Portrait Of Jennie: A Nod To Tom Blakeman

... I came down into Provincetown the next afternoon. The moment we crossed the bridge at Bourne, and I breathed the warm, sunny fragrance of scrub pine and broom, I felt the old peace of summer flow into me. Lilac was out in the Yarmouth yards and doorways, and in Brewster the juice-pear and the wild plum had opened their blossom, white as snow. The marshes at Wellfleet were all a silvery green; and beyond Truro, there was the bay, still and shining, bluer than bluebird's wing, with Plymouth clear, dark, and distant on the horizon.

Arne was waiting for me; he had a room in the west end of the town, down near Furtado's boat yard, and he took me there to wash up and get settled. I went to the window, and drew in a deep breath of the past. How well I remembered it. The old weedy, fishy smell rose from the tide; the gulls were circling and crying, out in the harbor; and on the sand below, Manuel was hammering at the white hull of a lobsterman. The schooner Mary P. Goulart was in harbor, along with most of the fisheries fleet; and I saw John Worthington's tunaman, the Bocage, come chugging in across the blue water from the North Truro nets, kicking up a little foam at her bows. Slowly and peacefully sky and water deepened; the sun went down over Peaked Hill Bars, and the ruby light came on at Wood End, and the white light at the Point.

We walked down to the fish wharf, past Dyer's hardware store and Page's Garage, past the post office, and the little square with its great elms. The summer visitors hadn't begun to arrive yet, and the town was quiet, with only its own people in the streets. Dark faced fisherman lounged in the doorways, talking together in their own language, half argot and half Portuguese; and the girls went by, two by two in the dusk, hatless and laughing. We stopped in at Taylor's for supper, and I ordered a chowder, the way they make it down there. I wanted to hear the Provincetown news: --- who was teaching that year, and how the classes were shaping up, whether Jerry Farnsworth had his old studio, and whether Tom Blakeman was going to take a class in etching again. And then, of course, Arne had to hear about the portrait. When I told him that Mr. Mathews hoped to sell it to a museum some day, he flung out his hands in horror.

'Don't have it, Eben,' he thundered. 'Never allow it. A museum? The death of the soul.'

'Sure,' I said. 'Like Innes, or Chase.'

'They're dead,' he answered. 'That's all past and done with.'

'Is it?' I asked. 'I'm not so sure.'

'Good God,' he bellowed earnestly; 'the past is behind us. What?'

'There's still Rambrandt,' I said, 'and Van Gogh. We're not quite done with them yet. . . . The past isn't behind us, Arne---it's all around us. And down here, on the Cape, is where one ought to feel it most---where the years follow each other like tides in the Pamet, and the boats come in each day with the same fish they had before.'

I smiled at him across the table. 'I'm only beginning to think about things like that,' I said.
'Well,' he said unhappily, 'I wish you wouldn't. The artist ought not to think so much, it's bad for his color sense.' ...