The Old Painter

The Old Painter

Raoul and Alexandra moved into a newly bought house in December, two weeks before Christmas. Raoul was away on conference so it was left to Alexandra to oversee the movers - bulky young men who clumped up and down the stairs depositing boxes in the assigned rooms. Alexandra was very organized. On the door to each room was a square of Bristol board with a number and on each box was a corresponding number neatly printed in permanent black marker. The movers were appreciative. Usually unloading the truck into a house involved confused instructions and backtracking.

Many young women would have resented their husband being away during a move but not Alexandra. She disliked the packing but Raoul had been present for that. The unpacking she loved and to be able to do it free of Raoul’s interference was wonderful. It took her five days, delicious days full of the texture of curtains, the colors of bathrooms and the arrangements of kitchen counters. When Raoul came home everything was done. Except for the arrangements in his clothing drawers he changed around to conform to an eccentric pattern left over from his bachelor days, he changed nothing. This was a good thing, for Alexandra, although she would have said nothing at the time, would have been displeased. If you want to decide, she would have thought, then you should bloody well be here during the deciding.

Alexandra was an accountant. Happily her company gave her a week off for the move. When Raoul came back they both resumed their regular schedule, a heavy one with Raoul traveling and Alexandra taking courses and attending board meeting two evenings a week. Of course they had looked at the houses surrounding before they bought but such looking at houses is often cursory, especially since they both fell in love with their own house the moment they saw it. The two cars were parked on a pad at the back so other than a quick view of garbage cans and garages along the lane on the way to and from work, when spring arrived they had only a vague notion of the houses along the street. When the snow was melted and they emerged, like two animals squinting after a winter’s hibernation into the world of grass and flowerbeds they were surprised to find the house next door somewhat dilapidated. This was not the standard of the neighborhood, otherwise scrupulously neat, spiffy, and even a little military in its sparkling perfection.

Raoul was disappointed. “Somebody should do something,” he said. “Look at it. Weeds are growing in the gutters. Some of the siding has been torn off. The porch has a ten degree list. The front fence is rotting and falling down. Perhaps we should phone the Alderman.”

“Probably an old person lives there,” replied Alexandra. “Someone who can no longer do the work to keep it up and has no money to pay contractors.”

“Whatever the reason,” said Raoul, “it’s a wreck. We didn’t pay the kind of money we did for the house to be living alongside a wreck.”

After further discussion Alexandra convinced him to leave it alone for now. She thought it unwise to have their introduction to the neighborhood to be squealing to the authorities about their neighbor’s house. She had met some of the kind of people who did that and had no desire to join their ranks. Besides she liked the old house. The south side was covered with Virginia creeper now coming into bud. A three story, the top floor had an interesting array of six dormers. The windows on the main floor had beautiful old style curtains hanging in them, a pale shade of garden green. Granted the front porch was somewhat the worst for wear and listing, but what she could see of its inside was comfortable and homey with wicker table and chairs and a hammock. Since it was Alexandra who did most of the work in the yard – Raoul disliked physical work preferring to spend his spare time watching movies or on the computer – he soon forgot about the house next door. Alexandra, however, saw it every day when she was cutting the grass or working in the beds. Several times she saw a shadowy figure sitting in the front porch drinking tea. Alexandra waved and the figure waved back.

One Saturday at the end of May Alexandra decided to do the neighborly. She peeped through the curtain in her own front porch and saw the figure sitting at the table. Carrying a bag containing six banana muffins she baked that morning, she made her way to the neighbor’s front porch and knocked at the door.

“Come in,” said an elderly voice.

Alexandra did as she was requested and found the shadowy figure to be a very old woman, certainly late eighties but maybe even into her nineties. She sat in a stuffed chair  watching Alexandra enter with a pair of bright blue eyes which, in vivacity and liveliness would rival those of many twenty year olds. The porch was rich with the scent of herbs. Along the front windows, which went the length of the porch were three shelves filled with an assortment of coffee and jam cans interspersed with pottery pots of various colors and glazings, all spilling over or rising high with herbs. They sweetened the air of the room with several dozen aromas which swirled around one another as if by standing still one was walking through a country field filled with herbs and flowers.

“The smell is gorgeous!” she exclaimed.

