The Choiring Of The Trees Part 4

I had never heard that word in its s.e.xual sense; I interpreted glaciale in the sense of unfeeling, which I was not, or reticent, which I unfortunately was, to my embarra.s.sment. "You French," I said without reticence, and forgetting that he was not French but Slav, "are all libertines, and you are lecherous."

"We appreciate s.e.x as we appreciate wine. Life without it is inconceivable."

"But not at every meal."

"Why not? You say you are not a virgin, my Viridis, and I believe you, but have you ever indulged to satiety? Have you ever even done it twice in one night? No, I think not. s.e.x is a thirst, and an appet.i.te. Have you ever been satisfied? Are your o.r.g.a.s.mes powerful?"

I had not heard of o.r.g.a.s.mes and could not guess that what he was referring to was...what was that expression you used? "Get over the mountain"? Yes, I did not know that he was referring to getting over the mountain. I was not a virgin, no, not by a long shot, but je n'avais jamais joui comme ca, I had never been satisfaite, I had never been made to go over the mountain. w.i.l.l.y seemed to be waiting for an answer-this man who never wanted answers to his self-answering questions. I said nothing.

He took a different slant. "Show me your paintings. Let me look at your art. If I cannot admire the beauty of your unadorned body, let me see your most intimate croquis."

"All of my pictures," I told him, "are in my cabinet at the Academie Julian. I have nothing here."

He sighed, and seemed about to give up, but tried once more, one last ploy. "Are you ovulating and afraid you'll get pregnant? Very well, let me try ta neuvieme porte."

"My ninth door? What is that?"

"Don't be naive. Count your openings. Which is ninth and last?" When I seemed puzzled, he guided me: "Start with your ears, two, your eyes, two, your nostrils, two, your mouth, one, downward."

"Oh," I said. "No," I said.

"Ta douce rose. You are still a virgin there, no? I will be gentle. I will take your rose very slowly and with the most delightful sensations. You will love it. You will become addicted to it, so that whenever I ask again, it will be mine, alone. You will even beg me to have it whenever I am able to stiffen my monument."

I laughed as an escape from embarra.s.sment. I laughed at those words, faire raidir mon monument, such a conceited conceit. I drew a picture in my mind of his p.e.n.i.s as a monument approaching my ninth door, and found it hilarious, and couldn't stop laughing. w.i.l.l.y's face began to grow very red, and he gave me a disdainful look and vanished.

I did not tell Coco of the visit, of course. Whenever I saw w.i.l.l.y after that, always in the company of Coco, I couldn't suppress a short, quiet giggle, like a spontaneous belch, or a short hike partway up the mountain, and he tried very hard to pretend that I did not exist. But I found myself in private, lonely moments imagining what it would be like if I allowed w.i.l.l.y's monument to enter my ninth door.

I ran out of money. The funds that my father had calculated would last me a year in Chicago did not last a year in Paris. I had put off writing home to ask for more. Now I had to. It was a difficult letter, and an apologetic one. I described the Academie Julian and my teachers there, particularly Monsieur Levy, who was responsible for my having the rating of No. 3 in the school and who had encouraged me in resisting the temptation to become more fauve. I explained, or tried to explain, what Fauvism is, but then I realized that these pages were not going to make any impression whatsoever on my father, so I brought my letter quickly to its conclusion: that I was fulfilling myself, that I wanted very much to stay another year or so in Paris, that I hoped he would understand, and that I hoped he would send the money as expeditiously as possible.

I mailed the letter but realized that a month or more could pa.s.s before it reached him and brought his response back to me, and I could not borrow from my friends, who were no better off than I. I told Monsieur Levy that I would have to drop out of the Academie Julian because I couldn't pay the tuition. He suggested that I try to sell some of my paintings, and he arranged with a friend, the director of a small gallery, to give me a showing. I selected, with the help of Coco and the advice of Pablo and Max (w.i.l.l.y abstaining), my best fifteen paintings, including portraits of my friends, views of the Bois de Boulogne, but chiefly interiors of intimate rooms, usually without figures, and Pablo lent me some frames that fit, for the duration of the show. The gallery could give me only one week, and it was not the best season, and I sold only one painting, my portrait of Pablo, to a person who, I suspected, was simply a patron of his.

