AMONG
THE
ANGELIC ORDERS
213
When Gretchen graduated the next year from the High School
of Music and
Art,
she moved out of her parents' apartment and
rented a cold-water flat on Gouverneur Street. There was a terrible
irony
in
this for Mrs. Weiss-whose parents, when they first came
to America, as hopeful immigrants, came to Gouverneur Street. Mrs.
Weiss consequently found the whole situation of her daughter im–
possible to consider. Mrs. Weiss dimly connected Sheila with her
daughter's new existence-the cold-water flat but an enlargement of
the furnished room-and she would have been surprised had she
known how little Sheila was a part of it. For, although Sheila wrote
many thoughtful letters to Gouverneur Street-there was no tele–
phone-Gretchen saw her rarely. Questions about the ankh went un–
answered, fragments from
The Prophet
produced no response. Once
Gretchen invited Sheila down for dinner and tried to explain her new
self, but Sheila couldn't understand it-or she could, only if she could
bring in Rilke and Madame Blavatsky, .and Gretchen didn't want
them
brought in any more. Sheila took some of her own drawings
with her, she wore the ankh, she was as radiant, as gentle as ever,
but poor Gretchen had begun to feel superior and pitied her old
friend Sheila, as one does in such circumstances. Uneasily, Gretchen
tried to be nice and at the same time honest. Of course, it didn't
work, so she compromised by being cold and nervous.
And then Sheila's drawings, it will be allowed, made things
quite impossible. For Gretchen, remember, was a painter, and just
at this time she couldn't stand anything she didn't like. Gretchen's
own paintings hung on the walls of her dry dusty place, refusing to
be ignored. And Sheila's drawings of the lion and of the unseen forces
embarrassed Gretchen more than anything her old friend
said.
The
difference between the kind of drawings Sheila did-and she was
proud of her own work-and the paintings Gretchen worked on, was
so enormous, so manifold, so-nothing that Sheila said or did could
make up for it. Sheila, as one might imagine, made tight little sur–
realist sketches, coloring them and giving them each a severe moni–
tory name. To Gretchen, those drawings were strange, thin grotesques,
made up of uneasy lines and unmoving figures. They were stiff, they
were graceless, they were full of some mysterious unpleasant inten–
tion-but they were so bad! That was how they seemed to Gretchen
who was just then working very hard at still-life, on moving planes,
