CANCER SLOWS PAINTER. This headline appeared in the Houston Post a day after Frederick Becker arrived in Texas for treatment at the M. D. Anderson Medical Center. As he read about his illness, he wondered how soon his obituary would come, and how large it would be. Would it lift him or drown him in the mud? Early in his career he’d set a rule for himself based on his first bitter experiences in New York City: never speak to journalists. Like actresses, whom he also avoided, they burn for attention, so they’re always indiscreet.
In the case of the Post reporter, an eager wreck of a man in his late forties, Frederick made an exception. The fellow had caught him in one of the med center’s many parking lots; Frederick had just finished a frank discussion with a surgeon who’d told him his chances of surviving the cancer were slim, and he felt vulnerable, beyond all rules, in need of immediate human contact.
“All my life I’ve wanted to be Ernest Hemingway,” the reporter confided in him – a ploy to earn his trust? In the noon sun the men sat on a curb like a pair of melting lozenges. “As a result, I’m a tremendous fisherman, I have a permanent limp from a climbing accident, and I’m a recovering alcoholic. For all that, I’m still writing crap for a crappy paper.”
This was a standard profile of most male journalists Frederick had encountered over the years. Once, in the early seventies, a New York Times reporter who’d tried to interview him confessed, “I have a basement full of stuffed marlins I’ve caught, all because of Papa. Still, I’m stuck writing features. Does anyone take features seriously? Do you? Be honest.”
The man limped from an old boating accident. Frederick fled his misery, as he’d fled most writers since roughly 1959· On that hot afternoon in Houston, though, shaken and weak, he’d told the Post, “Here’s the end of the story. I dribble a bit more paint, then go away.”
The reporter, no Papa, wrote: “In both his art and his personal demeanor, Frederick Becker has always strived to rise above conventional norms. Disease, however, is a great leveler. The well-known smirk is now a simple grin, and the rebellious, unruly beard has shriveled into a neat white square, the like of which might adorn the chin of any distinguished lawyer.”
Frederick was furious about the article, right up until the week he died.
On a steaming Houston morning, a first-of-the-month Tuesday, Robert Becker opened the Times and counted Frederick’s columns.
Three and a half, page A22. No photo.
When Motherwell died, he was granted a front page picture plus all six columns on B9. Of course, Motherwell had established himself as a prominent critic as well as a painter. Extra duty so he’d guarantee extra coverage, the sly, lovely son of a bitch.
Late in the day, reporters from all over the country phoned Robert for a reaction to his father’s death. Tersely he shared his grief, then added, to perk himself up, “I’m also a painter. In a sense, my father lives on through me.”
“Right, son,” said a gritty old editor at the Kansas City Star. “I had ambitions once too. I used to hang around Spain’s brightest bodegas, hoping to soak up the aura. Nada nada nada, you know what I mean? Now I got a liver the size of Madrid.”
All week the ghost in the nation’s dailies failed to match the man Robert knew. The “brooding,” “enigmatic,” “reclusive,” “energetic talent” the memorialists celebrated was strictly the East Coast Frederick, the late-night worrier spotted with cadmium blue, not the pale pink part-time dad who returned to Texas whenever his boy needed a birthday gift, or a graduation party or a best man at his wedding – or finally, when he himself needed the finest cancer specialists in the world.
“These doctors deserve every bit of their brilliant reputation,” Frederick told Robert over dinner one evening after a day of machines at the med center. The famous gaze was fully glazed and Frederick’s flesh looked tired. “Unfortunately, as with artists, it’s in the nature of their work that most of the time they fail.”
The week Frederick died, Robert walked six miles each day from his house to Buffalo Bayou downtown. The muddy stream, running through most of the city’s industrial neighborhoods, was junked with rusty old Weed-Eaters, car doors, freezers, twisted refrigerator shelves. Robert knew a shaded spot where he could be alone with the Frederick he remembered – not always pleasurably, he was startled to find. In fact, in these hours of quiet mourning, his most vivid memory turned out to be of a time, over twenty years ago, when he was certain his father would be murdered.
It started when Frederick agreed to teach a short course, in the winter of ’71, at Houston’s Now Arts Museum. At that point he’d been long away from Texas, in touch with Robert and his mother only on special occasions. The museum held a gala ball for what the Post later called “Becker’s triumphant return to the city of his youth.”
Robert, then fifteen, had enrolled in Frederick’s course (it was held after school) but he’d used the name “Smith” on all his official forms. He didn’t want his classmates to know he was the great man’s son; he hoped to sit quietly, unnoticed, in the rear of the studio and learn.
For the ball, the museum rented a spacious room at the Warwick Hotel. A jazz combo, hidden by two tall ficuses in a corner by the door, played “Misty.” Their every tune was “Misty.” Giant reproductions of Klimt and de Kooning women lined the walls, along with papier-mâché cowboys rustling steer.
“Ah, Ruth.” Frederick embraced Robert’s mother as soon as she arrived. “How are you?”
“At sea,” Ruth said, stepping out of his arms. “Of course, Robbie and I read in the papers you were coming, but you didn’t phone or write … will you be wanting my guest room?”
He’d stayed there once, years ago. The lilt in Ruth’s voice didn’t hide the heavy ordnance in her question.
“Thank you, Ruth, no. I’m only in town for a couple of weeks. The museum’s putting me up here at the Warwick.”
