by
Jean Berrett
The
walls had always hung heavy with pictures, gilt‑framed, dark and dimming,
holding fiercely onto what was already lost. Old pictures of Baltimore, the
streets of cobblestone and white scrubbed concrete steps in front of the row houses
like nuns waiting for supper.
In
some of the photos, the people stood tall in front of cardboard cutouts of
mountains and lakes, infinite shades of gray. The women in corsets that propped
their bosoms high up under their collarbones and the men in wide lapels with
hats tipped at a devil‑may‑care angle. The photographed children looked unhappy,
smiles forced over frowns or whimpers, little girls in dresses flounced and
laced, row upon row, and little boys standing straight as infantry.
In
one of the largest frames was a drawing of a stone cathedral, medieval‑style:
two massive, ornately sculpted towers, a huge rose window in the columned
belfry and three high arches that pointed to God, each topped with its bleeding
stone crucified Christ above the three stone entranceways.
Her
husband had left her for another woman twenty‑five years younger than both of
them. In the long year following divorce, those pictures still hung from the rosy
wall‑papered walls, gray and gilded and moldering green. One day I remarked
that her house still looked like a parsonage (the husband had been a minister).
Two days later, when I stopped by, the walls were almost bare. Where the
pictures had been, pale squares and rectangles on the faded clustering roses
marked their absences.
All
the pictures were gone but one, a two foot by three foot lithograph in a carved
oak frame, which surrounded an inner frame of tarnished metal crosshatched in
gold and black. Under the aged glass of the frame was Uncle Joe, half‑bald with
a thick but neatly‑trimmed mustache curling over his upper lip and around the
corners of his unsmiling mouth. Everything, even his white man's face, had
faded to shades of tepid brown. He too wore a wide lapelled suit and a stiff
white shirt with the collar pressed down around a small triangular cravat. The
look on his face not sad but intent, as if he studied the scene before him and
seemed to be saying to all who looked, "You whose hearts still beat, whose
blood pumps into your brains and behind your eyes so that you can see what I
cannot, you, who believe somehow that I watch your strange, strange lives from
behind these ink‑print eyes. I am bones at most by now, my dear. But you know,
I lived. My blood too pumped through muscles and brain and limbs as my own
inconceivably magic heart did its inexplicable dance for a while.” Almost a
kindness in Uncle Joe's eyes. His picture remained alone on the walls.
The
following week, new pictures hung across from Uncle Joe. Pictures which she
herself had painted during those long years of marriage. Pictures selected from
those kept hidden behind an ancient wood desk, canvases unframed and stuffed in
a narrow slot against that wall where bookshelves filled with heavy books hung
above and all the way down on both sides.
A
painting of a turtle's face peeking out from under a yellow and orange and
green‑streaked shell. Black eyes, one almost round and open, the other one
angular, half‑closed. Two small dark holes at the snout on a face where soft‑blended
reds and blues and violets made a mixing of sundown above the animal's two
front claws. The fine‑brushed outline of those claws was filled with tiny
trapezoids of brown and orange and yellow and white. Most amazing was the
turtle's mouth, a line crossing the face from side to side. At the center, the
line lifted slightly and wavered—a warily hopeful smile.
Above
the turtle were two other canvases, both of them paintings of luminous crabs. Viewed
from the top, the shells on their backs were shaded and stroked with dark and
light greens and dark and light blues. The eyes protruded bright, bright red
under an arc of red and blue and lavender claws balanced on the other side of
the shell with orange and green and lavender flippers. The sand behind stunned
to pink and orange by the sunlight that must have fallen that day on the moon‑loving
tides of the Chesapeake.
Hung
on a diagonal from Uncle Joe was a close‑up painting, a side view of the large
blue head of a blue‑eyed bird, its orange beak open as if in song. It was thick
with feathers that seemed to have burst that very moment from neck and head,
and the white ring around the bright blue eye grew a luxurious circle of
lashes. Out of the top of the feathery head poked three small heads of hungry
nestlings with wide open mouths that had to be fed.
Three
full‑grown children came that night to have dinner with their mother.
Jean Berrett has been publishing poetry since 1973,
after she took the first graduate Creative Writing-Poetry course to be offered
by University of Wisconsin-Madison. The instructor told her that he thought she
was the best poet in the class and encouraged her to begin submitting her poems
or stories to magazines. She obtained her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern
Washington University and taught English at College of Menomonee Nation in
Wisconsin. Since she first started sharing her work professionally, she has published
ninety-two poems. Other publications include translations from Virgil and
Lucretius and stories and book reviews. She has two sons and seven
grandchildren.
