Katherine Keenum (17 page)

Emily drew her legs together and swayed knees and ankles while she settled onto the bottom. She leaned back on her elbows. Jeanette, who had been holding her chin above water, decided it was no good taking her only swim in Brittany without ducking under all the way. She shut her eyes, held her breath, and dropped down. Her breath escaped in a trickle of bubbles. Cold water tickled in over her scalp; it lifted her hair. She shot back upward in a churning commotion, gulping and laughing. By now, Amy was on her way back. When she reached waist-deep water, she stood up and pushed forward, taking heron strides from the hips.

“That’s better,” she said, and headed for the shore.

At the boulders, Amy dried her hands and face with a petticoat and patted herself over lightly; then, laying the cloth on a sun-heated rock that rose like a beached whale, she pressed her hands down and sprang up onto its back. Jeanette followed. After lolling a little longer, Emily came out, wringing her hair, and climbed up beside them. The lightest of breezes raised goose bumps on their arms and thighs until the sun began to warm them again.

“I’m going to be a limpet,” said Emily, draping herself face down over the rock, with her hair spread over her.

Jeanette perched on the whale’s nose, hunched over her drawn-up knees, to watch tiny crabs in a tidal pool below.

“You two are merging into the landscape,” said Amy, who was squinting past them to the opposite shore of the cove. “Your skin has blue tones.”

“Nymphs in Arcadia,” said Emily, sleepily.

Jeanette leaned back in a coy studio pose.

“No, no,” said Amy. “Real nymphs are more aware of water and trees than of men. Blend again.”

Jeanette looked down at herself. “The interesting thing is, we don’t look like nymphs at all, do we?” She flexed her feet back; her calves had a walker’s pronounced muscles. She relaxed them; her thighs went soft where they spread over the stone. “I’m plump—and, Emily, you’re too thin; you need feeding up.”

“I’m pounds heavier. Miss Pendergrast has been seeing to that.”

“You are both beautiful.”

“You’re the beautiful one,” said Jeanette, tilting her head back to look back over her shoulder. Amy no longer had the lissomeness of girlhood, nor were her regular features and thin mouth remarkable in any way; but her skin was clear; she was graceful and strong.

“Did you hear about the time the Countess took home some of the girls?” asked Emily, her cheek still against the warm stone, her eyes closed. “She stripped off her clothes and lay back on her couch—”

“Oh, jiggerums, yes,” said Amy. “
Here is beauty!
they say she proclaimed.”

Jeanette swung around with her knees still up and turned disbelieving from one to the other.

“She did,” insisted Amy.

Jeanette sputtered with laughter through her hands.

“She claims we all cover up our nakedness because we are ashamed of our imperfections,” said Emily, with her cheek on the stone, her eyes still closed.

“
Who can resist the temptation to show off a perfection?
” mimicked Amy, reclining on her elbow with a hand languidly gesturing in the air. She lifted her chin.
“Shame disappears in the presence of supreme beauty; the ideal impresses the mind only with admiration.”

They all three exploded. Emily kicked her feet up and down.

“I hope her mama,” began Jeanette, and broke off, choking. “I hope her mama has hinted to her about other reasons.” She wiped a stinging tear from the corner of her eye. “All the same, she has a point. It is why we idealize from the model. Nobody’s perfect.”

“Which Sonja denounces as all wrong,” said Amy. “Draw what you see; depict reality with all its cross-grained flaws. I say, will you two hold still while I make a quick sketch?”

While Amy slid down to get her pocket sketchbook, Jeanette glanced around nervously to make sure they were still alone. Emily clenched. She’s going to go shy, thought Jeanette. To prolong the moment of ease and hot sun, Jeanette crossed her arms over her knees again and lay her cheek against them, saying comfortably, “Not too long, Amy, or we really will get sunburned.”

“A few jottings only.”

It worked. Although Emily’s face, hidden in her hair, was unreadable, her shoulders and torso went slack again.

“Sit up and look out to sea, Jeanette. Thanks.”

