Read Online A Peculiar Grace by Jeffrey Lent - Free Book Online Page B

the blues and also hillbilly music or the wild peculiar mixture of western swing and also the food, the food gained and gathered from all edges of the city as if for Celeste learning food was learning languages. And Susan grew and on her fourth birthday they held a party for her that was all adults, all people she knew and how he stood watching these formally attired guests and the poised little hostess and knew those people were here not only because of him but honestly for her as well and how she would lead, was already leading an extraordinary life. Now fully away from Pratt and almost all other formal ties except for the midtown gallery that handled his work as well as the Philadelphia and Chicago collectors, the wooly-haired duke or earl or whatever he was—an Englishman—who sent monthly telegrams and appeared two or three times a year and at the moment was bent at the waist in his tails as he led Susan in a delicate and not altogether disastrous attempt at a waltz. The upswell of cheers in the darkenedroom as she blew the candles and opened the pile of brightly ribboned boxes and someone handed her a half-filled flute of champagne and she sipped it as if it were the only reasonable complement to the occasion.
    How he worked. From noon until three in the morning and back up two hours later to work again until sunset. Then dinner and a short exhausted sleep on the sofa trickling in and out as Celeste read to Susan and bathed her and put her to bed and then came to him and slowly woke him and they would sit talking quiet, or loving, and then she’d go to bed as he brewed a pot of coffee and went back to work. How this would go on for days at a time, weeks even, and then he’d fall apart and sleep three or four days around the clock waking only to eat once or twice, then always beefsteak and nothing more with a tumbler of whisky and back to sleep. And how sometime during this wonderful catastrophic haze he lost sense of things, lost track of himself and of his two girls, as he thought of them.
    That night two years ago. The second autumn after the war. A soft evening when he’d finished a marathon of three linked paintings, of days and days he couldn’t count and so kissed his daughter and spat a No at his wife with her offered dinner and walked out and down the block around the corner to a bar because his head was blistered and reeling and he needed not quiet so much as nothing demanded or wanted or hoped of him for a few hours and how he sat there into the dark hours and even heard the sirens and saw the window-speckle of racing fire engine lights and pushed his glass across the bar for another drink. And was sipping that down when a man, a neighbor he knew only by face, was pummeling his shoulders and shouting at him and Thomas Pearce knocked over his stool and ran out and up the street already seeing the fire rising above the buildings, already knowing what he was heading toward.
    And stood at the inner edge of the great circle of watchers, the inner circle a snake nest of canvas hoses and huge puffing pumper trucks and the useless ladder extended toward an empty flame-licked blacknessof night, held back by men sanctioned to be within that circle from which he was excluded, the firefighters and the nervous less well-protected police as the top half of the building spewed upward and as he knew he would Thomas Pearce heard the popping explosions of jars of turpentine and thinners within the abhorrent tornado of fire and standing there, held there, restrained, he saw clear as if he was within the leaping orange fluid structure, the pile of rags soaked with spirits and gum and turpentine that had accumulated to the side of his big easel, into the corner to rest and ferment and foment.
    To be picked up and discarded another day.
    Last thing he said to Mary Margaret Duffy before she sank backward to the curb and cried as he stood silent before the rebuilt building, arms strapped across his chest was, “Once it sank in