Herb is a large, thick-necked, broad-chested, strong-looking man. Listening to opera records while he paints, he becomes very animated, puffing out cheerful baritone notes of the melody between taut lips, repeatedly bringing brush back to palette and peeking out at Mamita from behind a side of the easel. During those rousing men’s choruses that Mamita described years later without knowing what they were—“like all the soldiers singing as they march,” so maybe Boris Godunov or some such—he strides around his studio, singing along without words, suddenly coming to a stop in front of the canvas to stare at it like he’s never seen it before, then launching into another extended spell of painting, vigorously jabbing, smearing, slapping paint on with his brush, his singing subsiding to soft yelps and whimpers and finally falling silent inside his tunnel of concentration, the record still spinning, stylus knocking against the last groove. He has cut-up cardboard boxes laid over the floor instead of drop cloths and often falls to his knees to draw with a charcoal pencil or chalk, rows of preliminary sketches of Mamita’s hands crossing the cardboard floor. It astounds Mamita that a man can have become wealthy doing what Herb does. Even in winter, he wears a pigment-splotched white T-shirt, black horsehair shooting out through the V-neck like upholstery stuffing, and if the room feels cold, instead of encumbering his arms with sleeves, he puts on an old vest, its shaggy wool stiff as papier-mâché with paint smears from wiping and cleaning his own brushes against it. Joseph’s Mastodon Fur Vest of Many Colors, he calls it.
He often makes these little joking remarks about Jewishness. Like Bert, he considers himself a secular nonbeliever. Bert rarely mentions Judaism, though whenever he does, he sounds respectful or else nostalgically affectionate, as if referring to a lunatic but beloved old relative. The priest at San Sebastián, Mamita’s family church, had agreed to marry them so long as Bert vowed that their future children would be raised Catholic. But we weren’t raised Catholic.
Bert is always going on about how Herb is a true war hero. Mamita has heard him brag to some of his University Club squash-playing friends: My boyhood friend Herb Felman fought in D-Day, the Shrub War to Paris, and in the Battle of the Bulge, so don’t tell me he didn’t have a goddamned war. Who else do you know had a war like Herb did. Bert sure didn’t, he made bombs in a factory in Delaware. Bert has also told her that Herb is homosexual. Maybe it makes Bert feel a little better to evoke Herb’s homosexuality in the context of his own not-so-manly war. Somebody had to make bombs and, anyway, Bert was in his mid-thirties, commonly considered too old to go to war without an officer’s commission. But Herb was a thirty-four-year-old ordinary GI. With his broad face and noble nose, black hair receding over a strong forehead, thick, arched black eyebrows, and amber-brown eyes, Herb is a handsome man, he even somewhat resembles one of those broad-shouldered Aztec warriors she saw so many of in Mexico City during her honeymoon, depicted in murals and as statues. But his mouth is a little off-putting; the way his excessively rubbery lips seem nearly to turn inside out when he’s excited, exposing large front teeth, reminds her of that famous comedian who only she seems to think isn’t so funny. Years later, feet up in the recliner in her den, watching Carol Burnett on television performing a skit with that slapstick, doughty pathos that always brought out such gales of deeply felt laughter in Mamita, it will come back to her, and she’ll look over at her son and say, I’ve always thought Jerry Lewis would have been funnier as a woman.
Herb begins each portrait session by arranging Mamita in a white high-backed chair, setting her bare arm on the padded armrest so that the soft inner flesh of her slender bicep and the underside of her forearm are turned toward the viewer, hand resting slightly palm up on the silvery fabrics of her lap, giving her a look of relaxed, unselfconscious summer afternoon lounging. The other arm rests conventionally bent at the elbow on the padding, fingers dangling over the whorled wooden knob, engagement ring displayed. He tucks the orchid, always a fresh one, inside her décolletage. Holding up the Lady Agnew reproduction, he says, Try to hold your head just like this, Yolanda, with your left eyebrow just slightly raised. He wants the contrast with the slight droop of her opposite eyelid. The axiom of the slight symmetry-subverting flaw that lets beauty open out from the canvas. During one of their first sittings, Herb said, Yolanda, I want you to tell me a funny story without allowing yourself even to smile, never mind laugh. She told him about Coco, her pet monkey, and how she always spoke to Coco in English. He said, That’s wonderful, Yolanda. Now tell me the saddest story you know, but again, trying not to show any emotion. Mamita told how Coco had suffocated to death. Of course Mamita knew sadder stories, but this one, I think, was the one she relied
