The Blazing World

Kirsten Larsen Smith (interview, November 2011)

Hess: You have not wanted to speak publicly about your brother since his death in 2003. Can you tell me why you decided to talk to me?

Smith: Ever since I read the book by Oswald Case on Rune, I’ve been thinking about setting a few things straight about my brother. It’s been eight years since he passed away, and after I spoke to you on the phone, I knew I was ready to say my piece. It’s been building up for years.

Hess: You feel the book misrepresented your brother?

Smith: You bet I do. First of all, he turns Rune into some underprivileged child. The way he writes it, you’d think he had grown up as a dirty little piece of white trash running around in the woods behind our trailer, wiping snot from his nose with his arm and eating dinner out of a can. Dad owned and operated the biggest garage in Clinton. Our mom had two years of college, and she was an excellent seamstress. She could have been a clothing designer in some other city. We were not poor. We lived in a nice house and drove two cars. Case never talked to anybody who really knew us, except Mrs. Huggenvik, who was senile by then and had always been a persnickety woman anyway.

Rune was older than me by four years. Dad said that from the day I could walk, I followed my brother around, and most of the time Rune was pretty nice to his little shadow. I know it’s hard to believe, considering how much he grew, but Rune was a short, fat kid. He loved candy, comics, Lego, and the movies. He used to read the newspaper every morning and take notes on the articles he liked in a little book he carried around with him in the back pocket of his jeans. If he had been a good athlete, that little book he kept with current events in it might not have mattered, but he stank at sports, so the other kids picked on him at school. Then he grew seven inches the year after he turned fourteen and, all of a sudden, he was this tall, handsome guy with girls calling him up on the phone and sending him love notes.

I’m sure Rune talked Case’s ear off about his life, but my brother stretched the truth. It became a habit with him. Even when he wasn’t lying straight out, he could pull the facts every which way, and sometimes, after all the pulling, there wasn’t much truth left.

Hess: But if I remember correctly, Case writes that Rune cultivated myths about himself. I don’t think he believed everything Rune told him.

Smith: No, he didn’t believe everything Rune told him by a long shot, but he made Rune’s fibs and exaggerations into some fabulous achievement. You know, his position was that Rune was so creative he told this story and that one, and isn’t it great that he lied and kept secrets from everybody? I think that’s perverted, don’t you? Case seems to think that if you’re a famous artist, you don’t need to be a moral person like the rest of us. And then, Case paints a portrait of Mom that is so crude, so nasty — it really upset me.

Hess: You felt your mother was portrayed inaccurately?

Smith: Mom drank. Case had that right. I don’t think we ever knew how much she really drank every day. She hid it, and the problem must have gotten worse and worse, but for years she coped pretty well. She was not a “pathetic, weepy, female boozehound.” That’s a quote from the book. My great-aunt Susie used to call Mom “Sunshine” because she had such a magical smile. Mom knew how to play with us kids better than any grown-up we knew. She could run and do cartwheels and swing upside down on the jungle gym we had behind the house. She worked hard at hemming skirts and pants and doing other alterations for her clients, and she liked to make fancy dress-up clothes and costumes for me and Rune. You should have seen us on Halloween. I think she liked my sparkly, frou-frou princess outfits even more than I did. You see, Mom had been one of those drop-dead beautiful girls. Every time she walked down the street, heads swiveled to look at her. She liked to tell us about the day she was walking down the street in Clinton, just minding her own business, when a man stopped her on the street and said, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life.” That was all. He went on his way, but Mom’s eyes would get bright and glassy every time she told the story. When being beautiful is the best thing you’ve got, it’s bound to be disappointing because you have to get older. She called herself a dreamer. She used to say to me, “You’re the practical one, Kirsten. Rune’s the dreamer. You’re like your father. Rune’s like me.”

She was a fragile person. Sometimes I thought she’d break like glass, just shatter one day, and I guess she finally did. We worried about her all the time. We used to listen at her door in the morning to see if she was getting up. If we heard her walking around in the bedroom, we knew everything would be okay because she’d be at breakfast before school. On days when she was sick — that’s what Rune and I called it when she drank too much, being sick (alcoholism is a disease, so the word pretty much sums it up) — on the days when she was sick and couldn’t get up, Rune used to forge an excuse for school to stay home with her because Dad had to go to the garage. Rune would make her lunch and watch her eat it to make sure it went down. I know because I stayed home sometimes, too. He’d vacuum and pick up in the living room and clean the bathrooms. I mean, by the time he was nine or ten he was an expert. Yes, Mom was a sentimental drunk. It made her “lovey-dovey,” as Rune used to say. If we found a bottle of vodka we’d pour it down the toilet, but she was clever and obviously we never found all of them. She drank vodka because it doesn’t smell and she could mix it with anything. Sometimes she cried, and Rune would sit beside her, pat her, and give her Kleenex. “I’m so sorry, kids,” she’d say over and over, and then she’d hug us really hard.

