Once upon a time, Samuel Swerling, a World War II veteran and inventor, decided to build a park. It would be filled with trees trained to grow in such a way that children could easily climb them. He hired Alonso Hannah, a one-armed arborist, and b...
I seem to have gotten a little off the subject here. I was going to tell you about Renaldo Caprice as a means of illustrating what happened to Pepita after she fell in love with her one-armed knight.
The first time that Esther ever saw Renaldo was on the second Saturday in April, after a harsh and debilitating winter. He was a handsome man in his mid-twenties with a straight nose, strong jaw, brooding dark eyes, and a full head of curly black hair. When Esther described him to her grandfather, she said that he "always looks mad," meaning angry, but nine-year-olds are rarely keen on such grammatical distinctions.
He had set up his easel opposite a magnolia tree with petals in full pink bloom.
None of the trees had leafed out yet, so the only other colors in the park that day were the bright reds of tulips, the yellows of crocuses, and the deep purples of hyacinths.
Even back then, Renaldo was an outstanding artist. But we all noticed that there was something peculiar about his work. Everything he painted - flowers, grass, sidewalks, fences, park benches, trees, and even the sky - came out looking like a sepia photograph. No reds. No blues. No yellows. No greens.
But he was so talented that when Esther pointed him out to her grandfather, wanting to play their "What are they saying now?" game, instead of acceding to her wishes, Sam lifted her off my branch and led her toward the painter so that they could stand behind him and watch his brush dart expertly from canvas to palette and back to canvas again.
I have heard (you'd be surprised what we trees pick up while we are eavesdropping) that great artists often paint the same location or a theme or subject over and over again. Claude Monet did haystacks. Edgar Degas did ballet dancers. Marc Chagall did Russian villages. And Henri Rousseau painted jungles.
Renaldo Caprice's location, theme, and subject matter was the Samuel Swerling Park. He painted us in sunlight and in shadow. He painted us in winter, summer, autumn and spring. He painted our fountain, magnolias, maples, gardens, and even the stone bridge that crosses our little artificial stream.
The only things that Renaldo did not paint were people. This means that my fellow climbing trees and I were excluded from his canvases, because boys and girls were always scampering up and down our branches, and students were always reclining in our nooks to read books or lolling away a few hours of being pleasurably inert.
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Often a man or woman striding through the park would pause thoughtfully, as Esther and Mr. Swerling had done, to stare over the artist's shoulder at the image springing from the tip of his brush. Almost as often, they would inquire about Renaldo's other paintings, and purchase one from his studio, or buy the one that he was working on, right then and there. From overheard conversations, I learned that his work was on display in an art gallery on Madison Avenue, and that he was very much in demand.
This was right and proper, since Renaldo was a talented artist, and his paintings were compelling and attractive. But there was something sad about his artwork, too, for he painted a world with delicate flowers, stately timbers, winding pathways, and intricate wrought iron fences, but it was a world without people.
