Katherine Keenum (4 page)

“Oh, no need, Sarah. Nobody stands on ceremony these days,” said Mr. Hendrick, cheerfully. “Take my advice: Run along and see what there is to see.”

After that, Mrs. Palmer could hardly refuse; but when they set out, Jeanette was all too well aware that her mother was in no mood to be pleased. It helped that they had several blocks to walk. Whatever she thought of their ultimate errand, Sarah Palmer valued her reputation at home for moving in the larger world and observed the city with interest.

Down Fifth Avenue, Effie led the way briskly. On West Tenth Street, her step slowed as they approached No. 51. It was a large brick building, as wide as three of its neighbors put together and as high as four. Except for its unusually tall, wide windows, it might have suggested a warehouse or industrial workshops. Cousin Effie halted, clutching her handbag to her waist. “M-Mr. Moyer said to go in the front door,” she almost whispered.

Mrs. Palmer waited with an ironic look of detachment. As the youngest and on probation, Jeanette hesitated; but then, not to be deprived of a look inside, she stepped up and held the door open.

Under the high ceiling of the main lobby, several women were mounting prints, watercolors, and drawings onto movable screens. Jeanette wanted very much to investigate, but almost at once Effie found Mr. Moyer’s card on a directory board, and she had to follow her around to the annex.

The outer, double doors of Mr. Moyer’s studio stood open and one of two inner doors had been left ajar. Effie peered around and knocked timorously.

“Who is it?”

“Mr. Moyer? It’s Miss Iphigenia Pendergrast. From the Children’s Aid Society. You said if . . . if ever I were—”

Jeanette’s heart sank. Mrs. Palmer signaled a retreat with two tiptoeing fingers, but just then Mr. Moyer came to the door. A tall, loose-jointed young man in his twenties, with a quick, intelligent eye, he might have been an ambitious country law clerk if he had worn a coat instead of a painter’s smock. He looked surprised to find three ladies at his door, but his face lit up in welcoming mirth for Effie. “Come in,” he said, standing back. When Effie failed to initiate introductions, he held out a hand to Mrs. Palmer. “My name is Frank Moyer.”

“Mrs. Joseph Palmer, Mr. Moyer; and this is my daughter, Jeanette. Please forgive this uninvited intrusion.”

“Oh, not at all. Always open for business.”

“Cousin Effie said we might see your studio,” said Jeanette.

“By all means! Isn’t it grand?” he said, waving his arm to encompass the room. “It really belongs to Payne Hedley, but it’s all mine until June!”

It
was
grand, Jeanette thought, as big as the studio shared by all of Professor van Ingen’s students at once and lit by broad windows that rose from shoulder height to the ceiling. Framed pictures crowded the paneled walls; unframed canvases on stretchers leaned against the wainscoting. The largest picture in the room was some seven feet high by nine feet wide, a panoramic landscape of jungly forest with a parrot and orchids in the foreground and mountains in the distance against a glimpse of luminous golden sky.

“Is this yours, Mr. Moyer?” asked Mrs. Palmer.

“Good lord, no, that’s the
meister
’s. But thank you, ma’am, for thinking it might be. He’s off in South America now, making studies for a companion piece, and it was my great good luck to be allowed to sublet.”

“He’s a follower of Mr. Church?” asked Jeanette, studying the handling of light on the distant mountains.

“Bull’s-eye!” said Mr. Moyer, looking at her with more interest.

“And do you also paint landscapes?”

“Yes and no. In the afternoons, I fill in the backgrounds for Mr. Hedley’s parlor-sized variations on jungle birds and flowers.” He turned around a few of the canvases propped against the wall. They were all about eighteen by twenty-four inches, and all showed some tropical bird or other against a spray of lush blossom. “
Beaks and bouquets to pay the rent
, he calls them. Putting in twigs and sprigs earns me a share of the space.”

“You mean he sells pictures that aren’t all his own?” asked Effie, shocked.

“Everybody from Rembrandt on down has had workshop assistants!” said Jeanette, hoping that Mr. Moyer did not think he had been accused of shady practices.

“The genius does the interesting parts the patron pays for,” explained Mr. Moyer, not in the least offended, “and we groveling journeymen work in his style to complete the background. But come take a look at this. Every stroke mine, I promise.”

The picture on his easel showed a bare-legged young woman in a farm dress and apron, sitting on a split-rail fence as she gazed straight at the viewer.

