We Are Water

Later, I’m informed that the festival committee was unhappy with my selection, and I read in the newspaper the following day that an irate art show attendee rushed Jones’s Adam and Eve, intent on destroying it, and that this would-be art critic had scuffled with its creator. This news delights me! Isn’t that art’s purpose, after all? To engage and, if necessary, disturb the beholder? To upset the apple cart and challenge the status quo? Was that not what the great Michelangelo did as he lay on his back, painting political satire onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Haven’t artists, from that great sixteenth-century genius to Manet and Rivera, outraged the public and forced them to think? Now that his art has been attacked, Josephus has joined the ranks of an illustrious fellowship.

Several weeks later, I am in my office at the museum, working on the budget for the coming year and half-listening to the radio. A novelty song is playing—one that mocks “the troubles” between the Irish and the Brits.

You’d never think they go together, but they certainly do

The combination of English muffins and Irish stew

I chuckle at the words, thinking, well, if paintings can make political statements, then why can’t silly popular songs? But I stop cold when the music ends and the news comes on. The announcer says that thirty-nine-year-old Josephus Jones, a local construction worker, has died accidentally—that he has tripped and fallen into a well behind his residence and drowned. I sit there, stunned and sickened. A promising artist has been cut down by fate just as he was hitting his stride. Unable to work, I put on my coat, walk out of my office, and drive home.

I go to his funeral service at the colored church. The Negro community has come out in impressive numbers to sing and wail and shout out their grief about Joe Jones’s premature demise, but I am only one of four Caucasians who have come to mourn him; the other two are Angus and Ethel Skloot and a distraught young woman who looks familiar but whom I cannot, at first, place. But halfway through the service, it dawns on me who she is: the Eve of Josephus’s painting, reaching for the forbidden fruit that hangs just below the malevolent serpent. Joe’s brother Rufus is one of the pallbearers, but he looks disheveled and dazed, every bit the drug addict that Joe said he had become. The snake, I see, has bitten him, too.

None of the mourners who orate at the service, or who later gossip at “the feed” downstairs after the “churchifying,” mentions Josephus’s relationship to art. But I hear, over and over, their rejection of Coroner McKee’s finding that Joe died accidentally. “A skull fracture and a six-inch gash on his forehead?” one skeptic stands and says. She is a loud, angry woman in an elaborate hat who looks like she tips the scales between two fifty and three hundred pounds, and as she speaks I realize that she is the same woman who played the part of Aunt Jemima at the pancake breakfast. “A six-foot man just ups and falls headfirst into a well that’s seven foot deep and twenty inches across? If that was an accident, then I’ll eat this hat I’m wearing, feathers and all,” she declares. “That’s why we got to keep fighting the good fight in the name of Jesus Christ Almighty! To get Brother Josephus some justice and right what’s wrong in this sorry world and this sorry town!” From various places around the room, people call out in agreement. “Mm-hmm, that’s right!”

“You tell ’em, Bertha!”

“Amen, sister!”

From the other side of the room, I hear a man’s tortured sobs. It breaks my heart when I see that it is Joe’s afflicted brother, Rufus …

“How sad,” Miss Arnofsky says, and her comment returns me from the past to the present, from the basement of the Negro church back to my studio.

“Yes. Yes, it was. Poor Rufus died not long after that, in the flood.”

“The flood?”

I nod. “A dam gave way in the northern part of town, and the water it had been holding back took the path of least resistance, rushing toward the center of town and destroying a lot of the property in its path. Several people were killed, Rufus Jones included. The paper said he had been living in an abandoned car down by the river.”

“When was that?”

“Nineteen sixty-two? Sixty-three, maybe?”

“And so sad, too, that Josephus never knew what a success he would eventually become. But at least in his lifetime, he had your advocacy.”

“Yes, I was able to give him that much at least. But it went both ways. Joe gave me something, too.”

“What do you mean?”

