"The Death of a Painter" by Askold Melnyczuk
This story from our archives is featured in Epiphany’s My Last White Boyfriend anthology, available now for sale from Ristretto Books, which collects the last 20 years of Epiphany’s greatest prose hits.
“Why do people torment themselves with the threat of an afterlife?” my godfather asks from the wheelchair he’s been confined to since his stroke several years ago. We’re sitting in his shared room at a rehabilitation center on Riverside Drive. Through the window, past the trees, light scatters across the Hudson. Once a successful painter who supported himself and his family with his art while maintaining homes in Manhattan, upstate New York, and Paris, my godfather has lately suffered tragic reversals. Depending on your point of view, the stroke that paralyzed his painting arm is either the least or the worst of them. Rumor has it, two years earlier his son, once a promising student of international relations at Columbia, beat his own mother to death.
During his studies, he’d picked up a crack habit and was trying to extort money from his parents. Released from Bellevue to his father’s custody less than a year later, the young man set fire to the family apartment and disappeared. Unable to care for himself, my godfather moved here, four blocks from the Riverside condo where he’d lived since coming to
America in 1950. A few weeks before my visit, he learned his son had been found dead, of an overdose. Suicide is suspected.
I have not seen my godfather in nearly twenty-five years. It’s the news about his son that’s brought me. I remember the boy, some ten years my junior, as vivid and articulate, a bit of a shaggy-haired wild child. And I can almost—almost—recollect that February morning at St. Vladimir’s Catholic Church in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where I was baptized in 1955. The photograph my father took shows my dashing godfather, with his sportif French moustache, cradling me, beaming. At his side stands winsome Aunt Christine, my mother’s younger sister.
When my godfather is summoned to dinner, I stay behind in his semi-private room. I pace. I walk to the window. How fine it would be to scoop the gold coins skimming the water and shower them across the linoleum. I lift the two framed photographs lying face down on the sill near his bed and stare at these familiar strangers. Though Slavic, all three look French. They were an especially attractive family, full of glee and ironic bon mots at the expense of established authority—easily the most glamorous people I knew growing up, who remain forever tied to a period in life when everything seemed promised.
“I believe the truth lies in youth,” writes Andre Gide. “I believe it is always right against us.” Yet when my own comes back to me, sometimes (as another poet put it) I smile, but as often, I spit. Youth harbors an ocean of alternate selves, of messages and maps inside bottles proposing different routes home. What other course might you have followed? Who else might you have become? The tennis player Arthur Ashe observed that one stroke early in the game creates an entire set of possibilities and outcomes which evolve a certain way over the next hours. But a pattern, he said, is definitely established. Definitely. None launch from the same point, yet the most seemingly privileged drag their own knots to unravel. What dreams had these three—my godfather, his wife, and their son—hatched, in solitude and between them?
To me, they’d seemed noble skeptics who took the mess of life as it was and transformed it into a thing of beauty. Because I didn’t see my godfather age the way I’ve watched my parents growing old, it appears as though this catastrophe happened overnight: a horrific destiny singled him out for random punishment.
But destiny, by definition, can’t be random. The Fates sew their designs stitch by stitch before we’re ever born. Or do we weave ourselves as we go? Are we needle, thread, or pattern? Or all three?
Neither his eyes nor those of his wife and son in the photos offer a clue to the things that were coming, the future they must themselves have forged link by link—the corners turned, the self-denial and self-indulgence, luck good and bad, the cycles of behavior tilling the ground for decades that it might receive them.
While the nurse’s aide recites the menu to my godfather’s bedridden roommate—rice pilaf, pasta with pesto, none of the Salisbury horrors from my youth—I think, What’s more natural than wondering how they got from where they began to where they ended? The word “narrative” stems from the Greek gnosis, meaning knowledge.
To create a narrative is to propose how events in space link through time.
Consider these two photographs lying on my desk now. In one I offer the Dalai Lama a katah, as these wispy silks are called. Were there a next frame, you’d see him draping it around my neck. We’re in the Charles Hotel in Cambridge; it is April, 2003, and for the last three days I’ve been chauffeuring his entourage of high lamas, bodyguards, and friends between the hotel and M.I.T., where the Dalai Lama is taking part in a public conversation with psychologists and neuroscientists about brain chemistry and causality.
