I was a little surprised just how single-minded Gwenny was about her formalism. While I was looking at my own edge, looking at my paints, and arranging blue, green, and brown expressionist blobs as carefully as I could, Debbie came up to her and asked for help in painting a… cat. As I overheard and watched from my eye’s corner (while I worked on my own abstraction), I wondered if cats were not as forbidden here as horizon lines. But before the paper spread out on the counter next to mine, Gwenny stood beside Debbie’s shoulder and said, “Now, you’ve got your color. You’ve got your paper. You want to paint a cat. But basically, you’re going to put a shape on your paper — if it’s a cat shape, that’s certainly all right with me. But run your eyes all around the outside edge — go ahead, do it, look at it. Now think about the shape you’re going to put there. Is it going to be a little tiny shape like this…?” Gwen balled up her knuckle and put it down in one corner of the paper.
“No…!” Debbie laughed.
“Is it going to be a great big shape like this…?” With both hands Gwenny outlined a form even bigger than the paper.
“No!” Debbie protested; she was really a very serious girl. “I won’t get it all in!”
“Well, you just look at that outside edge, think about your cat shape. Then you put it down.”
Debbie bit her lip — and looked up, down, sideways. A moment later, she turned her paper around ninety degrees, so that it was the long way, and began to paint a large green tabby.
Soon I learned, though, that despite her formalism, Gwenny would acknowledge talent even when it came in late-romantic terms. I did the required abstract pictures and got a fair amount of praise for them. But a year later, without prelude, I turned to a figurative subject: my own, I thought. But the technique was pure Nagy, supplemented by what I’d learned of color modeling from a thick book that sat on my cousin Boyd’s desk in his refinished attic bedroom out in New Jersey. Illustration, by Andrew Loomis, was full of color charts and composition diagrams. It was called Illustration, but what Loomis really wanted to teach his readers was how to paint pin-up girls and athletes, neither of which, as picture topics, particularly excited me. Still, it was only a step away from the comic book art of Frazetta, Williamson, Krenkel, and Wood that was my first, visual love. So, in one corner of the busy art room, with just a little sketching that only one student noticed, I began a picture of a mighty-muscled potentate, seated on his throne, turned three-quarters face — which Loomis had explained was far more dramatic than a full front or full profile — chin on his fist and looking stern. His robes trailed the throne steps. Rising columns and smoking braziers loomed in the foreground.
“What are you drawing it first for?”
“Nothing.” But I was sketching it first because that’s what Loomis said you should do (emphasizing that you not put in much detail, but only basic forms), though I was sure Gwenny, who by now had also told us about “love of the materials,” wouldn’t have countenanced it.
The setting had come from one of Mr. Loomis’s harem scenes, odalisques banished and replaced by a hulking body builder I’d glimpsed inside a newsstand muscle magazine, where, somehow, the focus on the gleaming shoulders and shadowed belly had been sharp enough for me to notice on the great blocky fist that the lowering Hercules bit his nails. From my terror of homoerotic sexual discovery, in this school version I’d clothed him a bit better. But the background was Loomis’s arches, windows, and steps, only with his bevy of busty, gauzily-veiled maidens removed. The foreground columns and braziers were Loomis’s as well. (Probably he’d swiped both from Parish or Alma Tedema.) Emptied of Loomis’s sexual symbols (and replaced, yes, with my own), the picture was one I’d tried in my sketchbook half a dozen times over spring vacation back in Jersey. But now, in the sixth-floor art room, as I painted at my wholly borrowed amalgam of visual clichés, not only did the students crowd around, but finally Gwenny pushed up to see what I was doing and pronounced with some surprise: “That’s really very beautiful!”
From then on I was treated as someone talented at art. But I had been as prepared for her to be as dismissive of the whole counterfeit pastiche as she had once been of the horizon lines, the vanishing points, and the basic forms that, now hidden behind layers of gouache, had made that pastiche draftable.
Our science teacher was also an artist. Some years before, he’d married the woman who had been my teacher in the five-year-olds, magically changing her name (I never quite understood how) from Rubins to Robus.
If both last names had not been initial-R trochees, I probably would have understood the process. But for me, it was a transformation, rather than a replacement, and thus remained mysterious.
Hugo, as we called Mr. Robus, had a sculpture — Woman Washing Her Hair — in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I had pleaded to have him as my homeroom teacher (“to be put into his House,” in the school’s idiosyncratic jargon), and, with my friend Robert, I had been. In a way, Gwenny was too much a total surround for me to think of her as a favorite teacher — though she was certainly my most influential. But the title of favorite went to Hugo. He didn’t look in the least like John Nagy. He was clean shaven. When he taught, he always wore a white shirt and, usually, a tie. If the lab, with its wooden tables, glass-cased cupboards, and chrome gas jets, was warm, sometimes he left his sports jacket off. Whenever I came physically near him, I always thought of (but never once mentioned) Woman Washing Her Hair. Yet the little electric lights, the single-pole/double-throw switches, and the voltmeters and ampmeters Hugo taught us to wire up, the Lyden jars and Bunsen burners he taught us to operate, the test tubes, retorts, and pipettes he showed us how to fill and empty to precise measure, were all he ever spoke of. For me he was a scientist, and when I was around him, that’s what I wanted to be, too.
Oh, maybe, like Hugo, I’d have something in a museum somewhere, or a novel that you could buy in a bookstore, or a concerto that, while I was working with a hydrogen bubble chamber in an atomic lab someplace, was, even that same evening, being performed by a major symphony orchestra.
But science was my center.
Robert was among my best school friends — often my very best. Blond and round faced (yes, the strawberry custard confection), he was an inveterate nail biter and a general oddball. He tended to become splutteringly overexcited about things, and in many ways he was an immature and, often, an awkward boy. An early motor difficulty, which had caused him to clutch his pencil or pen in both hands when he wrote or to steady one hand with the other when he pointed at something, had settled into a slight clumsiness, most of the time unnoticeable. And he was as goodhearted a friend as you could want. Freddy the Pig books had been our early shared enthusiasm. Now it was Heinlein’s science fiction juveniles and amateur electronics. Our friendship dated from our first weeks together in the five-year-olds, when, on the first day of school, Robert had been the object of some truly vicious teasing. Sometimes I would pull away from him, but when I had been betrayed by Jeff or bullied by Jonathan (and Robert’s and my friendship had survived its own betrayals), Robert was whom I came back to.
In Robert’s penthouse apartment, just a block down from the school, a year before we got our own, I saw my first television set. The show we watched that evening was Burr Tillstrom’s Kukla, Fran and Ollie.