I pause before answering her, thinking about how to put it. “Well, Miss Arnofsky, many years have passed since the morning I hung that blue ribbon next to Joe’s Adam and Eve. I’ve judged many juried shows, large and small, always asking myself just what is the function of art? What is its value? Is it about form and composition? Uniqueness of vision? The relationship between the painter and the painting? The painting and the viewer? Sometimes I’ll award the top prize to a formalist, sometimes to an expressionist or an abstract artist. Less often but occasionally I will select an artist whose work is representational. But whenever and wherever possible, I celebrate art that shakes complacency by the shoulders and shouts, ‘Wake up!’ Not always, certainly, but often enough, this has been the work of outsiders rather than those who have been academically trained—artists who, unlike myself, are unschooled as to the subtleties of technique but who create startling work nonetheless.” My guest nods in agreement, and I laugh. “And now, if you’ll excuse me,” I tell her, “I have to climb down from my soapbox and go downstairs and use the toilet.”

“Of course,” she says. I rise from my chair and stand, my ninety-four-year-old knees protesting as I do. Miss Arnofsky asks if she might have a look around at my work while she’s waiting, and I tell her to be my guest.

When I return a few minutes later, she is standing in front of the shelf by the window, looking at a shadow box collage a young artist gave me years ago. “It’s called The Dancing Scissors,” I tell her. “The artist is someone I awarded a ‘best in show’ prize to years ago, and she gave it to me as a gift. She’s become quite celebrated since then.”

“I recognize the style,” she says. “It’s an Annie Oh, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right. You know her work?”

She nods. “I did a profile piece on her for our magazine when she was just starting out. It was called ‘Annie Oh’s Angry Art.’ She was very shy, almost apologetic about her work. But what struck me was the discrepancy between her demeanor and the undercurrent of rage in her art.”

“Yes, I suppose that was what drew me to it as well: the silent scream of a woman tethered to the conventional roles of mother and wife and longing to break free. I predicted great things for Annie back then, and I’m delighted that that has come to pass. We’ve stayed in touch, she and I. As a matter of fact, she’s being remarried next month, and I’m going to her wedding.”

“Oh, how nice. If you think of it, please tell her I said hello, and that I wish her and her new husband all the best.”

“Of course, of course. But I shall have to extend your greeting to Annie and her wife. She’s marrying the owner of the gallery that represents her work.”

“Aha,” Miss Arnofsky says. “Now tell me about the other paintings here in your studio. These are your works?” I nod.

She wanders the studio, looking through the stacks of my paintings leaning against the walls, both the ones that have returned from various shows and those that have yet to leave my work space. Standing before my easel, she smiles at my half-finished rope-skipping girl. “I so admire that you’re still at it every day,” she says. “I see this is a recurring subject for you.”

“Yes, that’s right. Little Fanny and her jump rope. I’ve painted her hundreds of times.” I explain to my guest that it was my good fortune to have received a scholarship to the school at the Art Institute of Chicago when I was sixteen years old, and how my training there helped to shape my artistic vision. “At first I merely imitated the styles of the painters I most admired. The impressionists and expressionists, the pointillists. But little by little, I began developing a style of my own, which one of my teachers described in his evaluation as ‘boldly modern with a freshness of vision.’ I don’t mean to boast, but I began to be recognized as one of the three most promising students at the school, the others being my friends Antonio Orsini, who came from the Bronx and loved the New York Yankees more that life itself, and Norma Kaszuba, an affable Texan who wore cowgirl boots, smoked cigars, and swore like a man.”

“A woman before her time,” Miss Arnofsky notes. “But tell me about your jump-roping girl.”

“Well, I spotted her one afternoon when Norma, Antonio, and I were eating our lunch in Grant Park. She was just a nameless little Negro girl in a shapeless gray dress, skipping rope and singing happily to herself. Her wiry hair was in plaits. Her face was turned up toward the sun in joyful innocence. As I recall, my friends and I had been arguing about whether Roosevelt, the president-elect, would prove to be a savior or a scoundrel. And as the others’ voices faded away, I pulled a pencil from my pocket and, on the oily paper in which my sopressata sandwich had been wrapped, began sketching the child. Back at the school that afternoon, I drew the girl over and over, and in the days that followed I began painting her in gouache and oils, in primary colors and pastels and monochromatic shades of green and gray. It was as if that guileless child had bewitched me! I gave her a name, Fanny, and came to think of her as my muse. For my final project, I submitted a series of sixteen works, collectively titled Girl Skipping Rope. On graduation day, I held my breath as one of the Institute’s capped-and-gowned dignitaries announced, ‘And this year’s top prize is awarded to … Gualtiero Agnello!’ It was the thrill of a lifetime. And as you can see, capturing Fanny has become a lifelong obsession.”