“I see,” Ruth said. “In other words, you’re traveling with a woman.”
Frederick frowned at her, then turned and shook Robert’s hand.
All evening Ruth sat by a wall beneath a wild de Kooning siren, watching Frederick dance with one young lady after another. She’d never forgiven him for leaving her to further his career in New York. Sometimes Robert shared her resentment, but tonight he was simply glad to see his dad. He saw a tall, sharp-boned woman tug his sleeve by the ficuses. “I have a secret desire, almost a physical itch, to paint,” she said breath lessly, touching his arm. “But right now I’m pursuing a life in the theatre.”
“An actress.” Frederick smiled. Gently, he spun her around and pushed her toward the door. She walked away, confused.
Frederick brought Ruth a glass of iced apple cider. “Care to dance, Ruthie? They’ve played our song all night. Maybe this time they’ll get it right.”
She didn’t say anything. Robert was happy to see her rise and take his father’s hand, but minutes later she was shoving him away. “Broadway babes!” she yelled above a shrill piano trill. “Selfish ambition!” She gripped her empty cider cup like an ice cream scoop and brought it perilously close to Frederick’s right eye.
The other dancers stared. Ruth quickly recovered her calm. She told Frederick not to call her again. “I don’t want to be there when some spurned little groupie finally decides to shoot you,” she said. After that, the ball whirled and sparkled warmly except for a brief incident which Robert later recalled as the first flicker of danger. A young man with thick red hair and a stiff suit approached Frederick to say hello. “I’ve enrolled in your class, Mr. Becker. My name’s Raymond. Raymond Purcell. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to meet you. You hold a very special place in my heart.” His hands trembled so badly, he dropped and broke his cup. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I’m nervous as a mouse. I think you’re America’s finest painter, really I do, the colors, the scope, the sweep of your work –”
Frederick smiled and nodded, embarrassed. Raymond swept the shattered glass into his palm, but never took his eyes off the man Robert thought of, proudly, as mine.
______
Frederick opened the first class pacing the airy studio. His steps echoed beneath the high wooden ceiling. With difficulty he pocketed a round car key, mumbled something about “too many churches in Texas” and “why I left this goddamn place.” He didn’t seem to realize other people were in the room. His hands shook. Shaving cuts formed a little jigsaw puzzle on his neck, just below his beard. Robert smelled booze on his breath. Twenty minutes passed before Frederick settled down – before he’d even look at his class. Then, in the time it takes to clean a brush, he was focused, alert, all business. The lessons had begun.
He assigned each student individual projects. One woman’s colors clashed; Frederick restricted her to different shades of brown. He forced another woman to slather oil on paper, to break her attachment to thin, pale lines.
“Anyone in the country can paint a beautiful picture,” he announced. “We’re after the not-so-beautiful that’s also somehow lovely.”
He told Robert to “paint the unpaintable.” When Robert asked for details, Frederick answered, “You show me, Mr. Smith. If you want to pass this course, get to work.”
Robert’s talent was for portraits – faces, profiles, surfaces. He assumed his father meant for him to get inside the people he painted, to expose the edges and hues of their angers and loves.
In the sunny studio, Raymond Purcell’s spongy red hair was afire. His body bobbed with excitement whenever Frederick spoke, as if buffeted by the sound of his voice. Raymond didn’t receive an assignment; Frederick said he had a remarkable style, and should just keep painting what he wanted. Robert felt jealous, especially as he’d landed the hardest task of all. Did this mean he had the most to learn?
He was shocked to see the actress in class, the woman Frederick had pushed from the room the night of the ball. “It turns out, she’s serious about learning,” Frederick told Robert when the first meeting was over. They were driving in a rented Dodge, on their way to the Warwick. “In my experience, actresses are the least serious people in the world. Jill is a pleasant surprise.”
In his room, Frederick fixed himself a Scotch and soda. Robert grabbed a Milky Way bar and a Coke from the portable refrigerator by the bed. When he was nine or ten, his father scolded him for eating too much candy, for being overweight. Robert was thin now, but he held the candy bar out of sight between his knees, still anticipating disapproval.
“It was a shaky start,” Frederick admitted. “It’s been years since I’ve spoken to a group. I was nervous. Needed a little something to steel myself. Did I embarrass you?”
“You did fine.”
Frederick opened the closet door. “See?” he said. “No harem. No hidden mistresses. Just lonely old me.”
Through the window Robert watched the looping grids of Houston’s streets.
“How is your mother?” Frederick asked. “Since she won’t speak to me, you’ll have to be my spy.”
“She’s okay. She says you left her high and dry, but I think she’s learned to live without you all right.”
“And you?”
Robert shrugged. “I guess you knew what you needed.”
“The thing is, when two people live together as long as we did, one’s voice becomes background noise to the other, like an all-day radio,” Frederick said. “Soon, they’re only half listening to each other. ‘What, what?’ – the single most common utterance in marriage. I couldn’t stand a lifetime of ‘what,’ Robbie. It’s as simple as that.”
He poured himself another Scotch. Below and all around, Houston’s lights throbbed like clusters of fireflies swimming out of the dark. “On the other hand, comfort’s harder to find than you think. I’m an old man now.” He was forty in ’71. “These days I’ll see an attractive woman on the street and try to catch her attention, but she glides right by. It’s shameless, the way the young only want the young, like some abominable herding instinct. What about the rest of us?” He sipped his drink. “You definitely know when you’re out of the hunt. It’s not a choice you make.”
