There was a wadded-up linen handkerchief in the envelope, which was clean and empty. I knew my mother kept her less expensive jewelry folded up in handkerchiefs, so I checked the corners of the envelope. As expected, I found a pair of earrings. They were simple dogwood earrings with twisting clasps, not for pierced ears. The gold was of high quality and the workmanship on the enamel exquisite, but to the untrained eye they looked gaudy, cheap, almost drugstore. I had loved these earrings as a child. I looked at them in my hand, remembered how they’d looked on my mother.
“Try them on,” said Arthur.
“I’ll never wear these,” I said. “They’re not for wearing.” I wadded them back up in the linen handkerchief and pulled an old envelope out of the FedEx packet. The envelope was a return billing envelope with a yellowed cellophane window. Inside were curling locks of black hair. I set this down. Arthur was quiet for some time.
“Is that your mother’s hair?”
I shook my head. “It’s mine. She must have kept it with her.” I inhaled deeply. “My father had to have thought it was her hair too.” I pushed the envelope across the table. The hair, my hair, made me inexplicably sad. I felt so stalled by it that I thought I might fall asleep sitting at the table.
“Are you okay?” said Arthur.
I thought for a moment, then nodded. “Look here,” I said. I held up a piece of computer-generated paper. “This must be the deed to the ranch.”
Arthur was silent for a moment, but I could tell something was bothering him.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said politely.
“Just say it, Arthur. It won’t bother me.”
“All right.” He cocked his head to one side. “You should go see her.”
“Now?”
“Why do you think she’s sending you all this stuff? She misses you. Even if she is all fucked up on drugs, she’s thinking of you.”
“What do you know about any of this?”
“I know how it is to wish you’d done something differently. You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t see her.” Arthur lowered his head and looked at me with such honesty that I felt my heart quiver. “Is she dying? Because it sounds like she is. You never talk about her leaving the hospital…”
“I never talk about her!”
“But you think about her every day. I can see when you’re thinking about her. You look so sad.”
The last thing in the envelope was a picture postcard, The Raft of the Medusa. I picked it up and looked closely at it.
“What’s that?” asked Arthur.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “I think she is trying to tell me something.”
11
I think my mother loved the paintings of Géricault because the possibility of death seemed remote, despite the fact that it was always suggested in his work. True mortality is morbid and abstract, the opposite of artificial and concrete, and therefore difficult to represent. Similarly, my mother filled her days with artifice, laughter, and plans for the future, because impending mortality was abstract and didn’t pass the time.
As a child, I knew death was present in our house, the bogeyman beneath my bed not threatening me, but menacing my mother with his long, bony fingers. I was aware of death; she was not. I wouldn’t go so far as to say there was hope in her life, or that she had a cheery attitude; rather she had a certain gay abandon that one might have after losing everything in a hand at poker.
She was awash in her life, precariously balanced on a raft that threatened to sink at any moment. Appropriately, she had on her dresser the postcard of The Raft of the Medusa, which she had purchased at the Louvre on her honeymoon. I find this ironic since her honeymoon—a send-off into married life—was the start of what proved to be a journey destined to end in tragedy. The painting depicts a moment of hope. Two passengers wave billowing scarves in the air, presumably to alert an approaching ship to the survivors’ presence. The tiny raft has floated to a purpose and the divine hand of God, poised just beyond the picture frame, is about to snatch this small band of pioneers—eighteen people in all—out of water and away from certain death.
The actual raft of the Medusa was a makeshift floating vessel made of planks tied with rope and was intended to keep close to 150 people afloat—French settlers and soldiers—who were shipwrecked off the coast of West Africa on the way to Senegal. The senior officers, who were to tow the raft and its passengers to safety, commandeered the rowboats. After a short stint of rowing and towing, however, the officers decided to cut short their labor—and the ropes—and took off into the sea.
The raft and its inhabitants, knee-deep in water, were left to the seas and skies and menace of sharks. There were three kegs of wine; this was their only sustenance. One hundred fifty people floated in the searing heat with no food, some wine, and not even the space to comfortably sit.
On the first night, most people panicked or despaired. The people looking out to sea, moaning at the sky, et cetera, were despairing. The people plotting against each other, bouncing up and down in a dangerous manner, and challenging others to duels, were panicking. All, even those deeply in prayer (which is neither panic nor despair) were appreciating their situation.
Everyone was hungry.
The following morning, the death toll was at twenty. Some people had been dragged from the edges of the raft by the sea’s salty hands. Others had drowned, their feet tangled in the coils of rope while still on board, their bloated bodies floating in the well of the raft’s center. The following night, in the intense darkness, the people at the peripheries of the raft pushed toward the center to escape the encroaching sea. There was hysteria. Some of the sailors broke open casks of wine and driven by hunger, fear, and alcohol, became mad. One man took a hatchet and slashed at the ropes; the raft would sink and all would drown. He was overcome by other passengers still hoping to survive. In the escalating skirmish sixty-five people died.
On the third day—after some futile attempts at fishing—the living began to butcher and eat the dead. This gave the passengers strength and hope. Some considered the bodies manna from heaven, the presence of this new food an act of God.
On the fourth day, a tinderbox was discovered; the flesh could now be roasted. People found stealing wine or afflicted with hysteria were cut down by appointed executioners. Nothing was wasted.
On the sixth day the sick were thrown to sea, to preserve provisions (wine and flesh) for the others. Bones tossed into the ocean’s yawning mouth were already stripped of flesh and cartilage.
On the seventh day, the Argus sailed into view. The survivors, fifteen in all, were saved, although five died before reaching land.
Little of this makes it onto the canvas of The Raft of the Medusa. There is no mayhem, disorganization, hysteria. Movement. Instead, the passengers are posed in such a way as to suggest classical statuary, although here it might be interesting to note that Géricault used the severed limbs of dead criminals as models for his work. This accidental nod to the truth of the story interests me. I am not saying that Géricault was unaware of the sensationalistic subject matter of his work. In fact, that was Géricault’s great innovation, which ushered in the Romantic age: Géricault took the bizarre and sensational as inspiration for his monumental works of art.
This is the job of the romantic.
There is a story that Géricault set up a small studio devoted to the painting of this great picture. His young friend, the painter Eugène Delacroix, came to visit. We are told that on seeing the great canvas, Delacroix was so affected that he took off running down the street. I ask this question: Was it the canvas that sent him running, or the numerous severed limbs that littered Géricault’s studio? While Géricault’s memories of Michelangelo’s statuary were fresh (the painter had just returned from Rome), the various limbs from which he drew had started to decay. Critics have even suggested that the atmosphere of decomposition in Géricault’s studio is evidenced in the blotching, greenish patchiness of the canvas’s sky.