Katherine Keenum (14 page)

“In the weeds.”

“Here? Marvelous! We must have a treasure hunt some day. She’s quite fitting, you know—patroness of arts and trades.”

“We do know; and we are also quite up on Diana, Proserpine, and Juno,” said a new voice.

“And Hecate, Miss Richardson—Medusa? Winkie, my lad, these are sacred precincts from which my unhallowed masculine feet had best be off. Since yours remain, be good. Miss Pendergrast, keep an eye on this fellow.” Effie, who had effaced herself as usual in the presence of a forceful man, giggled in delighted alarm. “Mlle. Borealska, your servant.

“I’ll be back for you at nine,” Robbie added to Emily, in a solicitous undertone. He bowed slightly to Jeanette, glanced a challenge to Amy Richardson, and left without a backward look.

Sonja gestured for the rest of them to enter and grabbed up the stand, which she carried one-handed at a tilt like a lance. “Mind the step.”

“Mind my skeleton!” said Mr. Winkham.

If the stone floor did not exactly weep moisture as Sonja had implied, it did have a cool luster, except where it was topped by runners of straw matting. There were bricks and planks stacked against the walls for building catwalks in the wetter months, and rough bins to store canvases sat permanently on wooden pallets six inches off the ground. Sonja led the way to the north end of the shed, where a wide double window and a skylight let in the summer evening sun. She set down the skeleton beside a couple of wooden crates for Jeanette and Emily to use as stools. Nearby, on a heavy, tarpaulin-covered table, stood two lumps, wrapped in damp towels.

Cousin Effie, who had straggled behind the rest, studying sketches pinned to more straw matting on the walls, picked up a linen strip as though to begin unwinding it. “May we peek?”

Jeanette hissed a wordless warning to her to put it down. Too late: Sonja had seen. Yet something in Effie’s undisguised curiosity amused Sonja.

“Why not? But let me.” The fingers of Sonja’s big, strong hands worked delicately to remove the wet toweling without disturbing what was underneath.

“You have the hands of a surgeon,” said Winkham. “Ah, no,” he emended, as a portrait bust of Amy Richardson emerged. Even in its highly unfinished state, a mercurial flash was discernible in the face as though something had just caught the sitter’s eye. “You have the hands of a genius.”

*   *   *

On evenings when Mr. Winkham was free to give a lesson, Jeanette and Effie met him and the Dolsons at the Luxembourg Garden after a six o’clock dinner for the walk to Sonja’s studio, where Amy would already have shared supper with Sonja. Robbie Dolson seldom accompanied the group farther than the park gate at the Rue d’Assas, but when he did, he monopolized conversation. Robbie was a writer, at work on some mysterious magnum opus of undisclosed scope and genre, who in the meantime supplemented a meager inherited income with freelance articles on Parisian life for the popular London press. Although he kept Emily on his arm, he seemed to enjoy making Jeanette laugh, and she was more than ready to listen to his gossip from the
beau monde
or a café where daring poetry was read and incendiary, scabrous songs sung.

Mr. Winkham had ambitions to lecture on medicine as well as become a practicing physician. It was his conviction that workmen’s institutes in London could do much to combat vice and disease by teaching the poor to understand their bodies and honor how nobly and intricately they were made. He had jumped at the chance not only to house his skeleton for a few weeks but to try out his skills as a teacher. He was happy to begin by explaining how bones and muscles worked if that was what the ladies wanted. Entrails, too, he thought important—how could they portray the body cavity if they had no notion of what was at work inside? (They voted him down.)

They started by measuring individual bones and worked out ratios. They twisted Mortimer into different positions and thumbed through a textbook Mr. Winkham brought along to clarify his explanations with engravings. Exhilarated by having Mortimer at her disposal, Sonja disappeared from her painting class for a few days at the beginning of July. When the others next arrived one night, they found all twenty-odd bones of the left foot and ankle laid out neatly on the table.

“What have you done?” demanded Mr. Winkham, angrily.

“Posed a practical problem for the evening’s lesson.”

“But it’s all in pieces!”

“With the other foot intact as a model. Here I have beautiful copper wire, very pliable,” said Sonja. “We shall reassemble the foot, bone by bone. I promise, the foot will safely articulate each natural movement.”

“That may well be, Mlle. Borealska, but you never asked permission!”

“Sonja,” Amy said, “I regret to say it was just like you to disassemble someone else’s property without asking. Nevertheless, Mr. Winkham, wouldn’t you say now that the best thing all around is to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?”

