Sunday, August 12
Before he admitted Jim and Charlotte to the embalming room, Cooper positioned a screen in front of the gurney that held Pollock’s draped body, which he had yet to autopsy. No need to subject the artist’s old friends to the sight of his corpse, even under wraps. Once the screen was in place, Cooper carefully arranged the sheet that covered the woman’s body, tucking it under her chin and behind her head so that only the face was visible and the marks on her neck were hidden.
He returned to the anteroom, took his jacket off the hook, and offered it to Charlotte, who was wearing only a light summer blouse, dungarees, and sneakers.
“Here, you’ll need this. It’s cold in there,” he told her. Jim helped her slip it on and replaced his arm around her shoulders as they both prepared themselves mentally for the viewing.
Cooper opened the door. “This way, please,” he said, and ushered them in.
No sooner had they entered the room than Charlotte spoke.
“It’s Edith.” Even from ten feet away, she was certain.
“How can you tell?” asked Nugent.
“Her hair. Both she and Ruth have dark brown hair, but Ruth’s is long and wavy. Edith’s hair is short, as you see, what they call a pixie cut.
“Does she have blue eyes?” Charlotte asked. Cooper said yes. “Then it’s Edith for sure. I remarked on how lovely they were when I was trying to get Ruth off the subject of affairs with married men. Her eyes are brown.”
Cooper thanked her, and followed the couple out to where Ossorio and the Fitzgeralds were waiting. Charlotte returned the doctor’s jacket and told the others that she had identified the woman in the next room.
“We need to inform the next of kin,” said Cooper. “I’ll call the hospital and find out if the other woman—you say it’s Kligman—is conscious. Maybe she can tell us how to get in touch with Metzger’s family.” He reached for the telephone, then paused.
“Has anyone been in touch with Pollock’s wife? Where is she?”
Ossorio answered, “She’s in Paris, at the apartment of Paul Jenkins, an artist friend, and his wife, Esther. They invited her to stay with them, so she checked out of her hotel and moved over to their place on Friday. Not realizing she would actually be there, I thought Paul would know how to reach her, so I put a call through to him early this morning.
“It was nine a.m. their time, and Lee was in the apartment. I don’t know how, but she knew the call was bad news even before Paul told her. As I was explaining what happened, I heard her scream—the look on Paul’s face must have given it away. He told Esther to grab her, apparently she ran to the window and he was afraid she’d do something foolish.
“He called me back later. It took an hour to calm her down, then he and Esther took charge. They canceled her return passage on the Queen Elizabeth and arranged a flight back to New York. I’m driving to Idlewild to pick her up tomorrow morning.”
“Has he any other family who need to be notified?”
Jim spoke up. “Yes, there’s his mother and four brothers. Jack was the youngest. I’m close to his brother Sanford, he’s called Sande for short, knew him before I met Jack. We worked together on a big WPA mural at LaGuardia Airport in the late ’thirties. He and Jack lived together on East Eighth Street in the Village. Then Sande got married to his sweetheart Arloie, had a kid, and the WPA was winding down so he decided to give up being a painter and earn a steady living. He moved the family up to Connecticut and opened a printing shop, did some war work and commercial stuff. When their mom got too old to live alone, Sande and ’Loie took her in.
“When Sande left—spring of ’forty-two, I think it was—Lee moved in. She and Jack had both been on the WPA, getting a regular paycheck for their work as artists. Seems like a million years ago that we had that kind of government support. But by then it was no longer a case of just doing your own paintings. After Pearl Harbor the WPA became a war services program, and they had to do propaganda posters and window displays for civil defense, things like that. But it paid the rent, and they could still do their own work after hours. By that time I’d been drafted, and I shipped out overseas, still working for Uncle Sam as an artist, but now on the army’s payroll.
“After I came back stateside I was looking for a place, and Jack and Lee were thinking of moving to the country. You may remember how bad the housing shortage was then—you couldn’t find an apartment in New York for love nor money. Jack told me that one of his other brothers, Jay, was taking over the Eighth Street place, but that he might rent us the front half, where Jack had his studio and a bedroom. Jay agreed, so we moved in when Jack and Lee left.”
He smiled and gave Charlotte a little hug. “We weren’t married then, but we got hitched a year or so later. In ’forty-eight I got a teaching job at Pratt, and we found our own apartment and bought the Montauk cottage for summers. Jack was sober then, and I really enjoyed being around him. He loved to go beachcombing, or we’d go out in the rowboat with a picnic lunch and pretend to fish. But I especially liked our studio visits. He really understood what I was driving at, and his comments were always right on target. When I went to his studio, I could feel the energy, almost like an electric charge, that went into his paintings. Lee once called it a living force, and I think that about sums it up.”
Jim took a deep breath. “Where was I going with this? Off on a tangent, I’m afraid. Oh, yes, I was talking about Jack’s family. Well, like I said, Sande, ’Loie and mother Stella are up in Deep River. Jay and Alma are still on Eighth Street, I think, and Charles, the eldest, is teaching out in the Midwest. Frank, the middle brother, lives near San Francisco. I’ll call Sande, he’ll notify the others.”
He paused, and shook his head ruefully. “Stella’s going to take this hard. He was her youngest, her baby boy. She always encouraged him, praised him, never scolded or criticized. She glossed over his emotional problems, just acted like they didn’t exist. And she was so proud of his success.”
“It’ll be very hard on Sande, too,” added Charlotte. “Of all the brothers he was closest to Jackson, they were only three years apart. But more than that, he was Jackson’s soul mate, the shoulder he cried on before Lee came along. They lived through hard times together, and that forged a bond time and distance couldn’t break. He was so disappointed when Jackson fell off the wagon, really angry with him. Not that Sande is a teetotaler, but he knew how badly alcohol affected Jackson, much worse than most people. He had no tolerance, couldn’t hold his liquor at all.”