Dad's Change of Genre

1972 My dad, Steve Kenney, painting of a postcard.

I didn’t see it right away. The first time I entered the second-hand and antiques shop I felt overwhelmed by all there was to regard—the front window display featured quite a doll collection, an old-fashioned doll buggy, and various articles of doll furniture. I needed people furniture, and the display showed the prices were reasonable. Indoors, I spied an art deco bureau with the waterfall design of six rounded drawers cascading artfully to its foot. My sister pronounced its superiority and echoed the sign in the corner that said, “If you like it, buy it. It won’t be here tomorrow,” but I ignored all that.

There were other things in the shop that caught my eye: a desk, and several mirrors and paintings on the wall. I had just moved from Colorado and wasn’t used to seeing so many framed prints of ships when I went thrift shopping. One picture that stood out was elegantly framed in gold and hung at the far corner of the high, left-hand wall. This was the kind of picture you find on the North Atlantic Coast where I imagine those who have learned to love the sea in order to survive it celebrate its role in commerce, recording in oil on canvas their impressions of the majestic, square-rigged, multi-mast ships that sailed its waters.

I returned the next week and sure enough, the dresser was gone. The owner of the store, a young man in his thirties, echoed my sister with his caveat of buying when you see it, but it was okay with me. The owner Scott told me he sold online, too, and every week traveled to estate sales, so he was constantly re-stocking. I engaged him in conversation about his business venture discovering the shop was new to him and he was taking courses in how to price and otherwise value the bounty he collected in various estate sales and such. He offered his personal number to call first, in case he might have some more furniture. I looked around again long enough to get a momentary feeling of déjà vu.

Later, driving home, I thought about the déjà vu feeling and surmised that the collection of items he had gathered seemed so familiar because many items were from my grandfather’s era. For instance the dolls; my grandmother had given me a real Shirley Temple doll, a  collector’s item with eyes that open and closed. Nana’s gift had been destroyed in a family fire, and I considered it a lost treasure, something we might have insured if we were that kind of family.

Our mother said it was a sin to fight over any inheritance, although her choice of a father for her children made that worry moot; when you grow up in a family that doesn’t own a lot of nice things, the contest that might ensue for the family jewels or the coveted parental treasures passed down through generations never occurred.

I called Scott the shop owner the next week, and he told me that he had some new dresser type units, and to come in any time. That particular week I was feeling weepy, as my move to New England from Colorado was not going the way I had pictured it. It seemed that the whole trip had been a mistake because each of my major goals and expectations had been thwarted. I will spare you most of the details.

My family, who were helping me look for a place to live, didn’t seem particularly thrilled to have me back, given they were discovering how hard it is to find a handicap accessible place to live in and rent at market prices in Massachusetts. We found a temporary place near my brother, and then what followed was a special moving grief when my movers turned out to be scam artists, and from weekend to weekend while the movers kept postponing their arrival, I was canceling the moving date for my family members to help me.

My heart’s greatest burden was for the loss of my best friend:  my miniature black poodle named Comet. His health was failing, his once crackerjack jumping legs couldn’t clear the bed, and after the sixth straight day of rain in August, he refused to go outside for the first time in his life. If my arthritis was feeling the weather, I could see his was worse. I knew that he would not live another season. I would find myself turning to God saying, “Show me a sign that this not a colossal mistake that can’t be undone or won’t ruin my life and career.” I know God doesn’t give answers right away.

Visiting the shop for the third time I had a better survey of the various items for sale. There were no other people in the store so when I spied a small stool, I perched on it for a panoramic view of the southern wall. Looking for a large mirror, I ended up commenting on the large painting of a ship I had noticed before. I was already conversing with the owner, so I felt free to comment out loud that the painting of the ship had caught my eye several times, and I couldn’t imagine why except I was beginning to think it was the painter’s distinctive palette of blue for the sea that reminded me of my father’s style, his unique mixture of blues.

“It doesn’t have a price on it,” I observed, and he confided that he had become so comfortable with it he thought he might keep it for himself.

“My father was primarily a portrait painter,” I mused, “but out of necessity he changed genres.” I was now making small talk. “He ended up doing a lot of seascapes. He was also mentally ill,” I intoned darkly, “and was eventually hospitalized in Tewksbury in that hospital for the mentally ill.”  The latter was a town not too far from Beverly. I realized at this point I was getting a little more personal than you should get, and another day I might not have confided, but we were alone in the store, so I began to tell him a story.

“While he was at the hospital, my father made pocket money for buying cigarettes by painting landscapes and seascapes for his occupational therapist. As a matter of fact, the day my Dad was discharged, he had finished one of the scenes the therapist had assigned him and my father asked me to take it to the man’s home since the therapist had already paid for the canvas.”