Robert recalled all the young women eager to dance with his father at the ball, and the actress, Jill Ryne, placing her hand on his arm, but he didn’t say anything. Frederick seemed convinced of being, as he put it, a “sexual cast-off.” The more he drank, the more depressed he became. Robert wanted to ask his dad’s opinion of his work, but the Old Master was clearly stuck in his sadness.
In the next few days Robert got to know his classmates. They’d go for sandwiches, share what they’d learned. They all agreed that Mr. Becker was a magnificent teacher, magnetic and inspiring (if a little offbeat). They wanted to ask him to join them some night, but were too intimidated to approach him personally. Robert could’ve asked, but he was enjoying meeting new friends; he knew if Frederick came along he’d dominate every conversation. At the end of each class he watched his father frown and slink away to the parking lot alone, to go drink in his room. Robert had seen the roses Frederick sent Ruth after the ball. She’d tossed them out with the coffee grounds. “All drunks are sentimental,” she said. Still, it was hard to believe that a man as brilliant as his dad could remain unhappy for long.
Raymond Purcell was the only member of the class who didn’t socialize with the others. He always looked spent when the sessions were through, limp in his chair, as though he’d been beaten instead of steadily encouraged.
As Frederick said, Jill Ryne was the nicest surprise in the group. “I used to be a painter’s model,” she told Robert. “One morning I realized the painter was having more fun than I was, playing with his colors while I sat there freezing my ass off in that big, drafty room.” She always wore a black ribbon around her neck to highlight her bone-white skin, the most erotic sight Robert had ever seen. She joked about being old – at twenty-five, and with a birthday just around the bend, she was the senior member of the class. Robert felt giddy whenever she laughed or looked at him and smiled. She was kind to everyone, but seemed especially warm with him. One night after dinner with their pals she dropped him off at Ruth’s house. When he opened the car door she kissed his cheek, just a friendly peck, but he was so excited he couldn’t find the curb, and slipped on the soft front lawn.
Buffalo Bayou winds around cotton warehouses, rice mills, freeway overpasses, clumps of blooming dogwood. Herons rise from thin brown reeds along its banks, possums skitter over plastic garbage bags, Pepsi, Coors, and tuna fish cans. Flies circle an old, abandoned shoe, buzzing like cracked cellos.
Robert sits and stares into the water. Brown and orange eddies – mud and rust – stir wild rose petals in pools around warped coffee tables, Volkswagen fenders, jackets and knives, tires and old bicycle pumps. People dump this stuff for convenience or fun; the stream is a living collage of color and shape.
Frederick, dredged from memory, drifts near the bottom by a hot water heater, wearing a striped wool shirt and khaki-colored pants. He claws his way toward the surface, past the city’s cast-offs, the auto parts and toaster plugs. Twigs and silt tangle in the once-thick beard, the firm, ironic smile is now an O of fear.
A black four-door Chevy pulls swiftly off the freeway, stops, raising dust. Robert slaps mosquitoes from his wrists. Two young men drag a busted vacuum cleaner from the Chevy’s trunk and heave it into the bayou, at the spot where Robert imagined his father. The men grunt and spit. When they’re gone, Robert stands and watches the ripples. Frederick, cut and bleeding, paddles back into his head. He lifts his arms to the sky. Robbie, he mouths. Lend me a hand. Please, Robbie. Save me. Bubbles erupt from his throat. O. O.
One day, in the second week of class, Jill leaned past Robert to smooth a charcoal line on her sketch pad, and he caught a shot of her breasts beneath her smock. She saw him look, smiled. He turned away, embarrassed, but felt he’d received a brief, sweet blessing.
“He assigned me set designs, backdrops for plays,” she said. “Sunsets, stars.”
She drew perfectly lovely clouds, Robert thought, but how hard is a cloud? She’d gotten off lightly. Nothing like painting the unpaintable. Frustrated with his own assignment, he spent studio time sketching Jill’s neck. Her birthday was two days away. “An early gift,” he said, handing her the drawings. She blushed. “You’re a sweet boy,” she told him, and kissed his cheek.
Frederick asked Robert to go help Raymond. Robert caught a tang of Scotch in the air, beneath the drifting smells of chalk dust and oils, radiator heat and fresh breezes from the windows. “I can show you a better sky,” Frederick promised Jill, pulling up a stool. She beamed.
Under his smock, Raymond had on the same stiff suit he’d worn at the ball, and to every class so far. His hands twitched with nervous energy, rattling the legs of his easel. “I want to kill him,” he whispered. “Wring his goddamn neck. I’m letting him down, letting him down …”
Robert was astonished by the work: flat, nearly colorless eggs curled across solid black backgrounds. Raymond had gouged each canvas with a palette knife, to interrupt the surface. Robert saw no balance here. This was a remarkable style?
Raymond laughed when Robert described his own project. “That’s not an assignment, it’s a chisel in the heart, man.” His red hair bounced above his ears.
A tight, cold pain seized Robert’s stomach and balls. He rose, mumbling “water” and “excuse me.” Raymond returned to his canvases, whispering, “Twist his silly neck till his Adam’s apple pops to the floor.”
