As the letters pile up I save them under my bed, tied with a pale pink ribbon. In one he writes: “Every night I look up at the great square in the southeast, nearly overhead, and name the stars in it: Broad Cove, Four Corners, East Friendship, and the Ulmer Church, and wish that I were driving around it with you.” After supper I open the shed door and step outside, looking up at the vast expanse of stars, and imagine Walton doing the same in Cambridge. Here I am, there he is, connected by sky.
THE CAMEO SHELL
1944–1946
For years, nobody has seemed particularly interested in the young artist who set up a studio in our house. But this summer is different. In town with my sister-in-law, Mary, doing errands, I’m approached by a woman I don’t recognize in the canned-goods section of Fales.
“Excuse me. Are you . . . Christina Olson?”
I nod, puzzled. Why would a stranger know who I am?
“I thought so!” she beams. “I’m renting a cottage near here with my family for the week. I’ve read about you and your brother. Al, is it?”
Mary, who’d wandered over to the next aisle, comes around the corner. “Hello, I’m with Miss Olson. Can I help you?”
“Oh, I’m sorry! I should’ve cut to the chase. A famous painter is working at your home, I believe? Andrew Wyeth?”
“How do you—” Mary starts.
“I wonder if I might presume on you to get his autograph for me?” the woman wheedles.
“Oh. Well?” Mary asks, looking at me.
I give the woman a tight smile. “No, that’s impossible.”
Later, when I mention this to Betsy, she wags her head as if she’s not surprised. “Sorry about that, Christina. Andy was on the cover of American Artist a while back, and we worried it might change things. Evidently it has.”
“Did he say anything about Al and me?”
“A little. Not much. He may have mentioned your names. Of course the article reveals that he summers in Cushing, so it probably isn’t hard to figure out. I know he regrets saying anything. He really doesn’t like being bothered. I’m sure you don’t either.”
I shrug. I’m not sure how I feel about it.
Several weeks later, sitting in my chair beside the open kitchen window, I watch a baby blue convertible pull up in front of the house. The driver is wearing a cream fedora, the woman beside him a filmy polka-dotted head scarf.
“Toodle-oo!” she calls, waving pink-tipped fingers. “Hello! We’re looking for . . .” She bats the man on the arm. “What’s his name, honey?”
“Wyeth.”
“That’s right. Andrew Wyeth.” She gives me a pink-lipped smile through the window.
Andy isn’t here yet, but I know I’ll see him sauntering up the field from Kissing Cove any minute. “Never heard of him,” I tell her.
“He’s not painting inside this house?”
“Not last time I checked,” I say.
She purses her lips, perplexed. “Frank, isn’t this the place?”
“I don’t know.” He sighs. “You tell me.”
“I’m pretty sure. That magazine said so.”
“I don’t know, Mabel.”
“I could swear . . .”
Sure enough, as they’re chattering away I see Andy coming toward us through the grass, swinging his tackle box of paints. Following my gaze, Mabel cranes her neck in his direction.
“Look, Frank!” she hoots. “That’s probably him!”
“That guy?” I say with a forced chuckle. “He’s just a local fisherman.” I raise my eyebrows at Andy, who sees me and pivots toward the barn. “We let him store his rods up here.”
Mabel sticks her lip out in a pout. “Aw, darn it, we came all this way.”
“He might sell you some mackerel. I could ask.”
“Ew, no thank you,” she sniffs, tightening her scarf around her hair. She doesn’t bother saying good-bye.
When they’ve turned their car around and headed off down the drive, Andy emerges from the barn. “Thanks. That was a close one,” he says. “I need to keep my big mouth shut.”
“Might be a good idea,” I tell him. We’ve had such a closed-off and intimate existence here that civilization has felt very far away. But slowly it’s dawning on me that Andy belongs to the world, and not just to us. It’s an unsettling realization.
