I gathered my courage about me, and started to pound on a huge oaken door. I didn’t know where I was, but only that it was the biggest, warmest-looking door I had ever seen. I thought to beg of whoever opened it that I might work in the kitchen and sleep in the storeroom. I decided to bribe him with my fountain pen—a beautiful Swiss instrument of ebony, with gold fittings—so I took it from my case and was holding it in my mouth as I fumbled with the books that were trying to fall to the ground. There I was, pen in mouth, in my shirt, my hands full of books, when a servant appeared, half in livery and half in his underwear.
I couldn’t say anything, because the pen was in my mouth. He jumped forward to help me with my spilling case, and, having rescued my books, he said, “Go right in. They’ve been at it for about an hour and a half, but it’s going to be a long night.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“The top floor. They’re all here tonight.”
“Oh.”
“And you’ll be glad to know that Martha is with them.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “What would it be without Martha? She makes things so—how can I say it—so excellent.”
“Yes. Excellent is an excellent word, sir.”
“Excellent!”
“Very excellent, sir.”
I went up the stairs, winding around a large dimly lit well that rose into the darkness for seven or eight stories. As I made my way, I could see stars shining through a skylight. On each level, different musical compositions were being played in unseen rooms. I didn’t know if this were a music school, a boardinghouse for string musicians, or a dream, but I ascended in the warmth until, on the top floor, I saw a row of strong lights. There was no sense in hiding on the staircase, so I entered the night class.
In a room that echoed from the upwelling chamber music, about forty men formed a crescent before a raised platform upon which stood a woman who, in the light that glared upon her, seemed to have the proportions of a classical statue. She clasped a yellow shawl about her in Roman fashion. Her shoulders and arms were exposed in a blaze of waxy pink and beige and white. I sat down at an easel, just like everyone else, and rolled up my sleeves the way they had done.
It was easy to understand why no one had noticed me. Their model was hypnotically beautiful, and their teacher, a tall wiry man with a mustache and slanted, almost Oriental eyes, was pacing back and forth in complete control. He was the master, and he knew it. They worked intently, for they dared not shatter the magic of his attention and enthusiasm.
In front of me was a big sketch pad on an easel, a box of charcoals, and a three-quarter view of a goddesslike woman bathed in electric light. This was good for at least a couple of hours, and I decided to try my hand at a sketch. Confident of my invisibility, I calmly opened the box of charcoals and took one out. The instructor, who had had his back to me, wheeled around and said, “We’re just about finished with the shawl. Why don’t you wait.” I put down the smooth stick of charcoal. I was not invisible. In a little while, he said, “All right, Martha, let’s try the standing pose with one arm out a bit as if in motion.”
“With the shawl?” she asked, expressing what appeared to be apprehension.
“No.”
She undid the clasp and the shawl fell about her feet. I had never seen such a ferociously nude woman. I was so astounded, and so drunk, that I gasped and said, “Oh!” I wondered how she felt, standing in full light, unhindered and unrestrained, in front of nearly half a hundred men, as if she had someone with whom to share her apparent mortification. But, apart from that, how wonderfully and extraordinarily beautiful she was, how lovely, how exquisite—how magnetic! Paying no attention to the stares of the other members of the class, I nearly reeled in astonishment. The beauty of a woman’s face is magnified and empowered by the free-flowing shape and color of her body in a way that clothing cannot match. I had never known this for sure, since all the nude women that I had seen had been at close quarters and always in the dark. Now I knew. I thought of falling in love with her, but dared not take such a risk. I assumed, as well, that she was betrothed to the teacher, for he was the pacing tiger—the leader of the band. Nor was he angry. He walked over, put his hand on my shoulder, and looked in my eyes—just as if he were a doctor. The rest of the class began to laugh, but he shot them a glance which, had it been prolonged, might have turned them into brass monkeys.
Then he asked quietly, “Have you never seen a woman without clothes?”
“No sir,” I answered. “Not in this fashion.”
He knew from my accent that I was an immigrant. “When did you come to America?” he asked, cocking his head slightly.
“This evening,” I replied.
“And you came to my class? Why did you—oh, I see. It’s cold out, isn’t it.”
“Very cold.”
“Well,” he said, “America to you now is a big nude woman, and that’s just fine. But! You must understand that we approach the subject here as a thing of beauty.”
“What else?” I interrupted.
He nodded his head. “Good. Tell me, why do you think we draw from the nude?”
I shrugged in ignorance and looked away.
“I’ll tell you then. It’s very important. And then you can start drawing, and we’ll see what you can do. After class, you can sleep in the studio if you’ll help to sweep up in the morning. But you’ll have to find somewhere else to go as quickly as you can.” He paused.
“We draw from the nude,” he said, “because the world is full of passionate and confusing colors, all of which can lead us astray. Its forms are so various, its combinations so active, that we often find ourselves in a dissociated dream. We are like that, you see—weak and vulnerable. However,” and here he smiled, “there is one thing that we can know—better than landscape, better than the planets, better than mountains or the sea. That is the human form. If you can render it skillfully, you can render anything. Look at her,” he said. “She’s so beautiful. Have you studied anatomy?”
