The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

BILL FIELDBENDER: I was passing through the school’s faculty lounge one evening—I’d been at a policy meeting till late, and I found Addison curled up in an armchair, sketching and eating a bag of Doritos. “Hey, Bill, tonight I’m sleeping here,” she explained, “because my folks had a fight.” Very matter-of-fact. As if sleeping inside her high school was a reasonable option. That was when my brain pulled the fire alarm.

That next morning I emailed the high school summer program at Pratt Institute. I wanted Addison capital O-U-T out of Peacedale. Sadtler money or not, we could rescue her through a summer program. She’d be turning eighteen, and Arlene and I reckoned she could even stay in New York through the next school year. Then she could start laying down a solid groundwork of classical knowledge, as well as focusing her training on form and technique, and make up any additional required classes at the Professional Children’s School—a highly accredited school that is specifically for young people in the arts.

Look, my wife and I are small Rhode Island potatoes, but we’re on good terms with plenty of well-connected people in the New York art scene. We thought they could be her sponsors and her mentors. We saw invitations and opportunities well beyond what anyone here could give her. We didn’t see issues. Not the way we should have. That’s how badly we wanted Addison out of Peacedale. That’s how badly we wanted her to soar.

LUCY LIM: The Fieldbenders were fricking bananas to get Addy out of Peacedale. They pushed it hard. They’d even plan these little “spontaneous” meet-ups with me and The Lenox, because they wanted us to whisper in Addy’s ear about how she needed to go to New York, how New York was the only place that could “handle her genius.” At first, we were all like, “Enough with your crazy!” I mean, Addy was too young to pack up and leave home. She wasn’t even eighteen till summer!

Besides, Addy said her own mom was a big obstacle to the Fieldbender plan. Addy cracked us up, imitating her mom wringing her hands and whimpering, “Oh goodness gracious, oh dear, oh dear. Over my dead body will I let my daughter get eaten by wolves in New York!”

And then, just when we thought the argument was over and the Fieldbenders had dropped it, Addy won that W.W. Sadtler thing, plus her Talking Head painting of Mrs. Hurley won the Maynard Prize. Everything changed. The newspapers were all over it. They did a huge article on her in Parade magazine, and another one in The Narragansett Times, and then it seemed like she didn’t belong anywhere but New York City. So it all got settled pretty quick, zip-zilch-zot.

BILL FIELDBENDER: “Your Future Goes Here” is sponsored by the Maynard Institute. It’s a privately funded program that gives away about five million dollars a year to students by way of grants and prizes. Arlene and I had submitted Addison’s painting of Nancy Hurley, who is South Kingstown’s school principal.

Nancy has been our school principal for almost twenty years, so she’s a well-known face in these halls. Everyone loves Nancy; she’s an institution. What I love most about the painting Addison did of her is that it shows Nancy in a different light. Not the jolly, smiling, lively lady we all recognized. There’s something quiet and unguarded and intimate about it; you feel like you’re kind of creeping up on Nancy while she’s asleep. In a final touch, Addison etched MOM above her head, which is definitely the way many students think about Nancy.

ARLENE FIELDBENDER: Of course it wasn’t lost on any of us that both Bill and Nancy were, in a sense, stand-in parent figures. Addison only painted people she felt emotionally connected to. But Talking Head was interesting, too, because it had the technical chops that the Maynard appreciates. Addison tended to work large. Lots of thick paint applied to giant canvases. She’d started the piece mid-December and worked straight through the holiday break—we even gave her keys so she could come in when the school was locked up.

BILL FIELDBENDER: Arlene and I submitted it ourselves because we knew Addison wouldn’t have bothered with the mundane paperwork details. We’d hoped that she could get some recognition from real institutions. Every single thing Addison was doing deserved recognition—and nobody in her inner circle seemed to care. Well. I cared. My wife cared.

Talking Head by Addison Stone, courtesy of Carine Fratepietro.

MAUREEN STONE: Addison came home one day in late spring and said, “Mom! I won twenty grand from the W.W. Sadtler Foundation and five thousand from the Maynard Institute. No strings attached. So I guess I’ll be going to New York after all.”

Twenty-five thousand dollars! Merciful heaven, I just didn’t know what to say. Roy’s and my jaws dropped. Our fight to stop Addison from running off to New York City just crumbled away—how could we hold up an argument against it?

Of course, Arlene and Bill Fieldbender had to play queen and king of the chessboard. The way they smiled at me and Roy, with daggers in their eyes. “No need to worry. We’ve taken care of everything.”

Over and over. No matter what I said, one or the other would answer, “We already thought about that” and “Everything is paid for” and “One of us will see to that.” They’d found Addison a dorm and a chaperone. They even called Addison’s psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttnauer, and helped her to secure Addison a new psychiatrist, Roland Jones, in the city. The Fieldbenders ladled poison in Dr. Tuttnauer’s ear, I’m sure, about how Addison had to get away from her small-minded family and her smaller-minded town.

When we all sat down together, I could feel their resistance to everything Roy and I said or thought. They believed we couldn’t provide anything for Addison. Their judgment flavored every word out of their mouths. Heaven knows, I never wanted to hold Addison back. But she’d been so sick, and junior year, she’d been doing so much better. I didn’t want her to lose that.

Whatever else these interviews are telling you, about our family, our struggles, and Addison’s desire to be free of us, I promise, it was never, ever as bad as you’ll hear. Blame poverty, blame family—but mostly, blame the mother, right? It’s an old story, isn’t it? I will tell you, though, if my daughter had stayed in Peacedale, she’d be alive today. Because I would have been watching Addison. I was always watching her.

But I couldn’t watch her once she dropped out of sight.

Addison Stone, summer before senior year, courtesy of Lucy Lim.

V.

“THEY NEED TO LET ME COME BACK.”