Does he come home after this? He does not. He is sent to England, Scotland, Ireland before a short leave in Boston and forty-five days of training in Newport to become a crew member on an aircraft carrier. Then he heads to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese.
Sadie, whose son, Clyde, also joined the naval reserve, tells me, “I’m always on high alert, listening for the sound of an unfamiliar car up the driveway.” I know what she means. I wake in the night with a sense of dread that mostly dissipates by morning but is never entirely absent. At random moments in the day and night I think: this could be the moment Sam and Mary arrive on my doorstep with a telegram. But perhaps not if I knead the dough until it’s silky. Not if I pluck the chicken until it’s smooth of feathers. Not if I sweep the floor and get rid of the cobwebs in the eaves.
EARLY IN THE winter of 1946, Betsy writes with terrible news: Andy’s father and his nephew Newell were killed in October by a train in Pennsylvania. Mr. Wyeth was driving the car, which stalled on the tracks. Andy is bereft, she writes, but hasn’t shed a tear.
When they return to Maine for the summer, I can see right away how much his father’s death has affected him. He is quieter. More serious.
“You know, I think my father might’ve actually been in love with her,” he says when we’re alone in the kitchen. Sitting in Al’s rocker, he pushes it back and forth abstractedly with his foot. Heel, toe, creak, squeak.
I’m confused. “Sorry, Andy—been in love with who?”
He stops rocking. “Caroline. My brother Nat’s wife. The mother of Newell, my nephew, the one who was . . . the one in the car.”
“Oh—my.” I’m having a hard time grasping what he’s saying. “Your father and . . . your brother’s wife?” I don’t know any of these people by name. Andy has never really talked about them.
“Yeah.” He rubs his face with his hand, as if trying to erase his features. “Maybe. Who knows. At the very least he was infatuated. My father was that way, you know. ‘A man of great and varied passions,’” he says, as if quoting an obituary. “He never made any bones about that. But I think in the end he was miserable.”
“Did something happen just before the accident? Did someone—”
“Nothing happened. As far as I know. But I do know death was on his mind. I mean, it was one of his obsessions; you can see it in his work. It’s in my work too. But that’s not . . .” His voice trails off. It’s as if he’s talking to himself, hashing out what he feels, trying to settle on an interpretation. “It was strange,” he murmurs. “After the accident, we found his painting gear carefully lined up in his studio. All in a row. He’s normally like me, his stuff all over the place, you know?”
I think of the tempera splatters and crusted eggshells and petrified paintbrushes all over the house. I know.
“And maybe it was a coincidence, but the bible in his studio was open to a passage on adultery. Or—not a coincidence; I mean, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that he was contemplating the consequences of an affair, whatever actually happened. But it doesn’t mean he purposely . . .”
“It seems out of character,” I say. “From what you’ve told me. You always described him as so—present.”
Andy gives me a sardonic smile. “Who knows what motivates anyone, right? Humans are mysterious creatures.” He lifts his shoulders in a shrug. “Maybe it was a heart attack. Or carelessness. Or—something else. We’ll probably never know the truth.”
“You know you miss him. That’s pretty simple, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
I think of my own parents—how sometimes I miss them and sometimes I don’t. “I suppose not.”
Rocking slowly back and forth, he says, “Before my father died, I just wanted to paint. It’s different now. Deeper. I feel all the—I don’t know—gravity of it. Something beyond me. I want to put it all down as sharply as possible.”
He looks over at me, and I nod. I understand this, I do. I know what it is to carry mixed feelings in the marrow of your bones. To feel shackled to the past even though it’s populated by ghosts.
WHEN HIS FATHER died, Andy was working on a life-sized egg tempera of Al leaning against a closed door with an iron latch, next to our old oil lamp. He started it the summer before, trying, in sketch after charcoal sketch, to render on paper the scratched nickel of the lamp and the solid weight of the latch. Then he pulled out his paints and asked Al to pose next to the door in the kitchen hallway. For hours, days, weeks, Al sat against that door as Andy tried, and failed, to translate the vision in his head onto canvas. “It’s like trying to pin a butterfly,” he said in exasperation. “If I’m not careful, the wings will crumble to dust in my hand.”
When Andy left Port Clyde at the end of the summer, the painting still wasn’t finished, so he took it back to his winter studio in Chadds Ford. After the accident, he started working on it again. When he returned to Maine, he brought the painting with him and propped it against the fireplace in the Shell Room.
I’m standing near the fireplace looking at the painting one morning when Andy arrives at the front door and lets himself in. Noticing me in the Shell Room from the hall, he comes to stand beside me. “Al hated sitting still like that, didn’t he?” Andy says.
I laugh. “He was so bored and fidgety.”
“He’ll never pose for me again.”
“Probably not,” I agree.
Half of the picture is in light and half in darkness. The oil lamp casts shadows across Al’s face, on the old wooden door, under the iron latch. A newspaper behind the lamp is stained and wrinkled. Al is staring into the middle distance as if deep in thought. His eyes seem clouded with tears.
“Did it turn out how you wanted?” I ask Andy.
Reaching out a hand, he traces the outline of the lamp in the air. “I got the texture of the nickel right. I’m happy about that.”
“What about the figure of Al?”
“I kept changing it,” he says. “I couldn’t capture his expression. I’m still not sure I did.”
“Is he . . . crying?”
“You think he’s crying?”
I nod.
“I didn’t intend that. But . . .” With a rueful smile, he says, “You can practically hear that wailing train whistle, can’t you?”
“It looks like Al is listening to it,” I say.
He moves closer, studying the canvas. “Then maybe it did turn out all right.”