Bespoke Clown
“I’m friggin’ bored.” Jude
Kowalski gazed skyward, puffing her doughy, pockmarked cheeks.
Tessa Scott frowned.
“Tessa? You mad at
me?” Jude reached for her friend, who neatly avoided her touch. “I hate
Hartford.” She picked distractedly at some fresh eruption on her face.
“Cut it out, man!”
Tessa snapped, immediately regretting her sharp retort. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
Jude, rattled, folded
her hands onto her lap. “S’okay.”
“What do you think?”
Tessa shot back. “Hartford’s the last place on earth I want to be. I hate Connecticut.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Jude
moaned. “You’re never bored. Why would—?”
Tessa shot back, “It’s
not my friggin’ fault you’re bored!”
Stricken, Jude stared
down at her mannish hands, willing them to reveal the reason for her friend’s
pique.
Tessa shrugged off
Jude’s dismay. Only slightly apologetic, she recalled their first adventure.
“God, remember that friggin’ dog in New Britain? Oh man, you were freaked out!”
“Ma-a-an. He
was friggin’ e-e-evil,” Jude drawled,
relieved.
Short of carfare on a
long holiday weekend in early October, the two high school seniors had made the
nearly nine-mile trek on foot to an art museum in New Britain, the next town
over from Hartford. At Tessa’s instigation, they’d plotted a route, packed a
few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and started out at dawn. Their only
misstep brought them uncomfortably close to a nervy Alsatian pacing his domain,
his matted coat oilier than the floor of the gas station, his bared teeth the
color of old piano keys.
The museum turned out
to be old-fashioned stucco that looked like somebody’s grandmother’s house. It
housed a sizable collection of paintings by artists of the Hudson River School.
“You hated that
stuff,” Jude laughed.
“That stuff” was
nature portrayed as gaudy backdrops, what Tessa called calendar art. Her
preference was for the modern, like Rothko’s dark abstractions that made her
cry, or the art that pissed off her dad and made her laugh, like Andy Warhol’s Mona Lisa. She loved it all, every
radical thumb that flicked at the nose of convention.
Tessa grinned. “It
scored points with Miss Merz, am I right?” She mocked the art teacher’s prim
New England lilt. “Albert Bierstadt was a painter of such grandeur. What divine
brushstrokes….” Tessa twirled an imaginary brush in Jude’s face.
There was that
irrepressible shriek, followed by the spluttered coughing sound Jude made when
she laughed. Jude’s friendship laid bare such ferocious intensity that had
Tessa not been so lonely it would have put her off. Instead, Tessa laughed
along with her friend.
Again, Jude trailed
her fingertips lightly across her face, exploring the scars.
“Don’t do that, okay?
You’re bumming me out.”
“Sorry,” Jude
mumbled.
Tessa searched for
distraction among the unruly flame-colored daylilies fanning the porch stairs
the girls sat squarely upon. It was still a novelty for Tessa—roomy old houses
and the wicker furniture that creaked with exhaustion. A silent fusillade of
wildflowers spilled across the worn selvage of the unkempt lawn.
Tessa lived with her
father in a small, furnished apartment on Laurel Street, a few blocks from the
high school where she’d spent her senior year.
On the Lower East
Side of Manhattan, where she’d grown up, front porches and backyards were as
scarce as swollen bank accounts. What prevailed in the 1950s were drab
tenements, tough housing projects, Italian pizzerias, Jewish delicatessens,
Ukrainian coffee shops, and bars. There was Tompkins Square Park—a place she’d
avoided at the best of times—despoiled by the career homeless, as her dad
called them, and paper-bag winos. He had equal disdain for the other bums, the
artists and poets—the beatniks—who had put down roots and whom Tessa secretly
admired. “Get a job,” he’d mutter or, “Get a haircut.” There had been talk
about fixing up the park, but the neighborhood families were less bothered by
its derelict band shell. They wanted something done about encroaching crime,
rival teen gangs. They wanted to leave their airless apartments, return to park
benches of a summer evening, and linger among desultory conversations with
their fellow escapees. They wanted their park back.
