That year, my parents pulled me out of my private Pasadena school, much to the chagrin of the nuns who would miss their annual Blakely Christmas tree lighting fundraiser, and enrolled me in PS 334 on the Upper West Side, a K through 8 public school for “gifted” kids, though most of them looked pretty normal to me. PS 334 was the perfect place to ride out an alarming growth spurt and some Shannon Doherty bangs as I lurched into puberty. The anonymity balanced out the loneliness.
My parents hired a high school girl named Rachel to be my friend and escort me around the city in the afternoon. That fall is when my obsession with Joan of Arc started, as there are quite a few Joans all over Manhattan, from a nearby statue at Riverside Park and the Bastien-Lepage masterpiece at the Met to a charming former junior high school near our apartment called the Joan of Arc School.
I loved a nineteenth-century French tapestry depicting Joan’s life that hung at the Cloisters the most. The bucolic scenes made her look like a warrior version of Laura Ingalls Wilder, at least that’s what I thought, as the Little House books were my only reference point for this medieval French farm girl challenging the king of England. Rachel and I spent many afternoons taking the long subway to the upper reaches of Manhattan to see the other gems at the Cloisters, but I kept returning to the tapestries. I was beginning to understand the importance of symbols in art and in life.
But it was also the beginning of my understanding of what Joan of Arc meant to my father. We weren’t churchgoers, but I’d gone to Catholic schools my whole life, so I knew enough about faith to see that my father relied on Saint Joan for strength and sobriety. He manifested that belief through his art and through symbols like the coin in his pocket. When he noticed my interest in his patron saint, he took up the quest with me. We spent weekends in antique bookstores around the city, from Greenwich Village to the Upper West Side, hunting for a rare first edition of a children’s book from the late nineteenth century about the life of Saint Joan by a French painter and illustrator Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel. Though the text was rather dry, the drawings of Joan were magnificent, filled with rich colors and a use of matte black that my father admired, like Japanese woodblock prints of that era. The book had brought Boutet de Monvel worldwide fame in his day, resulting in commissions from wealthy art collectors and collaborations with fellow artists. (I think my father admired his career trajectory as well.) In the days before Google, we wandered from one tiny store to another, spending hours in each other’s company, buying dozens of other books, and stopping for hot chocolate before we walked home slowly through the park or ducking into Chinese restaurants and eating the sesame noodles my mother would never let us order because they were, according to her, “a calorie wasteland.” We never found a copy of Boutet de Monvel’s masterpiece, but it didn’t matter to me.
It was my favorite year. Life changed for my father after that, for all of us really. Suddenly Henry Blakely was famous, like stopped-on-the-street and asked-for-autographs famous, something he’d never been before. Fellowships and awards came rushing in with cash prizes and medal ceremonies. There seemed to be an endless stream of commissions that took us to places all over the world for a month or two every summer. There were museum retrospectives and magazine covers. It was new territory for him and a role reversal for my previously more-famous mother, but my father stepped up to the task. He understood that he had an obligation that was bigger than his own work.
And that’s what I was thinking about—our obligation to art, audience, Joan, experience, New York, tapestries, and faith—when I walked into Notre-Dame at sunset holding Nate’s hand. I was reminded of Jacques’s comment that the crowds made Joan Bright & Dark a masterpiece every night. I thought that everything I had known or believed was coming together in that moment, from the Panthéon Sketches, my father’s work, and the cool gray walls of the twelfth-century church to my own reaction upon seeing the simple, elegant Joan statue in the north portico of the famed church. I am not afraid. I was born for this. Ha, Joan’s own words seemed like a spiritual overreach, but I was emotional. I felt on the verge of tears.
Nate, on the other hand, was in full 007 mode. He was decked out in a leather jacket and on high alert. He dropped my hand, turning around slowly to take in the full scope of the interior of the church. “Wow.”
“I know. Notre-Dame is something. Is this your first time here?”
“Yes. My previous trips to Paris included too many meetings, not enough time. And I’m not really a church guy.”
“Well, then you’ve missed a lot of history.” My hand caressed his sleeve. The leather felt smooth, supple. “Did you buy this today?”
“I needed one. You know, when in Paris.”
I did know. “Of course.”
Notre-Dame de Paris. Our Lady of Paris. When my father used this spot for Joan Bright & Dark, he examined both the feminine and the masculine sides of Joan. She called herself the maid but dressed in men’s clothing. Her spirited leadership of the army compared to her ban on the prostitutes that normally followed the troops. Her devotion to Saint Catherine and Charles the Dauphin. My father had tried to capture that dichotomy using both light and sound. The statue of a pious Joan, hands in prayer position while holding her flag, was bathed in electric light using the colors of the famed rose windows as inspiration for his installation and bathed in sound by a chorus of a hundred women in men’s suits. Standing there with Nate surrounded by the noise of tourists and the whizzing of their cell phone cameras, I wished I could go back to 1980 when there was, according to a piece in Art in America, “silence, then singing, then glorious light.” There was no silence today, but a little glorious light seeped in through the stained glass.
I turned to Nate, who was fixated on the engineering of the cathedral, and the look on his face brought me back to a moment years ago. “I remember how all the guys in our study abroad art history class laughed when we came here with our teacher and he said the words ‘flying buttresses’ like a million times.” I turned to see Nate laughing. “That’s mature.”
“Some things are always funny, no matter how old you are.”
“You know the second trial of Joan of Arc happened right here in Notre-Dame.”
“The second trial? I thought she was guilty, then burned at the stake during round one?”
“She was. Guilty of heresy and burned at the stake by the Church during the first trial. But twenty years later, after some rebranding and soul-searching, Joan got a retrial. In absentia, of course. The Trial of Nullification. The one where the Catholic Church said, ‘Sorry. We take it all back. It’s totally cool you dressed like a man and led an army and said that God asked you to do it.’ That happened here in, like, 1450-something. Then she was canonized here almost five hundred years later.”
“Why’d it take so long? The haircut?”
“That was it. Unflattering optics.” I paused, and then added, “It can take a while for the truth to emerge.”
I heard a voice. “Joan? Are you Joan?”