“Fascinating,” my guest says. “You know, I Googled you before I came over here today. You’ve had shows at several major museums, haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes. MoMA, the Corcoran, the Whitney. One of my paintings was purchased for the Smithsonian’s permanent collection a while back—a study of my little rope-jumping angel over there.”

“Wikipedia said you were born in Italy.”

“Yes, that’s right. In the city of Siena.”

“Ah, Tuscany! Well, that was certainly fortuitous. So many great artists came from that region. Who would you identify as your early influences?”

“Well, my parents and I moved to America when I was quite young, so none of the masters. I’d have to say I was drawn to art by my father.”

“He was an artist?”

“Not by trade, no. He was a tailor. But among my earliest and fondest memories is having sat long ago on his lap at a table outside the Piazza del Campo, watching, wide-eyed, as Papa’s pencil turned blank paper into playful cartoon animals for me. His ability to do so had seemed magical to the little boy I was. But sadly, my parents fell on hard times after my father’s tailor shop was burned to the ground by the vengeful husband of his mistress. It was Papa’s brother, my Uncle Nunzio, who came to our rescue. He assured my father that Manhattan has thousands of businessmen and they all needed suits. He sent money, too—enough American dollars which, converted to lira, allowed Papa to purchase three passages to New York. And so we left Siena, boarded a ship at the port in Livorno, and traveled across the ocean. I still remember how frightened I was during that long voyage.”

“Frightened? Why?”

“Because I thought we would never be free of that endless, shapeless gray water—that we were doomed to sail the sea forever. But twelve days after we left Livorno, we passed La Statua della Libertà and arrived on American soil.”

“And you were how old?”

“Eight. Of course, at that age, I could only understand bits and pieces of the reasons for our uprooting. But years later, after my own sexual desires had awakened, Papa confided to me that he had not wished to be unfaithful to my mother, but that his inamorata, Valentina, had a body by Botticelli and hair so flaming red that she might have stepped out of a painting by Titian. You see, my father was a clothier by trade, but his passione was art. He was like Josephus Jones in that respect. He’d had no formal training, but he had a natural talent and an undeniable urge to draw. He was seldom without his pencil and portfolio of onionskin paper. ‘A gift from God,’ my mother once called her husband’s artistic talent, although she would later describe it as ‘my Giuseppe’s curse.’”

“And why was that?”

“Because it unhinged him. Made him crazy. That’s often the case, of course—that creation and madness begin to dance with each other.”

“Like Van Gogh.”

“Yes, Van Gogh and many others. Painters, writers, musicians.”

She nods. Sighs. “So your family settled in New York?”

“Lower Manhattan, yes. We lived above Uncle Nunzio’s grocery market in a four-story tenement on Spring Street. Nunzio knew someone who knew someone, and soon my father was altering men’s suits at Macy’s Department Store on Herald Square. And while Papa was measuring inseams, sewing shoulder pads into suit coats, and letting out the trousers of fat-bellied businessmen, I was mastering proper English in the classrooms of the Catholic Sisters of the Poor Clares and learning broken English at Uncle Nunzio’s grocery market, where I worked after school and every Saturday. In warm weather, my job was to sell roasted peanuts from the barrel outside on the sidewalk. During the winter months, I was brought inside to wait on the customers.” I chuckle as I recall the kerchiefed nonnas who came by each day to shop for their family’s dinner and haggle over the prices of fruit and vegetables. Cagey Siciliani for the most part, who would first bruise the fruit they had selected and then demand a reduced price because the fruit was bruised. “At school, my teacher, Sister Agatha, took a shine to me and, because she thought I would make a good priest, urged me to pursue the sacrament of Holy Orders. But I was my father’s son on two counts: first, when I was in the eighth grade, I surrendered my virginity to a plump ‘older woman’ of sixteen who was fond of roasted peanuts. And second, I loved to draw. Seated on a stool next to my peanut barrel, I began sketching the Packards and roadsters parked along Spring Street, the passersby rich and poor and the fluttering garments hanging from clotheslines, the birds who flew in the sky and the pigeons who waddled along the sidewalk, pecking away at morsels. I filled sketchbook after sketchbook, eager to show Papa my latest drawings when he returned home from his day of tailoring. My father smiled very little back then, but he beamed whenever he looked at my pictures.”