“Thank you, dear. Or perhaps I should thank you on behalf of the herbs. After all I am only their caretaker.”

Alexandra moved along the shelves looking at the plants. She could recognize, sage, thyme, summer savory, fennel, lemon balm, basil, rosemary and mint.

“I had a herb garden at the old place but nothing like this. Why there must be three dozen.”

“About thirty,” said the old lady, “but some are duplicates. If you want to start a garden at your new house then I can supply you. The garden places charge a fortune for herbs, even just the seeds, whereas I can give you sections of root and plant which will grow full within six weeks and all for nothing. It’s one of my missionary enterprises you see. I haven’t supplied anyone for a few years now. One’s contemporaries die off and one loses contact. But in the old days I must have supplied twenty of the neighborhood women and the odd man over the years.”

“I would appreciate that very much,” said Alexandra.

“Done then my dear. All you have to do is pick a time and show up with as many pots or cans as you would like.”

They made an appointment for later in the week. Alexandra introduced herself. The old lady’s name was Regina, an appropriate name for she was a very queenly looking woman. Even in old age she had a regal bearing, a kind of distinction to her. Framing those intense blue eyes was a finely boned face draped with the almost translucent skin of the very old. Her hair, full and combed into a bun at the back, was so shockingly white it seemed to shine in the half light of the porch. She was wearing a blue linen housedress and a dark purple sweater with two gigantic pockets from which peeped a pair of scissors, three knitting needles, a tall glass jar of something or other, a notebook, three pens, two pencils and several multicolored rags.

Alexandra gave Regina the muffins and the old lady went inside to the kitchen returning shortly with a tray of tea things.

In five minutes they were talking as if they had known one another all their lives. Although Alexandra had told Raoul that she would be back in a few minutes she didn’t return until two hours later.

That spring and summer Regina and Alexandra saw a lot of one another. Alexandra helped the old woman turn over her beds before planting. Regina filled fifteen coffee cans Alexandra had saved over the winter with herbs. Alexandra set them atop a stone flowerbed wall in the backyard, guarding them against being knocked or blown over with bamboo canes and string. They spent many hours in Regina’s porch talking of gardening, the neighborhood, who lived where and for how long. Although she was advanced in age Regina was very much on top of things. If two seven years olds strolled by on the sidewalk, arms around one another’s shoulders, headed toward the playground at the end of the street, she could tell you their names, who their parents were and what school they went to. But it was not until the fall that something happened which increased their intimacy.

One Saturday, on a cool day in early September, Regina, for the first time, invited Alexandra into her kitchen. Later, upon reflection, Alexandra figured that the old woman had been cleaning all summer in preparation. The counters, the floor, the glass jars holding food on the long lines of open shelves, were sparkling clean. Regina, with a cane to help her, was quite mobile, yet, as she herself said, she had so much time each day and then that was it. The work involved in this cleaning must have taken her weeks.

But it was not the kitchen, impressive as it was, which drew Alexandra’s attention. To get to it one passed through the living room/dining room, a large area thirty feet by thirty. The walls of these rooms were hung with paintings, some oils, some acrylics overlaid with watercolors, all painted on masonite panels three feet square. Some were framed with narrow strapping painted mat black; others were not framed at all but hung from a piece of plywood glued to the back of the panel. These paintings were gorgeous. Although the room was not well lit with natural light and the electric lights were not turned on, they shone with a radiance Alexandra found stunning. The artist had used mostly primaries but in such a variety of textures and shadings, although they were not realist in any way, they gave the impression of a reality much deeper than literal realism. The shapes and forms they depicted and what could only be called their flow, their effervescence, was mesmerizing, magical. While Regina continued on to the kitchen Alexandra could not help herself from stopping in front of the panels and gawking. Regina seemed to feel what was going on. She busied herself making tea and laying the table. When things were ready she called the younger woman and Alexandra broke herself away from the paintings’ spell and came to sit at the kitchen table.

“You like them then,” Regina said.

“Like is too tame a word, Regina,” Alexandra replied. “They are breathtaking.”

“O how Dominic would have loved to hear that!” said Regina. “He liked to pretend he was indifferent to both praise and censure but, of course, he wasn’t. No human being is and Dominic, as much as he sometimes claimed otherwise, was a very human human being.”

 “Do you mean Dominic Leblanc?” Alexandra asked.

