The Dog

Painting by Bruce McAllister

The Dog

Bruce McAllister

        I would, my parents decided, spend our third summer in Italy studying art in Florence. They wanted to support my interest in being a painter some day. My grandmother–my mother’s mother–would accompany me, and we would live in a modest pensione, one that overlooked, if my father could arrange it, the great Arno River and its very paintable ponti.
        I was thirteen, shy and overweight, and certainly could not have done it on my own. I was also not a very good artist, but I hoped to become a better one. My parents wanted this, too; and my grandmother–who was what less charitable people called a “weekend watercolorist”–did love me and was delighted by the idea of our adventure in the City of Flowers.
        I would need a private teacher. My father, at my mother’s behest (she was the force in our family), arranged it: I would be taught by the Florentine painter Arrigo Leone, who held a position at the Accademia di Belle Arti and had two landscapes in the modern wing of the Uffizi. I would take my lessons in the professor’s private studio, where he lived and whose outer wall (he would later boast) had been destroyed by a bomb during the war, though this had not, artist that he was, stopped him from painting.
        How can this trip not be an account from the era of “Grand Tours” taken by young women and men of privilege a century or two ago? It was not. It was 1960, the middle of the Cold War. My father, an American naval officer from a genteel family in Virginia, was stationed with a submarine warfare center in La Spezia, a port just south of Genoa, in its research division. He was no “Cold War warrior.” He liked inventions, science and the sea; he was full of wonder and could not have cared less about power or intrigue.
        A few kilometers south of that gray port was a little fishing village where the communist pescatori attended church faithfully and were always generous of spirit. There we lived for three years in a little stucco villetta on a hill above the village’s pretty cove–one I would try to paint more than once, though never well.
        My mother, a determined woman, was an anthropologist who had no intention of letting me attend the Navy base school in Livorno, to the south, and speak English and eat base food all day; so I went to school in the village instead. I learned the language well enough that first summer to be admitted, and soon had good friends. But leaving them for the summer to learn the prestidigitation of drawing and painting would be worth it. We would meet again at summer’s end, again study together, re-take the classes we needed to re-take, receive tutoring if we needed it, and once more be the friends we had been for two years. I could wait till then.
        “Isn’t it pretty?” my grandmother–whose moon face and turned-up nose were not at all like my mother’s–asked me that first day in Florence. Our room did indeed overlook the Arno, and she was happy because I was. “I hope you will paint the lovely river this summer, Bruce.”
                                                                #
        When my mother was a young woman, the depressed were treated with B-vitamin shots. I knew she’d always received them, but I didn’t know what they meant when I was a kid. Vitamins were important, I knew; B vitamins were important, too, I also knew. But beyond that, I didn’t know why she was receiving them.
        Later, in the 50s and 60s, doctors gave amphetamines to the depressed. I didn’t know it at the time–I knew only that my father seemed happier and was losing weight–but his doctors in the Navy, both in San Diego, California, and in Livorno, gave him amphetamines to treat his depression even as my mother continued to receive her vitamin shots.
        Though she hit him at times–especially when either he or I did something to make her mad–I don’t think being hit caused his depression, that is, from the rages of a woman whose father had left his family and who had decided somewhere within her that she would need, in a husband, a man who would never leave her. He had lost his own mother–a fragile, angel-faced woman I remember hearing about when I was little–in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and I don’t believe he ever got over it. He was, I’ve often thought, looking for a woman so strong that nothing would ever take her away.
        My mother hit me occasionally, too, but when I was older. And it was the absurdity of the words accompanying the blows that I remember more than the fists or open hands. “Don’t you dare block me when I’m hitting you!” she would shout. Or “How dare you contest me–after all I do for you three!” Or “You should be more of a man, like Robert; but if you were like him you’d be a coward!”
        Her twin brother, Uncle Robert–a big man with dark eyes and a complexion just like hers who, people said, had twice the charisma of Hemingway–did everything he could to avoid her. He lived safely four hundred miles away in San Francisco and was always, according to my mother, too busy for family gatherings with his medical practice and ranch and the women who, one after another, fell in love with him.
                                                                #
        Toward the end, when heart disease had already taken my father and my mother was alone–which she found intolerable–her doctors felt she had dementia, early Alzheimer’s; but I knew that was not the case. She had always embellished stories, even invented them for the attention they provided–“good story is everything,” as she told me once, eyes flashing as they always did. She should have been a writer, but writing, even journal articles in her field, somehow terrified her. It made her think about herself, I remember thinking; and now, in her terror at being without my father, and in her inability to sleep at night in that grief, she inhabited a place no more informed by dementia, I believed, than her life had ever been. I was trying my best to find ways to love her, to express that love before she, too, left–which she would soon, as the ovarian cancer that had nearly killed her twenty-five years before returned, and without her doctors’ awareness.
        So I drove her for hours down the streets of Pomona and Monrovia in the dry, dusty part of our state–cities she remembered from childhood–because she liked to have “adventures,” as she put it. I knew from my grandmother, who had passed a decade before my father, that this was the same word my mother’s father had shouted as he’d piled his family into the car during the Depression and taken them for drives without itineraries: “Let’s have an adventure! Let’s have more than one!” he’d shout, and everyone loved him and didn’t want him to leave. My mother missed him. I knew that without her ever telling me. She missed what her family had been before it had fallen apart, and no rage could bring it back, though rage–that emotion so many use to keep despair at bay–kept trying. It was the least I could do, wasn’t it? Drive her on those streets for however long she wished even if her back hurt her.
        On one of those drives she fell silent, which was unlike her, and I decided to try, to outmaneuver “the cobra.” This I’d always called the creature that would appear in those rages. I would try to do it with the love I felt for her, though I had no idea whether it would be enough. I said to her:
        “Did you sometimes feel that Grandma–your mother–was your baby? That you had to take care of her, bring her into our family because she had no other place to go after he left, because she was alone and you did love her?”
        It did reach her. It got inside. Her eyes began tearing; and, no hooded serpent rising, she answered:–
        “Yes, my baby. That is exactly how it ….“
        Then she turned in her seat and gave me the look. The snake had returned. Her voice was different now, hideous, a snarl, as she said: “Why do you ask?–How dare you think you know what I have felt?”
        I wanted to touch her hand but did not.
                                                                #
        There were certain things that made my mother’s eyes tear up, and over the years I came to view them as the things that could, unlike so many others, get past her anger to the heart I knew was there. How could there not be in that rage? She had taken her mother in to live with us. She had done this out of love, I knew, even if it also allowed her to avoid the duties of a 1950’s wife, which she hated, just as she may have hated having a child and, they say, have cried for months after I was born.
        The first thing that made her eyes tear up was animals–animals too weak to survive. When our first dog died, a little terrier–and I didn’t know for days it had–she cried. We were standing in our backyard–the yard of our pleasant quarters on the Navy base in San Diego–and she could barely speak. “She’s always been sickly” was all she could say, and it was true.
        The second was Chinese poetry, which she loved.
 