The profit from that sale lasted scarcely two weeks, and I was not able to help Coco meet the month's rent on our appartement in Auteuil. The day I took down my show, the gallery had a last-minute visitor, my wealthy friend Marguerite Thompson. Marguerite admired the paintings although she did not want to buy one. The two of us had a Pernod together at a nearby cafe, and I learned that Marguerite had left the ecole de la Grande Chaumiere, which had been too conservative for her, and was now at the ecole la Palette, where she was quickly becoming a little Fauve. Marguerite also wrote a weekly column for her hometown newspaper, the Fresno Morning Republican, a sort of "American in Paris" description of her experiences as an art student, and she wanted to use me and my show as the subject of this week's column, in which she intended to mention my "famous" friends: w.i.l.l.y, Coco, and especially Pablo.

"I didn't know they were so famous," I said.

"Close friends are never famous," Marguerite said, and took out her notebook and began to ask me questions about them.

"Do they pay you for writing the column?" I asked.

"Sure," said Marguerite. "Ten dollars a throw."

Without waiting to see if my father was going to answer my letter, I wrote to the editor of the Arkansas Gazette, enclosing a sample of one of Marguerite's columns and asking if the Gazette might be interested in having me write something similar for them, on a weekly basis, or even daily, if they wanted it.

Waiting for a reply from the Gazette sustained me through a dark period of poverty that culminated in the arrival of this letter from home: Dear Viridis- Glad to hear from you at last. Wondered whatever had become of you. Sounds like you are doing okay. Always wanted to see Gay Paree myself but never could. Sounds like there is lots to see there and lots to do. Glad to know the teachers think you are doing okay.

Wish we could say the same but things are not going too hot here. Problems with your sister. The boys are all doing okay, Matthew got married in June, didn't know where to send you the invite. Your mother stays over to Hot Springs just about all the time. Doctors don't seem to know what to do, just keep her happy and reasonable sober.

Viridis, I am not dictating this to my secretary but writing it out myself. You should have known that Cyrilla could never match up to you. I don't know why I let you think that. She just plain could not take it, and I didn't know what to do. I guess I was desperate and tried too hard, and she couldn't take it, and tried to do away with herself. You don't want to hear the details, it would make you feel as awful as I did. I am going broke paying for her fancy treatments now on top of your mother's.

So if you think I've got loads of money laying around loose to keep you in high style in Gay Paree, you got another guess or two coming to you, girl. I think you better just catch the next boat home. I mean this. You do what I tell you, and come right on home. The enclosed draft on Credet Lyonnaize (sp) is to pay for your boat ticket, and your train ticket from NY to LR, and not for anything else, hear me?

Your poor old father really does love you and miss you something terrible and can't wait to hold you again and tell you many, many sweet things. See you soon.

C.J.M.

The days after that letter came are still a dream, or at least I remember them no better than we remember our dreams. Coco said that I spent many weeks just sitting in my room doing nothing except staring at my useless hands.

What saved me finally, or restored me, was my first real memory of those days: looking down at my useless hands and discovering that they contained a letter, which I vividly recall reading almost as if it were my salvation, a letter from Thomas Fletcher, the features editor of the Arkansas Gazette, who said that, yes, they would be interested in seeing a column I might wish to write, with a view toward regular publication (weekly, at best, not daily). I roused myself out of my fugue or funk, or whatever depression I was in, and wrote a column, which I t.i.tled "An Arkansawyer in Paris," trying to capture for the homefolks the sights and sounds and smells of Paris. My first column was devoted to the life of the streets: the quay along the Seine, with its many bookstalls where you could buy books and prints very cheap; the street musicians; a barrel organ pulled by a donkey; the strong, gray draught horses with their heavy carts; the colorful, picturesque caps the women wore, and the failure of the caps to cover the sadness in their eyes. For weeks after mailing it off to Thomas Fletcher, I feared that my column had captured the melancholy and suffering of Paris but not its gaiety. Yet finally Thomas Fletcher wrote back to say that the Gazette would be happy to use it and subsequent columns on a regular basis-although style or usage required them to change the t.i.tle to "An Arkansan in Paris," and Thomas Fletcher was required to blue-pencil my references to Bohemian free love, drinking, and "abstract" art. The Gazette began to run my column weekly, and in Paris in those days it was possible, though difficult, to live on the $8.50 a week that the Gazette paid me.