“Yes.”

“My god, Regina. You have a million dollars worth of paintings hanging on your walls.”

“More than that my dear. I would say about twelve million. Dominic and I were lovers and over the years he gave me his very best. The surgeon thought he was getting first pick but he wasn’t. Dominic let him chose only from the second rank.”

 When they were finished tea and cookies they went back to the paintings. Regina sat in a chair while Alexandra went from panel to panel, first looking at them from different angles, then standing directly in front ten feet away and letting them bewitch her into the world of Dominic Leblanc. When she was through she started over again, stopping here and there to ask Regina questions about technique and colors.

“Dominic was endlessly inventive,” the old woman said. “He had no standard set of colors or procedures and held those who did in contempt. He was given a great talent which remained fluid right until the end. I suppose he had his moments of depression but they never stopped him from working and working to him was experimenting, inventing, changing, trying this and throwing it out and then trying something else. Most of the acrylic colors you see are house paint. He had a house painter friend who gave him paint left over from his jobs. His pantry was piled to the ceiling with paint cans. But this didn’t stop him from using fancy stuff in tubes if he could get his hands on it for nothing or next to nothing. And he worked up the house paints with other material to give it various qualities he was looking for. Some of the brighter surfaces are lead based enamels which you can’t buy any more. Most of the watercolors are from cheap children’s sets he bought at garage sales or flea markets. At the end he found a little shop in the old downtown which sold watercolor cakes cheap like borsch. They made color with a flaky grainy texture that he loved. I saw him once mix strained river mud into a soup can of bright white. He was so happy with the results he danced around the kitchen singing. When he painted that onto the panel he took it out into the yard and let it dry in the sun. After it was dry and baked hard he fixed it with three or four coats of clear acrylic and then painted over it with a translucent yellow watercolor. Over this a thin spray of sealer and then, with his awl he poked a thousand tiny holes through to the panel and covered the whole thing with a towel soaked in black tea. When he took off the towel and dried it once again in the sun he used it as a base over which he painted a world of ducks, pheasants, small woodland animals like badgers and squirrels, and a series of mountain ranges with blue boats sailing along their ridges. He sold that one to the surgeon who was so delighted with it he paid Dominic a hundred dollars more than he asked. A hundred dollars was a lot in those days.”

Fortunately Raoul was off to another conference that weekend. Alexandra stayed four hours examining the paintings, asking Regina endless questions and she would have stayed another four if she had not feared overtiring her. She went home exalted. After a quick sandwich for supper she went to her studio on the third floor and worked until three in the morning.

On Thanksgiving day Raoul was once again off at sales conference south of the border and Alexandra and Regina decided to have Thanksgiving dinner at a downtown hotel. They dressed in their finest and took a taxi. The Maitre De tried to seat them at a table near the entrance where there was a cold draft but Regina would have none of that.

“That table over there,” she said, pointing with her cane, “ is in a better location and is empty.”

“Well, madam,” said the Maitre De, “It is empty now, but…..”

“”Of course it is,” said Regina, “but that’s because we have not got to it yet.” And with this she led an embarrassed and amused Alexandra across the floor to sit at the table. The Maitre De frowned and shrugged his shoulders.

When he was gone Regina said, “O dear, now we will have to tip him an extra five percent to sooth his ruffled feathers.”

After a supper which did not measure up to the either the prices announced in the menu or the supposed prestige of the hotel, Alexandra brought the conversation around to Dominic LeBlanc. Regina eyes sparkled with amusement.

“Alright, my dear. I know a young woman like you, a painter herself, filled with the curiosity of the young, infused with admiration for Dominic’s paintings, is not going to be satisfied unless I spill the beans. I don’t mind. Dominic himself was not a secretive man. Private in many ways but not secretive. He used to say that secretive persons  over estimate the worth of their secrets. It was his opinion that only fools worry about what others know or think about him. ‘The trick,’ he was fond of saying, ‘is to do your best and let the chips fall where they may.’ ”

“Dominic was a bum pure and simple,” said Regina. “All he cared about was books and paintings and any woman who became involved with him was a fool, including me. Not that he was a womanizer, mind you. During the thirty-four years we were together I don’t think he touched another woman. But I think this was due less to faithfulness than that he was loath to give time to affairs and intrigues and thus take it away from his books and paintings. Of all my men he was the most physically capable, an imaginative and tireless lover. It is not uncommon with men that after the first rush of passion they become patterned and boring lovers. Not so with Dominic. The last time we made love was just as vigorous and powerful as the first.”

