The Fisher Boy (12 page)

So I resolved to keep silent about my Drummond blood—if it existed.

Chapter Fifteen

July Fourth weekend, the Thomas Royall exhibit opened at the Provincetown Municipal Museum. Miriam coaxed Arthur into attending the opening reception, but Roberto and I were very busy at the White Gull. We’d finally been targeted by the Christian Soldiers, in the form of picketers with professionally printed signs like“ A Double Room in Sodom, Harbor View?” and “Worried about Global Warming? Hell Is a Lot Hotter.” Only one of the picketers wore battle fatigues, a female, oddly enough.

They picketed two days, until eight o’clock at night, then, abruptly, they left. So Roberto and I missed the opening, which included the crab-stuffed mushroom caps prepared by the Hungry Gull, Roger Morton’s catering business, and a few words by an old man who’d once delivered kerosene to Royall’s Provincetown residence and remembered him as “a great strapping fellow who smelled of violet toilet water.”

So Roberto and I went to the exhibit the first day the picketers failed to arrive. Roberto was letting his hair grow, looking wonderful, like a Samson who’d stopped dating Delilah. Instead of the jawbone of an ass, he held something equally unwelcome to the museum attendant selling tickets, a bag of that crumbly, all-natural licorice they sell in art-house movie theaters.

“I’m sorry, sir, but there’s no food allowed inside,” the attendant said.

“Fascists,” snapped someone beyond the entrance.

I could smell him before he emerged from inside the museum; smell the rank odor of his unwashed flesh. He was thin, about thirty, shirtless and in overalls. He had blondish hair of Jesus’ length, and his bare shoulders were dense with freckles. “Gestapo, Gestapo,” he called the woman selling tickets. “You should let him have his food,” he said. “People have the right to eat, don’t they?”

“Not in the presence of art,” the woman answered.

“It’s no big deal,” Roberto told the foul-smelling stranger, surrendering the candy.

Stiff as her hairdo, the attendant deposited it on a shelf next to some leaflets about an exhibit, “Whaling in Oils,” which had long since closed.

Then the foul-smelling stranger retreated back inside the museum.

“We’re interested in the Royall exhibit,” Roberto said, and she gave us directions without bothering to look up from the yellow legal pad she was filling with writing no larger than dust mites.

“This place is getting more homophobic by the moment,” Roberto complained, but I reminded him that, even people as benevolent as us had our cranky days; on the desk at the White Gull, with demanding guests, for instance.

***

The Royall exhibit was in the new climate-controlled wing. It included more than forty paintings from museums and private collections, ranging from oils with almost life-sized figures to watercolors so small they could trick you into thinking you could afford them. Almost all were inspired by the sea: fishermen gutting cod, waves challenging piers, brigantines in opalescent fogs. One wall was full of nudes—youths diving from wharfs, wrestling on sand, tossing a ball near cliffs the color of nougat.

“They’re either dead or in nursing homes now,” Roberto observed.

“Not so loud,” I said, mindful of other visitors, elderly liberals migrating from painting to painting in the sequence the exhibit literature suggested.

“So where is the painting that changed your life?” Roberto asked, tickling my back.

“You’ll see it, eventually.”

At the beginning of the exhibit were cardboard panels with photographs of Royall and the so-called artists’ communities he’d established throughout New England. Some of the story on the panels was familiar. Royall had been born in 1880, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the son of a hardware merchant, Ezekiel Royall, and Emma Root, the famous clairvoyant. His formal schooling ended at age eleven when he almost died of diphtheria. While recovering, in bed, he made a series of pencil sketches—of a pear, his canary, and of his own feet, with their distinct hammertoes—the toes which convinced his mother that he was a uniquely gifted artist, the reincarnation, to be precise, of Angelo Bonelli, the sixteenth-century Florentine master.

Royall senior resisted the reincarnation idea, principly out of anti-Italian prejudice, but agreed that his son was ill-suited to spend his days selling shovels and wrenches. So, Thomas was allowed to become apprenticed to Wendell Sleeper, the Boston painter who paid for the boy’s journey to England, where he met Edward Carpenter, posed for Henry Scott Tuke, and drank absinthe with Aubrey Beardsley. Carpenter’s writings on Uranian love would eventually fire Royall to imagine founding his male Utopias.