Marguerite Thompson came into my life again, asking me if I wanted to join the American Women's Art a.s.sociation of Paris and to show my work at the annual exhibition of the American Art Students' Club. I said yes, and took the opportunity to thank her for having suggested what was now my sole means of livelihood, my column for the Gazette. We two columnists exchanged notes and experiences. Marguerite was leaving Paris soon to travel in Bordeaux and perhaps Spain. Would I like to go with her? I couldn't afford it. Marguerite generously offered to pay my expenses. Why? "Because I like you," Marguerite said. "I like your work. You need to travel more, broaden your sense of landscape, get into the sunny South. Or are you afraid to leave your famous friends?"

No, I was all too eager to escape my famous friends, especially w.i.l.l.y, who could never take no for an answer and still attempted whenever he could to seduce me and, failing that, to insult me. As for Coco, our friends.h.i.+p was becoming strained, not by her suspicions (she suspected that w.i.l.l.y was unfaithful to her with every woman he knew...except me) but by our artistic differences: Coco's painting was becoming increasingly charming, sweet, fas.h.i.+onable, and, yes, feminine; she was pleased with its feminine daintiness and sought to capitalize on it; I thought her painting was becoming more superficial and losing substance in both subject and form, and I couldn't help telling her my reservations. In retaliation for my critical remarks on her feminine style, Coco called me an interior decorator who was all eye and no mind. Actually, her paintings and mine at that particular time were more similar than our arguments would have indicated, but we went our separate ways ideologically and, at last, geographically. I went with Marguerite to Bordeaux.

I never returned to Paris, except when pa.s.sing through. With Marguerite I traveled to Burgos and Madrid during May and back to southern France for June; in July we traveled through Switzerland and to Germany (Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Heidelberg, and Munich). In August we rented a studio for six weeks in Bruges. Then we went to London for a while. I loved hearing English spoken again, and I decided to change the t.i.tle of my column to "An Arkansawyer in London"-which became in Tom Fletcher's hands, of course, "An Arkansan in London." Tom had a cousin living there, a Little Rock man named John Gould Fletcher, who was becoming a well-known poet, or trying to, and when Marguerite decided to go back to Paris (to study at La Palette, where she would meet her future husband, the artist William Zorach), John Gould Fletcher helped me find a room off St. Martin's Lane, and Tom Fletcher raised my "salary" to ten dollars per column. I remained in London all that winter.

Before Marguerite returned to the United States and married Zorach, she invited me to rejoin her in the spring and summer of 1911, and we painted together in Avignon, Saint-Remy, Aries, Les Baux, Martigues, and Ma.r.s.eilles. She and I shared a great love for the work of Vincent van Gogh and wished we had known him, and we tried to find the places he had painted in Arles, and we each painted our own versions of a little cafe in Arles that van Gogh had loved; neither of us imitated van Gogh, but we were inspired by him and felt a little of his pa.s.sion. In those days not much was yet known or written about the life of van Gogh, who is very famous now, but I knew that he had been a very religious man who had remained a complete skeptic, and I knew that he had danced on the edge of insanity for a long time. I also knew that he had sold only one painting during his whole life, and although he had received slightly more for it than I had received for the portrait of Pablo, he had lived in wretched neglect and poverty. The painting I am proudest of having done during that period, which now hangs in the offices of the Gazette, is called Olive Trees in Arles, and it shows a quartet of low, twisting trees writhing and chanting in the southern suns.h.i.+ne against a background of mountains more like Cezanne's than van Gogh's. I did not use olive green in the picture but several shades of green that give the total effect of being olive: there are patterns of apple green, pea green, sea green, beryl, reseda, Kendal and Dartmouth greens, choiring together. The picture is suffused with a sense of hope, joy, and youth, although I wept the entire time I was painting it. Marguerite could not understand why I was crying my heart out while painting such a happy picture.

In October, Marguerite and her aunt and another friend prepared to sail on a voyage that would last seven months and take them to San Francis...o...b.. way of the Orient. Marguerite invited me to come, and a.s.sured me that I could make a good rail connection from Fresno to Little Rock-after, she hoped, serving as a bridesmaid at her wedding. I was homesick, and I said yes. We sailed from Venice, and I began to write for Tom Fletcher articles ent.i.tled "An Arkansawyer in Cairo," "An Arkansawyer in Alexandria," "An Arkansawyer in Palestine," "An Arkansawyer in Port Said," "An Arkansawyer in Calcutta," "An Arkansawyer in Mandalay," "An Arkansawyer in Hong Kong," and "An Arkansawyer in Yokohama." Needless to add, Tom Fletcher insisted each time on transforming me into an "Arkansan" before the columns saw print, but otherwise he ran most of them as I'd written them. He personally met my train when it arrived in Little Rock, because he alone had been wired from Fresno that I was coming home.