Nearby the air seemed clear, but out toward the horizon, distances were hazy, humid. The week’s hot weather would end in rain—soon, Jeanette supposed, tonight, tomorrow—but not now. It was still too bright for Mr. Post. Her hand remembered the press of his lips; her stomach tightened in revulsion (or titillation?). She tried to push away thoughts of him; daydreams didn’t help, too pallid. She found herself wondering whether Charlie Post ever painted the sea on dark afternoons when storm threatened. If so, would his sun behind clouds suggest promise or menace?

“I’ve had an idea,” she said, aloud. “What would you think of drawing empty rooms as portraits?”

“Why?” asked Amy.

“Because people hide,” said Emily.

“And rooms reveal—but an empty room also hints; it’s suggestive. I guess what I’m really wondering is how we choose our subjects.”

“When a subject is mine, I’m not there at all, only the picture,” said Emily, without looking up.

Jeanette looked around at her, then met Amy’s eye. “Oops, sorry. I moved.”

“Doesn’t matter. Inch way over to the edge and stare down. Lovely. You were saying?”

Seaweed oscillated in the pool below Jeanette; the little crabs scuttled; a wave slopped over the rim. “Well, just now you wanted to draw us, Amy, but I don’t feel any desire to tackle the pool below me even though I could stare at it for hours. Emily’s right that a picture should seem as much outside as in you, but it’s inside, too.”

“Sometimes I start composing a picture and find I’ve done something else when I finish—” said Emily.

“Happens to all of us,” said Amy, matter-of-factly.

“—because other things have crept in,” said Emily, “invisibly.”

“Oh, lawks!” cried Jeanette, scrambling to her feet. “I’ll tell you what’s creeping in, it’s the tide! Our clothes!”

Sure enough, water had crept around the base of the boulder, almost surrounding it entirely. They tumbled down its sides as alarmed as if they had heard someone approach. In their haste to pull on garments—some wet, some dry—they blundered, fumbled with each other’s laces, missed hooks and buttons. Their skirts and sleeves twisted into maddening snarls.

“Don’t put on boots yet, we’re going to have to wade to the path,” said Amy.

“Can we go through town like this?” asked Emily.

“Amy, is that tall boulder the one we saw from the grain field?” asked Jeanette.

“It’s a menhir,” said Emily.

Jeanette shot a smug I-told-you-so glance at Amy, who shrugged: “If anyone knows, Emily does. We’d better reconnoiter.”

They forced their way up through scrub bush. When they reached the stone, they could see a mowed field above them where the grain was piled in neat shocks.

“We have walked into your picture, Amy,” said Jeanette.

“So we have. Come on, then, let’s climb to the top. Emily, you can see Jeanette’s mystery well, after which we’ll sneak our disgracefully disheveled selves home the back way.”

*   *   *

That night, although Jeanette had seen each of Emily’s Pont Aven floral studies as it was completed, she asked to look through them as a group. Emily worked in layers of tiny watercolor strokes that caused light not only to reflect forward off flowers but to pool behind them; shadows receded under foliage. She sometimes painted rows of the cutting garden from almost ground level. The effect was the opposite of Charlie Post’s oncoming wave: Her pictures withdrew; they occluded. And yet, the more Jeanette looked, the more she knew that the work of both artists responded to a disconcerting power more felt than understood.

Mr. Dolson warned against losing originality. Amy said you had to spend time in a place to know it well enough to paint it. It was half enticing, half frightening to realize that you must also plunge past what you knew into what you could only sense. A conviction came to her that her hunch was worth pursuing: Empty rooms could express much about people’s hidden lives. And it came to her also that sometimes you had to take a chance on qualities that you sensed hidden in people, too, people like the Dolsons or Charlie Post—or, oddly enough, Effie’s Dr. Murer.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Paris, Early Autumn 1878

P
arisian artistic life would not revive until October, when the École des Beaux-Arts reopened. Nevertheless, the Académie Julian started up again in September, and Amy had duties. It was time to return to disciplined work.

