People Tell Their Stories:
Death and Dying

Wine and Ashes  Suzy McKee Charnas

Excerpted from My Father’s Ghost: The Return of My Old Man and Other Second Chances (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York, 2002).

 

Now, this early spring day, the back field was rough with neglect. You could still see faint ruts marking the orderly rows of the plowing once done each spring.  The ground was covered with an early crop of the weeds that had eventually driven my husband and me from the Valley because of my allergies.  But above the weeds, beyond the line of elms down at the end of the field, the plateau of the city's Heights still tipped upward to the crumbling knees of the Sandias, the mountains that rose raw and grainy into the clear blue eastern sky.

 

"Well," I said, "there it is, the mountain he was going to paint but never did."

 

"He didn't even make any sketches?" Ian said wistfully.  A slighter version of our dad, with the same strong Scots face, my half-brother lived in Phoenix and sold computer chips.  This work took him to Sandia Labs and up to Los Alamos from time to time, so he had often come to see Pop and us here in Albuquerque over the past years.  "I thought he was drawing, at least."

 

"I haven't found anything but some old stuff he brought out here with him," I said, and left it at that.  I had been the one to suggest to Pop that the mountain was there for him to paint it, following in the footsteps of the great French painter Paul Cezanne, whom he had idolized. Now that I thought about it, Pop had never actually agreed to this program, so it was a little ridiculous for me to complain about him for not having gone along with it. I set down the brown-paper shopping bag I had brought from the car, took out the small white cardboard box, opened it, and set it on the ground between us.  Ian and I sat on the stumps of elms cut down years ago and toasted the old man's ashes, and his unpainted mountain, in good red wine.

 

Then I upended the box and we dumped out the coarse gray grit onto the ground. Together we scooped dirt over the spot to keep everything from being messed with by stray animals or curious human visitors; though who would wander down to the end of that brushy, unused plot, or why, I can't now imagine.

 

Just the two of us; I have a sister whose father was also Robin, but her life was falling apart at the time. Her disintegrating marriage and her resultant state of chronic emotional and financial meltdown, plus the exigencies of providing for various dependent animals, had kept her stuck in L.A. for some time.  My father had so thoroughly cut his ties with everyone back east, friend, colleague, or relative, that I had no idea who else to inform that he was dead, let alone invite to our little free-form service. The obituary notice that I had run in the New York Times, just in case, had drawn no response.

 

Ian and I were Robin's funeral, hunched in our coats because a chilly breeze was blowing; but the sun, that southwestern light that had inspired generations of regional painters out here (but not my father), was clear and bright.

 

So that was that; we poured a little wine on the ground, returned to the car (talking mildly about our memories of the old man), and drove back into the city and down to the house on Cedar Street, with its "mother-in-law quarters" where Pop had finished out his two decades, nearly, with my husband and me. In the silent studio apartment he had lived in (where the radio used to play all day, tuned to the area's one classical music station), Ian helped me bring down some canvases and boxes of papers from the storage space up under the skylight.  He wanted a painting or two to remember the old man by; our sister had asked for some, too.

 

There was no clutter in the room, apart from Pop's skinny, nearly toothless cat, which wound itself around and around Ian's ankles, purring and meowing in manic excitement.  What Pop had left behind was the detritus of failure, a poor man's meager hoard: some beat-up old books on the narrow shelves flanking the fireplace, where they had sat untouched for years gathering dust; a couple of drawers' worth of jeans, long-sleeved shirts, underwear, and socks; a bright red down vest left over from the days of winter cold out on Fourth Street, a blue blazer, one pair of barely worn shiny black shoes, and a huge old tweed coat that looked as if Sherlock Holmes would have been at home in it; and a painting-box full of dried up color-tubes and brushes, with a heavily encrusted palette tucked up into the lid. There were also some paintings: a few small examples of old work that he had brought with him from New York and some abstract watercolor sketches on heavy paper.  We looked through them, not saying much.  Ian set aside a couple of slashing abstracts done in an electric blue on black paper to take home with him.

 

He sighed.  "It's not much, is it?"

 

It sure wasn't; not for an eighty-two-year-old man who, so far as we both knew, had devoted the better part of a lifetime to painting pictures that he couldn't sell.

 

That was when Ian told me about the bonfire Pop had made of a vast pile of his own work back in the mid-sixties, when the slumlord who owned the Canal Street loft he had been renting had evicted him in order to modernize the place and raise the rent.  Pop had had to retreat for a time to a tiny apartment in the East Village.

 

"He told me he had no room for the stuff," Ian said.  "Hell, if he'd said something beforehand, I'd have stored those pictures for him!  But I only found out about it when it was all over."

 

That certainly fit our dad: not finding out about things till it was all over.

 

Then there were the notebooks, ranks of them left standing and leaning in the lower bookshelves.  These were actually sketchbooks, the black-bound, blank-paged kind still sold at Sam Flax Art Supplies.  Ian picked up one and flicked through it.  Dust flew, and ancient, crumbling magazine clippings and postmarked envelopes floated from between the pages and fanned out over the rust-colored carpeting.

 

"Can you read any of this?" Ian said, peering at the straight but minuscule lines of cramped printing that filled every facing page. I shrugged and leaned down to retrieve the scattered papers.  "Kind of, if I use a magnifying glass and don't spend too long at it at a time.  He told me once there was an entire novel in there someplace, but I wouldn't even know where to start looking for it."

 

He put the book back, eyeing the rows and dusty stacks of similar volumes. "How many are there?  Have you counted?"

 

I had counted: there were forty.

 

Ian whistled.  "Wow!  What the heck do you think is in them?"

 

From what I had gathered, skimming through some of the pages, it seemed to be mostly left-wing political ranting and long disquisitions on painting, painters (particularly his ideal and saint, Paul Cezanne), and, well, paint.  And, I added, the occasional wisecrack.

 

"What are you going to do with them?" Ian said, dusting his hands

together.

 

I said I thought I'd try to decipher a few of them, when I had a gap in my own work and some time to spare.  As a writer by profession, I thought there might be something in there I could use in some kind of book about Pop, though frankly I was more doubtful than not.

 

"Great," Ian said.  "Let me know what you find, will you?"

 

I said I would, and the two of us went back into my house to get some newspaper and string to wrap up the pictures he had chosen to take home with him.

 

Does all this sound cold to you?  Do you miss the tears of the dead man's children, the sighs of loss, the fond recollections laid out for mutual solace?  Pop was not a demonstrative man, and -- not surprisingly, perhaps -- we are not particularly demonstrative children in that way; and there are other reasons . . . and, I have discovered, other ways to acknowledge the impact of a parent's death than tears.

 

 

Excerpted from My Father’s Ghost: The Return of My Old Man and Other Second Chances (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York, 2002).

(c) 2002 Suzy McKee Charnas. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.

         

         

Suzy McKee Charnas is a Nebula award winner and nominee who, over the span of thirty years, has written a multi-volume Science Fiction epic, from volume one, Walk To The End Of The World through volume four, The Conqueror’s Child.  Now, she has completed a memoir, My Father’s Ghost: The Return of My Old Man and Other Second Chances (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York)—the story of the last 17 years of her father’s life and the years he could no longer care for himself and lived in an adobe cottage beside her own in New Mexico. For more information, go to www.suzymckeecharnas.com.