My punchiness matched hers, and I started to laugh.
Suzi was on a roll. “We’re a sad, sad pair. What’s wrong with us? What would your father think of us here, holed up in Ojai, drinking wine, and crying over some man?”
Then I started to laugh even harder. “What is wrong with us?”
We laughed like we hadn’t in ten years, like we were expressing some kind of demon from our systems, the kind of demon that drags its victims down in a time-lapse drowning and then breaks their necks when they are just about out of air. It felt fantastic. We gasped and snorted. My stomach muscles hurt, and tears sprang from my eyes, the good kind, not the bad. I didn’t even mind not being able to breathe.
Finally, my mother managed, “We have got to get over ourselves and get on with it.”
I knew what she meant.
The next morning, I had a hangover, from everything, not the least of which was the laughing jag that resulted in sore abdominals. But I felt focused, liberated. I wandered into the kitchen, looking for coffee and finding my mother. “Good morning,” I said, aiming for chipper.
The big farmhouse table in the kitchen was covered with letters, some hand addressed, beaten up, and yellowed, others in large manila envelopes with impressive seals on the outside. I poured a cup of coffee into the hand-thrown mugs my mother had used forever and added milk from the matching pitcher. “What’s all this?”
“Getting over myself and getting on with it.” My mother sat at the table in a sweater the color of oatmeal. Underneath was a light blue T-shirt that matched her eyes. She had on her reading glasses and a touch of lip color. She looked a little tired herself this morning. “Fan mail. Queries. Requests. People wanting to know about Henry Blakely. His work, his papers. Some are academics, others are fans, I guess. For the first few years, I swore I was going to read them and answer them all. But I couldn’t. I read a couple, but then I couldn’t open any more, there were so many. I tossed them into a plastic tub, then another tub. The guilt is unbelievable. It wakes me up at night, but I haven’t done anything. I guess today’s the day I start going through them.”
I had no idea. I had gotten a few, mostly through the museum and all from book editors or writers looking for a quote or two, but nothing like the pile on the kitchen table. “How do they find you?” I picked up a legal-size envelope and read the address. Suzi Blakely, General Delivery, Ojai, California.
My mother shrugged. “I guess people know I live in Ojai. The post office knows I live here.”
I opened one from a small college in the Midwest, a query by a senior doing a thesis on my father’s project in Central Park when he illuminated Belvedere Castle with enormous brilliant multicolored flares that he himself had handcrafted and giant projections, a technology way ahead of its time. The date on the letter was from three years earlier. “I hope this kid didn’t fail his thesis. He wanted to know about the significance of the ratio of red flares to orange flares in the Castle Burning project. Good work, Mom. I think we can assume he didn’t win the Art History prize at Wittenberg.”
The former Barnard art history major didn’t skip a beat. “I bet the kid’s still there because he never graduated, thanks to his poorly researched thesis. Should I call the school and tell them that Henry Blakely always worked in prime numbers, and anyone writing a thesis on his work should know that? He was a mathematician first, artist second. Use a little algebra and you’ll figure out the significance of the ratio of red to orange.”
My mother was back. “Maybe you shouldn’t answer these letters if we’d like to keep Dad’s reputation intact. You know, as a generous man and humanitarian,” I said. At times, my father was as intense and moody as the next gifted artist, and the last thing he wanted to do was share about his work with undergraduates. But thanks to my mother, he managed to pull himself together to be social and socially conscious when he needed to be. “It would be a shame if all those years of image management on your part went down the drain.”
“You’re right. Yesterday, I was still too sad to open these. Today, I’m too cynical.” Plus, she’d never have the stamina to get through all the letters. My mother was a doer, not a writer. She’d be more likely to rearrange the stacks of mail into piles and photograph them than respond to them in writing.
“I’ll hire someone. There’s a young woman at the museum, she’s one of those unpaid interns getting her masters at UCLA. Her name’s Kiandra Douglas. I’m sure she can use the money, and she’s sharp, really sharp. The least she can do is open them and see if there’s anything significant in any of them. I’ll make sure she puts together some kind of generic response that will work for most of the letters. We can send people to the foundation website, recommend the few good books on him. Maybe suggest that awful movie,” I suggested, referring to an ill-conceived film starring John Cusack as my father and Robin Wright as my mother, based on a Vanity Fair article about the Motel. I could only watch about fifteen minutes of it.
“We should get more wine and rent that movie tonight to do a final purge,” my mother responded. “Honestly, Joanie, thank you. These letters have been weighing me down. You better warn her, though, I’m sure there are quite a few from wackos and 9/11 deniers. I can’t handle the conspiracy theorists.” Weariness worked its way back into her voice again. “And honestly, some of the details about you father’s work are starting to dim. Without his notebooks . . .”
“I know.” We both knew. In many ways, the loss of the notebooks was almost as tragic as the loss of my father. Henry Blakely worked out the details of his projects in densely filled notebooks over the decades of his career. As he prepared to turn over his papers to a museum, probably the WAM after the completion of his commission there, my father had begun to go through the notebooks. To get them in shape, he’d told me, and to remind him of all he’d accomplished.
It had been my job in the summer of 2001 to help with the notebook project while he was on location in Maine, cataloging the contents of each for the fifty-plus binders. It was fascinating work, to see the evolution of his creative process, the advanced geometry, the painstaking design work that went into every project, from the epic public spectacles like Joan Bright & Dark and Castle Burning to smaller works, like Light/Break #1, which consisted of a single high-intensity circle of light in a closet-size room. To me, the notebooks were the documentation of his genius; to him, they were everything. The closer he got to turning them over to a museum, the more protective he was of the notebooks. He was afraid to let them out of his sight, so he checked the trunk containing the notebooks onto his flight that September morning, not trusting them to an airfreight company.
Or so it seemed, because the notebooks had disappeared.