“Then why do you call him a bum?” asked Lolinda.

“Money, dear. He was one of those brilliant men who refuse to be sensible and pragmatic about money. All his life he was pillar to post about money. He lived in a little house down by the river so crumbling and dilapidated that even rats wouldn’t live there.  Although he was a wonderful painter whose works are now in the galleries, praised by the sons and grandsons of the cultural post holders he despised and held in distain, he refused to lift a finger to better himself. Would Dominic call on this gallery owner with a portfolio? Of course he would, right away, tomorrow in fact. And then you would empty his kitchen garbage into the outside container some months later and there was the note with the address on it crumpled, tea stained, tossed probably on the very day you gave it to him. If you asked him about it he would get into a towering rage. “I hate them!” he would shout. “The very sight of their greedy pig faces fills me with disgust. I would rather be tortured with hot irons for a month than to spend one second in the presence of such people. Liars. Calculators, eaters of horse shit!” His comments on gallery owners was mild compared to his opinions on ‘critics’, for there were some in town who considered themselves critics but who in truth were shills for the latest nihilism coming from America. His opinions of these toadies was so scatological that even I, a liberal old lady past caring what people think of me, hesitate to repeat them.”


“He survived by taking odd jobs. He was a caretaker for a while and then a window washer. Sometimes he went from door to door soliciting work. He would install storm windows, cut grass, even walk the dog. As a result in the neighborhood he was known not as a painter, an artist, but as an odd jobs man. It was strange to go out walking with Dominic. He knew everyone, children, housewives, widows. It was like walking in a public place with a politician, a popular one that is, for Dominic was always gracious and humorous with these people, especially with the children. Although he had no children of his own he adored them. One day when I was suggesting he enter a competition held by the local Art Society, in as diplomatic a way as possible so as not to set him off on one of his rants, he turned his long sad face to look at me. He waited until I was finished and then said, “Don’t you see, dear Regina, that such people are not interested in art but in artifacts. Their brains are pickled in conventionalities and all the customary drivel of social role playing. Bringing real art before them would be like reading the Sermon on the Mount to a crocodile.”

“In forty years of painting he sold perhaps a hundred pieces, mostly to a single man, an Eye Surgeon. The Surgeon was a kind and generous man but even then Dominic, for a whole lifetime of painting, received a paltry few thousand dollars. And now a single small piece is worth in the hundreds of thousands. I hear that the Surgeon’s grandson now administrates a fortune based on the clever manipulation of the value of Dominic’s paintings after his death.”

“Did he ever borrow money from you?”

“Dominic? No, no. Dominic would rather die of starvation than borrow money or take any kind of handout. The single exception to this rule was food. He had a ravenous appetite and although he could tell the difference between well cooked food and the other kind, he wasn’t picky. I suppose his circumstances wouldn’t allow it to be any other way. He would let me take him out to dinner on occasion. He would dress in his best clothes, classics he bought at second hand stores and looked after with the meticulousness of an old maid. Wools mostly which were truly beautiful and shone in the soft light of the restaurants we went to. Dominic had a bit of the repressed dandy in him. In restaurants he was very gay. He would joke with the waitresses and insist on adding a little of his own money to the tip. He called our restaurant trips his ‘vacations from the glorious life of sensual poverty’. Isn’t that a strange thing to say? Dominic was like that. Full of strange, quirky thoughts and sudden explosions. Despite how exasperated he sometimes made me in those days, I miss him. Compared to Dominic most men are very boring. Even at the end when he was dying Dominic could make me laugh so loudly that afterwards I felt like a fishwife. He had a way of demolishing everything and revealing the world to you as totally ludicrous, totally absurd.”

“Did he paint you?” asked Alexandra.

