and then Europe, and he finally settled in Volendam, Holland. That became his home, and that was where Father discovered him before the First World War.
Volendam was John Rettig’s Katmandu. When Father met him, this man from Cincinnati was wearing wooden shoes.
• • •
“Crucifixion in Rome” is signed “John Rettig,” and it is dated 1888. So it was painted four years before Father was born. Father must have bought it in 1913 or so. Felix thinks there is a possibility that Hitler was with Father on that skylarking trip to Holland. Maybe so.
“Crucifixion in Rome” is indeed set in Rome, which I have never seen. I know enough, though, to recognize that it is chock-a-block with architectural anachronisms. The Colosseum, for example, is in perfect repair, but there is also the spire of a Christian church, and some architectural details and monuments which appear to be more recent, even, than the Renaissance, maybe even nineteenth century. There are sixty-eight tiny but distinct human figures taking part in some sort of celebration amid all this architecture and sculpture. Felix and I counted them one time, when we were young. Hundreds more are implied by impressionistic smears and dots. Banners fly. Walls are festooned with ropes of leaves. What fun.
Only if you look closely at the painting will you realize that two of the sixty-eight figures are not having such a good time. They are in the lower left-hand corner, and are harmonious with the rest of the composition, but they have in fact just been hung from crosses.
The picture is a comment, I suppose, but certainly a bland one, on man’s festive inhumanity to men—even into what to John Rettig were modern times.
It has the same general theme, I guess, of Picasso’s “Guernica,” which I have seen. I went to see “Guernica” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, during a lull in the rehearsals of Katmandu.
Some picture!
22
I WENT FOR A WALK through hospital corridors all alone after Father died. A few people may or may not have murmured “Deadeye Dick” behind my back. It was a busy place.
I came upon strange beauty unexpectedly in a fourth-floor cul-de-sac. It was in a dazzlingly sunny patients’ lounge. The unexpected beauty was in the form of Celia Hoover, née Hildreth, again. She had fallen asleep on a couch, and her eleven-year-old son was watching over her. She had evidently brought him with her to the hospital, rather than leave him alone at home in the blizzard.
He was seated stiffly on the edge of the couch. Even in sleep, she was keeping him captive. She was holding his hand. I had the feeling that, if he had tried to get up, she would have awakened enough to make him sit back down again.
That seemed all right with him.
• • •
Yes—well—and ten years later, in 1970, that same boy would be a notorious homosexual, living away from home in the old Fairchild Hotel. His father, Dwayne Hoover, had disowned him. His mother had become a recluse. He eked out a living as a piano player at night in the Tally-ho Room of the new Holiday Inn.
I was again what I had been before the fiasco of my play in New York, the all-night man at Schramm’s Drugstore. Father was buried in Calvary Cemetery, not all that far from Eloise Metzger. We buried him in a painter’s smock, and with his left thumb hooked through a palette. Why not?
The city had taken the old carriage house for fifteen years of back taxes. The first floor now sheltered the carcasses of trucks and buses which were being cannibalized for parts. The upper floors were dead storage for documents relating to transactions by the city before the First World War.
Mother and I inhabited a little two-bedroom shitbox out in the Maritimo Brothers development known as “Avondale.” Mother and I moved into it about three months after Father died. It was virtually a gift from Gino and Marco Maritimo. We didn’t even have a down payment. Mother and I were both dead broke, and Felix hadn’t started to make really big money yet, and he was about to pay alimony to two ex-wives instead of one. Old Gino and Marco told us to move in anyway, and not to worry. The price they were asking, it turned out, was so far below the actual value of the house that we had no trouble getting a mortgage. It had been a model house, too, which meant it