Hotel Honolulu

45 Camera Obscura

The only portrait of Wayne Godbolt that was ever painted by his brother, Will, hung in the Honolulu Academy of Arts for a week before it was removed one morning without explanation. At about the same time, Will flew to Honolulu from his Big Island home and quietly checked into my hotel under an assumed name — strangely enough, his brother's name. I had no idea who these brothers were, but Buddy happened to see Will, and it was he who told me all about them. Their family history was part of the oral tradition of Hawaii.

The sighting of Will at the hotel made me want to see the painting, and it was on that visit to the museum that I discovered it had been removed. A security guard told me that it was being held in a dark room somewhere downtown. "That's appropriate," I said. This man, with the name Balabag on his ID badge, opened his mouth wide, just dropped his jaw, his way of showing incomprehension, something Buddy did all the time. The portrait was called Camera Obscura.

What made the removal shocking was that Wayne had died so recently, and that he and his brother, the photographer and the painter, were so loving toward each other, like twins on a mission. Will's paintings had a fanatical exactitude that was photographic; Wayne's photographs were impressionistic — cloudy, airbrushed, meddled with in the darkroom, with a ghostly and abstract liquefaction.

The painting that had been on view in Honolulu showed Wayne in a darkroom holding his old-fashioned camera. The composition had a scumbled background of glossy maroon-dark paint that was so blistered it made you think of dead beetles and brittle wings. Wayne's eye, just a brush stroke, stared like a camera's lens. An unmade bed, stark as a sacrificial altar, was part of the foreground, but the glossy blistered color dominated. On the Academy wall one day, gone the next. What had happened?

"I'm a vegetarian, he's a cannibal," Will had said of Wayne, the painter brother of the photographer brother. "It's why we're able to love each other."

Will was known on the mainland, and his work sold there; Wayne was not, so his work didn't. That was Hawaii's test of artistic talent and success, though the distance was merciful: because we were in the middle of the ocean, we were unaware of the further fortunes of anyone enjoying celebrity on the mainland. Local people seemed to disappear when they went there, even when they were enjoying great success. Hawaii residents with great reputations on the mainland — W. S. Merwin, Leon Edel — were mostly faceless and unspoken of here. Will Godbolt's paintings were better known in New York than in Honolulu.

The wordy label stuck to the Academy wall explained that a camera was a room as well as a photographer's instrument, and a camera obscura was a simple device for viewing. The label also mentioned the closeness of the two artistic brothers, how they had been raised by their mother in the most fertile part of the Big Island, the slopes of Kamuela. The Godbolts were an old kama'aina missionary family. The mother, Lydia, was a Daughter of Hawaii; the father, Simon, had been killed in the Solomon Islands during World War Two.

The rest I knew. Lydia Godbolt had not remarried. She had raised her children and they had remained her children, had not married, saw her all the time, did portraits of her. Each son's portrait of her was distinctly different, two women entirely. Will used Lydia's own cosmetics on the canvas, lipstick and powder to heighten the facial features, making the portrait an amazing likeness. Wayne's photograph would have been shocking except that the image was almost indistinguishable as a woman and looked like a shattered meringue — just as well, for it depicted his mother in the nude.

The Godbolt brothers still each kept a bedroom in the family house, though for the first twenty years of their lives, until they left home, they shared the same room, on the north side of the house. In that dark room they developed and came of age.

They made many portraits of Lydia, but they boasted of never having portrayed each other.

"No competition!" Will declared. Wayne agreed.

Wayne, the wilder of the two, was a tormentor. When Will had a girlfriend whom he began to call his fiancee, Wayne teased her, teased Will, cried out, "She's hairy! You're a fairy!" Her name was Laura. She winced, anticipating mockery, whenever Wayne opened his mouth. And Wayne mocked. Laura had been in the Peace Corps in the Philippines. "Say 'Rice-a-Roni' in Tagalog!" Then he jeered at her for acting insulted and criticized her for being thin-skinned. "Look at me — I'm harmless!" He so frightened Laura into silence that she stopped making eye contact. Wayne said, "Why are you mute? Being mute is a form of nagging. Silence is aggressive." He kept at her until she cried, and then Will pleaded with him to stop. That night in the dark room, in a knifelike voice, Wayne said, "If you could get rid of her by pulling a plug, would you pull it?"

A luminous life study of the young woman and Will, one of his many self-portraits, hung in Will's studio. Caine and Mabel, Wayne called it. He ridiculed her skinny thighs, his beaky penis. "The bugfucker! Spiderwoman with webbed feet!" Wayne seemed to flap around the studio, his stiff coat flying like big articulated wings. What was most remarkable in this painting was the clotted shade of yellow that made the bodies glow.

The dense sunny color, Will explained, was the sort obtained in India by feeding mangoes to sacred cows and then collecting and evaporating their urine until only a residue like pollen dust remained. This yellow "cow cake" was used for the rich pigment in the holiest temple paintings.

"You've been feeding mangoes to a cow and saving its sheeshee?" Wayne said.

