Gods of Deception, page 14
When he reached her climbing station, he found a loyal remnant of Wendy’s class staring up at their instructor. She seemed to skitter across the cliff face, literally hanging by her fingertips from the transverse sheets of conglomerate. At first glance he missed her rope, due to the reflected glare of the lowering sunlight. He held his breath as he watched her long-legged, orange-helmeted figure continue to glide across and up the cliff face. Standing with their gear, avid students craned their necks as she demonstrated the movement and grip placements, calling out each move in a loud but unhurried voice, her agile and adept transfers of weight effortlessly executed. For a moment, she lay marooned flat against the stone, carabiners on her harness glinting, clinging like a bent spring as she prepared the next move. She was wearing blue spandex tights, a sports bra, and gray climbing shoes, her outstretched fingers dusted in white chalk. Every tendon and muscle showed in long, tensile lines across her arms, shoulders, and back as she reached far up and sideways, seeking a hold, testing, swinging up and over, adjusting limbs as she mastered the equilibrium point for the next advance skyward: ten thousand years in every reach. Moving closer for a better view, he was relieved as her rope became visible, a thin blue lifeline attached to a harness on her waist. His initial apprehension was calmed by the rapt appreciation of her students below as they absorbed the technical details on offer. An older climber stood at the base of the cliff, holding her belay line. Once at the top, she gave a wave and quickly, expertly rappelled herself down to the climbers below, high-fiving the men and hugging the women—clearly the alpha female in the pack. Then everyone began to gather up their gear and move off toward the gravel carriage road and parking area.
Only then, as she was gathering up her stuff and policing the area, did Wendy realize she still had company. A palm over her eyes to shield the glare out of the west, she looked at her watch, then smiled and came forward to give him a sweaty kiss on the cheek.
“You found me,” she said, letting out a sigh as she caught her breath. “Sorry if I kept you waiting.”
“My legs are shaking. I didn’t see the rope at first.”
“This is kindergarten, a cakewalk; I could free-climb it with my eyes closed.”
“I think it’s terrifying.”
“My dad took me climbing when I was eight on much tougher terrain than this. But the Gunks are pretty cool—best rock climbing in the east, certainly the best teaching courses.”
As she looked up from her backpack, holding a bottle of water to her lips, the slanted sunlight caught the blue of her eyes, the honey streak in her ponytail, the quivering, shapely ridge of her long nose. Her muscled body, caked with sweat and rock dust, smelled of dirt and leaves … and fall.
“You and Altmann,” he said with a hint of chagrin, something about her—the upturned tip of her nose, her long, agile fingers—reminding him of someone. He felt not a little bewildered at her seeming transformation from two nights before.
“Ah, so you get it now”—she pointed to where he stood with a hand braced against the cliff face—“the fissures, the lichen patterns, the shadings of striations in the sandstone—and just fourteen thousand years ago the last retreating glacier polished them up for us and your grandfather.”
“I feel pretty stupid that I never bothered to check this all out.”
“The moment I walked into your gallery, I knew. Like an old friend … the feel of this place. I was just blown away.”
“Expensive friend, dropping forty thou like that.”
“Cheap!” She snapped her fingers. “What price for the timeless.” She arched her chalk-stained eyebrows. “And you don’t have to worry: My check won’t bounce. I’m a long-term investor.”
“You are the dream—ah, Duveen, right, priceless?—client. A triple threat: enthusiasm, connoisseurship”—he was going to say “money” but then thought better of it—“and an offer to schlepp paintings. What’s not to like.” He gazed at her, a tad nervous. “’Fraid to say, there’s been a slight hitch in plans.”
“I know, I had to take on an extra class and we ran late.”
“My aunt Alice—you met her at dinner—insists I stop by for dinner tonight.”
“That’s cool.”
“Means we’d have to stay over at my mom’s tonight.”
“Cordelia. I absolutely loved your mom.”
She smiled, seemingly embarrassed at her undue enthusiasm, and so returned to a diligent survey of the climbing route to make sure everything was shipshape. He noticed sketch pads held by rubber bands next to her backpack, and one that lay open, a pastel and ink rendering of a rock face.
“You sketch, too, while you climb?”
“Oh, these,” she said, coming over. “Just noodling around when there’s time to kill.”
He picked up the open pad, a Penguin paperback of Jane Austen’s Persuasion beneath, and began flipping through the pages: pencil sketches and pastel renderings of the rocks, lush color-saturated studies of the cracks and crevices and patterns in the grain. He paused, staring at a drawing of a nude figure gripping a rocky overhang. “Geest,” he said, looking up at her, “is this your work? Did you do this, too?”
“Yup, like I said, scratching around.”
He couldn’t hide his indignation. “You’ve been fucking with me. These are really good, professional-caliber.”
“Just as well you have a good eye,” she replied with a bemused, endearingly goofy expression.
“So, I don’t get it. You’re an artist who teaches climbing, or a climber who does art on the side—while buying expensive paintings for kicks?”
“Actually, I’m a professional climber with sponsors. And I don’t need to tell you: Only a few contemporary artists make a living at what they do. Not unless they’re in bed with Gagosian or Glimcher or part of the celebrity art circus.”
