Orchard by Larry Watson Page A

from him, a partial profile, with one foot on the seat of the chair and the other leg extended. After a very quick watercolor washed with a pale gray that made it seem as though rain had fallen on the paper, Weaver at last said, “If you would please, take off your clothes and then sit again in the chair just as you are now.” Oddly enough, the chair had inspired him as much as she had. He wanted the contrast between the chair and its unyielding wood—a chair that a lawyer or a bookkeeper might once have sat in before his rolltop desk—and her body, as languid as she might be in her bath. For the first nude studies, he would switch to a new medium—charcoal, in keeping with the day’s somber expression.
    Weaver was fifteen years old when his father was killed on a Chicago sidewalk. An iceman became enraged because a hotel doorman would not allow him to park in front of the Monroe House. The iceman drove his wagon around the block for no other reason than to pick up speed; he then jumped the curb and careened down the sidewalk with his brace of horses, driving right into Arthur Weaver and the small group of jurists with whom Mr. Weaver dined weekly. Arthur Weaver hit his head on a fireplug and died soon thereafter; the accident also left a district judge paralyzed from the waist down.
    Two of his older brothers woke Ned with news of their father’s death, and then told him to come downstairs to join the rest of the grieving family. Weaver, however, remained in his darkened room, too confused at that moment to face another human being, much less his sisters, brothers, mother, or any of the mourners who had come to the house.
    The need to draw and paint had already inflamed Weaver, and while he was determined on a career in art, his father, a practical public man and an enormously successful one at that, ceaselessly cross-examined his son on how art would enable him to make his way in the world. The questioning was good-natured, but rigorous all the same, and as frustrated as Weaver became over these interrogations, he knew their purpose: His father wanted to make certain his son did not answer his vocation halfheartedly. If Weaver could not stand up to his father’s questions, how could he overcome the obstacles that stood in the way of anyone who sought a career in the arts?
    So, while his siblings’ sorrow no doubt centered on the deprivation of happiness that was sure to be the result of a life without their father— no more sailing on Lake Michigan, no more endless summer picnics, no more walks on Lake Shore Drive, in short no more of those occasions made memorable and pleasurable by Arthur Weaver’s humor, wit, and generosity—Ned Weaver lamented that his father would never again say, upon viewing one of his son’s watercolors, “Pretty enough, I imagine, but why that line of green at the water’s edge? Will that put food on the table or clothes on your back?” Weaver loved his father, but he also needed him the way an oyster needs a grain of sand.
    Weaver rolled onto his side, but before rising from his bed he stretched to his nightstand, and in a fit of anger, grief, and despair, clamped his fingernails into the table’s varnished soft pine. He squeezed down so hard that the wood forever bore the faint imprint of his nails.
    Sonja House rose from the swivel chair and walked to the iron cot that Weaver kept in the studio. With her back to Weaver, she proceeded to undress, spreading out her garments from the top of the mattress to the bottom, as if, without having them thus singly arranged, she might not remember the correct order when it was time to clothe herself again.
    When she turned, Weaver did not gasp, though he was unprepared for the plenitude and power that he saw in her when she appeared naked before him for the first time. This was a woman in whom he had seldom seen anything far from sorrow, a woman whose careless beauty brought her no joy, a woman whom he felt he had to capture quickly, so