Chapter 1 - "The Painting" According to Boy

 

(While "The Painting" never actually accompanied us to New York, it still became an integral part of our first years together.)

According to Boy: As are so many memories, this one can be triggered by the utterance of a single noun, preceded by the definite article—"The Painting." Together they become a proper noun, much like Greenwich Village has come to be called "The Village," Frank Sinatra became "The Chairman of the Board"; and all baby boomers knows what is intended when someone mentions "The Assassination."

I can close my eyes and see The Painting; but I have no idea who painted it, nor do I recall what the work was called. What I do remember about The Painting was that I really loved it. It was the first piece of "art" I ever bought. I had found it at a small shop in Springfield, Missouri. I had just finished repainting my dorm room, and I wanted something nice to hang on the wall. I didn’t have a car at the time, so I had to talk a buddy into helping me pick it up. It was too large to carry on the bus.

The Painting looked like something Louis Aston Knight could have painted. In fact, he just might have. It pictured a sleepy river at dusk, with barely a ripple showing. It appeared almost more like a lake, except for the steep bank, which strongly suggested that it was a river. Actually, it wasn’t a real oil painting, it was a printed reproduction. One of those that are mass produced on shiny cardboard, with the brush marks stamped on it before the image was applied. It didn’t look anything like a real oil, but at least the fake brush marks did not reflect light as would a smooth surface.

The frame was real wood. It looked like it might have been produced at the same factory that made cheap wood molding. Even so, it still looked nice to me.

On the bank along the river was a small cottage, in an advanced stage of disrepair. Moss hung from the trees. I think there was a faint hint of a setting sun, but that was not clear. I don’t think there were any birds or humans in the picture. The only sign of civilization was that tumbledown cottage.

The Painting was quite large—probably forty-eight inches by twenty-eight inches (it is pictured at the end of this chapter). It practically filled up my whole dorm wall. Every year I would pack it up and bring it home to my parents’ house. Then, in the fall, I would take it back to school with me. By the time I graduated, it had more than one gouge in both picture and frame. When I moved to New York, my mother decided that it belonged over her fireplace, so that’s where it ended up.

After Evie and I got married, the drama about this "piece of art" got started. I really liked The Painting, and my mother knew it. At least once a year, when Evie and I would visit my parents, my mother would ask us if we were ready to take The Painting home with us. Evie was willing, but I knew her style, and I knew that The Painting did not appeal to her. So, every time my mother would ask us about taking it home, we would come up with a different excuse.

It would have been easy enough for us to take it off her hands, but we were not sure whether or not Mom actually liked it. We thought that just maybe she wanted it, but was offering it back to us just to be gracious. It was a puzzle.

Had she ever taken it off the wall, and replaced it with something she picked out, then the solution would have been clear. We would have acted excited about getting it back, loaded it in our car, and then found a dumpster in Grand Rapids. But we didn’t know how to read her.

With my dad it was a different story. He never minced words. If he didn’t like something, he would mutter about it a little, and then just admit his dislike. My dad’s feelings regarding the picture were obvious—he really liked it. It was his style—the little cottage, the quiet river, the warm still sky. He smiled whenever he looked at it.

But my mom was less easy to read. Confounding the dilemma was my dad’s reaction to her trying to get us to take it back with us. He would always say something like: "Carol, don’t bother them about it. If they had room for it they would take it." So, the picture stayed in their living room.

Nearly fifteen years after we got married, my mother died. My parents had been married about sixty years when she passed. Her death devastated my father. For nearly a year he struggled to come to grips with his loneliness. Still the picture from Springfield hung over his fireplace. I think at that point it reminded him not only of the ideal cottage, but also of the love of his life. He was not about to give up anything that reminded him of her.

Finally, after that first year had passed, he called me one day and asked me to come down to visit him. I normally drove the sixty miles (each way) every weekend to visit, and when I did I would always bring Evie and the kids. This time he wanted me to come alone. I thought that curious, so I inquired about his health. I suspected he might be sick. He assured me, however, that he was feeling physically strong and healthy, but that he just wanted to talk. He had never made a request like that before, so I told Evie that I was heading down to talk to him, about what I did not know.

When I got there, Dad seemed especially melancholy, but otherwise in good health.

After nearly an hour of small talk, Dad finally shared with me the purpose of our meeting. "Mike," he said, looking directly into my eyes, obviously trying to read me, "you know your mother was an angel. I miss her more than I can express. She was everything to me. I get no joy out of life anymore. I get up in the morning, have breakfast, pull out pictures of Carol and me, and I just sit here and cry. I can’t help it. She was an angel, and I miss her more than I can say.

