He'd Like Me - Now That I'm Old

I was almost born a few decades before my actual birth date, and I almost had a different father. That is, but for a sleepy Justice of the Peace, my mother would have married another man. That would have made me much older now, and in fact, I’d be a different person entirely. As the cosmic stand-up comedian can tell you - so much depends on timing.

When my mother dabbled in post graduate work at Columbia in the 1920’s, she met a dashing scion of those “Roaring” years. He was Cleland van Dresser, son of the noted American illustrator William van Dresser. He would pick my mother up for dates in a fancy car (I picture a Bugatti) and drive her out to his family’s summer estate on Long Island. Since his father had made such a success as an illustrator, the van Dressers could afford every luxury. My mother was attended to by maids when she was a guest at the house. It was a Great Gatsby kind of life.

The van Dressers were loving parents, but there was one thing Cleland had trouble prevailing on his father to do for him. He wanted his father to do a portrait of my mother (the woman who would become my mother). His father was reluctant. First of all, he was busy with other commissions. He was illustrating a book by Jack London. He was illustrating books his wife was writing. He was assigned to do covers for McClure’s and American magazines. But the real reason for his reluctance was my mother herself. He said quite frankly that even though she was a pretty girl - she had no character. He said he preferred to draw older people - people who showed life’s weathering. He said my mother’s face and hands were too bland. That critique rather smote my mother, because she regarded herself as being more than just a pretty face. She thought her looks were already at that young age at least interesting, if not downright enthralling.

But Cleland persisted. “Pleas, Papa. Please!” And finally William relented. He’d do a charcoal drawing of her. That medium was his specialty.

He had my mother pose in the fashionable flapper clothes of the day, draped languidly, loosely. He drew her hands resting languidly over the arm of her chair, over her purse. Van Dresser was famous for his ability to draw hands. Those are the most difficult features to draw. Most artists avoid them. Many commissioned Renaissance portraitists would charge by the hand. You can tell how rich a subject was by the number of hands visible on those canvasses done in the 1500’s and 1600’s. Two hands – a veritable king. One hand – a wealthy member of the nobility. No hands – a minor burger with pretentions.

Van Dresser’s rendering of my mother’s hands proved to be especially compelling. The whole portrait relaxes the viewer into repose, a contemplative detachment from all the busy-ness of this world. That was the kind of demeanor most admired in women then. Women were considered attractive if they had a center of quietude. The ideal wasn’t the running, jumping, ever-active woman ubiquitous in modern ads. Back in the 1920’s, it was the becalmed woman who sold you.

 

                                             

That kind of appealing lassitude came naturally to my mother. She was never one to seek the action of any playing field. However she did bestir herself to do some properly 1920’s-style madcapping with Cleland around New York. After they had known each other only a matter of weeks, they decided on the spur of the moment one night – to get married. They sought out the home of a Justice of the Peace in the boonies of Long Island. It’s possible that the formalities of preliminary licenses and blood tests weren’t necessary then. They seemed to have some expectation of actually being married on the spot. But it was not to be.

Like in some movie, the Justice was roused at that late hour from his sleep and, looking down from his bedroom window, told them to come back in the morning. He said he was not performing any ceremonies at that time of night. He couldn’t be coaxed. The two turned away from the house in the woods. Hansel and Gretel got a reprieve from what might have been too unprepared a venture into the forest.

By morning, their madcap enthusiasm had evaporated. When my mother’s semester of study was over, they parted friends with a cheerio good-bye honk from Cleland’s Bugati, or Stutz Bearcat, or whatever. My mother went back to her parents’ home in Chicago, and almost three decades later - had me. Another time, another place.

I didn’t know, until I just recently did researches on the Internet, into what ethereum Cleland might have evaporated. I still only know very little about him, tidbits of his life such as that he eventually settled in Florida and wrote occasional hunting and fishing pieces for the local newspaper. Not a life that my mother would have blended into very happily. Although the life she ended up in was in many ways even less likely and less congenial to her nature.

Once I got started speculating on “whatever became of…” though, it was hard to stop. I looked up the name of “van Dresser” in the White Pages. There was of course no more Cleland by this time, but there was a “William” listed in a southern state. Since it’s not a common name, I took a flier and phoned that van Dresser. A machine answered and I started babbling about trying to trace relatives of Cleland van Dresser and his father, a famous illustrator from the early 1900’s. I said I had a portrait of my mother done by William and I was just curious…

At that point a man picked up the phone. With a nasal, rather disaffected tone, he said, “Yeah?” I continued to babble into that uninviting vacuum. I asked if he might be any relation to the illustrator who’d been a sort of early Norman Rockwell. As I spooled out an increasingly incoherent motive for my call, I could hear a woman swearing savagely at what sounded like a ravening pack of children in the background. From the reverberations that her vituperations were creating, I gathered that the family was occupying rather tight quarters, possibly a trailer in a trailer park.