When he returned to Massachusetts, Royall began painting. He produced grittier canvases than Boston contemporaries like Benson or Tarbell: his subjects included Gypsy encampments; maids at soapstone sinks; newsboys picking lice from each other’s scalps. Slowly, his work began selling, but his very subject matter, Boston, with its slums and soot and buildings plastered with advertisements selling spats and tooth powders, began to depress him. He left the city, never to return. Eventually, he settled on Cape Cod.

“He came here to escape,” I told Roberto.

“Escape what?”

“People in Black Dog T-shirts,” I said, spotting yet another tourist with the canine logo of the Vineyard restaurant.

Royall moved to Provincetown in 1907, settling in a house in the East End later obliterated to make way for a gas station. But he was also busy founding communes: Brook Farms for artists, Jacob’s Pillows for craftsmen. Ascetic, all-male, almost monastic societies where one could paint, sculpt, weave, and throw pots while espousing the vague Nordic paganism Royall was formulating in dreams, with help from his late mother’s shade.

A video monitor had been built into one of the exhibit’s cardboard panels. I punched a button and a narrator, whose deep, reassuring voice I recognized from PBS nature documentaries, informed us we were seeing the sole footage in existence in the Cape Cod community. The film was grainy, flecked with age, as if photographed through sleet, although it depicted a summer meadow and a circle of men costumed like druids dancing around a flat glacial stone picked with petroglyphs.

“Interesting,” Roberto said.

The thirty or more men ranged from college boys to men Merlin’s age.

“Is that Royall?” Roberto pointed to an old man.

“No, that’s him there.” Royall was the only man bare-chested, in some kilt ancient highlanders might’ve worn, with a tusk or crescent of bone suspended from a chain around his neck.

“He’s quite the dish,” Roberto said, approving of Royall’s eyes, dark with anger, as though something about the ritual had gone wrong—the dance or the offerings heaped on the stone, the grapes, melons, and ears of corn.

An elderly couple now hovered behind us, consulting their pamphlets about details of Royall’s life. The woman said to us, “My husband likes the paintings of ships.”

“He does ships well,” the husband said. “I was in the Navy. At Midway, during the war.”

“This Royall gets the sails and rigging right,” the husband continued. “And I should know, I was born on an island. Off Nova Scotia. I’m a naturalized American citizen.”

The wife said, “He’s not much on nudes.”

“They look silly,” the husband stated. Then, guessing we were a couple, he added, “But they’re fine for you fellows. It’s not like we’re Christian Cuckoos.” He squinted at the video. “Now these people in robes look like they’re worshipping an idol, an elephant. That would be Ganesh, the Hindu god of luck. We took a tour of India in eighty-eight.”

“It isn’t Ganesh,” his wife corrected him. “It’s just a long flat stone. He won’t wear his glasses, he’s too
vain.”
Using the exhibit brochure, she jabbed her husband in the ribs. “Uh-oh,” she muttered. “Here comes trouble.”

She was not speaking about the group of Japanese tourists who had followed their leader’s upraised red umbrella into the room.

“Over by the window,” the wife whispered to Roberto.

It was the reeking man in overalls, with the Biblical hair. He had rolled his exhibit program into a tight cylinder, which he used to beat the palm of his hand as he paced back and forth by some of the nudes, including
The Fisher Boy.

“He’s been here for hours,” the woman said. “The woman at the desk told us all about him. He gave her a terrible time. He was waiting outside when the museum opened and he only left to get his lunch. In fact, he tried to bring his lunch in here, a big plate of fried clams, when it was perfectly obvious it’s against the rules. There’s a sign that says so, for all to see, unless you’re my husband and you leave your glasses in the car.”

The wife leaned closer to Roberto and me. “Well, he threw the clams all over the lawn, then just glared at the woman like it was a perfectly normal thing to do. Of course, the seagulls were delirious, happy as clams…”

“He’s a little off,” the husband confided. “Swearing, talking to himself about ‘the last days.’ I heard him. He has pamphlets from the Christian Cuckoos in his pockets.”

“I mean, if he doesn’t like the paintings, why did he come?” the wife asked.

“I don’t see why he wouldn’t like the ships,” the husband said.

His wife realized it was “almost time for the whale watch.” Her husband drew a coconut candy bar from his shirt pocket and ate half of it in one bite. “I smuggled it past security,” he told us, as his wife laughed and led him away.

