As the trolley car stops at Fisherman’s Wharf, Frances wakes up from her memories of what happened and how she’d left Anne fourteen years ago, feeling remorse and a deep shame at her behavior. She walks briskly away from these feelings, inhaling deeply as if the air will cleanse her. She passes the Dolphin South End Club, Ghirardelli Square, Muni Pier, and climbs up the hill and down into Fort Mason, stopping at Greens’ takeout for a second coffee and a scone, which she carries upstairs, stopping at the first landing to admire the view, the expanse of Marina Green leading to the Golden Gate Bridge on one side and Alcatraz on the other, with Sausalito just beyond. The abstract shapes of the scene below, the triangles of the suspension bridge, and the stone-cold line of Alcatraz meeting the sea bring a painting to mind, one she’s done or has yet to do.
The cold metal steps, not unlike those on her own boat, comfort her as she opens the white waxy bag. Rough fingers trace the perimeter of the scone. “Triangular,” she whispers, removing the gem from the bag. She first bites off one corner of the buttery dough with a crystalized sugar coating. Pecan and orange zest mix with her saliva, revealing a symphony of tastes. Then she bites off a second corner before sipping the still-hot coffee. Golden crumbs rest on her large bosom.
On the second landing, she opens the metal door and walks down a narrow hallway, passing the drying room where paintings rest in slots. She imagines them as lost souls separated from their creators. On her left she stops automatically in front of her former locker, number forty-nine. This art class had been her refuge when she left Anne and Greg in such a hurry fifteen years ago. She stands staring at locker forty-nine where she used to store oils, brushes, a gray woolen sweater that was her grandfather’s, and a pair of old shoes. She even remembers 34-4-34, her combination.
Frozen in front of the orange metal storage bin, she sees herself as she was then: forty-five and pregnant, living with Sister Mary as a lay-person, dressed in a black woolen sweater and a tweed skirt with an expanding front panel that would accommodate her growing tummy over the months that followed.
The old tool box holds the palette knife, the hard edge, the screwdriver she’d use to open her gesso, small tubes of Windsor Newton paints, expensive Sennelier from money she’d eked out from her last paycheck from her position at the university. The tubes run together. The cadmiums—yellows and reds, light and medium—sit together; then the vermillion, the alizarin crimson rest next to the burnt and raw siennas. The third space holds the cooler colors—phthalo blue and green, cerulean, ultramarine and cobalt, and her favorite, indigo, a dark blue, almost black color.
She looks through the metal door with X-ray vision, seeing the well-worn brown T-strap shoes splattered with paint, the neatly folded gray woolen cardigan sweater that Papa Nicola used to wear on winter days when he’d let her mix the colors in his home studio.
Her heart fills as she recalls her old painter grandpa having done what she loves to do, teaching her how to mix paint with the right amounts of linseed oil and damar varnish with stand oil; how to lay her paints out in oppositions of orange against blue, red against green, yellow against purple. She crosses her arms, caressing her body, caressing the image of her papa, who’d been a mentor to Alan Sterling in Alan’s early days at the Art Institute. Painting with Alan brought her closer to Papa Nicola; painting in this classroom with Alan was like being in her papa’s studio in the old Belvedere house before he died, in his mid-fifties, of tuberculosis when she was nine. Mixed feelings of death and the excitement of creation invigorate her. She jiggles the lock. It doesn’t open. Of course, it wouldn’t. She hasn’t been here for fourteen years.
She then moves to the far doorway of the art room and steps inside. The long rectangular room, with large industrial windows facing Greens’ in the direction of the Marina and the Golden Gate Bridge, is exactly as she remembers it. She walks to the front of the large studio space and sees opposite the windows and between the two doors, the white walls smattered with assorted paint strokes of every color and pinpricks where her canvases had been pinned into the wall—canvases mural-size, sometimes six or seven feet wide.
Small tables and wooden easels stand helter-skelter; a platform used for models rests in the center. The yellow metal cabinets that contain lethal thinners, turpentine, and oil mediums are locked with a chain. Below the faucets, two deep and darkly soiled sinks wait. Frances can hear the water as it pours over soapy fingers, squishing paint from hairy brushes that have been soaked in solvent. She makes a full sweep of the room to make sure she is alone.
Before sitting down on one of the stools, she covers the seat with a piece of paper, knowing how paint has a way of finding clothing. As she smells the residues of thinners and oils, she closes her eyes and imagines seeing her former classmates file into the painting studio.
Mostly women artists, the women at the studio reminded her of the sisters in the convent in the way they coddled each other and had fun. When she first went to the school she’d imagined they wanted to touch her tummy and to feel the heart beat of the new life growing inside. Frances wanted to engage with them in a playful way, to celebrate this new life given to her, but she had to put a restraint on her joy. No matter she wanted their blessings. But how could she have shouted out her excitement at feeling life stir within her when it had cost her so much? Look what she had lost. Look what she had done. Not only had she abandoned Anne again, but worse, she had held inside her the baby Anne couldn’t have. It was bittersweet.
Sitting in the classroom now, she wonders how she’d managed the early months of her pregnancy.
There was Cora, in her seventies and recently retired. “Frances, you better paint for two. My mother used to tell me to eat for two. I got as big as a house!”
“Don’t you even listen to that one, you’ll get as fat as she is,” Elsa, the oldest among them, shouted.