MANY THINGS ARE disquieting these days. In June of 1944 a torpedo zeroed in on John’s ship off the coast of Normandy and killed two dozen men. He almost didn’t make it out alive; he clawed his way out of the sinking rubble with only the clothes on his back. “The watch I bought in Brooklyn for $100 was smashed to smithereens,” he writes, months after the fact. “A day after we were hit, a seagoing tub towed us back to the English Channel, where we were put on a ship to Plymouth. I slept on a coil of rope and nearly froze to death, but I didn’t care. I’m just happy to be alive.”
Does he come home after this? He does not. He is sent to England, Scotland, Ireland before a short leave in Boston and forty-five days of training in Newport to become a crew member on an aircraft carrier. Then he heads to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese.
Sadie, whose son, Clyde, also joined the naval reserve, tells me, “I’m always on high alert, listening for the sound of an unfamiliar car up the driveway.” I know what she means. I wake in the night with a sense of dread that mostly dissipates by morning but is never entirely absent. At random moments in the day and night I think: this could be the moment Sam and Mary arrive on my doorstep with a telegram. But perhaps not if I knead the dough until it’s silky. Not if I pluck the chicken until it’s smooth of feathers. Not if I sweep the floor and get rid of the cobwebs in the eaves.
EARLY IN THE winter of 1946, Betsy writes with terrible news: Andy’s father and his nephew Newell were killed in October by a train in Pennsylvania. Mr. Wyeth was driving the car, which stalled on the tracks. Andy is bereft, she writes, but hasn’t shed a tear.
When they return to Maine for the summer, I can see right away how much his father’s death has affected him. He is quieter. More serious.
“You know, I think my father might’ve actually been in love with her,” he says when we’re alone in the kitchen. Sitting in Al’s rocker, he pushes it back and forth abstractedly with his foot. Heel, toe, creak, squeak.
I’m confused. “Sorry, Andy—been in love with who?”
He stops rocking. “Caroline. My brother Nat’s wife. The mother of Newell, my nephew, the one who was . . . the one in the car.”
“Oh—my.” I’m having a hard time grasping what he’s saying. “Your father and . . . your brother’s wife?” I don’t know any of these people by name. Andy has never really talked about them.
“Yeah.” He rubs his face with his hand, as if trying to erase his features. “Maybe. Who knows. At the very least he was infatuated. My father was that way, you know. ‘A man of great and varied passions,’” he says, as if quoting an obituary. “He never made any bones about that. But I think in the end he was miserable.”
“Did something happen just before the accident? Did someone—”
“Nothing happened. As far as I know. But I do know death was on his mind. I mean, it was one of his obsessions; you can see it in his work. It’s in my work too. But that’s not . . .” His voice trails off. It’s as if he’s talking to himself, hashing out what he feels, trying to settle on an interpretation. “It was strange,” he murmurs. “After the accident, we found his painting gear carefully lined up in his studio. All in a row. He’s normally like me, his stuff all over the place, you know?”
I think of the tempera splatters and crusted eggshells and petrified paintbrushes all over the house. I know.
“And maybe it was a coincidence, but the bible in his studio was open to a passage on adultery. Or—not a coincidence; I mean, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that he was contemplating the consequences of an affair, whatever actually happened. But it doesn’t mean he purposely . . .”
“It seems out of chara
cter,” I say. “From what you’ve told me. You always described him as so—present.”
Andy gives me a sardonic smile. “Who knows what motivates anyone, right? Humans are mysterious creatures.” He lifts his shoulders in a shrug. “Maybe it was a heart attack. Or carelessness. Or—something else. We’ll probably never know the truth.”
“You know you miss him. That’s pretty simple, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
I think of my own parents—how sometimes I miss them and sometimes I don’t. “I suppose not.”
Rocking slowly back and forth, he says, “Before my father died, I just wanted to paint. It’s different now. Deeper. I feel all the—I don’t know—gravity of it. Something beyond me. I want to put it all down as sharply as possible.”
He looks over at me, and I nod. I understand this, I do. I know what it is to carry mixed feelings in the marrow of your bones. To feel shackled to the past even though it’s populated by ghosts.
