Katherine Keenum (25 page)

Your ever grateful and obedient partner in drollery,

R. Dolson

“What cheek,” said Amy, but Jeanette hugged Emily.

That night, after she had grinned at the note, Effie said, “This should make Cousin Joseph very proud, and Sarah, too.”

“Mama does believe in self-reliance,” said Jeanette, weakening inside a little at the hope of pleasing her mother.

“With two publications and a third in the offing—? Of course, she’ll be tickled pink.”

“But what about this piece on the models’ market? You’ve already done one, and . . .”

“Oh, it’s too different from anything Mr. Dolson will write to matter.”

“Very well, then! Here are five francs apiece for pin money—mine for me as the artist; yours for you as the agent.”

“Not equal shares!” said Effie.

“It’s what every bloodsucking parasite of a gallery owner charges,” said Jeanette, doling out the coins.

“Well,” said Cousin Effie, a little flustered, “all right then, just this once.”

Effie deposited her five francs in the ginger jar, but Jeanette splurged at an art supply store. To her ever-growing collection of scavenged paint scraps, she added a large tube of lead white, a few new brushes, and a stack of cheap pasteboards so that she could continue practicing Amy’s exercises in juxtapositions of color and paint mixing at home.

*   *   *

With Emily back in town and Sonja turning again to graphic work, Amy suggested Saturday sessions at which the four friends could pose for each other. The first week, when Jeanette set off for the Rue Madame, she took a little time to dawdle and enjoy the street despite a freezing fog. At a grocer’s window, bunches of leeks hanging upside down caught her eye: Roots were spread out like frothy fringes above white stalks; these, in turn, descended to spreading skirts of green. They looked like some exotic flower. How French! She almost laughed out loud at the thought of startling Circleville some day by
arranging
fruits and vegetables. At the studio, Amy came to the door wearing a loose wrapper without stays or corsets under her painter’s smock; her hair, usually coiled and pinned tightly, was braided loosely at the nape of her neck. It was like being back in Pont Aven. In the studio, the coal stove was lit.

“Heat—what bliss!”

“The Witkiewicz children pay for it,” said Sonja. “The count, their father, approved my portrait of his wife. Now he tells me to paint
les enfants
but insists that my studio be warm for them. You supply coal, I tell him; I supply stove.”

“You didn’t!” exclaimed Jeanette.

“She did,” said Amy. “But not until she had told him Polish children should be indifferent to cold.”

“They should,” said Sonja.

“What did the count say?” asked Jeanette.

“Purchase coal.”

A few minutes later, Emily arrived, bringing with her the warm, buttery smell of baking. “These are just out of the oven,” she said, holding out a paper cornet spotted with grease. “
Pains au chocolat
. We can save them for elevenses . . .”

“Not if they’re hot right now, my girl,” exclaimed Amy. “I’ll make coffee, and we’ll have a second breakfast.”

“No time,” objected Sonja. “Set them beside the stove to keep warm.”

“And be tantalized all morning? Not on your life.” Amy whisked the bag away and headed for the kitchen.

“Robbie refilled my housekeeping fund, and I thought I might as well stand us a treat before he dips into it again,” said Emily, as she shed a fur-lined mantle. It dated perhaps from the forties, and the fur was worn in spots; but it was warm and somehow suited her.

The second breakfast cost them half an hour. Nobody but Sonja minded, and she was pacified when Amy said, “Pose me first. I’ll pose you last, and you only have to sit for an hour.”

*   *   *

Jeanette followed Amy in a standing pose. When it was Emily’s turn in the afternoon, Sonja told her, “For your face, so pensive, so delicate, I have special use. I embark this spring on allegories. Here, sit.” She placed a straight chair on top of a crate for a model’s throne. “Now hang your head down to the right, please. Lower shoulders.”

“What thoughts shall I think?”

“Deep regrets or sorrow,” ordered Sonja.

Emily’s face saddened.

“Not sorrow, secrets,” suggested Jeanette. She thought Emily should not brood like that for an hour and a half; feigned emotion bled too easily into the real thing.

“What on earth
are
you thinking?” demanded Amy, as Emily turned enigmatic.

“I tell my secret? No indeed, not I. It snows and blows and you’re too curious: fie!”

“Good lord!” said Amy. “Did you make that up?”

“No, it’s by Christina Rossetti.”

“
Come buy, come buy
,” said Jeanette, throatily.

Wicked stealth crept across Emily’s face though she kept her head turned down.
“We must not look at goblin men.”

