The Lacuna

September 14

Mr. Lincoln Barnes, my Mr. Lincoln. He means well. A second novel makes me “a novelist,” says he, and therefore duty-bound to meet my editor in New York. He can’t know how entirely it’s out of the question. He should invite me to dance with angels on the head of a pin, I’d sooner try, if I could do it from home. But my failure will mean conceding every battle. Beginning with my title, Where the Eagle Eats the Snake.

“Wrong,” he pronounced yesterday on the telephone. “People hate snakes.”

Well then, wouldn’t they be happy to see an eagle tearing one to pieces, sitting on a cactus plant? The dust-jacket art seems ready made.

He is keen to call it Pilgrims of Chapultepec.

Americans take “pilgrim” to mean the fellow in buckled shoes with hands folded in prayer. And the unpronounceable remainder, as dubious as Brand X soap.

Mrs. Brown suggests that for the next one I ought to turn in the manuscript with a title I despise. That way, she says, they’re apt to change it to something you favor. A trick she learned while working for the U.S. Army.

September 26

The exhibit, Advancing American Art, is advancing at this very moment toward the National Gallery, packed up on the train with Tom Cuddy as its Shipping Shepherd. And still I have no answer for him. Tommy the golden boy, with the good looks of Van Heijenoort and a better idea how to use them—it’s possible he has never been turned down before. On the telephone, he coaxes. Says I have to be there in D.C., he’s desperate for backup, certain there is trouble afoot. Congress has called a special hearing to discuss the exhibit after they’ve had a look at it. And what Tommy said about the Hearst Press is true, Mrs. Brown brought in one of their magazine ads today, a reproduction of one of the “ugly” paintings with the caption “Your Money Bought This!” They suggest a foregone conclusion among soap-buying housewives: your money would be better spent on soap. But with Mrs. Brown their propaganda failed: she is now intently curious about the show.

Paris with Tommy, dear Lord what a vision. (He was dazzling enough in a dim boxcar.) But surely he’ll understand there is too much to do here, revisions and galley proofs still ahead. He’ll be less willing to understand why Washington is out of the question. To have a look at those modernists, have a drink with old Tom, help him ship out the paintings. Patiently Mrs. Brown waits to send an answer: yes or no. Probably she has already drafted both letters and only needs the word. Such is her efficiency.

We discussed it again this afternoon, or rather I talked. Justifying my absurd fear of travel and exposure, despising it all the while. My face must have been the Picture of Dorian Gray. At the end, when he goes to pieces.

She used the quiet voice she seems to draw up from a different time, the childhood in mountain hells, I suppose.

“What do ye fear will happen?”

There was no sound but the clock in the hall: tick, tick.

“Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.”

October 2

The matter is settled, the letter sent. Mrs. Brown provided the solution: herself. She will go along on the trip, make all arrangements, reserve the hotel rooms for both of us in names no one could recognize. No girls in short socks will gather in the halls. We will take the Roadster, she’ll carry the money-purse and purchase the gasoline, no strangers need be addressed on the journey. Only Tom, once we arrive at the gallery.

Indispensable Mrs. Brown. She has known all along the problem is not the grippe. But couldn’t know how her firm hand on my arm could make many things possible, including walking out the door onto that swaying bridge.

“It appeared you needed steadying,” was her diagnosis.

October 12

Poor Tom. And also the forty-odd artists who will suffer from this, but somehow I worry most for Tom. He believed in Advancing American Art, and not just the free ride to Europe. Now he has to hang his head, call Paris and Prague, and explain the show isn’t coming. They will dismantle it, sell off these treasures to the first low bid so the Department of State can recover the taxpayers’ cash. The boss will make Tommy do the worst of it. The O’Keeffe already went for fifty dollars he said, salt in the wound.

Mrs. Brown and I were more than ready to put miles between ourselves and that debacle. But the journey home was long. The mountain parkway is a strange passage from city into wilderness, hundreds of miles of forest and vale without habitation. Occasionally an apple orchard, fenced by a zigzag of split rails, like a piece of green calico cut with pinking shears. Driving along high ridgetops is like being a bird on the wing, with slopes dropping steeply away from the roadsides, and views opening out to rumpled, hazy horizons. The leaves were crimson, auburn, jade, and gold, lying together in patchwork against the mountainsides. “God’s hand bestoweth beauty on the advancing trial of winter,” Mrs. Brown quoted. But it looked as if God had turned over the job to a Mexican muralist.

When first I made this drive, the forests were leafless. I told Mrs. Brown about it. Father unexpectedly dead, and then this endless passage into a barren wilderness. I thought I had come to a nation of the interred.

“Then you came to Mrs. Bittle’s,” she said, “and knew it for certain.”

“Old Judd seemed mummified. True enough. But certainly not you or Miss McKellar.”

Each time we stopped for gasoline she insisted we take on coffee and sandwiches as well. “Feed the car, feed the driver,” was her succinct advice. The gray mass of a storm sat on the mountains to the west, waiting like a predator. In the afternoon it pounced, drenching the view and washing the brilliant leaves into matted sop in the road. The rain on the windscreen was blinding. The wiper had to be cranked every few seconds, and it made for difficult, one-handed driving. Mrs. Brown offered to help turn the wiper lever, but its location overhead above the driver makes that awkward.

“Mr. Ford should have thought to put it over here,” she said, “so the passenger could help.”

“He knew better. In life’s dampest passages, the driver often has to go it alone.”

“I ought to know that. Here knitting socks without one child of my own.”

“Is that what you have there? I thought it was an indigo porcupine.”

She had a laugh at that. She has eleven nephews and nieces, I learned, and meant to outfit the tribe on this journey, working through socks from top to toe, all from the same massive hank of blue wool. The coming holiday shall be known as “The Christmas of the Blue Socks from Aunt Violet.” She worked on a little frame of four interlocked needles that poked out in every direction as she passed the yarn through its rounds.