to be a poet and actually became one, Skennen was not unusual.
It was strange to hear the love-elation I’d recently felt so nakedly expressed in the letters of a seventeen-year-old. It made me wonder if love, whenever it hits you, is always the same. Like the young Skennen, I couldn’t help thinking about my ‘beloved.’ But, unlike him, I could no longer revel in the longing my thoughts of Anne brought.
Professor Bruno kept Mrs. Kelly talking for two hours and was rewarded by the discovery of a poem John Skennen had written as a seventeen-year-old. The poem was in one of the letters Mrs. Kelly had kept. She wouldn’t tell us anything about its meaning, but she allowed me to transcribe it:
Ticking tocks
taking clocks
before they
hurt me,
Train, unhinged,
is what I bid
toward me,
Sheet of earth,
I let you go
above me
And limestone grey
is what I taught
to love me
Listening to Mrs. Kelly’s memories also brought my parents to mind. What must it have been like for them, young and in love, both God-fearing, as they called it, both wanting to get out of Chatham, Ontario? They’d met in their teens, right around the same age as Kathryn Kelly and John Skennen, but their love had flourished and lived on to the end of their lives. How rare that seemed to me now.
Maybe because I had my parents in mind, it occurred to me that the young man in Mrs. Kelly’s photos looked like Professor Bruno or that Professor Bruno looked like the young man: same thick hair, same strong chin, and, in one photo, the same complicit smile. The resemblance was so obvious that both Mrs. Kelly and the professor admitted it. It made me wonder if Mrs. Stephens had mistaken the professor for her nephew.
– But then why would she hit me? asked Professor Bruno. Wouldn’t she be happy to see her nephew?
– You know, said Mrs. Kelly, I haven’t spoken to John since we broke up, but there must be a reason he changed his name from Stephens.
– I suppose that’s true, said the professor. And Skennen is the Ojibwe word for peace. I’ve always wondered if he ever found it.
– Oh, I don’t think John ever found peace, said Mrs. Kelly. So few of us do, on this side of the lawn. Anyway, if his aunt didn’t beat him with an umbrella, it would be one of the few things she didn’t use. That generation liked to hit.
While we were in her home, Mrs. Kelly made sure we had lemonade – a clear lemonade with mint leaves crushed in it – and that we were comfortable and that the air conditioner was not too cold for us. Her kindness struck me. Though her living room was cool as a larder, it was still welcoming, because she was herself so generous.
Sometime later, Professor Bruno spoke of his admiration for Mrs. Kelly’s beauty. I must have looked at him as if I weren’t convinced. Mrs. Kelly was in her sixties, maternal in my eyes. The joints of her fingers were slightly knobby. She was thin but big-breasted so that her body looked weighed down. Her face had, I think, once been what’s called ‘beautiful,’ but it was now gaunt and a little intimidating.
– Was she beautiful? I asked.
Professor Bruno was annoyed.
– No, she wasn’t beautiful. She is beautiful. Her spirit is as warm as a sauna. And I mean a good sauna. Not one of those overheated contraptions where you can’t breathe. I’m surprised at you, Alfie, observant as you are! You know spirit is as important to beauty as physical appearance, don’t you? There’s a difference between a leaf on a tree and one that’s dead, isn’t there?
– Yes, I said, but dead leaves are beautiful, too, aren’t they?
Professor Bruno took a dark leather pouch out from somewhere in his suitcase. Our vicinity immediately smelled of moist and sweet tobacco, like tar, cinnamon, and oranges. He took out a brown pipe and, after he’d filled the pipe and lit his tobacco, he said
– I wonder what you mean by beautiful. Dead things aren’t as beautiful as living ones. I mean, you can’t be interested only in surfaces, can you? It’d be a great mistake if you were. I understand you artists and your natures mortes. You’re fascinated by geometry. But all those still lifes with their skulls and flowers can’t touch a well-done portrait or a vivid landscape. And do you know why? Because with still lifes you don’t have to capture the spirit that animates a person or a place. It’s an easier job, isn’t it? I wonder if you know the story of Apelles, the Greek painter? He was drawing a horse, a running horse, and he’d got the painting’s background and the horse itself perfectly. The work was going to be his greatest, except for one thing. The only detail he couldn’t get right – a small detail – was the froth coming off the horse’s mouth. For months, he tried everything – every brush, every way to apply paint. And despite all his skill, he couldn’t get the froth right, and the fact that he couldn’t get it right ruined the painting for him! His greatest painting! Ruined! Out of frustration, he took a sponge he’d been using and threw it at the canvas. It hit the painting at exactly the right place and got exactly the right effect: the froth on the mouth of the horse! I’m sure you’ve heard the story, Alfie, but people don’t talk about the lesson in it. The living and spontaneous in the work of Art – the horse’s froth – can only be caught by the living and spontaneous in the artist. True beauty, Alfie, perfection in Art, has spirit as its object and as its subject and as its substance. Do you see?
– But doesn’t all Art have some of this spirit in it? I asked.
– Most works of Art, he answered, don’t have enough of it to justify their existence!
– So then, are you mostly disappointed by Art, Professor?
– Oh no, he said, not at all. I live for a perfection I’ll never find! That’s the human condition in a nutshell, isn’t it?
I wasn’t sure what to say. I’m not any kind of artist. Far from it. And, where plants are concerned, I’ve always been happy with surfaces. The idea of perfection or even ‘true beauty’ had never occurred to me because I’ve always enjoyed what’s there in front of me. I’ve never thought that’s a perfect lilac or here’s the true beauty of celery. In the same way, I wouldn’t have said Mrs. Kelly was beautiful any more than I’d have said she was ugly. She was as I found her. In the end, I had no experience with separating the spirit from the thing. I wasn’t even sure what the professor meant by ‘spirit,’ but I believed he was on to something, and it pleased me to think that one day I might understand what he was talking about.
We drove toward Concord along gravel roads. We were going to see one of John Skennen’s childhood friends, Ron Brady. Mr. Brady lived on the outskirts of town on a farm, or what seemed once to have been a farm: a dilapidated barn, a stone farmhouse, fields overrun by weeds – Queen Anne’s lace, mostly, the land smelling of sour carrots – the property delimited by fencing whose posts and struts were silverfish-grey.
We didn’t see any dogs as we drove onto Mr. Brady’s land, but his first words to us were
– Didn’t the dogs greet you?
– Which dogs? asked Professor Bruno.
– My dogs, of course, he answered.
Mr. Brady was tall. His hair looked as if it had been dyed black. Recently dyed, I’d have said, because although he was in his sixties – his skin pale, the backs of his hands with faint spots on them – the hair on his head was an almost lustrous dark. In fact, Mr. Brady’s hair had something defiant about it, as if it were a wig meant to challenge your conceptions of him, whatever they might be.
–