The Art of Keeping Cool Page 14

  On other evenings there were other stories, about how my dad read everything on the early aviators and wanted nothing but to fly. Aunt Nan remembered him as a teenager sneaking out of school, trying to build glider planes in the woods.

  “He’d launch them off the bluffs at Windmill Hill, but they never worked. He had crash after crash! It’s a wonder he didn’t kill himself”

  “I guess he was determined, because he went on to be a pilot,” I said.

  “Against his father’s wishes,” Uncle Jake said. I saw Grandma’s hands press suddenly against the table. The next second, she put an end to the stories by ordering the table cleared for dessert. There was still a line, I saw, beyond which we must not go when we talked about my father.

  The night I heard about Dad’s glider planes, I followed Elliot up to his room after dinner, thinking I might somehow get him to tell me more. By then, it was mid-September. As it had in Ohio, school began later here, where farm kids were needed to help out with the fall harvest, so we still had a little time left before classes started.

  “What are you drawing these days?” I began by asking.

  He showed me some pencil sketches of the table in his room with stuff on it, of his bed and the light bulb hanging down, of his shoes, the back of his door, somebody’s hand in close-up held before a window. All indoor scenes, really personal.

  “Whose hand is that?”

  “Mine.”

  He’d used Abel’s pastels to color the sketches in and they were good. Like photos almost, they were so true to life. He’d gone back to real drawing, I was glad to see. Elliot didn’t look happy with them, though. He hadn’t looked happy about anything he’d done since Abel’s fire.

  “Tried any more of the ocean?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Just as well.”

  He sat silent, fingering a pencil.

  “That was pretty amazing what your mother said about my dad,” I said, “that he wanted to be a flyer, even way back. I wish I could’ve known him then.”

  Elliot nodded.

  “Grandma has a picture of him from when he was about our age. He’s holding a gun and his leg is still okay. She said he liked to hunt. He looks pretty normal.”

  Elliot shrugged.

  “So, what happened?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did he have to leave?”

  “How should I know?” Elliot said.

  “I think you do.”

  “How could I? It was before I was born.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  Elliot shook his head. He leaned forward and ran off a sketch of an army Jeep. He got the headlights and windshield just right. From the front, army Jeeps have a kind of dopey expression. He got that, too.

  “I saw one of these today. It came around the corner and ran over the McGowan’s dog,” he said. He bent and drew a dead dog beside the Jeep. Then he colored the dog in, reddish tan, with one of Abel’s pastels. “You know which dog I mean?”

  I knew. “Too bad. I liked that old mutt. He used to follow me around sometimes,” I said.

  “He was hungry,” Elliot said. “He was asking for food. The McGowans didn’t feed him right.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I watched him.”

  “You should have said something.”

  “What good would that have done?”

  Elliot laid the sharp edge of his ruler down and tore the Jeep picture angrily off the roll.

  He put it aside and unrolled a longer piece of store wrap. He lined the ruler up, tore the long sheet off the roll, and anchored the corners with four flat stones he’d taken from the beach. It was a method he had and I’d seen him do it before.

  “Know where Grandpa keeps his guns?” he asked.

  I didn’t.

  Elliot bent and began to draw. “There’s a closet behind the dining room door. Inside is a gun rack. He has three guns, two kinds of shotgun and a twenty-two.”

  “Must be one of the shotguns my father’s holding in the photo Grandma has.”

  “Probably is.”

  “I guess Grandpa doesn’t do much shooting anymore.”

  “He doesn’t do any shooting,” Elliot said, sketching away on one edge of the paper. He had drawn the closet with its door open to show the gun rack. The two shotguns were in the rack; the twenty-two was missing.

  “Grandma said my father was a good shot,” I said. “Grandpa taught him. He had a dog named Baron. They used to go off hunting together and bring home stuff for dinner. Grouse and rabbits and things. One time, he shot a thirty-pound wild turkey and they had it for Christmas dinner.”

