Part 11
personally had no objection to smoking, but that, alas, the school's policy was against
smoking in the instructors' room. He cut short my profuse apologies with a
magnanimous wave of his hand, and went back over to his and Mme. Yoshoto's side of
the room. I wondered, in a real panic, how I would manage to get sanely through the
next thirteen days to the Monday when Sister Irma's next envelope was due.
That was Tuesday morning. I spent the rest of the working day and all the working
portions of the next two days keeping myself feverishly busy. I took all of Bambi
Kramer's and R. Howard Ridgefield's drawings apart, as it were, and put them together
with brand-new parts. I designed for both of them literally dozens of insulting,
subnormal, but quite constructive, drawing exercises. I wrote long letters to them. I
almost begged R. Howard Ridgefield to give up his satire for a while. I asked Bambi,
with maximum delicacy, to please hold off, temporarily, submitting any more drawings
with titles kindred to "Forgive Them Their Trespasses." Then, Thursday mid-afternoon,
feeling good and jumpy, I started in on one of the two new students, an American from
Bangor, Maine, who said in his questionnaire, with wordy, Honest-John integrity, that
he was his own favorite artist. He referred to himself as a realist-abstractionist. As for
my after-school hours, Tuesday evening I took a bus into Montreal proper and sat
through a Cartoon Festival Week program at a third-rate movie house--which largely
entailed being a witness to a succession of cats being bombarded with champagne
corks by mice gangs. Wednesday evening, I gathered up the floor cushions in my room,
piled them three high, and tried to sketch from memory Sister Irma's picture of Christ's
burial.
I'm tempted to say that Thursday evening was peculiar, or perhaps macabre, but the
fact is, I have no bill-filling adjectives for Thursday evening. I left Les Amis after dinner
and went I don't know where--perhaps to a movie, perhaps for just a long walk; I can't
remember, and, for once, my diary for 1939 lets me down, too, for the page I need is a
total blank.
I know, though, why the page is a blank. As I was returning from wherever I'd spent
the evening--and I do remember that it was after dark--I stopped on the sidewalk
outside the school and looked into the lighted display window of the orthopedic
appliances shop. Then something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced
on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day learn to live
my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans,
with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss.
The thought, certainly, couldn't have been endurable for more than a few seconds. I
remember fleeing upstairs to my room and getting undressed and into bed without so
much as opening my diary, much less making an entry.
I lay awake for hours, shivering. I listened to the moaning in the next room and I
thought, forcibly, of my star pupil. I tried to visualize the day I would visit her at her
convent. I saw her coming to meet me--near a high, wire fence--a shy, beautiful girl of
eighteen who had not yet taken her final vows and was still free to go out into the world
with the Peter Abelard-type man of her choice. I saw us walking slowly, silently, toward
a far, verdant part of the convent grounds, where suddenly, and without sin, I would
put my arm around her waist. The image was too ecstatic to hold in place, and, finally, I
let go, and fell asleep.
I spent all of Friday morning and most of the afternoon at hard labor trying, with the
use of overlay tissue, to make recognizable trees out of a forest of phallic symbols the
man from Bangor, Maine, had consciously drawn on expensive linen paper. Mentally,
spiritually, and physically, I was feeling pretty torpid along toward four-thirty in the
afternoon, and I only half stood up when M. Yoshoto came over to my desk for an
instant. He handed something to me--handed it to me as impersonally as the average
waiter distributes menus. It was a letter from the Mother Superior of Sister Irma's
convent, informing M. Yoshoto that Father Zimmermann, through circumstances
outside his control, was forced to alter his decision to allow Sister Irma to study at Les
Amis Des Vieux Maitres. The writer said she deeply regretted any inconveniences or
personally had no objection to smoking, but that, alas, the school's policy was against
smoking in the instructors' room. He cut short my profuse apologies with a
magnanimous wave of his hand, and went back over to his and Mme. Yoshoto's side of
the room. I wondered, in a real panic, how I would manage to get sanely through the
next thirteen days to the Monday when Sister Irma's next envelope was due.
That was Tuesday morning. I spent the rest of the working day and all the working
portions of the next two days keeping myself feverishly busy. I took all of Bambi
Kramer's and R. Howard Ridgefield's drawings apart, as it were, and put them together
with brand-new parts. I designed for both of them literally dozens of insulting,
subnormal, but quite constructive, drawing exercises. I wrote long letters to them. I
almost begged R. Howard Ridgefield to give up his satire for a while. I asked Bambi,
with maximum delicacy, to please hold off, temporarily, submitting any more drawings
with titles kindred to "Forgive Them Their Trespasses." Then, Thursday mid-afternoon,
feeling good and jumpy, I started in on one of the two new students, an American from
Bangor, Maine, who said in his questionnaire, with wordy, Honest-John integrity, that
he was his own favorite artist. He referred to himself as a realist-abstractionist. As for
my after-school hours, Tuesday evening I took a bus into Montreal proper and sat
through a Cartoon Festival Week program at a third-rate movie house--which largely
entailed being a witness to a succession of cats being bombarded with champagne
corks by mice gangs. Wednesday evening, I gathered up the floor cushions in my room,
piled them three high, and tried to sketch from memory Sister Irma's picture of Christ's
burial.
I'm tempted to say that Thursday evening was peculiar, or perhaps macabre, but the
fact is, I have no bill-filling adjectives for Thursday evening. I left Les Amis after dinner
and went I don't know where--perhaps to a movie, perhaps for just a long walk; I can't
remember, and, for once, my diary for 1939 lets me down, too, for the page I need is a
total blank.
I know, though, why the page is a blank. As I was returning from wherever I'd spent
the evening--and I do remember that it was after dark--I stopped on the sidewalk
outside the school and looked into the lighted display window of the orthopedic
appliances shop. Then something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced
on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day learn to live
my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans,
with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss.
The thought, certainly, couldn't have been endurable for more than a few seconds. I
remember fleeing upstairs to my room and getting undressed and into bed without so
much as opening my diary, much less making an entry.
I lay awake for hours, shivering. I listened to the moaning in the next room and I
thought, forcibly, of my star pupil. I tried to visualize the day I would visit her at her
convent. I saw her coming to meet me--near a high, wire fence--a shy, beautiful girl of
eighteen who had not yet taken her final vows and was still free to go out into the world
with the Peter Abelard-type man of her choice. I saw us walking slowly, silently, toward
a far, verdant part of the convent grounds, where suddenly, and without sin, I would
put my arm around her waist. The image was too ecstatic to hold in place, and, finally, I
let go, and fell asleep.
I spent all of Friday morning and most of the afternoon at hard labor trying, with the
use of overlay tissue, to make recognizable trees out of a forest of phallic symbols the
man from Bangor, Maine, had consciously drawn on expensive linen paper. Mentally,
spiritually, and physically, I was feeling pretty torpid along toward four-thirty in the
afternoon, and I only half stood up when M. Yoshoto came over to my desk for an
instant. He handed something to me--handed it to me as impersonally as the average
waiter distributes menus. It was a letter from the Mother Superior of Sister Irma's
convent, informing M. Yoshoto that Father Zimmermann, through circumstances
outside his control, was forced to alter his decision to allow Sister Irma to study at Les
Amis Des Vieux Maitres. The writer said she deeply regretted any inconveniences or
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