“No. He didn’t paint the human figure. He had weird notions about that just like he had weird notions about almost everything else. He called the nude paintings of the great masters pornography. Not that he objected to pornography mind you; he thought it had a proper and rightful place in art but he found the idealist critics to be prudes and puritans. In fact he once told me that in a way all paintings and works of art are pornography in the sense that they arouse us, although a more focused definition he admitted, would be that they arouse us genitally. But he claimed the difference between these two arousals is far less clear than most people think. He claimed in a post Christian society, encumbered as it is with all sorts of pruderies and repressions, intelligent discussion of such topics was impossible. For instance he once told me Donatello’s ‘David’ was spoken about by critics as a work of pure art when to Donatello and to any honest observer Dominic claimed, it was obviously an erotic object, a pornographic work. But since admitting it to be such would have confined to the basement a magnificent piece of work so radiant in its Eros as to call up the repressed bisexual in even the most heterosexual of men, it was explained in idealist terms which, to any human ten percent aware of their own sexuality, was patently absurd. But then Dominic claimed that patent absurdities formed the great bulk of human discourse. That’s why, he said, he chose to live his life as a worker, a craftsman, as far away as possible from that river of lies, self promotions, chicaneries, demagogueries, self serving pieties and rotting delusions.”

After this great mouthful of words Regina paused for a deep breath and then laughed. “My goodness I’m beginning to sound like him,” she said. Then she continued. “He did put some human figures in his paintings but they were always part of a panorama, a much larger scene. A single human figure or even group of figures were never the focus not for any intellectual or idealist reason he once told me but because he simply did not see the world that way. Humans could not be separated from their environment, the world of nature with its deaths and rebirths which in turn was enveloped in the great cosmos with its violence, its cataclysmic eruptions. He saw the art where human beings were placed at what he called a sentimental center, although often sublime and full of wonders, as degenerate. We are temporary and a part of a whole he said and a painting should have that essential reality at its core. It should show in some way the fire that burns from inside all things including the human and hurdles them towards their dissolution. This is why he claimed real artists are lonely people. They have come to live in a place all others studiously avoid as morbid or misanthropic.”

“Did you stay together until he died?” Alexandra asked.

“O yes. No, there was no way of getting rid of Dominic once you had him. You had to rely on God to do that for you. I went over twice a week to eat at his place which was very messy. He refused to let me bring things to eat but he did allow me to bring clean sheets for the bed. Dominic washed his only once a month although personally he was meticulously clean. He bathed as soon as he got up in the morning before he started painting. As a lover he was very considerate about cleanliness. His wretched hot water heater, left over from the Victorian Age, could do only one bath so before I came he put two enormous pots of water on the woodstove for my bath. He took the first and then carried the water for mine. Then he would sit in the bed reading a book, waiting for me. In many ways he was a sweet and considerate man but coiled, if you know what I mean. It was as if his mind was always in the process of compressing springs which would then pop in the most unexpected of ways. This made him interesting, original but not very restful. I did once ask him why he never painted me. He said he took the same attitude toward painting a lover or any other human being for that matter – very complimentary I’m sure – as the Muslims do. Contrary to popular opinion, he claimed, the Muslims did not interdict images for reasons of prudery but because the reality of creation was too complex to be depicted, especially if it were expressed in a human being with whom we shared love and sexual passion. It was like trying to paint the inside of our own heart - an impossibility.”

“And what about the renaissance painters then?” I asked him.

“They didn’t paint human beings,” he told me once “They painted projections of human beings. Botticelli painted his lovers or those he wished he had as lovers – willowy northern Italian blonds with large breasts. Many of the homosexuals painted muscle bound men, the ancient equivalent of modern body builders. They were painting their sexual fantasies, not human beings.”

“And what about modern painters, Picasso for instance.”

“ Picasso disliked women,” he said. “He was all ambition and phallus. So he chopped them up or made them ugly in an attempt to reduce their power over him. It’s a good thing he was a great painter or he might have become a mass murderer, one of those guys who wears a cape of women’s body parts in private rituals of perversion.”