“Like father, like son,” she says.

“Well, yes and no. Papa was unschooled, as I said. But when I was fifteen, one of my drawings won a prize: art lessons. And so each Saturday morning, freed from my job at Uncle Nunzio’s, I would ride my bicycle up Fifth Avenue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I would receive instruction from a German painter named Victorious von Schlippe. Like Uncle Nunzio, Mr. von Schlippe knew people who knew people, and the following year, at the age of sixteen, I was offered the scholarship at the Art Institute.”

“Your parents must have been very proud of you,” Miss Arnofsky says.

“My father was, yes. But Mama was against my going. She begged me to stay in New York—to find and marry a nice girl from the Old Country and give her grandchildren. Papa, on the other hand, urged me to go and learn whatever Chicago could teach me. I remember the tears in his eyes the morning he saw me off at Grand Central Station, especially after I unfolded the sheet of paper I’d slipped into my pocket when I’d packed the night before. ‘Look what I’m bringing, Papa,’ I said. He stood there, holding in his shaking hands one of the cartoon drawings he had made for me years before. Then he handed it back to me, blew his nose, and told me I’d better board the train before it left without me. And so, without daring to look back at him, I did.

“And oh, I loved the Windy City! Its crisp autumn weather, its warm and friendly people. I loved my classes, too, and was a sponge, absorbing whatever my instructors could teach me. On Sunday afternoons, it became my habit to write long letters to my parents about my exciting new life. But as autumn turned into winter, Mama’s letters back to me began to describe the strange obsession that had overtaken my father. Papa claimed that Catherine of Siena, Italy’s patron saint, had appeared to him in a vision, commanding him, for the edification of Italian Catholics the world over, to illustrate the story of her life: her service to the sick during the Black Death; her campaign to have the papacy returned from Avignon to Rome; her receiving of the stigmata. It was a terrible thing to witness, Mama wrote: a husband’s strange decline into madness.

“That Christmas, unable to afford the trip back to New York, I stayed in Chicago and sent my parents a gift box of candied fruit, sugared nuts, and nougats. Presents arrived for me as well. Mama had sent me three pairs of socks and a week’s supply of woolen underwear. Papa’s gift arrived in a long cardboard tube, and when I opened the end and uncurled the onionskin paper within, there was his charcoal rendering of the mystical marriage of Saint Catherine to Jesus Christ. The lines of the drawing were as frenzied and driven as the brushstrokes of the great Van Gogh, and the paper had several tears where he’d pressed down too hard with his pencil. I pinned Papa’s present to the wall above my bed, next to the fanciful drawing he had made for me when I was a little boy, and, looking from one to the other, lamented. If fate had been kinder to my father, I thought, he might have left New York, traveled west to California, and found work with the great Walt Disney instead of in a windowless back room at Macy’s gentlemen’s department. But as the people of the Old Country say, Il destino mischia le carte, ma siamo noi a giocare la partita. Destiny shuffles the cards, but we are the ones who must play the game.”

“That could just as well be a Yiddish proverb,” Miss Arnofsky says. “But destiny has certainly been kinder to you than it was to your father. A successful painter, the director of a museum.”

I nod. Smile at my guest. “Overseeing the Statler’s collection and hanging shows in its gallery hall is what paid our bills. But painting has always been my primary calling.”

“And there’s ample proof of that,” she says, scanning the room. She asks if I have children. One son, I tell her. Giuseppe. Joseph. “And has he followed in your footsteps?”

“As an artist? In a way, I suppose. He works in television out in Hollywood. Directs one of the daytime soap operas. And that calls for a kind of artistic style, too, of course. Television is so much about the visual.”

“Do you see him very often?”

“Not as often as I’d like. But I’ll see him next weekend. He has to be in New York on business, and so he’s coming up for the weekend. In fact, he’s bringing me to Annie Oh’s wedding.”

“Sounds nice. And you’re a widower?”

“Yes, my Anja died in 1989. Heart failure. One day she was here, the next she was gone.”

“And since then? Any other women in your life?”