“
Death’s left foot lay a-lying on the table
,” sang Jeanette.

a-lying on the table,

a-lying on the table.

Dear Wee Willie, we are willing now and able

to put him right again.

Mr. Winkham turned on her furiously. “This is not some silly girl’s school!”

Jeanette winced.

“Winkie,” said Emily, with conciliating softness, “it will be all right. We won’t leave until it’s all put back together. Sonja really is very good with her hands.”

Mr. Winkham swallowed his anger as if he knew he must accede. “Very well, ladies, start with the toes. There’s one for each of us,” he said, curtly. “Pick up a distal phalanx. I see, by the way, Mlle. Borealska, that you have laid everything out with taxonomic precision.”

“Naturally. This is a scientific demonstration, not a parlor game.”

“The devil it is.”

Later, when she had a chance, Jeanette said, “I should not have called you Wee Willie, Mr. Winkham. I’m sorry. You don’t like that nickname, do you?”

“No,” replied Mr. Winkham, disarmed by her forthrightness, “Of course, with a name like mine—William Winkham? I ask you. And me being short—well, inevitable, I suppose. It’s all right coming from Dolson, but—” He broke off. “I don’t mind plain Winkie so much: We all got stuck with something—Dolson was Dolly at school.”

“He wasn’t!”

“He was.”

“Do you ever call him that?”

“Not often.”

Somehow their brief conversation put the two of them on a different footing, more trusting, more confidential. Jeanette came to think of him as Winkie, a friend, and not merely an appendage of the Dolsons.

“Oh, he’s worth a dozen Robbie Dolsons,” agreed Amy, when Jeanette said something about him later, “not that it will ever do him any good.”

“What do you mean?”

Amy hesitated before answering. “Maybe that some people are born to be taken advantage of, that’s all.”

*   *   *

As August approached, talk turned one night to where it would be best to spend the month.

“All of Paris empties,” Amy explained.

“More likely it’ll be stuffed to the gills,” said Jeanette, “what with the World’s Fair and all.”

“Tourists don’t count.”

Even Sonja was locking her door behind her and decamping. “I go to Italy.”

“Italy! In August? You can’t,” said Amy. “It will be boiling hot, and pestilential. It will make Paris seem like the Arctic by comparison. You’ll catch Roman fever. Nobody goes to Italy in August.”

“Thus it will be cheap. Somnolent peasants will pose without knowing it, and no bustling Englishmen to spoil the view.”

“It’s the sun will spoil the view, my girl. Glaring down white and reflecting off every surface. Even under an umbrella, you’ll have to squint to see a thing. Impossible to paint.”

“Where are you going, Amy?” asked Jeanette.

“Back to Brittany, of course. I must have the sea for at least part of the year, you know.”

“Artists congregate in Brittany more thickly than in Julian’s ateliers,” said Sonja to Jeanette and Emily. “Gray studies of gray beaches and low, gray waves rolling up onto the gray shore. A stalwart woman with her sturdy back to us peers out to sea, dressed in drab olive—”

Amy threw a balled-up muddy rag at her.

“Robbie wants us to go walking in Switzerland,” said Emily. Mr. Winkham looked around at her sharply.

“Do you?” asked Amy.

“It’s sure to be sublime,” said Emily, without sounding convinced.

“Sublime is forty years out of date and exhausted by Turner,” said Amy.

“Are you sure you have the strength for mountain climbing?” asked Mr. Winkham.

“I must, Winkie, or I’ll slow Robbie down,” said Emily. “If I don’t go, neither can he.”

“Why not?” asked Jeanette.

“Because he has to look after me,” said Emily, as though it were obvious. “I couldn’t stay in Paris by myself.”

“You
could
,” said Amy, who lived alone, “or you could go visit cousins back home in England.”

“There aren’t any we haven’t quarreled with.”

“What about coming somewhere with Cousin Effie and me?” asked Jeanette. “We could get up a ladies’ party. What do you say, Cousin Effie?”

“My, it would be good to get out of this heat. A city is always hot at the end of summer; you have no idea what New York can be like.”

“Amy, how expensive is Brittany?”

“It all depends. Pont Aven, where I’m planning to be, is not bad, and the farther inland you go, the cheaper the lodgings.”

“Could the three of us get a cottage?” asked Jeanette.

“Detached? Maybe. More likely rooms to let in a farmhouse.”

