The Art of Keeping Cool Read online

  “Poor struggling artist!” Grandpa just about came out of his suspenders. “He’s the first poor struggling artist I ever saw with a pair of fancy two-hundred dollar German binoculars in a brand new leather case.”

  “Who says he has something like that?” Grandma asked.

  “I say it!” Grandpa thundered. “I saw them with my own eyes when he came to see me.”

  “He came to see you?” Grandma said in surprise.

  “He did, for an injury, and I’m not going to say any more about it,” he barked out, as if he was afraid someone might accuse him of aiding the enemy.

  Uncle Jake came in then and the conversation swung around to the rubber shortage. He’d been up the lane helping old Mrs. Taylor change a flat on her Buick. It was the same tire that had gone two weeks ago, and a couple of weeks before that. She’d have to get it patched up again, too, because no way would she find a brand new tire these days, even if she could afford one.

  “Guess you’ll be up there again in another two weeks,” Grandma said to Jake.

  “Guess I will,” he said, sitting down heavily.

  We laughed, but my mind had gone back to the discussion about Abel Hoffman before. That was an interesting point Grandpa made about Abel’s expensive binoculars. It kind of raised my suspicions about the man again. I wished I could tell Elliot about seeing Abel in the field to find out what he thought. But I couldn’t, and besides, Elliot was upstairs having a bowl of soup in bed, not talking to anybody.

  • • •

  Without Elliot, I’d started playing baseball in the afternoons when my jobs around the house were done. A bunch of us were out hitting flies in the field beside the school when Abel came in to town for groceries and supplies one day about a week after he was arrested. He was taking dirty looks from almost everyone he passed. People were crossing the street to keep away from him. When Larry Bean from the filling station saw him heading for the post office, he yelled:

  “Hey, it’s the Nazi. Picking up your instructions, Nazi?”

  We saw Abel look around and walk away fast. Then somebody, not one of us, threw a Coke bottle and it smashed to pieces on the street in front of him. He jumped like a spooked cat and ran up the steps to the post office, slamming the door after him. We all laughed. He looked so ridiculous.

  While he was inside, Jerry Antler and Willie Vogel began to joke around about the way Abel talked. Willie was the kid whose dad had been killed in action, and he’d been getting kind of loud and sassy lately. He and Jerry had a little routine they’d worked up together after they’d overheard Abel in the post office one time. Abel was in there almost every week to pick up packages. He ordered painting supplies from somewhere and had them shipped to him. A whole stream of stuff was always coming in from Boston or New York. No one could figure out where he got the money to buy it.

  “Have-ensee post most wery please?” Willie would ask.

  “What, not post?” Jerry would say. “Where what not post?”

  Willie: “How where not post what?”

  Jerry: “What not post commen where tomorrow, wery please?”

  This would go on for a while, until everyone was practically on the ground laughing, which was how Abel found us when he came out that afternoon. He looked over and stared for a long second, then started away toward the grocery store.

  I was laughing as hard as anyone, but when Abel stopped and stared that way, I quit and turned my back on him fast.

  “What’s that matter with you? You look like you saw a ghost,” Jerry told me.

  I didn’t say anything, but five minutes later I got out of there and went home. I thought Abel had seen me, had picked me out specially from everyone else there and given me a look. It made me wonder if the FBI agents had told him who talked, and I didn’t want to be around when he came back down the road with his groceries.

  Grandpa must have heard from one of his patients about the bottle-throwing incident because that night, he sounded off at the supper table.

  “The fellow’s a magnet for trouble. Arrest him on some charge, any charge, and get him out of here, that’s what I say. By the time the FBI digs up enough evidence to prove anything, he’ll have done whatever damage he’s capable of, or it’ll have been done to him.”

  “Now, Harvey,” Grandma said. “There’s nothing to prove the poor man’s doing anything wrong.” She was still siding with her friend Agnes.

