Jean knew she’d had to
do something. She felt paralyzed, her creative drive suspended, out of reach.
She needed to restart full throttle. At that moment she faced a roomful of
wide-eyed criticism glossed as patronizing curiosity.
They didn’t fool Jean.
The artificial sweetness was as obvious as the tiny chunks of canned fruit
visible in a Jell-O mold. She tugged orange braided ties at the neck of a
turquoise crepe peasant shirt. A worn denim maxi flared around her ankles,
above bare feet shod in strappy sandals on cork platform soles. She loved the
indifferent comfort of clothes that said: “I am an artist.” She fiddled with a
tightly curled strand of shoulder length hair that glowed like a burnished
penny and that made her feel especially apart from them.
Her mother-in-law
smoothed a non-existent wrinkle on her trim salmon colored skirt. “Why now,
darling?” she managed through gritted teeth. Waiting for an answer from Jean,
she fidgeted a string of pearls from the neck of her ivory Shantung blouse.
“Oh, you know, it was,
um, already in the works before, um, before Fred’s….” Jean chattered
helplessly. Schottenstein was kind of forced on her when they married. “No, I
don’t mean forced, you know….” She meant she’d had no choice. Or at least she
was unaware of a choice. “It was quite an ordeal. To get my name back, I mean,
going through the courts and all.”
“So, nothing is wrong
then? Frederick approves?” Jean followed the manicure. Fingernails, the color
of the inside of a seashell, rose to a powdered cheek. Her mother-in-law’s hand
clenched, and then relaxed as she patted her dark, lacquered hair layered into
an immoveable shag.
Frederick sidled up
beside his wife, patting Jean’s head like an indulgent parent warns a
sharp-tongued child. “No, nothing is wrong Rona. She means her artwork, her
paintings, how she signs them.”
The company of
Frederick’s aunts and uncles, niece and nephew—Jean’s in-laws—resumed their
interest in the food laid out on the dining room table. Her sister-in-law,
Dawn, is the daughter of vastly prosperous Texans, who grew up on a ranch
second only in size to Lyndon Johnson’s, whose family, in her words, “picked
cotton.” A recent convert to Judaism, she cast a benign glance at her children
fingering the pickles. Her husband, Frederick’s brother Jacob, was out of town.
Jean’s announcement
had quieted them down, no small feat as they gushed over Frederick still
slightly hollow-eyed from his recent hospitalization. Everyone tread carefully
now, like they were wearing ballet slippers on a stage of crushed glass.
Jean inspected what
looked like the entire menu of the Madison Deli spread before her. It was Uncle
Maury’s doing. This was no time for his sister’s fancy schmancy ‘petty
fours’ or whatever she called them. The family summoned required comfort food.
And there it was in abundance, loaded onto the Lenox saved for special
occasions. At the center lay a football-shaped mound of chopped liver, symbol
of Frederick’s high school glory days. Cold cuts, speared with toothpicks
bewigged in frilly cellophane, began to curl at the edges. A pair of old
Sheffield silver chafing dishes separated pastrami, roast beef, and brisket
from potato pancakes. There was smoked fish and crudités, which to Jean looked
suspiciously like shriveled celery and raw carrots drained of moisture. Humble
staples, like coleslaw and potato salad, were upgraded into gilt-edged
porcelain Chinese bowls. “It’s tradition,” Maury said, when asked about the
glistening, pocked lumps of gefilte fish that appeared for the first time since
Poppie died, and as yet, no one had touched.
Too much food, thought
Jean. It was a lot to take on for a girl raised on vegetables boiled to death
in the English manner. A nostalgia for fish and chips had never induced her
mother to batter cod for them. It was a lot to take on for a girl whose
American father had left before she was ten years old. He died, but in
her mother’s eyes he’d left them. Her father, Dennis, had been a musician, a
piano player on tour with the big band when her parents met in Leicester. They
married and her mother, Margaret, returned with him to the lower eastside of
Manhattan. Love at first sight, Jean guessed. Her mother said little more about
the marriage than it was the drink and cigarettes that killed him.
