The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

Stone is having a moment, having blasted into our consciousness last summer with her painting Talking Head, the runaway star of the Berger/Fratepietro glitz-fest. We need to know more. We need to know everything. So who is Addison Stone? She is, foremost, an artist. “I’m young, I’m a student, I have a ways to go,” she acknowledges, but even she seems to know this definition of herself is not quite correct. Working mostly in oil on canvas, Stone’s painterly portrait style is both nostalgic of another era while at the same time dismantling it, as her swashbuckling brushstroke captures powerful, beautiful

(cont. on page 128)

“I’m young,

I’m a student,

I have a ways to go.

”

LUCY LIM: The reception was emotional overspill. Addy’s mom had to go lie down on the cot in the church office. It was way too crowded. I remember thinking that it was like the dark side of the same drama she and I got when Addy first moved to New York. Addy had invited her mom down just to show her that everything was okay. It was also her mom’s birthday, so she took us both to dinner, and a movie premiere, and then to a late-night garden party in Williamsburg after. Such a crush of people loving Addy already, and all of them scrambling to be closer.

Addison Stone, Maureen Stone, and Lucy Lim, courtesy of Brian Bedrino.

Addy’s mom loved that night. Me, too. It was magic. It was the chaotic opposite of the church basement. Although Addy herself would have been amused. I could almost hear her telling me, “Lulu, my funeral was the shit! Everyone came! There was even a fight!” She’d have eaten it up with a spoon.

JONAH LENOX: Late in the afternoon, I drove around all the places where we’d gone. My grandma’s barn, our old school, the Cold Creamery. I let myself slide back in love with her all over again. I kissed her for the first time at Cold Creamery. It was in October. I bought a scoop of honeycomb, and we shared it.

We’d been sitting on the stone bench outside. Addison’d said, “I love eating ice cream when it’s cold out. Double coldness!” And she swung up her legs on my lap. Her mouth was sticky cream and honey. I wanted to ask her a million things. All those personal questions like, “What scares you? Are you a virgin? What would you do if you had a month to live? What would be your last meal on earth? What does heaven mean to you? What one word would describe you?”

But mostly I wanted to kiss her. Kissing Addison made me hungry. I was crazy for every detail of her—physically, mentally, all of her. I knew I could get closer to Addison than to anyone else in the world, even if she left me needing more. So I was relieved not to see those other dickhead guys at her funeral, Zach and Lincoln. The only good thing from that day was those two not showing.

MAUREEN STONE: When everyone was gone—when the kids who’d been camping out on our lawn had packed off to catch up with their own lives, and Charlie had headed out to be with his friends, and Roy’d slunk off to bed—my girl was still gone, too.

Do you know they never found a note? I’ve read that about half the time in suicide, there’s a note. Addison would have left one. As a mother, I know that. I know it from the deepest place in my heart. So I just can’t believe she did it on purpose. No. I won’t believe it. And yes, I do think it was strange that those young men were nowhere to be seen. Especially Lincoln. All day, I had an eye out for him. Hoping. But nothing.

How could I not have a thousand questions?

Exit Roy by Addison Stone, courtesy of Saatchi Gallery.

II.

GROWING UP STONE

ROY STONE, father: This is how I’ll go down in history, right? As Addison Stone’s father. That and her painting of me, Exit Roy. I hear it’s hanging somewhere in London, England. I got no problem with a painting of me being famous. I just don’t care for it. Maybe one day I’ll go to London and see if anyone recognizes me. I got no problem with me being famous, either.

I’ll give you the rundown on the family bloodline, how’s that to start? My people are originally from Lowell, Massachusetts. Been there generations, working in the textile industry. Spinners, mostly. Cotton cloth, linen, wool, following the mills as they built them out along to Fall River, till that work dried up years ago, when this once-great country of ours got outsourced to India and owned by China. I mean, you can’t find one thing in America that’s made by Americans anymore, am I right?

When my dad, Ethan Stone, was a boy in the ’50s, and even back when I was growing up in the ’70s, there was plenty of mill and factory jobs. Most of my stock—uncles, aunts, cousins, everyone—eventually worked down the line at Burlington Coat Factory. My folks raised us three kids in Burlington and then later in Bristol. I was the smartass who went a different path. Earned my CPA straight after college. I was a damn near genius at math. Can I tell you something? I know for a fact that Addison inherited her art brain straight from my great-great-grandmother, Dorothea Egglington. Known by everyone as Dottie.

Dorothea “Dottie” Stone née Egglington, Fall River, 1913.

Photo credt unknown; courtesy of Roy Stone.

The way Addison could tease out a design, or how she’d draw a pattern or a shape to kiss your eye and make you think … well, that was Dottie, too. She was a legend—even looked a bit like Addison. “Black Irish,” they call those looks. She could invent quilt and collar patterns—she was before her time. Now on Addison’s mom’s side, that’s mostly straitlaced teachers, with plenty of flea-bit French Catholic nuns and Canadian lumberjacks. You better not tell Maureen I said that.

MAUREEN STONE: My grandmother, Addison’s great-grandmother, Renee Arsenault—she was the spitting image of Addison. Not on the outside, but her soul. A real wild card. French-Canadian, a poet and adventuress, married twice before she met my grandfather. She traveled with one of those husbands all over the Great Lakes Region. Catching her own fish, living off the land—and then she joined a theater troupe in Vermont, the Portland Players. She was in a production of Only an Orphan Girl that was so popular it went on for almost a year. She was a maverick, Granny Renee. That’s who Addison takes after. Don’t let Roy tell you different.

Renee Arsenault, circa 1952 with an unidentified man, possibly her second husband.

Photo credit unknown; courtesy of Maureen Stone.

ROY STONE: Once both kids were up and running, Maureen decided she needed a change from Bristol, and she began chatting up Peacedale, the schools and hospitals and day care and on and on. Things that are important to a mother. I had no reason to stay in Bristol. Plus it never helps a man to argue with his wife, am I right?