The picture: unfinished business

Dear friends and readers,

Jim and I are not entirely through with coping with my mother’s estate, we still have some stuff to do about the money she left, which has come to me. Sunday, though, we finished the physical things. This is the story of unfinished business going back to 1971/2.

Shortly after I left my first husband and was living with my parents in an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant (for a few weeks before I was to go to England), I found myself wandering in an department store. I no longer remember why. I came across this picture I just fell in love with. I didn’t know the artist’s name and still don’t. It was not an original — it was just a print. But it seemed to contain in it a vision of a mood, a life, a lifestyle that had deep appeal. I knew most of NYC city didn’t look like this row of picturesque brownstones through which one could view a young woman walking quietly. It has something of a feel of my favorite painter, Pissaro. I wished I could live in a part of a city that at least faintly resembled it. Its frame was plain wood and the cost $14.00.

Readers of this blog or the list-servs I post to will know how much I care about pictures.

I took it home. It was not easy since I had to bring it by subway. Then I hung it over my new cherry wood bed. It had come with string and all I needed to do was bang a couple of nails in the wall. When it came time to go to England, I knew I couldn’t take it with me. It was way too big. I had to leave it with my parents in the apartment they had just moved into in Fresh Meadows. This was 1967/68.

Fast forward a couple of years later I had returned from England, was now married to Jim and I came to my parents’ apartment. There was that picture again, but now it hung over the central sofa in the living room. Alas, my father had to some extent ruined it. He had re-framed it with an “better” wood frame that had a gold lining in it. It didn’t fit it. It was too pompous. He admitted that was so. It had become his picture in appearance as well as possession. What else would he put over that couch.

So I said nothing.

Well when we came to clear out my parents’ apartment, bag and box everything and remove what we wanted, I almost didn’t take it with me. I still couldn’t bear that new frame. Further, the picture itself had faded and embrowned over the years. (It’s not as dark as it appears in this blog; that’s the result of the darkness of the corridor.) Morning I used to think in the city was the best time of day, the time before people’s faces took on the growing anxieties and stresses of the day. But who would hire someone to clean a print that had cost $14 30 years ago? It had lost that early morning freshness of colors it had had. Also where would we put it in the truck. It was silly of me to care. It was self-indulgent in a way I couldn’t find reason for. Yet I wanted it. As Izzy wanted the china lazy Susan in the front of the house, and a small reproduction of a fin-de-siecle painting (cost $3 in a supermarket sale) that was in the front room.

In the end I took the Susan, small painting and my large one home. My big painting took up the side panel of the truck and it got scratched. Since I decided on this the last moment, the Lazy Susan didn’t get properly wrapped and one of the china pieces got smashed.

Still she was happy with them. She put the three (one chipped) on the round thing that swings about and now has her pencils, pens and other things in it on her new cherry wood hutch and desk affair that stretches from her desk to Laura’s now ex-desk with a new wide-framed TV on it.

When I got my picture inside though, it was not clear where I could put it. We have 54 bookcases. Most of our walls are covered and those which are not have favorite pictures already. There is Jim’s three Italian sloops in the front room. He found that similarly, took it to work in the Pentagon, and the day he retired brought it home.

It was more like $30.00, but then this was 30 years later he bought it.

Walls with small ones: an acqua nymph on a rock, looking dreamily up from the waters to the sky; an Alma Tadema in black-and-white of pseudo-classical figures listening to someone read aloud Virgil (these from auctions); from thrift antique shops, some commedia dell’arte figures sitting and wandering wearily in a park where some kind of masquerade is occurring; and this print of an engraving in bad shape of a salon with a gentlewoman to the side holding (cuddling) a cat:

A Chardin of musical instruments:

But I did have behind the door in the hall and over the small thin bookcase (with audio books), a stretch of wall that had a sort of reproduction of a Monet of an exhibit from a museum in France that I really didn’t care for. Had it had been a Pissaro that would have been different. Would this fit? just? and how could I put it up? My father had taken away the original string set.

Well yesterday Laura and Rob brought over their drill. I had bought a new string set from Home Depot, and voila Rob put it up so it was straight and beautifully cover the whole wall. The bookcase under it prevents the door from slamming at it. It’s a bit dark in that corridor since there is no window and just one light bulb so you can’t tell how the painting needs a cleaning and the frame somehow loses its prominence.

I had held it against my father that he had gotten my painting. I had acquiesced in giving it up because he had made it his by that frame. But over the years it had become his, it had somehow in my mind stood for where we did share a taste, for he liked it as much as I did — though could not just leave it be, had had to make it conform to some imposed norm of impressiveness. But then when he had done it, he saw he had lost part of its charm.

So, at long last I got it back. But I got it back with this new meaning, that it had been his, but time has now reverted it back into being mine through the operation of shabbiness.

Almost there.

Ellen