“It’s where you get it
from,” she’d admonished Jean.
“I don’t smoke,” Jean
shot back.
Jean sipped the last
of her drink. Sweet vermouth. The imprint of her lips clung to the sticky rim
of her glass like an SOS. She’d asked for bourbon and this is what she got.
Admittedly, it was the
wrong time for Jean to reveal that she was reverting to her maiden name, or bad
timing as her father-in-law suggested in the surgeon’s deliberately imperious
manner. But why did Frederick have to add that he thought she’d be more
comfortable with her maiden name? That would surely open a can of worms from an
already overstocked shelf. Jean popped a maraschino cherry into her mouth and
rid herself of the sticky glass. She stopped at the walnut bar cart and chose
from among cut glass decanters draped with engraved labels. “Even the liquor
gets dressed up,” she mumbled. She poured straight bourbon over ice. She gulped
from the glass, tapping the pressure. That was better, much better, she
thought, and started for the living room.
Sprawling apartments
on Central Park West were like museum exhibitions in the hands of a doctor’s
wife who aspired to meticulous conservator in displaying her possessions. The
rest of the family had retired to the living room, volleying trivial remarks
around Frederick, avoiding anything about why he was hospitalized. Maury’s
benevolent profile shadowed the curtained windows above the park.
Jean hated the heavy
gold and cream damask that choked the light. Cigarette smoke hovered in the
room like a depleted dust storm. Tasseled tiebacks on the drapes reminded her
of loosened belts on overfed guests. She never understood the purpose of a
valance. A plumped, elaborately floral-patterned sofa, Jean habitually called a
couch, was overrun with decorative needlepoint pillows. The Persian carpets and
oriental vases cum lamps topped with pleated silk shades, she hated it
all. No surface lay uncluttered; there was nowhere to rest the eye. Cloisonné
was her mother-in-law’s passion and it was everywhere in the apartment. Even
the soap dish in the guest bathroom was her handiwork. Whenever Jean’s painting
was mentioned Rona added demurely that she, too, dabbled a bit. Her abstracts
embodied Mondrian and hung alongside expensively framed lithographs by Picasso
and Dubuffet.
Frederick’s nephew
snuck up behind Jean and filliped her on the back of her arm. She yelped,
shooed him from her and returned to the dining room.
Frederick appeared
wearing his time-to-get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge look. “What’s with Jakey?”
Jean waved vaguely, as
if to say it doesn’t matter.
“Are you drunk?” he
asked.
“Maybe a bit, it’s
been a long day,” she replied, nibbling a potato pancake.
“Don’t be forgetting
this y’all,” Dawn purred. She held out a fringed wool rectangle. Rona had
presented it to them earlier and Jean had promptly tucked it out of sight. Her
mother-in-law’s go to gift for family and friends: the needlework pillow. “Gone
Antiquing” and “Daydreaming” were her favorites. “I already have two of these.”
She sighed and tucked a strand of naturally blonde hair behind her ear. She
nodded to her children who were tearing up and down the long hallway, skidding
like frenzied cats on the geometric pattern of a headache inducing kilim rug.
“Your turn,” she said. Jean studied the pillow, its meticulous stitching:
“Whenever a child is born, so is a Grandmother.”
Usually they walked to
the east side through the park to their walk-up on 94th Street. The
staying power of summer light was still evident in August so she was surprised
when Frederick insisted on taking a cab.
“We’re practically
there,” Jean griped.”
“You’re tired,” he
told her, “and drunk.”
At home, absent the
scrim of family, she noticed Frederick’s paleness, an uncertainty in his
movements. He’d lost weight and his jacket hung from his frame like an empty
garment bag. He would not return to medical school. His father had connections.
Already there were inquiries made at Rockefeller Institute. Frederick would be
granted some time off before he began his doctoral work, something in research,
at the university. She had not been included in these plans. She was the last
to know he’d been hospitalized.
