“Aren’t you afraid you’ll hurt yourself with that?”
“Mr. Shepherd, if women feared knitting needles as men do, the world would go bare-naked.”
What had happened in Washington was an outrage. Yet life goes forward mostly as an exchange of pleasantries on a narrow bridge that hangs above the chasm of outrage. “There’s Grandfather Mountain. See, the shape of it. An old man lying down.”
“Is it too cold for you? We could stop and get the lap blanket from the back.”
“No. I’m warm-blooded.”
“We’re lucky it’s cold. This Roadster overheats famously on hard inclines.”
“You don’t say.”
Grand white clapboard hotels turned up sparsely along the route, their front porches mostly populated with empty rocking chairs. At dusk they began to be lit by the yellow glow of lamplight. Once, just as we passed an inn, a black-skinned man in a red jacket was lighting the porch lanterns one by one, leaning with difficulty around elegant men who sat idle, smoking cigars. Castes of the nation.
Mrs. Brown finally broached the void. “Indigo Porcupine, that could just as well be the name of one of those paintings we saw at the show.”
“Yes. Indigo Porcupine Leaping into the Void, that might do.”
“Well. I couldn’t make out what all they were meant to be. Truly I’ve never seen the like, Mr. Shepherd. But I’m deeply obliged for it.”
“I wasn’t going to come until you volunteered as escort. So I’m the one obliged.”
“For all, I meant. The paintings and our nation’s capital. Going right straight in the hall where the Congress meets.”
“Had you not been to Washington before?”
“This is my first time out of Buncombe County.”
“Really?”
“Yes sir. I’ve read the Geographics since I was a girl. My sisters could tell you, I strained for travel like a horse fresh to the bit. But never thought it would happen.”
“Mrs. Brown, you make me ashamed. The whole world knocks at my door, and all I want to do is stay home.”
“It’s a wonder,” she said tactfully, working at a tiny sock.
“Well, you’re a worldlier person than most of those congressmen. They want Norman Rockwell and statues of muscular horses and nothing new under the sun.”
“Even still. There was no cause to speak so rudely. What peeved them?”
“Fear, maybe. The foreign element, that’s what Tom thought. They expected to go in the gallery and see old friends, but instead they met strangers. Gashes of color and surrealism. It made them uneasy.”
“They didn’t say ‘uneasy.’ They said ‘un-American.’ I can’t see that. If an American paints it, then it’s American, isn’t it?”
“Not according to Mr. Rankin and the Congress.”
Or Truman: If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot. Others said vulgar, obscene, insane, namby-pamby pacifism. Or Stalinist, a perfect irony, from these congressmen who seem as determined as Stalin to suppress creativity among artists. The show scared them out of their wits. The Special Session was a thrashing.
“We should have taken Tom out of that hearing. It was humiliating.”
“Your poor friend, he’d worked so. He’ll take it hard, will he not?”
“Oh, believe me. Tom Cuddy feels for those paintings about the way you do for your nieces and nephews. He’d knit socks for Winslow Homer, if he knew how. I’ve seen that in him ever since the civilian services. Moving paintings and sculptures to safekeeping, that was America the Beautiful, for Tom. That was patriotism.”
“Bless his heart.”
Bless it indeed. Now he’s had to hear Congress declare the whole Western world threatened by some paint and canvas. Our finest painters, a menace. One was specifically damned for having urged Roosevelt to come to the aid of the Soviet Union and Britain, after Hitler attacked Russia. Which in fact, Roosevelt did.
The click of knitting needles, the shush of tires through leafy muck. The lozenge of space inside the automobile felt surprisingly safe, like a small home moving through a tunnel of darkness. Mrs. Brown finished off a sock before speaking again.
“Not all the pictures were hard to cipher. Some were plain. The ones with cemeteries and tenement houses got people the most riled, if you ask me. More than the ones that looked like dribble-drabble.”
“The Guglielmi and those.”
“Why do you think?”
“Congress has to keep up appearances. The paintings were going around the world. We can’t let them know we have racial strife and tenement houses.”
“My stars, Mr. Shepherd. Europe is lying in a pile. On the news they said Berlin city just dug two thousand graves for the ones that aim to starve to death before spring.”
A car blazed by, two bright eyes in the dark.
“They had to dig the graves before the ground froze,” she added.
“I understand.”
“And London, no better. I read they’re allowed nought but four ounces of knitting wool for the year and two yards of material, to cover each person in a family. They must be about naked. What’s the harm in those folks seeing some of our troubles?”
“Well, five years of wartime censorship. Old habits die hard. We’ve gotten very good at pretending everything is shipshape here. Don’t you feel that way?”
“What way?”
“That it’s a little dangerous to advertise our weak points. Jerry and Tokyo Rose might be listening. Loose lips sink ships.”
“They were listening. But the war’s ended.”
“True. But if it keeps the paintings pretty and all people’s whining buttoned up, maybe they’ll want a new war every five years.”
“Mr. Shepherd, for shame. That is no subject for jest. We can’t keep on forever saying the nation entire is perfect. Because between you and me, sir, it is not.” The needles clicked in the dark. She must have read the pattern with her fingertips.
“Do you remember the first advice you ever gave me?”
She seemed to think it over. “The pot roast at Mrs. Bittle’s?”
“Advice about writing.”
“I never.”
“Oh, you did. In that first letter. You said Tom Wolfe got himself in hot water exposing the scandals of Asheville, and I was wise to keep my story in Mexico. Here was your advice: people love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.”