Forty-One #2
And then she was in the doorway with a stack of records and two jars of warm soup with two spoons.
She sat on the porch, facing away from me, and as she ate her soup, I could see the back of her head through the window.
I set my jar and spoon aside for later, put on the first of the records.
The sound began: striking, unfamiliar, a house with its windows lit at night.
I mixed the blond of Elise’s hair and turned it into a patch of sunlight.
Later, after hours of violins, I painted the first leaf, and more of them, and trumpet flowers, and ferns.
Days went by and I painted more plants and flowers, the hibiscus and gingers from my childhood, coffee berries and vines from the Conservatory of Flowers, oaks and palms, I couldn’t stop, I filled all the bare places with foliage and blossoms. All but for the area around the blue chair, still empty, as though I’d kept it open for a figure to sit there, even though I hadn’t thought I’d include any people.
I sat and I waited to know who it would be.
The sun was low and the shadows were long and I closed my eyes and there he was, in profile, talking about brushstrokes and light: Papa.
That night I took down my box of mementos from the back of the high shelf in the kitchen and I found my small collection of photographs.
I practiced drawing the line of his nose, the curves of his forehead and chin.
The next morning I sketched him out on the canvas, his legs crossed, leaning against the chairback, a slight smile, his body tilting upside down from the left side of the canvas with his arm outstretched, as though presiding over the painting, as though orchestrating it.
Now, Claire turns to me from where she’s standing. Her own arm outstretched, her palm flat, suspended close to his face. “I never thought I’d see him again, but here he is.”
“Does it have a name?” Sebastian asks. He’s stuck to Bernard’s side, wary of his older cousins despite Nathalie’s overtures and the way Elizabeth tugs at his hand.
“Meet Me in the Garden,” I say.
“Meet Me in the Garden,” Bernard repeats, and his eyes close for a moment, a flash of something complicated across his face, and I want to ask him about it, want to know if the name means to him what it means to me—a full life, with all of its attendant heartbreaks, each painful, wrong thing sidled up against the right ones—but Espen’s saying, “We’re planning a whole show around it. In New York, in the spring.”
“How will you get it there?” Al asks.
“Art handlers,” Elise says. “Experts, don’t worry. We won’t take any chances.”
I get very close to Bernard. I say, “You got swept up in something.”
“Oh,” he says. “We don’t have to talk about things like that tonight, honey.”
“It’s all right,” I say. “I want to know.”
Very low, he says, “It brought me back to Omaha Beach. All those dead young soldiers. We collected the tags for each of them, so we could have a record of who died. Something in the title of your painting reminded me of those boys, in Heaven now.”
“Bernard,” I say. “You never told me.”
He pats my shoulder, as though to comfort me, says, “There’s no way to describe it.”
“It moves me, that you’d think about that.”
“But it’s not what you intended?”
I start to tell him that I don’t know if I believe in Heaven.
That a garden can be anywhere where something grows and dies and changes, anywhere there’s a little beauty to cling to.
But memory overwhelms me. Bernard coming home from the war, barely a man yet, injured in body and soul and never speaking a word of it.
Claire, watching him when he wasn’t looking, her young husband, so good, so human, part of him gone and never coming back.
He’s holding my elbow. “You feeling all right?”
“A little too much to drink maybe,” I say, even though I can only remember having a glass or two.
“It’s warm in here,” he says. “Why don’t you sit down for a little while?
” He steps aside, and there’s my chair, empty and waiting.
I sit, and we’re boarding the train together—Bernard and Claire.
Al and Adele and Baby Rudy. Lionel and me.
We crowd into the colored car, so many of us on it leaving home for good, and the train whistle sounds, and we lurch into motion.
I was pregnant, I was terrified, I was trying not to think about it.
I had the window seat and I watched as we crossed the river, as we left New Orleans.
Thickets of bare-branched trees. Crows over tractors.
Small bodies of bright blue water. Three chairs lined up on a dock.
A jolt of movement from a freight train passing close.