“You girls could go sketching and I could keep house,” said Effie, wistfully. Her voice gained strength as the beauties of the plan revealed themselves to her. “And, then Mr. Winkham,
you
could go hiking with Mr. Dolson! Anyone can see you’re particular friends.” Winkie opened his mouth to say something, but Effie prevented him. “It would do you both good—fresh air, manly company. Miss Richardson, if you come in with us, too, and share the rent, it won’t cost a thing. Do you suppose we can find a place with a goat? I’ve always wanted a goat, such sweet faces, though not a billy; they smell.”

“A goat is not guaranteed in Brittany, Miss Pendergrast, but all too likely,” said Amy. “There would certainly be barnyard fowl pecking at the door.”

“Which would mean fresh eggs!”

“It was just an idea,” said Jeanette, alarmed to see Cousin Effie’s tether slipping loose.

“But a jolly good one,” said Amy. “Let’s give it some thought.”

“Oh, there’s no need to think,” said Effie. “I always find that when the right idea pops up, the decision has already been made.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Going Down to Brittany

I
don’t think Amy was glad that Emily’s brother rode down with us to see her settled
, Jeanette wrote home in a letter about the party’s train trip to Brittany,
but honestly he was a big help. He did things like lift everybody’s overnight gear into the luggage racks, and at stops, he fetched refreshments. All day long, it was the funniest thing how he kept pulling maps and books out of his pockets.

Robbie Dolson could discourse on a wide range of topics, but he could also listen when he chose. He questioned Jeanette on life in small-town Ohio as if she had come from somewhere as remote and bizarre as the outback of Australia, with opossums for kangaroos.

“You certainly needn’t travel to Pont Aven for the picturesque,” he said. “Why ever did you come to France at all?”

“To learn to paint what I see, of course!—and what I think.”

“Now, that is very interesting—though a word of advice: Spend no more than a year or two at Julian’s, or you’ll lose your originality.”

“Hear that, Emily?” said Amy, without looking up from her book.

“Emily’s originality is irreducible,” said Robbie. He leaned back, stretched out his legs, and closed his eyes.

Dismissed! thought Jeanette. Yet later, while the others were dozing, Robbie looked across at her. “Originality is the very deuce,” he mused, as though there had been no interruption in their conversation. “It’s all that matters in the end, all that wins one a place in history, but you never know whether your glittering brightness is the real thing or fool’s gold. As true for us writers as for you painters. Why do you suppose we do it?”

“Because if we don’t, we’ll always be wishing we were,” said Jeanette.

“It’s certainly the only way to be with people who halfway understand. Not that most of one’s acquaintances don’t turn out to be lackwits or drones.”

“I feel guilty saying it, but do you know something? When I went to the World’s Fair and saw all those hundreds of contemporary paintings, after a while they began to look alike. Not the subject matter, of course, but technically.”

“Subject matter, too. They run in herds.”

Jeanette grimaced. “What’s worse is how you sometimes get fooled into thinking they are realistic when they’re not true to life at all. The funny thing is, here I am trying to acquire those very same skills and practicing on all the same subjects.”

“Strange girl to be so candid.”

*   *   *

The women had decided to wait until they reached Brittany before breaking the trip. It was six o’clock when they reached the hill town of Vitré, where Amy had reserved a couple of rooms. Everyone was tired; the sky was overcast—not heavy with storm, but low enough to make gray stone buildings and timbered gables more glum than quaint. Against such a sky, the half-ruined castle high on a precipice remained gloomily romantic, but what Jeanette really wanted was a hot meal.

At their hotel, a small one on a side street, the landlady regretted that her house was almost full. Perhaps if
monsieur
would accept a small room under the roof? He would.

“I have a view of the castle!” Robbie reported, when they gathered again downstairs. “Well, a view of a bit of the tower. If I lie prone across the foot of the bed, I can see it out a window under the eaves. If someone were signaling with a lantern up there, I’m sure I’d know it. The room must usually go to pirates, smugglers, or spies.”

Amy cut short his description. “Let’s eat,” she said.

*   *   *

Next day, Jeanette woke up early, very early, to a hint of dawn where the shutters were slightly ajar. Slowly and carefully, she peeled back the covers so as not to disturb Cousin Effie and tiptoed to the window. It must have rained overnight, for the world smelled wet; overhead the pale sky was clear. She slipped into clothes—at dawn the stealthy spy crept forth, she thought, smiling to herself.

