The Great Man (13 page)

“I imagine he broke a lot of hearts when he married you,” said Henry. He checked his watch by tilting his wrist slightly and stealing a quick glance.

“Of course not,” said Abigail quietly. His glance at the time, along with the question, had hurt her feelings. She tamped down her disappointment. It wasn’t Henry’s fault, it was her own. In the old days, she wouldn’t have minded. Maybe she had spent too much time alone with Ethan. She never should have gone to so much trouble to get her hair done and all that; now she felt foolish.

“Actually,” she said, her voice steady, “it broke some sort of tension, a question hanging in the air between Oscar and all the girls he flirted with. He was off the market, but that just made him somehow more interesting to them, so they wanted him even more. And they got him, or part of him anyway. I’m just conjecturing. I don’t know this for a fact.”

He stopped writing, looked up. “Why didn’t Oscar paint portraits of you? He obviously loved having you as a subject in those photographs.”

“I wouldn’t let him,” she said, wiping Ethan’s mouth with a napkin.

“Why not?”

“I didn’t like how it made me feel. I had to be quiet and try not to move while he looked at me. Some painters talk while they paint, and maybe he talked to his other models, but I could feel myself disappearing. I told him to stop and walked away, and that was the end of it. Later he asked why, and I tried to explain, but it was the one thing I think he never could understand. The real reason was, when he painted me, it was one of the rare times with Oscar when I felt—” She stopped talking abruptly. How could she be revealing these things? She was a private and dignified person, or at least she always had been, until now. She had been about to say that it was the only time Oscar made her feel like a purely sexual object, and she hadn’t liked that feeling at all.

The telephone rang then, and with relief Abigail got up and went out to the hall and picked up the cordless phone from its bay. “Hello?”

“Abigail,” came Maxine’s harsh voice. “Can you come down here this afternoon? That horrible Claire is coming to talk about something, and I think you should be here.”

“Claire!” said Abigail.

“Yes, I know,” said Maxine. “I need you to be whatever it’s called in duels, the person who hands the pistol over, then carts off the body or escorts the victor from the scene, whichever.”

“A second?” said Abigail. The last person she wanted to see was Claire, but she was not in the habit of standing up to Maxine. “What is this all about, Maxie?”

“Eccch, it’s these biographers,” said Maxine.

“One of them is here right now,” said Abigail.

“The black one or the white one?”

“The white one,” said Abigail. “Why is Claire coming?”

“Because I sent a note to her best friend. They’re both coming at three. Can you get here at a quarter of?”

“Why did you send a note to her best friend?”

“I want to explain all this in person. I don’t know whether Oscar ever told you about this, but if he didn’t, I can imagine that you’re going to need a little time to adjust to the news before she arrives.”

Abigail pinched the bridge of her nose between forefinger and thumb. She wanted to say, So there’s some big secret that I don’t know about but that you, my dead husband’s former mistress, and her best friend are all in on that you’re going to drop on me fifteen minutes before I have to protect you from her? Hell no!

“Gosh,” Abigail said instead. “Like I said, Henry Burke is here right now. I’m not sure I can get away.”

“Well, if you can’t, you can’t,” said Maxine in a tone that suggested that if Abigail couldn’t, she was a terrible person. “Anyway, I have to go.”

Abigail hung up the phone and went back into the kitchen. She was shaking.

“I’m so sorry, Henry,” she said with a thundercloud in her chest. “Where were we?”

He was peering through reading glasses at the old leather-bound diary of Oscar’s she had loaned him the week before. “Let’s see,” he said. “I had a couple of questions about June 1984. His childhood friend Morris Treitler totally falls off the radar screen after June seventeenth. There is no other reference to him anywhere in Oscar’s diaries or calendars. Did something happen?”

“Yes, but you’ll have to ask Moe about that yourself, because Oscar wouldn’t tell me, but look out, he’s an unreliable windbag. He lives down in SoHo, not too far from Maxine. Speaking of which.” She blew out air through her nose. “That was Maxine on the phone just now. She asked me to come down this afternoon. I’ll need to leave in about an hour.”

He looked up at her. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “That’s no problem.”

“Are you sure?” she said. “I know you blocked out this afternoon to work on the 1980s.”

