Having bypassed an empty ward, we followed our chaperone down a long ammoniac corridor toward the end of which he rapped on a closed door. “Though he has his walking privileges, Mr. Pin seldom leaves his room,” he informed us, then had us to know it was generally against hospital policy to allow patients to keep to themselves. “But in Mr. Pin’s case the staff feels his hobby is the best therapy.” And having received no answer from within, he turned the knob.
No wonder the door had been shut. Because the riot of color that escaped the narrow horse stall of a room threatened to subvert the bilious atmosphere of that grim facility. If not contained, it might deluge the place in a brilliance that could wake up the loonies from their stupor and excite them beyond electroshock to flat-out mutiny. I don’t know what I expected — maybe some poor gibbering soul chained in a catacomb, his palette hung round his neck like an albatross. Instead, surrounded by exotic panels plastered to every surface, including the ceiling, sat a slight, bird-boned man in his mid- to late forties. He had cheeks white as meerschaum, sleepy green eyes, and a crop of fine auburn hair. He was wearing a bulky blue fisherman’s sweater several sizes too large, his moist lips mouthing a silent language as he stirred a brush in a yogurt container on a table scattered with children’s art materials: a Winky Dink Magic Paint and Crayon set with a plastic palette, and a tin tray of Kopy Kat watercolors. The composition before him, slathered in rich, incongruous hues on a flap from a cardboard box, depicted, as did all the others, a phantasmal streetscape. The street was represented in every season, or rather all seasons were simultaneously evoked. There was the floating North Main, North Main Street populated with shopkeepers haggling with celestial messengers and fish with feet, Hasidim riding Torah pointers, wild Indians and peddlers with wagons harnessed to dragonflies, fiddlers and fox-faced pipers serenading a wedding in a tree. Snow fell on fleshred magnolias in full blossom; children slid down awnings out of firetrap tenements that crumbled behind them into skirmishes of honeysuckle and wisteria. A girl frolicked on a wire over an open pit filled with higgledy-piggledy corpses blanketed in stardust. The only relief from that assault on the senses was the small window looking out onto an afternoon that was blessedly leaden by contrast.
I knew there were artists who cultivated such crackbrained visions, could even name some that might be cited as Tyrone’s “masters.” But this was the authentic horror vacui, and it was humbling, if not downright stupefying, to be standing there in the presence of a certified maniac.
Having seen us into the room, our minder entered behind us and shut the door, compounding the claustrophobia that already gripped my gut. We were now completely immersed in the painter’s element, and I wondered: had Tyrone been spurred by his dementia into interpreting Muni Pinsker’s fabulations, or had the fabulations themselves driven Tyrone mad? Meanwhile our escort, peering owlishly over his horn-rims, had turned curator: “He works in a number of mediums, mostly cheap watercolors, though in recent years he’s used the tempera poster paint the Hadassah ladies send him.” His intonation itself was as unctuous as oil from a tube. “They also provide him with preprimed canvases, though he still prefers cardboard and construction paper. The art is quite primitive, as you can see, without logic or perspective, but the blockish figures have a certain folkish charm.”
I could have brained him with a brickbat. Did he think the artist was deaf and dumb? From Avrom I knew that Tyrone Pin had been born late in the lives of his parents, Katie and Pinchas, so late in fact that neither survived his childhood. Orphaned, he was looked after by his cousin Muni, who inherited him along with Pinchas’s store, and at a relatively tender age the boy had gone to war.
The mirrored door of a small medicine cabinet hung on the wall above a sink, its glass smeared with enamel in the shape of a mask, with a beard like surf and a deep-creased brow. Looking into it Tyrone would see his own eyes peering out from the face of an Ancient of Days, into a cell in a madhouse appointed in the spitting images of those that decked the inside of his skull. “Hab rachmones,” I heard myself say under my breath, a Yiddish phrase I’d picked up from my reading, meaning “Have mercy.” I vowed then and there to curb my use of mind-altering substances.
Rachel, in the interim, had assumed her professional demeanor. Removing a small handheld tape recorder from her purse, she asked permission with the arch of a brow to switch it on. Then she edged closer to Tyrone and inquired of him calmly, “What are you working on?” I was proud of her for ignoring the curator or keeper or whatever he was, who cautioned her that the patient was beyond her reach. Tyrone continued daubing with his brush at the composition in front of him, his mouth still speaking silent instructions to his hand. He gave no indication of having heard his interviewer. “Do you know where you are?” she asked, again with delicacy, and in my mind I answered for him: “Somewhere else.” The radiator twanged like a Jew’s harp, the heat in that hermetic room intensifying the chemical taint of the assorted pigments. Rachel persisted softly in her questions, holding her device close to Tyrone’s lips as if to catch a stray mumble or sigh, though the artist never showed the least awareness of her presence. But at one point the words he was mouthing became briefly audible.
“I can sleep in the window,” he said, the statement half a question, “with the curly dog coats?” His voice was a rusty hinge.
“Yes,” said Rachel, gently encouraging. “Sleep wherever you want.”
He became a touch more declarative: “And tomorrow we’ll go to the circus under Jenny’s dress.”
Rachel blushed a peachy pink. “Sure thing, the circus.”
“When I would jump on the bed,” he mused, still without looking up, though his lips twitched as if in an effort to smile, “my head got stuck in the ceiling and my legs would go …” Here he actually kicked his legs a bit under the table.
Rachel said she was sorry.
“One time I pulled the barnacle goose out from the ground by his beak,” he continued, “and hid him inside the pendulum clock.” We were all — even the keeper who’d cupped an ear — straining to make sense of his utterances, when he suddenly raised his head from its former focus with an expression of acute distress.
“My back aches where they pulled out the wings,” he proclaimed. He looked at us then and began to snigger so uncontrollably that I wondered if he’d been putting us on all along. But just when it seemed that he might be in danger of coming undone, the tears streaming in freshets down his cheeks, he inhaled and abruptly ceased; again he bent toward his watercolors, muttering “The people there were made out of flies.”
For the first time since we’d entered his room, Rachel turned toward me, her oval face stricken in an echo of the artist’s agitation. By this time, however, his language had ebbed back into soundlessness, his face bent in its fixated attention to the picture at hand.
On the drive back to Memphis, still a little unstrung from the encounter, I only half-listened to Rachel expressing annoyance. “Well, that was a waste of time,” she complained; she seemed to be talking to herself for my benefit. “What did I learn? Not to go chasing after wild geese … barnacle geese yet.” Despite a moist eye she blew a derisive raspberry, then further irked by my enduring silence, persisted: “I know what you’re thinking, Lenny.” I wasn’t aware of thinking anything. “You’re thinking we’re in one of those movies where the mismatched couple meets some holy fool and then bond over the experience?” She groaned at the very idea, while I, still trying to recall if I’d ever seen such a movie, said nothing: let her fume. I bit my tongue rather than tell her how much, at that moment, I wanted to kiss her neck.