Land of Dreams: A Novel (2 page)

Germans were not popular since the war had broken out in Europe, and although Hilla was an artist and argued her lack of bourgeois values, she was, after all, from German aristocratic stock and was surely frightened of losing both her social standing and the good income that her relationship with Solomon Guggenheim—as his art curator—had afforded her. Her tenuous hold on charm was also, I suspected, due to a poisonous and painful relationship with another German artist—Rudolf Bauer—an egocentric fool (and mediocre artist, in my opinion) who undermined her at every turn. Hilla was one of the most powerful people on the New York art scene, but she was a gruff, opinionated person, and was not always easy to like. She had needed a friend when we met, more than she had needed another artist to “mind.” It might have seemed to her, and to others, that I had given her my friendship in return for her patronage, but that truly wasn’t the case. I had earned my own money through working hard and being wily in business all my life—I became an artist because art fed my soul. I had other means by which to feed my body. I had willingly given Hilla my friendship because I knew what it felt like to be an alien in another country. We Irish had always been underdogs, and I recognized her carefully hidden stance of being both uneasy with and proud of her background, at a time when it was very uncomfortable to be German in America.

I had a habit of looking beneath the obviously unfavorable in a person to the vulnerable human who lay beneath the skin. I was good with other people, but I had come to realize that was not necessarily an asset when it came to pleasing myself.

However, in one sense Hilla was right: it was too cold out here at this time of the year to work with oils. The paint needed heat to help it dry quickly—but even then, my work had to be handled extremely carefully for up to a year.

Leonardo da Vinci said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned,” and never was this more true than when working with oils, where one could scrape off and start again months after “finishing” a piece of work. “Abandoned” was such a cruel word that I preferred to call it “letting go.”

In any case, I was ready to let go of this landscape.

I took it down from the easel and placed it on the large sheet I had laid out on the floor, so that the painting was facing up toward me. I could not risk letting the fabric touch the canvas as yet, and had devised a way of wrapping my canvases for transportation to avoid damage. I never painted to the edge of the canvas, but always left a two-inch margin, onto which I placed narrow wooden slats that I carefully screwed into place with the narrowest, shortest screws that would hold it. On top of these I glued two more slats diagonally across, then finally a layer of cardboard pinned on with thumbtacks, before wrapping it all in a cotton sheet.

I had been nervous that my opulent wrapping would make it seem that I was churning my work out with such speed that I didn’t allow it time to dry before cashing the check. However, my agent assured me that the reverse was true. The bare margins and four pin marks had become my trademark—as distinctive as a signature—and the theater of unwrapping my pieces (carefully unpinning the cardboard, unscrewing the pins and, finally, removing the wooden slats) gave a sense of drama and suspense to the proceeding, which was so unique that my clients now enjoyed it as part of the process.

The “unveiling” of an Eileen Hogan was almost as important as the work itself. Such was the nature of the New York art scene that my extensive packing had come to be perceived as a deliberate artistic eccentricity more than a practical necessity. I had spent the vast majority of my life working at practical things—farming, housekeeping and business—before entering the whimsical, self-indulgent profession of an artist. Few artists were women at that time, fewer again were mothers like me (none that I knew of, at least), so the idea that I would feign eccentricity amused me greatly, especially when my agent asked me to wrap all my work in this way, regardless of whether it needed it or not. It was to perpetuate the uniqueness of my Irish heritage that Hilla insisted that I continue to work under my first husband’s name—Hogan—rather than allow me to adopt Irvington, after I married my second husband, Charles.

I went over to the large wooden cupboard where I kept my supplies and tugged at the swollen drawer. I was out of string. Damn! The shop on the island was poorly stocked at this time of year. Most of the inhabitants of Fire Island were already back in their homes on the mainland, where I knew I should be. Maureen and Bridie, my old friends in Yonkers who ran the homeless community I had helped fund during the Great Depression, wrote every week with news and were, I knew, longing to see me. The apartment in Manhattan, after all the trouble I had gone to, creating an elegant home for me and the boys, lay empty.

