‘No, Jacques. Tell me. You know, because of my eyes, I cannot read. Hearing you tell about another life in another place is very interesting to me. More than that, I want to know you, how you became what you are. One wonderful thing about being blind is I can enter into your voice, feel your feelings, see the things you tell me about in my mind, with nothing to interfere. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Mirabelle, I think so. Now I’ll try to tell everything that had to do with my life which I think had some part in bringing me here to this place in this moment.
‘Back there, in school, I joined the art club, it was after school. I was more proud of this than of my good grades.
‘My father, who was an electrician, worked for Westinghouse. He wanted me to be an engineer. He labored every day in his dirty overalls and always had dirty hands. He worked with men, engineers, in white shirts, who wore suits and ties, whose hands were never dirty.
‘He wanted his only son to be like them. He’d show me his beaten-up, dirty hands and that was enough. It was his personal badge of failure.
‘World War II was going on during my high-school years. As part of a speed-up program, I was selected to go three days a week in a bus with five other students to a technical school called the Drexel Institute, in Philadelphia, to study engineering. My father was intensely happy about this. Somebody in the family was going to be somebody.
‘I enjoyed the studies, but even then I knew I would never be a happy engineer. Too much of it was so predictable. Engineering was making everything as predictable as possible, eliminating all room for error. Art is living with the possibility of error.
‘By a series of strange accidents, too complicated to describe, I found myself, in September of 1943, at eighteen, in the infantry as a private. By chance and good luck, I didn’t get killed as your father did. I did, however, learn one thing: if I survived, I was going to be an artist, not an engineer. I had my own one and only life to lead.
‘My parents were so happy to have me home in 1946, after I’d been gone three years, they didn’t complain much when I told them my decision. I think I could’ve said I wanted to be a trapeze artist and they would have agreed.
‘My father said, ‘After you’ve spent six months with all the weirdos in art classes you’ll be happy back in engineering.’
‘I studied art at the University of Pennsylvania. My grades got me in and the government was paying the high tuition with the GI Bill. It was the chance of a lifetime.’
I start lightly indicating the darker areas of her face. There is a concentration, an empathy, I want to capture in my painting.
‘My father wasn’t completely wrong. The art department at Penn was mostly women, and the men, except for a small contingent of veterans, were borderline. The overt sensitivity, theatricality, and inbred exclusiveness of the others were hard to live with.
‘But I was learning perspective, color theory, learning how to use different media: pastels, watercolors, tempera, canvas, various kinds of paper. The government was paying for all my materials, too. It was truly a dream come true.
‘A good part of the faculty shared their preferences with many of the students. Cliques formed. The teaching was very esoteric, with a sprinkling of pseudo-Picasso spread over dramatic, erotic, exotic abstraction. My own aesthetic did not fit. But I did learn.
‘I was like a maniac in my excitement and joy. In order to pass my classes, I dealt in muted colors, flowing curves, breaking up any surface or area into prismatic bits and painting them with subtle designer colors. I learned to dramatize almost to theatrical levels when it came to painting. There was much Sturm und Drang, suffering, with a capital S, necessary in our drawings. One teacher wanted us to tie our hands to a doorknob and slump to the floor so we could experience real pain.
‘It was all so artificial, but I didn’t care. I did one kind of work for school to get by, but I was using the paid-for materials, the big well-lit studios, all these advantages, to work out my personal aesthetic on my own time.
‘I was convinced, still am, that the world is intrinsically beautiful, and that I could see it and somehow show it to others, share my vision, without all the artifice, the theater, the intellectual rationalizations. I was almost like a missionary in my convictions.
‘But I did begin to think I might have made a better engineer. Sometimes the simplicity, the cleanness, of draftsmanship would exert its appeal.
‘I managed to survive the role of outcast in the art department, ate my own aesthetic, managed good grades, and became a member of the Art Honor Society. However, I was losing confidence that I was actually becoming an artist. These teachers at Penn were turning me into a designer, a member of a special fraternity or priesthood. I learned to outtalk almost anybody when it came to discussing painting: emphasis and subordination, plastic quality, transition, analogous colors, all kinds of nonsense which didn’t have much to do with what I thought art was about. It was very frustrating. Do you understand, Mirabelle?
‘I still just wanted to communicate from one person to another by making an honest personal statement about what I felt. This was not what “art” at Penn was concerned with at that time. It was mostly trickery in an attempt to get attention, any attention.
‘In school, in an English class, I’d met a wonderful girl who was studying at the Wharton School of Business. She was specializing in personnel management. She had no personnel to manage, no family business to go into, and it all seemed strange, meaningless to me, as removed from reality as what I was doing in the art department.
‘But we had fun together. We both loved to dance, to row on the river, to visit the museums, the aquarium, but mostly we loved each other. We married when we graduated.
‘She was offered a job in a pharmaceutical concern, somewhere between secretarial work and personnel management. I found an old garage in South Philadelphia, just across the South Street Bridge, not far from the University. I started painting seriously, painting the way I wanted. I sold nothing, no one was interested. I took a night job in an art agency, doing color corrections. It all looked dismal. Then Lorrie and I found out she was pregnant.
