Now the coolness of air off the dammed lake and the swans’ vulgar brackish cries would touch us, and up high through a gap in a mythic black-leaved beech a pale ochre cornice of the museum would show, and a sunstruck section of the raised skylight with its pistachio-green leading. We would pass through the parking lot that made me covetous and ashamed, for at that time we had no car; pass along the gravel pedestrian path among children bringing bags of breadcrumbs to feed the swans; pass up the wide stairs where a few people in clean summer clothes would be snapping cameras and unwrapping sandwiches from waxpaper; and pass into the high religious hall of the museum itself. Admission was free. In the basement, indeed, free classes in “nature appreciation” were held in the summer months. At my mother’s suggestion I once enrolled. The first lesson was to watch a snake in a glass cage swallow a chattering field mouse whole. I did not go for the second lesson. The main floor was given over to scientific exhibits for the benefit of schoolchildren, stiff stuffed creatures and Eskimo and Chinese and Polynesian artifacts, case after case, categorized, dust-proof. There was a noseless mummy, with always a small crowd around him. As a child this floor filled me with dread. So much death; who would dream there could be such a quantity of death? The second floor was devoted to art, mostly local paintings that, however clumsy and quaint and mistaken, nevertheless radiated the innocence and hope, the hope of seizing something and holding it fast, that enters whenever a brush touches canvas. There were also bronze statuettes of Indians and deities, and in the center of the large oval room at the head of the stairs a naked green lady, life size, stood in the center of a circular black-lipped pool. She was a fountain. She held to her lips a scallop shell of bronze and her fine face was pursed to drink, but the mechanics of the fountain dictated that water should spill for ever from the edge of the shell away from her lips. Eternally expectant-with slight breasts, a loosely swirled cast glory of verdigrant hair, and one foot lightly resting on its toes-she held the shell an inch away from the face that seemed with its lowered lids and parted lips asleep. As a child I was troubled by her imagined thirst, and I would place myself so I could see the enduring inch that held her mouth from contact with the water. The water fell as a thin varying ribbon, pearlish green, spiraling as it left the scalloped edge, splaying before it struck the surface of the pond with a ceaseless gentle impact whose splash was sometimes flung by the subtle variations of accident as far away as the rim of the pond, deckling with a tiny cold prick, like the touch of a snowflake, my hand resting there on the black marble. The patience of her wait, the mildness of its denial, seemed unbearable to me then, and I told myself that when darkness came, and the mummy and the Polynesian masks and the glass-eyed eagles below were sealed in shadow, then her slim bronze handmade the very little motion needed, and she drank. In this great oval room, which I conceived as lit by the moon through the skylight above, the fall of water would for a moment cease. In that sense, then-in the sense that the coming of night enwrapped the luminous ribbon of downfalling water and staunched its flow-my story is coming to its close.
The irritable traffic pecks soothingly at the windows of our loft, those windows whose thin glass has so long needed dusting that their delicate grapitic grayness seems internal, a shade of cathedral glass. The cafeteria neon two stories be low rhythmically stains them rose. My vast canvases-so oddly expensive as raw materials, so oddly worthless trans muted into art-with sharp rectangular shoulders hulk into silhouette against the light. Your breathing keeps time with the slow rose. Your solemn mouth has relaxed in sleep and the upper lip displays the little extra racial button of fat like a bruise blister. Your sleep contains innocence as the night contains dew. Listen: I love you, love your prim bruised mouth whose corners compress morally when you are awake and scolding me, love your burnt skin ceaselessly forgiving mine, love the centuries of being humbled held in the lilac patina of your palms. I love the tulip-stem stance of your throat. When you stand before the stove you make, all un conscious, undulant motions with the upper half of your body like a drinking hen. When you walk naked toward the bed your feet toe in as if your ankles were manacled to those of someone behind you. When we make love sometimes you sigh my name and I feel radically confirmed. I am glad I have met you, glad, proud, glad; I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoons, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
Hey. Listen. Listen to me, lady. I love you, I want to be a Negro for you, I want to have a wised-up shoe-polish face taut as a drum at the cheekbones and wear great opaque anonymous-making sunglasses at three a.m. in a dim lavender cellar and forget everything but the crooning behind my ribs. But I cannot, quite. I cannot quite make that scene. A final membrane restrains me. I am my father’s son. In the late afternoons while the day hangs in distending light waiting to be punctured by the darkness that in arrows of shadow rides out from the tall buildings across the grid of streets, I remember my father and even picture-eyes milky with doubts, mustache indecisive and pale-his father before him, whom I never knew. Priest, teacher, artist: the classic degeneration.
Forgive me, for I do love you, we fit. Like a Tibetan lama I rise out of myself above the bed and see how we make, yin and yang, a person between us. But at the hour in the afternoon when my father and I would be heading home in the car, I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floor boards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer’s map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am beginning to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened. I consider the life we have made together, with its days spent without relation to the days the sun keeps and its baroque arabesques of increasingly attenuated emotion and its furnishings like a scattering of worn-out Braques and its rather wistful half-Freudian half-Oriental sex-mysticism, and I wonder, Was it for this that my father gave up his life?
Lying awake beside you in the rose-touched dark, I wake on a morning long ago, in Vera Hummel’s guest bedroom. Her room shone in the aftermath of the storm. My dreams had been a bent extension, like that of a stick thrust into water, of the last waking events-the final mile staggering through the unwinding storm; my father’s beating at the door of the dark house, knocking and whinnying and rubbing his hands together in desperation yet his importunity no longer seeming absurd or berserk to me but necessary, absolutely in my blind numbness necessary; then Vera Hummel yawning and blinking in the bleaching glare of her kitchen, her un bound hair fanning over the shoulders of her blue bathrobe and her hands tucked in the sleeves and her arms hugging herself as she yawned; and the limping clump of her husband descending the stairs to receive my father’s outpour of explanation and gratitude. They put us in their guest bedroom, in a postered sway-backed bed inherited from Mr. Hummel’s mother, my grandfather’s sister Hannah. It smelled of feathers and starch and was so like a hammock that my father and I, in underclothes, had to cling to the edges to keep from sliding together in the middle. For some minutes I kept tense. I seemed stuffed with the jiggling atoms of the storm. Then I heard the first rasp of my father’s snuffly little snore. Then the wind outside the room sighed mightily, and this thrust of sound and motion beyond me seemed to explain everything, and I relaxed.