With that, my father started shaking all over. He dropped his head, and cradled it between his wrinkled fists, and started sobbing uncontrollably. My father was a tough man. He had been on his own from the age of thirteen. He started working as a lumberjack at that young age, without the guidance of a father or mother. He was a fighter, a moonshiner, a gun packing purveyor of illegal goods, and a gambler—all, of course, in his youth. As an adult, and as a father, he was a mature responsible man. My mother had tamed him well.

"Mike," he continued, "I don’t want to go on. I can’t handle not holding her, not hearing her voice, not talking to her. It’s just too hard."

Neither one of us could hold back our tears. I had seen him cry only a few times before—once was when my older brother was killed in an accident while serving in the army in 1946. I also saw him shed tears at the death of my mother. Other than on those occasions, I had never seen my father exhibit signs of anything that could be perceived as weakness.

In fact, when Dad first received the news that Mom had died, he did not weep this much. Mom had requested before she died that I be the one to tell Dad she had passed. I was always a little puzzled that she would make that request. I had always known it was not because she thought I would do a better job at it. All of us kids loved her deeply, and any one of us would have performed that heavy task with grace and compassion. It was only later in life that I came to realize her reasoning. I think Mom knew that I, as the youngest, could easily lose my way at her passing.

Prior to her death, she and I had engaged in some lengthy and painful conversations about death and dying. She knew that at that point in life no one close to me had ever died, and I think she wanted to engage me immediately in the grieving process, knowing it would be therapeutic.

Again, the "angel" was right. It seemed that she was always right—right in life, and now she was right in death. The fact that she gave me that job, truly did force me to begin my time of mourning. How wise that woman was.

When I gave Dad the sad news, he was sitting in his favorite chair, in the living room, beside the fireplace, and under that wonderfully serene picture of the cottage on the still river. As the words came from my mouth, he simply lowered his head. He sat there quietly for a moment, and then I heard him quietly say, "It’s better now, she won’t have to suffer anymore." His words were true; he had watched his love waste away from a long bout with pancreatic cancer.

I bent over him from behind, and kissed him on his thinning gray hair. As I pressed my lips on the crown of his head, and wrapped my arms around his neck, I could feel the heat rising from him. He was weeping alright, but gently—not convulsively as he did today. After a few minutes, he got up and went into the bathroom. When he came out his face was pale and old, but he had stopped crying, and he seemed ready to take on life again.

Today, however, Dad was approaching life from a different direction. "I’ve got something I need to talk to you about," he said. "I’ve thought about it a lot." He paused for a few moments to organize his thoughts, then he looked up at me with his tired blue eyes, and continued. "If I give up the fight, I will pass, and be with her. I was never happy before I met her, and I’m miserable now." He then paused again. I could sense that he thought he might have given me the wrong impression of what he was intending. "Don’t get me wrong. You and your brothers and sisters do all you can, and I appreciate it. But it’s just not the same anymore. No one, and no thing, can take her place. She was one of a kind."

By that time, he was finished crying. He had some serious talking to do, and he had to block out his emotions in order to do it. He forced himself to stop. I likewise struggled to stop weeping.

"I wouldn’t do anything to take my life. That’s not what I mean," he said. "That would be the coward’s way out. But it is a real struggle to keep my head clear, to take my medicine, and all the rest of it. If I just quit the struggle, I know I would just pass."

At that point, he was sober as a preacher, but I had begun crying much harder than before. I did not have his self control—not when it came to this. He tried to console me, but without success. The harder I tried to stop, it seemed, the worse it got. It was not that I was used to shedding tears. Not at all. As far as pain is concerned, I do not remember ever crying from pain, at least not as an adult. But the death of a loved one was something I was not prepared to deal with at that moment, and the prospect of it being my father devastated me.

I knew he needed me to be a strong man, not a weak one. I simply had not expected anything like this, and I was not prepared to handle it. Finally I excused myself and went into the bathroom. I washed off my face with cold water, and convinced myself that I had to buck up.

I did get control, and returned to talk to him.

As soon as I sat back down, Dad continued, "What I want to know from you is this. Do I have your permission to give up?"

"What a strange question to ask your youngest son," I thought as I sat there. After a few moments, I said: "Dad, you should do whatever you think you should do. I love you with all my heart. You were, and are, a great dad. All your children love you, and look up to you. We all need you. My kids need you. All your other grandchildren need you. You are the patriarch."

Then I paused for a moment, "But, with all that having been said, I will always respect your wishes. If you cannot go on, I will respect that. I do not want to lose you. I don’t know how to let go. You are so very important to me. But I know you have thought about this. And I understand your loss. We all loved Mom. She left a huge hole in all of us. But we all have our own families, now. Dad, I know how devastating your loss must be. So, whatever you do, it’s okay with me. You have always been a great father, and I will respect your wishes. And I will always love and respect you."

