WEESIE WAS RIGHT that she would want to trade. Maude gazed around at the splendor that was Weesie’s bedroom—her bedroom: Maude’s whole ugly box of a house could fit in Weesie’s bedroom.
Instead, however, what was in it was a canopy bed. Not some white-painted reproduction such as Maude had once envied a neighbor, and not even the spindletip beauties of historic houses she had been taken through on car trips, but a massive fantasy structure from the Indian Raj, with elephant heads carved into the posts and designs in orange, blue, and gilt: a paean to decoration.
What her parents would call, in Yiddish onomatopoeia, ungapotchkeh.
But it wasn’t overdecorated. With all that space around it, it certainly wasn’t too much, except as the boys at her school brayed the words: “Too much!” Crowing as if, by admiring, they appropriated what they approved.
French windows with a Juliet terrace and printed red curtains that reminded Maude of the richly colored frontispiece in her old edition of Grimm, with shaded roses and leaves so realistic they had holes bitten into them and, especially, glossy beetles with a green sheen that made her not want to get close to the polished cotton.
“My mother used to have to open and close these for me. I wouldn’t touch them,” Weesie said. “They like really creeped me out.” Both girls shivered with the easily resurgent childhood belief in the aliveness of things, enjoying their fear. This was a room full of aliveness, from the tall windows that let in a welcome outdoors—a thick willow as reassuring as a farm horse, lawn, a white stone bench, artfully naturalized shrubs, a glint of bay—to the elephant trunks that undulated over a sleeper’s head.
Softly shining wood floor, oriental carpet in tender, fading colors, a loveseat. Maude had never seen living room furniture in a bedroom before and wondered at the redundancy of upholstered furniture in a room that had a bed. But she didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t expose herself that way. An Empire dresser with mahogany curves like a woman. A pierglass: you could make the room into a hundred different oval-framed pictures, tilting it. Wallpaper that looked like flowers made with cream of tomato soup. Maude recognized it from one of her father’s artbooks—William Morris. Milton approved of Morris, or rather the Arts and Crafts movement, as a precursor to the later, more rigorous German approach to better living through design. It wasn’t that Maude didn’t warm to the idea of better living through design. It was just that she had her own preferences as to design and as to what constituted better living.
“Oh! It’s so beautiful!” she said about everything.
Weesie smiled her crooked smile, flattered, embarrassed—ashamed of her plenty, as she always was—pleased, but a little sarcastic and not wanting credit.
Maude turned to some framed photographs standing in front of books on the shelf. “Oh, my God, is that Mary Jane?” It was a girl in a strapless white evening gown and tiara, from the rather recent days when teenagers already looked older than grown-ups did now.
“Her coming-out,” said Weesie in a voice that seemed to curl her mouth like lemon juice.
A terribly English-looking young man in tennis whites was the young Jock Herrick, now a distant, intimidating power with gray hair, a big American. “Who’s this?” Maude asked about a chubby girl, around nine or ten, with a forthright expression, not quite smiling but looking straight at the viewer as if she could see ahead to Maude.
“The real me,” said Weesie. She laughed. “The fat me. I wore glasses too, but I took them off for the picture.”
It was hard to believe.
It wasn’t the little bit of fat that was so different, though that was different; it was a lack of tension, a frankness instead of the wild tenseness that added a frisson to Weesie’s confident gesticulations, plunging, headlong narrations, and laugh that popped like a cork. She was so keyed-up, every exchange with her was many notches more exciting than with other people. But you never felt you were quite altogether enough to occupy Weesie’s attention. The girl in the picture wasn’t like that.
They were lost for a while in Weesie’s children’s books, which Maude began plucking from the arched bookcase, and then her artbooks, agreeing that Renoir was a pornographer, whereas Modigliani was erotic. They loved saying the word; it was erotic to say erotic. It was almost erotic making these kinds of distinctions, being able to articulate them, and having someone to share them with.
Weesie had the tiny paperback Edward Gorey books, of which Maude had only ever seen one and felt it to be her own private discovery. They immediately made themselves a cult of two, the only initiates, they felt, into the poetry of poverty, yearning, loss, and death made wistful in spidery lines. Like Maude, Weesie had a crumbling paperback called The Beat Generation, with its cheerfully appalling account of insulin therapy (you got fat!), and she had the square, black-banded stapled volume, as-doll.-like as the Goreys, of Howl. It was cool to have it, but they both felt abashed by the poem’s grandiloquence. They had not gone looking for an angry fix and did not, really, intend to. Weesie had a book of lyrics to the songs of the folk-gone-rock musician that everybody worshipped. Maude, who was just learning to love the electrified version of the singer, found the lyrics, bald without their music, not so great as poetry.
“You’re wrong,” said Weesie, folding the oversize paperback to her chest and closing her eyes in a way that was just short of wincing, her silence, as much as the aristocratic ridge of her nose, suggesting she was too fine to comment but that Maude was damned by limitation of understanding and bad taste. Maude was afraid it was all over. But really, reality resists its curlew wing, it rides against fur-pawed silent woods was kind of . . . ungapotchkeh
Rather than never speak to her again, Weesie opened her eyes and asked if Maude wanted to go with her to the city on Saturday.