On any enervating
summer afternoon, Tessa, her skin glazed with sweat, languished on a stoop in
the projects, where she’d lived since birth. She watched through letterbox eyes
as drugs were passed in narrow doorways on Avenue D. Older boys jimmied the
hydrants, drawing sunburnt kids out of nowhere. They fanned out across the
street, braving the icy cold torrent. A dare would prompt one of the braver
among them to bodily redirect the deluge to an open basement window until the
building super rained his fury upon them, scattering them like cockroaches at
first light. Hartford had none of that. Tessa couldn’t get good pizza, not like
in New York, a whole pie for under a buck. For beer, Connecticut had package
stores. A hero back home was a grinder in Hartford.
The student
population at Hartford Public High had taken her by surprise. Arriving on
opening day, she was struck by the scramble of Negro teens discharged from a
convoy of yellow school buses. Her old public high school in Manhattan had been
fully integrated. Back home, some of the students at the High School of Art and
Design—including her best friend, Hugh—had adopted Black as a self-descriptive term. Buses were for public
transportation. Both the financially underendowed and the students who were
better off coalesced from neighborhoods near and far for the purpose of
generating some kind of art. Martin Luther King’s dream was not quite the
reality on Forest Street in Hartford. Apart from Miss Merz’s class, which
suffered from twentieth-century blindness, there was nothing close to that at
Hartford Public High School: no painting, no photography class, no sculpture
studio, no fashion or advertising design. Woodworking was a “boys only” class, relegating
Tessa to home economics, a subject she found laughable.
All expectation of
fitting in was abandoned early on. She’d been thrust into her senior year in a
strange school. Her clothes were wrong. She spoke with a funny accent she
refused to modulate. She unabashedly declared herself an artist. Friendly
overtures to Negro girls in her homeroom were met with wary amusement. The
madras-and-Weejuns crowd gave her wide berth. Asylum Hill seemed a perfect name
for the neighborhood.
A big girl with a
coarse complexion was seated next to her in art history class. The girl cackled
with delight when a flippant comment escaped from Tessa, causing Miss Merz to
pucker with irritation. “Jude, we’ll have none of that,” the teacher warned,
not unkindly. Then, addressing the transplant, “You’ll find there is culture
beyond New York City, Miss Scott.” Tessa’s face had burnt brighter than the
Bierstadt sunset projected onto the pull-down screen at the blackboard. But the
incident brought her the admiration of the few defectors from preppy she’d
found there.
She’d left her old
schoolmates and neighborhood pals back in New York. It was also where she had
left her mother.
Tessa was an only
child. Jude never asked, and Tessa never revealed her mother’s violent
outbursts, rages that came from nothing ever being good enough. Her mother had
a flirtatious side that bordered on hysteria. Tessa suspected she had been
unfaithful. There were times when her mother fell into an almost sweet
confusion, as if she didn’t know who or where she was exactly. The three of
them were like strangers thrown together, and for a brief while they steadied
their little boat until the tranquil sea turned savage again. Avoiding the
flare-ups, Tessa sought refuge in her journal, her art, and the many galleries
and museums in the city. Her father put in even longer hours at his antiques
repair shop on First Avenue near the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. Sometimes Tessa
would walk the few blocks after school, spending the rest of the day into
evening at her father’s side.
He sometimes talked
about leaving New York. Tessa had assumed he’d meant the three of them.
Finally, in 1963, there was a citywide newspaper strike that lasted one hundred
days. After that, leaving was all he talked about. Tessa imagined it was the
real reason he abandoned his idle business, taking a job with a decorator in
West Hartford. He never talked about his wife. If Tessa asked about her mother,
he’d reply, “You’re better off not knowing.”
All of that was behind
her, allowing a dozy intermission on a muggy afternoon in June, the air so warm
you could hear the trees drone. It was Tessa’s first summer away from New York.
Liberty in a strange city stretched ahead for a few weeks longer, until the
summer job started.