An open field. A lone egret in a swamp. A graveyard with white tombstones.
Rickety shacks and rust-covered outbuildings.
“Will you take him for a little while?”
Adele eased a sleeping Rudy off her lap, her dress flattened by his weight. I held him and she stood and stretched, swayed with the movement of the train car, put her hands on Al’s shoulders to steady herself.
We ate the sandwiches we’d packed, bought overpriced Coca-Colas from the cart the porters brought up to the colored car.
No dining car available to us. No hot food or glasses of water.
And the sky grew black and I couldn’t sleep.
My family, heads against shoulders or in laps, and me, forehead against the cold window.
The train stopped in San Antonio and passengers shuffled off and on and closed their eyes and settled in and still I didn’t sleep, not as the train waited for what felt like an hour or two, and then we moved again and it was the movement that I needed, and I woke up to a pink sunrise over the desert and Claire was looking at it, too.
For hundreds and hundreds of miles, the desert.
Alabaster rock and scrub. Mountains against mountains like ghosts in the distance.
We drank Coca-Cola instead of coffee, our only choice.
Relieved ourselves in the loud, reeking restroom, urine and soiled paper on the floor.
We stopped in Sanderson, where there were a few old Western buildings and a water tower and that was all.
Moving again. Adele and Rudy pored over a children’s book.
Claire and Bernard and Al played cards, invited me to join but I was fixed to the window.
The thick clouds and the faraway sun. The alienness of the landscape.
Nothing and nothing and then a tree with bright yellow pom-poms, or a strange cactus bearing a single flower, taller than a man, at its center.
Out of nowhere, a buck with giant antlers stood statue still and staring.
Cold seeped through the windows. I had hunger pangs, stiff limbs, a sore neck.
An intensifying fear over all that we were leaving—the lushness, the city, the music, the color.
I turned around to see the others. I was sure we’d made a terrible mistake. “Where are we going?” I asked, heart racing.
They looked up from their card game. They registered my panic.
“To Los Angeles,” Bernard said. “Where the pictures are made. Right by the ocean.”
“A lot of nothing in the middle,” Adele said. “That’s to be expected.”
Claire said, “It’ll be all right. You’ll see. Just one more night on this train.”
And then Lionel, from his seat on the other side of Adele—I hadn’t thought he was listening—turned his beautiful, bruised face and said, “There’s always something worthwhile at the edge of things.”
“My little brother, the philosopher,” Al said, and Lionel ignored him, lit a Chesterfield and reached to hand it to me, and we hurtled on across the miles, finally stopped at Union Station, the end of the line, stepped foot in California, as unfamiliar as another planet, carried our few chosen possessions through the grand hall and found the exit, where it was still the dark early morning hours and an old man leaned out of the window of a truck and said, “Bonjou. Is that my young cousin Bernard and his beautiful fanmi?” Adele and Rudy rode in the cab of the truck, the rest of us in the open bed with the suitcases, and I slept on the sofa of Bernard’s cousin’s house, and then in that first small apartment’s second bedroom with Rudy, as my stomach swelled, as I waited for Cyril to come find me, but I got the phone call instead.
Hattie, voice barely above a whisper, a few short sentences, all that she could do. “Where should we bury him?”
“At home,” I said. “St. Louis number three. He’d want to be with you.
” Too pregnant by then to take the train ride back for the funeral, promising to send the baby for summers in a few years.
Hanging up and placing my hand on my belly.
Not even born and already such loss. Now twenty years have passed.
Clément looks like his father and like Hattie and like me.
He’s standing in my studio, he’s standing right in front of me, he’s offering me his hand.
He pulls me to my feet and back into the moment, the music and the laughter, my colorful, colossal, riotous painting, my friends’ and my family’s voices.
I’m among them again. And these people I love—with their high heels and loafers, alcohol breath and faded lipstick, their cigarettes burning down and their shining bracelets and their unbuttoned shirt collars and their hands and their faces, every one of which I know by heart—all of them are here with me, looking at what I’ve made.
The night wears on and they’re still looking.