Jean, too, had quit
school. She didn’t want to be a social worker. Her mother wanted her to be a
social worker, or a teacher, even a nurse. Her mother wanted her to be
something. An artist was not something. At the end of her first year at Hunter
College, with her mother retired from her job at Metropolitan Life and in
Florida at a safe distance, Jean became an artist. When Jean met Frederick
she’d just started working in an art gallery on Madison Avenue. The clientele
were mostly women with too much money on their hands and not enough time to
spend it. If they didn’t play tennis or mahjong, or engage in ego stroking
charity work, then, like Frederick’s mother, they shopped.
He’d pushed open the
door to the gallery, with his mother fussing at his shirt collar.
“Rona,” he’d whined
comically, “behave.”
“My son, the
absent-minded doctor,” Rona said to no one in particular.
Jean was both new to
the job and to a child being on a first name basis with its parent. Hers was
‘mum.’ To address her as Margaret would have been unthinkable. She’d been left
to entertain or, more like, be entertained by Frederick while the gallery owner
took a valued customer under his wing. Frederick joked self deprecatingly, was
pleased with Jean’s laughing response and expressed interest when she told him
she was an artist. He’d asked for Jean’s telephone number, well out of his
mother’s earshot.
Despite deprivation
Jean was a surprisingly cheerful child with a singular imagination. Her mother
had, albeit unconsciously, tried to tame liveliness in a daughter that
challenged her own inner angry life. Jean had always been content in her
solitary pursuit but she realized soon after meeting Frederick that she was
lonely. An impetuous courtship was one way to combat the loneliness.
She quit the gallery
and they eloped. They returned from Maryland and Jean found an entry-level job
at Columbia University in the Fine Arts Library. It was quiet work and she
enjoyed handling the fine leather bound volumes of art history. She shared a
basement room a few blocks further east and downtown from their apartment and
set to painting seriously. Between Frederick’s studies and her job and
dedication to her art they rarely spent time with each other. When they did it
was usually at family gatherings or parties thrown by Frederick’s fellow med
students. Jean had never quite understood Frederick’s heated pursuit of her. It
all fell into place, though, when she met his brother, Jacob. Sibling
rivalry—striving to upset the most apples in the parental cart—compelled them
to marry ‘outside.’
Jacob and Dawn met in
New Orleans when they were students at Tulane University. Cool, blonde, a
cheerleader and a Southern Baptist, Dawn bested even Jacob’s revolution and
horrified her parents by marrying a New Yorker, a Jewish New Yorker.
After discreet enquiry on Dr. Schottenstein’s part she was received like a bit
of exotica that had fallen into their midst, something to be re-fashioned to
enhance their status. Dawn played the folksy card. She gave them attractive,
precocious grandchildren. She started a decorating business from home, which
was a late 50s architectural sugar cube in Pound Ridge. She began placing
Rona’s abstracts in living rooms across Westchester County, seducing her
mother-in-law’s circle with relentless southern charm. Jean remained the
enigma.
And she and Frederick
were like strangers now. He went out in the day, usually to his father’s office
or to spend the afternoon with his mother shopping to fit a thinner body. He
was never allowed anything less formal than tan chinos and pastel polo shirts
adorned with little green alligators. Jean kept track of it all in her journal;
that he’d accompanied her to the library that morning, telling her he needed a
change of scenery and how she had been unaware that Frederick was found,
unconscious, in the men’s room on the floor above in Schermerhorn Hall.
She’d gone home at the
end of her day thinking he’d just not bothered or forgotten to let her know
when he left, which was not unusual for him. It wasn’t until later that evening
that her father-in-law telephoned. He’d been the one they called. Frederick, it
seemed, had had a breakdown. He was exhausted, his father said, and they would
concentrate on getting his strength back for the moment.
When Jean visited
Frederick the following day she was not prepared for the restraints on his
wrists, his motionless body. Alone with him in the room, she felt pointless and
grabbed a stray sock that lay on the floor like a failed flotation device.
Suddenly Frederick reared up, stared confusedly at his tethered hands and then
faced her, wild-eyed. Jean leaned in to catch something like an ominous draft
from a deep cave.