“No.”
“Then take note.” And he went on, filling me full of ambition and glory, talking about masses of light and shade, about determining the sway of the body (there was a plumb line, he said, that fell through Martha’s ear, her right breast, her hip bone, and her heel), the leading measurements, proportions, the effect of gravity upon the flesh, the subtleties of expression, the motionlessness which held a world of powerful implicit movement, and, above all, the beauty, the holiness, and the Godliness of it.
When he finished, he looked at me with an understanding that I had seen before only in the eyes of the deeply religious, the suffering insane, or children—an openness through which everything can flow. I shuddered with inspiration, and took up my tools. For the next two hours, I exhibited the passion of a great symphony conductor. Whereas the other students worked quietly, touching their own faces now and then as they contemplated what they had done, I knitted my brows, clenched my fists, hummed, groaned, and moved my arms in sweeps of ecstasy. I had never drawn before; I had never contemplated so brazen, dignified, and statuesque a nude; and I had never been marinated in a quart and a half of whiskey. The lights shone in gold from under conical tin shades; the wind outside howled as it had done on the sea and on the Isle of Tears; and I drew with the fiercest, tenderest, most genuine emotion. After two hours, when half the students had finished and stood talking by a thundering wood stove, I sank back and spread my tired arms.
How can I explain what I had drawn? It looked like an angry dragonfly with huge breasts. Representations of stars, moons, comets, and great moments of history littered the background. For some reason, the dragonfly was fitted out with aviator goggles and a broadsword. As I stared at this peculiarity, the immense pride and satisfaction I had accumulated while creating it began to drain from me as if I were a tub and someone had pulled my plug. The instructor glided over. I could see that he wanted badly to discover a prodigy. He was anticipating history, and although he was not Je
wish (I think), he looked like a rabbi on Rosh Hashanah.
As he rounded my easel, I smiled weakly with one side of my mouth. He stopped short as if petrified. The petrification became disbelief, and then (it seemed) almost fear. He turned to me and asked, “What did you say your name was again?”
I was ashamed, and did not want to give my real name, so I made one up. “Hershey Moshelies,” I said, trying to be American, and yet not too American.
He took me by the shoulder (when I was young, everyone always took me by the shoulder—as if it were a banister or a bath rail): “Look, Hershey. You know, you really can’t draw.” My head sank in despair. “I mean you really can’t draw.” He looked at my work again, and shook his head in dismay. “Hershey, a cat can draw better than that.”
I walked down the long gallery and looked at the sketches that the others had drawn. I nearly cried, for they had done Martha so much more justice than I had. What was I doing? I asked myself. Where was I, where had I been, when they were intently rendering? I resolved that in whatever I might come to do I would mind the real beauty of things and pay less attention to my own dreams—which is not to say that I intended to abandon them but, rather, to use them in a more disciplined fashion.
I returned to the easel, rolled up my picture, and brought it to the fire. As it burned—sword, stars, comets, and all—I felt as if I had been in America not for a few hours, but for years. In what other country do lessons and beauties arise, strike, and disappear so fast?
While I stayed in the darkness, generating resolutions faster than the fire sparked, the art students clustered about the stove and talked in fast, idiomatic English. As I watched them, I saw that they themselves were a painting, and I guessed that, in seeing it, I was already on my way, although I did not know where. Martha had put on her shawl and was speaking to them. She seemed to know them quite well. How jealous I was; that is, until they left, a few at a time, and only Martha, the instructor, and I remained in the studio.
Martha sat on the edge of a cot at the side of the room, watching the instructor go to each electric lamp and turn it off. Finally, there was only the rolling red-and-yellow stove-light, and starlight coming in through the ice-covered windows. The instructor moved in shadow as he put on coat and scarf, but Martha remained on the edge of the bed, the shawl having slipped to her lap.
“Good night, Martha,” he said, and then vanished into the darkness.
I was hidden deep in the shadows, and I thought that he had forgotten about me. As he opened the door to the hall, a dim square of yellowish light appeared, and then disappeared.
Martha shielded her eyes as if the stove were the sun, and said, “Where are you?”
I moved into the light. The moon had cleared a cliff of dark buildings, and now it silvered all the windows in a blinding glare. I realized that I was shaking. The loft was dancing in firelight, flickering in black, orange, and white. She was only five feet away from me, sitting straight, as white and nude as alabaster.
“Is your name really Hershey Moshelies?” she asked.
“No.”
“I didn’t think so,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because my name isn’t really Martha.”
Then she held out her hand, and took me into her bed.
A Crooked Stick
In the night class, and afterward as the loft had danced before my eyes in stove-light, I had forgotten the cold on the street. Though in Martha’s warm bed I had no need to think of the frigid January lying in wait outside the ice-covered windows, perhaps it was in the back of my mind.
At seven, she jumped out of bed and began a ritual of washing, looking, and the application of mysterious creams and oils, which she applied not only with her hands but with towels, cotton, little brushes, and strange womanly pompadores, none of which I had ever seen before that morning. “What are these pompadores and things?” I asked. She refused to answer, because either she was too absorbed in the daubing and stroking, or she could not believe that I did not know, or she didn’t want me to know. I have never been able to fathom the uses and complexities of the little tubes, jars, cylindrical brushes, Arabian tools, and Oriental implements that women use, and I imagine that it is because they do not actually make any sense whatsoever.