______
That evening Robert heated himself a chicken pot pie, scarfed it down, and told his mother he was going to catch a bus to the Warwick. Ruth had meant to serve stew. She stood in a bright orange apron, holding a spoon, watching Robert finish his pie. “If you’re looking for his approval, Robbie, you might as well know he’ll never give it. That’s him, not you. God forbid he should ever admit he cares for anyone.”
Robert set his plate in the sink.
Softly, Ruth touched his shoulder, his back. “I should’ve thought twice about letting you take this class.”
“He’s a good teacher.”
“Good to all the young women, I’ll bet. He’s never learned to act his age.”
Her bitterness was like an extra roll of insulation in the ceiling, trapping heat. Robert snatched a sweater from his closet and ran from the house.
Late-season fireflies swirled above Buffalo Bayou; Houston’s winter was typically mild. The bus chugged past the stream, under live oaks and willows, streetlights haloed in mist. Robert drew his father’s face in the moisture on the glass. A stern, disenchanted stare.
The Warwick looked like a party cake, bright yellow windows in curves of smooth white stone. The moment he stepped off the elevator near Frederick’s room, Robert saw Raymond Purcell pacing by a failed ficus in a corner of the hallway. His suit was wrinkled and dirty. He held a large portfolio case. “Smith!” he said, moving quickly as a bee, grabbing Robert’s arm. “What are you doing here?” His breath smelled of coffee and pickles.
“I’m … I have an appointment,” Robert said.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“You do? He gives appointments?”
“What about you?”
A large, erratic vein pulsed in Raymond’s forehead. “I see his disappointment, you know … I want to strangle him sometimes.” He shook his fist at Frederick’s door. “I wish he’d … appointments? Jesus Christ, he gives appointments? Why didn’t he tell me?” He snapped and unsnapped his case, shook his head, then strode past Robert toward the stairway. “Oh God, he hates me. I know it. America’s finest painter, my one chance, and he … oh my God, oh God I want to kill him. Tell him, Smith. Tell him I want to see him.” He disappeared down the stairwell.
When Frederick answered Robert’s knock he was carrying the phone. “Yes, Ruth, that’s all I want too.” He motioned Robert into the room. Robert veered toward the tiny icebox for chocolate and a Coke. His hands trembled from the force of Raymond’s outburst.
“Ruth, Ruthie please, don’t hang up,” Frederick said. “I’m trying to be friends.” He lowered his voice, glanced at his boy. “I never stopped loving him, you know that. And you, Ruth. Dear Ruth. It hurts that you won’t even see me.” A minute later he set the receiver in its cradle. “Well.” He rubbed his face. He’d cut himself shaving again; a drop of blood dyed the tip of his collar. “She’s worried about you.”
Robert gobbled the last of a Snickers. He remembered eating greedily as a child so his father wouldn’t catch him, swallowing so rapidly the candy had no taste. Always, whenever his father entered a room, Robert’s belly felt leaden but empty.
“She asked me when you got here to – oh hell. Do I treat you all right, Robbie? Do you ever doubt how important you are to me?”
“No.” Robert shoved the Snickers wrapper deep into a pocket of his jeans. “It’s just that sometimes I wonder what you honestly –”
“Good,” Frederick said, brightening. “Good. I tried to tell her. Your mother’s just a worrywart.” He walked, quick and suddenly sure, across the room. He wouldn’t look at Robert. “Now, what do you say I fix myself a drink, then we go for a ride, eh? I’ve only got a few days left here in the old hometown. I’d like to see some sights.” He opened a bottle of Dewar’s.
“Dad.” Robert rarely used the word. It felt like day-old gum in his mouth.
“Yes?”
“I guess Raymond Purcell’s a pretty good painter, huh?”
Frederick shrugged, busy with the ice.
Robert didn’t know what he wanted to say, exactly. He blurted, too loudly, “I worry about him.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t he seem … a little dangerous to you?”
“How?”
“I’m not sure, but maybe you’d better be careful. I think he wants to hurt you.”
Frederick raised a pointed eyebrow.
“I know it sounds crazy, but he’s worked himself up so much trying to please you, and he thinks … he thinks you’re not happy with his progress, like you’re punishing him and he can’t understand why.” In the rush of his words, Robert felt the beginnings of tears. He was so surprised by this, he sat on the bed to keep from losing his balance. He caught his breath. “He just wants to know.”
Frederick looked at him, only for a moment, then smiled. “So he’s angry with me?”
Robert shook his head. “Not –” He blinked a few times. “I don’t know. He’s making threats.”
Frederick sniffed his booze. “You don’t suppose this is poisoned, do you? Quick, call the Post. If I die before they arrive, it’s up to you to see they get my story straight. I want a glowing obit, photo and all.”
Robert brushed his nose with the back of his hand. Frederick patted his arm. “Okay. Thanks for the warning, Robbie. I appreciate it.”
______
They took the rented Dodge into the cool night air, past shopping malls, construction cranes, chapels. “I can’t get over how religious Texas is,” Frederick said. “I’d forgotten, completely. Look at the steeples! And down in the cellars, Methodists, Lutherans, Catholics, Baptists stirring vats of potato salad. Hundreds of believers mixing the vile yellow stuff to sling at unrepentant sinners. We’d best arm ourselves, Robbie. They’re bound to come after us.”