In deep shadows below overhanging gables, a steep, crooked street climbed to an open square where a moss-furred, utilitarian fountain trickled. As Jeanette approached, the first sunbeam touched it. Mist floated off tiny bracts. She paused, captivated by the miniature world of sunlight, green growth, and water particles. A few yards away, a flock of sparrows, twittering softly, popped out one after another from a heavily branched vine surrounding a door. Taking fright, they disappeared into the leaves again, diving with a beat of wings. As she walked on, she tried to take in everything—the sound of a dog barking, cooking smells, dark crimson dabs of geranium petals in window boxes. At the top of the hill, she leaned on a wall to look over pitched roofs and chimney pots down to the sheen of the river Vilaine where it reflected the sunrise. Narrowing her eyes to reduce visible detail to abstraction, she analyzed the scene into simple areas of light, medium, and dark. If she expanded the range of tones to five—white, ash, medium gray, charcoal, black—how much would that help? In this light, not much. Next, what was most important in what she could see? What would Mr. Dolson call an original view? Straightening up, she made a circle of her thumb and forefinger to frame compositions. After weeks of focusing only on the human body, it was liberating to embrace the larger world.

A memory of Effie’s Dr. Murer floated across her mind. They had been looking at landscapes in the Russian galleries at the World’s Fair. “After this, if I never go to Russia, I’ll still feel like I’ve been on the steppes,” he had said, with a quiet conviction that moved her. He was nice. She had the feeling he was the sort of man who would know what mattered even if she could not have said what she meant by that.

*   *   *

The journey by rail on the second day was less than half the length of the first; but at Quimperlé, they had to wait from noon until six thirty for the horse-drawn diligence, which would take another four hours to reach Pont Aven. The good news, said Amy, was that it would deliver them to the very doorstep of the Hôtel des Voyageurs, where they had rooms reserved for their first night.

In Quimperlé, Amy proposed that they stroll around the market to pick up a picnic supper to eat along the way. “The diligence shakes, but the road is surprisingly good.”

“One up to Napoleon III,” said Robbie. “However tinselly and factitious the late emperor’s reign may have been, he understood roads.”

“Marius Renick helped finance the gravel crushing,” said Effie.

“Good lord, Miss Pendergrast, the journalist’s bonanza,” said Robbie, as he took her by the elbow.

Amy drew Jeanette aside and fell back a few paces. “Are you two actually acquainted with Marius Renick?”

“A little. Mrs. Renick had us to dinner when we first arrived in Paris—my parents know her brother back in Ohio.” Jeanette was not about to go into the details of that horrible night. “She’s taken to inviting Cousin Effie for morning coffee.”

“You do know that they have one of the best private art collections in Paris.”

“No, I didn’t! I mean, there are Watteau panels in the dining room, but I thought they belonged to the house, and some gorgeous modern things in the salon. I did notice those.”

“Yes, and bless your compatriots for buying from living artists. Not everyone does. She collects artists themselves, too, by the way, everyone from painters to actors to writers.”

“I sat next to Hippolyte Grandcourt at dinner,” said Jeanette, unable to resist the pleasure of name-dropping.

“Did you, indeed. Lucky girl,” said Amy. “Well, in addition to whatever they display as decorations, there is reputed to be a gallery well worth the visit if ever you are asked. And if you are, and if you are invited to bring a friend, do remember who told you about it.”

*   *   *

In the diligence, Jeanette sat by the window and watched as the long summer’s evening waned. Conversation flagged. A golden haze spread like a thin varnish over a slanting heathland and hovered in the air, brightest where it was closest to the ground; it made the shadows more, not less, impenetrable. Scattered sheep, their backs dirty and nubbly, were virtually indistinguishable from the coarse heather and broom. If there was a farmhouse tucked in somewhere out of the wind, no gleam of oil lamp nor trace of smoke betrayed it.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere so remote,” she said, dreamily.

“That cannot be true, Miss Palmer,” said Robbie, without opening his eyes. “America is the land of wide, open spaces and trackless wastes. You can’t fool me.”

“It’s not just distance; it’s something about emptiness and secrecy and time,” said Jeanette. “This is an old landscape.”

“Druids,” said Effie.

“Very poetical,” said Robbie, still with his eyes closed.

Sunset faded into the late, northern dusk. Dusk deepened to a summer’s night of pale stars. The passengers, including Jeanette, nodded off.