‘I went back to Penn and took a teaching credential, a special credential to teach art in secondary schools. I managed to get a position in September; the baby was born in October. I tried to keep painting. Lorrie seemed happy as a mother, or at least convinced me.
‘We’d found a small old house in a row of run-down houses, not far from my studio, where we could afford the rent. I was a reasonably good teacher but I still wanted to paint. I was becoming interested in some of the assumptions we’d all made as art students, about the communality of vision. The incipient engineer was striking back.
‘The art department couldn’t, wouldn’t help me. I found a man in the psychology department who was interested in what I wanted to try. He managed to get me a grant for my project.
‘Are you sure you want to hear all this, Mirabelle? The more I go on, the longer it gets, I’m practically telling you the story of my life. Besides, it’s getting dark.’
‘It’s always dark for me, Jacques. If you do not mind going on, I should like very much to hear you. It is growing cold, though; would you close the window? I shall make us coffee and we can eat some cake I have here.’
She stands and goes into the kitchen. I stand and turn around to close the window. There’s still a little light in the sky but not much. I hear the scratch of the match and its flare as Mirabelle begins heating water. In the near dark, I take down my painting box, then move the chairs back over to the table. Mirabelle brings the two cups of hot coffee and some cake on individual plates. It’s even more astounding to me seeing her move so easily now it’s getting darker. In half an hour I won’t be able to see my hand in front of my face, but for her nothing will have changed.
The coffee and cake are delicious. I didn’t realize how wound up and, at the same time, how tired I am. Mirabelle sits in the chair across from me, her eyes just vis
ible in the dark. She’s waiting. I take a long breath, let out a sigh, and go on.
‘It was hard living for us. Lorrie’s parents didn’t have any money to help us with, either. Then, less than a year later, we find that Lorrie’s pregnant again. The first one we named John after me; Lorrie said if this next one is a girl, she could have any name but Lorrie. She was never going to name a girl child after an English truck. It was another boy and we named him Albert, after my dad. I felt he’d been so disappointed in me, he deserved at least this.
‘We were always short on money. I had to give up my night job at the agency so I’d have time to do my master’s thesis. Even so, because I was teaching days in a junior high school, I was having difficulty establishing myself as a resident student at the University. In those days, things were much more rigid.
‘I titled my thesis Differential Visual Perception and Its Relationship to Certain Personality Variables. Basically, this meant I was trying to demonstrate how people see differently according to the way they are. I think most people suspect this, but nobody except a Swiss named Rorschach, a long time ago, had tried to prove it. I worked a great deal with his set of ten ink-blot cards.
‘Klopfer and Kelly, the main interpreters of Rorschach, became my heroes. I got my master’s degree just before Lorrie delivered our third child. This one we named Helen, after Lorrie’s mother.
‘The thesis was well received and published in the most prestigious of the psychological journals. I received a few hundred dollars a year more from my school district because of the degree and was offered a period off every day to act as a grade counselor. I thought that was the end of it.
‘I’d proven to my own satisfaction what I think I always knew, and now could shake off the encrustations of four years in art school at the University of Pennsylvania, maybe get on with my own painting.
‘Mirabelle. You don’t have to listen to this. It gets more boring before it gets better.’
She stands. She walks over to the wall where I’ve stood the portrait. I can barely see it in the dark.
‘How I wish I could see what you are seeing in me, Jacques. Please, continue with your story, I find it very interesting.’
I know now I’m telling all this as much for myself as for Mirabelle. It’s like sorting out cards that have gotten jumbled up and are spread on the floor. They’re the same cards, but now, seen in order, they aren’t so confusing, incomprehensible, to me.
‘About a month after the publication of my thesis, I received a phone call from California. We’d just gotten our phone and I thought one of my buddies from the school where I was teaching was putting me on.
‘It was from an organization called the Nard Corporation. It was what they called in America those days a “think tank,” a place where supposedly intelligent people were brought together to solve problems and think together. They’d do something they called “brainstorming,” where they’d take an idea and try to look at it from all sides.
‘The man on the phone said they’d read my thesis with great interest and wanted to know if I would fly out to California and talk to them about it. They’d pay my plane fare and a per diem of a hundred fifty dollars a day.
‘I was shocked. I was only making slightly more than twice that a month teaching. I said I’d call them back. I told Lorrie and she said she’d be okay and I should go. I then called my school and had more trouble getting time off there, but they agreed, finally, to find a substitute for me for a week, but it would be deducted from my pay.
‘I called Nard Corporation and said I was on my way. They’d already made plane reservations and scheduled a meeting with those who were concerned. I guess they’re not accustomed to being refused at a hundred and fifty dollars per diem. I don’t imagine they often were, especially in those days.
‘It was January, and I arrived in California in bright sunny weather. Except for my military time, which was all cold, wet, and the wrong direction, I’d never traveled, never been in a warmweather climate.