“
We must not buy their fruits
,” said Jeanette.

“
Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots!
” they chanted together, and burst out laughing in spite of Sonja’s instructions.

“Christina Rossetti in America?” said Amy.

“Well, we can read, even in the backwoods. I’ll have you know that
Goblin Market
was passed around the dormitory after hours all one semester,” said Jeanette, forgetting that she had vowed never again to allude to Vassar. “We’d whisper
Come buy, come buy
whenever we were warned against the big, bad world.”

“Such warnings, pah,” said Sonja.

“They are not altogether misplaced,” murmured Emily, wistful again.

*   *   *

Three days later, on their Tuesday afternoon walk to the Louvre, Jeanette said, “The goblin men, Emily, is it you or Robbie they’re after?”

“Poor Robbie. Pirates and smugglers after him, I think, or miserly usurers; but he escaped.”

“He seems to have gained the upper hand. You certainly came home from Brussels flush with gold.”

“Enough for now.”

“And the goblin men?”

“Oh, Jeanette,” said Emily, wearily, “they tempt you with luscious fruit and honey from a rock—with visions and when those grow dark, oblivion.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Third Interlude: Rome

R
ome, the red-rose dusty city, was nothing like the halls of white marble that Edward had hoped he would find. The hills were hillier, the surrounding folds and flats of the Campagna more barren, broken at intervals by the ruins of medieval saints’ shrines and relics of the ancient empire. He had come a long way to lose his craving for laudanum only to find it lurking in the dinginess of the Eternal City. He promised himself a day at a time that if nothing improved, he could take a dose; day by day, he succeeded in postponing surrender. He counted the hours. He also adjusted his expectations of what the city should offer as he and Carl explored it. And from the beginning, there was sunshine—such sun! It floated at noon, when the Alban hills swam azure on the distant horizon. In the late afternoon, it glowed in every shade of ochre from yellow to tan to darkest red. As surely as the Black Forest firs bristled in dense endurance against ice and snow, Italy’s conical cedars and open umbrella pines promised the return of summer. Not that there were never cold or rainy days; there were, and then Edward’s leg ached. But almost from the start, entire days could be spent out of doors, resting against a sun-warmed stone wall or sitting at an open-air café, or strolling in the vicinity of the Piazza Colonna where well-dressed men seemed to have nothing to do but devote their time to genial idleness. It was a wholly new experience for Edward to welcome ease as natural. He might have accused himself of lotus-eating had he not awakened one day toward the end of their second week glad to greet the morning, satisfied with the previous day, unafraid of the day to come. Neither lotus nor poppy conferred such a solid sense of well-being. He wondered for a moment how long it could last and knew in the next it was better not to ponder the question.

Carl had booked them into a hotel safe from bedbugs but well shy of opulence. His apt choice for two unpretentious American bachelors of adequate means impressed Edward favorably until he realized that their arrival had been duly noted by the American colony in Rome. They were taken up as indispensable commodities: unattached gentlemen. Had he been alone, Edward might have declined all the invitations. But knowing that he was a dull dog as a companion for Carl, he made an effort; and if he listened more than he talked, so much the better for the other guests and his hostesses. Carl came back late one night looking self-consciously pleased with himself and tried to slip into bed without arousing attention. The moon shone in through the shutters, which Edward had left open, and betrayed him. “So now you know,” said Edward, from his bed. His own initiation had been with a prostitute, too, a scrawny, bitter camp follower; it was a scene too hurried, coarse, and sordid to afford much pleasure in recollection except at the revelation of entry into a woman’s soft moisture. He hoped the Italian had had more leisure and a greater willingness to lead sensually. “Remind me in the morning to warn you against the clap.”

Despite his own widening circle of friends and activities and Edward’s contentment with what he called plain loafing, Carl never altogether neglected his uncle. He bought a Baedeker and showed a willingness to visit churches, monuments, museums, and recommended vistas on the principle that a man might as well get the benefit of the Old World charm he had paid to come and see. As January flowed into February, that charm came to include burgeoning verdure, the first flowers, and the fragrances of spring. Given the drabness they had first encountered, they were both astonished by the beauty—Carl with naive enthusiasm, Edward with an almost disbelieving gratitude. They had both read enough to know that they ought to have expected it, but nothing secondhand could prepare them for what they saw and smelled and felt in their blood. The insides of churches and palaces came to seem cold and clammy by contrast to the sweet air found in gardens or on drives to villages in the hills. They went to Florence; they went to Naples.

