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