Parachutes and Kisses (7 page)

She'd read this headlong, hurtling, heedless of response, not even stopping when the rabbi sucked in his breath at the mention of “hell.” But now she was feeling more and more as if she had uttered a malediction, not a blessing.

How did she know that? She just knew.

“From his favorite poem,” Isadora said and stepped down from the podium.

 

By the time she found her seat again, she was covered in cold sweat as if she had a fever breaking. It wasn't just the heavy knit dress she was wearing, nor the emotion produced by reading these things about her grandfather, nor the fact that the rabbi sucked in his breath horribly when she uttered the word hell in the poem, nor even the unmistakable feeling that she had uttered a malediction, hastening her grandfather's passage to hell and dooming him to everlasting torment. There was more: a sense that however detailed the memoir, however accurate it sought to be, it could never sum up the man. No writing could. Life was messy, various, contradictory. Writing, which tried to impose order on experience, wound up diminishing that experience simply because so many things had to be left out. Her grandfather was gone. No poem, no memoir, not even his own paintings could hold him; no artifact could contain the multitudes within the man. What use was art if it could not deliver what it promised—respite from death? Approaching her fortieth birthday, at the crest of her career, she felt this most keenly. It was not enough merely to “make a leeving,” or to win prizes, or be famous, to have a long listing in
Who's
Who, or to be assured an obit in the Times. There had to be
more
to life than what she had struggled for all her nearly four decades. But what was it? According to the
world's
estimation, she had it all. Then why was she so frightened? And what was she so frightened
of?
Ought she to sit za-Zen, like Josh? Ought she to divest herself of material possessions and become a devotee of Sai Baba—the only guru who didn't come to America and do lecture tours? No. Such enlightenment was not for a gamy girl like Isadora—a wearer of perfumes, a connoisseur of cocks. But still ... what did this death mean to her life? Papa was, in some spiritual sense, her father, and when your father dies in you at last, he leaves you free to love another man. Then why did she feel a great tide of change overtaking her life? And why did it seem that this tide was about to sweep away everything she knew?

She sat through the closing prayers with her palms dripping and her mouth dry with grief. When the ceremony ended, neither the fact that many relatives were weeping nor that others said the most complimentary things about her eulogy, comforted her. Nor did it comfort her when her last ex-husband, Bennett Wing, the psychoanalyst, embraced her tearfully, and said how moved he'd been. Nor did it comfort her when her “little” sister Chloe dismissed her fears of malediction with: “I can assure you that the Almighty won't dispose of Papa's soul based upon your poem.” Nor did it comfort her when Josh said: “Promise me that if I die before you, you'll just give me a straight Jewish funeral—with no paeans of praise to my cock, okay?” Isadora laughed. Early in their relationship she had written juicily erotic poems to Josh, which depicted the fabled organ in various stages of tumescence and detumescence. But Isadora was hardly comforted by his joking about it now. She felt that she had exposed herself in a place where only pious platitudes about the deceased were required, and all she wished was to sink six feet deeper underground than Papa was going.

Why had she read that damned memoir? It exposed her more than her grandfather! Why hadn't she let well enough alone? Papa had requested a Jewish funeral and she had desecrated it. Women were not wanted in the house of the Father-God, but if they were tolerated at all, it was as silent witnesses of generalized male devotion. To stand up and speak ugly truths about the dead was insufferable presumption. Isadora felt ill with regret. All she wanted was to undo her speech, to suck the words back in like dirt being sucked into a vacuum cleaner.

Her orgy of self-loathing was interrupted by her second cousin Abigail, a white-haired, dowdily dressed retired schoolteacher who spoke the overcareful English of one who has spent the better part of her life enunciating the unspeakable to the unteachable.

“A lovely speech, Isadora,” she said. “That was truly Uncle”—her mother was Isadora's grandfather's sister—“a true portrait. He would have approved.”

“Really?” Isadora asked in disbelief.

“You remember what Uncle used to say: ‘Paint me as I am—warts and all'?”

“Yes—but he didn't mean that.
Nobody
ever means that.” (Isadora knew this because, as a novelist, she had discovered that the people who say “please write about me” are always pissed off when you do, while the ones who make you swear
not
to, secretly lust for such dubious immortality, and are devastated if you keep your word. Nevertheless, one thing is sure: nobody wants to be painted “warts and all”—any more than “Mr. and Mrs. Johnson” did.)

“I don't know,” Abigail said. “Uncle always maintained that there was no point in being an artist if you were going to lie. That was why he hated doing formal portraits. ‘Liberty is the right not to lie,' he often said, I think after Camus. You were faithful to that. He would be proud. Tell me, Isadora,” she went on, “that painting of horses in the poem—did you ever see it?”

“No. I saw several sketches of horses and some small oil studies. Why?”

“Well, Uncle painted a huge canvas of horses galloping out of the sea—a painting perhaps thirty feet by fifty feet, to be hung as a mural somewhere in a public building. I remember it because I remember the trouble he had getting the canvas and finding space large enough to work on it. That was in the early forties, before you were born, I think. I don't even remember who commissioned it, but it was to be done for some building in the west, I think, and he was to paint it here, in sections—huge squares of canvas—then ship them out west. I remember him working on it. It was the most amazing thing he ever did—huge as the Tintorettos at the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice—and as good, to my mind. It was a stampede of wild horses galloping out of the sea. I could have sworn from that poem that you knew it.”