The shop owner nodded to show he was following.

“Once we got there the man came out to help carry the canvas in. I said to the guy, ‘I don’t know who is “zoomin’” who! here,’ and then I asked him in a friendly way as we crossed the threshold into his home. ‘Or is yours a symbiotic relationship?’”

I told Scott the shop owner: “I’ll never forget what the guy told me,” and I waved my arm wide to the right and waited a beat.

“‘I’ve got hundreds of your father’s paintings!’ he said. He motioned for me to follow him up some steep stairs to his attic. There they were. Not hundreds, but there were at least several dozen paintings, most seascapes with ships and with coastlines and lighthouses.”

 “From all over the world,” I added.

While I was telling this story, Scott looked up at the painting and then surprised me by climbing on top of furniture behind him to get close to the painting–to read the artist’s name.

“It’s Kennedy,” he said from on high, and although that is not my family name, that’s when the goose bumps on my arms clued me in. While he brought it down from the wall, I knew it was my father’s signature even before he showed it to me; he had been a letter off. I read “S. E. Kenney, 1974” at the bottom left hand corner where Dad usually signed.

We looked at the back of the frame and found a name that could have been the therapist’s or the name of whoever owned it and framed it, and then sold it at a garage sale to Scott. The name told me nothing except it had once been valued enough to be put in a nice frame. Most of the paintings that family members owned did not come with frames, just the canvas stretched on wood.

My Dad had been born in Sanford, Maine, and was raised in Arlington, Massachusetts. Dad’s father was in the merchant marine, and had left his ailing wife to succumb to her mental illness and left his children to care for themselves. My dad when he was young had been drafted into the Navy.  Maybe it’s there he developed his talent for painting portraits. Dad eventually exhibited signs of a mental illness, but he was too smart to get identified with that stigma. Luckily, he didn’t pass down the schizophrenia to us, but he did terrorize us as children and passed down to us the special struggle to survive when your home is a battleground from which, in a subtle neurological way, you are scarred for life.

The problem was complicated by my mother’s profound idealism; she couldn’t leave him, she had made a vow, they were Catholic and she kept “going to the priests for help,” as she put it, and then having babies, and her babies were her blessings. Her lack of knowledge about the “drama” that a person with schizophrenia will play out with anyone who will engage kept her in the battle with Dad until at 15 years old, I told her I would leave home if she didn’t kick him out. That’s the year I went to live with grandpa. My mother got a restraining order and Dad left.

We were very poor—we went to bed hungry often–when we were young, so it’s weird–if not a sign–that while innocently looking for a dresser in a second hand store, I should find a family heirloom, the kind that only my family could claim. The shop owner then asked me if I would want to buy the painting, and knowing he had thought to keep it to himself, I told myself that I didn’t need to spend money on such an item. I already had several of my Dad’s paintings, but the truth is I don’t easily part with my money, and I wanted to think it over. Possibly I didn’t want to seem interested, for that might drive up the price.

As I drove home this time I realized that this “find” could be a sign that I needed to be here with my sister at this time in our lives. I called my brother Bill’s wife and told her the story–the long version up to a certain point, and I said “Can you guess where I’m going with this?” and she said no, so I had to tell her how the guy strode across the tops of bureaus and desks to get to the painting and how he read my dad’s name as Kennedy. My excitement began to grow when she expressed extreme surprise, so next I called my sister Joanne who lived in Somerville at the time.

     “Did you buy it?” she asked me.

     “No,” I said. “I don’t have the money. Plus, I’ve got a few of dad’s paintings–probably one too many.” I was referring to a picture of my mother he did for my birthday many years before.

That must have felt like a slap to my sister because she reminded me that except for myself and my married brother Bill, no one else in the family had any of Dad’s paintings because of the huge fire that consumed all our collective things that had been stored in the cellar of the “family” house my three youngest siblings were all living in after my mother died.

“That’s right,” I said, and apologized for forgetting this fact of our lives.

“What’s the name of the shop?” she asked me. I told her, and she asked me to look in the local yellow pages for the number; I could have read it off the card that Scott had given me, but I didn’t. I told her I’d get the name and number tomorrow, and call her. It was at that point I decided I’d call him back and buy it right away, and not call Joanne, but give it to her for Christmas. She tended to have too many things on her plate to focus on something not relevant to her spontaneous life.

That night I began thinking of all the paintings we lost. First, there were the nudes, which one of us kids discovered to my mother’s deep mortification. She hid them after that and it’s unknown to me how many there were but I remembered one of her bare breasted.

From a studio shot my parents paid for when I was three or four, Dad had painted me sitting on a mushroom in a sylvan setting on a 6 x 4 foot-large canvas that had once been on a parlor wall in our home, but for most of my life it was folded up and kept in the “cache” my mother somehow kept track of. Dad had done several paintings for Joanne, most notable request being the singer Michael Jackson when MJ still had a ‘fro. I thought it made him look like a clown but Joanne loved it.