“We can get as far as we can and then finish another time,” he said. “I can give you a lift if you’d like. I drove here.”

“Oh, no, I’m sure it’s out of your way.”

“I honestly don’t mind.”

“Well,” said Abigail, “gosh.”

About an hour later, after Abigail had put the remnants of the lunch away and cleaned up and discussed nearly a year of Oscar’s life day by day while Henry filled many notebook pages with jotted notes, Abigail and Henry led Ethan into the elevator and rode it down to the street, where Henry’s car was parked not too far from Abigail’s front door. Ethan moved sideways, scuttling crablike, staring up at the sky, his knees slightly bent, arms flapping gently from the elbows; Abigail was always afraid, now that she was old and not strong, that she wouldn’t be able to support him if he tripped, but somehow, he rarely did.

After they’d managed to fold Ethan into the backseat of the car like an enormous, gawky bird, they were off. Ethan shrieked for the first few blocks, disoriented by being in an unfamiliar car. Abigail made a constant shushing sound but didn’t look at him or touch him. Finally, he stopped and seemed to accept his new whereabouts. Henry took the West Side Highway down the island; Abigail leaned back in her seat and looked out the window at the rotting, monstrous, gorgeous old cruise-ship docks. She caught a glimpse of herself in the little mirror on the side of the car and remembered that her hair was freshly dyed and styled; she felt suddenly glad that she had gone to all the trouble of fixing herself up. Seeing Claire, even now, was going to be tricky enough without having to worry that she looked like a wreck of an old woman. She felt Ethan’s fingertips on top of her head, touching very lightly; then they were gone, quick as a spider. She looked back at him. He was looking out his window with an expression of aching blankness. His face looked exactly the same to her as it had at five, eleven, twenty-four. He hadn’t aged; he was still as perfectly beautiful as he had always been.

She had always believed, like most of the other mothers of the most deeply autistic children she had met, that he understood much more than he could show, but he was so completely locked in that his IQ was untestable. She was always careful to talk to him in a low, steady voice, because whenever he heard a sudden, loud, or piercing noise, he flapped his hands by his ears as if it caused him physical pain. It was almost exactly the same gesture Oscar had used when he thought someone was being stupid or nuts. When Ethan did it, she found it poignant, even now that he was forty-seven years old. When Oscar had done it, she had often laughed. Even though she had never fully understood his manifest, arrogant, and (in her opinion) unjustified impatience with his fellow man, she could see the humor in his impatient hands flapping by his ears, unless he was reacting to something she herself had said or done, in which case it hurt her feelings. She thought she should have been granted immunity from Oscar’s judgmental superiority, she who so devotedly forgave his transgressions against her and their marriage.

“For some reason, Ethan reminds me of a certain poem by a poet named Greta Church,” said Henry. “It starts like this: ‘There is a thing within a thing./ The thing itself is all it is./ The thing is just the thing it is,/ No more no less than what is it,/ It is the thing within the thing.’”

“Is that the whole poem?”

“No, it goes on, but that’s the part Ethan has been making me think of. It’s called ‘On looking at El Señor de la Misericordia in the Cathedral at San Cristóbal de las Casas, April 1949.’”

Abigail laughed. “What a mouthful of marbles! What exactly about Ethan reminds you of that?”

“Well,” said Henry. “Something about the way he stares so blankly, without seeing, his presence so mysterious but embodied. I think the poem is about some of the ways in which art has become different from religion.”

“Which is how?”

“People pray to a statue of El Señor in a glass box in the cathedral. He’s crawling on his hands and knees, bleeding, supplicating. Women especially. They stand in front of it and weep, and pray. I went all the way to Chiapas just to see it in the course of writing her biography. It’s completely different from how people look at a work of art. The second stanza goes, ‘Sometimes a thing is not a thing./ It’s something other than a thing,/ A thing that’s greater than a thing,/ Beyond, above, beside a thing/ It is the pure, the only Thing.’”

“That reminds me of a children’s nonsense rhyme.”