Isadora's heart turned over at this news. “How amazing,” she said. “I never even heard him talk about it.” Still, she had always suspected that there was a metaphysical connection between her and Papa, something went beyond granddaughterly affection, a certain interchangeability of souls. But this notion that her poem had intuited a lost painting was eerie indeed.

“The painting was lost,” Abigail went on. “The war came and the people who commissioned it never even built the building. The project was sold to another real-estate consortium, the plans were altered, and Uncle was never paid for the work. The painting was shipped out West, and disappeared. He tried to collect on the money they owed, but when the project changed hands he couldn't track down the original people. Anyway, you know Uncle: He always used to say: ‘Beware of any project requiring lawyers.' He was not the sort to get into a lawsuit over it. He let it go and went on to the next work. But he was always terribly bitter about it. I think he stopped mentioning it because it pained him so. I thought it was his greatest painting, and so did he. If it could be seen and exhibited today, it would establish his reputation beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

 

On the way to the cemetery—Chloe and Isadora drove in her silver Mercedes with the Connecticut license plate that read QUIM —Isadora thought about her various promises to her grandfather. He had always wanted her to write his story, be his Boswell, tell it true. He had half expected that she would catalog his paintings, find him a major gallery, organize a retrospective of his work, write his biography, publish an art book of his work. And she had never done so—not for lack of
wanting
to, but because it seemed to her that all the family examples of profligacy with talent demanded her nurturing her own, even if it meant refusing to serve the patriarch.

It would have been so much easier, in a way, to become the chronicler and cataloguer of her grandfather's genius. Women are applauded for being helpmeets to the patriarchs, only denounced when they seek to trumpet their own talents. Isadora knew the joys of the good-girl role; she knew the pleasures of cataloguing, restoring, collecting anecdotes about the great man, effacing oneself in service to the Master.

Think what flak she could have avoided by being her grandfather's good granddaughter rather than the bad girl of American letters! Think of all the attacks she could have avoided, all the grief she would never have known, all the uncertainties she would have sidestepped, all the empty pages she would never have faced! And think of the garlands of praise she would have garnered, the pontifical pats on the back, the approving nods, the loving looks. No woman born in this world is immune to the pleasures of being good. We are born to goodness; it is our birthright. Only sheer grit and pigheaded obstinacy make us demand the right to be bad, for we know that only by being bad can we become ourselves—not daughters and granddaughters, but individuals and possibly artists. Being an artist demands a cut umbilicus (which often bleeds); being a daughter demands the cord intact (a bloodless but confining fate).

Josh was first and foremost a son. That was why he had trouble being a husband. At some point, he would have to jump ship—the SS
Patriarch,
Isadora called it—and swim. Until he did that, he would never write all the beautiful books that were in him. Often Isadora wished that Josh's father would die, just to release him before it was too late. But the old man hung on, unwittingly weakening his children with bribes of money and real estate, with the desperate delusion that Daddy never dies.

They drove to a cemetery in the stony wastes of Queens. For one born in Manhattan, Queens means cemeteries or a flight abroad. Papa was going on his last flight now. The earth was cold and unforgiving. Isadora thought of her grandfather—even the ruin that was left of his body—spending his first night underground and she began to weep. Couldn't he even take a blanket? She had the doubtless common fantasy of her grandfather discovering himself alive and pounding on the coffin lid for help. The gravesite's finality never fails to elicit blocked tears. No wonder we weep as we shovel in our modest contributions of earth.

The limousine bearing Jude and Nat, Aunt Gilda and cousin Abigail preceded them through the cemetery gates. Isadora was driving QUIM, headlights blazing. Josh had refused to go to the cemetery and had taken off for lunch with his mother and father instead. Isadora hadn't objected. “Go on, darling,” she had said, not wanting to impose her grief on him. But on some level she was pissed. Why did he stubbornly refuse to see how much her grandfather's death meant to her? Was it because of his own refusal to confront his father's eventual demise?

She drove with a vengeance, thinking of her vaguely blasphemous license plate blazing through the Jewish cemetery's gates. Both Josh and Isadora were name nuts. Their dogs were named for writers; their cars for sexual organs; and their child narrowly escaped being named after the greatest woman poet of antiquity—Sappho—or else Vigée after Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, the infinitely skillful court painter to Marie Antoinette.

Isadora's mother had also debated among the names of all the great women artists when she named her second daughter. She might have been Marietta after Marietta Robusti, Tintoretto's offspring, or Judith after Judith Leyster, Frans Hals's contemporary, or Sarah after Sarah Peale, or Constance-Marie after Constance-Marie Charpentier, or Rosa after Rosa Bonheur, or Angelica after Angelica Kauffman. Thank heavens her mother never considered Sofonisba after Sofonisba Angussola, but merely—merely!—sad dled her with Isadora Zelda—after Duncan and Fitzgerald.