ALICE AND JACK

     Alice and Jack were friends of ours, old friends of my parents, yet new when they were finding their way in the sun-baked days of bright New Mexico in the forties. Like my father they were both painters much intoxicated by the aroma of burning piñon and sage-soaked mornings that pleasantly stung the nostrils, devotees of mountain light and angular shadows.
Alice, who came from Cleveland wealth and a life not far astray of middle “C,” finally gave in to her affinity for papooses and moccasins, colored beads and lapis skies. So she surrendered herself to a marriage and a move, and tried to paint whenever she could, in between child feedings if need be, and generally ingested life with gusto.
     In spite of that her days and nights dwindled to an early end in a hospital bed in a room with quaint stucco walls and tin crucifixes, the light pouring in the window most days spilling onto the floor, and a view of the stars at night if the nurses were willing to pull the gray vinyl curtains aside for her when they came to make their rounds.
     She smiled easily when my mother visited her one autumn evening, especially when she placed the recorder music as a gift on the white sheets that covered her lap. It seemed incongruous, the music and the thought of anything lovely and lyrical in that place for the sick. The smile she returned was for irony, for the twist not lost on her intelligence. She took up playing the recorder after Jack had left her life for good to live in California; meanwhile the oil paints dried up in their tubes and the linseed oil hardened the brushes stiff.
     One day, about a year before this, my mother, seated at a clunky upright piano in the living room of their hand-built house in the valley off North 4th, and Alice, recorder at her lips silhouetted before the stained-glass window, played a Baroque duet together, sorrowful and slow. Then the breath of the notes diminished to a tapered silence through the narrow pipe and translated into words with the same message: “I miss Jack.”
     Together she and Jack had loved the desert, the forms found there, abstract and subtle: delicate dried seed pods, for instance, that reminded them of the quirky shapes in the paintings of Bosch, volcanic rocks like black Swiss cheese caught in the act of a million years, and the razor-sharp shadows of dandelions stretching impossibly far over the pearl sand. It was a landscape they viewed as a slow sketch by an invisible hand, divine it seemed, they said.
     After three children and the unexpected loss of a teaching job, a move further west was the only solution for Jack. Upon his return years later to New Mexico there would be just two sons and a daughter, no Alice, his wife; the youngest son meanwhile had abandoned himself to the streets and wandering, near Central mostly, the main artery of the city, and had lost his sense.
     Come to think of it, the only thing of Alice’s we have left is a sketch she did of herself holding this son, the homeless one, done in blue ballpoint pen, which, no doubt, is stored away in my mother’s trunk among newspaper clippings and a jumble of tattered children’s drawings on manila paper.

©Vincent Montenegro

_______________________________________________________