“Those are some of the things he used to say to me in bed or while we were having coffee at his kitchen table. The table he got out of the back lanes along with just about everything else he had in the house – the furniture, the bed, the mattress, the cutlery, bowls, coffee pot, and so on. The house was messy but I must admit that he did make an effort to clean it up before I came. The kitchen was neat at least. Everything was old and worn, from the linoleum, whose pattern had disappeared many years before, to the curtains which were so threadbare he may as well have used plastic wrap. The shelves he made himself from wood he got from the back lanes, odds and ends which he ingenuously put together to serve his own purposes. In a way it was fascinating because it was so individual, so adapted to his personality. Most people’s kitchens are out of a magazine or some memory from their childhood but Dominic’s was a constructed from a joining of his mind with the old junk he could pick up in the lanes. Sometimes we would sit there talking in the light of an oil lamp because his electricity had been cut off. The yellow light of the lamp played on the wood surfaces of the shelves, bare for he refused to ‘cover up such beauty with ugly paint’ as he put it. The wood stove, a huge old range which took up one quarter of the kitchen’s floor space, and which he had polished with stove black, one of the few things he actually bought, shone darkly, a silent black rock jutting into the sea of our conversations.”

“Sometimes after supper, sex and conversation we would go down to the river behind the house. Dominic kept a wooden boat there, one he had built himself, so old and patched with so many odds and ends of plywood, sealed with roofing tar that it’s color was mostly black although it had originally been yellow. I didn’t trust Dominic’s boat so bought two life vests which I brought with me every time I came to visit for he didn’t like them and was not above letting them drift off in the current one day if I left them with the boat. I wouldn’t climb aboard until he put his on and tied it securely. Dominic would row us up river for a mile or two and then we drifted back down with the current, Dominic using one of the oars as a rudder. When I think of him now the times on the river are one of my favorites to remember. Dominic who always claimed he didn’t have a romantic bone in his body, always made sure we were on the river on full moon nights, and despite all the wretched popular songs written about such scenes, it was truly magical - the moonlight spread like a milky way across the water, the quiet lapping of the current against the banks, the night birds singing in the trees. Dominic and I, both big talkers, never said a word on our journeys in the rowboat. We were as silent as two cloistered monks.”

“A few of the paintings at your house which remind me of such a scene,” said Alexandra.

“O yes. It was one of his big themes. He must have made twenty or thirty paintings ‘jumping off’ the river in the moonlight. “Jumping off’ was the term he used. He claimed doing a painting was a matter of negotiating a series of emotions and to begin one needed a reference point. The river in moonlight was one of his reference points. He claimed the reference point was less important than what one did in the middle of the painting but at the same time without one where would one start? He said the mid point in any painting was the most important. By then something should have taken over and the whole thing proceed in an orderly matter back to the beginning and then to the end. The most frustrating thing for a painter was to arrive at the middle and find nothing there. No amount of rummaging about in his bag of technical tricks could save the situation and the best thing to do was take the hint, clean one’s brushes and go off fishing in the boat on the river. Dominic was a devoted fisherman and probably half the protein which sustained him in those years came from the river. People around here consider catfish  trash, bottom feeders. Dominic loved catfish. They were bottom feeders Dominic would say, but so were artists. He rolled the flesh in a sweet dough and deep fried it. Delicious. Dominic would fillet the cats, if that is the word, for getting the flesh off those plated creatures was more of a hacking job than filleting. He put the pieces in margerine containers, filled them with water and brought them over for me to put in the freezer. Dominic, of course, didn’t have a freezer. And if he did have one, when they cut off his electricity, as they did regularly, the catfish would have been ruined.”

“He was also a gardener and as was usual for Dominic a radical one. He wouldn’t use chemical fertilizer or pesticides. He peed into two liter jars –  pickle bottles he salvaged from the lanes – and, after diluting the urine five to one with water, poured it on the garden. Urine he said was even higher in nutrients than solid waste. He also composted his solid waste, very carefully for you have to watch the e coli. Apparently the trick is to get the temperature of the compost pile high enough to kill the e coli. The human waste compost was kept separate from the ordinary pile and sat in the backyard in a place where it received full sun. He had a thermometer which measured the temperature in the center of the pile and even after it reached the required point he left it another year to be sure. He said that industrial civilization was the only one which did not compost its own waste, preferring instead, for the most part, to dump it into the environment untreated. So foolish were the citizens of industrial societies that they did not realize ecological processes are circular and this meant that in essence, they were condemning themselves to eating their own shit.”

