Three chapters from what I can't bear losing

Andy and Phil went to New York City to find work in commercial art when they graduated from Carnegie Tech. Andy, who already had a stunning portfolio, would in a matter of weeks get major assignments in freelance illustration and design in Glamour, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and other publications whereas Pearlstein got nowhere. Their teacher at Tech, Balcome Greene, who walked around the quiet college neighborhood with his two aristocratic Russian wolfhounds and an aristocratic wife, used his influence to find them an apartment just off Tompkins Square Park, on St. Mark's, for the summer, and that fall (1949) they found an apartment together on 21st Street in Chelsea. I found out later that Andy, after he and Phil went their separate ways, lived in an apartment on West 103rd, the same street I lived on, a block or so away and probably at the same time. But I didn't know it at the time, nor did we ever see each other.

The biography I used has Andy and Phil making several forays to New York before they left for good in the summer of 1949. It describes them boarding a train "late one evening" and arriving at the Pennsylvania Station "around dawn," certainly a perfect time to arrive, just as the light was pouring into the vast hall. They may have planned to meet on the train but it was I who drove Andy-alone-to the East Liberty train station (no longer in existence) in my father's new 1949 Ford and said good-bye on one of the platforms. He had one of those flimsy cardboard suitcases in one hand and a painting maybe twenty-four inches by eighteen in the other, which he apparently intended to take with him to New York. He suddenly gave me the painting, in a gesture of friendship or indifference, which he cemented with a quizzical smile, as if to say, "Do you really want such a thing?" He clearly didn't hold it dear or he didn't want to be bothered with it or he was showing his cosmic detachment or he just wanted me to have it and take care of it. I was delighted with the gift, maybe the first painting I ever owned, and treasured it. My only private place in my parents' apartment, I am a little ashamed to say, was a long closet in which I had built bookcases for my quickly growing collection. I nailed the painting to my wall, the right of the door when you entered alongside the pull chain, and it gave me a secret pleasure when I walked into that closet to retrieve my sleek new Auden or my huge Rabelais.

The painting was grey, blue, and white, with a firm black line, a representation of an older woman, extremely well done, glasses on her nose, a kind of wen on her chin. I had met Andy's mother-Julia-once and the painting reminded me of her. It also looked like Andy himself just as the 1974 portrait of Julia at first blush looked shockingly like him, a stouter, older female Andy, the same face. At least I thought so, his own hand at work this time, the painting less mechanical, more expressive, more vulnerable and emotional, than the other things he was doing. Less detached or ironic. Julia was born in 1892 and Andy in 1928, so she would have been approaching sixty in the earlier painting, an older mother, certainly an older mother for the time, particularly in the Slovak or Carpatho-Russian culture she came from; Slavic Andy.