Early on the damp silvery morning of the party’s departure, Jeanette took one last walk up through the orchard. In late August, branches were heavily laden with fruit; and on a tree that Mme. Gernagan had called a Belle d’Eté, she found a few oblate apples perfectly ripened. When she rolled one back on its stem, it dropped into her hand. A prickly acid under the skin stung her gums and tongue, yet the juice was sweet, with an aftertaste of cloves. For a moment, she rebelled at the thought of leaving Brittany, the farm, the studio where she and Amy and Emily had worked so happily. She looked higher at the sweeping hillside, which blocked the horizon, then turned to gaze down on the farm buildings and the straight rows of vegetables and flowers in the angle framed by house and barn. Next year, she vowed, next year she would be back—not in Ohio, here. And next year she would be painting in oils.

*   *   *

Mr. Dolson and Mr. Winkham met us on the platform when we got back to Paris
, Jeanette wrote her parents. She did not mention that when she waved from the compartment door, the men’s eyes remained fixed solely on Emily.
I asked Mr. Dolson whether he had gathered enough material in Switzerland for an article, and he said, “Easily a thousand words a day in my diary, and more packed into the cranium.” Then he told Emily that an article called “Dispatches from High Places” would feed them on caviar all fall. “And dispatches from low?” asked Amy. “Always an inspiration, Miss Richardson,” he said. Then he and Mr. Winkham whisked Emily away.

After being made to feel invisible on the train platform, Jeanette was glad to return to Julian’s Academy and find that she was no longer the new girl but a regular, chatting away with the others about vacations. She was content—until Emily arrived with a palette and bundle of paints and brushes.

“Robbie gave me money to buy supplies,” beamed Emily. “I took it for a sign.”

Amy and M. Julian had long been urging Emily to take up oils; and after seeing her dense watercolors in August, Jeanette had joined them. It didn’t change her own need to master drawing techniques, but it was a jolt to see Emily pulling ahead.

“Tell you what,” suggested Amy. “As the weeks go by, the floor will be littered with mostly spent tubes of paint. Collect them, and I’ll teach you some exercises in color gradation. It’s never too early to start mastering the tonal scales in color; they are fiendishly hard.”

At noon, Sonja stormed in. “I will hear of your stay in the gray lands later. Welcome back and all that. First you hear my news or I explode. What do you suppose awaits me when I return from Italy? Seven paintings in my studio ruined,
ruined
from a new leak in the ceiling. I demand satisfaction, and that pig, my landlord, tells me to buy a bucket to put under the drip.
Deduct the cost from the rent
, he says. He says the paintings were always unsaleable and thus worth nothing.”

“He said they were worthless?” exclaimed Jeanette.

“Damn his eyes,” said Amy.

“Perhaps you had better just move,” said Emily, with the resigned look of someone who had done it often.

“No. I stay, but I deduct the rent entirely.”

*   *   *

For Cousin Effie, the return to Paris soon brought a welcome resumption of invitations to morning coffee with Mrs. Renick. One morning, as she came into the Poutery, Cornelia said, “Darling Effie, look who’s here!”

Effie stopped. Her cheeks turned pink. “Dr. Murer! Oh, my.”

Edward rose from a chair beside a low table on which stacks of fashion magazines lay mixed up with sheet music and newly bound novels, one with a silver paper knife stuck in it as a bookmark. In an open gilt-paper box, chocolate bonbons nestled individually in gold tissue paper. Perhaps owing to his recuperative year spent with Sophie, he felt at ease amid this feminine clutter. He also perceived his effect on Effie. He was glad, very glad, of a chance to resume his acquaintance with her and, as he hoped, Miss Palmer. At the same time, the reticences that had kept him a bachelor in Cincinnati warned him now to tread carefully.

“Effie, dear,” said Cornelia, patting the seat beside her, “come show us what you’ve brought. Effie has been to the Bon Marché for me, Edward, to pick up samples of lace. And Edward has just been telling me what it’s like to live in the land of half-timbered houses and cuckoo clocks.”

