What I Loved

to be, it became the obsessive thread of his existence, one he would follow indefatigably to its end. His enthusiasm was infectious and also a little wearing. He quoted scholarly articles to me, handed over xeroxed drawings, discoursed on the significance of threes — three sons, three daughters, three wishes. He played folk songs that were distantly related to his investigations and put penciled X's by works he thought I must read. I rarely resisted him. When Bill came to me with a new thought, he never raised his voice or showed excitement with his body. It was all in his eyes. They burned with whatever insight he may have had, and when he turned them on me, I felt I had no choice but to listen.
    In five years, Bill produced over two hundred boxes. He illustrated a book of poetry written by a friend, continued to make paintings and drawings, many of them portraits of Violet and Mark, and he was usually building some contraption or vehicle for the boys. These brightly colored playthings rolled or flew or spun like windmills. Mark and Matt were particularly fond of a crazed-looking boy puppet who performed a single trick: when you pulled a lever in his back, his tongue popped out of his mouth and his trousers fell to his ankles. Making toys was a vacation for Bill from the grueling work of the fairy-tale boxes. They were all the same size — about three feet by four feet. He used flat and three-dimensional figures, combined real objects with painted ones, and used contemporary images to tell the old stories. The boxes were divided into sections that resembled small rooms. "They're two-D and three-D comics without the balloons," he told me. But this description was misleading. The miniature proportions of the boxes drew on the ordinary fascination people have with peeping into dollhouses and the pleasures of discovering them, but the content of Bill's small worlds subverted expectation and often created a feeling of the uncanny. Although their form and some of the magical content recalled Joseph Cornell, Bill's works were larger, tougher, and far less lyrical. The tension inside each work reminded me of a visual argument. In the early pieces, Bill counted on the spectator's familiarity with a story to retell it. His dark-skinned and dark-haired Sleeping Beauty doll lay in a coma on a bed in a hospital room. IV tubing and the wires of a heart monitor entangled themselves with elaborate floral arrangements sent by well-wishers — gigantic gladioli, carnations, roses, birds-of-paradise, and ferns that choked the room. Ivy from a pink basket wove itself into her hair and curled into the receiver of the Princess telephone that lay on a table beside her bed. In a later scene, a cutout of a naked man with an erect penis hung in the air over her bed as she slept. The man held a large pair of open scissors in his hand. In the final image the girl was seen sitting up in bed with her eyes open. The man had disappeared, but the flowers, tubes, and wires had all been cut and were lying in a knee-deep mess on the floor.
    Later, Bill adapted more obscure stories for the boxes, including one we had read together in Andrew Lang's The Violet Fairy Book: "The Girl Who Pretended to Be a Boy." A princess disguises herself as a young man in order to save her father's kingdom. After numerous adventures, including rescuing a captured princess, the heroine finds that her trials have transformed her into a hero. The final image of nine squares showed the story's protagonist standing in front of a mirror dressed in a suit and tie. At her crotch was the unmistakable bump of manhood.
    The summer of 1987, Bill finished a piece called The Changeling . It's still my favorite work of that series. It was Jack's favorite work, too, though for him the piece was about contemporary art — a play on identities, replicas, and pastiche. But I was closer to Bill than he was, and I couldn't help but believe that the artwork with its seven rooms was a parable of sorts taken from his own inner life.
    In the first room, a small sculpted figure of a boy stood in his pajamas in front of a window with his hands on the sill. He looked to be about the same age as Matt and Mark were then — ten or eleven. Outside, night had fallen, and three windows from the adjacent building glowed with electric light. On each window Bill had painted a scene — a man talking on the telephone, an old woman with a dog, and two lovers lying naked in bed flat on their backs. The