“So, you’ve been fucking with me.”
“I hadn’t gotten around to that yet.”
“You never said boo at the opening or dinner.”
“Listen,” she said, an indignant flush in her cheeks, “that was your celebration for your genius grandfather. It wasn’t my place to butt in and go on about myself—another contemporary artist pushing her shit.”
“You’re hardly a shrinking violet.”
“With your family clamoring like hungry beasts, what else was I supposed to talk about except my climbing?”
“They thought you were a rock star.” He kept flipping through the sketch pad. “Is this what you do, the nudes against the cliff background?”
“Stone nudes, self-portraits. It’s my thing, my signature style—you know how it is.”
He stared at a delicately sketched nude woman, upside down, clinging to a ledge by hands and feet, every sinew and tendon stretched, the line of her backbone echoing the horizontal creases in the escarpment above.
He shook his head, exasperated. “Paintings?”
“Yes, paintings.”
“How big are the paintings?”
“Some life-size, some smaller, some mucho bigger. It’s all about the color and texture—stone and skin tones, the patterns of line in the rock and the body—real formal issues.” She glanced at him as he closed the sketchbook and handed it to her. “Listen, this isn’t about my pimping myself for your gallery, if that’s where this conversation is leading.”
“You have representation?”
“Not exactly. A few group shows here and there, lots of private clients, especially in the climbing fraternity—it’s tough starting out.”
He smiled, his head perched at a jaunty angle on his wide shoulders. “But you’ll let me do a studio visit?”
“We’ll do an exchange. I’ll help you move your grandfather’s stuff— get a gander at the estate—first pick, shall we say—and then I’ll grant you the visit. And you don’t even have to sleep with me.”
“God forbid. Do you work from sketches or photographs?”
“Both.” She held up her phone, which she’d been checking for messages. “Photographs, which I work up into sketches, and sketches, which I photograph and then work up into paintings, abstracting and teasing out the formal relationships as the process unfolds.”
“You have a professional do the initial photography?”
“Nope, can’t afford professionals; just friends, colleagues. People like you. Here, I’ll show you—if you’re game, if it won’t embarrass you.”
“Try me.”
“Help me get my crash pad positioned underneath the overhangs there. Just keep your eyes peeled; I saw a copperhead around here last week.”
9
A Life in the Law and Out:
Teddy and Alice
THERE IS ANNIE, blond hair in a bun, sitting in her favorite wicker chair on the piazza as she nurses tiny Teddy, her white breast swollen with milk, her contented face dappled in leafy sunshine on this late-spring day. She is humming to her firstborn, humming a lullaby over the breeze rippling the lake, humming in time to the song of the Blackburnian warbler, orange-throated fellow just returned from the South—rudely interrupted by the redheaded drumbeat of a pileated woodpecker—her warm breath mixing with the scent of pine and damp moss and the nearby woodpile of aging oak logs.
Why is it that sometimes this image, this timeless maternal image, should strike such a sinister note in my soul? As if Annie held a viper to her breast. I recoil from the thought, realizing that perhaps the Hiss trial has branded my heart with a cruel streak of cynicism: that good can so easily be transformed into evil. That the goodness of my son could prove the downfall of my family.
Is such a metamorphosis possible—even likely—and for a child so early introduced to the goodness and healthy life of the woods, the woods he came to love, and so made his own? A child who came under the spell of the ship’s keel ceiling, where Annie would place him in his infant bassinet and later his playpen for naps while she played Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals or some dreamy Debussy or Satie, soothing him with evocations of clouds and sea and the early-morning mists over the lake of which she was so fond. All in forlorn hopes of encouraging an attachment to the piano that might sprout wings in his young heart. As she also did with the girls—obtaining equally meager results.
Even at three or four, there would be little Teddy, toddling down to the lake along the rooted path with a huge pair of binoculars like an anchor weighed around his neck to spy on his “birdies,” his blond hair tousled, knees scraped. He’d spend hours staring up at the boathouse rafters, where the barn swallows made their nests and shuttled to and fro, feeding their young. Or he’d fish off the dock for bass, waiting for the bald eagles to glide into view, a mating pair that had taken up residence on the tallest white pine down the lake—Annie’s sunlit steeple of Saint-Hilaire. That boy had the patience of Job—unlike his father—the way he could sit and watch, waiting for their mating dance, for their frolicking pinwheeling through space like tiny white angels, as he often said. Or perhaps white-robed gods escaped from their lair in the ship’s keel ceiling to sport among the clouds, as he later, already a teenage heartthrob, fancifully described another pair of eagles to me. Teddy grew by leaps and bounds from summer to summer—butternut-tanned, agile, ropy-muscled—and, unlike most first children—delighted at the advent of his sisters, Alice and Martha, mostly because they distracted Annie and so left him free to roam.
