Spring 2009

Retrospective

by Ron Savage

He seemed not to care for the thing itself, the bowl of fruit,
the pond beneath the bridge, the girl on the roof, none of that mattered.
He was concerned with the way the light and the shadow played on the
thing. This was first, always first, this was what infatuated my father.
He had to know how the light and the shadow brought these things into the world.
Laura Gaus-Daulton
A biography for the Thomas Gaus retrospective

That morning Margaret had arranged her husband’s first show at a Chelsea gallery on West 27th Street. That night she slept with their three year old on the fold out sofa in the living room and didn’t talk to Thomas until the evening of the second day and only to ask him to pass the oregano during dinner. What have I done? Thomas wanted to know. Then he said, You shouldn’t be carting Laura off and disturbing her sleep.

She is an old woman standing at his door. The old woman was once his wife and still is his wife, legally, technically, and she wants to see the daughter she hasn’t seen in God knows how long. That thick rust colored hair nobody could comb has gone white on the sides and frames her face. She is also half a foot taller than him, mostly angles and pale long arms, and her eyes go to this and that, taking in the details. He hasn’t seen her in, it must be, twenty years.

She says, What do you think, Thomas?

He thinks, Uh-oh. Then he says, Look at you. I thought you’d be dead.

Thought or wished? she says and gives him a quick anxious smile.

Both, he supposed.

His wife tells him she has had a few wishes herself. She tells him she isn’t well but death is playing hard to get. Too much smoke or drink or both, she isn’t sure. Her liver doesn’t work right, and her heart has problems of its own.

What can I say? she says. I was always a disaster, and now I’m an older disaster. But I’d like my Laura’s address or maybe her phone number, either one. She steps inside his apartment before he invites her. Then she says, You got any wine? White’s fine but I’d like a nice red, something dry.

I remember, he says.

I want to talk with my daughter, she says again. I want to apologize and listen to her tell me what a hideous mother I was. His wife glances around his living room for clues.

Thomas is already nervous. He doesn’t want to undo his solitary life, the years he took getting to this reasonable and safe place. But she isn’t here for him, or so she says.

She isn’t here to apologize and listen to him tell her what a hideous wife she was. His wife has come to find her daughter and not to see her husband, or so she says. Thomas thinks he is more afraid of what he may want than what she may offer.

The painter was hospitalized in 1963 for mania and depression. He liked to use alcohol to even out his moods. Red wine was his favorite but the wine only helped until the depression got bad. Then Thomas Gaus would sometimes cut on himself, a razor, a knife, broken glass, whatever he had available. That was how it happened in ‘63, when he turned thirty. His friend Fat Willy found Thomas naked on the roof of his mother’s Bay Ridge townhouse in Brooklyn. The air felt warm and damp and the sky was filled with charcoal clouds. Thomas sat cross-legged on the tar roof. He had a skinny, delicate look in those days. His hair was curled and dark and to his shoulders; his eyes were dark, too. That day he smelled of vinegary sweat and cigarettes. When Fat Willy found him, Thomas was holding his cut left wrist above the canvas and painting his blood into the picture with a steady right hand.

Thomas met his wife during a Friday night social at the hospital on First Avenue. The room was the size of a school gym and had a blond wood floor and fluorescent lights that were either too intense or burnt out or blinking on and off and buzzing. Patients had collected in the shadowed corners and covered the dance floor. Some of them smoked and talked in small groups. Some danced slow and they hugged each other. They hugged each other while the Beatles sang Yesterday and Nirvana sang Smells Like Teen Spirit. They didn’t care about the song and the tempo. Others danced at arm’s length so they could look down and watch their feet. Cigarette smoke rose to the ceiling in bright layers.

I feel like Olivia de Havilland, the young woman said. Margaret McFerrin was a year older than Thomas and taller than him, but not much taller, and just as skinny. She had rust colored hair that fanned out and gave her a shocked look. Her eyes were large emerald eyes. Thomas thought she was beautiful. Her eyes quivered when she talked. Margaret leaned down to whisper. She said, Mama and me love The Snake Pit. It’s our favorite movie. We like to sit on the sofa with popcorn and a box of tissues and have ourselves a good cry.

Margaret also cried when she wasn’t watching movies. That’s what happened the evening her mother took her to the hospital. I’d been crying off and on for three days and didn’t know why, Margaret said to Thomas. She sometimes heard a woman’s voice, too. The woman liked telling Margaret what an ugly, disgusting person she was and that her talents were mediocre but Margaret ought not to worry because these talents would soon vanish entirely. She thought the woman had her mother’s voice. Margaret kept that part to herself.