Blow after blow of his usual wit – as if his sincerity in the room had been a joke. I might as well stay Mr. Smith, Robert thought. He felt no bonds with the man here beside him or the mighty Becker name.
“When I was your age, Robbie, this very spot was an occasion of sin for me.” Frederick pulled off the highway, to a dark gravel patch on the banks of Buffalo Bayou. “One night I stole my father’s Buick and a bottle of sour mash and went for a joyride. It ended right here. There wasn’t a freeway then, just a dirt road by the stream. I back-ended another happy drunk. Ruined the front fender. My father never forgave me.”
He got out and headed for the bayou. Robert followed. Frederick sat beneath a large live oak and began to remove his shoes and socks. “The other fellow and I lay here for an hour or so, laughing about the accident, sharing our whiskey. It was a cool night like tonight but we barely felt it, dipped our feet in the shallows – ah! – and watched the moon, big and yellow, sail above the trees.”
Robert listened to his father splash the water, scanned the tires and busted chairs that broke the surface of the stream. He found the candy bar wrapper in his pocket and quietly dropped it on the ground.
“Join me?” Frederick said
Robert shook his head.
“You’re an awfully sober young man, you know that? Do you smoke or drink, Robbie?”
“No.”
“That’s good, I suppose. Healthy.” He wiggled his toes. “Don’t you ever get tired of being good?”
Always riding me, Robert thought. How do I get inside this man, past all the layers of irony?
Frederick sighed and stretched his arms. “This is a nice, shady place in the daytime. Your mother and I used to come here.”
“Really?” Robert sat. “She won’t let you make up with her?”
“No, no. Too many sins.” Frederick said nothing for a minute. Frogs chirped in the reeds. When he did speak, he almost whispered. “In those days, when your mom and I were courting, this whole area was quite romantic. Bluebonnets. Tall grass. It’s tragic, what people have done to it. What’s that sticking out of the mud over there?”
“Looks like an air-conditioner,” Robert said.
Frederick shook his head. “Ruthie and I watched sunsets here, a million years ago. Silly kids. Well.” He reached for his socks. “Best to let it all go.”
Touched by his father’s nostalgia, Robert searched the weeds for his candy wrapper. “The city should clean this place,” he said, attempting to imagine a shining blue bayou, his father and mother holding hands beneath swelling Gulf Coast clouds.
“A guy like Rauschenberg would know what to do with this stuff. He’d haul it all out and make something with it. If we knew how to look, Robbie, we’d see endless possibilities in this wonderful, wretched stream. I envy sculptors. They can redeem the most useless junk.” Frederick laughed and clapped Robert’s back. “Sin and redemption, eh?” He frowned. “Why are you so quiet?”
Robert shook his head.
“Raymond?”
“No.”
“Is it your mother?”
“Not really.”
Frederick stood and stroked his beard. “I see. You came over tonight to talk about your work, didn’t you?”
Robert lost his mental portrait of his fresh young parents. “Yes.”
“You feel the assignment’s too hard?”
“I don’t know what I feel. Maybe.” He followed his father back to the car.
“None of us ever learn enough about what we’re doing, Robbie.” Frederick threw his boots onto the slick back seat. “Not even Picasso or Matisse. But don’t worry.” He turned the key. The engine coughed. “I know how the story ends.”
______
It was after eleven when Frederick dropped him off at Ruth’s house. Robert invited him in but Frederick said no. As he pulled away he waved and gave a weak smile. Ruth was still up, stirring stew. She’d already made three pots, with ham and carrots and peas. “It’s late. I was starting to worry,” she said. When Robert told her where they’d gone, she cursed Frederick for dragging him out in the cold. Then she smiled, remembering the spot. “It was a special place.”
“It’s trashed now,” Robert told her. “What made it so special?”
“Oh, I don’t know if it’s the setting so much.” She tapped her wooden spoon on the stove. “We were young and happy … a little careless. I think you were conceived there.”
“Mom!”
She blushed. “Well, it was nice and lush and private. No freeway.”
“Dad told me.” He grinned. “So you liked him in those days?”
“Oh yes.”
Robert tasted the stew. “And now?”
“Don’t be taken in by his charms, Robbie. He shook Texas off his boots and never looked back, once he left.”
“That’s not true. He’s flown back plenty of times.”
“He has a whole other life in New York, believe me.”
“Like what?”
“Like, he married an actress soon’s he got to Manhattan. That’s what. Some Broadway queen.”
Robert burned his lips on the clear, steaming broth. “You’re kidding. But you were still married to him.”
Ruth shook her head. “We’d filed our divorce papers, just barely.”
“Who was she?” The peppery ham made him cough. “What was she like?”
“No idea. The marriage only lasted six months or so. I never knew what happened. All I heard was she left.” She glanced at her boy, testing the effect of her words. “I guess your father got his heart broken – his drinking got worse – but I didn’t want to hear it, and he won’t talk about it now.” She washed her hands. “He always was a sucker for aggressive women. Don’t know why he hooked up with me.”
Robert stared at the worry lines on her cheeks and chin. She dried her fingers, straightened her hair. “Anyway,” she said. “It’s over and done. Time for bed.” He squeezed her hand. For a moment in the flat kitchen light she looked, despite her worn face, like a sad little girl, pale as dough, waiting to be taken, shaped, gracefully held. She turned out all the lights and hugged him goodnight.