My father did not know, until he looked up from his desk in his private office at the bank one day and said, "Well, lookee who's here! You sure have gone all the way around the world, haven't you? Are you home to stay?"

From my purse I took a snub-nosed derringer I had been given by an art dealer in Los Angeles, and I let my father look into the barrel of it, and I said, "I'm home to stay, Daddy, but if you ever try to f.u.c.k me again, I'll kill you."

On.

He did not know what to say. His eyes filled with tears. There was no mistaking the singing of the trees as their green boughs swayed, their limbs danced, their leaves rustled and trembled and quivered in quaver with their voices. A song of life.

"Well, Chism, you son of a b.i.t.c.h, what do you have to say?" the warden demanded.

"I," said Nail. It was all he could get out for a moment, as if he had said "aye." And at last he said the rest of it: "I'm right glad of that."

"You better be 'right glad,' you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," the warden commented. "Gabe, put the cuffs back on him. Take his stuff out of that death cell and throw him in with the others in the stockade. Let me know how he likes that."

The two guards took his arms once again and started to lead him out of Old Sparky's room. Fat Gabe was fit to be tied, he was so disappointed that Nail hadn't got it. Nail was going to be in real trouble with Fat Gabe.

"Wait, Mr. Burdell," said the lady from the newspaper, the one called Miss Monday. "Would it be possible for me to interview the prisoner before you return him to his cell?"

"Interview him?" said the warden. "What for?"

"Well," she said, "I'd just like to write up how it feels to escape death."

The warden snorted. "You jist heard him say he's 'right glad,' didn't you? What else could any man say?"

"Could I just ask him a few questions?" she requested.

The warden looked back and forth between the lady and Nail. "Okay," the warden said. "Here he is. Ask him."

"Do you mind?" she said. "He's not going to feel free to talk with everyone standing around like this."

"Well, I aint gon let y'all use the visit room," Burdell told her. "We don't let condemned men use the visit room."

"He isn't condemned anymore, is he?"

"He aint been pardoned, Miss Monday. He's only been reprieved."

The lady gestured at the witnesses' chairs, two rows of wooden folding chairs at one side of Old Sparky's room. "Couldn't we just sit here a few minutes?" she asked.

Again the warden needed time to make up his mind. His brains is real slow, Nail reflected. "Well, okay, I guess," he said finally. "I'll have to leave Gabe here with y'all, and let me remind you, ma'am, this person is a convicted rapist and is dangerous. I ought to hang around too, but, h.e.l.l, I'm late for my supper already."

"Mr. McChristian can handle it," the lady said, calling Fat Gabe by his proper name.

"Mister McChristian, huh?" the warden said, as if he'd never heard n.o.body call ole Gabe that before. "Well, Mister McChristian, you watch 'im, and if he tries any funny stuff you beat the everlastin sh-horse hockey out of him."

The warden and the others left the room. Nail sat down in the same chair he'd sat in to watch Skip get electrocuted, and Miss Monday sat in the same chair where she'd been sitting. Fat Gabe watched them as if they were getting ready to pull something funny. A sudden inspiration occurred to Nail: he could reach inside his jacket, take his blade, kill Fat Gabe with it, then take the woman hostage and break out of here. He would have to handle it carefully: right now Fat Gabe was far enough away to pull his gun beforehand. Nail would have to get him closer. But with these handcuffs back on his wrists, he wasn't sure that he could handle it, even if he got Fat Gabe close enough and moved fast enough. He hadn't even had a chance when he'd tried to reach his blade as Fat Gabe and Short Leg were putting him into the chair. They hadn't even given him enough time to- "h.e.l.lo."

The lady had spoken to him. He realized he wasn't paying her much attention. He looked at her. She had her notepad out, and a broken piece of charcoal pencil, which was all she had to write with, the same pencil she'd made that mark on his hand with before, the same pencil she'd used to draw that portrait of him that made him look so awful, the pencil now broken. "Howdy," he said.

"How does it feel?" she asked. "Or is that a stupid question? Were you all prepared to die?"

"No, ma'am," he answered her. "I'll never be prepared to die, until I'm real old and there aint nothin to live for no more."

She wrote this down, or tried to, the dull charcoal pencil making big clumsy letters, with few to a sheet before she had to turn the page over. Then she asked, "Did you really think it was going to happen? The execution, I mean. Did you still hope you might get a reprieve at the last minute?"

"Yeah, I guess," he admitted.