  Elliot didn’t answer. He was drawing on the other edge of the paper now, sketching in the kitchen, the kitchen door, which was swung open. There was some space beyond the door that was probably going to be the backyard. He left that part empty for now. The way he was drawing this picture was different from anything I’d seen him do before. It was as if the house was sliced open. You could see the outside of the house, the yard and front door, but you could also see inside two rooms, the dining room and the kitchen.

  “What are you drawing, El?” I asked, but he wouldn’t answer.

  He drew Grandma’s stove in the kitchen, a china cabinet that stands against the wall in the dining room, the kitchen sink and the icebox, part of the dining room table and some chairs. He went back and forth between the two rooms, filling them in, and soon I saw that in a space between the rooms, he was drawing a person.

  “Is that Grandpa?” I asked him.

  Elliot looked up at me. He raised a finger to his lips, then went on drawing, his eyes carefully following the point of his pencil.

  I knew it was Grandpa from the round shape of his head. He looked younger, though, had more hair and wasn’t wearing his glasses. He was in profile, staring into the kitchen, and his arms were lifted in front of him. He was holding something up before his face. What was it? Elliot moved on without sketching it in. He worked on the space beyond the kitchen door.

  It was the backyard, as I thought. Grandma’s herb garden appeared. Her big tin watering can. She’d forget it sometimes, run off to do something else. I began to see how this picture was sort of like a story unfolding.

  “Who is that?”

  Elliot had begun to draw another person, not Grandma. It was a young man with dark hair and an angry face. He looked at first to be walking away, but then it seemed that he had stumbled or fallen down. His body was at a strange angle to his legs.

  “Elliot, please tell me what’s happening here?”

  Elliot’s lips were pressed shut. He would never tell.

  “Elliot!” I stared over his shoulder at the drawing coming to life on the long piece of store wrap.

  He was working on Grandpa. Grandpa had a gun. It was the twenty-two. He was sighting along the barrel, standing in the little hall, aiming through the kitchen, out the kitchen door. He was pulling the trigger. The gun was going off. The young man was falling. His leg was gushing blood.

  “Is that my father? Elliot, is it?”

  With Abel Hoffman’s pastels, Elliot put in the yellow of Grandpa’s shirt, and the flesh color of his hands and face. He made the kitchen walls light blue, the way they are, and the sink and icebox white. Outside, he made the grass green, the trees brown with green leaves, the field a soft wheat color. Then he put in the red, a big pool of it, beside Grandma’s pretty herb garden.

  14

  EVERYONE HAD BEEN in the house, after all: Aunt Nan and Uncle Jake, already keeping company with each other; Grandma, though she insisted that she never heard the fight or the gun going off. (“Which is strange,” my mother commented, later. “She was bound to be nearby”)

  They’d argued over a job, another of the many arguments they were having at that time. They seemed opposed on every issue. For several years they’d been at cross-purposes, Grandpa driving my father to achieve along well-beaten tracks; my father backing off, choosing p
aths of his own. That spring, as his graduation from high school approached and then took place, the arguments grew worse.

  My father refused to apply to college. Not yet, he said. He wasn’t ready. He wanted to work at an airfield on Long Island, get his pilot’s license and fly for the U. S. Postal Service, which was just then expanding routes all over the country. After that, he’d decide. He needed time to think things through.

  Grandpa was furious. Flying was a madman’s game. He knew what was best. My father should go into medicine, become a doctor, aim for the things in life that were of known value, which had already been achieved by Grandpa, no less, and proven solid.

  Freeloader, he called my father. Imbecile. Ungrateful jackass. After everything my father had taken from the family, been given free and lovingly—education, respect, good health, care, and support—did a son owe a father nothing? Nothing?

  A day came in June when my father announced that he’d had enough. He was leaving, he said, that very afternoon, would hitchhike if he had to, to catch the ferry at Point Judith.

