Very Old Bones Read online

  Peter learned about Francis’s leg wound from me (it was years before we knew how he’d gotten it), for I had seen it at the house when, sitting alone at the table, he wrapped a napkin around it, then tied it with a piece of string he took from his pocket; and I saw it again clearly when he sat on the switch box and raised his pant leg to examine his lease on death, so to speak. Peter created one picture in which only that ghastly leg exists on a realistic plane (precisely the repulsive purplish-and-white scaliness as I had related it to him), vividly detailed in drybrush watercolor. The rest of the scene—the body of the leg’s owner, the sky, the tracks—he rendered with a few pencil strokes and a smear of color. The leg in that drawing appeared to be a separate being, an autonomous entity. It did belong to a body, but further specifics of that body remained for other drawings to reveal.

  I’m speaking now about the sketches Peter drew (he liked to quote Ingres that drawing included three-quarters of the content of a painting, that it contained everything but the hue), to some of which he added watercolor, most of them in pen or pencil or charcoal, depending on the tool at hand when the impulse came to conjure yet another response to the event. Peter did forty-nine sketches for the three paintings, which may seem sizable, but is really a parsimonious figure when one compares it to the hundreds of sketches he did for the Malachi paintings.

  The Itinerant series, as the Francis paintings came to be called, was the realization of Peter’s new artistic credo: profligacy in the service of certitude. He came to believe that he could and would paint for decades to come, and that there was no such thing as too much prefatory creation to any given work. But he did not behave in any way that supported his new flirtation with infinity. When he removed himself into silence he also began to ignore his personal life. He grew further estranged from Claire, remote from me (which I didn’t understand; and I felt myself guilty for having done something I had perhaps not understood, or did not know I’d done; but I had not done anything except witness his fratricidal behavior), his personal hygiene deteriorated to the level of the most unwashed of those bohemians in whose midst he lived; his work as an illustrator, more in demand than ever, became loathsome to him, and he did less and less of it until his income was zero, and in this latter action he achieved a secondary goal: to so impoverish himself that he would henceforth be of no help whatever to Claire in supporting the house.

  He was slowly converting himself into a replica of Francis at trackside: man without goal, home, family, or money, with only his wits to keep him alive. This was art imitating life, artist imitating man who lives or dies, who cares? Art be damned. Useless art. Pointless art. Now is the time to live or perish.

  In this way Peter moved forward, trying to discover how the phantasm of death is visually framed in this life.

  Peter concealed his Itinerant series for two years after he completed it, his first manifestation of that reclusive temperament that would continue for another two decades, and sold only three unrelated oil portraits (commissioned) to support himself. His year of silence had obviously fed his imagination, and led to the creative explosion he could no longer keep to himself. Critics who subsequently wrote about these paintings gave Peter his first leg up to fame, finding in them the originality he’d long sought, and either ignoring his earlier work or relegating it to the status of preparatory effort. They did not yet see that all six paintings had their subliminal inspiration in one late masterwork by Hieronymus Bosch, even to the name: The Peddler, or The Tramp, or The Landloper, or The Prodigal Son, as the Bosch work was variously called.

  I doubt seriously Peter ever knew all the parallels the Bosch would have to his own work, his own family. He was not derivative, always argued against emulating the Impressionists who had so moved the American artistic world in the Armory Show in that year of his arrival in Greenwich Village, 1913. He resisted also the thrust of the Surrealists, who dominated the direction of art in the 1930s and 1940s. Peter used all these schools in his own way, never fitting any categories; yet the critics, after The Itinerant series, linked him to proletarian realists and Depression agitators, all of whom he might admire in principle, but would loathe in the particular for their politically partisan cheerleading.

  An Interview with Peter Phelan

  by Orson Purcell

  O: These Itinerant paintings, they’re all about your brother Francis, are they not?

  P: No. They’re not about anybody.

  O: Who is the tramp figure in the paintings?

  P: He’s anybody, nobody.

  O: How can you tell me this when you and I were watching as Francis stepped onto the tracks and then off?

  P: Artistically I never saw that.

  O: You’re clearly lying, even to yourself.

  P: All art is a lie.

  O: Is your life a lie as well?

  P: More often than not.

  O: With the success of this art do you consider yourself an arrived man, a famous artist?

  P: I will never arrive, but I’m famous with my friends.

  O: Who would they be?

  P: They’re all dead. Their names no longer matter.

  O: What motivated you to paint The Itinerant series?

  P: The paintings, as they took shape.

  O: The paintings inspired themselves?

  P: That’s how it happens. There is nothing and then there is a painting.

  O: But things happen to make you arrive at a certain subject matter.

  P: No. Nothing happens ever. There is no subject matter until the painting exists.

  O: You are putting the egg before the chicken. What makes the egg?

  P: The artist. He is an egg factory. He needs no chickens.

  O: No guilt or envy or enmity or smoldering hatred or fratricidal impulse ever inspires art?

  P: I know nothing of any of that.

  O: You talk as if you have no internal life, as if only an empty canvas exists on which you, a mindless vessel, an automated brush, shape the present. This is the school of unconscious art, is it not?

