wick igniting with the rasp of a secret.
Catherine stood back, evaluating her work. She had addressed the detrimental changes caused by the rain and had matched the pigments precisely. The vibrancy of the original painting shone through. It might’ve been odd to think that she’d become intimate with her subject, but she had. She found herself wondering what He thought of her, His attaché to the living world.
It was almost five, already dark. She hated the unyielding darkness of winter. Franny and the nanny would be back from the playground by now, and Mrs. Malloy eager to catch her train. A cold draft summoned her from the doorway as she pulled on her coat and scarf. Behind her, she could hear the old couple’s clattering approach through the empty sanctuary. They were mumbling to each other, words she couldn’t make out, and then the woman clutched ahold of Catherine’s arm. Alarmed, she turned around.
She’s just saying hello, the old man said.
But the woman offered only a troubling stare, her eyes fluttering like moths, and Catherine discerned that she was blind.
Now, you know it ain’t polite to stare, the man told the woman. Let’s leave this nice young lady alone. He unclenched her grasp from Catherine’s coat and, in an awkward sort of dance, maneuvered her toward the door. The woman twisted around again, looking back at Catherine, and held her unseeing, terrified gaze.
Catherine buttoned her coat. She needed to get home.
Through the clerestory windows she could see the moonless sky. Leaving the balmy darkness of the cathedral for the swift cold air of the city she felt overcome, troubled by the interchange with the strange couple, the woman’s blindness. She walked home quickly, wrapping her scarf around her head, the people on the street hiding their faces, bracing themselves against the bitter wind.
—
IT WAS THE WINTER of 1978. They were living in a gloomy apartment on Riverside Drive, a short walk from the university where George was completing his doctorate and teaching two sections of Western Art Survey. Often, he’d told her, at the end of a slide presentation, he’d find the students asleep. This didn’t surprise her. Her husband could be dull. Since their marriage, it would be four years in August, his life, and hers by extension, had been controlled by his dissertation and the temperamental declarations of his adviser, Warren Shelby. George would come home from their meetings in a state. Pale, beleaguered, he’d retreat to the bedroom with a juice glass full of Canadian Club and watch reruns of M*A*S*H. In Catherine’s mind, the dissertation was an existential malfeasance, a relative from some foreign place, a hoarder of conundrums and neurotic tics, who’d moved into their lives and refused to leave. His subject was the painter George Inness, a disciple of the Hudson River School, whom she had come to know through an esoteric collection of evidence, the walls of the apartment shingled with index cards, scraps of insight and cryptic notations, postcards of Inness’s landscapes taped here and there (even one over the toilet) and an Inness quote that had been gone over so many times with a blue pen that the paper had ripped. Folding laundry or doing some mundane task, she’d read the quote again and again. Beauty depends on the unseen, the visible upon the invisible.
On George’s small fellowship, the apartment was barely affordable. They had few possessions: the wingchair they’d found at an estate sale, prickly with horsehair, its spent legs splayed like a drunk’s; the Persian rug that had belonged to his parents; the camelback sofa from her distant aunt, covered in faded celadon damask, that served to accommodate the rare visitor, usually her sister, Agnes, who’d stay a few days until the crowded apartment drove her crazy. The building had no elevator. She’d drag the stroller up five flights, holding her daughter’s little hand, and it could take half an hour to get
Catherine stood back, evaluating her work. She had addressed the detrimental changes caused by the rain and had matched the pigments precisely. The vibrancy of the original painting shone through. It might’ve been odd to think that she’d become intimate with her subject, but she had. She found herself wondering what He thought of her, His attaché to the living world.
It was almost five, already dark. She hated the unyielding darkness of winter. Franny and the nanny would be back from the playground by now, and Mrs. Malloy eager to catch her train. A cold draft summoned her from the doorway as she pulled on her coat and scarf. Behind her, she could hear the old couple’s clattering approach through the empty sanctuary. They were mumbling to each other, words she couldn’t make out, and then the woman clutched ahold of Catherine’s arm. Alarmed, she turned around.
She’s just saying hello, the old man said.
But the woman offered only a troubling stare, her eyes fluttering like moths, and Catherine discerned that she was blind.
Now, you know it ain’t polite to stare, the man told the woman. Let’s leave this nice young lady alone. He unclenched her grasp from Catherine’s coat and, in an awkward sort of dance, maneuvered her toward the door. The woman twisted around again, looking back at Catherine, and held her unseeing, terrified gaze.
Catherine buttoned her coat. She needed to get home.
Through the clerestory windows she could see the moonless sky. Leaving the balmy darkness of the cathedral for the swift cold air of the city she felt overcome, troubled by the interchange with the strange couple, the woman’s blindness. She walked home quickly, wrapping her scarf around her head, the people on the street hiding their faces, bracing themselves against the bitter wind.
—
IT WAS THE WINTER of 1978. They were living in a gloomy apartment on Riverside Drive, a short walk from the university where George was completing his doctorate and teaching two sections of Western Art Survey. Often, he’d told her, at the end of a slide presentation, he’d find the students asleep. This didn’t surprise her. Her husband could be dull. Since their marriage, it would be four years in August, his life, and hers by extension, had been controlled by his dissertation and the temperamental declarations of his adviser, Warren Shelby. George would come home from their meetings in a state. Pale, beleaguered, he’d retreat to the bedroom with a juice glass full of Canadian Club and watch reruns of M*A*S*H. In Catherine’s mind, the dissertation was an existential malfeasance, a relative from some foreign place, a hoarder of conundrums and neurotic tics, who’d moved into their lives and refused to leave. His subject was the painter George Inness, a disciple of the Hudson River School, whom she had come to know through an esoteric collection of evidence, the walls of the apartment shingled with index cards, scraps of insight and cryptic notations, postcards of Inness’s landscapes taped here and there (even one over the toilet) and an Inness quote that had been gone over so many times with a blue pen that the paper had ripped. Folding laundry or doing some mundane task, she’d read the quote again and again. Beauty depends on the unseen, the visible upon the invisible.
On George’s small fellowship, the apartment was barely affordable. They had few possessions: the wingchair they’d found at an estate sale, prickly with horsehair, its spent legs splayed like a drunk’s; the Persian rug that had belonged to his parents; the camelback sofa from her distant aunt, covered in faded celadon damask, that served to accommodate the rare visitor, usually her sister, Agnes, who’d stay a few days until the crowded apartment drove her crazy. The building had no elevator. She’d drag the stroller up five flights, holding her daughter’s little hand, and it could take half an hour to get
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