“If the Brothers Grimm weren’t dead, I’d expect to see them coming down the street any time to collect folk tales,” said Edward.

While Cornelia fingered pieces of lace one by one and spread them on her knee, he went on with his description of Freiburg. The center of town was far more medieval than either he or Carl had been prepared for, while the industrializing suburbs were rawer and newer. “It’s been a dye-making region in a small way for centuries, and people are used to seeing colors run in the rivers from time to time, but they complain now when arsenic kills the fish.”

“Arsenic!” Cornelia looked up.

“A by-product of the alizarin dyes that give you all your vivid new reds. It’s in the effluent.”

“Oh, it shouldn’t be. What a waste! Surely there is some way to recover and reuse it—make rat poison or something. We must tell Marius. That’s the sort of out-of-the-way scheme he loves.”

“It’s what Carl has in mind, too.”

“And where is your golden-haired nephew, by the way?” asked Cornelia. “You didn’t bring him along this morning.”

“I left him in Freiburg, pegging away at his coursework; he’s going on a sales trip soon with one of the cousins. But I’ve waited a whole lifetime to come back to Europe, Cornelia, and I don’t want to spend my whole stay in a dye works. I missed Paris.”

“Oh, so do I, Edward! Every day I miss it, and I
live
here. Trapped, trapped.” Cornelia rocked from side to side in her brace. “Tell me exactly what you are going to do this very afternoon. I’m going to close my eyes and imagine myself walking every step of the way with you.”

“This afternoon? I thought I would go to an organ recital at the Madeleine. It’s only the assistant organist, but—”

“Oh, he’s supposed to be
wonderful
! He’s new, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, he is, and he composes.”

“That much I did know. He’s put something of his own on the program.”

“I can’t bear to miss it. Promise me to come back with a report. Come tell me whether I should invite him to play at one of my little musicales.”

“Cornelia, how much can you move?”

“Oh, Edward, I can walk from one side of the room to the other, using two canes. Up twenty-eight steps into the Madeleine? No, not if that’s what you’re thinking. And I certainly won’t be carried up by footmen in public like some painter’s dummy or a rag doll.”

“So you really don’t get out of the house, do you.”

Cornelia sighed. “Not much. Into the garden mostly. Marius had a backstairs lift installed for taking me up and down in my wheeled chair.” Mischief came into her eye. She held down Effie’s hand and lowered her voice as if she were telling a secret. “And now once a week I’m making the most marvelous escape. It was dear Effie’s idea.”

Effie made a noise of modest protest and smiled into her lap. The points of her cheeks went pink again.

“It
was
your idea, and I’m nothing but grateful! Effie pointed out that I might be able to handle the reins of a trap, Edward. I couldn’t ride, but maybe I could drive. And, of course, she was right—I can! The first time we went, Jacques, the footman, wheeled me out to the stable. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to smell horsiness and hay and stable dust again. I can still feel the tickle of soft hairy lips taking sugar from my hand.”

“You were thrown from a horse, weren’t you?”

“I was. Dear sweet Flora, it wasn’t her fault at all. Some duffer let his mount dash across our path, and Flora reared in a panic. I would have kept her, but Marius was too upset. I can’t tell you how much I miss her. Anyway, now when we go out, Albert, the coachman, brings the trap around to the front door. He and Jacques lift me up onto the driver’s seat, Effie gets in the back, and off we go, Albert, of course, at the reins. He takes us through all the traffic—I am not a complete idiot; I would never have attempted to drive through Paris in all my daring days. But when we get to the Bois de Boulogne, Albert hands the reins to me and takes up his post on the footman’s stand, Effie comes forward, and off we go, trot, trot, trot, ever so free and debonair. I wave to all my friends; I’m seen around and about; I’m not forgotten. It’s a grand jollification, isn’t it, Effie? What an ingrate I am to want more.” Sadness came into Cornelia’s voice. “But I do—so much more.”