He can’t imagine his father’s second wife without also smelling his mother’s mushrooms, carrots, potatoes simmering on her stove. This afternoon, as he walks along the stream, humming some half-remembered tune, he realizes Frederick’s New York years are an empty space to him, an unmarked corner of a canvas. Robert sees his father walking in the city, working there with ease, unburdened by the doubts that paralyze him in his studio at home until he often wonders if he can go on.
He kicks a rusty crankshaft. Mud-sprinkles scatter tiny blue-flies through the air, stir the bayou’s oily brown waves. Down below, his father floats. 0. 0. Robbie. Save me. Lend me a hand.
All day, people have tossed broken steam irons, croquet mallets, skillets, ax blades chipped and bent into the swirling silt. Each time a man or woman hurls an object into the water, Robert remembers a recent newspaper phrase: “Becker was simply in the right spot at the right historical moment”; “The late Frederick Becker is little more than a footnote to contemporary American painting”; “If Pollock was genuinely witty, then Becker is merely amusing.”
Other obituaries have lavishly praised Frederick’s work, but the barbs are blunt steel to Robert. Cold and unforgiving, precisely aimed, like steam irons and skillets. He watches mosquitoes skim the water’s thickness. Frederick drifts in tattered algae. Robbie, don’t let them bury me. It’s up to you to see they get my story straight. The ax blade shoots past his ear. A mallet slams his thin, bluing chest.
Robert shuts his mind to his father’s cries. Memories are starting to rise that he knows are no good, old furies about to riddle the day. He paces the banks of the bayou, tries to concentrate on birdsong, water splash, sunlight. The melodies that have haunted him all morning. But the bubbles erupt.
It was the night of Jill’s birthday. Robert and his classmates, all except Raymond, had gathered early at the sandwich shop to arrange a surprise. Robert brought party hats and bright red balloons. The waiters agreed to sing “Happy Birthday” as loudly and embarrassingly as possible when she walked in the door, but at 8:30 she still hadn’t shown, and by nine everyone was restless. “Wasn’t she planning to come?” someone asked. “Did anyone see her after class?”
“Yeah. She was talking to Mr. Becker.”
“Where?”
“In the parking lot, outside the studio.”
The door slid open, ringing a dwarf silver bell attached to the frame. Cool air brushed the tables and chairs. A flicker of red. A goofy grin. “Hi,” Raymond said. “I hoped you’d all still be here.” The class stared. He laughed – almost a bray. “Have you already eaten?”
A brief, edgy silence. Then the students rose to leave, saying it was late. Blushing, Raymond stared at the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I know I haven’t been very friendly. I just hoped to accomplish something while we had him in our midst, that’s all. I didn’t mean to snub any of you. Honest.” His loafers creaked.
No one moved or knew what to say. A waiter who’d heard the bell emerged from the kitchen with a square of ginger cake. He began to sing the birthday song, then caught his mistake.
The place was so quiet, Robert heard pipes in the walls knocking with steam, water tapping in a sink. “Mr. Know-It-All,” one of his classmates said.
“Mr. Style,” said another.
Raymond shivered. Robert touched his sleeve. “Can you drop me somewhere?” he asked.
“Sure,” Raymond said. Relieved, people reached for their coats then quickly, silently left.
Raymond led Robert to his car, an old Ford Mustang. It smelled of linseed oil. Crammed into the back, sketch pads, charcoals. Stiff, used brushes, some the size of housepainter’s tools. His foot twitched on the accelerator; the car hiccuped and jerked.
Robert’s belly ached with Jill’s absence. He’d hoped to get her alone later, maybe guide her to the bayou, hold her hand in the dark, but she had her eye on someone else.
He asked Raymond to take him to the studio; from there, he’d walk the few blocks to the Warwick.
Maybe he was wrong.
“I’m glad it’s nearly over,” Raymond said. A light mist peppered the streets. He switched on his wipers. “The class, I mean. I’m exhausted.”
“Me too,” Robert said.
“Who needs him, anyway? He can’t appreciate what I do. So what? It’s not like he’s God.” The Mustang lurched through a dull yellow light. “I mean, you cut him and he bleeds like anyone else, right?”
Robert’s skin tightened and his throat went dry. Raymond gripped the wheel like a strangler. He was scowling, no longer the pathetic figure Robert had seen in the sandwich shop. He seemed, as he always did in class, malevolent, deceitful; his red hair a stain against decency and reason. Somehow, his presence made the streets chaotic and mean. The city’s old grid pattern clashed with the new, north/south blocking east and west. In parks and at bus stops, people clung to each other in the rapidly cooling air, men and women, women and kids, ragged Pietàs.
“I’ve always trusted myself,” Raymond said, slowing for another light. The mist was twice as dense as it was a moment ago. “Never needed anyone’s approval, so why start now?” His right foot stopped twitching. He reached into his coat pocket for something apparently heavy (the weapon he might’ve clocked Frederick with, Robert thought); his shoulders tensed. He sidled close with a grin.
Robert didn’t wait to see what happened next. “Thanks,” he said, unlocking his door. “This is good.” He stumbled onto the pavement.
“Hey!” Raymond called. “Are you crazy? Watch out!”