  “He’s doing wrong just by living here!” Grandpa said. “It’s bad enough that he’s one of those crackpot artists. Freeloaders, every one of them, Communists and kooks.”

  Across the table, I saw Elliot begin to chew on his hand. He was downstairs eating with us again, though he still didn’t look well.

  “On top of that, what’s he think?” Grandpa went on. “That people around here aren’t going to suspect a Kraut? We’re at war with them, for pity’s sake. Why is he here, on this coast, right next to our military installations? That’s what I want to know. If he’s what he says he is, why isn’t he painting his rubbish in Kansas . . . or Ohio,” Grandpa turned to look accusingly at me, “where he doesn’t pose a risk? Anyone would think he was up to something. Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t, but the man’s asking for trouble. He’s going to get it, too.”

  The dark, twisted look that came over Elliot’s face while he listened to this made me feel sick myself. I couldn’t stand to see him hurt, even when I thought he was wrong. I saw how he hated Grandpa for the things he said, and at the same time, how he wouldn’t allow himself to fight back, no matter what. I’d never known anyone like that and it really stumped me. If I could have stood up for Elliot, I would have. That night I almost did anyway. But Grandpa was right about Abel being a magnet for trouble. He was right about Abel asking for it by staying around.

  After supper, I went up to Elliot’s room, which I hadn’t done for a while. He took this as a kind peace sign and showed me a wild turkey egg he’d found. Wild turkey eggs were rare around Sachem’s Head, as rare as wild turkeys themselves, so this was a real find.

  “What are you going to do with your egg collection when you’ve found every egg there is? Sell it for a million dollars?” I asked him, kind of half-kidding.

  “Well, first of all I’ll never find every egg,” he said.

  “But what if you did?”

  “I’d never sell it,” Elliot said. “I’d never give it away to a museum or anything either. I’d just keep it and have it to go over whenever I wanted. Every single egg that’s here, I know where I found it and how and when, so it’s special. If I gave them away, no one would know anything about them. They’d just be this mass of old birds’ eggs that people came to see because they were all together in one place. What good would that do?”

  I don’t know why, but I loved that answer. I looked at Elliot and just shook my head. It seemed to me that no one else in the world or in the history of the world would have thought that way about a dumb egg collection. Elliot was the only one.

  A few minutes later, though, he brought the conversation around to a place I wished he wouldn’t.

  “I was at Abel’s today,” he said. “He’s afraid to go into town, now.”

  “Well, he should be afraid,” I couldn’t help saying.

  “He doesn’t dare go anywhere to paint, not even the beaches that are open,” Elliot said. “He stays in the woods.”

  “Sounds like a smart idea. You know, if I were him, I might start thinking of other places to live.”

  Elliot shook his head. “He can’t leave now. You should see what he’s doing. Big oils, six feet across, that make it look like the sea is going to rise up and break through the surface.”

  “Hm-mm.”

  “He says they’re going to make his name over here. Listen, Robert, you should come look. Abel’s been really good lately. No drinking, just work. He’s a really nice man underneath. If people knew him, they’d get to love him. That’s why all of this is so stupid.”

  “He should start lear
ning better English.”

  “He is!” Eliott said. “I’m helping him. And he’s helping me a little with . . . with my stuff, you know. He thinks I’m coming along okay.”

  “When he bothers to pay attention to you.”

  “He does! Not every minute, but I wouldn’t expect that.”

  “Once a month?” I asked meanly.

  Elliot glanced at me angrily.

  “I’ll show you,” he said. “This is what I’m doing now.”

  He drew out a pile of paintings from under his bed and brought them over to his table. They were all done with oil paint and he was very proud of them. While I looked through them, I could hear him almost holding his breath with excitement.

  I’d always been in awe of Elliot’s talent but these new things were terrible. They were supposedly country scenes, but the trees in them didn’t look like trees, more like crazed jellyfish. There was a brook that was just a purple line, when he used to be able to draw every bubble and stone. He’d painted a picture of Abel in front of his boat. You couldn’t tell that from looking at it though. I had to ask what it was.