I’m an illustrator for an advertising firm in midtown, Margaret told Thomas. She supported her mother and knew people Thomas had only read about in magazines. Then she had said, You want to sneak out and drink some wine?

We can’t leave the hospital, Thomas said.

Who’s leaving the hospital? Margaret said. She said it the way people talk to the less educated. I got wine in the garden, she said. You like red? I got a good Cabernet, nice and dry.

Thomas Gaus was not above having heroes. He loved Monet and Pierre Renoir and Pissarro and Sisley. My father believed the Impressionists understood our limits and gave us our freedom He used to say, How can we know the exact look of a thing? Only God knows the absolutes. All we have is what we see and the light and the shadow. My father was unyielding about this. Nothing stirred his rage more than anxious critics who missed the comfort of nineteenth century realism. Thomas Gaus believed the world came to life through personal and shared experiences of it. How we make sense of our senses, that was what he used to tell me.

Four years into their marriage, toward the end of the summer, Margaret got her husband into an uptown gallery on East 77th. By midweek Thomas had sold sixty-eight of seventy-two paintings and had received praise by both the Times and the Voice. Margaret withdrew again and wouldn’t talk to Thomas. She also started sleeping on the roof of their apartment building with the baby. The baby had Margaret’s rust colored hair and her father’s dark brown eyes. Six days passed before Margaret would talk to Thomas and sleep in their bed.

The afternoon the Guggenheim called to ask Thomas to show some of his work, Margaret took a serrated kitchen knife to ten of her own paintings. She had cut straight down on each painting three times then straight across three times. The paintings were a project she had labored over for the last six months.

Thomas and Margaret stand in front of the wine shelves at the Korean grocery on West 4th Street. Margaret sneaks a look at Thomas, and Thomas guesses his wife doesn’t think he is telling her the truth about his drinking. She doesn’t believe he has quit. Her big emerald eyes have started to vibrate. His wife is talking about wanting to see Laura again. I was too busy with myself, she says. I couldn’t live with you and be satisfied with my own painting, my own work. I always felt bad. But you can’t be a mother and constantly focus on yourself. This is when Margaret saw Thomas keeping his distance from the wine shelves.

It won’t bite, his wife says.

I’m sorry, what? He hears her and for a moment she is a stranger.

The wine, she says. It’s awful but it won’t bite.

Thomas was remembering their lives together. All the drinking, yes, but he also didn’t know where he ended and his wife began. His moods swings had subsided after a month or two of marriage. He had quit his medication and the depression never got bad enough to cut on himself. Margaret was healing him by her presence alone. Still, their troubles could get dark and out of control. They were too tangled in one another. If they drank too much they could become petulant and cruel and they drank too much most of the time. Then there was baby Laura who cried for things and got them angry but kept them in this world and responsible. Laura was a mother long before she knew they had given her the job.

Now his wife is telling him, I want you to have a drink with me, Thomas. We haven’t seen each other in twenty years. One drink. Why would you deny me? What’s the harm in it?

Mr. Kim sells both jugs and boxes of red wine. The jugs have a finger loop near the mouth and the boxes show pictures of vines and wet red grapes. The two wine shelves are between the rice, pasta, and macaroni and cheese products to the right and the rye and white breads and English muffins to the left. Mr. Kim is sitting on a stool behind the cash register. Mr. Kim is in his early eighties and likes calling Thomas ‘young man.’ As in, Young man, you buy that or not? Mr. Kim’s eyes and his tan bald head are just above the cash register.

Margaret is seventy-five and there isn’t a line on her face. Maybe three or four lines but nothing like an elderly face should be. Crazy people don’t age the way normal people age. Thomas knows that from his days at the First Avenue hospital. He sees it in his own face. Crazy people have the faces of old children.

When I quit I quit, Thomas says

You mean you don’t drink period? Margaret says and sounds bewildered.

I stopped drinking awhile ago, Thomas says.

He feels scared telling her he stopped drinking. During their time together he didn’t think about telling her no. Disagreeing with her wasn’t what his mind considered. These were the years Thomas thought and felt only what Margaret thought and felt. He didn’t know he had a ‘no’ in him. What she wanted was okay with Thomas. He did not need to upset her and lose his comfort.