        Clouds float into a great expanse.
        Birds fly but do not sing in flight.
        How lonely are the travelers.
        Even the sun shines cold and white.
 
        And this:
 
        She rides a red leopard, striped lynxes attending,
        Her chariot arrayed with banners of cassia and magnolia,
        Her cloak made of orchids and her girdle of azalea,
        Calling sweet flowers for those dear to her heart.
 
        And the third was a story that changed over time–one she told to anyone who would listen, and one her father used to tell before he left–about a Mexican boy with a limp who tried to help a wounded man in a saloon gunfight in dusty Juarez, long before she was born, and was killed by a heartless man for trying. “Just for trying,” she would say every time.
                                                                #
        There is a photograph–black and white–of my mother standing in front of a garden wall whose whitewash is flaking off to reveal the crumbling bricks. My grandmother had a wall like that in Long Beach, just south of LA, at her home–one the Great Quake of ’33 destroyed and that was soon rebuilt, but I don’t think it is that wall. The tree behind my mother is one I don’t remember from childhood. She is wearing a sleek, long-sleeve dress–the fabric heavier than crepe–1940’s, before my parents were married–and a tilt hat with a dark, shiny feather. Pretty as she was (no one ever argued with this), she looks stiff, serious, self-conscious. On the back of the photo, to my father, she wrote:
        “Sorry I look like ‘Madam Satan’ here, dark and disheveled, but I trust you won’t show it to anyone. Maybe you’ll like the dress if not the furrowed brow (which is from wanting you). This hat just doesn’t take a good picture, does it? That’s a poinsettia tree, but there are no red leaves on it. What a poor photograph of me to be sending. JP.”
        When I was in my late thirties, after my father retired and they both started teaching, I said something to her in their living room in a suburb about being “self-conscious,” about how self-conscious I’d felt at an awards event. She stopped my story and declared: “Well, Bruce, one day I decided I would never again be self-conscious.”
        When human beings look at themselves, it can feel like death. I know that now.
 