  “I’m painting appearances,” Elliot said. “Not objects so much as the way they appear in different lights, at different times of day.”

  “The sky in this painting is yellow. Abel is a pink lump.”

  “Right. The sun is in my eye.”

  “But how is a person supposed to know that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Why do you have to know exactly what everything is? Maybe it’s better not to know.”

  “How is it better?”

  “It makes you see things differently, not just the same old way you think they should look.”

  I couldn’t understand this at all, which made him mad. Then I got angry and told him he was wasting his talent. The next minute, he ordered me out of his room, and we were back to being sore at each other.

  • • •

  Nothing that had happened to Abel made any difference to Elliot. He kept on going to the woods to paint. Most afternoons he was there. On Sundays, when Grandma gave us the day off from chores, he went over in the morning and stayed until supper. He was secretive about it, I’ll say that for him. I don’t think people in town had any more idea than his own family what he was doing. He might even have got away with it if he’d kept up that way. But he didn’t. He made a mistake. He started running errands for Abel.

  The Coke bottle had put Abel into a permanent state of fright. Afterwards, he never wanted to go into town again, and with Elliot there, he didn’t have to. At first Elliot was just buying a few groceries for him. For all anyone knew, they were for his own mother or his grandmother. Later, Abel began to send him for his mail and the packages of supplies he needed to keep painting. The post office staff took note of this and word went around, very quietly, that Elliot Marks was doing jobs for the German in the woods. I heard it from the kids I played ball with, and talked it down the best I could. You can set a rumor against a rumor and have it work for a while.

  Sachems Head being a small village, no one spoke to Aunt Nan or Grandma about Elliot. I guess people felt it would have seemed impolite, as if Aunt Nan and Grandma didn’t know their own business. Nobody told Grandpa, either, or even Uncle Jake. Elliot went on doing Abel’s errands, and people went on watching him, and nothing seemed to come of it. All during the second half of July this continued, until even I stopped worrying and began to think everything would work out all right.

  Partly, it was the weather. The days had turned hot and clear. The smell of ripe field grass drifted in the air. Practice air-raid sirens still went off, searchlights patrolled the sky at night, in Europe and the Pacific the fighting went on but, for a little while, the war let go its grip on our lives.

  Carolyn went to the beach every day with a family up the road. My mother and Aunt Nan took some time off from work. Grandpa and Grandma rolled up their sleeves and gardened side-by-side in the long evenings, “happy as two old peas,” Grandma said.

  “This is what carries us over the rough spots,” I heard her telling Aunt Nan. “Thank heaven for summer in Sachem’s Head.”

  I was in good spirits, too, and played a lot of baseball. Even Elliot was happy; happier than I’d ever seen him and maybe than he’d ever been. He went around the house in the same shadowy way he always had, avoiding Grandpa when he could, but he spent less time in his room, and his hand-chewing disappeared. His skin tanned until it looked almost healthy. When we worked together for Grandma, we could joke around as long as we stayed off the subject of Abel Hoffman.

  It wasn’t easy to tiptoe around Abel, though, not for either of us. I could see Elliot wanted to talk about what he was learning. He’d come home practically bursting sometimes, and half of me would want to ask about it, but the other half was against Abel, and afraid of him, and didn’t want to know anything good about him. Everybody in town was waiting for the German to make a false move. I was waiting, too, though Elliot didn’t know it. I told myself it was my duty to keep an eye out. My country might depend on it. But I was scared all the time. I worried what would happen to Elliot if Abel was caught spying again. I worried what would happen if I was the one who caught him.

  Luckily, Abel was deep in his woods, far out of sight. Three weeks went by and nobody heard anything about him. You could almost begin to believe he wasn’t there anymore, except that Elliot went to the woods and came back, went and came back. He had his own knapsack, now. Grandma and Aunt Nan thought it was for his birds’ egg collection. I knew better.