On Long Island, “the city” only meant one thing. It was New York, but it was not Brooklyn, the Bronx, or nearby Queens; it was never New Haven or Newark; it was only Manhattan—museums, ballet, Greenwich Village, and restaurants that had meaning beyond food.
They ran down the back stairs, a thing it was amazing to have, to find Weesie’s mother. In her studio.
Mary Jane Herrick looked like a dowager in a cartoon. Not only because of her solid bosom and full waist, giving that ship-in-full-sail effect, but her hair was an iron gray flip streaked with rust, as stiff and disguising as a nun’s coif. And even though, as Maude was breathlessly to tell her parents later, “she was working in oils, for Christ’s sake,” she wore, above a neat, blue, Peter Pan-collared smock, at her pinkly powdered throat, pearls.
Maude felt sorry for her. She was the consummate version of what her father called “lady painters.” And Weesie clearly saw that too. That was why she was so impressed with Maude’s father: he was a real artist.
That was why, to Weesie, his whole house was a work of art, while her mother had only this one room in their conventionally furnished dwelling, and even that was really for plants, a conservatory, glass on three sides, its herringboned brick floor protected by a canvas tarpaulin. This canvas looked to Weesie more like “real” art than her mother’s over-careful, too neat pictures. It was blotched and spattered in random colors under-foot. Gorgeous.
“Louisie-lou,” said Mrs. Herrick, leaving a lipstick kiss on Weesie’s forehead. Louise: Weesie. Maude hadn’t gotten it till that moment. She would never have looked for a resemblance between this mother and daughter, unless that streak of deep rust suggested Weesie’s wavy-to-curly caramel and butterscotch hair. Until they smiled. They had thin-lipped but wide, warm smiles, as if their faces cracked open in a great happy wedge, Weesie’s mouth pale and freckled, her mother’s a bright, conservative, no longer fashionable red.
Mrs. Herrick was working on a still life: a piece of Imari china, so that you would have to render not just the light and shadow but the pattern and shaded colors. This was next to an old pink doll, maybe once Weesie’s, with macabre holes where its arms had been and one eye crazily half closed, the other staring open. The doll rested on a garishly embroidered shawl; and behind the doll, a box of detergent, the kind of ugly thing one instinctively looked away from, so that it looked like What is wrong with this picture? But in Mrs. Herrick’s rendering, with its frankly evident, confident brushwork and naturalistic tones, the box was shadowy, and then you saw the joke: the way each object had some of the same colors. It was unclear why this should have the effect of a joke, but you looked at the picture and felt yourself smiling; then felt as if you had grinned at a skeleton or corpse.
But it was a studenty thing, a naturalistic still life. It wasn’t part of the dialogue of contemporary art. Anybody knew that. Maude looked at fuzzy-leafed, profusely blooming African violets, gloxinias, the downturned kisses of cyclamen faces pushing through jungley fronds. Down among the pots and pot stands were paintings leaning on the low wall, in danger of water damage. “Can I look?”
“Certainly.” Mrs. Herrick had turned back to her little picture.
There was a whole stack of portraits of Weesie. So many it would have been like stop-action photography of the growth of a child except that each was so psychological a study too, the moods and angles too different for continuity. The chubbo, relaxed Weesie around ten, not posing, sprawled out reading, tumbled with a patchwork quilt whose floral colors had the synesthetic effect, as pattern and color often do, of melody. Though splashy and loose, the picture was detailed enough to capture the morsel of flesh that fascinated Maude in class, or catching Weesie’s face in repose, the bud at the center of her upper lip, at the end of the deep groove, which could give Weesie the baby innocence of a prattler but could also look beaklike and predatory in ways Maude thought the person behind the face would not feel.
There was even a picture of baby Weesie, no more than a little bunched ham, an uncooked veal roast—fists, open mouth, closed eyes. A portrait, if such a thing were possible, of love.
“My father painted me once. It looks like a bunch of sticks. I mean, you can’t tell at all! He calls it ‘Study.’ ”
“You know, it’s never occurred to me to name my pictures,” fluted Mrs. Herrick, as if Maude’s father were a wonder.
Maude could not express the immediate and secretly formed wish that Mary Jane Herrick should paint her. Because she wanted it she couldn’t say it.
Weesie proposed their outing, and Mrs. Herrick’s face cracked into its wedge to say, “We’d be delighted, Maude Pugh.”
“I—but—the thing is, I was going to go to the Whitney. With my father.”
“Oh, the artist himself. Well, we could join you. Would that be all right—do you think?”
The way she said this, with a clear display of consideration but also certainty that it would be all right, made Maude believe that there was something to the term “good breeding.” It made her wary of making a misstep, and oddly mistrustful. Parents always liked well-behaved Maude, but Weesie’s mother was too emolliently warm. She treated Maude as an equal. It couldn’t be real.
They agreed they would meet at the museum, unless Mr. Pugh objected, and then the girls could go off and take the train home when they wanted to. The parents would fend for themselves.