Because Rune was older, he felt responsible for Mom and, although he didn’t show it, I think it made him angry underneath. He used to snitch things and hide them in his room: a couple of dollars from Mom’s purse or a new box of potato chips or cookies from the cupboard. I suspect he nabbed things from stores just for the thrill of it. He had key rings and flashlights and doodads you see hanging near the cash register at the grocery store in his “stash.” He needed to hide things, and he needed to have secrets. Rune invented a special code for the two of us. It wasn’t too complicated. For each letter in a word, we’d count two letters that came after it, and we’d have a secret message. We left Y and Z the way they were, so sometimes I’d come home after my clarinet lesson and see a note on the table: OQO KU UKEM. “Mom is sick.” We got good at that one. Not long before he died, Rune called me MKTUVGP on the phone, pronounced Mik-tuvga-pa. That’s how Kirsten came out. He hadn’t called me that for years. We had to put in vowels just to pronounce those crazy words, but you get the idea.

Rune used to tell me he remembered when our parents got along. All I could remember was fighting, not physical fighting, but yelling, crying, and door-slamming, or silence — the two of them hardly talking at all, ships in the night. I’d climb into bed beside my brother and ask him to tell me about “before,” and Rune would put me to sleep by telling me that Dad used to come home with big bunches of flowers and valentines on Valentine’s Day for Mom, and back in those days, he said, Mom didn’t drink at all. He said they danced together in the living room like a couple of lovebirds, smooching and hugging. When I got older, I realized he was making it all up, but my point is that he was making it up for me. Case makes fun of my job in the book, too. It’s unbelievable. Everything’s a joke to that guy. He writes that my work probably influenced Rune’s art, but he says nothing about the accident.

Hess: The accident?

Smith: The accident when I was eleven. I was on my way to ballet class with three of my friends. Jessica’s mother was driving, and I was in the passenger seat because that day the girls decided I smelled bad. Honestly, girls can be so stupid and mean. I pretended I was too good for them. They all hopped into the back, said there was no room for me, and I ended up in the front seat, which is a highly important detail because a few minutes later a car sped through the light at an intersection and smashed into the side of the car where I was sitting. The last thing I remember was the sight of the dirty gray bottoms of my ballet slippers lying in my lap. When I woke up, I was in the hospital with cracked ribs, torn ligaments in my back, a dislocated shoulder, a broken jaw, and a sliced-up face. I could easily have died, so everyone said I was lucky. They sewed my face together, but I had to have six plastic surgeries over the years to repair the keloids and scar tissue.

You know, what’s funny is that right after the accident, things were better, in the family, I mean. Mom stayed with me, and she seemed pretty sober, and after Dad left work he came straight to the hospital. He didn’t talk much, and my jaw was wired shut so I couldn’t say a word to him. Even nodding hurt me in the beginning, but he held my hand and he’d tighten his grip and loosen it and then tighten it again, and he smiled at me with a pitiful look on his face. Rune made me little houses from Popsicle sticks, which I liked, and Jessica, Gina, and Ellen, who had walked out of the smashed car without a scratch, were so guilty they brought me cards and flowers, and that felt good.

The doctors did a great job on me, and as you can see, I only have a few minor souvenirs, but it was hard losing my old face. When Mom first saw me, she sobbed and sobbed. I’m sure she thought my life was over. I mean, what was a girl going to do with a face like that? I became a craniofacial technician because I understand what it means to lose your face, to look different and have to live with distorted features. It is extremely interesting work, and believe me, there are people much worse off than I ever was, and whatever I can do to help restore a person’s identity is positive. I don’t think that’s so comical, do you? When Rune made The Banality of Glamour, I know he was thinking about me in the hospital. He was thinking about my surgeries and how tough they were. That work was personal, you see. In the book, Case makes it seem as if nothing Rune did was personal. He makes him into a robot, not a person, but that was not my brother at all. His problems, and he certainly had them, were personal. And now that I’m on a roll, I want to say Dad did not drown those kittens.

Hess: But kittens drowned?

Smith: It happened before the accident. When I was seven and Rune was eleven, we sneaked a stray cat into the house, Joe, who turned into Josephine when she gave birth to a litter in our hamper. We were not allowed to have pets, and we were scared Dad would find out. It didn’t happen often, but every once in a while Dad blew his top, and when that happened we’d both run like the wind because you didn’t want to be in his way. He didn’t hit us, but he threw things. Mom and Dad were both out, and that’s when Rune grabbed the six pink, blind kittens and drowned them in a big bucket in the garage while I scratched, kicked, pounded on him, and screamed bloody murder. They died right away. Rune stood there looking down at them with a sad and surprised look on his face. I don’t think he knew himself why he had done it. I buried them in the dirt under the holly bush in the backyard.