Cruce laughed, poking Cora. “Eat for two, she’s always kidding.”
Frances wanted to hear these old tales, the chitchat, and to receive their wisdom to eat for two, but she couldn’t indulge them so freely. But they didn’t know. She couldn’t blame them for not knowing how she stole this baby. She turned away toward Leah and Zel, Chrissie and Jane, Annie, Kathy, Jo, and Naomi, who were setting up their easels and palettes when Alan announced a current exhibit he’d seen at SFMOMA.
“Has anyone seen it? If not, you should see Manuel Neri’s work. He paints large canvases of ghostlike figures. They are sculptural in quality.”
“Isn’t he a sculptor?”
“Competition for Giacometti.”
“Have you seen the Arneson exhibit?”
Alan Sterling stood tall, a head over her shoulder as she painted in front of a six-by-five-foot canvas pinned to the wall.
“Keep going. Then do another one.”
“Another one! But this is not finished!” she said.
“It’s working. Do a half dozen more. Your gestural quality is your strength. And go see Neri at SFMOMA. Look at Odilon Redon, and Dufy, too,” he recommended. “I think you’ll like the Fauve artists, as well.”
Wasn’t Alan validating her creativity? She believed that through his encouragement of her work, he was honoring her pregnancy as well, because Frances believed that her success was related to the baby growing inside her. He was providing the inspiration. But she didn’t tell Alan that her unborn child helped her to paint for two or twice as good. She didn’t tell Alan how his support helped her feel deserving of this new life given to her by God. Her meaning pointed to creating beauty in the world. And that is what she would do—paint beauty in this world!
• • •
Opening her eyes now, Frances sees with absolute clarity how Alan saw her and understood her work. For him, her paintings were alive. He didn’t see the grayness and blackness of her life in the habit she’d worn for so many years. The black and white was gone, replaced with colorful movements as if painted by whirling dervishes. No stoic nuns lined up in a row. And now he’s dead.
She regrets that they had not been in touch these fourteen years and that she had not told him how much he mattered to her. She realizes she has exiled herself from all whom she loves. The sobering thought brings to mind the Madonna and Child series, which emerged in those early months of her pregnancy and reflected not only joyful anticipation of the birth of a child but sadness as well.
As she reflects on her work, she’s aware of the despair she painted into the eyes of the Madonna. Deep fluid eyes downcast, with shadows of gray daring to cover her rosy cheeks. More like the eyes of the Mater Dolorosa, Lamenting Virgin, the virgin of tears and sorrow, than Virgo Gaudens, the joyful virgin. Mary held the infant Jesus close to her breast, but her eyes spoke of a sadness foretelling the loss of her only son. This recognition is stunning for Frances. Her loss was foretold, but she had missed the cues.
Frances bends her head away from the disturbing image only to find another one emerge—of a crying woman, the one who came to Frances when she lived with Sister Mary. Mary was a renegade nun who had made her house a ministry for grieving women. Frances had just left Anne’s house, not knowing she was pregnant, when Sister Mary asked Frances to help out by seeing this grieving woman. Perhaps Mary understood the workings of God by putting them together.
The woman was grieving for her toddler at the time. “We were celebrating at my brother’s new house. Jimmie just started crawling. I set him down on the floor. We were toasting, and when I looked down, I didn’t see my baby. He’d crawled away in a split second. We searched, running down the steps and toward the pond. When I looked over the railing I saw his green tank top floating on the top of the water. Belly down like he was looking for fish.”
Frances, then three months pregnant, sat in front of the crying woman, who clung to the tiny striped cap her baby wore, letting her tears wash her face. She dabbed her eyes with the little cap. Frances thought the woman’s confession to be inappropriate given her state, and yet imagined that it was her state that had elicited the confession in the first place. Frances didn’t cry with the grieving mother, not letting herself too close to the horror of the death of a child. Instead a screen came down between her and the lamenting woman. In this vacant, cold art studio she cries with the poor woman. Can you forgive me my sins? My aloofness? My coldness toward you? Now she sobs for the woman, for herself, and for her dear sister whom she lost twice.
Frances gets up from the covered metal stool and starts moving frantically, swings her arms, sweeping figure eights and great arcs, dancing her feet toward the painting wall as if this movement will console her, will bring back the lost opportunities for more peaceful choices. All that remains are the ghosts of her loves. The ghost of Alan Sterling; the ghost of Grandfather Nicola; the ghost of Anne. The lost baby Jimmie of the grieving mother and her own lost child. All of them, ghosts, and yet together perhaps. Somewhere.
Why have I come here today? She remembers the reason: Alan’s death. In her mind she sees herself as an old lady dancing and swinging her arms in the middle of an empty classroom, sniffing turpentine, waving her hands in the air. A lost soul hidden in a red coat walks where the teacher would have been, searching for those blue eyes that used to twinkle with sparks of joy, those thin lips that said, “Keep painting, Frances.”
She flicks off the florescent lights and leaves the room. On the fire escape, she pauses briefly to look out at the bay, letting herself sit on the stairwell again, peering out at the cold blue gray water and Alcatraz, thinking only of solitary confinement, The Rock in the middle of the bay. They were imprisoned for far less. She prays, Save me, Dear Papa, have mercy on me.
Begin again today.
She yearns for absolutio, to be set free from her sin. Or is it dissolutio she wants, to be dissolved into a state of nothingness?