“Dominic grew lovely vegetables. He especially loved beets, tomatoes, green pepper and potatoes. To accompany our deep fried catfish he would make a stir fry composed of a dozen vegetables from the garden, cooked in a Chinese wok. His rickety house had a earth floored basement and here he kept his root vegetables in five gallon plastic pails he got from the lanes, of course. He bore small holes in them for air and laid the vegetables in between layers of dried grass clipping. The pails were for the mice who otherwise would have eaten everything there were so many of them. He refused to trap or poison them. He claimed they had as much a right to live as he did. He controlled them somewhat by putting all his food in containers. But still, when you lay in bed at night, you could hear them scurrying about nibbling and squeaking. Dominic said he found their noises comforting. I found them creepy and when I said so Dominic laughed. He said that most women were nervous of the natural world because of their uteruses and their babies.”

Alexandra raised her eyebrows at this. “Well dear,” said Regina, “Dominic wasn’t much concerned with political correctness.”

Alexandra smiled. Her own opinions on such things were not as conventional as Regina assumed. She could see what the old painter was driving at.

“How was it when he got old, Regina. Did he mind getting old?” she asked.

“A little at first I think but then he adapted. The chief joy of his old age was the government pension. “No more mopping floors,” he said. “No more Kraft dinner.” In his case this was true. His expenses were always bare boned so he was, relatively speaking, rich on the pension. He even saved money because with the way he lived he couldn’t spend it all. He bought himself a second hand aluminum boat. When we were sixty-seven – we were the same age – we went on a four week trip to the coast. He was so distressed by the amounts we paid for food, hotel rooms, etc., that we figured out the total cost and he gave me his share of the money in cash. If I was paying then he could forget about it you see. From that trip he got perhaps five years of paintings. It was the first time he had been outside the city since he was a teenager. He was like a poor kid from the inner city at a vacation camp for the first time. He filled so many sketch books that we had to send most of them home by mail for there was not enough room in the bags.”


“How old was he when he died?”

“Seventy-seven. Lung cancer. He was a smoker, starting when he was twelve or thirteen. He grew his own tobacco in the back yard and smoked it in a corn cob pipe like General McArthur. When he got the diagnosis he put away the pipe in the cupboard and that was that. Of course it was already too late to stop the cancer. They wanted to give him chemo but he said no. “Cancer is bad enough without chemo,” he said. Even at the end he wouldn’t go to the hospital. The doctor gave him morphine. He simplified things in the house so he could still look after himself when he weakened. But he didn’t stop working. On the day he died, late in the afternoon, he spent three hours in the morning working on a painting. A good one too.”

“In the last month I moved in to help him. At first he resisted but then he seemed to accept it as an inevitable thing. There wasn’t really that much to do for he could still get around but I was horrified by the thought of his dying alone. He knew that I think and let me come for my sake more than his own.”

“A man like that who was such an oppositionist, a critic, a complainer, a rabble rouser, an iconoclast, you would think dying would be hard for him. But, at least observed from the outside, it wasn’t. He never complained. People came to visit him – when they phoned I set up times in the morning when he was at his best – and he told them jokes. He had a will of iron. During the visiting time, between nine and eleven, he didn’t cough once. When it was over he was so racked with coughing I thought several times he would die on me right then.”

“He became very thin and his walk became a controlled stagger. He used a cane but if, worried about him falling I put out my arms to help, he would brush me off, not unkindly but firmly. Even during the last week – it was summer- he walked through the kitchen onto the back porch and sat in the afternoon shade. He did this on the afternoon he died. When he was seated in the chair he asked me to go to the corner store and bring him back an ice cream. I knew then but I pretended I didn’t. And I think he knew I knew. It was one of those things between old lovers or old friends. When I came back he was dead. I think he rose and walked to the edge of the porch to look at the river. Then he lay down on the deck – he didn’t fall the doctor said, there were no bruises - stretched out and died. Some people die in a way that their bodies are totally relaxed and others are tightened up, their faces a grimace. Dominic was relaxed. His face was as smooth as a baby’s. I wept for an hour before I could gather the strength to call the doctor. And I covered his face with kisses, more perhaps than I had covered it with when he was alive.”

Alexandra reached out to pat Regina’s hand but the old lady’s eyes were dry and she was looking across the dining room to where a middle aged woman was seated alone at a table eating Cornish hen. Regina picked up the check from the table.

“Do you still think he was a bum, Regina?” Alexandra asked.

The old woman smiled and said, “O he was a bum all right my Dominic. But he was a glorious bum.”