Jude’s life was just
as it had always been. She was living in the house where she’d been born, still
mired in submissiveness on a splintered porch. Her older brother, an abstract
painter and radical by necessity, had left for Canada just before Tessa
arrived, before the draft caught up with him. “An escape artist,” Tessa once
joked, and then took care never to mention him or the Vietnam War again. Jude
had a few friends before Tessa came along, but they fell back as Jude embraced
Tessa. They could not compete with a girl from New York.
The houses on Jude’s
street wore their benign neglect without rancor. Only its inhabitants
differentiated Jude’s home from the neighbors’. Her family was white. The
neighbors were black, apart from a few elderly Poles and Lithuanians who lived
further from Farmington Avenue. The houses set back from the street shared a
common fall from grace that demanded they respect each other’s privacy. They
did not mix. There was no need.
A command, gruffly
served in Polish, broke their reverie. “English, Mama,” Jude sighed. She took
the straw hat leveraged above her from the thick, purposeful fingers of her
mother. Mrs. Kowalski did not like Tessa, granting her only the thin evidence
of a smile. It did not sit well that Tessa’s mother had stayed behind in New
York. Jude’s Polish family was die-hard Catholic. “She’ll like you once she
gets to know you,” Jude offered. When the girls bent over homework or hauled
oversize sketchbooks to their laps, Jude’s mother appeared, wordlessly shoving
her daughter’s bedroom door open. If Tessa stayed overnight, Mrs. Kowalski was
sullenly even more uncommunicative in the morning. It was disconcerting. Mrs.
Kowalski made Tessa uneasy, though Jude tried to reassure her. It was the
language thing. Summer brought the girls out into the open, out of Jude’s
airless bedroom under the eaves.
From the start, Jude
followed Tessa’s lead, though her ardent nature was bothersome at times. They’d
had other outings, closer to home. Many Saturday afternoons were passed in the
cool marble interior of The Wadsworth Atheneum. It was graveyard quiet there. They
wandered the empty galleries unnoticed, heads close, brooding over their
reflections in a shallow pool under a statue of Venus in an open sunlit court.
They huddled giggling in a dark corner, mimicking the marble statue of a couple
of scowling women. “Let him perish!” they’d squeal, tearing up the staircase
behind it.
“Caked-on blustery of
dusty history.”
Jude often recited
aloud fragments from the poems she wrote but never showed Tessa. She’d nod in
earnest as Tessa excitedly described the meaning of a certain minimalist
artist’s installation—the “approximate invisibility” of the piece—but Tessa
failed at enlightening Jude as to the deeper meaning of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent
tube. Compared to the museums in Manhattan—apart from contemporary bright
spots—Tessa found the Wadsworth antiquated. She missed the welter of emotions
that sprang up when she’d stumbled upon the ordered chaos of a Twombly at the
Modern, both disturbed and aroused by a swan’s ecstasy.
They sketched
outdoors in Elizabeth Park. Tessa showed Jude how to abstract the landscape
around them. They had explored all three floors of Mark Twain’s pink-and-red
Victorian Gothic mansion that rose above Farmington Avenue. Smaller, but no
less interesting, was the cottage around the corner, which had once belonged to
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Writers Tessa had devoured as a sophomore back home.
“We’re reading it for English this year,” a senior classmate offered. “Uncle
Tom’s Cabinet.” Hartford was a desert she’d not have to endure much longer.
Tessa stabbed a loose
floorboard with her foot. Unthinking, she pouted. “What did you ever do without
me?”
Jude, eager for
validation, gushed, as if on cue, “M-m-m, my groovy friend.” She gauged
Tessa’s irritated squint. “I meant groovy in a good way.” And then helplessly
she blurted, “I mean, special. You’re my beautiful, special friend.”
Tessa rolled her
eyes, mitigating discomfort. She took in Jude’s lank, waist-length hair, an
ambivalent dishwater blonde cascade. Jude wore apology like a shroud: the
thickset Polish physique, shoulders like sagging house beams, and a down-turned
mouth that even laughter could not right. Tessa knew—because Jude had told her
often enough—that she despaired of ever having the kind of attention Tessa got.
Jude’s hooded reptilian stare, her complexion unfairly scarred by genetics were
constant reminders.