Edward would have gone on to Provence if the Renicks had not returned to Paris in mid February. After the acute phase of his nervous attack passed, he still tired easily and without warning. He was sometimes unaccountably jumpy. The first time he realized that Cornelia must have left Marseilles, he felt a panicked need to follow her to Paris as if she would otherwise be lost to him forever, as if Jeanette Palmer and her friends would be lost, as if he would be cut off from the new life he was groping toward. Habit enabled him to bite his tongue. Gradually, the waves of sudden desperation, the feeling that he was on the brink of losing something immeasurably precious, ceased as he got used to the sense of time outside of time during this Italian interlude. It was better still when thoughts of Jeanette Palmer arose in his mind, unbidden, and he could look forward calmly to seeing her again.

March unleashed an ever-mounting exuberance in nature; April promised to be better still; but Edward and Carl both began to stir. Italy was splendid, but it was not where they belonged. They needed to move on.

“Well, what shall it be? Freiburg? Vienna?” asked Edward, one day.

“You know something, Uncle Edward?” said Carl, “I’m thinking Cincinnati. If you ask me, it’s about time to book passage home. I can’t see going back to the
Hochschule
, but I’m turning into mush.”

Edward was momentarily taken aback until he realized, with a wondrous lightening of spirits, that Carl’s desire to go home made no difference to him. He could do whatever he wanted. And he wanted to return to Paris.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Carolus-Duran

E
ffie was fully recovered from her cold by the time the Renicks returned to Paris in mid February and was again invited to spend mornings tête-à-tête at the Rue de Varenne. (Cornelia’s fashionable friends never paid calls before lunch.) On milder days, she assisted Mrs. Renick on slow walks around the extensive garden behind the house. She ran errands or played social secretary, helping to write out invitations and the like. Without a clearly defined position in the household, she became a fixture. Footmen stood straighter when she passed, and the parlor maids dusted more vigorously if she was sent to fetch something from a room where they were working; but she never trespassed on the prerogatives of Hastings, Cornelia’s lady’s maid Bette, or the housekeeper. Indeed from all the servants she learned a great deal about negotiating her way through the city.

“You’re very wise to pick their brains,” said Cornelia, one morning. “What odd corners they will send you to for your Lady Artist’s Guide! Speaking of which, where have you sent the three samples you showed me?”

Effie mumbled something about nowhere yet, she wasn’t sure, they weren’t ready to show.

“Nonsense, they’re marvelous. I feel quite able to hire a model, now. I’ll tell you what. Send them to the New York
Weekly Panorama
. The editor is an old friend; use my name. I shall write him you are bubbling over with other ideas.”

That night, Jeanette helped an excited Cousin Effie put together a packet. And then toward the end of the month, while they waited to hear from the
Weekly Panorama
, Effie brought home other news closer to hand: Carolus-Duran was to begin painting Mrs. Renick’s portrait in March. Owing to her infirmity, moreover, he would go to her house rather than she to his studio.

“She’s having a dress made to his orders, and gloves and everything. Oh, my, it’s quite a to-do.”

“Cousin Effie, could you wangle me an invitation to sit in on a session?” begged Jeanette. “Tell Mrs. Renick I promise I wouldn’t get in the way; I’d hide behind a curtain or anything.”

“Well, I, I . . .”

“
Please
, Cousin Effie.”

Effie, who could seldom bring herself to ask personal favors, would probably never have worked up the courage; but Cornelia invited Jeanette unprompted. She was to come in the early afternoon of the second Tuesday in March, the fourth sitting.

*   *   *

On the magic Tuesday, when she arrived, Mr. Renick was just on his way back to the bank after lunch but delayed his departure long enough to escort her up to the gallery where the sitting had begun. At their nearly silent entrance, a young man with a heavy dark mustache and short beard started to rise from his chair off to one side. Mr. Renick stopped him with a curt shake of the head. At the far end of the gallery, Cornelia sat facing them on a settee, dressed in yards and yards of gold satin trimmed abundantly in lace. Clustered at her breast was a corsage of crimson roses; behind her hung a dark red velvet backdrop. She wore a long, dark rose glove on one hand; the other held its mate in her lap. M. Duran retreated several steps and leaned back to study her; under the redoubled force of his gaze, even Cornelia seemed to stop breathing. Dexterously, he exchanged one brush for another in a sheaf he held splayed out under his palette. He loaded it and lunged forward to touch in a new color. Off came Jeanette’s right glove as she pulled out her pocket sketchbook and the pencil she always carried at the ready. She opened randomly to an untouched page. As she kept her gaze on the three figures, her hand worked rapidly, semiblind. A quick curved line for M. Duran’s shoulder; downward plunge for his upper left arm; round sweep for his huge, tilted palette (he must be strong to hold such a monster); twitchy little zigzag for the ruffle at his wrist. (Ruffles!) On to the other visitor: beard over sloping chin, raised knobby knee, extended long leg. Now back to the main figure. Jeanette’s heart beat a little faster as she raced against the moment when the composition would change. She badly wanted the romantic profusion of M. Duran’s bushy black curls, the confidence running through his powerful, broad shoulders.

