CHAPTER THREE

The scholarship to the Shannon-Phillips Institute of Art was the cloud upon which the Virgin Mayra ascended to womanhood. The Institute confirmed that she could paint and that there was indeed a world existent south of 110th Street that was not (necessarily) exclusively for whigros, the word Mama used for whites or, when she got real mad at them, whiggers. Indirectly through the Institute she was caused to yield her maidenhood without any of the dismaying diversions, such as the need to convince herself that she had fallen in love, and she got high pleasure and much spiritual excitement in return. Even Mama approved of the cherry-taker and in more ways than several.

His name was Caspar P. Lear, Jr. He was a black art teacher, a painter, a spiritual follower of Mao, a graduate of City College and a possible contender, he told Mayra, for the light-heavyweight championship, although he didn’t exactly say of what. He held a degree as a chemical engineer, had been offered good jobs as a chemical engineer. He was also about the handsomest man she had ever looked at. But all of that was not what had decided her to topple over in his bed.

They had their art and health and color in common, but he had never set a straight course on seducing her, nor she him. He preferred to discourse on the many forks ahead in his road, which he thought he might take and what he’d do when he got where he figured to be going. He was never dull, but she wasn’t altogether pleased with his perfection either. Everything about him was just maybe a little too much to think about living with forever, but he gave her more than the one thing she had not yet encountered—the possibility of revolt, the open door to rebellion. No hat-in-hand waiting around for whitey to run you for alderman or drag you screaming into the membership of his country club. Caspar P. Lear, Jr., believed in the expanding promise of black revolution.

After she had looked dreamily into his eyes, showing the high glaze of lust as they lay side by side on the big daybed in his apartment on 95th off Central Park West, and she had murmured “Let’s fuck,” she wanted to move in with Caspar because he did everything as well as he did everything else, but Mama talked her out of it. She said living with the first man you made it with was too habit-forming, and sometimes people never got out of the habit. She agreed that he sounded like a good man, but that didn’t mean Mayra had to go and live with him. Mayra capitulated when Mama suggested that she just try it out on Friday and Saturday nights. The Ashants were living on Long Island, and that was the right way to arrange it. It was a wildly exciting love affair once it got started, and once it did get started they didn’t talk about black revolution much any more. It lasted four months, then Caspar decided to accept a job in the petrochemical division of the Morania Oil Company in Philadelphia. There wasn’t much romantic sadness. They both knew how they felt by then, and she said she understood why he wanted to try the square side of the tracks for a little while. He told her not to be too sure, to keep reading the sports page, and anyway Philadelphia was only ninety miles away. “And, hey,” he decided to tell her, “one thing. You might like to hear that the Institute thinks you’re the most talented student painter they’ve had in almost fifteen years.”

Her eyes got misty.

“Whassamatta?”

“I don’t see how they can think that.” She turned away. “And I’m not fishing.”

“Why can’t they?”

“My stuff comes out okay, but I don’t feel anything about it. I don’t hear any bands playing in my head. I can’t smell much life coming off the canvas.”

He grinned, “They said ‘student painter,’ didn’t they?”

Her face brightened. “Yeah, I forgot that.”

He touched her cheek. “Technique first, always technique. When you got a lock on that, time enough to pour yourself all over it.”

After he left, Mayra was in the rhythm of staying in town Friday and Saturday nights, and she’d meet Mama and they’d have dinner, then go to a movie, then check into a mid-town hotel and do some shopping Saturday morning. Mayra got to brooding about technique, and one Saturday morning when Mama had agreed to go uptown to a laundry customer’s to sit with two of her kids while the woman took the littlest to an eye doctor, Mayra went to the 42nd Street Library and began to look at books in the art room. The first book she picked up was a book about trompe-l’oeil painting by a Martin Battersby, and as she read it and studied the illustrations she lost her sense of time and she kept looking at trompe-l’oeil books until an hour before closing, about twenty minutes before she was supposed to meet Mama at Penn Station. She was so quiet all the way home that Mama wondered what was going on. “Just trying to figure something out about painting,” Mayra said. She kept figuring all day Sunday, then she cut classes on Monday and went back to the art room and read it all over again. On Tuesday she began to ask questions at the Institute. She was told: “After all, no one takes trompe-l’oeil especially seriously, do they, Mayra?” and “Offhand I wouldn’t have the faintest idea who you could go to to teach you trompe-l’oeil” and “But it’s all so technically difficult, and to what avail, my dear girl?” At home she went over the whole thing with Mama, who said finally, “If you want pot you don’t go to United Cigars, baby. Go ask the man who wrote the book to tell you how to paint that way.”