  One morning while we were working our stint in the vegetable garden, weeding out the carrots and string beans and, this being August, tying up the tomatoes that were just beginning to ripen, Elliot asked me to come to Abel’s with him. He asked me for that afternoon, said Abel had a lot of new stuff to see. I shouldn’t miss it.

  I looked over at him and didn’t know what to say. All sorts of suspicions went through my head about why he was asking me, and even what Abel might be up to.

  “Does Abel know you’re inviting me?” I asked finally.

  “He says it’s fine. You can come any time. He remembers that you liked his painting.”

  I laughed. We both knew that was a lie.

  “Has Abel said anything about me lately?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s been too busy to think about people. Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “So you’ll come?”

  “Are you sure you really want me to?”

  “If you don’t, you’ll be missing out,” Elliot said. “I think you’ll like what he’s doing now.”

  I saw that this was really about art, nothing else, and I said I would go. It gave me a good feeling to know that Elliot would trust me to come see Abel’s paintings again. Maybe, with all the work he’d been doing, Abel had forgotten who I was. Or maybe he never had recognized me, and the strange stare he’d given me at the post office hadn’t meant anything. I didn’t really believe that, but I decided to go anyway. I wanted to have another look at Abel Hoffman.

  We went over after lunch. Some pilots from the Quonset Air Station were practicing dropping fire bombs in the bay and there was a terrific racket going on the whole time we were walking. Their planes were navy dive bombers with dipped wings and we watched them go up high in formation, then sweep down and come in low, one by one, over the water.

  We could see the bombs drop out of their bellies, but we weren’t close enough to the bay to see the explosions when the bombs hit the water. We could hear them, though, big tearing roars that made you think of what they could be blowing up instead of just sea water.

  “How’s your father doing?” Elliot asked.

  “He’s okay. A lot of American flyers are over there now with him. They want to do daytime bombing runs so they can target better, but the Brits don’t like getting shot up. They only want to fly at night.”

  “I hope he’ll be all right,” Elliot said. “Then when he comes back, maybe he’ll com
e here.”

  “Don’t count on it,” I said. “My mother didn’t even want to tell him we were here. She only wrote him the truth about a month ago.”

  “Why?”

  “She thought he wouldn’t like it. He didn’t either. We just heard from him. He wants us to go back to the farm as soon as we can.”

  Elliot nodded, as if he understood. “I’ve never met your dad,” he said. “I wish he’d come here just for a little while so I could meet him. He has a bad leg, doesn’t he?”

  “Always has,” I said. “From a flying accident way back when he was doing mail runs.”

  “Is that what he says did it?”

  “Well, yes. Was there something else you heard?”

  Elliot shook his head and wouldn’t say any more. I knew not to hound him. I was curious, though, why he’d said that, and put it into the back of my mind, along with the other scraps of clues I’d picked up about my father in Sachem’s Head.

  A few minutes later, we came up on Abel Hoffman’s boat-studio in the field. He was standing in front of an easel, painting away, and paintings were lying all around him on the grass. Others were stacked against the side of the boat, or set up against trees or bushes. Since I’d last been there, Abel had built himself another, much bigger, shed off to the side of the first one. Inside it, I saw a lot more paintings leaning up against each other.

  “Look at all this stuff. He’s been really working!”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Elliot said in a low voice as we crossed the field. “He hates to stop. As soon as he finishes one he goes right on to the next, as if he’s afraid it won’t get done otherwise. But he’s happy. He’s happy most of the time.”

  Something I’d noticed about Abel when I was there before was how much energy he put into his painting. He wasn’t the kind of painter that stands quietly in one spot dabbing here and there. Whatever he was working on, he was all over the place, running around it, standing back from it, rushing in for some big swipes with the brush then moving away again.

  Abel probably used up as much energy painting as most people do playing sports or hiking up a mountain. That afternoon, when we came up, he was going full blast on the job, and he didn’t notice for a while that we were there. But finally his eye fell on Elliot, and he gave him a big shout, and lifted his brush to me, too.