A rattling plunge jerked her awake as the coach pitched into a steep declivity. Louder than hoofbeats and the creaks of the vehicle as it strained against its brakes came the tumult of a river in a rocky course. “Thank God,” said Amy, “we must be starting down Toullifo Hill. That will be the Aven you hear. We drop plumb into Pont Aven.”

The coach clattered down between two stacked rows of houses and into the main square, which, despite the hour, was peopled with shadowy knots of villagers—men here, women there, their hands busy with knitting and their winged Breton coiffes like giant white moths in the darkness. Outside the Hôtel des Voyageurs, men sat at little tables, men in straw hats or berets. Their corduroy smoking jackets and velveteen waistcoats showed faintly brown in the light of two oil lanterns: the artists “thick on the ground” against whom Sonja had railed.

From the doorway, a magisterial woman in kerchief and coiffe bent to say something to a guitarist on a bench against the wall. He laughed and struck a chord. As Robbie jumped out of the coach to hand down each of their party, the guitarist strummed insistently faster and faster, louder and louder. Robbie lifted Jeanette’s hand in sportive exaggeration. Saucily pointing her toe, she sprang down lightly with a twitch of her shoulder. The next instant, she felt a fool when he helped Emily down gravely. Jeanette stepped to one side but stood with her chin up, still hoping she looked pretty. After a final chord, the guitarist thumped out a hollow rhythm with his fingers on the wood. “Miss Richardson!” called an American who stood talking to someone at the nearest table.

“Charlie Post, as I live! Don’t tell me Rag-Tag and Bobtail are back, too. Nobody warned me you lot were coming.”

“Where else would any of us be in summer, Miss R? I’m at the Gloanec. Regular supper and drink for me, thanks, and stagger up to bed on the premises. Ragland and Nagg, with their dour Presbyterian views on liquor, took a shanty below the quay. I’ve got my big canvas in their shed. Dolson, what brings your disreputable carcass this way?” Mr. Post, a sandy-haired American of about thirty, looked inquisitively at Emily. “That’s not the famously guarded family jewel, is it?”

“Don’t be offensive, Post,” said Robbie, coldly, and made no introduction.

“Do I detect a midsummer frost?” asked Mr. Post, raising his eyes to the sky and holding out his hands palms upward. “Weather may be warmer a bit south; I’ll be off.”

“Who was that?” asked Jeanette, as soon as he was out of earshot.

“A most dissolute beast,” said Amy, though clearly she liked him. “Mr. Dolson for once is right. Miss Pendergrast, you must flap your apron and shoo Post away if he ever comes sniffing at our door. But he has an enviable talent for rendering water and wet surfaces.”

“Chic tricks,” said Robbie. Then, as though sparring with Amy were not worth the trouble, he slipped Emily over to Effie’s side. “Excuse me. Must circulate if I’m not to sleep on the ground.” He sauntered over to an acquaintance as if to prove that this was his world as much as Amy’s, in which claim the smell from little glasses of curaçao and absinthe concurred.

Mlle. Julia, as the landlady was universally called, greeted Amy and led them inside. She did not mind that Amy’s party was looking for cheaper lodgings this year; she had no trouble filling her rooms, and the more the artistic community thought of the Voyageurs as its center, the better for business. She suggested a farm that had, in the past, provided a meal and a bed to travelers on the old highway west to Concarneau. Little traffic used the road any more, and she thought that Mme. Gernagan would be happy to let a couple of rooms for the month. Meanwhile, they must partake of a late supper in the common room before bed.

“Well, that was easy,” said Robbie, coming in behind them. He swung a leg over to sit on the bench next to Emily. “Found a bunk.”

“We may have found a place for the month, too,” said Emily, and told him about the farm.

“Oh, no, it won’t do at all,” said Robbie. “I know the sort of place. There will be a loft upstairs under the eaves with three wide beds and everyone sharing, including the passing drover. Still, you must go see it for local color.”

“We shall certainly go,” said Amy.

“Whereupon you will see what I mean, Miss Richardson.”

*   *   *

The next morning, Jeanette had to admit to herself that she hoped Robbie Dolson would not turn up before they had seen the Gernagan farm; but just as they set out, he did, tousled and much in need of a cup of coffee. A quarter of an hour later, they headed west over the main bridge beyond the market square. Outside town, the road sank between banks deeply shaded by old oak trees until it came out onto open land that tilted toward the sea in long slopes. They found a roadside shrine they had been told to watch for and soon drew alongside a walled farmyard where a cart gate was open.