“Cornelia,” said Edward, gently, “may I ask the nature of your injury? I don’t mean to pry or be indelicate, but . . .”

“Oh, ask away, Edward! I’m not one of those women who’s afraid to say
legs
in mixed company. Besides, you have seen the offended member muddy and scabbed. Now, don’t blush, Effie; you may have never climbed trees with this man, but I have. It was my knee, Edward: torn ligaments and a fracture—the head of the fibular bone.”

Edward nodded. “That can knock you back, all right. Knees are intricate. Even after the bone knit, you found your foot gave way under you?”

“Suddenly, without warning! My back was hurt, too. No broken bones, thank goodness, but I jarred myself badly when I hit the ground, and I must have wrenched something.”

Did they—? wondered Edward; and blocked the word.

Unaware that she was answering his unspoken question, Cornelia ran on, “They gave me laudanum at first, bless them; it does dull the pain. Well, I don’t have to tell you that, you’re a druggist. You know the dozy haze it puts you in . . .”

He became very still, listening behind a polite mask.

“. . . as though nothing . . . in the world . . . matters at all.” Cornelia’s voice trailed off in a singsong. She snapped back. “Edward, I won’t end up one of those invalid ladies with the drifting stare. The world is much too much fun to leave behind.”

“Were you able just to quit?” asked Edward, enviously.

“Luckily, yes. Oh, but why not? I was always plumped up with cushions and hot-water bottles and had nurses to order around. Two months, and then came the crutches and trying to walk. When my foot gave way one time too many, the doctor strapped me into this contraption of his to keep me supported and rigid. You are frowning.”

“I’m a druggist, Cornelia, not a surgeon, and I’ll assume your man is the best in Paris.”

“He is, but, but—? Go on.”

“Well, it’s just that from my experience—” He remembered from years back the pressure of Sophie’s hand behind his elbow, guiding him; a fleeting memory of touch. Too personal. He changed tack slightly: “From what I saw in hospitals after the war, it was the stubborn ones who wouldn’t stay in bed who mended fastest. I’d have said you should be moving around as much as possible. Restricted muscles wither.”

“That’s what I said!” Effie nodded vigorously.

“And didn’t I see it when the cast came off. Ugly, blotchy, flaky, shrunken; you’ve never seen such a hideous—well, that’s stupid of me. You’ve seen far, far worse. But you’re right: I should be moving; I
know it
! It’s just that Marius is so afraid for me. Never mind. It’s your turn, Edward. You were shot in the leg, weren’t you?”

“Leg, lung, and rib.” He spoke dispassionately, as if merely stating a fact. Yet a simple assent would have been more to the point; he knew it was his analogous leg that interested her. It was not that he longed for sympathy over his wounds; he had had more than enough of that through the years. To state the extent of his injuries was an excuse, a sop to his pride, the old rationalization for his weakness.

“Rib and lung! My dear, no one ever told us.”

“It was a long time ago, and ribs heal. So do lungs, more than you’d think,” he said. “But, yes, I took a bullet in my leg, and it shattered some bone.”

“And
you
walk freely.”

“Well, it’s a different injury. But if you’re willing to try exercise, Cornelia, I’d certainly talk to that medical man of yours.”

The two women exchanged a wordless, excited look. Cornelia bubbled. Pure champagne, thought Edward, and Miss Pendergrast is fizzing like soda pop. Obviously, they were up to more than drives in the park.

*   *   *

That afternoon, Edward attended his recital. He arrived early enough to play the sightseer and walk through the variegated marble splendors of the Church of the Madeleine. Neither an aggressive freethinker like his father nor an indifferent one like Theodore, Edward had turned resolutely away from philosophic and religious speculation. But he had always liked to hear mysteries embodied in music, and he was finding in Europe that he responded to the buildings in which it was played: churches, opera houses, and halls. The neoclassical Madeleine, built in his century and dedicated to a redeemed sinner, was confident and opulent. With a dose of irony, he liked it.