  When Grandpa saw that my father was packed and ready to leave, that he’d asked his own mother for a ride across the bridge, that he would not discuss it anymore, yelled insults, used filthy language, turned his back and walked away when he was being spoken to; when Grandpa saw that he would not win this battle either, after all the others lost, after watching, day by day, the disintegration of his fine, trusted boy (a crack shot at twelve!) into this angry, foul-mouthed young man; after Grandpa had stood it and more, after he’d tried everything—arguing, reasoning, patience, discipline—and nothing had worked and there was nothing else to do but watch my father leave for who knew what life of waste and ruination, after this . . .

  He could not remember pulling the trigger, Aunt Nan told us.

  “He denied it to your grandmother and to himself. The gun went off in his hands, he said. He would not take responsibility, could not believe what he had done. I saw him, though,” she said. “He was aiming through the door. Jake and I were in the dining room. We saw the whole thing.”

  The bullet struck my fathers right leg, smashing the bone above his knee. He was facing the open kitchen door when he fell, and he lay on the grass by the herb garden without a cry or a word. He watched as his father leaned the gun against the kitchen wall and walked out to help him.

  My grandfather made a tourniquet from his own cotton shirt. He left Aunt Nan to hold it firm while he went for morphine, antiseptic, his surgery tools. With help from Uncle Jake, they moved my father a few feet into the shade and Grandpa operated right there to remove the bullet.

  The bone was badly fractured. He brought the pieces together the best he could for the moment. Splinted the thigh. Carried my father indoors to the guest room bed, where my father lay groggy and suffering, eating nothing, speaking to no one. Grandpa had planned to take him to a hospital the next day, but that night, despite the morphine, my father carried out a plan of his own.

  Coming into the room to help him to the bathroom the next morning, Grandma found his bed empty. The crutches, which he’d not yet been able to use, were gone. Somehow, he’d dressed, dragged himself outside to the family car, and driven off, a feat which must have caused him excruciating pain.

  He took the early morning train from Riverton to Providence, that much was reported. Where he went next to hide and nurse himself, he never told. He disappeared and, though Grandma waited every day to hear from him, he never called, not in the weeks after, or the months. Three years went by before a printed card arrived from Ohio telling of his marriage to my mother. A year later he wrote personally to announce, with obvious pride, the day and hour of my birth.

  All this, we learned from Aunt Nan. I went straight to my mother the night of Elliot’s drawing. I told her everything, and armed with the right questions, we extracted the rest of the story the next morning. In whispers. Out of Grandma’s hearing.

  “Don’t speak to her about it. She believes it was an accident,” Aunt Nan warned.

  “How could she?” my mother asked.

  “I think she must. It would kill her otherwise. It would kill them both.”

  “How did Elliot find out?” I wanted to know.

  “Jake and I told him,” Aunt Nan said, “for his own good. We were moving here, you see. Your father thought he should know.”

  “My father?” I asked.

  Aunt Nan nodded. “He was afraid for Elliot. He said he should be warned about Grandpa’s temper.”

  “His temper!” I cried in disgust. “Is that what you call it?”

  “Hush, Robert,” my aunt said. “Please, not so loud.” She lay her finger against my lips to shut them.

  • • •

  My father never came to see us in Sachems Head. Five months later, my mother, Carolyn and I took a train down to meet him in Washington, D.C., where he’d gone on a two-week leave. We stayed in a hotel, climbed the National Monument, saw the Capitol, ate at restaurants, and took pictures of ourselves under the cherry blossoms.

  Dad looked thinner. He wore a metal brace on his back under his shirt, and his dark hair had gray in it, but we didn’t mention these changes. We knew that, like his limp, they weren’t meant to be noticed. When Carolyn wanted a piggyback ride one time, my mother snapped at her and told her it was time to grow up and walk on her own two feet. I could see she was protecting my father after all he’d been through, and I didn’t blame her. I was being pretty careful of him. myself. I never once asked him about Sachem’s Head or his life there. I wanted to. I was desperate to know his side of things, but I kept quiet, and he volunteered nothing. As far as I know, the subject of Grandpa never came up.

  Elliot came up, though. My father wanted to know about him.

