clothes were graphically in disarray. Actually, I was much less
struck by the satiric implications of the picture than I was by the quality of
workmanship that had gone into it. If I hadn't known they were living hundreds
of miles apart, I might have sworn Ridgefield had had some purely technical
help from Bambi Kramer.
Except under pretty rare circumstances, in any
crisis, when I was nineteen, my funny bone invariably had the distinction of
being the very first part of my body to assume partial or complete paralysis.
Ridgefield and Miss Kramer did many things to me, but they didn't come at all
close to amusing me. Three or four times while I was going through their
envelopes, I was tempted to get up and make a formal protest to M. Yoshoto. But
I had no clear idea just what sort of form my protest might take. I think I was
afraid I might get over to his desk only to report, shrilly: "My mother's
dead, and I have to live with her charming husband, and nobody in New York
speaks French, and there aren't any chairs in your son's room. How do you
expect me to teach these two crazy people how to draw?" In the end, being
long self-trained in taking despair sitting down, I managed very easily to keep
my seat. I opened my third student's envelope.
My third student was a nun of the order of Sisters
of St. Joseph, named Sister Irma, who taught "cooking and drawing" at
a convent elementary school just outside Toronto. And I haven't any good ideas
concerning where to start to describe the contents of her envelope. I might
just first mention that, in place of a photograph of herself, Sister Irma had
enclosed, without explanation, a snapshot of her convent. It occurs to me, too,
that she left blank the line in her questionnaire where the student's age was
to be filled in. Otherwise, her questionnaire was filled out as perhaps no
questionnaire in this world deserves to be filled out. She had been born and
raised in Detroit, Michigan, where her father had been a "checker for Ford
automobiles." Her academic education consisted of one year of high school.
She had had no formal instruction in drawing. She said the only reason she was
teaching it was that Sister somebody had passed on and Father Zimmermann (a name
that particularly caught my eye, because it was the name of the dentist who had
pulled out eight of my teeth)-Father Zimmermann had picked her to fill in. She
said she had "34 kittys in my cooking class and 18 kittys in my drawing
class." Her hobbies were loving her Lord and the Word of her Lord and
"collecting leaves but only when they are laying right on the
ground." Her favorite painter was Douglas Bunting. (A name, I don't mind
saying, I've tracked down to many a blind alley, over the years.) She said her
kittys always liked to "draw people when they are running and that is the
one thing I am terrible at." She said she would work very hard to learn to
draw better, and hoped we would not be very impatient with her.
There were, in all, only six samples of her work
enclosed in the envelope. (All of her work was unsigned--a minor enough fact,
but at the time, a disproportionately refreshing one. Bambi Kramer's and
Ridgefield's pictures had all been either signed or--and it somehow seemed even
more irritating--initialled.) After thirteen years, I not only distinctly
remember all six of Sister Irma's samples, but four of them I sometimes think I
remember a trifle too distinctly for my own peace of mind. Her best picture was
done in water colors, on brown paper. (Brown paper, especially wrapping paper,
is very pleasant, very cosy to paint on. Many an experienced artist has used it
when he wasn't up to anything grand or grandiose.) The picture, despite its
confining size (it was about ten by twelve inches), was a highly detailed
depiction of Christ being carried to the sepulchre in Joseph of Arimathea's
garden. In the far right foreground, two men who seemed to be Joseph's servants
were rather awkwardly doing the carrying. Joseph of Arimathea followed directly
behind them--bearing himself, under the circumstances, perhaps a trifle too
erectly. At a respectably subordinate distance behind Joseph came the women of
Galilee, mixed in with a motley, perhaps gate-crashing crowd of mourners,
spectators, children, and no less than three frisky, impious mongrels. For me,
the major figure in the picture was a woman in the left foreground, facing the
viewer. With her right hand raised overhead, she was frantically signalling to
someone--her child, perhaps, or her husband, or possibly the viewer--to drop
everything and hurry over. Two of the women, in the front rank of the crowd,
wore halos. Without a Bible handy, I could only make a rough guess at their
identity. But I immediately spotted Mary Magdalene. At any rate, I was positive
I had spotted her. She was in the middle foreground, walking apparently
self-detached from the crowd, her arms down at her sides. She wore no part of
her grief, so to speak, on her sleeve--in fact, there were no outward signs at
all of her late, enviable connections with the Deceased. Her face, like all the
other faces in the picture, had been done in a cheap-priced, ready-made
flesh-tint. It was painfully clear that Sister Irma herself had found the color
unsatisfactory and had tried her unadvised, noble best to tone it down somehow.