I had once been on the cover of a ski magazine and Dad painted the “glamour shot” based on the photo, though he missed the pattern in dots that spelled “USA” on my red ski hat. Nevertheless, I’m proud to own that picture. Was Dad proud of a daughter who had been on the 1980 US Olympic Disabled Ski Team? I don’t think he could imagine me skiing.

I also owned a painting of Revere Beach that was first painted by an artist named Norman Gatreau. Norman’s painting was made from an aerial photograph he took of Revere Beach Boulevard in the 40s. I loved his oil painting, the way it displayed Revere Beach the same way I had written about it: I personified the ocean as a mother with the whole of Revere Beach’s commercial concessions “strung like a candy necklace” on one side of the boulevard and the blue grey water side opposing it.  I appreciated that my dad wrote Norman’s name on the canvas at one end and his own initials at the other; probably because I educated students on how to reference sources so as not to plagiarize.

Another painting of Dad’s I own is the one he did of my mother and that story is the one I might have been going to finish telling Scott after I told him of Dad’s “change of genres,” about how I’d seen the painting at his house and when he offered it to me, how I told Dad I didn’t want it because it didn’t look like her and how Dad said gruffly, “It looks enough like her.” And how when my dad died I went to his house and there the painting sat alongside Dad’s cracked glasses and the picture of my mother, how I discovered that the image lived beneath a piece of glass so thick with oil and dust it was a wonder Ma’s smile was not lost entirely.

There’s one painting I remember because both Ma and Dad posed in front of it like a cat and dog or Israel and Palestine meeting peacefully to pose for a photo just one minute before resuming the fight. It was about 4’x4’ view of the Amalfi Coast off Italy where the houses hug the hills turning the view of the bay into a patchwork of sundrenched Mediterranean villas whose streets don’t seem wide enough for a donkey to cross but autos do travel along. I know there are more paintings out there, and I asked my brother Steve whether he would want a picture my Dad painted if I came across another one, and he said “not unless it was a really good one,” referring to the Amalfi Coast.”

My parents, Steve and Bernice, pose against the backdrop of Dad's painting.

I called my shop owner acquaintance up and asked him how much he wanted for the painting. I was surprised when he told me he had to do a little research on the painting before he priced it.  I kept my voice steady and sure, but I was a little freaked out when I realized my Dad’s painting belonged to the shop owner. I asked him if he would call me when he knew. He said he would. After a few days I called him and asked him if he’d finished his research.

“Well,” he said, and I braced myself for the news. “Actually, I spoke to my friend the appraiser about this, and he told me I shouldn’t let it out of my hands for less than $500.”

I know I was thinking “How could it cost that much; it’s just one of Dad’s paintings!”, and as I worked through all the layers of guilt, grief, and judgment that the memory my father invoked in me, I began to see it wasn’t going to be as easy as it might have been that day when we made the discovery together and the shop keeper asked me if I wanted it. I was being chastened for selling my father short.  However, I also saw that I should not get off the phone without buying it. I said to him, “I imagine there must be many variables involved in each painting that you have to figure the price for. Did your appraiser say what it is about that painting that makes it that price?” I asked.

“Yeah. They’re all different.’” he said. “For instance, this one is in a very nice frame, but also it uses materials that have a cost to them, and really, it takes a certain talent and skill to paint any painting that large, even if it is off a postcard,” Here he took a break, then summed up the mark-up with this: “and just painting it takes time, as well.’”

     I made my move, boldly, saying, “Please tell me if I am wrong, Scott. It seemed to me the other day when we discovered my dad had painted it, you were willing to sell it to me right there and then. And you seemed to be willing to do that out of a certain “honoring” of my relationship to the artist. I am not a person with a lot of money, but it seemed you were going to ask for maybe $100, which is about what I would spend on a dresser. If I can be so bold, I’d like to offer you $150 and call it a sale. I’ll come by today and write you a check or bring you cash, whichever you prefer, if you would set it aside for me.”

So that’s how I came to acquire a piece of art I have come to think of as “Dad’s change of genre,” a seascape. I picked it up the next day, and after another week I began my gift wrapping and hid it lest Joanne should see it when she visited. When I tell people this story, they ask me about Joanne’s reaction, expecting that my sister must have been thrilled, but that’s not how it went. Maybe she felt entitled to it, but on Christmas, Joanne did not leap in the air, as a kind of thank you I might have hoped for. However, when you give someone a gift you know is more valuable than any dollar figure, when you restore to someone something they might feel is theirs in the first place, you are the one who dances the little jig of joy.