At the age of fifty-two, he died. My mother told me later that his weight had dropped precipitously, that he’d turned yellow, that, at the end, he’d bled through his skin. And she told me a story about the last year of his life, a story about a woman no one in our family had known a thing about.
Back when he was a boy, back in that ancient time when Robert Antrim was driving over birdbaths and urns, Eldridge had known a girl who lived on a farm that neighbored his mother’s brother Tom’s property on the James River, near Amherst, Virginia. My uncle and this girl had ridden horses together. The girl fell in love with Eldridge, and she never forgot him. Like Eldridge, she grew up to live a difficult life in which she became an alcoholic and found herself alone in the world. In the year before he died, she somehow tracked him down. She came to Sarasota to be with him for whatever time they had left. She tried to get him to eat, and she measured out what he could drink. She was dying herself, of a brain tumor. She was there — ensconced in the apartment my uncle had shared with his mother — when, in 1992, my mother drove to Sarasota to say good-bye to her ex-husband’s brother, whom she liked to refer to, in the spirit of the old days, as Sam. The story goes that, at the moment Sam died, this woman none of us knew, who was alone in the apartment, saw — so she later reported to my mother, an ideal audience — bloody footprints walk across the living-room floor.
I never know what to make of these kinds of stories, or of the people who tell them. The truth of the matter is that I neither believe nor wholly discount the tale of the bloody footprints, in part because I think Eldridge should be allowed a memorable parting gesture, a gesture of — what? Loneliness? The woman from Virginia became the custodian of his ashes, which she carried home to Virginia with her. Shortly after that, she, too, died. My mother told me, years later, that this woman from the farm on the river in the foothills of the Blue Ridge had had a brother, a man who lived deep in the woods, and who was rumored to be a violent person. My mother supposed that Eldridge’s ashes might have fallen into the hands of this man.
After his brother’s death, my father drove up the Tamiami Trail to Sarasota and cleared out the apartment. There was no funeral. I asked my father what had become of Eldridge’s rifles and his records, his scuba and golf and tennis gear, and he told me that these things had been replaced by high-caliber handguns and case after unopened case of small-arms ammunition, which he, my father, had dug out of the bedroom closet and hauled back to the gun shop, where he’d convinced the owner to buy them back.
PART III
In the fall of 1988, six years after the close of my parents’ second marriage, four years before the death of Eldridge, my mother telephoned from Miami to inform me that her boyfriend, S., whom she had met in Alcoholics Anonymous, would soon be en route to New York. The reason for S.’s visit — his first since the mid-seventies, when, as a young man setting out to study painting and drawing, he’d fallen instead into drinking, and become, according to my mother, at least intermittently itinerant — was, my mother told me, to locate and, with any luck, authenticate a certain painting, a landscape that had, back when S. was an aspiring artist living in Manhattan, captivated his imagination.
“Painting? Authenticate?” I asked.
“He’ll have to tell you about it. It’s his trip,” she told me. Then she said, “Hang on a minute,” and there was a rustling sound — my mother’s open hand closing over the telephone’s mouthpiece — and I could hear her saying to S., in a stage whisper that revealed the faint nasality of her southern-Appalachian accent, “Go ahead and tell Don what you need to tell him. He’ll listen.”
S. spoke exceedingly slowly and quietly. I stood in the cramped and cluttered kitchen of the Upper East Side apartment that I shared, in those days, with my girlfriend, K. I pressed the phone receiver against my ear and heard S.’s soft, anxious voice, a voice made, as I think of it now, almost entirely of breath, of exhalations, saying, at the excruciating rate of about one word every ten seconds — I am exaggerating in fact, though not in spirit—“Oh,
“Mom says you’re coming to New York,” I said quickly, trying to use my own words the way an English bobby uses his nightstick to hurry vagrants along.
“New York …,” he said.
And I waited.
“ … Yes …,” he went on.
We waited. And eventually, gradually, infuriatingly, in bits and pieces, a story emerged — the story of the painting.
The painting, I learned, was old. It was rectangular in shape, maybe four feet tall and two feet wide. Its wooden frame was large and slightly ornate. As I understood things, the work belonged — or had once belonged — to a man who owned a brownstone in Chelsea, a boardinghouse, a building in which men lived in rooms. It is possible that this man had bought the painting somewhere in Europe or America. Or maybe he had simply found it.
Slowly, over the course of many minutes, my mother’s boyfriend in Miami told me that there had been another man on the scene in the downtown boardinghouse. For some reason, I am under the impression that this man was related to a friend of S.’s; he was, I believe, one of several cousins who at one time or another either had possession of or claimed to know something about the painting. Anyway this man remembered having seen, in an art magazine, a reproduction of the work. The cousin could not recall the name or the date of the magazine or even the content of the article. In fact, all the cousin remembered with any certainty, according to S., was the fact that the painting was “important.”
But in what way important? This was the question that was to become—had become — S.’s obsession.
For nearly fifteen years after he left New York, my mother told me, S. had wandered up and down the Eastern Seaboard, living in short-term lodgings, drinking, and working the kinds of temporary jobs — auto-body painting, sign painting, construction, and so on — that are often performed by people in his situation. At a certain point, he wound up back in Florida, where he was from, and where, after repeated attempts — in this he was like my mother; the movement from defeat to recovery was a bond between them — he had managed to get, and stay, sober. He had even begun, for the first time since dropping out of the School of Visual Arts in New York, to paint.
I have one of S.’s paintings from this period hanging on my living-room wall. Like all the works he made after joining AA and moving into my mother’s condominium in South Miami, it is signed with his middle name, Craig. It is small, more or less the size and shape of an LP record jacket, and it is, as were many of S.’s works, a landscape. But it is not painted from life. Or is it? It shows, in the middle distance, and to the right side, a steep-sided mountain, predominantly white and lavender in color, as if overgrown with flowering plants. In the upper-left foreground (hanging down from a corner, like decorative proscenium elements) are some delicately painted leaves that look almost prehistoric; far off to the right, against the mountain and a blue-white-lavender sky, a solitary, impossibly tall and narrow palm tree seems to be growing out of an impossibly deep and wide gorge. When I look at the painting, with its strange topography, its sliver of moon in an unnatural sky, and its dizzying, off-center palm tree, I feel there is something amiss in the relative sizes and positions of the objects. The effect is of a disturbance, either in the mind of the painter or in the world of the painting. And I feel, considering this disturbance, that the scene is missing something — a Tyrannosaurus rex, perhaps. Then I notice, in a way that has more to do with feeling than observation, the symmetry inside the disturbance, and I am aware that S., deliberately and skillfully, or maybe by accident, has painted a truly alternative world, which is to say a world that is different from ours not only by virtue of the imaginary elements of which it is composed but also in the laws of whatever nature governs the spatial relations between those elements.