Once again it is not far from my door to Mount Hope Cemetery, not far to the ravines and tombs that so fascinated my mother, and, I suppose, it won’t be long before I will join all the other residents of this city who have increased the population of the graveyard’s heights and depths. Returning to Rochester could have been viewed as the initial stage of a journey towards the graveyard gates: the first plodding steps of an old elephant going home to die. But, in fact, it was the availability of a piece of property that brought me back to my native city. Ten years before, I had bought the house built by the famous modernist architect, the house in which I now live. Long and low, spacious and angular, it is completely out of character in this neighbourhood of mock Tudor revival and large, ornate nineteenth-century houses. Like this architect, I find that the upholstered furniture and useless gadgets, the kept things that decorate most houses, depress me. I need space around me, and light. Air. Like him, I want a lot of emptiness between me and any object in a room.

I am a civilized man by nature. Despite the reality that at my age pure enjoyment seems to require more strength than I possess, I like my creature comforts. A soft bed, a warm bath in a spacious tub; clean, wide rectangular windows, spotless white walls. For this reason I hired Mrs. Boyle, to whom I speak as little as possible, though, unhappily, this does not prevent her from speaking to me. When she leaves in the evening she takes the noise of the world with her, and I find myself alone with one of her casseroles in the kitchen, smoking and swearing and wishing I were in that other kitchen, with the Great Lake thundering outside and me cleaning my brushes near the sink. The kitchen I have just learned that I now own. But I refuse to take anything from the world now. I will continue to live in a modernist work of art with a housekeeper and ghosts; uncomfortable ghosts who form attachments to neither calm white architecture nor quiet residential streets. Ghosts whose only reason for being here is to haunt me.

Decades ago, between the ages of twenty and forty, I was in the gathering period of my life, filling myself to the brim with subject matter until I was forced to overflow onto the picture plane, onto the canvases Sara so often posed for. I was an accumulator, a hoarder. I trespassed everywhere and thieved constantly. I believed that I would always be younger than those around me; that I was connected to the history of that to which I was related, never to its conception. I was a student of Robert Henri’s at a time when his celebrated career — even as a teacher — was coming to a close, a time when his earlier pupils, or at least those of the much-admired Ash Can School, had become more famous than he, and they, in turn, were being submerged by the advance of cubism after the Armory Show. I met Rockwell Kent when he had already lived the lives of ten men, had fathered children, had had affairs, had lived and worked in the Far North. Even what I was to learn of Sara’s story leaned towards the past, not the present: the mine disintegrating below the lake and everything in her father’s house kept and cherished like relics. As I saw it then, each life I touched had found its focus and was existing in a kind of aftermath. I think of my friend George Kearns when I first glimpsed him. He was hardly more than a boy, but the ease with which he strolled around his shop, his cherished China Hall, gave the impression that it had been, for a very long time, the centre of his world. In contrast, there was me; my relationship to any place, any surroundings, was always awkward and self-conscious. Yes, then there was me, dismissing relationship so casually.

This large, famous white house in which I live — this house that suits me so well — was neither built by me nor for me. Now, in its open spaces, behind its oversized panes of glass, I am haunted by robbed histories, stolen goods. Each day in the studio I play with colours, build up textures, experiment with white, distort the subject matter underneath, while the ghosts press their faces, their lives against the doors and windows, trying to make me stop.

I missed the Armory Show by one year.

I participated in neither war.

I never travelled farther north than the opposite shore of Lake Superior.

I avoided love.

Eventually all of my work, even that which is now in private collections, will go to institutions where it will be consigned to walls or banished to basements. It matters little to me which location posterity chooses. What matters is the China collection; the bright objects gradually filling the glass shelves on the south wall of this otherwise mostly empty room. Who will want it? Who will treasure it? Who will place it in the correct light? It has taken so much time to put even part of it together, so much meticulous effort. A task not made any easier by Mrs. Boyle nattering about the probability of my eyes being ruined by too much close work and too much reading. I have a small library, just a few shelves of books, really, books containing information about manufacturers, marks, certain celebrated potters and designers. Sometimes I remove a volume from the shelf for no particular reason at all, let it fall open on my lap randomly, and stare at a photo of an eighteenth-century piece, a piece so rare that George Kearns could never even have imagined possessing it. Sometimes in my mind I see myself presenting it to him. A gift. I never, in all the time I knew him, gave George a gift.

Perhaps it could be a wedding present, for him and Augusta. Ghosts at a ghost wedding. And me the wedding guest who slew the albatross.

But I accept no invitations of any kind, am visited only by the past. And George and Augusta were never man and wife.

“You should get out with people more,” says the socially minded Mrs. Boyle. “Stop fussing around with all those poisonous paints. You only keep starting over again anyway. If you saw people once in a while, maybe you wouldn’t make so many mistakes. Maybe you’d actually finish one of those pictures.”

Pictures. Mistakes.

As I said, I take nothing from the world now.