There were no other serious flaws in the picture. None, that is, worthy of
anything but cavilling mention. It was, in any conclusive sense, an artist's
picture, steeped in high, high, organized talent and God knows how many hours
of hard work.
One of my first reactions, of course, was to run
with Sister Irma's envelope over to M. Yoshoto. But, once again, I kept my
seat. I didn't care to risk having Sister Irma taken away from me. At length, I
just closed her envelope with care and placed it to one side of my desk, with
the exciting plan to work on it that night, in my own time. Then, with far more
tolerance than I'd thought I had in me, almost with good will, I spent the rest
of the afternoon doing overlay corrections on some male and female nudes (sans
sex organs) that R. Howard Ridgefield had genteely and obscenely drawn.
Toward dinner time, I opened three buttons of my
shirt and stashed away Sister Irma's envelope where neither thieves, nor, just
to play safe, the Yoshotos, could break in.
A tacit but iron-bound procedure covered all
evening meals at Les Amis Des Vieux MaRres. Mme. Yoshoto got up from her desk
promptly at five-thirty and went upstairs to prepare dinner, and Mr. Yoshoto
and I followed--fell into single file, as it were--at six sharp. There were no
side trips, however essential or hygienic. That evening, however, with Sister
Irma's envelope warm against my chest, I had never felt more relaxed. In fact,
all through dinner, I couldn't have been more outgoing. I gave away a lulu of a
Picasso story that had just reached me, one that I might have put aside for a
rainy day. M. Yoshoto scarcely lowered his Japanese newspaper to listen to it,
but Mme. Yoshoto seemed responsive, or, at least, not unresponsive. In any
case, when I was finished with it, she spoke to me for the first time since she
had asked me that morning if I would like an egg. She asked me if I were sure I
wouldn't like a chair in my room. I said quickly, "Non, non-merci,
madame." I said that the way the floor cushions were set right up against
the wall, it gave me a good chance to practice keeping my back straight. I
stood up to show her how sway-backed I was.
After dinner, while the Yoshotos were discussing,
in Japanese, some perhaps provocative topic, I asked to be excused from the
table. M. Yoshoto looked at me as if he weren't quite sure how I'd got into his
kitchen in the first place, but nodded, and I walked quickly down the hall to
my room. When I had turned on the overhead light and closed the door behind me,
I took my drawing pencils out of my pocket, then took off my jacket, unbuttoned
my shirt, and sat down on a floor cushion with Sister Irma's envelope in my
hands. Till past four in the morning, with everything I needed spread out
before me on the floor, I attended to what I thought were Sister Irma's
immediate, artistic wants.
The first thing I did was to make some ten or
twelve pencil sketches. Rather than go downstairs to the instructors' room for
drawing paper, I drew the sketches on my personal notepaper, using both sides
of the sheet. When that was done, I wrote a long, almost an endless, letter.
I've been as saving as an exceptionally neurotic
magpie all my life, and I still have the next-to-the-last draft of the letter I
wrote to Sister Irma that June night in 1939. I could reproduce all of it here
verbatim, but it isn't necessary. I used the bulk of the letter, and I mean
bulk, to suggest where and how, in her major picture, she'd run into a little
trouble, especially with her colors. I listed a few artist's supplies that I
thought she couldn't do without, and included approximate costs. I asked her
who Douglas Bunting was. I asked where I could see some of his work. I asked
her (and I knew what a long shot it was) if she had ever seen any reproductions
of paintings by Antonello da Messina. I asked her to please tell me how old she
was, and assured her, at great length, that the information, if given, wouldn't
go beyond myself. I said the only reason that I was asking was that the information
would help me to instruct her more efficiently. Virtually in the same breath, I
asked if she were allowed to have visitors at her convent.
The last few lines (or cubic feet) of my letter
should, I think, be reproduced here--syntax, punctuation, and all.
. . . Incidentally, if you have a command of the
French language, I hope you will let me know as I am able to express myself
very precisely in that language, having spent the greater part of my youth
chiefly in Paris, France.
Since you are quite obviously concerned about
drawing running figures, in order to convey the technique to your pupils at the
Convent, I am enclosing a few sketches I have drawn myself that may be of use.