Fire Island had been my summer retreat for the past four years, but this year I didn’t want to leave it, even though I knew it would be a harsh place to spend the winter. Something inside me had shifted that summer. I was tired. I just wanted to be alone—and Fire Island in winter was as remote as the Himalayas. Unfortunately, it seemed, it was also as cold. Nonetheless, this wooden cabin and studio were my haven, the place where I felt most at ease, where I could be alone with my sons and my art, with nothing to distract or bother me. On Fire Island, life stopped and I didn’t feel ready for my life to start up again.

So much had happened to me, so much kept happening, that I could not help but think that I was bringing much of it on myself.

All I wanted now was a simple life that would enable my boys to flourish and me to create meaningful art.

Fire Island was the perfect place for me to hide away, physically and socially, from my hectic life. We were a small community of artists and eccentrics burrowing our simple wooden summerhouses into the dunes. Cherry Grove was the most settled of the Fire Island communities: a tiny village huddled around the dock, with a post office, a hotel and little else. I had bought my tumbledown house and plot for very little and had renovated it more or less myself. My first husband, John, whose death in Ireland had precipitated my move to America, had been a skilled carpenter—and I knew how to cut wood and handle a hammer as well as any man. The village had built up over the years into a network of wooden buildings. Most of us preferred simple two-story houses behind the sand dunes that ran on either side of this long, narrow strip of barrier island off the Long Island coast. Although we were less than two hours from the city, Fire Island had the remote air of a forgotten land.

During the summer our beaches were busy with holiday makers, although the crowd who came here was almost entirely bohemian, mostly artists and writers. We creative types prided ourselves on always finding the most beautiful and interesting places to inhabit. Cherry Grove was also a hub of social activity for homosexuals and lesbians. The bohemian lifestyle provided sanctuary for people who could no longer endure the convention of hiding their preferences. Fire Island allowed them to live an alternative lifestyle—at least during the summer months and weekends. My nearest neighbor was a wealthy socialite who lived here with her much younger female lover during July, August and September each year. Her husband was content to have his wife do as she pleased during her summer vacation, as long as she maintained her loyalty to him in front of their peers, so for the majority of the year they attended functions and smiled for the press cameras and nobody was any the wiser. There was a code of secrecy and a respect for privacy on Fire Island that made it, for me, the perfect place to live. So even though we were, in many ways, a small close-knit village, nobody asked any questions and there was none of the interfering, cloying neighborliness that I was so familiar with from my rural Irish background.

As I had done before, I stepped off my Manhattan carousel in July and settled into my summer routine of happy solitude on Fire Island. My September deadline came and went; I wanted it to last a bit longer.

I had been stockpiling all summer and had arranged everything I needed to hole up here for the winter: enough food and fuel, books and art supplies to keep us happy through to the spring. I did not want to have to go back onto the mainland in search of something as banal as string!

Against the silence of my studio I suddenly heard a strange noise and, when I turned around, I nearly jumped out of my skin. A huge stag was scraping his horns along the rusted metal side of my studio doors. Behind him was a deer and a baby fawn tucked into her side, its tan ears too large for its delicate, pretty face. The stag lifted his huge head and the three of them stood for a moment and regarded me expectantly. They were a perfect family: father, mother and their child. Although the animals on the island were generally tame, it still wasn’t a good idea to shoo away a stag. I knew if I just ignored them they would go of their own volition, but I was anxious to get into the house and search for the string. If it were the deer and fawn alone, I happily would have walked past them—but the stag was a different story. As a male, he commanded respect. I was not in the habit of giving respect to males, especially not strutting stags trespassing on my space.

The mother and her fawn were gazing at me and I became irritated by their calm stare. I was in a hurry.