Thomas wants to tell Margaret that he had to stop drinking or the social worker and the judge would have taken their daughter, his daughter. But he doesn’t say that.

The social worker and the judge are a fear, not a fact. He gets too nervous around his wife. Thomas doesn’t want to backslide and get all twisted up in her again. The way she saved his life was far too expensive.

What’s awhile ago? Margaret says. She wants to know the starting date of his sobriety. She says, Two months, a year, what? Margaret has the suspicious tone of someone who doesn’t trust a quitter. She closes one eye and looks at him with the other.

I don’t know, Thomas says. Thomas does know and feels irritated with himself. Why does he lie? What can she do? This is an old woman. He touches one of the boxes of red wine with his fingertips. His forefinger and middle finger are stained yellow from cigarettes. Thomas says, I quit six or seven months after you left us. That’s when I quit, six or seven months after. His tone is too forceful, lying isn’t his strong point. He quit drinking the night Margaret left him but telling her this would upset her. Six or seven months of drinking lets a person know he struggled over the loss.

Margaret smiles a sly smile then she brushes aside a strand of white hair on her cheek. She isn’t as beautiful as Thomas remembers but she is beautiful enough. That’s okay, Thomas, she says and rubs his thin shoulders the way she did when they first knew each other back in the day. This was when he relied on her to keep him alive and sane, to keep his moods from consuming him. She rubs his shoulders there in the aisle beside the glass jugs and the boxes of wine, the breads and the macaroni and cheese. She rubs his shoulders while old Mr. Kim looks at them over the cash register. Margaret is humming a tune Thomas used to love but now can’t recall. Her hands are delicate bones; her nails, long and red. That’s okay Thomas, she says. He hates how her touch can still calm him.

Thomas and Margaret had not left the Friday night social to go outside and drink. Margaret brought the Cabernet to his room and they drank the wine there and talked and Thomas showed her the drawings in his black leather sketchbook. The room had a bed and a lamp on a gray metal nightstand. There was a wooden chair with a crimson vinyl seat and a bureau that looked expensive but was probably particle board. The lamplight put shadows in the corners and across the ceiling and the polished concrete floor. His room smelled of disinfectant and spice aftershave.

Margaret was balancing his sketchbook on her lap. She would turn the page and say, God, look at that. God, look. This was when Margaret told Thomas that she drew, too. But nothing like this, Margaret said. Not anything like this, believe me. She was an illustrator for a midtown firm and drew men in expensive suits and women driving their children to soccer games and ballet. I’m not an artist, she told him. Thomas thought his sketches had hurt her feelings or left her sad or maybe both. Her compliments came with an undefined struggle. Each praise was delivered the way a doctor might tell a patient the bad news. She could have been saying, You have cancer. These sketches are incredible. I’m sorry, you’re H.I.V. positive. One drawing is better than the next. I think its a fatal blood disease but we should do a few more tests. I love what you do with your light and shadow, the way it brings out the object. Thomas didn’t understand her reluctance. He wanted to look inside her and get the truth. He lighted a cigarette, instead. After Margaret and Thomas drank more wine they said they had never been good with people but they felt good with each other.

Why do what the camera can do? I remember my father being emphatic about that. The first photograph was taken in 1826 with a wooden box camera invented by two Parisians named Chevalier. The Impressionists came along some years after that. My father said the Chevaliers changed what artists ask themselves. The camera forced the artist to rethink everything, he said. Our bowl of fruit, our pond beneath the bridge, the girl on the roof, the camera clipped each thing from the world. All we needed to do was paste these things into scrapbooks. The artist had to look for another path, ask a different question. What do I see and how do I feel about the thing I see? That became important, that was my father’s argument for the Impressionists. What do I see and how do I feel about what I see? This became the eternal questions of Thomas Gaus. He would ask me, Isn’t that paramount? Isn’t that more intriguing than what the camera can do?

Margaret had crept into her husband’s studio the night before the movers were scheduled to transport seventy-five of Thomas’s painting to the Guggenheim. This was close to one-fifteen in the morning. She used a serrated kitchen knife on each painting. She cut them three times straight down and three times straight across, the way she had cut her own paintings two weeks before. Then she scooped Laura up from the bed and put a finger to the four year old’s lips and told her not to fuss and to do what mommy said to do. Laura wanted to know if they were going to sleep on the roof again. Margaret told her, No, hon, not this time, and the child nodded and laid her head on her mother’s shoulder.