We stayed away from the wall of nudes because the man in the overalls was pacing in front of them, humming. He seemed as likely to desert his post as a guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Copy on the cardboard panels informed us that Royall’s communes outside Cape Cod all “failed” within two to five years, but “the Pamet experiment” lasted a full seven years, from 1911 to 1918. At Pamet, Royall and his followers raised all their own food and made their own clothing, weaving the cloth and dyeing it with extracts from roots and leaves. Royall was fascinated by Norse sagas and the speculation that Vikings had reached New England. “Royall was obsessed by runes,” Roberto read, “although the runes on this stone are now known to be a colonial-era hoax.”

A still photograph, sepia like tobacco spit, showed some of the same men from the footage of the ritual seated at a long wooden table, doling gruel out of an iron cauldron. They were in a sort of hall, with sheaves of grain tied to its rafters.

The next photograph was much more startling. In it, Royall— naked, clutching a dagger—was lying on a large flat stone, possibly the one the elderly man had mistaken for the elephant god. Any petroglyphs on the sides of the stone were concealed by a cloth draped over it, a bolt of what might be velvet embroidered with interlocking swastikas.

I winced, massaging Roberto’s shoulder, but he didn’t act upset. “It was taken in 1912,” he said, noting the caption. “Long before the Nazis. Swastikas are an ancient talisman.”

It was impossible not to notice Royall’s body, taut from the regimen of exercise he imposed on the commune’s inhabitants: calisthenics three times each day, a workout with barbells each noon, morning and evening swims in ponds or the sea, from May Day through October
.
Royall was holding the dagger so that it pointed directly toward his genitals, toward his heavy, uncircumcised penis. Seeing genitals in old photographs always startled me; you see them so seldom that it almost seems they’re a modern invention.

“Why is he lying there like that?” Roberto said. “Like he’s some sort of sacrifice.”

The Japanese tourists were collecting in murmuring knots behind us. I expected the women to giggle and the men to gawk at these pictures from a lost private world, but, instead, they consulted their guide with expressions no doubt as baffled as ours.

The guide was a small man with a great many moles. In English, he said to us, “A group of strange bohemians.”

“Do you mean us?” Roberto asked.

“Sun worshipper,” the guide said, of Royall lying naked on the stone. Then, in rapid Japanese, he commented on the exhibit, thrust his umbrella into the air, and ushered his flock out of the room.

The man in overalls remained, pacing in front of
The Fisher Boy.
He was still swatting his hand with the rolled-up pamphlet. His gesture, repetitive and obsessive, called to mind Duncan Drummond kneading that stuffed cloth carrot at Ian’s house.

I kept hoping he’d move away from
The Fisher Boy
and investigate the watercolors of ships. “Let’s look at the ships,” I whispered to Roberto. “Until he moves.”

We had looked at the ships twice, but he was still in front of
The Fisher Boy.
I said, “I think he’ll be there all day, let’s just ignore him.” He edged away from us, mumbling something I couldn’t understand. He reeked of a combination of cigarettes and body odor—acrid, punishing your nostrils, odd among these paintings of water and clean, naked skin.

The Fisher Boy
was large, six feet by four feet, I’d say—and still youthful, of course. I’d grown older, but he’d stayed the same, nineteen or so, smiling as he held the giant halibut. “I had no idea this was here. I mean, I’ve seen this before,” Roberto said, “but I thought it must be someplace like the Louvre.”

The boy in this painting, Thomas Royall’s model, would be well over one-hundred today, knotted by arthritis and closed tight like a fist, in worse shape than my pitiful possible father.

“Is this your favorite?”

I almost jumped. The man with the long Jesus hair was addressing me. He’d asked a perfectly sensible question, but my guard went up, the way it does when a panhandler approaches.

“Is this your favorite?” His smile revealed teeth that were yellow as kernels of corn. “I like this painting a lot,” he said. He kept smiling, as though he’d just told a joke, and drew closer.

Roberto put his arm around my shoulder. I was suddenly alarmed at his gesture, seeing the pamphlets in this man’s overalls. His dyed hair was dull with grease, and black roots were growing from his scalp.

“This is a good painting,” he said, and he laughed, showing his broken teeth. “I like this painting very much.”