Chapter One

Chapter One

When he first came back to New York, and that would be twenty years ago now, my brother Jack was in a kind of stupor, for it was shortly after the death of his daughter Peg. What can you say about the death of a child? She was sixteen when it happened, and the impact on all of us, Jack of course in particular, was devastating. When I glimpsed the extent of his grief, after the first shock wore off, and he awoke to the grim slog of flat, empty days that yawned before him—all meaning, hope and pleasure drained from life—I called out to him from across what seemed a chasm, and got back only the faintest of answers, which might have been no more than an echo; I mean I did not know what to say to him to bring him back into living contact with the world, and more immediately with myself, his sister. I don’t suppose there’s very much you can say.

I never feared for his sanity, however. I never feared that he would attempt to do harm to himself, and for this reason: he had his work. And with the first, weary, reluctant attempt to pull himself together came a return to the studio, a loft I had rented for him in an old warehouse building on Crosby Street. I remember watching him silently building stretchers, the very mindlessness of this familiar activity giving palpable relief to a soul in pain. I sat in that loft drinking tea and trying to make conversation as he nodded and grunted and nailed his stretchers, and the next day he cut canvas, and began to staple it to the stretchers, and again I was the one who sat there with him, talking or silent, whichever he seemed to prefer, simply a familiar body in the same bleak space during those slow wr