Port Mungo Read Free

briefly, through Vera, he made spiritual if not actual contact with the family he had lost.
    Her proposal came the night before she was to leave for London. I think she knew it was hopeless, but it had to be done. That was Vera all right: if a possibility occurred to her she was not the one to suppress it, the fact of its occurrence demanded at least an attempt upon it; she is the same today. So she told him they were going to rebuild a life together, not as it used to be but in a new way, a better way. They would buy a barn upstate and make two big studios, each with a view of the river—Mungo-on-Hudson—what about it?
    —But I don’t want to live up the Hudson!
    —Then we’ll live in New York. We’ll live here.
    He regarded her fondly. He didn’t say, you’re only after my loft. She was serious, and at the same time she knew it was hopeless.
    —No, darling, he said, and sweet Jesus it cost him—he would have been angry with her for putting him through it, but he’d known she would, she had to, he’d known it the moment he told her she could sleep on his couch. He didn’t go out to Kennedy with her, she wouldn’t let him. They hadn’t slept. He went out onto the fire escape and watched her emerge from the building. She looked up at him, shielding her eyes from the early-morning sun. She stood in the middle of the street and gave him just a little of the flowery bow he’d first seen on the Charing Cross Road when he was seventeen, sweeping her Panama down close to the sidewalk—a quotation, yes, from the Book of Better Days. She made him sad. Off she tottered up the street with her suitcase, shabby woman in a tight skirt, over fifty now, quite alone, penniless, to catch a bus to the airport to go to a show in a nothing gallery in London. Jack thought: Her promise is all behind her and her talent all burnt up. What is to become of her? What happens to painters who run out of talent—spent painters? He stood on the fire escape watching her up the street. She had lost everything, all except her eye. She still had her eye, and when he had hauled out his canvases, the work he had done since coming back to New York, how generously she had spoken of his accomplishment. There was much of her in them, it’s true, but he who had recently come to the city and was just starting to know success, at Vera’s praise he had swelled and glowed as he had swelled and glowed for no other. Reflecting on this later I realized he painted for her, he painted
only
for her, hers was the judgement, hers the approval that counted.
    Ten years ago Jack left the Crosby Street loft and came to live with me on West 11th Street, this at my suggestion. I saw him change during his last years in New York, but the changes were superficial. A certain wild shyness, that famously
farouche
quality—it became more tempered—he began to guard his fire, hold his best energies for the studio. He stopped going out and his appearance grew distinctly odd, as he came to resemble a kind of urban Apache, with his hair turned silver and bound up in black headscarves, and the baggy clothes flapping about his lanky frame, all dark blues and blacks, and his long bony face, burnt and weathered from the tropics, ever more scraped and taut and hawklike. He restricted himself to wine, apart from the one cocktail at six, and managed to give up cigarettes. Superficial changes, as I say; what remained constant was the discipline of work, the daily return to the studio, the finality of the closing door. . . .
    In his later years, then, my brother lived like a recluse and towards the world sustained a posture of indifference and even outright hostility. By day he painted, and I did not disturb him. His studio was at the top of the house, with a window from which he could look down into the garden, one of those narrow city gardens condemned to perpetual gloom because it was sandwiched between taller buildings which hogged the light. I let it grow wild, rather like a