"Could you tell me what was going through your mind during those last minutes?" she asked, and added, "If it's not too hard."

"Well," he said. He thought. Both of them were looking not at each other but at Old Sparky sitting there forlorn and cheated but vengeful. He did not know quite how to say it, or even whether to try to tell her. Would she think he was nuts? Or just misunderstand? "I wasn't really thinkin," he said. "I was just listenin to the trees singin."

Her mouth fell open. She thinks I'm crazy, he said to himself, and cursed himself for having tried to tell her. She asked, very quietly, almost whispering, "What did you say?"

"Never mind," he said.

"No, tell me. Did you say-?"

"Forget it," he said. "I didn't know what I was sayin."

"You said," she said, "didn't you? that you were listening to the trees singing? Did you say that?"

"Maybe," he admitted. "I been feelin awful, tell you the truth, I don't know what I was sayin."

She laid a hand on his arm. "That's strange, because-"

"Don't touch the prisoner!" Fat Gabe hollered. "No con-tack allowed!"

She removed her hand and continued her sentence: "Because I was hearing the same thing. Trees. I heard trees singing. I swear." She laughed, and observed, "I didn't even know trees can sing."

A strange lady. He smiled at her and waited for her to ask something else.

"Can they?" she asked.

"Can who what?" he said.

"Trees. Sing."

"These were."

"What kind of song?"

"Want me to play it for ye on my harmonica?"

"Yes! Would you?"

"Fat Gabe, would you fetch my harmonica?" he asked, grinning so Fat Gabe would know he was just funning.

Fat Gabe snarled, "I'd like to shove that mouth organ up your-Listen, Chism, why don't y'all jist shut up this love song and git your G.o.dd.a.m.n talkin finished?"

"Do you really have a harmonica?" the lady asked Nail.

"Yes'm, I do," he said.

"I hope-" she said. "I hope sometime I can have a chance to hear you play it." Then she held out her hand. "My name is Viridis Monday." He did not take her hand, and then she must have remembered that Fat Gabe had forbidden their touching, for she withdrew her hand.

"I reckon you know my name," he said. "Pleased to meet ye. And you know, don't ye? that I wouldn't be alive right this minute if you hadn't drew that pitcher."

She smiled. She had such a nice, pretty, clean smile, teeth real good and straight and white. She didn't use a whole lot of lip-rouge either, the way most women did these days. She said, "Mr. Chism, I'd like to help you. I'd like to do some investigating. I'm not really a reporter, I suppose you know. I'm just an ill.u.s.trator. But I know how to do what reporters do, such as checking into facts. There's one fact I'd like to determine: whether or not you...you actually did what they said you did, to that thirteen-year-old girl."

n.o.body had made any reference to Rindy in a long time, and at the mention of her Nail clenched his jaw, narrowed his eyes, and took an involuntary deep breath. "Lady," he said, "there's only three people on this earth who honestly and truly believe that I'm innocent. One of 'em is me, of course. The other'n is my mother. And the third one-" he paused, and gritted his teeth to p.r.o.nounce her name: "is Miss Dorinda Whitter, the so-called victim."

"I would like," Miss Monday announced, "to talk to all three of you. Right now I'm talking to you. Why do you think the girl would have falsely accused you?"

"Now, that's a real long story," he said. "Fat Gabe aint et his supper either, and he aint gonna want to hang around and let me tell it to you. Right, Fat Gabe?"

"Boy," Fat Gabe snarled, "I've tole you before: you don't never ask me no questions. I do the askin, you hear me?"

"Yes, boss," Nail said, knowing that Fat Gabe was going to get real mean with him as soon as this lady left. Again he flirted with the notion of killing Fat Gabe now and taking this lady hostage, but this lady, he decided, was too nice to have to be subjected to something like that.

"The first thing I'm going to do," Miss Monday declared, "is find out the status of your reprieve. If Governor Hays did it himself, on his own, it's probably got some political motive and is very temporary. If the Supreme Court made him do it, it might be permanent." She stood up and stuck her notepad into the pocket of her coat, then pulled the coat tighter around herself. The sun had gone down; the room was very cold now. But Nail, despite the thinness of his cotton jacket, did not suffer the cold. The kindness of this lady warmed him.

He stood up too. "Lady-" he began, but decided that wasn't polite enough. "Miss Monday, why are you doing this for me?"

Again that pretty smile. "I don't know what song the trees sang," she said. "But somehow it told me that the trees would be very sad if you were killed for something you didn't do."