You will see that I have drawn them rather rapidly and they are by no means
perfect or even quite commendable, but I believe they will show you the
rudiments about which you have expressed interest. Unfortunately the director
of the school does not have any system in the method of teaching here, I am
very much afraid. I am delighted that you are already so well advanced, but I
have no idea what he expects me to do with my other students who are very
retarded and chiefly stupid, in my opinion.
Unfortunately, I am an agnostic; however, I am
quite an admirer of St. Francis of Assisi from a distance, it goes without
saying. I wonder if perhaps you are thoroughly acquainted with what he (St.
Francis of Assisi) said when they were about to cauterise one of his eyeballs
with a red-hot, burning iron? He said as follows: "Brother Fire, God made
you beautiful and strong and useful; I pray you be courteous to me." You
paint slightly the way he spoke, in many pleasant ways, in my opinion.
Incidentally, may I ask if the young lady in the foreground in the blue outfit
is Mary Magdalene? I mean in the picture we have been discussing, of course. If
she is not, I have been sadly deluding myself. However, this is no novelty.
I hope you will consider me entirely at your
disposal as long as you are a student at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres. Frankly, I
think you are greatly talented and would not even be slightly startled if you
developed into a genius before many years have gone by. I would not falsely
encourage you in this matter. That is one reason why I asked you if the young
lady in the foreground in the blue outfit was Mary Magdalene, because if it
was, you were using your incipient genius somewhat more than your religious
inclinations, I am afraid. However, this is nothing to fear, in my opinion.
With sincere hope that you are enjoying completely
perfect health, I am,
Very respectfully yours,
(signed)
JEAN DE DAUMIER-SMITH Staff
Instructor
Les Amis Des Vieux Maltres
P.S. I have nearly forgotten that students are
supposed to submit envelopes every second Monday to the school. For your first
assignment will you kindly make some outdoor sketches for me? Do them very
freely and do not strain. I am unaware, of course, how much time they give you
for your personal drawing at your Convent and hope you will advise me. Also I
beg you to buy those necessary supplies I took the liberty of advocating, as I
would like you to begin using oils as soon as possible. If you will pardon my
saying so, I believe you are too passionate to paint just in watercolors and
never in oils indefinitely. I say that quite impersonally and do not mean to be
obnoxious; actually, it is intended as a compliment. Also please send me all of
your old former work that you have on hand, as I am eager to see it. The days
will be insufferable for me till your next envelope arrives, it goes without
saying.
If it is not overstepping myself, I would greatly
appreciate your telling me if you find being a nun very satisfactory, in a
spiritual way, of course. Frankly, I have been studying various religions as a
hobby ever since I read volumes 36, 44, 45 of the Harvard Classics, which you
may be acquainted with. I am especially delighted with Martin Luther, who was a
Protestant, of course. Please do not be offended by this. I advocate no
doctrine; it is not my nature to do so. As a last thought, please do not forget
to advise me as to your visiting hours, as my weekends are free as far as I
know and I may happen to be in your environs some Saturday by chance. Also
please do not forget to inform me if you have a reasonable command of the
French language, as for all intents and purposes I am comparatively speechless
in English owing to my varied and largely insensible upbringing.
I mailed my letter and drawings to Sister Irma
around three-thirty in the morning, going out to the street to do it. Then,
literally overjoyed, I undressed myself with thick fingers and fell into bed.
Just before I fell asleep, the moaning sound again
came through the wall from the Yoshotos' bedroom. I pictured both Yoshotos
coming to me in the morning and asking me, begging me, to hear their secret
problem out, to the last, terrible detail. I saw exactly how it would be. I
would sit down between them at the kitchen table and listen to each of them. I
would listen, listen, listen, with my head in my hands--till finally, unable to
stand it any longer, I would reach down into Mme. Yoshoto's throat, take up her
heart in my hand and warm it as I would a bird. Then, when all was put right, I
would show Sister Irma's work to the Yoshotos, and they would share my joy.