WHEN HIS FATHER died, Andy was working on a life-sized egg tempera of Al leaning against a closed door with an iron latch, next to our old oil lamp. He started it the summer before, trying, in sketch after charcoal sketch, to render on paper the scratched nickel of the lamp and the solid weight of the latch. Then he pulled out his paints and asked Al to pose next to the door in the kitchen hallway. For hours, days, weeks, Al sat against that door as Andy tried, and failed, to translate the vision in his head onto canvas. “It’s like trying to pin a butterfly,” he said in exasperation. “If I’m not careful, the wings will crumble to dust in my hand.”
When Andy left Port Clyde at the end of the summer, the painting still wasn’t finished, so he took it back to his winter studio in Chadds Ford. After the accident, he started working on it again. When he returned to Maine, he brought the painting with him and propped it against the fireplace in the Shell Room.
I’m standing near the fireplace looking at the painting one morning when Andy arrives at the front door and lets himself in. Noticing me in the Shell Room from the hall, he comes to stand beside me. “Al hated sitting still like that, didn’t he?” Andy says.
I laugh. “He was so bored and fidgety.”
“He’ll never pose for me again.”
“Probably not,” I agree.
Half of the picture is in light and half in darkness. The oil lamp casts shadows across Al’s face, on the old wooden door, under the iron latch. A newspaper behind the lamp is stained and wrinkled. Al is staring into the middle distance as if deep in thought. His eyes seem clouded with tears.
“Did it turn out how you wanted?” I ask Andy.
Reaching out a hand, he traces the outline of the lamp in the air. “I got the texture of the nickel right. I’m happy about that.”
“What about the figure of Al?”
“I kept changing it,” he says. “I couldn’t capture his expression. I’m still not sure I did.”
“Is he . . . crying?”
“You think he’s crying?”
I nod.
“I didn’t intend that. But . . .” With a rueful smile, he says, “You can practically hear that wailing train whistle, can’t you?”
“It looks like Al is listening to it,” I say.
He moves closer, studying the canvas. “Then maybe it did turn out all right.”
ANDY HAS NEVER asked me to pose for him, but several weeks after this conversation he comes to me and says he’d like to do a portrait. How can I say no? He sits me down in the pantry doorway, arranges my hands in my lap and the sweep of my skirt, and draws sketch after sketch, pen on white paper. From a distance. Up close. My hair, each minute strand, swept back off my neck. With a necklace and without. My hands, this way and that. The doorway empty, without me in it.
Most of the time the only sounds are the scratch of his pen, the great flap of paper as he turns a large sheet. Squinting, he holds out his thumb. He sticks the pen in his mouth, leaving him inky lipped. Mumbles quietly to himself. “That’s it, there. The shadow . . .” I have the odd sensation that he’s looking at me and through me at the same time.
“I hadn’t quite noticed how frail your arms are,” he muses after a while. “And those scars. How did you get them?”
I’ve become so accustomed to dealing with people’s reactions to my infirmity—uncertainty about what to say, distaste, even revulsion—that I tend to clam up when anyone mentions it. But Andy is looking at me frankly, without pity. I glance down at the crisscrossing strips on my forearms, some redder than others. “The oven racks. Sometimes they slip a little. Usually I wear long sleeves.”
He winces. “Those scars look painful.”
“You get used to it.” I shrug.
“Maybe you could use some help with the cooking. Betsy knows a girl—”
“I do all right.”
Shaking his head, he says, “You do, don’t you, Christina? Good for you.”
One day he scoops up all the sketches and heads upstairs. For the next few weeks I barely see him. Every morning he comes toward the house through the fields, his thin body swaying off kilter from that wonky hip, his elbows and knees flailing out, wearing blue dungarees and a paint-splattered sweatshirt and old work boots he doesn’t bother to lace. He raps twice on the screen door before letting himself in, carrying a canteen of water and a handful of eggs he’s swiped from the hens. Exchanges pleasantries with Al and me in the kitchen. Thumps up the stairs in his work boots, muttering to himself.
I don’t ask to see what he’s doing, but I’m curious.