Next to it is the photo from my baptism, half a century earlier, which I’ve already mentioned. My parents still attend that same church. These days, there’s just one service, but back then there were three, including a high—or sung—mass, at ten. The liturgy was conducted in Old Slavonic, which no one understood, but that didn’t worry the crowds, since mystery lay at the core of life anyway, and they were grateful to honor it formally. Clouds of incense nurtured the usual fantasies in a not so good (Greek) Catholic boy: one day I’d wave that censer, too, and send forth purifying smoke.
Here’s that smoke:
From where I sit today, the two events seem improbable: both my baptism and the meeting with the Dalai Lama. That past seems as unlikely as the future has proven unpredictable. Could my grandfather, a scholar of Byzantine Art in Peremyshl, recognized by Yad Vashem for saving the lives of Jewish friends in the forties, ever have imagined he would end his career working as a shipping clerk at Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia? All of it is as surprising as the fact that I am writing this at a stone table in Tuscany, above the Arno Valley, just two months after one of my closest friends killed himself with a shotgun.
But what if it weren’t unpredictable at all? What if the future were here, waiting to be read inside each moment? Isn’t it? How might we live differently if we knew what the present were saying—if time were an open book, inviting our gaze?
A Buddhist might say I’m trying to make sense of karma. The word means action: it’s a comprehensive term encompassing the study of cause and effect or, in other words, of the principles of narrative.
***
As I pace the corridor waiting for my godfather to finish dinner, I take in the hospital’s unsettling sensations. The smells aren’t as toxic as they’d been when I was a sickly kid kicking around such places—but the absence of odors is itself disturbing. A woman down the hall screams. Again and again. I can’t make out her words but when I glance anxiously at the nurse behind the desk, she says, “She can’t help herself,” and I nod, as though that explained everything. Neither can the rest of us, I think—though we pretend.
Wasn’t that feeling of helplessness why I turned to Buddhism in the first place—slowly, over decades, making no sudden moves, so that the process wouldn’t contradict the practice, doubting myself at every step: to help me think about how to live, and die? To keep from screaming?
Finally I see my godfather wheeling himself down along the greenwalled corridor. I ask him if he’d like to go outside. He shakes his head.
Definitely not. The world beyond these walls has no more interest for him.
“Let’s smoke,” he says, rolling up beside me, and for a moment I think I hear some of the old impishness—he was a born mocker, doubting all creeds, political positions, and received wisdom. An artist of the old school, he viewed life as an experiment, the data still gathering, all conclusions yet to be drawn.
We take the elevator to the smoking lounge on the seventh floor.
Once a devotee of Gauloises, he fires up a Marlboro Light. Hoping to revive his old high spirits—for my own sake, I realize—I pepper him with questions. Most he answers with a shrug, saying he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember much about his work as a professional cartoonist after graduating from Cooper Union. I recall my awe as a nine-year-old when I learned he was one of the hands behind the “Hekyll and Jekyll” cartoons I watched every Saturday morning. He visited me once at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and entertained me with quick sketches of my favorite superheroes. Was it a vestigial memory of that visit buried in the body that drew me to him now?
It’s unsettling to know more about a person than he does about himself. Does he remember how, recovering in a hospital in Vienna from a war wound in 1944, he developed a morphine addiction requiring years to kick? He tells me he does not. Yet it was a story my mother repeated to illustrate what will power could accomplish, when it willed.
He draws the smoke in deeply and holds it so long I want to run behind him and perform the Heimlich maneuver.
When I say again how sorry I am about his son, he tears up. He bites his lip—as I should have done, instead of reminding him of what he must wish with the strength of a million selves to obliterate from memory: A wife killed by her own son, then the son himself . . . inconceivable.
We lapse into a silence which stretches across years and decades, until finally I wheel him back to his room.
Soon after promising to return, which I myself doubt even as I say it, I leave. On my way out, I thank the nurses, laying it on thick, trying to shield him in a sheathe of general good will. “He’s one of our favorites,” beams a large woman with a Jamaican accent. Even kindness is outsourced these days. “He’s so sweet,” she smiles.