I thought these couldn’t be the descendents of the William van Dresser I was researching! If they had been, surely the phone would have been answered by a butler with a British accent, and I would have heard the tinkling of a silver tea service in the background. I started to make my apologies and ring off.

But just then the man caught me up. He said, “Yeah, well, I dunno. I got some pictures stored here somewhere. They’re drawings. They’re all like done in charcoal. They’re pictures of people sitting – and then there are pictures outdoors, of lots of trees and stuff like that. I dunno. I think some aunt or maybe my grandmother gave ‘em to me. I never really looked at ‘em.”

Yes! Yes! Charcoal was van Dresser’s preferred medium! And besides doing portraits of seated subjects such as the one he’d done of my mother, he also often did illustrations of rural scenes. On the Internet I’d seen that some of the pictures of his going up for auction were scenes of willows by a riverbed, of maples by a stream. But how could a branch of the family have become so divorced from such an illustrious past? And how could they have passed from refined Long Island wealth to trailer park squalls and squalor - from F. Scott Fitzgerald to William Faulkner, in such a relatively short span of time? Of course the Long Island world of Gatsby was, in its way, as corrupt and mean as the world of the Snopes Family of Yoknapatawpha County. But the van Dresser Family’s quick transition from one to the other seemed odd, even inexplicable.

But now that I was sure I had legitimate descendents of THE van Dresser, I explained a little further. I underscored how famous William van Dresser had become and how any cache of his originals would likely be worth quite a bit of money.

The man warmed to me a little then, but not as much as I would have liked. However, we ended the conversation with my promising to follow up. I said I’d send more information explaining how nearly I missed being a cousin of his, and telling more of what I knew of his ancestors.

I plunged into this completely irrelevant project with gusto. It got me out of doing the hard work of writing my own Great American Novel – and I have always been up for any excuse to postpone that job. I researched the van Dresser Family more thoroughly than I’d ever researched my own. I found that William wasn’t the only notable in the family. His wife Jasmine got quite a bit of critical acclaim for the children’s books she wrote, which William illustrated using Cleland as a model for the Tom Sawyer-like character featured in a series of them. William also had a sister who gained some fame as an opera singer. I found Marcia van Dresser even has an archive devoted to her in the New York Public Library. It’s a repository of her correspondence with a veritable Who’s Who of the glitterati of the first half of the 1900’s. Marcia had also been one of the opera stars whose pictures were featured on decks of playing cards distributed by a soap company as high-brow advertisements for their product. I also learned that she might well have been ahead of her time in having a female consort, none too discretely - an actress become secretary/companion named Gertrude Norman. The two lived together for the years they were in London, charming the haute monde there.

I didn’t know if I should include this last bit of information in what I sent off to the man on the phone. It seemed possible he might be a religious fundamentalist who wouldn’t take too kindly to hearing that some ancestor of his had been a pioneer for Gay Rights. But in the end, I enveloped the whole of it, the respectable and the experimental, the Internet pictures, copies of microfilm articles, and my own elaboration of what I knew of the family – and sent it all off in a plump package to the latter-day William van Dresser.

When I hadn’t heard anything from him in a couple of months, I called his number once more. This time, it seemed an actual person, not a machine, answered the phone. I could hear cautious breathing on the other end of the line, but no salutation was offered. So I launched into another flurried summary of who I was – “the woman who contacted you a while back about your ancestor William, the artist, who drew the charcoal pictures you have. I wonder if you might have received…”

At that point, the line went dead.

Oh, I’d done it again. I am the perennial carrier of TMI – too much information! I’m always hurtling in from outer space, crashing leaden lumps of meteoric excess into other people’s back yards. But I had accomplished a lot for myself. I had postponed doing the hard work of any creative writing. I had learned something about the life and times of the man who had almost been my father. And I had had an entertaining run of it. As with most of my offerings, I had ended up giving them only to myself. Me – the eternal sole recipient.

As I tucked my copies of all this other-family history away, I remembered that smarting affront my mother had received at the hands of the artist. Too bland indeed! She had never forgotten that insult. When my mother was old and ill in her eighties, I remember one evening how she spread her hands out in front of her on the kitchen table. Surveying them with all their liver spots and wrinkles, she remarked with a sense of having finally achieved a rueful triumph – “Van Dresser would like me now.”