It’s a warm, sunny day in July when Andy comes downstairs and says he’s tired and distracted and maybe he’ll take the afternoon off and go for a sail. After he leaves, I realize it’s a good time to see what he’s working on up there. No one is around; I can hoist myself up each stair as slowly as I want. Resting every other step.
Even before I open the door to the bedroom on the second floor I smell the eggs. Pushing the door wide, I see broken shells and dirty rags and cups of colored water scattered all over the floor. I haven’t been up here in ages; the wallpaper, I notice, is peeling off the wall in strips. Despite the breeze from an open window, the room is stuffy. I glance quickly at the painting, propped on a flimsy easel in the far corner, and look away.
Pulling myself up onto the single bed—my childhood bed—I lie on my back, staring at the spiderweb fissures in the ceiling. Out of the corner of my eye I can glimpse the rectangle of canvas, but I’m not ready to look at it directly. Andy told me once that hidden in his seemingly realistic paintings are secrets, mysteries, allegories. That he wants to get at the essence of things, no matter how ugly.
I’m afraid to learn what he might see in me.
Finally I can’t put it off any longer. Turning on my side, I look at the painting.
I’m not hideous, exactly. But it’s a shock nevertheless to see myself through his eyes. On the canvas I’m in profile, looking soberly out toward the cove, hands awkward in my lap, nose long and pointy, mouth downturned. My hair is a deep auburn, my frame thin and slightly off kilter. The pantry doorway is rimmed in dark, half in shadow. The door is cracked and weathered, the grasses wild beyond. My dress is black, with a slash, a deep V, below my white neck.
In the black dress—not what I was wearing—I look somber. Severe. And utterly alone. Alone in the doorway facing the sea. My skin ghostly, spectral. Darkness all around.
Bridget Bishop, waiting to be sentenced.
Waiting for death.
I roll onto my back again. Shadows of the lace curtains, moving in and out with the wind, make the ceiling a roiling sea.
When Andy comes in the next morning, I don’t tell him I went upstairs. He says hello, we chat for a few minutes while I stir up drop biscuits, and he walks into the foyer. Stops. Comes back to the kitchen door with his hands on his hips. “You went up.”
I spoon the dough onto a flat metal sheet, dollop after dollop.
“You did,” he insists.
“How’d you know
?”
He sweeps his hand up with a flourish. “Path through the dust all the way to the top. Like the trail of a giant snail.”
I laugh drily.
“So what’d you think?”
I shrug. “I don’t know about art.”
“It’s not art. It’s just you.”
“No, it’s not. It’s you,” I say. “Didn’t you tell me that once? That every painting is a self-portrait?”
He whistles. “Ah, you’re too shrewd for me. Come on. I want to know what you think.”
I’m afraid to tell him. Afraid it will sound vain or self-important. “It’s so . . . dark. The shadows. The black dress.”
“I wanted to show the contrast with your skin. To highlight you sitting there.”
Now that we’re having this conversation, I realize that I’m a little angry. “I look like I’m in a coffin with the lid half shut.”
He laughs a little, as if he can’t believe I might be upset.
I stare at him evenly.
Running his hand through his hair, he says, “I was trying to show your . . .” He hesitates. “Dignity. Solemnity.”
“Well, I guess that’s the problem. I don’t think of myself as solemn. I didn’t think you did, either.”
“I don’t. Not really. It’s just a moment. And it’s not really ‘you.’ Or ‘me.’ Despite what you think.” His voice trails off. Seeing me struggle with the heavy oven door, he comes over and opens it for me, then slides the baking tray of biscuits in. “I think it’s about the house. The mood of it.” He shuts the oven door. “Do you know what I mean?”
“You make it seem so . . .” I cast about for the right word. “I don’t know. Lonely.”
He sighs. “Isn’t it, sometimes?”
For a moment there’s silence between us. I reach for a dishrag and wipe my floury hands.
“So how do you think of yourself?” he asks.
“What?”
“You said you don’t think of yourself as solemn. So how do you think of yourself?”
It’s a good question. How do I think of myself?