The Rowing Lesson Read Online Free PDF Page A

us the last time? When I took you up onto the roof of our loft?
    YOU CHAPS ARE in the crow’s nest!
    You weren’t listening to William telling you how he’d bought the loft for a song twenty years ago or when he told you that the street below was called Bond Street because of the bond traders and merchants who lived here before the factories came. You were staring at the lumps in the tar paper covering the roof, at the wooden water tower, and then finally you gazed out at the skyline. I’m in Manhattan, for Chrissake! Hell’s bells, man. That’s where the Jews used to live, and that’s the Bowery, and there’s Wall Street, for crying out loud.
    When William went downstairs, I pulled open the swollen door of my studio and took you inside. You barely noticed what I’d pinned up on the walls to show you, the very beginning of my series of extinct animals. You glanced quickly at the quagga, the bandicoot, the potoroo, the Great Auk, the rat kangaroo, the gelinote and the kaka. You didn’t even comment on the mess, dabs of paint everywhere—on the walls, tables, as well as my palette—postcards tacked everywhere, shelves piled high with shells, tiny animal skeletons, rusted old toys, my drawings stacked on the floor, canvases leaning against the walls. Where are the naked women? you asked me. Dad! I could hear the plaintive mix of shame and fury in my voice. Come on Betsy, you said. You’ve got to have the big match temperament! Trying to recover, I pointed to my favorite, the quagga, extinct cousin of the zebra with its striped head and neck, the rest of its body plain brown, a creature that lived right where you were born. You looked at it as if you were looking at a rival. But I thought you painted nudes, you repeated. As we left, the Great Auk looked at me with a beady eye and I wondered why I bothered with him, big lug of a bird lost more than a hundred years ago.
    Back on the roof, we were swept up into the buzzing, grunting, honking sounds from the streets below. I sat down on an upturned flowerpot, a relic of one of my failed experiments at roof gardening.
    You pulled up a broken beach chair and sat down right next to me, talking the hind-leg off a donkey about Freemasonry, and your lodge brothers, ma’s repugnance at the lodge dinners, the Royal Arch, and the Third Degree. Of course I’m not supposed to tell you, you said. It’s a secret. Those chaps take it too seriously, man. They don’t have a sense of humour. Your mother hates the whole thing. But she and the other girls cook for us, and they do a damn good job. When I became Master of the Lodge, we had a big dinner. All the chaps and their wives came. I made a toast. It was quite something, even though I say so myself. I brought the house down. I should have been an actor.
    You got up to look over the edge of the low parapet wall. Somebody’s going to have a terrible accident, you said, backing away. You know ever since my fall, my shoulder’s never been the same. Wragtig , that was something. I was at Tjoekie van der Merwe’s house, examining one of the kids who had chickenpox and I was just on my way out of the door. One minute I’m standing and the next minute I’m on my arse, twisted sideways, in their bloody conversation pit. I knew I’d fractured something. It hurt like hell. Your face was riven with melancholy, the hardest of memories. It’s hard when an old person falls, you sighed. Old bones take a long time to heal and they’re never the same again. Did you know I have Paget’s disease?
    What’s that? I said airily, staring at up at the empty sky.
    My spine is turning into bamboo, for Chrissake!
    Wait, you said, let me take a picture of you up here. You took your camera out of the old leather camera case around your neck. Stand over there, you told me. Not near the edge, for God’s sake! Your mother wants lots and lots of pictures. Damn it. There’s something wrong with the mechanism.
    Dad! I said, waving my hand in front of my