And roam he did in realms of gold, both past and present. For when he wasn’t birding or fishing or exploring Handytown (avoiding piano practice), he’d be huddled with John Burroughs and Jack London by the hearth. Before he was ten, first encouraged by Annie (bored with children’s literature), he immersed himself in Joseph Conrad, who seemed to stir some far-flung adventuring spirit in his soul. In the pages of that exiled Polish author he encountered a congenial band of courageous misanthropes and duty-bound natural philosophers. Often he’d quote at dinner—drawing on his near-photographic memory—whole paragraphs of Conrad’s alter ego, whether Marlow or the narrator, who insisted on man’s duty to persevere in the face of an unrepentant, uncaring nature—the cruel yet enchanting sea that tested men relentlessly. One troubling quote that Teddy repeated more than once stays with me: “Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only an expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.” Was Teddy, in this line from An Outpost of Progress, slyly acknowledging the efficacy of the Bill of Rights to his lawyer father? I think not. For Teddy seemed innately attuned to natural laws, if not nature red in tooth and claw. As a boy and youth, he found in the mastering of any adversity or challenge our woods might pose a kind of inner serenity, a oneness—perhaps a completeness (as Annie did with her music and books), which fueled the audacious escapades of his short but glorious life. Looking back, I can almost see him as a Lord Jim, striking out on his own, exiled by his dreams and ambitions to prove himself worthy in the eyes of Marlow (God forbid his father), living up to some intuited code of conduct while testing his limits when faced by the forces of chaos. So I was not surprised when he joined the marines. I suspect he felt as safe in the competency of his will to survive as he did in the company of likeminded comrades who shared a common fidelity to a code of honor.
All of which Annie dismissed as balderdash.
“Teddy, Conrad was an artist, not a philosopher. Read his Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ where he writes of art as something transcending wisdom, which speaks—how did he put it?—to ‘our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation …’ That’s why you need to keep practicing, to feel the music, the timelessness of Mozart at your fingertips—that’s what binds us together. As your Conrad put it, ‘the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.’”
How often Annie and I feared for Teddy’s safety when he failed to return from a hike until after dark. Or when he took to rowing his racing shell in the middle of the night, sprinting like a demon under the quicksilver moonlight, when an unseen root or stump could prove disaster. A boy, a youth, strong and determined, with a will that both disarmed and charmed his disciplinarian mother, a boy whose natural talent and physical skills at the keyboard often drove her to distracted tears. Teddy could effortlessly put pages of music to memory in one or two practice sessions. Of all my children and grandchildren, he was the only one who genuinely cared about the sorry fate of the old D & H Canal and the early settlers, as if drawn to their sad unstoried past, these phantoms who had once peopled Hermitage’s woods, their tiny hardscrabble farms, now just pine-clad clearings, scattered like so many tattered prayer rugs over the endless foothills, where phantom walls appear and disappear like despoiled chthonian altars. He loved nothing better than hunting out artifacts of their desperate lives, digging up old bottles and rusted bits of farm implements, repairing walls in places I’d never laid eyes on. Perhaps he saw these “invisibles,” as he liked to call them, as yet more Conradian figures lost to time, revenants inscribed in their tumbled fieldstone walls.
Teddy was hardly a solitary dreamer. He loved company, especially that of girls, who would flock his way, not just because he was good-looking and could play anything by ear on the piano, or because of his outrageous sense of humor and happy-go-lucky high jinks, but for his essential kindness. And, too, they were drawn to his wildness—his daring outrages (if Alice is to be believed), a kind of romantic deviltry that fed some need of letting go in the fair sex, a break with the ordinary—a freedom, a daring, the allure of risk-taking that, oddly enough, produces in some a feeling of safety. So unlike his circumspect father, who bored the young women of his youth to tears with briefs on history and the law. Or was it that he’d absorbed so much of his mother’s spiritual grace, and so saw in a woman’s pensive smile a reflection of his own deepest yearnings, and they an abiding competency and love in his seductive arms?
What can a father say about a child who is not only different from his parent but who, in youth, had already bested him in most of what he’d been taught, blessed, too, with an innate temperament that both disarmed those who knew him and effortlessly earned their love? Dare I say it: a temperament not unlike that of Alger Hiss, who so deftly deployed his charm and expertise as to effortlessly win over his detractors to his cause, and turn friends into loyal minions.
My dear wife, Annie, were she still here, would accuse me of being in awe of my own son, as she often did, or worse, of giving into his every whim, of being too aloof, of refusing to discipline him. Of the same laxity of character, if not judgment, that allowed Alger to manipulate me and so doom our son.
“My God, Edward, I do believe you are jealous of your own son. When you’re not competing with him, you’re egging him on to disaster or worse.”
Annie claimed I pretended to rule the roost with my logical mind, setting goals and standards, but always turning a blind eye to Teddy and the girls with a busy shirk, while, needless to say, ignoring their deeper needs. Not that Annie wasn’t a little overawed by Teddy’s physical prowess at the keys. Annie was an artist, a musician, a believer in the imaginative glory of music and literature, and so felt that raising children required only firm but empathetic fellowship—leading by example and meticulously laying down the law—to solve everyone’s problems. Like her beloved Proust, she believed that art and abiding memory, compacted in a book or a Mozart sonata, were all children required to ground them in the sustaining heart of life.