Even in their forties the brothers frequently used baby talk, Wayne more than Will.

"Laura has been eating our mangoes" was all Wayne said.

Wayne was just finding out that fact, yet the technical details that lay behind that painting were described in the gallery's press kit and contributed to the popularity of the traveling exhibition. It was a sellout on the mainland and made Will's name.

Wayne usually ignored Laura, though he invented clownish names for her mother, Carol-Ann (a divorcee who lived in a condo in Aina Haina), for presuming to write poetry, saying it was a sign of approaching senility, calling her Anna Banana, reciting her poems in a screechy voice and English accent, beginning, "Welcome to Masterpiece Theatre." He was rude about the mother's boyfriends, her passion for cats, her clothes, her attempts to get parts at the Manoa Valley Theater. "She's shapeless! She's shameless! She's a thespian!"

This cruelty toward her mother isolated and demoralized Laura. Yet Laura went on cooking for the brothers, and sometimes the ailing Lydia, in the family house. Sometimes, pushing his plate aside, Wayne said, "Yup, I think I'll just open a can of Alpo." He seemed to dance around his brother and Laura, pestering, satirizing, making funny faces, talking baby talk. He borrowed money from Will. He often showed up at Will's openings in old clothes, wearing them like a taunt, and if anyone remarked on them, he screamed, "Snob!"

Wayne's pleas for money were like a reproach to Will's success. Will handed over the cash, but when he mentioned that he needed it repaid, Wayne howled, "I can't believe what a cheapskate you are!" and said he was hurt, all the while demanding more, which Will gave him. Laura said, "What about our future?" Long, horrible nights. Wayne's weird vitality. Will was finally so worn down he wanted to pull the plug.

He didn't have to. Laura, the only woman he had ever loved, left him after weeks of tears, and Wayne, relieved, was gentle and consoled his brother. Not long after that, Lydia died and the brothers were alone. Once, Wayne said, "I owe you so much. Please forgive me." But when Will reminded him of it, Wayne said, "How many times do you want me to say it," speaking with such surprising anger that Will stopped using the word "loan." He said, "This is a gift."

Although Wayne called himself a portrait photographer, and cursed the big businesses in Hawaii for not hiring him to make expensive boardroom portraits, his specialty was abstract pictures of cluttered interiors. He claimed they were aspects of his melancholy — attics, cellars, rooms piled high with junk: musical instruments such as hautboys and sackbuts, printed sheets, fever charts, musical scores for unusual duos, brass fittings, stacks of magazines, stuffed toys, tools such as spokeshaves and plumb bobs, wooden printing type, stenciled crates, a cider press, an oryx skull, closely scratched whale teeth, Shaker baskets, smeared palettes, hand looms, elephant bells. The assortment defied interpretation. Baroque conglomerations, the images were allegories, he said, for the room that framed them was the brothers' dark childhood room.

Wayne screamed like a parrot when sarcastic critics listed the objects, cramming them into a mocking paragraph like the one above instead of — as Wayne demanded — interpreting their harmony and significance.

A pitchfork, a cigar box, a cranberry scoop, a stack of cups and saucers, a flintlock, a gramophone, a dagger, a pair of women's riding boots, a Coca-Cola sign, a mildewed book of piano duets, and two leathery balls that might be mummified heads in an anonymous room.

"The heads and the music were the whole point," Wayne said, and, furious, he never exhibited his photographs again. He had piles of photographs. "I am withholding them!" He put away his old plate camera and hardly worked. He grew scruffy and cross. He began to say, "I like the way I smell."

He knew his brother had become, if not famous, then well known outside Hawaii, which was a great and enviable thing. Will was loved for his vivid colors, the creation colors of the Edenlike islands, including the urinous mango-juice yellow, green from crushed hibiscus leaves, dusty purple from wild plum trees on Java, and a peculiar russet in his Country Road, Kamuela was a pigment of red clay he had scraped from the very earth he had depicted.

"Stop brooding, Willy."

"I never brood."

The brothers were truthful in using their lives in their work, never allowing Hawaii to stand for paradise. Hawaii was a real, flawed place, with melted mountains, fallen trees, iron in the soil, crumbled coral. Full of aliens and transplants, the islands were choked with vines and pests, which had destroyed the old native growth. That clutter had been the point of Wayne's photos. There were angry children in Will's paintings, and on Will's fruit there were always teeth marks.

"We are witnesses!" Wayne said.

The mainland exhibit traveled to Honolulu. After Buddy told me about the brothers, I went to the show and saw that the portrait of Wayne was missing. Buddy had no explanation, though he said he had known the brothers as crazy teenagers when they stayed at the hotel with their mother. It seemed that the portrait had been hurriedly removed by the police. After it was examined, the blistery paint was identified as Wayne's blood. The Honolulu papers reported that Will was wanted for questioning in connection with his brother's murder. Among Will's possessions was a photograph that Wayne had taken of him and cruelly retouched. Will was arrested in his room at the hotel and led through the lobby, Buddy said, "laughing like a naughty boy."