I should mention that there were people in Clinton and on the farms around town who drowned kittens routinely. I thought and still think it’s inhumane, but animal rights wasn’t such a big concern then as it is today. I didn’t speak to my brother for two days, but then he came crying to me because he felt so bad, and I forgave him. And Case was right about one part of the story. Rune took good care of Josephine after that. She never became a house cat. She was a roamer, but Rune had her spayed and fed her every time she came around for food.

Hess: Are you saying that Rune regretted what he had done?

Smith: Yes, he seemed really sorry, and I think he was. Rune played perfect, if you know what I mean, the model citizen, the all-around nice American boy, but it was partly an act, a put-on. I used to see it happening when he talked to Mom and Dad or other grown-ups. He’d get this special hidden look on his face, a disguise, really. With his friends he was different, tougher and cooler, but was that really him? I don’t think so. It was lonely for him. That’s why he needed me. If you hide yourself too much, you get isolated and sad. We had fun together, even during the really bad time after my accident and Mom was sick, and Dad was pretty much useless except for going to work and coming home. Rune used to help me with my makeup to cover up some of the scarring, but he’d do my eyes and mouth, too. The artist in him was hard at work with sponges and brushes, and he’d say, “Look at you, glamour girl.” He’d be really proud, and sometimes he’d turn me into a witch, and we’d laugh so hard we had to lie down on the bathroom floor and hold our stomachs.

Mom passed only a year later. I had turned twelve and Rune was sixteen. Rune and I were home. We’d been in the house for an hour, but I peeked in the door and I thought Mom was sleeping. When Dad came home, he went in to get her up and then he saw that she wasn’t breathing. It was pretty bad for all of us. After she was gone, we felt lost. We had all spent so much time worrying about her and taking care of her and loving her and hating her, we didn’t know how to organize ourselves anymore, how to be together. Before Rune left home, he had black moods, days when he’d go into his room and stay there, lying on his bed with a towel over his face. Once he broke the mirror with a baseball bat. Dad and I heard the crash, we ran into Rune’s room, and he was just standing there, grinning. I helped him clean it up. Dad turned around, walked out, and never said a word about it.

After Rune left home, Dad and I were alone in the house. He had his Thursday poker game and we went to church every Sunday. Dad was a sort of quiet believer, I think, and he liked the church suppers and the company. I was glad when he went out, period. Then I left home for college and worried about him because I could see him shuffling around the house, fixing himself hot dogs and beans or a Swanson’s frozen dinner in the evening, and it depressed me. I called home every week but Rune didn’t. I sometimes felt my brother had departed for another dimension Dad and I couldn’t have entered if we’d wanted to. I think I was partly right.

He came back, though. That’s another thing. Rune lived with me in Minneapolis when he supposedly dropped out of sight and couldn’t be found. He had come home to visit Dad, and while he was staying with him, Dad fell down the stairs. Rune called 911 and a little later he called me. The doctors told us he’d had a stroke. They guessed it happened while he was on his way down to the basement, and that he fell and then injured himself more. He never regained consciousness, but he lasted a week, and then he passed away. Rune took it so hard. Dad and Rune never got along too well, and after Mom died, I think Rune reminded him of her — too much of her, if you see what I mean. They looked a lot alike. Dad also thought it was absolutely nuts to be an artist, but that’s a pretty typical attitude. Our father was not some strange bird in that regard. Dad recognized the Mona Lisa, knew that Van Gogh had cut off his ear, and that Picasso made pictures of people with scrambled faces. That was about it, but so what? I was closer to Dad because we understood each other, I guess. I used to work to try and cheer him up when he was down. I’d do little dances for him, play him something on the clarinet, show him my good report cards, rub his shoulders, whatever. Sometimes my little schemes worked. He used to call me “his brave, hardworking girl.” After Dad’s funeral, all the air went out of Rune. He was so depressed he could hardly move, so I said I’d put him up for a while. I had graduated from college, done my training, and had my first job.

Rune would lie in my den on the sofa, staring at the ceiling for days on end. I finally got him to a doctor, who prescribed medication. Whether it was the drug he was taking or something else that got him going again, I don’t know, but he started moving around, eating a lot more, and fiddling with his sketchbooks, but he turned nasty. He complained about my cooking, my clothes, the way I talked — that nasal Midwestern accent, ugh. One morning he was actually out of bed before I went to work, and he started criticizing my apartment and the convertible sofa he had been sleeping on for months. “Do you have any idea how cheap and tacky this thing is?” He started kicking it with his foot. He called the furniture vulgar and crass. It was unbelievable. “This is what you want?” he said. He kept saying that. “You want Jim and shag carpeting and some middle-class shithole ranch house for the rest of your life?” Jim is my husband. He was my fiancé then. We met at work. I said, yeah I wanted Jim and a house and my work, and I wanted children, and what the hell was his problem? He told me he’d “severed” the name Larsen from his existence. Did I know that? He and I were no longer related. He hated Mom and he hated Dad and he hated me. I told him not to bad-mouth the dead. You have to understand I had been supporting Rune. He didn’t have much money then, and it wasn’t any fun to have Jim over with Rune moping around, but he was my brother, and I stuck with him. I did what I had to do. I took care of Rune. He had taken care of me when I was little, after all.