“Shoo!” I said, not very loudly, waving an oil-stained rag feebly by my side. The stag stopped scratching and looked up. His head was not much bigger than the female’s, but his antlers spanned the width of the huge open doorway. He looked at me and, sensing this could go badly wrong, I kept the next “Shoo” to myself. After just a few seconds he turned and walked away, the deer and fawn following him. I was, he had decided, of no interest to him whatsoever. Strangely, I felt more rejected than relieved.

When they were gone, I walked up the wooden steps and opened the door to the kitchen. A breeze followed me in and sent three hastily pinned watercolors fluttering to the floor. After four summers here I was still so infatuated with the beauty of Fire Island, in love with its muted sea-soaked palate, so grateful for the peace and solitude it had offered me, that I found myself sketching all the time in a sort of homage to the landscape. My passion for creating art—despite my commercial success—was still very new to me, as was the skill of drawing; the novelty of being able to capture life as it was, with merely a soft pencil and a piece of paper, had not worn off. While my sprawling artist’s studio behind our house was packed with canvases of my stylized Impressionistic landscapes, the walls of the narrow two-story cabin where I lived with my two sons were pinned with small, simple watercolors of the natural landscape and abundant wildlife that surrounded us: sketches of the silvery grasses that looked so delicate and yet anchored our precarious sand dunes with their network of slim, greenish threads; the ballooning clouds of a summer morning that floated overhead on breezy days like “angel’s ships,” as my sons called them.

There were sketches of the boys on every surface of the house. Both my boys were adopted, so they looked very different from each other. Tom was stocky and black-haired. Leo, now sixteen, was blond and lean. There was nothing more beautiful to me than my sons’ faces; there was no greater feeling than their soft lips on my cheek. As they grew older they paid less and less attention to me. Their arms were directed now out into the world, and not back toward the comfort of their mother’s bosom; yet, as with a bad lover, their sometimes feckless disregard only made me love them more. I craved their affection, but perhaps the fact that I wasn’t their natural parent made me more reserved in demanding it. I did not feel that I had the right to cloy, so when they came crying to me with a scuffed knee or a cruel slight, my concern for their troubles was overridden by the joy of being allowed to give them comfort; a pleasure so addictively sweet that every mother hopes her child will need her forever.

Although I was certain I loved them with the same passion that a mother loves her natural child, the act of re-creating them over and over again on paper had become a compulsion for me, as if every sketch was in itself a microcosm of giving birth. Each picture was a homage to their detailed, intricate anatomy: the complex formation of their ears, the perfect rounds of their shoulders, the soft confusion of their eyes, the plump innocence of their lips—hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hastily drawn sketches, not just on the walls, but in the pockets of aprons and handbags and jackets. While the few visitors who called at the house would comment on the abundance of pictures, Tom, Leo and I did not see them anymore. My drawings were merely an extension of our lives with one another, another eccentricity of their artist-mother’s abounding love.

I opened the odds-and-ends drawer in the kitchen, but there was no string there, or in any other drawer or cupboard. I now clearly remembered putting a large roll of string in that drawer.

“Did you move the string, Tom?” I called over to my son, who was sitting on the sofa with a blanket over his lap, under which was a bag of expensive crackers that I had specifically told him not to touch.

There was a pause.

“What string?”

“The string in the top drawer,” I said, pulling aside the blanket and snatching the bag of crackers from him, “the string that you obviously took, Tom—where is it?”

His crackers now confiscated, he had no further fear of punishment and said defiantly, “I made a kite.”

I groaned as I remembered him chasing down the beach, trying to get two sticks and a hankie to take flight. “Where is it now, Tom? I need the string.”

He looked at me and shrugged, then his eyes opened and he blinked—fearful that he might have really upset me.

I lifted my eyebrows and reset my expression from frustrated to benign.

“Let’s see if Conor has some in the post office shop,” I said.

“Can we get candy, Mammy, can we?”

“Come on,” I said noncommittally as he ran ahead of me down the stairs and, still only half dressed and barefoot, onto the sand path toward the Cherry Grove post office.