“The hidalgo puts on a good show,” murmured Mr. Renick.

“He paints a good portrait!”

“He does, which is why I hired him.”

Unless M. Duran’s ears were extraordinarily good, he could not have made out the words of their whispered exchange, but the slight stir caused him to look over his shoulder. Jeanette hurriedly slid her sketchbook back into her pocket. An intelligent flash of the painter’s dark eye registered his surprise at seeing Mr. Renick again, though he had presumably been warned that a young art student, a friend of the house, might appear. He lowered his palette. As he did so, the young onlooker shuffled awkwardly to his feet.

Cornelia came out of her pose, rotated her shoulder with a flirtatious cock of the head, and winked at her husband. Her gaze shifted to Jeanette’s hidden hand. “I saw you, my dear. You were sketching—just like Mr. Sargent.”

So the tall, young man who managed to loom and efface himself at the same time was John Sargent! Everyone in Paris knew he was Carolus-Duran’s star pupil, with a painting of his own in the last Salon, no less. Other art students spoke of him with awe shading into envy, but Jeanette had never met him. Nor did she give him much thought now, except to register peripherally for Amy’s benefit that his pointed-toe shoes matched those of the master exactly; for even a rising star fades in the light of the sun.

And M. Duran outblazed even Mrs. Renick. A Mephistophelian arch to his eyebrow and a pointed beard above his wide collar hinted at danger within the effulgence; anyone could see that he had a temper. Jeanette’s feelings were too mixed to sort out: admiration for his work, chagrin at the mention of her sketching, and naive excitement at being in the presence of someone at the height of fame, especially someone so handsome. Mr. Renick escorted her across the room, delivered her up, and withdrew, saying he really must be off. As introductions followed, Jeanette managed to suppress what Aunt Maude denounced as gush, but just barely.

“Now, Mr. Sargent,” said Cornelia, “my vanity insists on seeing what you have done with me.” The young man handed her the sketchbook readily, unencumbered by false modesty. “Oh, my goodness! This is beautiful—not me,
it
.”

“It, it w-would be my honor to, to present it to you,” stammered Mr. Sargent.

Mrs. Renick clutched the sketchbook to her heart, then turned it outward for M. Duran and Jeanette to see. “You must be a wonderful teacher, Carolus.”

A bow acknowledged the compliment with pleasure. “Perhaps. But it was not I who taught John how to draw. That he learned elsewhere. How well I remember the day he brought his portfolio to my atelier! Not a man present will ever forget our astonishment.”

He turned to Jeanette. “Is it true,
mademoiselle
, that you also were sketching?” If her hot face had not given her away, Jeanette might have lied. How stupid to have given in to the impulse! Her one chance to meet Carolus-Duran and what must she show him? Squiggles—squiggles in competition with a near-perfect drawing. M. Duran was genial at the moment, but his eye betrayed a ruthless, professional efficiency. He would make short work of a talentless amateur.

“I was only taking down an impression, a sort of souvenir—” No. No girlish apologies, no excuses; it only made things worse. Jeanette handed over the open sketchbook.

The drawing was distorted, silly. Mr. Sargent almost tipped out of her picture; Mrs. Renick’s hair might have taken flight. Yet the firm strokes for the master were confidently placed. They widened and tapered like the cut of knife in clay; they had energy.

“Virile,” said M. Duran, while Mr. Sargent, mouth slightly open, looked over his shoulder. “May I?”

Without waiting for permission, M. Duran flipped back to the dirty-edged pages at the front of the sketchbook. Some held first drafts of cartoons; some idly recorded a detail from a lunch table. “
Evidemment vous avez talent et esprit, mademoiselle
,” said M. Duran, “but from so slight a sample, I can tell little more. Perhaps you will show me a larger portfolio?”

“Do you mean,
monsieur
, that you will give me a critique?” asked Jeanette, in hopeful disbelief.