By eight, she was pulling herself into a fortress of clothing that she would have to dismantle an hour later when she started work at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts (“What is Brooklyn?” I asked) as the figure upon which would be based the realization of a five-ton marble statue entitled “Liberty in the New World.” As she laced up her boots, she spoke at triple speed of how difficult it was to be a nude model. No one knew her name—her real name—she said, just as no one knew mine. She made a lot of money, and it was all in the bank, waiting out the few years until she would return to Ohio as a rich woman, the honor of her family. Her eyes said that she would never go back, ever, but I didn’t challenge her. I merely asked about Ohio, and was told that it was the place in America which produced the majority of fine-arts models. I believed her, and, as I learned later, it was true.
She left at a run. Her footsteps on the stairs went round and round and down and down, as if she were running on a corkscrew, until a door slammed in a miracle of banging glass which did not break, and I was left alone in the studio, sitting on the bed. The stove had gone out, and when the wind rose to match the morning industry of the city’s six million hands, I decided to fling myself onto the street as Martha had done. To be flung out or to fling oneself out of doors seemed to be the pattern of daily life in this country.
But before I could jump through the lintels, the caretaker arrived and put me to work with a broom. He took me by the shoulder (I was so sick of that already that I almost punched him) and volunteered to get me a job. I didn’t understand his eagerness to help me, and he was vague about what I was going to do, but I was grateful nonetheless. He used the telephone to call his cousin, who was going to get me the job. I had never seen a telephone, or, in fact, heard of one (we were cut off from many modernisms; my education had been strictly rabbinic, and then, after I went my own way, classical). When he began to scream at the box on the wall, standing right up against it, I could not decide if he were a lunatic or if I didn’t know something that perhaps I should have known. After he was done, I asked him if the machine on the wall was a talking telegraph.
“No,” he said sarcastically. “It’s a pepper grinder.”
“Then, then why,” I asked sheepishly, pointing at it, “why did you talk to it—”
“Him.”
“I’m sorry. To him”—I looked at the telephone again—“to him, as if, as if… he were alive?”
“Talked to what?”
“To him,” I said, indicating the telephone.
“To he,” said the caretaker authoritatively.
“To he,” I repeated.
“I didn’t talk to he. Do you think I talked to he? You must be imagining things.”
“I apologize,” I said, and started to back off.
“Apologize to he,” said the caretaker.
I made a low bow to the telephone, and went to sit quietly by the window.
After a short time, the cousin (who said that his name was Herman Lerker) came in, carrying a wool jacket for me to wear. The two men exchanged a few words, and we were off. We ran down the stairs and hit the street at a fast trot, just the way I wanted. Everything was alive with morning, and I saw for the first time that the city was blue and gray. The colors and textures of the building stone were unfamiliar, like a new kind of cloth that one has never before seen, and the light was magically cold and revealing, so that paintings, prints, and drawings were suggested at every turn. For the city held winter like an armature, and was filled with the subtle and reluctant beauties of commercial civilization—that is, color, form, and movement which innocently combine only to rear up like a lashing wave. I was impressed, too, by the health of the horses. Never had I seen such full-bodied, shiny
-coated, sweet-faced animals. (They flicked their thick brown tails like buggy whips.) I was told that we were to join a street crew in Brooklyn, and that I was to be an assistant fire tender.
It was snowing in Brooklyn—a fitting expression of the easy silence that clasps the borough and contains it like a crystal palace. We traveled along a tree-lined street bordered by fields and gardens; the trees were young and yellow and beginning to accumulate dry snow in a thicket of arches. As the snow began to swirl in occasional halfhearted squalls, one could not see far in any direction, and I was reminded of Rabbi Legatine. I hadn’t eaten, and was still giddy with amazement from the night before, but I was ready to work, to redeem Elise from the Island.
We came to a line of wagons and construction machinery. Twenty or thirty men were using pick and shovel a little way down the street, now visible, now whited out by the snowfall, I was taken inside a tarpaper shed mounted on a wagon. There, I met the crew boss.
“Absolutely perfect,” he said when he saw me. “Couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and he looks strong, too.” I didn’t know what he was talking about; nor did I understand English measures; but I was delighted to receive a compliment. “What’s your name?” he asked, ready to enter into a tattered logbook whatever words I spoke.
Rabbi Koukafka had said that Jews were not wanted for manual labor. Furthermore, I had had outstanding luck as Guido da Montefeltro and as Hershey Moshelies. I thought that the unfamiliar tumult in which I found myself required an active defense, at least in the beginning, since, for me, America was a dreamworld. And I had customarily (perhaps habitually) been willing to do my share in the nurturing of confusions. Therefore, I thought for a while, and (with what I assumed was deceptive nonchalance) arrived at a name for a heroic and dependable American worker.
“Whiting Tatoon,” I said, staring toward the blue Pacific. (Actually, I was staring toward the gray Sheepshead Bay.) The crew boss wrote it down.