They were as unalike
as Lucille Ball and her television sidekick, Ethel. Tessa knew they made an odd
couple in the school hallways—she with her trim, athletic build, unconventional
dress, and a disposition that drew guys to her like rats to cheese. Tessa’s
female classmates regarded her with suspicion, taking in her blonde ponytail, a
barefaced, flawless complexion, and a laugh that struck like lightning.
Tessa wanted to
scream, “Don’t blame me if I’m pretty. I hate it, hate all the friggin’
attention. I hate every friggin’ minute of it. Guys don’t take me seriously. No
one takes me seriously.”
Instead, she softened
her rebuttal. “You were born here at least. You weren’t dragged kicking and
screaming.” She snatched the straw hat from Jude’s head, spinning it with her
index finger. “You’re really talented, you know, Jude. You get to be treated
like an artist. Everyone drools over your work. Miss Merz thinks you’re a
genius already.”
Jude shrieked, lunging
for her hat. They wrestled like boys, rolling into the wicker chairs, shoving
them aside in their tussle. Jude straddled Tessa, thrusting her meaty hands
against Tessa’s thin shoulders.
“Get off!” Tessa
shouted, grimacing. Red-faced, she rose sharply, clapping her hands to her
thighs. She tugged at her denim cutoffs. “Right. I have an idea.”
“What?” Jude asked.
Tessa grinned. “Trust
me. It’s outta sight.”
They were the first
ones through the entrance to the Wadsworth Museum the following morning.
“Shush,” Tessa whispered. She pushed Jude from
the smaller gallery where the new acquisitions were displayed.
Jude, surprised by
Tessa’s urgency, yelped, “For Pete’s sake, don’t have a cow.”
“Cool it.” Tessa
urged under her breath.
“You’re cr-a-a-zy,”
Jude snorted. She drew a lank of hair into her fist. She scowled at the ends
for a moment before tossing it behind her. “What’s this all about?”
Tessa coughed. “Let’s
go outside.”
Jude allowed herself
to be hurried past the tapestries and through the Great Hall.
At some distance from
the museum entrance on Main Street, Tessa breathlessly repeated her idea. “This
will blow your mind,” she said. They would create a painting, frame it, and
hang it in the museum.
“We’re artists,
right? Ready for anything? Ready to be a little daring?” Tessa urged.
Jude nodded soberly,
still unconvinced. “But we could get in trouble, big trouble. What about the
guards? You gonna hammer a nail—?”
That was going too
far, Tessa had to admit, banging holes in museum walls. But she was running out
of options. Downtown had taken only a few weeks of exploration before she’d
covered all the historical sights. The hoopla surrounding a newly completed
glass building they called “The Boat” seemed overblown considering where she’d
come from. She’d be working downtown soon enough, filing medical records for an
insurance company. Constitution Plaza had a desolate, crypt-like feel away from
Main Street’s older department stores. She’d sauntered around the East Side
neighborhood of her school back home in Manhattan and encountered the likes of
Marilyn Monroe and Suzy Parker in Bloomingdale’s. She’d cut class sometimes to
wander alone in Greenwich Village and check out the troubadours in Washington
Square Park. Downtown Hartford got pretty old, pretty quick.
They planned their
moves carefully. They made many return trips noting the uninterested museum
guards’ whereabouts. Because it was summer, a heavy overcoat would only draw
attention, so they had to devise a way to sneak in a watercolor portrait of a
clown, loosely painted on a thick sheet of Arches that they had gingerly
removed from a 9 x 12 block.
Jude balked at making
it into an abstract. “I’m painting it, let me do it.”
Tessa saw the bigger
picture, leaving it to Jude. Tessa signed it Maurice Rageau. They framed it with the simplest frame they could
find at the art supply store, attaching picture wire to the back. It looked
professional enough. It fitted nicely under an old paint smock Jude would wear
buttoned to the neck. They practiced roping Jude’s waist with a perfect knot
that would loosen with a flick of the wrist. They purchased gummed hangers, testing
them to hold the modest weight of the picture.