“No,
mademoiselle
. That I do only for my pupils, but I will evaluate your work to see whether there is a place for you among them. You wish to paint, do you not? And Rodolphe Julian tells you to draw, draw, only draw. Perhaps out of class, you paint, in the Louvre—not yet? No, but at home, in the studio of a friend, you put brush to canvas.”

Jeanette blushed and looked down.

“I am right.
Bien.
If I can teach you, I will. If you are not ready, I shall waste neither my time nor yours. Bring examples of your work to my studio on Thursday; I shall be in between nine and eleven.”

*   *   *

From the Renicks’ house, Jeanette walked to the Louvre, loving every tree and streetlamp, every shop, every passerby, every fluctuation of light on the swollen river hurtling by in its spring floods. She passed under the arch to the Place du Carrousel and saluted Victory driving her chariot on the arch at the Tuileries end. A short time later, she slipped in next to Emily on the bench at a work stand in the print department; but after she had spilled out her story, it was impossible to settle down to copying. She went out into the galleries to search for paintings by the artists Carolus-Duran had praised while he painted—Velázquez, Titian, Rubens. In front of a Rubens, she remembered the well-dressed copyist she had seen there on her first visit to the Louvre. Her heart stopped. Could that have been Carolus-Duran himself? It could have been, might have—must have been. From now on, as far as she was concerned, it was; she would count it as an omen.

That evening, Jeanette went through her notebooks and finished drawings to put together a portfolio. She would take it to Julian’s for Amy to review her choices, but she also had another idea. Cousin Effie had kept up with the Reade sisters ever since their return from Pont Aven. “Do you suppose Mabel Reade would give me advice? She studies with Carolus-Duran.”

“Oh my, yes indeed, she does! She has been most interested in anything I can tell her about Mrs. Renick’s portrait. Let’s invite her to tea tomorrow.”

Effie sent an invitation by messenger to Miss Reade and Miss Isobel for Wednesday afternoon. Before they had gone to bed, they received a counterinvitation to come to the Reades’ apartment on the Rue d’Assas at the end of the school day—a much better arrangement, for the sisters had both the room to entertain and a maid.

Miss Reade’s large studio overlooked the Luxembourg Garden and doubled at one end as a sitting room. It was furnished with shabby, well-built furniture. Miss Isobel’s shell sculptures mingled with bric-a-brac on side tables; peacock feathers filled a brass vase; a threadbare carpet of Turkish weave lay at the sitting-room end, but the rest of the floor was bare, the easier to be swept out. Altogether, the place had a knockabout comfort overlaid with frilly, fussy touches.

At the working end of the studio, a large canvas, blocked in and partially worked, stood on an easel. In the innermost corner, away from the light of the windows, hung pictures in darker tones with more emphatic highlights than she used now, rather busy pictures; they clustered above a jumble of framed and unframed canvases stacked against the wall, three and four deep.

“There you have B.C.—Before Carolus,” said Miss Reade with a dramatic thrust of her arm toward the rejects. She swept on around to the easel and the nearer paintings, which hung in honor. “And here you have A.D.—After Duran. Night and day. Mash and distillation.” (The Reade family’s money came from whiskey.) “Ought to destroy all the old stuff, but somehow can’t.”

“Memories, sister; dear, dear memories of places and people,” piped Miss Isobel.

Miss Reade disagreed. “Egoism,” she said. “Extension of the beloved self. You, too, Isobel; you like seeing pictures of yourself young. Take my advice, Miss Palmer, and prune regularly. Everything not indispensable is noxious, says Carolus. Applies to life as well as art. Now let’s see what you’ve brought.”

*   *   *

The next morning, to avoid fiddling further with the portfolio, Jeanette and Effie gave themselves an unusually leisurely breakfast and leafed through all the morning newspapers downstairs in the
pension
dining room. Nine to eleven, M. Duran had said, but they thought it might be a mistake to arrive on the stroke of nine. Although by that time artists all over Paris, and especially art students, would be hard at work, they did not know the master’s habits. Accustomed as they were themselves to an early start, they were left with time on their hands. Back upstairs, Jeanette touched up her hair, changed her mind about how to place her hat, changed it back. Cousin Effie brushed cat hair off her coat only to pick up more when she shooed Boots out the window. Jeanette untied a perfect bow in the ribbon and rifled through the contents of her portfolio. New doubts assailed her about her choices. She slammed the portfolio shut and retied the bow sloppily.