“Fred? What is it?”
she whispered.
“I want to kill you,”
he croaked.
His mother arrived and
Frederick fell back against the pillows. “You should get some rest, dear,” she
chided, casting an apprehensive glance at Jean. “You look terrible.”
After what seemed like an eternity her sister-in-law pulled Jean’s crimped
fingers from the sock and led her from the hospital to a waiting cab.
Jean had taken a few
days off from the library. She was, in fact, exhausted. Days dragged in slow
motion. While Fred was in the hospital she’d scrubbed the apartment until her
fingers puckered. It was on the third floor of an old brownstone. The floor was
uneven and every closet door stuck. Casement windows she’d thought were so
quaint were murder to wash and very little sunlight eked through the tiny
diamond shaped pattern into the front room. Every bit of furniture, all
secondhand finds, shone with Olde English. A matchbox terrace off the bedroom
at the rear of the apartment was not often utilized for anything more than
storing their bikes because of the mad woman above who fed the pigeons.
Not long after his
homecoming Jean and Frederick had a heart-to-heart. “You’re not…?” he
started.
“What? Happy?” she
replied.
“No. I was going to say
you’re not painting.”
Jean waffled, making
small excuses. “A bit blocked. Only temporary. I’m drawing more.”
Frederick asked about
Taylor. Mary Jo Taylor was her full name but because she was never sure if she
preferred the feminine or the masculine she just called herself Taylor. Taylor
admired Jean. She was in awe of her passion but she was also a little
intimidated by her. They’d met at a student party. Taylor was a cousin of Neil,
one of the med students. She was, like Jean, an artist. Taylor was fresh from
Louisville, Kentucky and new to the city. She and Jean shared the basement
studio. Taylor worked in a bar nights and weekends. It was perfect.
“Is she back?”
Frederick asked. “Invite her over for a drink.”
***
A half-finished bottle
of Henry McKenna held down one corner of the map Taylor spread out on the floor
of the front room. The smell of marijuana lay in the air like virtual netting.
“I’m jealous,” Jean
pouted and rooted in the ashtray.
Taylor smiled,
gratified. “There’s more where that came from.” She produced another joint and
continued tracing a route with her fingertip. “I only made it to the Painted
Desert. Next time I want to go to Abiquiu.”
“Yes!” Jean hollered,
raising a jelly glass half full of the strong brown liquid.
Frederick looked
puzzled. “Abiquiu?”
“Georgia O’Keeffe,”
Taylor and Jean replied, laughing in unison.
“Oh,” he said,
chastened, “of course.” Gamely he offered: “You ought to do something like that
Jean.”
Jean resisted a sharp
comeback. Instead she ignored him and spoke to Taylor. “You know. I just
might.”
Taylor looked up from
the map. “Really? Cos if you’re serious I’d go right back. We could go
together. We could paint.”
“She doesn’t have a
license,” Frederick declared. And then, as if his wife had not heard, “You
don’t have a—.”
Taylor interjected:
“You can get one, a temporary one, in a couple of weeks.”
“She doesn’t drive,”
he said slightly more insistent.”
“I’ll teach her. We’ll
start right away.” Taylor dragged deeply on the joint and grinned. “Let’s start
now!”
Frederick watched
helplessly as the two women threw themselves across the map and head to head
they giggled and plotted.
“Well, maybe start
tomorrow. You’ve had a bit too—.”
Taylor’s excited
response rose above Frederick’s appeal. “We’d better make some tapes. We cain’t
count on the car radio. There’s gonna be some long stretches of highway. God
almighty, it was torture listening to Havin’ My Baby all the way through
Kansas.”
