Just before going back inside and closing the door, the kitchen worker looks back at me standing in the mouth of the alley, and no, his face is too narrow.
Standing on this corner under a streetlamp, I take out the arrowhead, feel the snow like icy sand pelting my palm around it. A brother is missing, not this arrowhead. Can’t really deny it. Somewhere I once read about Wampanoag walking along old Newbury Street, coming in from the forests to sell huge wild turkeys to the Puritan colonists for hardly more than nothing. A dun light cast by the streetlamps and the weather fill Marlborough Street, through which the rows of facing residential Victorian brownstones on both sides of the street stand dimly outlined and sketched as if with charcoal chalk, black bay windows like black rockface protruding through the wintry murk. Walking down the street, without even any lights on in these brownstones I’m passing, I think that this can’t look much different than it did when Henry James walked down it. And that’s when I see, ahead and high up through the dark, the only lamp-illuminated window on the block and inside that window a geometric shape of a cerulean blue, part of a rectangle, a standing screen, a jutting wall, or maybe a portion of a large painting hanging on that wall. The same cerulean or blue-green silk background of John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw. Herb Felman kept a magazine reproduction of that portrait taped to the top corner of his easel when he was painting his portrait of Mamita, in which he made the backdrop an impressionistic version of the one in the Lady Agnew. Lexi has the original, so that one up there is the copy Herb made for himself, still hanging in his old painting studio. When he went to live in Morocco, Herb left the brownstone house to be looked after by his sister’s daughter, Beth, a pretty girl my own age with sunken dark eyes who came with Herb, my father, and me to the Garden for a Celtics game one winter Sunday afternoon and to Durgin-Park for dinner after. I remember how worshipful Beth was toward Herb, a war hero and a successful Boston society portrait painter in the not-yet-extinguished Sargent tradition. Haven’t really thought much about Beth in ages. This was in about sixth grade, when I was still an emaciated simian boy. She wrote me a letter, but all I remember about it was how polished and sophisticated it seemed and for a while I kept the letter under my pillow. Beth lived with her family above her father’s bakery in Quincy. I must have written back, but I don’t recall what. Twelve sittings in all, three a week, I remember Mamita telling me, before Herb finished the portrait. To get to Herb’s studio, she took the subway. The weather during any of those sittings could have been the same as tonight, icy snow lightly scratching at the window. Mamita is the same age, twenty-six, that Lady Agnew was when she sat for Sargent.
The off-the-shoulder evening gown is her own, a Vogue copy made by the seamstresses in Abuelita’s hat and dress store. She keeps the gown at Herb’s studio and changes into it behind a standing screen near the wood-burning stove in the corner. She’d rather change in the privacy of one of the other rooms, but Herb has his reason for doing it this way. He’s explained: One thing the common man or woman on the street doesn’t understand even one bit about portrait painting, Yolanda, is that it’s a drama, like an opera or a play. Listening to the rustle of the gown’s silk and lace from behind the screen as he sits on the stool in front of the easel patiently waiting to begin is the musical prologue. Often Herb puts on an opera record while he works. On the morning that Mamita turned six, her eardrum was blown out by the celebratory chain explosions of