                                                                #
        That summer in Florence I remember thinking how Leone’s eyebrows were like black caterpillars and how his jaw had to be big to hold a big mouth. I was supposed to look at things carefully if I wanted to be an artist, and so I did. He would have me, each day, render the replicas of Greek and Roman busts and miniature full-body statues in his studio in charcoal, that I might gain an eye for detail and also learn chiaroscuro technique, which I would need, he said, for everything I drew or painted in my life.
        I don’t know where my grandmother (who barely had eyebrows, I noted one day) went, in one of her flower-print dresses, when I had my lessons. I imagined it was to art-supply stores, fountains, museums, and the flea market in the Mercato Nuovo with its bronze boar, the Porcellino, its nose shiny from all the tourists touching it. But I wasn’t sure. She wanted to talk about my day, not hers, when we were together again. She came back with souvenirs, paints and brushes and was happy.
        Twice she asked Leone whether she could stay while I had my lesson, and, though I don’t think he was pleased, he answered, “Of course, Signora.” Both times she sat watching us quietly from the corner of the studio, smiling, trying not to intrude.
        When I didn’t have lessons, she and I would walk the streets and bridges of Florence, climbing to the towns that overlooked it, and their strange evergreens, which I wanted to paint before summer ended.
        Did I ever think about my mother? I did when my parents phoned us in our pensione in the evening, or we called them. They would ask how things were going, and I wanted to tell them, and I knew that my grandmother would agree, that things were going perfettamente—grazie alla generosita di voi due! I would say it all in Italian–because I knew they liked to hear me speak it–and afterwards I’d translate it for my grandmother: “Perfectly— thanks to the generosity of you two!”
        I thought about my mother once in Leone’s studio. I was copying, with oils, a photograph of the Uffizi Palace, turning the sky an impossible blue, the stones of the building more yellow ochre than they actually were, and with my brushstrokes making the people on the sidewalk as lively as I could. I was sleepy, not yet awake, and for a moment I saw my mother walking down that street–in the painting, I mean–alone and happy.
                                                                #
        In high school and college, during summers or other vacations, I would sit in my bedroom, watch old movies–movies from the 30s and 40s–and cry. I didn’t know then why I did it, except that it felt right; but I understand it now, or imagine I do, because it fits this story: I was to feel my mother’s feelings even if she could not express them. She wanted me to. I was supposed to feel the loss and grief she felt, and I did, watching those movies. In them, sailors and their girls flirted easily, dancing happily in a big city, and I could feel it–how it was gone and lost.
        Or was the loss I felt mine, not hers, and not about old movies at all?
        Was it simply that I had come into this world a sensitive kid, one who could, like her, speak best through tears?
        Perhaps all of these.
        Perhaps something else entirely.
                                                                #
        Years later, long after my mother’s death, I heard from a cousin, the only son of my mother’s baby sister, that I’d suffered as an infant from a clinical “failure to thrive.” The doctors were, yes, worried. I wasn’t growing. I looked terrible. How this was, in fact, the real reason my grandmother had come to live with us and never left. Was it post-partum depression that made my mother even more angry and despairing, and I somehow felt it as an infant? This can happen, psychologists say. Was it a refusal on my part, spiritually speaking, to enter this world and remain, but preferring to be elsewhere? I don’t know. To try to understand someone when we cannot. Is it an attempt to have the other, to be them, when that is impossible?
                                                                #
        Another time, as I drove her on Pomona’s main avenue so that she might remember a past more pleasant than any present, she said suddenly, “It’s in that book.”
        “What book?”
        “The Stars Fell Over Alabama. It has the story. They were a Union-sympathizing family–against slavery–but living in Oklahoma Territory, which had many Confederate sympathizers.”
        What family was she was talking about? I waited, looking at the buildings on old Holt Ave as I drove my parents’ rickety Cadillac east, toward the cleaner town of Upland, which she also remembered fondly.
        She was staring at me, hoping I’d be interested in her story. I couldn’t look at her because I was driving, but I nodded.
        “One day neighbors killed the father,” she went on. “The mother took the father’s skull, made a soup, and then had the four sons drink the soup from that skull, vowing vengeance. She was an Indian–a Chickasaw, though the book doesn’t mention this–so this made sense to her as propitiation and honorable vengeance, just as it did to one degree or another to her oldest son, who’d loved his father in the way that adolescent boys come to love their fathers growing up in a rural setting. The oldest boy understood, but the three younger ones were terrified, didn’t understand, and wanted to leave. Though they knew their mother was Chickasaw, with Chickasaw ways, they may also have thought she was crazy–unstable in her grief.”
