Mrs. Jerrold said, “Well, what can you expect? He’s an abstractionist, you know.”
“Abstractionist?” said my mother. “I don’t think that’s quite right.”
“Oh?” said Mrs. Jerrold. She nibbled at her sandwich again. The way she pinched her lips to take the tiny bites she was taking made her considerably less attractive.
“I thought he was a—what’s it—a symbolist,” said Mrs. Morton.
“No, no, no,” said Mrs. Jerrold, using the same pinched mouth she’d used to take those tiny bites. “She is the symbolist.”
My mother said, “I think my friend Dudley Beaker says that Mr. Glynn is an exhibitionist.”
“What is a symbolist, exactly?” asked Mrs. Vernon.
Everyone except my mother, who seemed to be searching her memory for whatever it was Dudley Beaker had told her about Andy Glynn, turned toward Mrs. Jerrold.
“Welllll—” said Mrs. Jerrold, with a knowing smile.
“No, not an exhibitionist,” said my mother. “That’s something else. An expressionist.”
“I know what you mean,” said Mrs. Vernon, reaching out toward my mother. “I can never remember the difference between Manet and Monet.”
“Or maybe it’s im-pressionist,” said my mother.
“And I can never remember the difference between constructivism and suprematism,” said Mrs. Freed, shaking her head and smacking herself between the eyes.
Everyone turned toward Mrs. Jerrold again.
“Welllll—” she said again, and she turned toward the platter again, apparently because she would need another little circular sandwich before she could explain all the ists and isms that had been thrown her way.
I don’t recall just how Mrs. Jerrold defined abstract expressionist or symbolist that afternoon, but I do recall the impressions that she left with me. I got the vague idea that abstract expressionist meant something like “comedian” or “clown,” and that maybe being an abstract expressionist or expressing things abstractly had something to do with vaudeville, which was another thing that adults referred to with the same mixture of amusement and embarrassment that Mrs. Jerrold used for abstract expressionism. I knew that vaudeville involved performing, too, and Mrs. Jerrold made the point—quite vividly and memorably, waving her arms around quite a lot—that abstract expressionism was a pretty active way of painting, involving a lot of throwing, flinging, and flicking blobs of paint around. She was so good at miming these techniques that we actually cringed when she flung paint in our direction, and my mother’s face took on the same worried look that came over it at the dinner table whenever I tried to talk and twirl spaghetti at the same time. I got the impression that a symbolist might be someone suffering from a disease, like a diabetic or a hemophiliac, because whenever Mrs. Jerrold said “symbolist,” she followed it with a turning-down of the corners of her mouth, and the rest of the group acknowledged this expression with a sympathetic knitting of the brows, and some clucking.
I was left with one other impression from that afternoon: that the Glynns were wonderful, that they were what I wanted to be when I grew up. The idea that they could give themselves up so completely to whatever was on their minds raised the possibility of my becoming everything I seemed to be when I was dreaming.
[to be continued]
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