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no
politics,
and what was worse, he didn’t see any problem with that, being more passionate about a few square feet of painted canvas than he ever was about the escalation of the war in Vietnam. I remember how impatient I used to get when they started talking art theory, Walt and his friends, I think because I couldn’t imagine such talk being treated with anything but contempt by the veterans I knew.
The arguments about formalism they pursued deep into the night seemed to me so far beside the point as to be immoral.
    Agnes felt as I did, but when she confronted Walt on the apolitical issue he always eluded her. Only once do I remember her cornering him, or at least angering him sufficiently that he exploded, saying he had no time for art that tried to change his mind about the world.
    “Who needs it?” he shouted. “I have a show!”
    “That has nothing to do with it.”
    Agnes in those days was tenacious, also blunt. Her style was confrontational, and she was impatient with evasion.
    “I have to sell the work! Why else would I do it?”
    I don’t remember her answer exactly. It was along the lines, I think, of a work of art being about more than its commercial viability. Walt stamped around the loft mocking us as sentimental fools. Philistines.
Romantics,
worst of all.
    “You probably think art is about beauty!” he shouted.
    “No, I don’t,” said Agnes.
    It was late at night. None of the windows had drapes, so life was lived after dark against huge rectangles of blackness. I remember once discovering on Walt’s shelves a book of plates by Goya. It was titled
Los Caprichos.
It contained the drawing beloved by psychiatrists the world over: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” Nothing could better express what was happening to America in those years, but I was more interested in another drawing, “Here comes the bogeyman,” which showed two terrified children clutching their mother’s skirt while she gazes up at a cowled and hooded figure standing before her in shadow. Goya’s caption says in effect that it is wrong to teach a boy to fear the bogeyman more than he does his father, and thus make him afraid of something that does not exist—
y obligarle a temer lo que no existe.
    The problem in those years was the refusal to recognize a bogeyman that
did
exist, and that ravaged the minds of the men who’d had the misfortune to encounter it, and whose suffering was then compounded by the willful blindness of those who denied its existence. Walter eventually came around to our side, as my mother did. She was as vehement as any of us once she had, but when she first met Agnes she still believed that Nixon was going to end the war.
    She’d let things slide after Fred left her. The apartment was always awash in newspapers and discarded clothing and empty glasses. She was a full-time writer by then; she’d come to it late, but her two novels had been respectfully received. One afternoon I took Agnes up there and we found her sitting by the empty fireplace with a book in her lap staring into space. She was a little drunk. She rose with a small cry of pleasure. Agnes knew to expect eccentric behavior. I remember how she gazed at my mother with a curiosity in which I detected no trace of intimidation.
Agnes wasn’t a woman who could be pushed around, of this I was well aware, but at the same time I’d been accustomed to think of Mom as the force indomitable. I went to the kitchen for drinks, and when I came back the two of them were already arguing about the war. Did we talk of nothing else? Mom was a heavy smoker, and it was wrecking her throat. Her voice was hoarse and scratchy. She was telling Agnes we had to be in Vietnam or all Southeast Asia would be lost.
    “Lost to what?” said Agnes.
    “To Communist China. That’s why your brother went over there.”
    “Danny was drafted.”
    “At least he didn’t burn his draft card.”
    “He believed what they told him.”
    “And he doesn’t now.