They did go to the roof. The night was warm and clear and there were traffic noises far below them and the air smelled of frying foods from the nearby restaurants and the exhaust fumes from the traffic. Yesterday Margaret had laid two boards across a six foot space between their apartment building and the building next door. The drop itself ended in an undefined blackness. She began crossing the walkway with Laura pressed to her chest. The baby was thin with thick rust colored hair like Margaret and dark brown eyes like her father. Laura started to cry and wriggle, trying to escape her mother’s arms. Margaret told her to stop that now, please. Laura said she was very tired and wanted to go home and sleep in her bed. This is when Margaret got angry and left the baby on the roof next door to their building and never came back.

Margaret has decided on a small glass jug of the red. We’ll have one teeny drink, like we used to, she is saying to him. She says, Do you remember those days, Thomas? God, we were nothing but crazy. Margaret’s big emerald eyes start to vibrate. Her hair is thick and unkempt but more white than rust colored now. Her voice has a thready, frantic edge. You remember the fun? she says. How good everything felt when we were together?

Music plays in Mr. Kim’s grocery store. The music is far away, the sort Thomas hears in elevators and malls. He has to concentrate to recognize a tune. These are songs of the sixties but done with violins, Billy Joel’s Just The Way You Are, Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time, Kyu Sakamoto’s Sukiyaki. Mr. Kim’s store smells of fresh bread and pickle brine and floor wax.

Thomas doesn’t get why his words don’t matter to Margaret, why she is ignoring him. She tells Thomas that she is sick. It’s the second time she has told him. She says death keeps playing her like a coy young girl who is all flirt and no action. Too much smoke or drink or both, she isn’t sure. Margaret’s liver doesn’t work right, and her heart has problems of its own.

Promise me you’ll have a drink, Margaret says.

Let me pay for that, Thomas says and lifts the wine jug from her hands before she can agree or protest. He is walking toward the cash register and Mr. Kim.

We can talk about our Laura and drink this awful wine, Margaret says. She smiles at Thomas again but her heart isn’t in it. She says, Maybe you can give me her phone number.

Then Thomas does something he has never done with Margaret. He sets the wine jug on Mr. Kim’s gray wood counter and grips Margaret’s shoulders with both his hands and looks into those big vibrating eyes.

I don’t drink, he says. Thomas doesn’t yell this at her. He says it as a fact. I haven’t had a drink since I don’t know when, Thomas says. And I’m not going to start drinking now by having a drink with you, he says. Not now, not ever. I’m not giving you Laura’s address, either. I’m not giving you her phone number. And Thomas tells Margaret what he knows will hurt her. Thomas says, There are things we do to people that can never be forgiven.

Tears rise along the bottom rim of Margaret’s vibrating eyes. She shakes loose of Thomas and runs from the store. Mr. Kim frowns and nods at the jug of wine. Young man, you buy that or not? he says.

Thomas had awakened that night with thoughts about his new paintings and the Guggenheim. He followed his wife and the baby to the roof but got there too late to see Margaret leave. Thomas got there when his baby was balanced on the two boards and crawling to their building from the building next door.

Daddy’s here, baby, Thomas had said that as he walked to her. Thomas didn’t rush it, didn’t panic her. Thomas took his sweet time. Like everything was okay. Like you could kiss it all and make better. Meantime he was making deals with the Lord. He would go back on his medication, no problem. What’s a few pills, anyway? If a man can’t take a pill, he doesn’t know his priories. Let me get my kid and you can do what you want to with me, he was thinking, and I’ll be sober when you do it. I’ll be sober every minute I’m with her, he was thinking, and all the minutes I am waiting to be with her. Then Laura was up into his arms, hanging on, her arms hooked about his neck. Thomas gripped her tight to him and she said, Daddy, I can’t breathe, and Thomas said he was sorry.

Thomas Gaus seemed not to care for the thing itself, the bowl of fruit, the pond beneath the bridge, the girl on the roof, none of that mattered. He seemed concerned with the way the light and the shadow played on the thing. What do I see and how do I feel about the thing I see? That became paramount for him; that was my father’s mantra to the Impressionists. This was the constant focus of Thomas Gaus. What my father saw and how my father felt about what he saw became everything, became his life. And for that, for his steadfast vigilance, for his love that never wavered, for all things too sweet and fragile to reveal, the girl on the roof was, and is, eternally grateful.