Robert ran down the street through folds of bleak gray air. Car horns barked. A pair of headlights swung in an arc to his right, then whirled out of sight. “Asshole!” someone yelled. He sprinted against the evening’s stinging wet until his whole chest burned and he saw the yellow windows of the Warwick. The doorman, dressed in red, tipped his tricorn hat but Robert hustled past him, grunting. His muddy shoes soiled the thick blue carpet.
He bounded up the stairs to Frederick’s floor, half-searching for clues to Raymond’s foul deed, but there were no abandoned knives. No gory gloves.
In front of his father’s door he found an awful mess. He dropped, gasping, to his knees.
Two tall-stemmed glasses on a thin silver tray. Crumbs. A pale pink candle, never lit.
He groaned and got to his feet. Just go home, he thought. Leave it alone. He sidestepped the ficus and pounded on the door.
At first, no sounds came from the room. Then Frederick’s voice, muffled, “Go away.”
“It’s me.” Robert hit the door again. “It’s Mr. Smith. I’ve come for my grade.”
“Robbie?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“Just a minute.”
Behind the door, glass broke. Robert swayed. His lungs still ached from his run. Frederick stepped out bleeding.
“My God,” Robert said. “What –?”
“Sliced my hand on the Dewar’s,” Frederick said. He wore a towel around his waist. He was musky and sweetly perfumed, a swarming, cloying smell, all at once. “Damned annoying. Waste of good Scotch.” In his wounded palm he clutched a roiling cloud of toilet paper. Blood smeared his chest. “What’s so urgent? What are you doing here?”
Robert leaned against the wall. He felt foolish and weak. “Dad?”
“Robbie, what is it?”
“I need to know something.”
“What?”
“Have you seen Jill Ryne?”
Frederick blinked as if sprayed with a hose. He made a fist of his bloody hand. “Of course not. Why?”
Robert kicked the tray, crushing one of the champagne glasses. Frederick jumped. “I have to know the truth. Have you seen her?”
“All right, yes, yes,” Frederick answered. “She’s here with me, okay? She’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”
Robert went again to his knees, this time with a harder pain to find, but no less solid than the bite in his lungs.
“Robbie –”
“You son of a bitch.” He reached up and slapped his dad. The stiff beard raked his fingers like the bristles of a camel’s-hair brush. Frederick was sleepy and drunk. He fell against the door, into the room. A shadow rustled by the bed. Robert felt Jill’s presence, vital and near. He remembered the golden shade of the tops of her breasts, her friendly smile, and kicked the tray again. “Robbie, for God’s sake, what’s gotten into you?” Frederick tried to sit up.
“Mom was right about you all along!”
“Your mother? What about her? Robbie, help me up.”
“You and your not-so-beautiful bull and your actresses!” Robert yelled.
Frederick grabbed the doorknob, raised himself nearly to his feet. “Robbie. Wait here. Let me get dressed, then we’ll go for a drink. Let’s talk, okay? Robbie? Please?”
[Becker sniffs his fingers. “Every woman I’ve ever touched,” he says. “Every painting I’ve ever made. Amazing how they linger in the skin.” Pause.]
Reporter: My sources here at the med center-friends, really – tell me you’re suffering from cancer.
Becker: Bloody mort men.
Reporter: Sir?
Becker: Death-beat. Obits. The Post sent you to put me in the ground.
Reporter: No.
Becker: What’s your name, Papa?
Reporter: Chuck.
Becker: Chuck, what’s a good mort man earn these days?
Reporter: I wouldn’t know.
Becker: Life’s sweeter as there’s less and less time. You can print that.
Reporter: If you were to sum up your career –
Becker: I’m in no particular hurry, thanks.
Reporter: It would help our readers if, in the article, I could pin you to certain historical –
Becker: History’s already pinned me, Chuck. I don’t need any pinning from you.
[Pause. Becker sniffs his fingers again.]
Reporter: Okay, then, can you tell me what you feel is your finest achievement? Becker: The fact that I’ve accumulated only twenty years of regrets, rather than thirty or forty.
Reporter: Regrets about what?
Becker: Art and family. What else is there?
Before the final class, Jill pulled Robert aside in a far, cobwebby corner of the studio to assure him she was the same person she always was. “I hope we can still be pals,” she said.
Robert didn’t understand. “You slept with him,” he whispered. “How can you say you haven’t changed?”
“Who’d you think I was?” She looked nervous and tired. “Robbie –”
“I thought you liked me.” He knew he sounded childish, and he hated himself.
“I do, but I’m so much older –”
Robert shook his head then turned away.
“And who are you,” Jill said, “to go banging on people’s doors in the middle of the night and to stand here like Jesus Christ, telling me my business … you have no right to judge me, Robert Becker!”
His own name startled him.
“That’s right, your father told me. Who’s the real actor here? If you’ve got a problem, it’s between the two of you.” She marched across the studio to her supply table; the sound of her steps bounced off the sheer, dusty walls. She found Robert’s drawings of her and shoved them at his chest. “Take these,” she said. “We’ll have to clear out all our stuff after class.”
Remarkably, Frederick was fit and alert, no longer the bleeding drunk of the evening before, but king of his domain once more, witty, quick, and sure. He glanced at Robert once, but otherwise conducted himself with detachment and elan. “Fly, fly away,” he told the class. “And good luck.”
