Piecework

He shook his head and smiled in a sad way and sipped a beer. He was pleased that we liked what we saw, but insisted that he wasn’t finished with many of them. He probably wouldn’t show them at the Sidney Janis Gallery show scheduled for May. “They’re not there yet,” he said. Then he turned off the lights and we went back to drinking beer and talked for a while about prizefighters before we all went home through the gray New York morning.

Some of the paintings in color were shown at the Janis show, but most people were impressed by the ferocious Crow Dancer, which was another version of the mounted machine gun, a picture that I think now was called Siegfried. In later years, I saw different versions of what I saw that night, the shapes altered or refined, the colors overpainted. Among them, I’m sure, were the great painting Shenandoah Wall, along with Horizontal Rust and Andrus. Franz certainly didn’t intend to move through the ’60s or ’70s repeating what he had done in the ’50s. He had added color to his artistic weaponry. Like Guston (and in different ways, Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud), he might have returned to the figure. Franz was a man who loved to draw.

But like the Cedar Tavern, Franz Kline didn’t make it very far into the ’60s. In the spring of 1962, Kline, along with Mark Rothko and Andrew Wyeth, was invited by President Kennedy to a dinner at the White House in honor of André Malraux. The date of the dinner was May 11, a Friday. Kline didn’t make it. A week before, he suffered a heart attack and was taken to New York Hospital. While he was there, Janis opened a group show that included Scudera, Kline’s last painting, all deep rich blues, with some red and a broken black square. On Sunday, May 13, Franz Kline died, just short of his fifty-second birthday.

That night, I was working at a newspaper when the word arrived on the AP wire. I was first shocked, then filled with a kind of remorse. In my few encounters with Franz, he’d offered the same hand of friendship that he’d given to so many others. But out of stubbornness or empty vanity, I’d never really taken it. He was too famous and accomplished for us to enter as equals that private conspiracy called friendship. And I was too proud to serve as anyone’s acolyte. By 1962, I’d put painting behind me, with sorrow but no regrets, and gone my own way, into the world of words.

But when the night shift was over, I didn’t go home. At eight in the morning I walked up Rector Street to a newspaper bar called Page One and starting drinking beer. Around eleven, I went to the pay phone and called the World-Telegram and asked for Willard Mullin. When the great sports cartoonist answered, I told him my name.

“I don’t know if you saw the paper yet,” I said, “but Franz Kline, you know? The painter? He died yesterday. And he was a fan of yours. I just wanted to tell you that.”

“No kidding?” A beat. “What was his name?”

“Kline,” I said. “Franz Kline.”

There was another pause, then: “Oh, yeah. Franz Kline. He did those big black and white things, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You know,” the cartoonist said, “I bet that guy could’ve learned how to draw.”

ART & ANTIQUES,

May 1990

KEITH

I.

It is morning in the clubhouse at Huggins-Stengel Field in St. Petersburg and Keith Hernandez is moving from locker to locker, handing out schedules. He is the player rep of the world champion New York Mets; this is one of his duties. Still dressed in street clothes and sneakers, he says little as he hands the sheets to each of the players. At 33, he is young in the world of ordinary men; in baseball, especially on this young ball club, he is middle-aged. Kids and veterans nod and study the mimeographed sheets, which tell them when the bus will leave for the afternoon game and how many tickets they can expect for wives and friends. Hernandez explains nothing; he was out late the night before with a woman down from New York. “Too much goddamned wine,” he says. And besides, he has been here before, through 13 major league seasons; this is a time for ease, the careful steady retrieval of the skills of the summer game.

“It’s all about getting back in a kind of groove,” Hernandez says. “Not about getting in shape. Most of the guys are in shape, or they get in shape before coming down. I worked out with weights all winter, the first time I ever did that, ’cause I’m getting old.” He smiles, shakes his head. “At the Vertical Club in New York. Jesus, don’t go there at five o’clock. It’s fucking insane, a social — No, this is about getting your stroke right. About getting back your concentration. I don’t worry about it much until the last 10 games before the season starts. If I’m having trouble then, then I worry.”