As he always had been. As he was that day at a family party when he decided to give me my first driving lesson. I was thirteen. He told me to sit behind the wheel of his red Renault, showed me how to use the stick, how to steer, to brake. We were both looped, which simultaneously emboldened and hampered us. Cruising down deserted suburban streets, I did just fine until we pulled back into the driveway, when I mistook the clutch for the brake and we crashed into a station wagon owned by a less forgiving, soberer relative.
While I hadn’t seen him in a quarter of a century, I’d thought of my godfather often. Impossible not to: the walls of my parents’ house are covered with his paintings. I see them now as though I were again at one of the many openings I attended from childhood to early youth: a retrospective, as it were. Their azures and mauves, laid on with a palette knife in his distinctive impasto, often celebrated the landscapes of his beloved South of France. They flank the piano in the living room, and hang to the left of the grandfather clock like icons in a cathedral from a lost world.
***
My godfather was just one of several important émigré painters in my parents’ modest collection—yet he was by far the most ubiquitous.
They loved his sensuous colors and a lightness of touch which put me off the work dearest to them. The child-sized clown painting he executed for my first birthday, now hanging in my seven-year-old goddaughter’s bedroom, possesses just enough menace to render its silliness savory.
The piece which always moved me was a bleak little watercolor dashed off on the back of a magazine cover in the early fifties, when the war, and the passage to America, were still vivid and begging for shape. It shows a richly shadowed street of sepia and black apartment buildings with overwrought iron railings leaning menacingly toward the viewer. Everything’s askew. There’s an ominous track in the middle of the street aiming straight for the vanishing point. The whole suggests a sketch for the film set of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or the draft of a cover for a book by Bruno Shulz. My hunch is that the light palette of his middle period (it darkened in the later work) reflected more wishful thinking than frankness. And art without frankness feels, after a certain age, slightly foolish. Whether he was painting to please, trying to meet a need, or going through a phase I simply don’t know.
But nothing guarantees the downfall of art as surely as a false effort at uplift. During the most celebrated phase of its long history in the West, art was used by the church to illustrate what is, despite the lashes and nails, one of the most optimistic narratives of all time.
Once the Pope became infallible, however, art recognized infallibility as its chief enemy. The putative healthy-mindedness of dogmas coercing art to re-create their patterns of vision and preferred narratives is merely an assertion of the totalitarian impulse latent in all systems.
That’s why the bleakness of a Beckett braces while the chipper jabber of most self-improvement volumes triggers despair. It’s also why most popular Buddhist titles, including the Dalai Lama’s best-selling Art of Happiness, make me cringe. “Happiness fascists, that’s what you people are,” an Italian friend recently said about Buddhists.
I wonder how my godfather would have fared had he continued mining the darkness in that early work—even if it had reduced sales.
It was his financial success, after all, which prompted his son to come knocking.
***
Is it possible for me to understand what happened to my godfather’s family? Is it worth asking? Can the inquiry be conducted in a spirit not strictly voyeuristic? Another’s tragedy is no mere lesson. And yet, if I can’t understand the dynamics between three people, how can I hope to grasp the complexities of history, of political movements, of the common realm where our lives, forged within those personalized penal colonies called families, unfold? Surely misery, too, has a pattern. Years later, I remain unable to expunge the image of my godfather, emaciated and pale in the wheelchair, refusing to be pushed into the sunlight he celebrated because it, too, had betrayed him. Light must have seemed the biggest lie of all. Look to the light! Why? It can only illuminate, not eliminate, our woes. “Count no man lucky . . . ,” Ovid wrote.
“A person’s life,” continued Ovid’s heir, Italo Calvino, “consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.”
It’s no less than the blueprint of life’s inner architecture I’m seeking.
Why not? Aren’t you? Not a one-size-fits-all model—yet one that defines some general outlines nonetheless. I’ll settle for guesses, possibilities, provisional versions, for a few tentative dotted lines, then hold my breath when we hit the bottomless falls. L.’s recent death tells me I need a survival strategy.
Askold Melnyczuk is an American writer whose publications include novels, essays, poems, memoir, and translations. Among his works are the novels What Is Told, Ambassador of the Dead, House of Widows, and Excerpt from Smedley’s Secret Guide to World Literature. His work has been translated into German, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Melnyczuk also founded the journal AGNI and Arrowsmith Press (2006).
