faced from his journey yet almost eerily calm. She wants to remember how sweet he was. She wants to believe he will be sweet again.
But all she can think is:
Chapter Twenty-four
T he university starts its holidays by mid-December, and Clem is home, left to his own devices during the day as Gwen still has a week of school and Tally has her painting. Creativity doesn’t take a Christmas break, she informed Clem loftily when he began enumerating the things they might do together. Loftily and a little desperately. “I have to make use of what godforsaken light there is this time of year,” she said Sunday evening. She says that there are studies showing that some people need light, that she wasn’t made to live in this climate. Clem pointed out-gently, he thinks, even comically-that her mother’s people were Scandinavian. “And our furniture is Danish modern, so you should feel right at home. Perhaps you just need herring.”
Tally doesn’t find this funny. Tally finds very little funny as of late. She tells Clem that she hates their furniture, which she chose because it was the only style that worked in his house.
Until this latest project, most of Tally’s canvases were the sort of thing that makes people say, “My kid could paint better than that.” Tim Halloran said exactly that, adding: “And I mean Go-Go.” When Tim teased his kids, it never sounded quite right. Not to apportion blame, but-if that man in the woods had shown the boy any kindness, then Clem could understand how it happened. Go-Go yearned to be held by someone, anyone. Clem remembers how he used to climb Tally, seizing her hair, as if she were Rapunzel.
Despite what philistines such as Tim may think, Tally has a gift for abstract painting. She owes a lot to Rothko and Motherwell, but those are good debts. She uses cool colors in shades so close to one another that it is necessary to stand back and study her paintings to understand how much variation there is. Completely self-taught, she’s uncanny, and he’s proud of her, wishes she believed in herself enough to push for a show or even enter an amateur competition.
The painting that has bogged her down is figurative, however. No one’s child could paint this. It’s huge, an oil of two entwined children-well, teenagers, Clem has decided, because otherwise it would be almost pornographic. They belong to some other era, based on the clothing strewn through the foreground, an ancient time. The girl has a wreath of white flowers in her hair. A lion watches them from a glade. Pyramus and Thisbe? But the classic couple did not have a chance to make love before the lion entered their story. The painting is disturbing, in a good way, not at all trendy. But the faces are giving Tally fits. She clearly has tried again and again, but they are never quite right. The boy looks as if he’s in pain, not ecstasy, while the girl’s face has never advanced enough to have any expression at all. He yearns to ask Tally about what has inspired her, but then he would have to reveal that he has been sneaking into her studio.
It is an hour before dusk. Tally has retreated to the kitchen, where she will drink tea and mutter while preparing dinner. Clem loves the light at this time of year. True, he’s not a painter, but he can’t imagine anything better than walking through these hills of denuded trees. The soft gray light suits his mood. He’s not exactly upbeat himself these days. Ronald Reagan, president. A Republican-controlled Congress. It is scant comfort to live in one of the six states that Carter carried. If Tally’s depression were situational, he could better understand it, but she’s grown indifferent to politics. The only news that has affected her of late is John Lennon’s murder, which she insists on calling an assassination. Clem cannot bear to have such an important word used for the murder of a musician, and he told Tally as much. The argument spiraled out of control, perhaps because they seldom argued and had little practice. She wheeled their large dictionary over to him, showing him that it was accurate to use the word for the murder of any public person. “But for political reasons!” Clem countered. “Mark David Chapman was crazy, pure and simple. The desire for fame is not a political stance.” It was such a strange fight. Clearly, Lennon and Chapman were proxies for grudges they did not dare to address.
Now, striding across the hills in the fading light, it occurs to him that they were arguing over the fact that they were of different generations, that Tally had a stake in John Lennon’s murder, while Clem did not. But she doesn’t, not really. Although Tally is only four years older than Lennon, she is too old to be one of his true fans. By the time the Beatles came on the scene, she had opted out of her generation and joined Clem’s.
But perhaps
What would his children regret? How could he keep them from having regrets? They are so different. Miller, always determined to do the right thing in the right way, marrying at twenty-four, now on his way to being a father. Fee, so shy and diffident, a mystery even to herself. Gwen, her mother all over again, which scares him more than anything. He wishes he could protect them from disappointment, but he lost that battle long ago. Once, when Miller was very young, Clem drove him to a railroad crossing in South Baltimore, near Stockholm Street. A freight train finally lumbered past, a long one with varied cars. Miller, not even four at the time, was thrilled. When the last car passed, the train’s whistle blowing, he turned to his father and said: “Again.” And when Clem could not make it happen, he cried bitterly, upset not only by the lack of another train but at his father’s impotence.
Clem himself has no regrets. Well-he had no personal regrets until a little over a year ago, and he still can’t see what he might have done differently, so is that truly regret? He crests another hill, sees the little house on the other side of the stream. Is there smoke coming from the chimney? Are there chickens in the yard? He speeds up, almost running, splashing through the creek without thinking about his shoes, much less the risk of tetanus. It was all a horrible dream, then. The night never happened, the man never died, that’s why his body didn’t show up at the morgue.
But when he reaches the house, there is no smoke, and the “chickens” are old newspapers, blowing lazily in the breeze. The house looks different, though. And Clem can be sure of this because his walks, over the past fourteen months, keep leading him back here, although he hasn’t entered the yard for a month or two. Someone has been here recently. Probably kids. Only it looks neater, which makes no sense. Kids, even good kids, don’t leave things neater.
How did the children ever find their way here? It’s a question he has asked himself over and over again. The adults knew about the old man, of course, if not his predilections. In winter, the cabin’s roof was visible from the road they all used as a shortcut. But to the grown-ups, the house was a blight, an embarrassment. Clem and Tally, in particular, felt odd, living down the street from a man whose life seemed little better than a sharecropper’s.