“You are lucky in your model, Mr. Moyer. She has a lovely face,” said Mrs. Palmer.

“Well,
I
think so,” said Mr. Moyer. “She’s my fiancée, and you’d never guess from my turning her into a frontier lass that she’s just back from Europe. Wait! What am I thinking? Come with me; Susan may be in the gallery right now. There’s a group of them hanging a show of works on paper to open in a few days.”

“We saw them!” exclaimed Jeanette.

“Did you? Susan is deep into pastels these days; I hope some of hers are up already for admiration.”

Back in the main lobby, he led them to a young woman who was hanging a pastel portrait of a little girl, matted and framed, on a line with several others.

“Susan, here are visitors I want you to meet,” said Mr. Moyer. “Mrs. Palmer, may I present Miss Susan Whitmore, lately returned from Paris, France, soon to be the toast of New York City, New York. Susie, this is Mrs. Palmer and her daughter and my friend Miss Pendergrast from the Children’s Aid Society.”

Miss Whitmore was not quite as pretty as Mr. Moyer’s portrait of her, but almost. Jeanette decided to be in love with the pair of them and not him alone. “We want everyone to come in and see that they can—and should—own original art,” said Miss Whitmore, with a sweep of her arm to encompass the exhibition. “Would you like to look around?”

“Not now,” said Mrs. Palmer. “I’ve put on enough meetings to know how much we’d be in the way at this stage.”

“We’ll come back when the show is open,” said Jeanette, quickly. “And please, Miss Whitmore, may I stand off to one side and make a quick sketch of the scene to remember it by?”

“Do you draw? There’s some scrap butcher’s paper around here somewhere.”

“I have a sketchbook,” said Jeanette, pulling one out of her coat pocket. It was three inches by five, too small for most work but useful for jottings.

“Here! Just see what she can do,” said Cousin Effie. She startled everyone by whisking Jeanette’s picture of herself out of a handbag.

Jeanette’s chagrin turned into excitement when Mr. Moyer held it for Miss Whitmore to see. “Do you have a teacher?” he asked.

“No. I’ve been told the best place to study is New York or better yet in Paris.”

“Is Will Sartain taking on pupils, Susie?”

“It’s worth asking. But if Paris is a possibility, then go,” said Miss Whitmore to Jeanette. “I was at the Académie Julian. There’s nothing like it here to prepare a woman for a career. It has the same curriculum as the École des Beaux-Arts.”

*   *   *

“Oh, it was so inspiring, Aunt Maude!” exclaimed Jeanette, when they returned home for lunch and found Mrs. Hendrick in her upstairs sitting room.

“What did I say about gush, young miss?”

“Not to do it,” said Jeanette, in no mood to be suppressed. She knelt down by Mrs. Hendrick’s chair and crossed her arms on the armrest. “We went to some of the dealers’ galleries, but first we met Cousin Effie’s friend, Mr. Moyer, who introduced us to his fiancée, Miss Whitmore. She’s an artist, too, and awfully good; I want to be as good as she is.”

“And what about him?” asked Mrs. Palmer, in a tired voice. “If you are going to measure yourself, Jeanette, measure against the best.”

“Him, too. He
is
good, Aunt Maude. It’s scary to see how accomplished they are! Such competition! But Cousin Effie brought out my picture, and I showed Mr. Moyer and Miss Whitmore my letter from Professor van Ingen. They said maybe I should show samples of my work to a Mr. Sartain, and—”

“That was only politeness,” put in Mrs. Palmer.

Jeanette clutched the armrests tightly. “Why should it be?” she asked, in a strained voice, without looking around at her mother. “And even if they were only being polite, it wouldn’t hurt to try.”

“It would hurt to be rejected, Jeanette. In any case, there’s no point in wasting a busy man’s time. You don’t live in New York.”

“If he agreed to teach me, Mama, that would be reason to stay.”

“Let
us
see how good you are,” commanded Mrs. Hendrick. “Bring down your best work, Jeanette. Put on a private exhibition just for the three of us here. Sarah, you must be curious about your daughter’s progress.”

“Maybe after lunch, Maude.”

“No time like the present,” said Mrs. Hendrick, who had had the advantage of morning coffee.

