created an amiable new setting for the Brownell panel. He bought an ormolu French writing table and lines of Mycenaean gold cups to echo its glitter; one wall of his sitting room was papered in Indian tea papers with pressed-in strips of real gold leaf. It would be a parlor of complete aureate beauty, he said.
“So how is my painting? Are you loving it yet?” he asked on the phone.
“Not yet, its charms continue to elude.”
“Soon, maybe.”
“Maybe. But you should know that the cats seem to have accepted it, as they don’t try to pee on it anymore.”
“Well, there you are, then. Just a matter of time and you won’t want to defile it either.”
“And it has stopped making that notice-me, notice-me twanging sound when I have parties.” I had a hard time explaining that quality when it did sing its scratchy song in the cooler temperatures of the early evening, startling my more highly wired dinner guests.
“So it’s beginning to love your house. Poor thing, soon to be moved again. By the way, I found a New York gallery for her work. They want to give her a show next year.”
“You’ve seen her then.”
“Yes, we had lunch a few weeks ago. She told me that the Santa Fe exhibit had been purchased almost entirely by out-of-towners.”
Finally one day the movers were there to claim the Brownell and ship it off to New York City. I had to admit the wall all but hummed a song of emptiness in the first few days after its departure. I hung one of my larger garden paintings with bright colors in that location but it curiously did not take command like the Brownell did. It annoyed me that the absence of her painting was stronger than the presence of mine.
I tried other paintings and objects there but nothing really felt right. Is that all that Art is about? The perpetual ownership of a hanging space? Even now, years later, when I pass down the hallway, I feel that particular spot has been deeded for time immemorial to the gilded square.
The Deathbed of Cecily Brompton
One day in the summer of her ninety-first year, Cecily Brompton, after a lifetime of good health, avoiding minor colds, broken bones or major illness of any sort, took to her bed at the unaccustomed hour of nine in the morning, feeling very unwell. Her bedroom, a small cell with an iron-frame single bed, adjoined the Santa Fe studio where the work on her newest painting was not going well.
The household staff did not notice her departure from the studio, as they provided her complete privacy during the morning hours, her best hours for painting. She had trained the staff to make no noise or disturbance during these important early hours. At noon, the cook, Isabel Rodriguez, was instructed to check quietly into the studio. If work was going well there, she adjusted the serving of the midday meal accordingly.
The entire staff was aware of the necessity for seamless quiet in the home studio of the most important woman artist of the western world, as the art magazines had it. Brompton herself rankled at the adjectives “woman” and “western,” preferring to think of herself as the most distinguished painter alive, not merely an American female version of greatness. After all, Picasso, Matisse and O’Keeffe were all dead. Since her paintings sold for vast sums soon after they were delivered to her New York gallery, who could question her self-assigned spot at the top of the list? Collectors on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to purchase a prized new Brompton, an icon for success on sitting room walls the world over.
The four people who comprised the Brompton household, the cook, maid, driver and gardener were justly proud of their employer and furthered the cause of art and fame like a trusted palace guard. Isabel Rodriguez was the liaison between Brompton and the rest, nurturing the pride of servitude and quelling any disturbances. Few people got past this phalanx without permission to interrupt Brompton’s work.
The staff had learned to assess the situation without words; they sensed the direction work in the studio was taking and awaited Brompton’s re-emergence from her workplace at whatever hour she chose. So that was how the staff missed the start of Brompton’s malaise and her odd retreat to her mid-morning sickbed.
For two hours she slept fitfully, dreaming of brightly costumed dancers emerging from and retreating into a roiling wall of mist. She had this dream several times before and now, waking around eleven in the morning, made a painter’s practiced effort to remember the bold black and white patterns of the dancer’s costumes and small details of the dances. The sketchbook on the bedside table was full of quick renderings of dream images.
As she came up through the levels of sleep to awareness, the curious situation of her in bed at this hour startled her away from this happy reverie of remembrance. What did this being in bed at mid-morning mean? Was this unfamiliar weakness a prelude to something dark and final? Was this her deathbed?
She had always imagined she would go suddenly. As the years went by she formulated ever more dramatic scenarios for this finale: a private plane, solid maroon in her vision, plummeting down to winter seas off a storm-tossed coast, perhaps the rocky Atlantic side of Cornwall; a pistol shot from a crazed, foreign admirer in a Turkish military uniform, handsome with elaborate epaulettes and black boots; or, her favorite, because of its visual tension, a motor accident, the Mercedes with her at the wheel careening off an icy curve into an ultimate, smoky spiral down to the Rio Grande River, exploding in the dark New Mexico night, a night of festivities elsewhere. A satisfying show of concluding drama. A flamboyant death to match her eminence, not the slow wasting away that this morning in bed foretold.
A death at home in bed was for a rich dowager without artistic worth, not the painter that the world idolized, the artist that women everywhere took as a role model for female success in a man’s world. Furthermore, it would be a bore to die slowly in bed with wailing servants and long-faced associates to visit you, and then to depart with an audience of dull and sanctimonious faces. It would be a flat, atonal finale to what had been a glorious symphony. As she arrived at full consciousness, Brompton was very dissatisfied with this turn of events.
The cook found her. Isabel, after she saw the studio empty, quietly opened the closed bedroom door, let out a short cry to find Brompton in bed. In a flash she knew what it portended.
“Senora, you are ill.” she said, half a question.
“Yes, Isabel, it would seem so.” Brompton was annoyed with herself and her tone was clipped and harsh.
“I will call Dr. Harmon,” she said as she came near to feel Brompton’s forehead.
“Don’t fuss, Isabel.” She brushed her hand away. “I’ll have lunch here in the bedroom. Only broth and some toast, please.”
This was the day the staff knew would come, the end to their comfortable world. Cecily Brompton would die soon, Isabel thought, leaving their days empty but perhaps their bank accounts full of the expected bequests. The staff had discussed this day and what their inheritances might be.
Patricio, the driver, told the others that his legacy would be the largest as the Senora had always been in love with him. He said he saw her admiring him in the mirror when they drove in the Mercedes about Santa Fe. Cecily Brompton admired male beauty and all the drivers before Patricio had been handsome and young. Patricio counted on a large inheritance.
Isabel disagreed, saying that she and the Senora were like sisters, sharing decades of secrets and stories. The maid and the