First thing, Jean got
her learner’s permit. They went out driving in Taylor’s tangerine colored
Beetle every chance they got. They began slowly after the rush in the evening,
navigating carefully along the drive around Central Park. Sometimes they
started out at midnight after Taylor’s shift. Jean’s confidence grew and every
time she changed lanes or accelerated with a little more daring, Taylor slapped
the dashboard with glee: “Damn, girl. You are a natural!” They cheered when
Jean no longer slammed the clutch and stopped nervously shifting into a lower
gear that nailed them to a steep incline at 103rd and Lexington. On
weekends when neither had to be at work in the morning, they worked in the
studio until just before daybreak. High on turpentine and glorious
anticipation, Jean carefully navigated the Beetle downtown on the FDR,
her heart racing faster, at first, than the speed she was traveling. Soon they
ventured across the 59th Street Bridge and doubled back just in time for
sunrise over the city. They rewarded their achievement with breakfast in
Greenwich Village at an all night café called Pennyfeathers.
Everything looked
different from behind the wheel. The city, especially on the upper eastside,
lay in dormant splendor. They’d cruise past the Andrew Carnegie pile on Fifth
Avenue. Jean pointed out where Truman Capote had begged for alcohol from
passersby from a window of the imposing rehab center on 93rd and
they never tired of the ghostly façade of the old armory silhouetted against a
moonlit sky. Taylor spied the squadron motto carved into the red stone.
“It means Charge!”
Jean told her.
“Bootayanahvont!” Taylor yelled as they
sped past.
Jean passed the
written and aced the road test. She slipped behind the wheel like a seasoned
diver into a wetsuit. She stopped tearing at her fingers, seeing them displayed
so nakedly on the steering wheel. Once Taylor screwed up the courage to ask
Jean why she was so eager for this trip. She’d be away from her husband for
what, three weeks at least? “I’m feeling really shadowy, that’s why,” Jean
answered. She added that they couldn’t rush a thing like this. Maybe they
needed more time, a month, six weeks. “If you can swing it,” she said and did
not wait for Taylor’s answer.
A professor of
Frederick’s was induced to buy a painting from Jean. Frederick and Robert were
close friends. Everyone called him Havermeyer or Doc. She had only met him once
at a raucous party in his SOHO loft. For months before he was hospitalized
Frederick had rolled in late at night red-eyed and uncommunicative after
studying with Professor Havermayer. Since Fred’s release there had been no
mention of his downtown friend when once they seemed inseparable. Jean,
emboldened, arrived at the loft on a murky stretch of Greene Street, uninvited.
She nervously made a case for the sale of one of her larger paintings. It was
easier than she’d expected.
Jean’s bags stood on
the landing. She had only to pack the cassette tapes. She and Taylor had agreed
right off the bat to mix tapes of their personal choices. Taylor was more Harry
Chapin and the Allman Brothers. Jean was Joni’s free man in Paris. She was
midnight at the oasis. She was Steely Dan and Bob Dylan and Zappa. They bonded
over the Eagles and the Stones and early Beatles. They agreed to throw in
Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5, Elton John and Grand Funk. They had their
doubtful moments: Barbra Streisand? The Way We Were?
“I dunno,” Jean
admitted, “It feels right. I loved the movie.”
So, that gave Taylor
Jim Croce, and the Steve Miller Band. Wild Thing was a yes and John Denver a
definite no.
It was nearly 3 A.M.
The air breathed cooler as the seasons changed. Jean closed the bedroom door.
Frederick had an interview later that morning at Rockefeller. Her sketchbooks
lay on the coffee table, unpacked. Instead, she’d decided to bring lined
notebooks, bought a really good pen. Frederick often said that Jean saw
everything in black and white, which was not necessarily meant as a compliment.
Maybe she did. The studio wall was hung with huge white sheets of Rives BFK;
graphite line drawings that Frederick described as diluvial. Jean had to look
it up: like something caused by a flood.
She’d quit her job at
the library and had not told Frederick. It was the first time she lied to him.
She thought it might not be the last.
A familiar car horn tooted in the quiet
street, still dark. There was cash in her wallet. She left the credit card on
the table. Who was Jean Shottenstein? Her temporary driver’s license said: Jean
Margaret Fisher. Jean would be sure to drive the last bit, the best part on
their return. Driving into Manhattan at daybreak. Nothing better.