Jeanette knew her mother was hungry and the time unpropitious, but Aunt Maude was only too likely to lose interest by afternoon. And she wanted to show them her work, to show her mother why it mattered. Upstairs, she quickly gathered some samples and, with a flash of determination, snatched up her unfinished
Shrine of Shakespeare
. Mrs. Hendrick made a point of going through everything at a leisurely, admiring pace. She held up a page with a formal arrangement of hands drawn in pen and ink, taken from various plaster casts. “They almost look real, as though they could move.”

“Hands are harder than cheeks or noses,” said Jeanette. “They have so many subtle lines and angles. And they’re expressive.”

“Expensive, too,” said Mrs. Hendrick. “A three-quarters portrait costs more than a head, and the price goes up with each hand you show. I know, because my father checked into it when he commissioned the portraits of him and your grandmother that hang in the library.”

“Some day you must copy them for your father, Jeanette, and be sure to add in hands,” said Mrs. Palmer.

Mrs. Hendrick ignored her. “This is pretty!” she said, picking up a watercolor with a maple painted in deep colors in the foreground and paler washes for distant hills.

“I did that on one of Professor van Ingen’s sketching parties, and here’s where I used the tree in an oil composition.”

“The watercolor is livelier.”

“I know,” sighed Jeanette.

“But I’d rather have the oil on my wall. It’s richer.”

“That’s why I want to master oils—people buy oil paintings. Look, this is a copy I was working on when—” Jeanette broke off.

“When you presented all of us with the problem of what to do with you next,” said her aunt, darting a glance at Jeanette over her spectacles.

“Really, Maude, I think the problem of what to do with Jeanette is for her father and me to decide, not all of us,” said Mrs. Palmer.

Not even me, too? thought Jeanette caustically, but she held her tongue. Mrs. Hendrick had gone back to looking at
The Shrine of Shakespeare
. “What did you learn doing this?”

“Well,” said Jeanette, trying to keep her voice neutral, “you can see where I’ve chalked in the church building. The first task is just to get the outline and proportions right.”

“That should be easy. It’s all right there in front of you.”

“Maybe it should be, but it isn’t—not when you try freehand. So you use a grid—it’s like enlarging a dress pattern. And next when you try to figure out the brushstrokes, you learn how the artist gets his effects, like this rendering of the texture of stone in the church. Also, here, let me stand it next to the autumn leaves: Do you see how, even though it’s only half done, these sandy grays and bleached greens are going to induce a very different feeling from the brilliant reds and yellows? There’s something restful and Old World about the original painting that I wanted to capture. It’s called
The Shrine of Shakespeare
, Mama,” she said. “I was going to give it to you.”

“Then I wish you could have arranged to finish it.”

“Why don’t you finish it from memory?” asked Mrs. Hendrick.

“I—I wouldn’t want to mess this up. Maybe a whole new canvas,” said Jeanette, who was looking at her mother, not her aunt.

“This one has a certain value as it is,” murmured Mrs. Palmer.

“As a reminder? That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Mama? Here, take it then, as is! Have it framed and hang it in the entrance hall by the front door. You can add a brass plate that says
Her Unfinished Career, by Jeanette Palmer
, and then nobody, nobody, nobody who comes into the house will ever be allowed to forget that your eldest daughter made herself unworthy and was cut off from her talent and training and everything she ever cared about. Only it isn’t going to happen that way, Mama. You and Papa may try to stop me, but you won’t be able to. You are not the only ones who have a say in what happens to me. I
am
going to paint. I’m going to find a way.”

“Jeanette! I’m ashamed of such an outburst,” said Mrs. Palmer.

In her corner, Effie twisted a handkerchief.

“Calm down this minute, young miss, and apologize,” thundered Mrs. Hendrick. “Disrespect of elders will not be tolerated in this house, nor scenes. My girls were never allowed to make them.”

Jeanette squeezed her eyes shut and hung her head while she collected herself. “I am sorry for the way I spoke. It was sarcastic and emotional,” she said, adding under her breath, “but I am going to study art.”

“Hmmph,” said Mrs. Hendrick. “How much would you take for a copy like that—if it were finished, I mean?”

“Maude!” said Mrs. Palmer. “For the love of all that’s holy, is this the time?”

“Might as well clear the air, Sarah. Suppose I were to let Jeanette earn her room and board by making a set of copies for me? Adeline is always saying we need to redecorate. Now suppose this Mr. Sartain—”

“But it isn’t going to be Mr. Sartain or anybody else in New York, is it?” asked Effie, a little breathlessly. They all looked at her in surprise. “Didn’t Professor van Ingen tell you to go to Paris?”