And then he told me that he was having a fight with Dad before he fell. I felt sorry for Rune. It made sense that he fell apart. I said it must be awfully hard to live with that, and he said, “How do you know I didn’t push him?” I screamed at him that Dad had a stroke. He just stood there smiling and said, “But we don’t know when he had it.” I was stunned, literally. I mean, if someone had bonked me on the head with a bowling ball, I couldn’t have been more amazed. He must have let a minute go by, seriously, a whole minute. Then he started laughing and said, “Oh my God, you believed me, didn’t you? You must think I’m the devil. You think I could kill my own father? What kind of a sister are you?” And then he said he had another one for me to try on. He said Mom had climbed into bed with him when he was little and touched him sexually, more than once. “Do you believe that one?” he said to me. He said that and just kept on smiling. I didn’t believe it. “You’re crazy,” I said. I told him he had to be out by the time I came home from work.

When I came home that day, Rune was gone, but my apartment had been trashed. He had broken all the glasses and plates in the cupboards and turned over chairs and burned the sofa bed with cigarettes and cut my rug into pieces and left his turds smeared on the toilet seat.

You know, a normal person doesn’t do those things. A normal person doesn’t say, “Maybe I pushed my father to his death,” and then, “Maybe my mother molested me,” and then destroy his sister’s apartment. I kept saying to myself, My brother must be out of his mind. Without Jim, I don’t know what I would have done. Jim and I got married sooner than we had thought we would because I didn’t want to stay in that place anymore. We didn’t tell Rune, and he didn’t call or write to apologize or anything. My own brother scared me. Of course, I found out that he had gone back to New York and plunged into his art again. Things went really well for him, but without the Internet I wouldn’t have known. My friends here in Minneapolis aren’t keeping track of artists in New York City. I know he was famous, but he wasn’t famous out here.

Hess: You weren’t in touch with Rune?

Smith: No, not for years, not until September 11, when I panicked. I called his gallery, that’s how I was finally able to reach him. Nothing really mattered to me then, except knowing that he was all right. He was the only family I had in the world, except Jim and the kids. We started calling each other once in a while, and eventually I asked him about the awful things he had said. It’s hard to explain how terrible it is to have those ideas in your mind, even if you don’t believe them. It pollutes your thinking. Someone comes along and throws dirt into your head, and you can’t clean it out. He said he had lied to hurt me and that sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. He liked to be outrageous just for the heck of it.

Hess: But you didn’t visit each other?

Smith: No, Jim didn’t want him near the kids. I had to respect that, and the truth is, after that terrible day, Rune made me nervous, too. I wasn’t sure of him anymore.

Hess: I have to ask if he ever mentioned Harriet Burden to you.

Smith: Yes, a couple of times. At first I thought he was talking about a man, but then I realized Harry was a woman. He told me he was cooking up something with her.

Hess: Those were his exact words?

Smith: Well, I don’t know if those were his exact words; something like that.

Hess: Anything else?

Smith: He seemed to be enjoying himself, and he thought she was refined. Refined was a big word in Rune’s vocabulary. He said she was really smart and had read a lot and they had things in common. I don’t think there was anything else.

Hess: He didn’t say what they had in common?

Smith: No. You explained to me that he might have stolen her work. It sounds awfully complicated to me, and she sounds fairly nutty herself, using those guys to show art that was actually hers, but I just don’t know. He didn’t talk about Beneath at all until after the show, and then he sent me some clippings. Listen, I wish I could tell you he confessed everything to me, but I can’t.

Rune and I loved each other as kids and then we grew apart. It wasn’t easy for either of us at home, but was it that bad? I don’t understand what happened to him, why he turned out the way he did. His death was just plain sad, and I don’t really care if he wanted to kill himself or not. He must have known that taking those pills was dangerous, that he might kill himself if it went wrong. After all, that’s how Mom did it. There are days when the whole story comes rushing over me, and I get pretty low. I try to keep a positive attitude, but it isn’t always easy, and then I just feel like crying. But that’s not every day. And I say to myself, Rune will send my kids to college. The money from his estate will pay for Edward and Kathleen, who never even knew him. Something good will come out of all the sadness.