“It’s not nonsense,” said Henry. “The significance of the statue of El Señor is far greater than the thing itself. It is literally Jesus. Instead of being created aesthetically, it was made to provide an outlet for prayers. An artist’s rendering of Jesus is a work of art, in and of itself. She says it so much better in the poem. Modern people don’t pray and weep to artistic representations of Jesus as if they were Jesus himself. That’s one of the differences between religion and art.”

“In Judaism,” said Abigail, “iconography is frowned on. Oscar was very daring to paint figures, raised Orthodox the way he was. I think that was a big part of why he did it.”

Henry turned to look at her, blinking with the force of this revelation.

“I hope this isn’t some sort of an emergency, you having to go down to Maxine’s so suddenly,” he said. “I don’t mean to overstep, but is she all right?”

“Maxine?” said Abigail with a short laugh. “She’s never all right.”

Henry looked as if he weren’t sure how to respond to this.

“Actually,” she added with a touch of asperity, “she called me to come down because Claire and her friend will be there.”

Henry looked abstracted, as if he were remembering something. “Does this happen often?”

“This happens never.”

He pulled up in front of Maxine’s building. As Henry helped Abigail and Ethan out of his car, Abigail had the sense that he was dying to be invited up to witness this historical moment. She thanked him with enough finality to forestall any such request, then guided Ethan across the sunstruck pavement to ring Maxine’s buzzer. After Katerina’s garbled squawk issued from the box, Abigail pushed the door open and waited for the elevator to make its lumbering way down.

Maxine stood at the door of the loft, waiting for her. “Well, hello,” she said with her usual brusqueness. “Let’s sit at the kitchen table.” She stumped over to the table. Abigail followed her and parked Ethan on a chair. He was gently shrieking from the unpleasantness of being moved around from place to place.

“I’m having a bit of whiskey,” Maxine announced. She took down two glasses and poured a shot into each. She set one glass in front of Abigail. Abigail looked at it. This was unusual. Normally, Maxine failed to offer anything to eat or drink, knowing that if her sister-in-law wanted something, she would just get it herself.

Abigail took a tentative draught, as the nineteenth-century novelists called it, a word Abigail had always loved. She put her other hand over Ethan’s, which was trembling on the edge of the table. He had gone abruptly quiet. Her baby, her little bird. His eyes were as blank and his face as pure as those classical Greek sculptures of young men. She wondered for the gazillionth time what went on in there. The whiskey tasted like medicine she needed. “So,” she said, “what is all of this about?”

“It’s about the painting called
Helena,
” said Maxine.

“
Helena,
” said Abigail. “One of Oscar’s best paintings.”

“Yes, except for the fact that Oscar didn’t paint it.”

“Of course he painted it,” said Abigail. “What are you talking about?”

“I made a bet with him. I won and he lost. It was during a big argument we were having in a booth in the Washington Square Diner in 1978. Oscar took a catsup packet and a thing of saltines and squooshed them out onto the tabletop and said he thought that mess was as good as the average abstract painting. I told him he was full of shit. The upshot is that I ended up betting him a thousand dollars that I could paint a painting in his style, a portrait of a lady, and he couldn’t paint one in mine. To prove that it was worthy, it had to be accepted into the other one’s next show.”

Abigail laughed. “So what happened?”

“Oscar painted a train wreck that my dealer at the time rejected in no uncertain terms, and I painted
Helena.
It went in his next show, paired with
Mercy,
since his dealer thought they were a matched set. Claire’s friend Lila Scofield bought both paintings and had them reframed, and the framer noticed my mark on the back of
Helena.
He asked Lila about it. Lila recognized it and called me to ask me what my signature was doing on Oscar’s painting, and foolishly I told her the whole story, although I could have lied. She was upset, understandably, but she decided not to tell, to keep the painting and keep her mouth shut. We agreed that to do otherwise would just be silly, but I did offer to reimburse her for the damned thing. She refused, and that’s the last either one of us has said about it in all these years, at least I thought so, but now it turns out she told Claire.”

Abigail rubbed both hands over her face. “Why are they coming here?”

“When these biographers started poking around, I wrote a note to Lila and asked her to give me a call. I don’t want her spilling any beans. But Claire called me instead, which was unpleasant in the extreme. Goddamn it, I cannot stand that woman.” Maxine fished her cigarettes from her pocket and lit one.