  I told him about Elliot’s amazing drawing, how he’d kept it a secret from everyone. I told how Abel Hoffman had been in the art book my father sent, and all about Elliot’s trips to the woods. I described the big guns and Abel’s arrests, and how stupid Elliot had been to keep going back to him when the whole town was watching.

  Finally, I told about Abel’s terrible walk into the fire that had shocked everybody, whatever side they were on, and made them want to forget Abel and everything that had happened. Dad nodded, as if it didn’t surprise him. He said that kind of forgetfulness was something he’d seen in human nature before.

  “Is Elliot still drawing?” he asked.

  I said he was, as secretively as ever. Like everyone else, he never talked about Abel but I knew he thought about him because he was always up in the loft with Abel’s painting.

  “Elliot keeps saying he wants to meet you,” I told my father. “He’s hoping you’ll come visit. Can’t you? On your next leave? It would really mean a lot to him.”

  Dad didn’t answer for a while. He was so quiet I thought he might never answer, but finally he said, “You tell Elliot to come visit the farm. Tell him he can come stay with us after we settle back there, look into art school in Cincinnati if he wants. He’ll need to get out of Sachem’s Head if he’s going to do something with his talent. He’ll need to get away before it’s too late.”

  It was as close as he’d go to telling me what had happened to him back there when he was a kid. Whatever his reasons were, I knew he probably wasn’t ever going to say much more.

  “What about you? Are you doing all right? he asked me. When I said I was, he gave me a quick look.

  “Well watch yourself,” he said. “You watch yourself, Robert.”

  When my father’s leave was up, we all said good-bye at the railroad station. He caught a train down the coast to a ship that was heading for England. We took the train back to Sachem’s Head. Somehow my mother had convinced him that we were better off staying there for the time being, even knowing what we all did about Grandpa.

  As soon as we got home, I told Elliot what my father had said about coming to live with us. It made him pretty happy. I think he would have left right then if he could have. As it was, he got
out a year later, in the spring of 1944, when my father came home for good and we moved back to the farm.

  Elliot lived with us during his high-school years. Aunt Nan and Uncle Jake said it was the best thing for him until they could get their own house. By the time they did, he’d been accepted at an art school in Chicago and gone off to study. He’s set up his own life there now, got an apartment downtown, a lot of nutty friends in the art world. I’m a college senior myself, headed toward medical school of all things, but I take the train up to see him a couple of times a year, or he comes down to Ohio. He loves the farm, just like I do—the wide sky passing high overhead, the fields sweeping in from all sides. “Wing room” my dad still calls the feeling you get out there. Elliot knows what he means. It means he can paint right out in the open, whatever he wants, without anyone trying to stop him. He can leave and go back to Chicago, or any other place in the world, whenever he decides to, no questions asked.

  The last time I went to visit him, I saw he’d persuaded Aunt Nan to send him Abel’s bomb painting. It must have been up in that loft for nine years or more, but it still looked all right. More than all right, actually. It’s a knockout. Elliot was right about Abel. The guy was brilliant. He’s beginning to get recognized again in Europe, where a lot of his work survived the war after all.

  Apparently this painting Elliot has is worth a mint because it was the last one Abel did. Elliot’s friends in Chicago kid him about becoming a millionaire and retiring to the South Pacific. Some offers have come in from museums, but Elliot would never sell it. He still has his birds’-egg collection, too, still keeps it under his bed, and anybody who knows him knows that nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever make him give it up.

  Elliot says I’m slowly getting brought up-to-date in my taste for modern art, emphasis on the slowly. I think I still have a way to go because the paintings Elliot does get wilder every time I look. He’s always trying different styles and ideas. Usually, I hate them at first. Then I kind of warm up to them. One thing is, you can see he isn’t leaving himself out of his pictures anymore, the way he used to. He’s in them one hundred percent now, showing his feelings, giving people his own crazy views. Less perfectness, Abel said. More you-ness. Well, that’s pretty much what Elliot’s doing. He’s selling the stuff, too. Making a name for himself. Sometimes, I stand back and look at him in wonder and think, “Where is this screwball headed next?”