At the break, Raymond offered Robert his hand. “I wish you well with your work,” he said. “I don’t know where you were off to in such a hurry last night, but I meant to give you this.” He reached into his pocket for a purple cloth sack of milk chocolates. He’d bought everyone in the class a tiny pouch of sweets. Later, Robert learned he’d given Frederick a cassette recording of Beethoven’s final string trios, Opus Three, E-Flat: Finale; Opus Eight, D-Major: Pollaca; and Opus Nine, Number One, G-Major, along with a note:
Something for you. I edited Opus Numbers Three and Eight to keep the performance to ninety minutes, but feel justified because the Maestro didn’t hit his stride in this genre until Opus Nine anyway. May you find the same confidence and energy in them that I have.
Thank you for your time these last two weeks. I’ve learned from you that art is a by-product of the artist’s struggle to understand his pain, and that both the struggle and the pain are meaningless.
Mr. Becker, pick up your brush.
Show us why we matter.
Show us how to be.
Paint us a picture.
By session’s end, Raymond was twitching uncontrollably – nervousness? loneliness? uncertainty? He fumbled his palette, smearing black in the deep wrinkles of his dropcloth. Despite his dark disappointments, he watched Frederick with what Robert recognized as honest, eager love.
He never posed any danger, Robert thought. I’m the one who wants to kill the old man.
“I said goodbye to your mother. This morning, on the phone,” Frederick told Robert when the others had left.
“I know.”
“You didn’t mention –?”
“Last night? No.” He capped a can of turpentine, packed his paints.
Frederick nodded. “Still, she seems to think it’s best if I stay away from Texas for a while.”
“Too many churches,” Robert said. “And not enough Broadway, I suppose.”
Frederick smiled. “I’m a double-minded man, Robbie, always torn – like this music.” He tapped Raymond’s tape. “I know this. Sprightly and sad. It’s a good choice for me.” Years later, as he was dying in the hospital, he requested the string trios. Robert brought a portable tape player to his room. “Listen. Do you hear how harshly the melody fights itself?” Frederick said. “Like a madman shaking his fist at a world he knows he loves too much.”
That day in the studio he opened his arms. “What can I say?” he told Robert. “Usually I resist because I’ve learned how much attention a woman like Jill demands – more than one man can give-but they’re so inherently dramatic. Spicy. Beats back the humdrum, temporarily.”
Robert wiped his hands on a rag. “Are you going to see her before you leave?”
“Your mother?”
“No.”
“Oh. Yes. She’s adept at pretending, Robbie. Gives me the illusion I’m desired. Again, temporarily.” The big, empty room was stuff)r and hot. It smelled like a freshly painted gymnasium. Frederick blotted his forehead with the back of his cotton sleeve. “Anyway, congratulations. You did good work in the course.”
“I didn’t finish my assignment.”
“No,” Frederick said. “And you never will. Consider that a blessing. You have an aesthetic problem, and the talent, to engage your imagination for the rest of your life. That’s more than most people have. More than that poor wretch, Raymond. Or Jill.” He stepped forward; after a moment’s hesitation he squeezed Robert’s shoulder, kissed his cheek. “And that’s the end of the story.”
Robert watched him walk to the door. “One more thing,” Frederick said, turning, scratching his ear. “You might have a tendency, from now on, to mistrust women. That’s not the lesson.” He smoothed his wide, imposing beard. “The lesson is, don’t trust fathers.”
Robbie, don’t leave me here.
Go away, he whispers to himself. Time to forget.
I’m drifting off …
“So what?” he shouts. Muscles knot his neck. He fires an old soup can into the stream – Campbell’s chicken with rice, Andy Warhol’s brand. It strikes Frederick’s head right at the hairline. He sinks in lemon-colored foam, among sewing machines, dentist’s drills, axles, wheels, ceramic brown ashtrays, picture frames, photo books – faces embedded, like flashbacks in a story, in the unforgiving movement of the present – corkscrews and can openers, steam boilers, petticoats.
Endless possibilities.
“Stay there!” Robert yells.
A grackle lifts above the trees. Clouds huddle like big frozen birds wrapped in white plastic in a butcher’s bin.
His beginnings are lost in careless waste. He snatches from the shallows a copper pocket watch. When he opens the scratched glass face, water pours out. “Drink me,” he remembers, a line from Alice in Wonderland. Ruth read him that story once, when he cried all night for his dad.
He plucks out a hubcap, a carpenter’s file, an old apple crate, piles them together on the bank. He doesn’t know if he’s making a futile attempt to clean the place or if he’s building a ragged monument to his origin.
He watches another grackle float above the water toward a steel-and-glass steeple miles away. The night he sat here with Frederick this particular chapel was hidden in the dark. Or maybe it hadn’t been built yet. “Sin and redemption,” he mutters.
A blessing, Frederick says.
Standing here in the muck and swell of his conception, he hears Beethoven’s melodies rise and fall. One more thing, the music says, using Frederick’s voice. He pictures his father in the studio, that beautiful, terrible winter of ’71. I didn’t just give you the hardest assignment in the class, Robbie. It was the only assignment.
Cars rattle by on the freeway, shaking the concrete pylons. In the water, Frederick’s wedged against an old chest of drawers.
You were the only one who had a chance of going on, who still has that chance. Go on.
My life is full, Robert thinks.
Your life is full Go on.
He plants his feet firmly on the mud-and-gravel bank. Cello melodies soar in his mind. He reaches down, sighs, and pulls his father from the bayou.