‘I carried my overcoat on my arm and went to a hotel on the beach where they’d made reservations. I wasn’t in the room fifteen minutes when the phone rang and someone at Nard asked if I would care to join a small group for dinner at a private home. It was like living in a film, and here I was in filmland. It was so different from anything I’d ever known.
‘The dinner was comfortable, informal, my hosts and their guests never mentioned the subject of the scheduled meeting for the next day. It was only later I discovered that most of the Nard Corporation “thinking” was financed by the U.S. Air Force and all these people were very secretive, very security-conscious. I was an outsider and being observed; but I enjoyed myself and the dinner.
‘Next day I walked across a few streets to a low-lying brick building not more than a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean. I was stopped at the entrance. I was asked to wait and one of the guests of the evening before came down, signed a series of papers, gave me a little plastic badge to pin on my jacket, and I followed him inside, past guards, into an elevator, and up to another floor.
‘The meeting was held in an ordinary-sized room with a long table and folding chairs. I was asked to sit at one end of the table.
‘This sounds like a science-fiction story, doesn’t it, Mirabelle. You can’t be interested in all this.’
‘But I am, Jacques. I am truly.’
‘Well, to make a very long story short, they felt, from my thesis, that with my art background, and my experience with computers doing the statistics for the thesis, I was just the kind of person they were looking for.
‘You see, Mirabelle, I’d done my analysis of the data for my experiment with an early computer, a miracle of that time, something that looked like a series of pinball machines or jukeboxes and cost four hundred dollars an hour to use. I managed to wangle a half-hour grant. The material inserted into it had to be organized on little cards with holes punched in them, then strung on spindles. It’s amazing how things change.
‘They wanted me to help man one of what they called silos on the DEW Line. DEW had nothing to do with water on the grass in the morning. It stood for Distant Early Warning system. They wanted to teach me about more sophisticated computers, then have me design programs of artificial situations to be flashed onto radar scanning screens. There would be men in these silos who would watch, scan, for unidentified aircraft, meaning planes or missiles, to bomb the United States. It didn’t sound very interesting to me. It sounded too much like the engineering I’d abandoned. But when they told me the salary they’d pay, five times what I was earning as a teacher, I became interested.
‘I would live in the silo for a month at a time, not leaving it. Then I would be rotated home and could spend two months with my family. My family was not to move from where they were. Before I could be used, it was necessary I be cleared for security, also Lorrie.
‘One of the men there asked a series of questions about my background to see if there would be any problems. I’ve never joined anything, not even the Boy Scouts. My family couldn’t afford the ten-cents-a-week membership fee. Politics have never meant anything to me, I’m still not interested.
‘They said my training would start immediately. I would be trained in computers right at home, there at the University of Pennsylvania. Then, as soon as my security was cleared, I would have on-site training at a place unnamed and virtually inaccessible. I could tell my wife I was working for the government but no more. I was to tell no one else anything.
‘It all happened so fast, seemed so overwhelming to me, Mirabelle, that I was uncomfortable. But those who were presenting all this information looked exactly like the people who had sat in for the oral defense of my thesis. There was the usual sprinkling of pipes, tweeds, beards, mustaches, heavy-soled low-cut hand-made shoes. It was hard for me.
‘That night, in the hotel, I called Lorrie. I was sure the line was being monitored. I was already becoming very paranoic about the entire business. But I was fascinated,
too. I only told her I’d been offered a job at five times what I was making teaching, but I’d have to be away from home a lot more. I told her I’d work for the government, as a sort of artist-engineer. I explained I would be trained right there across the bridge at Penn, but then I would be assigned to a place, undisclosed, for a month, but then could be home two months.
‘She was excited. There didn’t seem to be any objections and she was sure I’d be home when the baby was born. It turned out she was right. I was still studying at Penn when Hank, our last child, came. Lorrie had her tubes tied. She wasn’t yet thirty and felt four children were quite enough.
‘And so that’s how I started working for the government. The work wasn’t too boring and I became fascinated with the new computers. Gradually, with my mathematics and art background, I developed a reputation as a specialist in computer graphics, at that time, in the mid-fifties, an almost unknown technology.
‘I worked through C.S.D., a subsidiary to Nard Corporation, during the next three years. Then the concept of the DEW Line, as an effective means of defense, came under scrutiny. I came back to the Nard Corporation headquarters in California to help develop new approaches.
‘I moved with my family to San Jose, California, near the Nard Corporation. I rode a bike to work every day. I was making even more money. We had a house near the hills. The children were going to good schools. We bought a new car. It seemed our lives were unfolding like a precast dream.
‘Then MBI came into the picture. They offered me a contract and a salary twice what I was earning at Nard. They offered security. I knew they were the biggest computer organization in America. At that time, it was difficult to even buy their equipment, they’d only lease it. There was tremendous opportunity for someone with a background like mine to advance. My friends at Nard encouraged me to make the jump and I did. We moved again, this time to White Plains, New York. This was in 1960, I was only thirty-five.