The final touch was
the label. Tessa typed it on an old Remington in Jude’s father’s office, in the
pharmacy he managed at the top of the hill where Farmington Avenue veered off
Asylum. Jude’s father was always pleased to see Tessa. Whenever they stopped in
they were treated to hamburgers at the lunch counter, scarfing them down with
cherry cokes. He enjoyed their giggling presence and did not interfere as Tessa
pecked out the words: The Clown, by Maurice Rageau.
On a quiet weekday,
under a dull sky, they set out for the museum. For a brief moment they stood
before the turreted stone castle, reconsidering. Jude’s heartbeat caused her to
stammer.
“We, we, shoulda done
a dress rehearsal.” She gripped the bulk she was carrying, feeling for the knot
atop her stomach.
Tessa breathed in
deeply, steadying their resolve. “If you snooze you lose, Jude. We can do
this.”
Moments later they
flew from the galleries, heading straight for the main entrance. They slowed
past the lone guard who had not seen them arrive. He nodded to the familiar
sight of a couple of teenage girls.
Afterward, they tore
across Bushnell Park, charged with adrenaline. The sight of the palatial sprawl
of the Capitol building stopped them. They were joyous, sweating profusely.
Relief came in a swell of laughter.
“We did it! We
friggin’ did it!” they chorused.
Breathlessly, Jude
ripped off the ridiculous smock, throwing it to the ground. They punched the
air with a fresh round of laughter. Collapsing onto the grass, they gripped
their stomachs.
“Outta sight,” Tessa
wheezed. “Now, aren’t you glad we did it? For real, man.”
Jude turned on her
side and gazed at her friend. “I am,” she said giddily, “I’m glad you’re
my special friend. Love you,” she whispered, “for real.”
“Love ya, too,” Tessa
laughed.
Jude stretched her
arm, a languid motion that landed her fingers above Tessa’s face. “I mean, I
love you,” she breathed as she trailed her fingers across Tessa’s cheek.
They walked home
without speaking. Jude left her at Laurel Street. Tessa shouted after her,
“Later!” Jude raised her arm in a half-hearted wave, and without turning,
continued along Farmington Avenue.
A week later Tessa
was flipping through her assigned carousel. She pulled cards on file with names
and numbers of those listed as deceased. It was deadly boring, but she’d make a
little money for her return to Manhattan in September. Everything was going as
planned. She’d work in an art gallery on Madison Avenue that sold posters. She
would be little more than a glorified stock girl, but she would attend evening classes
at the Art Students League. She and a former school classmate in Manhattan
planned to move into a basement apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village.
She’d be seeing her old friend Hugh soon enough.
When her father
asked, Tessa told him that Jude was getting ready to move to San Francisco,
where she would take classes at the Art Institute.
“We’re both busy, you
know. But we speak on the phone,” she said.
Jude’s father had
told him another story.
Tessa’s dad had
stopped at the lunch counter at the pharmacy for a coffee. “What happened with
you two?” he asked Tessa. “Mr. Kowalski said you don’t come around anymore. He
said Jude is brokenhearted, like you guys had a falling-out or something?”
Tessa felt ashamed and
angry at the same time. “She’s busy,” she said. “We both are.”
In the days after
their escapade, Tessa had planned to call Jude but one thing or another got in
the way. Then she started her summer job. She never told anyone about the
museum caper. Once or twice she thought about walking over there on her lunch
hour to see if the painting was still hanging. She never did. Not because she
thought she might run into Jude. Because she was busy.
In the week before
Tessa was leaving, a letter came for her from Jude. Her father asked about it.
Was Jude already in San Francisco? Yes, Tessa said. But that was untrue. The
letter contained a poem Jude had written. It was typed, Tessa could tell, on
the old typewriter at the pharmacy. Tessa’s hands shook as she read it in the
privacy of her bedroom. It was a bold poem. Tessa was surprised at how good it
was, but it struck her like a knife, tearing at her insides. “Some clowns are
worth tears,” it said. “You get what you ask for.” The letter was signed,
“Love, Jude.” Tessa crumpled the paper tightly, unable to tear it up.
Tessa thought about
packing. She would get what she asked for. She wouldn’t have to think twice.
She would be all right. Freewheelin’ soon, like the song said.