“No, no. I suppose you could say that in old age, my work has become my wife. Or maybe this was always so.”

“Two long and happy marriages then,” Miss Arnofsky says.

I nod. “Long, happy, and somewhat mysterious.” My guest cocks her head, waiting for me to explain. “One’s wife, one’s art: you can never know either fully. After Anja died, I read her diaries and learned things about her I had never known. That she wrote verse—lovely little poems about her village back in Poland. And that once upon a time she had loved a boy in her village named Stanislaw.”

“And your paintings? They keep secrets, too?”

“In a way, yes. Sometimes I’ll work on a composition for weeks—months, even—without knowing what it is I’m searching for. Or for that matter, after I’ve finished it, what finally has been resolved. After all these years, I still can’t fully explain the process. The way, when you are deeply involved in a composition, everything else in the room fades away—everything but the thing before you that is calling itself into existence. It’s as if the work on your canvas has a will of its own. When that happens, it can be quite exciting. But disturbing, too, when, as the painter, you are not in control of your painting.”

“Forgive me; I mean no disrespect. But the way you describe it, it sounds almost like you experience a form of temporary madness yourself.”

“Madness? Perhaps. Who’s to say?”

Miss Arnofsky points to The Dancing Scissors and says she recalls Annie Oh telling her something similar—that she began creating her collages and assemblages without really knowing why or how she was doing it.

“That was true of Joe Jones, too,” I tell her. “As I said before, he told me he had begun painting because he had to. That something was compelling him. All I know is that at such heightened moments of creativity, I feel as if my work is coming not so much from me as through me. From what source, I can’t say. The muse, maybe? My father’s spirit? Or who knows? It could even be that the hand of God is guiding my hand.”

“So your talent may be God-given? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Well, I’m afraid that sounds rather grandiose.”

“Quite the contrary,” she says. “I’m struck by your humility in the face of all you’ve accomplished.” For the next several seconds, we stare at each other, neither of us speaking. Then she smiles, closes her notebook, unplugs her tape recorder. “Well, Mr. Agnello, I shouldn’t take up any more of your time, but I can’t tell you how grateful I am. This has been wonderful.”

“I’m just relieved to see that you still have both of your ears. I was afraid I might have talked them off.” She laughs, says she could have listened to me for hours more. “Oh, perish the thought,” I say. She rises from her chair, tape machine in hand, and I tell her I’ll see her out.

“No, no. I can let myself out. You should get back to your work.”

I nod. We thank each other, shake hands. From the doorway of the studio, I watch her disappear down the stairs.

But I do not return to my work as I’d intended.

The sun and the conversation of the past hour have made me sleepy. When I close my eyes, the images I evoked for my guest play on in my head: Rufus Jones, bereft at his brother’s funeral … Papa’s cartoon drawings coming to life before me at the piazza with the Fountain of Gaia gurgling nearby, water spilling from the mouth of the stone wolf into the aquamarine pool … Annie Oh’s strange collages that day when I first came upon them. Suddenly, I remember something else about that day—something I had forgotten all about until this moment. I had been wavering about whether to give the top prize to Annie or to an abstract expressionist whose work was also quite impressive. But as I stood there vacillating, a gray-haired Negro appeared by my side—a man who looked eerily like an older version of Josephus Jones. It wasn’t Joe, of course; by then, he had been dead for years. “This one,” the man said, nodding at Annie’s work. It was as if somehow he had read my mind and intuited my indecision. And that had clinched it. The “best in show” prize was hers …

“Mr. Agnello? … Mr. Agnello?”

When I open my eyes, my housekeeper is standing before me. She says my lunch is ready. Do I want her to bring up a tray?

“No, no, Hilda. I’ll be down in a minute.” She nods. Leaves.

Half-asleep still, my eyes look around, then land on the unfinished painting resting against my easel. It confuses me. Why does Fanny have angel’s wings? When did I paint those? I rise and go to her and, on closer inspection, realize that her “wings” are only the clouds behind her … And yet, winged or not, she is my angel. Seventy-odd years have slipped by since I spotted her that day in Chicago, and yet she continues to skip rope in my mind and on my canvases, raising her dark, hopeful face to the sky, innocent of the depth of people’s cruelty toward “the other”—those who, for whatever reason, must swim against the tide instead of letting it carry them …