“WE’RE GOING to a show,” Henry says after he’s wrapped me in the sheet and put the flowers back in their vase.
I know he doesn’t mean a film; show to Henry means art. “Is it an opening?” I’m excited by the idea. I haven’t been out anywhere with Henry since we went to see the cow skulls and to meet his mother. “Who shall I be?” Last time I wore the banker’s suit because I was being an antique dealer; but he may have another idea this time.
“Indian,” he says. “It’s an exhibit of Navajo blankets, on loan from Dallas.”
“Little d,” I say, using Brogan’s name for the rival city.
“Little show, more than likely, but I want to see it.”
When I have my skirt on, which is deep blue and comes almost to my ankles, and a white shirt I wear a lot because it’s really loose and has no collar, he walks behind me and braids some blue yarn into my hair. He puts a silver belt on me and the turquoise necklace, and then he rubs some dark color across my forehead and nose and chin and cheeks.
I look in the antler mirror when he’s done, and it’s amazing. I could be weaving on a loom at the show and nobody would give me a second glance.
• • •
The blankets, it turns out, aren’t in a gallery like the Sun Dog, but at a little museum called the Bernais which is really a very old mansion where you step down onto a cool tile floor and where there are lots of carvings around the ceiling. Right inside the door is a table with flyers about a Game Show Auction that’s coming up in the fall, and glossy catalogues about today’s collection.
Henry gets permission to take some pictures, even though there are about a half-dozen signs that say NO PHOTOGRAPHS MAY BE TAKEN OF THIS EXHIBIT, because the curator is bobbing around all excited that a real artist is here.
While the jumpy man talks to Henry and Henry is snapping away, I read about the hangings. The brochure says that the ancestors of the Navajos came up out of the bowels of the earth to this world. That they lived in a sacred place surrounded by four mountains (four is their magic number) and that their baby girls were propped up in their cradles so that they could watch their mothers weave. That each baby’s hands were rubbed with spider webs, so that she would grow up weaving, too.
Henry wants me to come with him. He is looking at everything very fast, which is his way. Finally, he stops at two beautiful blankets, both striped, thin stripes, in white, brown, blue, and red. He feels the blankets although there are signs that say DO NOT TOUCH, but again the curator—who is talking to him nonstop the whole time—doesn’t mind at all. He even helps Henry lift the bottom of one serape-style to feel the weight of it.
The red, the man explains, is raveled Spanish flannel in this one, but over here the red is cochineal, which is made from crushed insects.
Henry isn’t listening. He has me stand in front of one of the striped ones and then another. Then he moves me to one with red triangles and fatter stripes.
The man tells him that the pattern in that one goes all the way back to the Arab invasion of Spain in the seven hundreds, maybe to China before that. And would Henry like to see the documentation?
“Here,” Henry says to me, “stand here and face it. Turn your back.”
So I do. I turn my back and stand real close to the blanket until I am almost touching it and I put my hands on it, too, since that seems to be all right. I get into my part, imagining that I’m learning to weave from the way the red yarn and carded indigo wool thread themselves into diamonds and stripes. That the pattern is magically in my hands, and that my hands can make this pattern that no other baby girl will ever grow up knowing how to make.
Then I hear a voice say, “Jolene, is it?” and I freeze. What if it’s Henry’s mother? (Of course it is, because I recognize that skimpy straight-up-and-down gray voice.) She will see me being an Indian instead of an antique dealer. I have a moment of total panic, but then I remember that Henry is here, and calm down. He will know what to do.
“Hello, Mother,” he says, not sounding surprised that she has appeared.
The curator bustles around even faster now, like he’s decided that something really important is going on in his cool old museum.
I turn around, looking at Henry.
“You remember my mother,” he says casually to me. To her he says, “My good fortune to have found myself a most satisfactory model.”
“Hello, Mrs. Wozencrantz.” I hold out my hand, which naturally doesn’t know the first thing about weaving any more, because the spell is broken.
She barely looks at me but says to Henry, “Do come say hello, won’t you, just for a moment.” She gestures to two ladies a few feet away who look just like her. “You remember Millie, from the Friends of the Bernais, and Hallie, from the Friends of the Fine Arts? Just say hello, won’t you? It gives them such a thrill to say they’ve seen you.”
“I’m working.”
“One minute, please.”
“Come on,” he says to me.
He kisses the cheeks of the two women in gray who are so thin you could blow them over like paper dolls in their floating dresses.
“Is that Karen?” one of them whispers, noticing me.
“Hush,” the other whispers back.
“This is Henry’s model,” Mrs. Wozencrantz says smoothly, as if my being that was old news to her and she’d known it all along. “Models are back in fashion,” she tells her friends. “Since, well, really before all that to-do about Wyeth. He was simply part of the trend. No doubt he’d been holding them for years, until it was the fashion again. Soon we’ll be back to figure studies entirely, isn’t that so, Henry?”
“Back to the seventeenth century like everything else,” the one called Millie pronounces.
“The more things change—” the one named Hallie murmurs, then speaks in French (real French, not like Glenna’s).
“Won’t you two join us for a bite of lunch at Lou Tess?” Mrs. Wozencrantz asks Henry. “We’d so like that.”
“I’m working,” Henry tells her, and hurries me off down a long wall of striped blankets to a new one that he likes, a yellow and orange and black and white chief-style blanket. He has me do it again, turn my face to the wall and stand there against the red bands made by the raveled Spanish flannel.
Then he doesn’t take pictures any more, or even seem to remember I’m there. When I get tired and turn around, hoping the dark smudges on my face haven’t wiped off on the stripes, he doesn’t even notice.
After a while I sit cross-legged on the floor and go back to reading about the Navajos while the ladies back down the hall talk and talk to the curator, and Henry paints and paints in his head.