  P: You see this painting here? That’s a shoulder bone. This is a chest bone.

  O: Whose bones are they?

  P: Anybody’s. Nobody’s.

  O: Why did you paint them?

  P: Because they emerged.

  O: Then they are your bones.

  P: Quite possibly.

  O: Just as The Itinerant, if not Francis, is then you?

  P: I wouldn’t deny it.

  O: What else wouldn’t you deny? Paternity, perhaps?

  P: What?

  O: I say paternity?

  P: What?

  O: I suggest that all your work and hence all your life is a parody of that subconscious you so revere. I suggest you cannot even take that deepest part of yourself seriously, that you have trouble acknowledging your status as a human being, as well as the status of your son, whom you treat as one of your works of art, disclaiming responsibility for him, allowing him to float free in the universe, devoid even of the right to the intentional fallacy. Your stance suggests you did not even intend him as quantitatively as one of your paintings, and so he remains a happenstance of history. Tell me if I am close.

  P: Art is the ideation of an emotion.

  O: Do I qualify as a work of art?

  P: Art is the ineffable quotient of the work, the element that emerges when the work is done, that does not itself exist in the spatial qualities of the finished painting. Art has no subject matter.

  O: Then neither do I.

  P: Art is a received conception.

  O: I am here, therefore I was conceived.

  P: The conception of art has no logic and means nothing.

  O: What does mean anything?

  P: Art, as it exists.

  O: What does art do after it exists?

  P: It represents, it symbolizes, it expresses. Art is impact.

  O: On whom? On what?

  P: On the universe.

  O: I doubt it.

  P: Doubt is
an impaction.

  O: As a work of art I doubt myself, my conception, my creation.

  P: A theory and its opposite may coexist in the same mind. The unavowed is the companion of mystery.

  O: And mystery is the secret of art and paternity.

  P: As you like it. As you like it.

  I was home from Germany five and a half months in March of 1953 when I visited with my mother for the first time in four years. We talked on the phone from time to time but she consistently put off any meeting. She was no longer Claire Purcell. She now called herself Belinda Love (not legally) and said at last she’d meet me, under the clock in the Biltmore Hotel, because she saw that happen once in a movie.

  I arranged my one outing of the week for that day, a visit to the publishing house for which I was editing and tidying up the erotic memoirs of Meriwether Macbeth, an extroverted and pseudonymous bohemian writer and sometime actor who was having a renascent vogue as a result of having been murdered. This was an assignment that seemed doable to me, first because it was the story of a real life lived in Greenwich Village, my environment of the moment; and further because Peter had known Macbeth personally in the 1920s and loathed his acting, his writing, his ideas, his presence, and his odor.

  I brought in the heavily edited and rewritten segments of Macbeth’s manuscript to my editorial boss, then walked the several blocks to the Biltmore, where I settled onto a bench from which I could monitor all who organized their futures under the clock.

  I spotted my mother as soon as she appeared in the lobby, and saw that she looked remarkably like herself of five years gone. She was fifty-eight, looked forty-five, and exuded (with long, scarlet fingernails, spike heels, pillbox hat, wasp waist that was visible beneath her open, form-fitting coat) the aura of World War Two, the era when her independence had reached its apogee, the time of her final separation from Peter, and of her entrance into a solo career as singer and mistress of ceremonies, first in local Albany nightclubs, then with traveling USO shows, and, after the war, in a 52nd Street jazz club where she sang with the resident Dixieland group, her looks and her legs equally as important as her voice, and, ultimately, more interesting. As she walked across the lobby she drew the stares of the bell captain and his minions, then turned the heads of two men waiting to check in. Nearing retirement age and still a dazzler. Mother.

  “Hello, darling boy,” she said when we embraced beneath the clock, “are you still my darling?”

  “Of course, Mother.”

  “Are you well?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “Your letters were dreadful. You sounded positively wretched. So discontented, so—what can I say?—scattered.”

  “Scattered is a good word. I’m nothing if not that.”

  “Whatever happened to you?”

  “I went out of my mind.”

  “Just like your father.”

  She signaled to the maître d’ of the Palm Court and we were seated under a chandelier, amid the potted plants, the tourists, and the cocktail-hour habitués. She ordered a Manhattan on the rocks, I an orange juice, my alcohol intake at zero level as a way of not compounding my confusion.

  “When was Peter out of his mind?” Orson asked.

  “Ever since I’ve known him. And I was out of my mind when I took up with the man. I thought he’d have committed suicide by this time. Miraculous he hasn’t.”

  “Why would he commit suicide?”

  “I certainly would have if I were him. The man is daft. Bats in his hat.”

  “He’s painting well.”

  “Yes. He does that. Does he have any money?”

  “Not really.”

  “Of course not. How are you living?”

  “Frugally. I’m editing a book for a publisher, and my wife is working.”

  “Oh yes, and how is she? The dear thing, she couldn’t bring herself to join us?”

  “She’s in Germany.”

  “There now, a wife who gets around. Something I always wanted to do.”

  “I remember you got around in vaudeville.”

  “The east coast. I never went to Europe until the war.”