        “Is this in the book?” I asked, checking with myself first to make sure the question was acceptable. How did she know the mother was Chickasaw? Other than that, it was the way she always spoke, a lay translation of her field’s lens.
        “Some of it is, Bruce. Some of it isn’t. You’ll know why in a moment.”
        I waited again, glancing at her to see her face. She was smiling. Her eyes were bright. The pain from her back–from that skiing accident when she was young when her father had a cabin at Arrowhead–didn’t seem to be bothering her, at least not enough to ruin the story.
        “The three younger brothers–they ranged in age from sixteen to nineteen–took a train to Texas, ran into trouble with sheriffs and other law-and-order agencies, but survived.”
        “Yes?”
        “My father’s real name was Elbert. We just called him Bert. His brothers, whom you never met, were Cecil and Ernest. Their names aren’t in the book, of course.” Perhaps the doctors were right–she had Alzheimer’s. These were, yes, the names of her father and his two brothers, one of whom had hanged himself in a barn in Long Beach when she was young. And her father had indeed been born in Oklahoma, Indian Territory then. But their story was in a book somewhere? She had to be confusing things. This happened in dementia.
        I didn’t want to believe her mind was leaving her.
        “The brothers made it to Long Beach, of course,” she added.
        “Of course,” I said.
        I glanced at her because I could hear tears beginning in her voice.
        “I went into the barn one day and there he was. I had to cut him down. I was the one. No one else was there.”
        I was holding my breath. I’d heard the rumor about someone having to cut down Ernest, who had always battled depression, but not who. Why should I be surprised that she had been the one?
                                                                #
        Later, after she died in a nearby hospice–the cobra appearing only once or twice–I asked her younger sister Barbara, ninety but still clear-thinking, about it.
        “She said she found him and cut him down–” I began.
        Barbara–once even prettier than my mother had been, they said, and still gracious and generous–shook her head. “No, that is silly.” She was gentle but firm.
        “You were there, so I thought I’d ask.”
        “No, I wasn’t there, Bruce. I don’t remember who cut him down before the police and neighbors came; but I don’t think it could have been Jean.”
        “Why not?”
        She wouldn’t answer. It was as if she didn’t want to give her sister any more reason than necessary. They hadn’t gotten along, and my aunt had never liked my mother’s showing off, the grandstanding, or, as her husband put it, “The spoiled-brat antics.”
                                                                #
        Did it matter whether this was the truth, whether it had actually happened, or was only a delusion driven, as psychologists would insist, by an end-of-life “psychodynamic need”? How could it matter in the end, to her heart or to anyone else’s?
        That she was, we all thought, part Native American herself (which had to be, we felt, the reason her specialty as an anthropologist was Native American culture) was obvious in her eyes if nowhere else. They were her twin brother’s eyes, and their father’s. Their father had come–with his two brothers–to California. He’d been called “Chief” in the thriving oil fields of Long Beach, where he moved, using his brain and considerable charisma, up from roughneck to wildcatter. It wasn’t an “epicanthic fold” in those eyes, as anthropologists say, but they were the eyes that many mixed Chickasaw have. Though I have those Chickasaw genes, too, I don’t have her eyes–except in the faintest way. My father was a fair American Celt from the Blue Ridge Mountains. But people tell me my eyes flash, looking just like hers when I’m angry, as if by this I might be able to know what she felt.
                                                                #
        One of the paintings I did that summer was of Fiesole, one of those pretty towns of Lombardy cypresses–the ones I’d so wanted to paint–that overlooked Florence’s terracotta roofs and glassy river. My grandmother and I asked Leone politely if, when we visited Fiesole that weekend, I might, with his blessing–and because my grandmother loved the medium–try a watercolor landscape. He did not believe in watercolor, he announced, citing reasons like “impermanence” and “tentativeness,” so any work I would do would need to be in oil. My grandmother, whose skin burnt like mine in the sun, was not hurt by his remarks. She delighted in me as I would delight in my own children when they were young and still do. Whatever medium I worked in would make her happy.
        Leone was not happy with my oil painting and enumerated his reasons, which included the impression that the paint had come too much directly from the tube; but with its cobalt-green cypresses and view of the Arno it remains my favorite work from that summer–perhaps even of my entire career, silly though that sounds–and it was my grandmother’s favorite, too. Shadows and light, she would say. A little dog, a coal-black terrier that belonged to a man on a nearby bench, kept visiting us as I painted at my easel, feeling like a real artist. Though the dog isn’t in the painting, our feelings about it–my grandmother’s and mine that day, as we wondered out loud how tiny black eyes could shine so joyfully in the sun–still are.