The fact is always obvious much too late, but the
most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid
and joy a liquid. Mine started to seep through its container as early as the
next morning, when M. Yoshoto dropped by at my desk with the envelopes of two
new students. I was working on Bambi Kramer's drawings at the time, and quite
spleenlessly, knowing as I did that my letter to Sister Irma was safely in the
mail. But I was no where even nearly prepared to face the freakish fact that
there were two people in the world who had less talent for drawing than either
Bambi or R. Howard Ridgefield. Feeling virtue go out of me, I lit a cigarette
in the instructors' room for the first time since I'd joined the staff. It
seemed to help, and I turned back to Bambi's work. But before I'd taken more
than three or four drags, I felt, without actually glancing up and over, that
M. Yoshoto was looking at me. Then, for confirmation, I heard his chair being
pushed back. As usual, I got up to meet him when he came over. He explained to
me, in a bloody irritating whisper, that he personally had no objection to
smoking, but that, alas, the school's policy was against smoking in the
instructors' room. He cut short my profuse apologies with a magnanimous wave of
his hand, and went back over to his and Mme. Yoshoto's side of the room. I
wondered, in a real panic, how I would manage to get sanely through the next
thirteen days to the Monday when Sister Irma's next envelope was due.
That was Tuesday morning. I spent the rest of the working
day and all the working portions of the next two days keeping myself feverishly
busy. I took all of Bambi Kramer's and R. Howard Ridgefield's drawings apart,
as it were, and put them together with brand-new parts. I designed for both of
them literally dozens of insulting, subnormal, but quite constructive, drawing
exercises. I wrote long letters to them. I almost begged R. Howard Ridgefield
to give up his satire for a while. I asked Bambi, with maximum delicacy, to
please hold off, temporarily, submitting any more drawings with titles kindred
to "Forgive Them Their Trespasses." Then, Thursday mid-afternoon,
feeling good and jumpy, I started in on one of the two new students, an
American from Bangor, Maine, who said in his questionnaire, with wordy, Honest-John
integrity, that he was his own favorite artist. He referred to himself as a
realist-abstractionist. As for my after-school hours, Tuesday evening I took a
bus into Montreal proper and sat through a Cartoon Festival Week program at a
third-rate movie house--which largely entailed being a witness to a succession
of cats being bombarded with champagne corks by mice gangs. Wednesday evening,
I gathered up the floor cushions in my room, piled them three high, and tried
to sketch from memory Sister Irma's picture of Christ's burial.
I'm tempted to say that Thursday evening was
peculiar, or perhaps macabre, but the fact is, I have no bill-filling
adjectives for Thursday evening. I left Les Amis after dinner and went I don't
know where--perhaps to a movie, perhaps for just a long walk; I can't remember,
and, for once, my diary for 1939 lets me down, too, for the page I need is a
total blank.
I know, though, why the page is a blank. As I was
returning from wherever I'd spent the evening--and I do remember that it was
after dark--I stopped on the sidewalk outside the school and looked into the
lighted display window of the orthopedic appliances shop. Then something
altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how
coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day learn to live my life, I would
always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a
sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss. The
thought, certainly, couldn't have been endurable for more than a few seconds. I
remember fleeing upstairs to my room and getting undressed and into bed without
so much as opening my diary, much less making an entry.
I lay awake for hours, shivering. I listened to the
moaning in the next room and I thought, forcibly, of my star pupil. I tried to
visualize the day I would visit her at her convent. I saw her coming to meet
me--near a high, wire fence--a shy, beautiful girl of eighteen who had not yet
taken her final vows and was still free to go out into the world with the Peter
Abelard-type man of her choice. I saw us walking slowly, silently, toward a
far, verdant part of the convent grounds, where suddenly, and without sin, I
would put my arm around her waist. The image was too ecstatic to hold in place,
and, finally, I let go, and fell asleep.
I spent all of Friday morning and most of the
afternoon at hard labor trying, with the use of overlay tissue, to make
recognizable trees out of a forest of phallic symbols the man from Bangor,
Maine, had consciously drawn on expensive linen paper. Mentally, spiritually,
and physically, I was feeling pretty torpid along toward four-thirty in the
afternoon, and I only half stood up when M. Yoshoto came over to my desk for an
instant. He handed something to me--handed it to me as impersonally as the
average waiter distributes menus. It was a letter from the Mother Superior of
Sister Irma's convent, informing M. Yoshoto that Father Zimmermann, through
circumstances outside his control, was forced to alter his decision to allow
Sister Irma to study at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres. The writer said she deeply
regretted any inconveniences or confusions this change of plans might cause the
school. She sincerely hoped that the first tuition payment of fourteen dollars might
be refunded to the diocese.