  “What are you doing now, Mother? Are you singing?”

  “Good Lord, no. I’m running a talent agency.”

  “For singers?”

  “Singers, jugglers, magicians, dancers.”

  “Strippers?”

  “One stripper.”

  “Tell me her name?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “So if I see her I’ll think of you.”

  “I don’t think I like that reason.”

  “She’s your client.”

  “I was never a stripper.”

  “You came close with some of your costumes.”

  “If you’re going to attack me I’ll leave.”

  “I don’t want you to leave. It’s taken five months to get you here.”

  “I’ve been traveling.”

  “It’s all right. We mustn’t dwell on maternal neglect. Tell me something important. How sure are you that my father is really my father?”

  “Absolutely sure.”

  “Manfredo had nothing to do with me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He had something to do with you.”

  “In a moment of weakness. You shouldn’t have seen that.”

  “Where is he now? Do you still see him?”

  “Not for fifteen years or more. He has palsy and can’t do his stage act anymore. He does card tricks at veterans’ hospitals.”

  “Peter thinks Manfredo was the one. Nothing convinces him otherwise.”

  “It’s his way, to be difficult.”

  “He really is consistent about it.”

  “I gave up trying to persuade him when you were a baby. Doesn’t he see how much you look like him? It’s quite uncanny, the resemblance.”

  “His sister Molly tells him the same thing, but he refuses to believe.”

  “It’s rotten that he still does this to you. And you’ve grown so handsome since I saw you last. Has he told you about all his women, how he even brought them home? He thought every man I knew was my lover, so that’s the way he behaved. A severe case of over-compensation if there ever was one. Is he still the king of tarts?”

  “He sees several women. I don’t think they’re tarts.”

  “Take a closer look.”

  “It’s difficult getting close to him. I never even know what to call him. I’ve spent my whole life not calling him Dad. I don’t think he’d answer if I ever did call him that, or Pa, or Papa. I never call him anything.”

  “It’s so depressing. The Phelans are crazed people. They always have been.”

  “No more so than the rest of the world.”

  “Oh yes. There’s a history of madmen in their past.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “Get your father to tell you about his Uncle Malachi.”

  “I’ve heard him mentioned, but not with any specifics. They don’t like to dredge him up.”

  “Of course not. He was certifiable.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I’m not sure. But I know it wasn’t good for anybody’s health. Ask your father.”

  She finished her Manhattan and touched a napkin to her lips, and I saw in her face beauty in decline, the artful makeup not quite camouflaging the furrows in her cheeks that I couldn’t remember seeing five years ago. She pushed her glass away and reached for her purse.

  “I must dash, darling. I have a dinner party.”

  “You’re such a butterfly, Mother. I didn’t even get to ask what I wanted to ask you.”

  “Ask away.”

  “It’s awkward.”

  “You can ask me anything.”

  “All right, anything. Can I move in with you? Temporarily. Peter works all hours of the day and night and I can’t sleep. It’s rather a small apartment.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “It truly is cramp
ed.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Oh darling, I don’t think so. I have any number of people coming through all the time. Friends, clients. You’d hate it.”

  “Probably so.”

  “You’re far better off with your father.”

  “Perhaps that’s true.”

  “Do you have money?”

  “I can cover the drinks.”

  She placed on the table, in front of me, a folded one-hundred-dollar bill she had been holding in her hand.

  “Buy yourself a shirt. Something stylish.”

  She stood up, leaned over, and kissed me on the cheek.

  “And do get some rest,” she said. “You look worn out. Call me some night and we’ll have dinner.”

  Dearest Moonflake,

  I write you from the dregs of my father’s teapot. We live together in an armed camp, tea leaves and silence being our weapons of choice. Neither of us drink anymore, he out of fear that the rivers of hooch he has already drunk have given his muse cirrhosis, I because the jigsaw puzzle that is my life becomes increasingly difficult to solve when several pieces of the puzzle are invisible. You, for instance. It is coming onto six months, your contract is up, and when are you coming back?

  I cheer your early photographic success from this remote bleacher seat, slowly gnawing away my own pericardium. I miss you with every inch of that bloody sack and all it contains. I live in a world without love, without affection, without joy. I have taken to sleeping for twenty-four-hour stretches whenever I can manage it, so as to lose a day and bring the time of your arrival closer. The job affords me small pleasure, but it does fill the hours with reading that does not remind me of my own inability to write. The author I’m editing is a micturator of language, a thirsty, leaky puppy whose saving quality is his cautionary, unstated message to me never to write out of the ego; in exalting himself he wets the bed, the floor, the ceiling below.

  I finally visited with Mother Belinda this week. We met for a drink and I examined her being and found her in full, late-blooming flower, not that she hadn’t bloomed in earlier seasons, but now she has the advantage of looking as young as she was in the previous blossom, quite an achievement for the old girl. She is utterly without guilt concerning her abandoned child and husband. She thinks him mad, and though I would also like to judge him so, I cannot; and she thinks me “scattered,” which I suppose is how I appear to those unable to perceive any purpose in my chaos. There is purpose, of course . . .