So Mayra went back to the library and was shocked to discover that Martin Battersby lived in England. England was farther away than the moon. England took money, and no Institute scholarship went that far. So she wrote to Caspar P. Lear, Jr., in Philadelphia and explained how her life had been changed in the art room of the 42nd Street Library, and what could she do about it? He sent her a telegram. He told her to apply for a Fulbright or a Guggenheim, or if she wanted to go first class all the way with the most, she could ask John Moodie at Shannon-Phillips how she could get a fellowship from the E. C. West Foundation, and that he wanted to be her number-one witness on the application forms, but that it might be a good idea to write to Martin Battersby first just to find out if he would agree to teach trompe-l’oeil painting.

May 14, 1954

Dear Mr. Battersby:

I am an art student at the Shannon-Phillips Institute of Art in New York who will soon complete its two-year curriculum. The faculty has said that if you will consider accepting me as a pupil they will supply high endorsements of my seriousness and ability. If you accept me as a pupil I shall apply for an E. C. West Foundation fellowship. I am Negro, almost twenty years old.

Very truly yours,

Mayra Ashant

Battersby sent his letter of acceptance in six days. His fee would be one-half of the amount of the fellowship after return travel had been subtracted and if the remainder was sufficient to cover her living expenses. She must guarantee to give not less than one year, hopefully two years, to her studies, but if she were late for class or if he found her abilities were not up to his standards she would be discharged. He looked forward to seeing her references from the faculty of Shannon-Phillips. Second to being laid by Caspar P. Lear, Jr., it was the most exciting moment of her life. She applied for the fellowship and Mama’s signature gave parental consent.

“I got news,” Mama said.

“What?”

“You know who ended Miss Baby’s career?”

“Who?”

“And you know who was Miss Pupchen’s sponsor when she kept the open line to her mama in Vienna?”

“Who?”

“Edward Courance West, that’s who.”

“Mama!”

“I think I can get through to him. He’ll remember me, baby.”

“But, I—”

“Won’t mean nothing to him. It’s all tax deducts, I read. And anyway, he never gave a damn about that open line to Vienna for five months. He’ll just tell somebody to set it up, and off you go to get what you’re after.”

“No, Mama. I can’t. This is something else, and I have to do it with my work. I mean I’m not saying it isn’t great the way you’re always there to get anything for me, but with this they got to take me because I’m a painter they’ll be proud they got started.”

“Now you talking, hon.”

The Institute’s austere director, John Moodie, arranged everything, and the Foundation demanded (beyond the Institute’s recommendation and photographs of three of the most representative pieces of her work) that she provide an affidavit stating that she was not then and had never been a member of the Communist party or a sympathizer with its aims. Caspar P. Lear, Jr., had instructed Mayra that Communists were almost as crazy to burn down the world as Republicans, so Mayra had no trouble signing that. Her application for scholarship was accepted and the scholarship/fellowship granted on July 3, 1954. Casp came up from Philadelphia and joined Mama and Mayra for dinner at Longchamp’s on lower Fifth Avenue. They didn’t talk politics. Mayra told him she was sailing on the Elizabeth on July 17, and, as though he were joking, Casp asked Mama what she would do with herself when Mayra had gone off to England and had left her all alone. “Mostly sit around waiting on you to call, Caspar,” Mama said, because she knew he wasn’t making any jokes, and as she told Mayra later, the whole thing gave her more confidence in her mirror. Casp was nine years older than Mayra, who was up to being twenty, and Mama was only nine years older than Caspar, and besides she had a lot of flair.