The mouse, I've been sure for years, limps home
from the site of the burning ferris wheel with a brand-new, airtight plan for
killing the cat. After I'd read and reread and then, for great, long minutes,
stared at the Mother Superior's letter, I suddenly broke away from it and wrote
letters to my four remaining students, advising them to give up the idea of
becoming artists. I told them, individually, that they had absolutely no talent
worth developing and that they were simply wasting their own valuable time as
well as the school's. I wrote all four letters in French. When I was finished,
I immediately went out and mailed them. The satisfaction was short-lived, but
very, very good while it lasted.
When it came time to join the parade to the kitchen
for dinner, I asked to be excused. I said I wasn't feeling well. (I lied, in
1939, with far greater conviction than I told the truth--so I was positive that
M. Yoshoto looked at me with suspicion when I said I wasn't feeling well.) Then
I went up to my room and sat down on a cushion. I sat there for surely an hour,
staring at a daylit hole in the window blind, without smoking or taking off my
coat or loosening my necktie. Then, abruptly, I got up and brought over a
quantity of my personal notepaper and wrote a second letter to Sister Irma,
using the floor as a desk.
I never mailed the letter. The following
reproduction is copied straight from the original.
Montreal, Canada June 28, 1939
DEAR SISTER IRMA,
Did I, by chance, say anything obnoxious or
irreverent to you in my last letter that reached the attention of Father
Zimmermann and caused you discomfort in some way? If this is the case, I beg
you to give me at least a reasonable chance to retract whatever it was I may
have unwittingly said in my ardor to become friends with you as well as student
and teacher. Is this asking too much? I do not believe it is.
The bare truth is as follows: If you do not learn a
few more rudiments of the profession, you will only be a very, very interesting
artist the rest of your life instead of a great one. This is terrible, in my
opinion. Do you realize how grave the situation is?
It is possible that Father Zimmermann made you
resign from the school because he thought it might interfere with your being a
competent nun. If this is the case, I cannot avoid saying that I think it was
very rash of him in more ways than one. It would not interfere with your being
a nun. I live like an evil-minded monk myself. The worst that being an artist
could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.
However, this is not a tragic situation, in my opinion. The happiest day of my
life was many years ago when I was seventeen. I was on my way for lunch to meet
my mother, who was going out on the street for the first time after a long
illness, and I was feeling ecstatically happy when suddenly, as I was coming in
to the Avenue Victor Hugo, which is a street in Paris, I bumped into a chap
without any nose. I ask you to please consider that factor, in fact I beg you.
It is quite pregnant with meaning.
It is also possible that Father Zimmermann caused
you to stop matriculating for the reason perhaps that your convent lacks funds
to pay the tuition. I frankly hope this is the case, not only because it relieves
my mind, but in a practical sense. If this is indeed the case, you have only to
say the word and I will offer my services gratis for an indefinite period of
time. Can we discuss this matter further? May I ask again when your visiting
days at the convent are? May I be free to plan to visit you at the convent next
Saturday afternoon, July 6, between 3 and 5 o'clock in the afternoon, dependent
upon the schedule of trains between Montreal and Toronto? I await your reply
with great anxiety.
With respect and admiration,
Sincerely yours,
(signed)
JEAN DE DAUMIER-SMITH
Staff Instructor
Les Amis Des Vieux Maltres
P.S. In my last letter I
casually asked if the young lady in the blue outfit in the foreground of your
religious picture was Mary Magdalene, the sinner. If you have not as yet
replied to my letter, please go on refraining. It is possible that I was
mistaken and I do not willfully invite any disillusions at this point in my
life. I am willing to stay in the dark.
Even today, as late as now, I have a tendency to
wince when I remember that I brought a dinner suit up to Les Amis with me. But
bring one I did, and after I'd finished my letter to Sister Irma, I put it on.
The whole affair seemed to call out for my getting drunk, and since I had never
in my life been drunk (for fear that excessive drinking would shake the hand
that painted the pictures that copped the three first prizes, etc.), I felt
compelled to dress for the tragic occasion.
While the Yoshotos were still in the kitchen, I
slipped downstairs and telephoned the Windsor Hotel--which Bobby's friend, Mrs.
X, had recommended to me before I'd left New York. I reserved a table for one,
for eight o'clock.
Around seven-thirty, dressed and slicked up, I
stuck my head outside my door to see if either of the Yoshotos were on the
prowl. I didn't want them to see me in my dinner jacket, for some reason. They
weren't in sight, and I hurried down to the street and began to look for a cab.
