“Whoever they were,” young Tom said.
“What’s some jockey’s name?” David whispered to Roger.
“Earl Sande.”
“You’ll be as big as Earl Sande,” David told him.
“Oh, go and goggle-fish,” Andrew said. “I’m going to be a friend of Mr. Davis like Tom was of Mr. Joyce. Can I, Mr. Davis? Then at school I can say, ‘When Mr. Davis and I spent that summer together on that tropical island writing all those vicious stories while my own father was painting those pictures you’ve all seen of ladies in the nude.’ You paint them in the nude, don’t you papa?”
“Sometimes. They’re quite dark though.”
“Oh boy,” Andrew said. “I don’t care about the color. Tom can have Mr. Joyce.”
“You’d be too shy to look at them,” David said.
“Maybe I would. But I’d learn.”
“A nude by papa would be nothing like that chapter by Mr. Joyce,” young Tom said. “It’s only because you’re a little boy that there seems to be anything extraordinary about a nude at all.”
“OK. Just the same I’ll take Mr. Davis, with illustrations by papa. Somebody said at school Mr. Davis’s stories were truly vicious.”
“All right. I’ll take Mr. Davis, too. I’m an old, old friend of Mr. Davis.”
“And of Mr. Picasso and Mr. Braque and Mr. Miro and Mr. Masson and Mr. Pascin,” Thomas Hudson said. “You knew them all.”
“And of Mr. Waldo Peirce,” young Tom said. “You see, Andy boy, you can’t win. You started too late. You can’t win. While you were up in Rochester and for years before you were born papa and I were out in the great world. I probably knew most of the greatest painters alive. Many of them were my very good friends.”
“I have to start sometime,” Andrew said. “And I take Mr. Davis. You don’t have to write vicious stories either, Mr. Davis. I’ll make all that up the way Tommy does. You just tell me anything awful you ever did and I’ll say I was here when it happened.”
“The hell I do make things up that way,” young Tom said. “Sometimes papa and Mr. Davis refresh my memory for me. But I figured in and took part in a whole epoch in painting and in literature and if I had to I could write my memoirs right now as far as that goes.”
“You’re getting crazy, Tommy,” Andrew said. “You better watch yourself.”
“Don’t tell him a thing, Mr. Davis,” young Tom said. “Make him start from scratch like we did.”
“You leave it to me and Mr. Davis,” Andrew said. “You stay out of this.”
“Tell me about some more of those friends of mine, papa,” young Tom said. “I know I knew them and I know we used to be around cafés together but I’d like to know some more definite things about them. The sort of things I know about Mr. Joyce, say.”
“Can you remember Mr. Pascin?”
“No. Not really. What was he like?”
“You can’t claim him as a friend if you don’t even remember him,” Andrew said. “Do you think I won’t be able to remember what Mr. Davis was like a few years from now?”
“Shut up,” young Tom said. “Tell me about him please, papa.”
“Mr. Pascin used to make some drawings that could illustrate the parts you like of Mr. Joyce very well.”
“Really? Gee, that would be something.”
“You used to sit with him at the café and he used to draw pictures of you sometimes on napkins. He was small and very tough and very strange. He used to wear a derby hat most of the time and he was a beautiful painter. He always acted as though he knew a great secret, as though he had just heard it and it amused him. It made him very happy sometimes and sometimes it made him sad. But you could always tell he knew it and it amused him very much.”
“What was the secret?”
“Oh drunkenness and drugs and the secret Mr. Joyce knew all about in that last chapter and how to paint beautifully. He could paint more beautifully than anybody then and that was his secret, too, and he didn’t care. He thought he didn’t care about anything but he did really.”