I knew he had not come to this conclusion overnight. I cannot say that I knew how he felt, but I think I had an idea. We continued after that with small talk, and eventually I excused myself and headed home. But my world had just been rocked. I really had no idea what decision Dad might have reached after our conversation, but I decided that I would accept and understand whatever he ended up doing. I did not share what Dad had said, not to my brothers and sisters, and not even to Evie.

Sometime shortly after that memorable meeting with my father, my sister Tot called to tell me that she, too, had met with Dad. He had asked her to do him a favor. He wanted her to take him on a driving tour of all the places he had ever lived. I knew at the time that he had not had the same conversation with her that he had with me. She would not have been able to handle it (not that I did such a great job at it).

Much like my mother before her, Tot too is an angel. She always made every effort to help our parents, and so she readily agreed to comply with Dad’s wishes. With his help, she drew up a map, and the next Saturday morning they embarked on what Dad thought would be his last trip.

As it turned out, while on that memorable tour, my father discovered that one of my mother’s best high school friends (Edith) had just lost her husband. On a lark, my father got her Florida mailing address from one of her Michigan neighbors, and he began writing her letters. After my sister got back, she called me and told me all about it. We both got a kick out of this part of it.

Shortly after discovering his new pen pal, my father shocked the entire family by buying a plane ticket to meet her in Florida (that was the first time he had ever flown). Shortly thereafter the letters turned into love letters, poetry, and songs. And within a year, they were married.

What does all this have to do with that picture of the serene cottage on the river that Evie and I feared might end up on our wall? Well, just like my mother before, Edith liked the picture, or at least she said she did. So, it continued to hang above the mantel, watching over my dad’s new love affair.

Finally, five years later (at age ninety-four) my father passed away from a heart attack.

I remember sitting there in the living room after the funeral, eating sandwiches and laughing with our whole family. Soon my eyes drifted to and focused on that well-traveled picture of that lonely cottage, with the still river and faint sunset, hanging over the fireplace. For all those years it never moved. I began thinking about whether my mother ever really liked it, or if she was just placating me, or maybe my father. I knew Evie didn’t like it—that’s why it never hung on her wall. Then I wondered if Edith liked it, or if she just tolerated it.

Then I anthropomorphized it. In a very real sense, that picture was actually me, at least in the eyes of my parents. I was gone, but they had the picture; Evie had me, but they had my cottage on the river. I have no doubt that had my parents not loved me with all their hearts, that picture would have found my dad’s burning barrel in the backyard the day I moved my junk back in their house.

As I sat there staring at it, I remember thinking, "I wonder how long that will survive now?" For sure, I was not going to ask for it. My sister was planning to move into the house after Dad’s death. I had never discussed with her the origin or history of that picture. I imagine she simply thought that Mom had bought it years ago. Little did she know that picture represented me. And now that Dad was gone, I no longer lived in that house—not in the flesh, not in memory, and not even in the picture of the serene cottage on the still river.

After all the hugging was done, and enough sandwiches eaten, I said my goodbyes to my brothers and sisters, and got our children ready for the drive back to Grand Rapids. Just before leaving, I went back in the living room to pick on my oldest brother (Jack) one last time. Whenever I teased him, he always would grab me and call me a "potlicker." I never knew what a potlicker was, but I assumed it to be a term of endearment.

As I turned to walk out of Mom’s and Dad’s house for the last time, I took one last look at the picture above the fireplace. My eyes fixed on it for a few short moments, and I realized that it no longer represented me hanging there. Always before looking into it gave me a warm feeling. But this time was different.

The one-hour trip back to Grand Rapids was atypical. Usually the kids would be fighting in the back of the van, and Evie would be correcting them. This time they pretty much just sat there thinking. Losing my father was a terrible loss to all of us. Finally one of them (probably John) threw a toy and hit Charity. With that, everything turned normal.

"Are you okay?" Evie finally asked me.

"Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just really hard for me to let go of him. He always had the right answers to my questions."

"He still does," she said. "Part of him is living inside of you. You know, you are a lot like him. You’re wise in many of the same ways."

I thought about what she had said, and it consoled me.

After several minutes, Evie asked me, "Do you want your picture?"

"No, do you?" I replied in jest.

"If you want it, you better tell Tot. I’m sure she won’t leave it there. And she doesn’t know its history. She’ll toss it."

"That’s fine with me," I responded. "Mike doesn’t live there anymore."

That was the last time I ever saw The Painting.