Read Online Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong - Free Book Online Page A

about the deceased were required, and all she wished was to sink six feet deeper underground than Papa was going.
    Why had she read that damned memoir? It exposed her more than her grandfather! Why hadn’t she let well enough alone? Papa had requested a Jewish funeral and she had desecrated it. Women were not wanted in the house of the Father-God, but if they were tolerated at all, it was as silent witnesses of generalized male devotion. To stand up and speak ugly truths about the dead was insufferable presumption. Isadora felt ill with regret. All she wanted was to undo her speech, to suck the words back in like dirt being sucked into a vacuum cleaner.
    Her orgy of self-loathing was interrupted by her second cousin Abigail, a white-haired, dowdily dressed retired schoolteacher who spoke the overcareful English of one who has spent the better part of her life enunciating the unspeakable to the unteachable.
    â€œA lovely speech, Isadora,” she said. “That was truly Uncle”—her mother was Isadora’s grandfather’s sister—“a true portrait. He would have approved.”
    â€œReally?” Isadora asked in disbelief.
    â€œYou remember what Uncle used to say: ‘Paint me as I am—warts and all’?”
    â€œYes—but he didn’t mean that. Nobody ever means that.” (Isadora knew this because, as a novelist, she had discovered that the people who say “please write about me” are always pissed off when you do, while the ones who make you swear not to, secretly lust for such dubious immortality, and are devastated if you keep your word. Nevertheless, one thing is sure: nobody wants to be painted “warts and all”—any more than “Mr. and Mrs. Johnson” did.)
    â€œI don’t know,” Abigail said. “Uncle always maintained that there was no point in being an artist if you were going to lie. That was why he hated doing formal portraits. ‘Liberty is the right not to lie,’ he often said, I think after Camus. You were faithful to that. He would be proud. Tell me, Isadora,” she went on, “that painting of horses in the poem—did you ever see it?”
    â€œNo. I saw several sketches of horses and some small oil studies. Why?”
    â€œWell, Uncle painted a huge canvas of horses galloping out of the sea—a painting perhaps thirty feet by fifty feet, to be hung as a mural somewhere in a public building. I remember it because I remember the trouble he had getting the canvas and finding space large enough to work on it. That was in the early forties, before you were born, I think. I don’t even remember who commissioned it, but it was to be done for some building in the west, I think, and he was to paint it here, in sections—huge squares of canvas—then ship them out west. I remember him working on it. It was the most amazing thing he ever did—huge as the Tintorettos at the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice—and as good, to my mind. It was a stampede of wild horses galloping out of the sea. I could have sworn from that poem that you knew it.”
    Isadora’s heart turned over at this news. “How amazing,” she said. “I never even heard him talk about it.” Still, she had always suspected that there was a metaphysical connection between her and Papa, something went beyond granddaughterly affection, a certain interchangeability of souls. But this notion that her poem had intuited a lost painting was eerie indeed.
    â€œThe painting was lost,” Abigail went on. “The war came and the people who commissioned it never even built the building. The project was sold to another real-estate consortium, the plans were altered, and Uncle was never paid for the work. The painting was shipped out West, and disappeared. He tried to collect on the money they owed, but when the project changed hands he couldn’t track down the original people. Anyway, you know Uncle: He