My letter to Sister Irma was in the inside pocket of my jacket. I intended to
read it over at dinner, preferably by candlelight.
I walked block after block without so much as
seeing a cab at all, let alone an empty one. It was rough going. The Verdun
section of Montreal was in no sense a dressy neighborhood, and I was convinced
that every passer-by was giving me a second, basically censorious look. When,
finally, I came to the lunch bar where I'd bolted the "Coney Island
Red-Hots" on Monday, I decided to let my reservation at the Hotel Windsor
go by the board. I went into the lunch bar, sat down in an end booth, and kept
my left hand over my black tie while I ordered soup, rolls and black coffee. I
hoped that the other patrons would think I was a waiter on his way to work.
While I was on my second cup of coffee, I took out
my unmailed letter to Sister Irma and reread it. The substance of it seemed to
me a trifle thin, and I decided to hurry back to Les Amis and touch it up a
bit. I also thought over my plans to visit Sister Irma, and wondered if it
might not be a good idea to pick up my train reservations later that same
evening. With those two thoughts in mind--neither of which really gave me the
sort of lift I needed--I left the lunch bar and walked rapidly back to school.
Something extremely out of the way happened to me
some fifteen minutes later. A statement, I'm aware, that has all the unpleasant
earmarks of a build-up, but quite the contrary is true. I'm about to touch on
an extraordinary experience, one that still strikes me as having been quite
transcendent, and I'd like, if possible, to avoid seeming to pass it off as a
case, or even a borderline case, of genuine mysticism. (To do otherwise, I
feel, would be tantamount to implying or stating that the difference in
spiritual sorties between St. Francis and the average, highstrung, Sunday
leper-kisser is only a vertical one.)
In the nine o'clock twilight, as I approached the
school building from across the street, there was a light on in the orthopedic
appliances shop. I was startled to see a live person in the shopcase, a hefty
girl of about thirty, in a green, yellow and lavender chiffon dress. She was
changing the truss on the wooden dummy. As I came up to the show window, she
had evidently just taken off the old truss; it was under her left arm (her
right "profile" was toward me), and she was lacing up the new one on
the dummy. I stood watching her, fascinated, till suddenly she sensed, then
saw, that she was being watched. I quickly smiled--to show her that this was a
nonhostile figure in the tuxedo in the twilight on the other side of the
glass--but it did no good. The girl's confusion was out of all normal
proportion. She blushed, she dropped the removed truss, she stepped back on a
stack of irrigation basins--and her feet went out from under her. I reached out
to her instantly, hitting the tips of my fingers on the glass. She landed
heavily on her bottom, like a skater. She immediately got to her feet without
looking at me. Her face still flushed, she pushed her hair back with one hand,
and resumed lacing up the truss on the dummy. It was just then that I had my
Experience. Suddenly (and I say this, I believe, with all due
self-consciousness), the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of my nose at
the rate of ninety-three million miles a second. Blinded and very frightened--I
had to put my hand on the glass to keep my balance. The thing lasted for no
more than a few seconds. When I got my sight back, the girl had gone from the
window, leaving behind her a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed,
enamel flowers.
I backed away from the window and walked around the
block twice, till my knees stopped buckling. Then, without daring to venture
another look into the shop window, I went upstairs to my room and lay down on
my bed. Some minutes, or hours later, I made, in French, the following brief
entry in my diary: "I am giving Sister Irma her freedom to follow her own
destiny. Everybody is a nun." (Tout le monde est une nonne. )
Before going to bed for the night, I wrote letters
to my four just-expelled students, reinstating them. I said a mistake had been
made in the administration department. Actually, the letters seemed to write
themselves. It may have had something to do with the fact that, before sitting
down to write, I'd brought a chair up from downstairs.
It seems altogether anticlimactic to mention it,
but Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres closed down less than a week later, for being
improperly licensed (for not being licensed at all, as a matter of fact). I
packed up and joined Bobby, my stepfather, in Rhode Island, where I spent the
next six or eight weeks, till art school reopened, investigating that most
interesting of all summer-active animals, the American Girl in Shorts.
Right or wrong, I never again got in touch with
Sister Irma.
Occasionally, I still hear from Bambi Kramer,
though. The last I heard, she'd branched over into designing her own Christmas
cards. They'll be something to see, if she hasn't lost her touch.
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