The Forest Lover (19 page)

“Unfair.” She rolled onto her side away from Alice.

“You've been here seventeen days. If you don't rouse yourself soon, we'll have to go home.”

“No.”

Alice put a telegram on her blanket and left.

Just like in London. Just as I predicted. This second illness in a big city ought to teach you. Give up on art. Come home. Stay home. Dede.

Emily flung it across the room.

The following day Alice brought her a crocus in a pot. Emily touched a violet petal as if it were a jewel. The bright yellow center quivered at the razor edge of sound.

“There are more in Luxembourg Gardens,” Alice said in a tantalizing way. “New sap green leaves everywhere.” She fluttered her hands in the air.

“How'd you know that hue name?”

“I read your paint tube and translated.” Alice gazed at the ceiling and sucked in her cheeks. “All the cherry trees are budding. Too bad you won't be able to see them bloom.”

Emily sat up in bed. The passing of time shocked her. Spring already. She couldn't bear to miss it, colors that produced the new art. To drench herself in apricot, tangerine, pomegranate, apple green, as fruit refreshes the tongue, that would cure her. Alice knew her better than she realized. A sister who wanted her to get out and paint.

“Thanks, Alice. It's a beaut. Better than a pill. I'm sorry I've been so spunkless.”

She slumped onto a bench alongside the canal. Taking the short train ride from Paris yesterday and walking four blocks on cobblestones from her rented room today was all she could manage.
Harry Gibb's promise of special attention in his oil class here had roused her to come to this village, Crécy-en-Brie.

For now, it was enough to breathe fresh country air and feast her eyes on the light washing the houses along the canal with honey tones. Women with suds up to their elbows slapped their clothes in stone wash booths along its edge. Kneeling like that, they reminded her of Sophie pulling roots. Drooping willows brushed the water. A breeze made ripples, which splintered light, breaking up the green liquid. How could she paint that action? Her brush strokes would have to be broken touches—green wisps, blue patches, red and violet daubs, yellow highlights—all to depict light bouncing off water.

Gibb came across a bridge and along the canal path whistling. Dour old Gibb, whistling! He was carrying a cheese and a bouquet of pink lilies.

“Pretty spot, eh?” she said. “In this light the water assumes so many colors.”

“Same with shadows. They take on the hue opposite them.”

He turned to the bridge. “Early tomorrow morning, take that bridge and follow the path to the base of a hill. Get there while the shadows are still long, and you'll see what I mean. I'll be there by eleven for a lesson. Mind you, have something to show me.”

Something to show! She barely had enough energy to keep herself upright. After he left, she dragged herself back to her room and stretched out on the rose chenille bedspread. Dust motes swirled over her in a shaft of sunlight. She let her eyes close in delicious stillness. Just for half an hour.

Her own snoring woke her in darkness. She turned onto her side.
What did you come here for if you weren't going to paint?
Gibb's voice rolled like distant thunder above her bed.

She jerked awake. It was light again. Still in yesterday's dress, she gathered her supplies, folding stool, and new adjustable easel, upright for oil, flat for watercolor, and hurried outside.

It was still early enough that trees and houses laid their shadows across cobblestones and vegetable gardens. She bought a baguette and a salami and trudged across the bridge to the first rise, out of breath. Poplars with new leaves cast diagonal shadows over the path. Shadows of what color? They seemed just a darker shade of the ochre of
the dirt. That wasn't what Gibb wanted her to see, was it? If he didn't think she was capable of seeing what he saw, what then? Would he dismiss her?

She laid in the cottages, hedgerows, poplars, and a copse tangled with honeysuckle and wild roses. What an astonishing miracle. Here she was, wrung-out Millie Carr, painting again, smack-dab in the middle of France, about to take a lesson from someone who cared enough not to let her waste the day.

Gibb ambled up the path wearing a farmer's straw hat and carrying two apples.

“It's a perfect whiz-bang day,” she said.

He held up both apples, turning them, and gave her the more dazzling one, pale yellow generously streaked with red-orange. Taking a look at her canvas and the scene before them, he asked, “Are those shadows of the trees warmer or cooler than the earth?”

“Cooler.”

“What hues?” He waited for an answer. “Wrestle with it.”

“Greens and blues.”

“Right. Just as if the poplars and the sky were spread against the earth.”

“Why in all my years of seeing haven't I noticed?”

“We're trained by living to use our eyes to recognize objects, but not color unless we make a conscious effort.” He took her brush and dipped one edge in vermilion, the other in turquoise. She gasped.

“Don't be afraid to exaggerate,” he said as he blocked in shadows of the cottages.

“I'd never have nerve enough to do that.”

“Now you have to. You've got to key up your palette so the rest of your painting will be in accord with what I just did. Make a few commas in red-violet next to that alizarin crimson, add a dot of red-orange and see what happens to that patch of flowers.”

When she did, the colors practically vibrated off the canvas. “This is the get-up-and-go I want all my work to have.”

He smiled in that lopsided, tortured way of his. “Do you have another canvas board with you?”

She pulled a small one out of her sketch sack and he set to work on the same composition but using hues she hadn't seen, even ones
she didn't see now in the landscape. New admiration and gratitude flooded her. “You paint more than the scene. You paint into it what's in your mind.”

“Art isn't reproducing visual facts. It's the difference between perception”—he pointed with the brush to her painting—“and conception.” He tipped his head toward his own. “Once you learn that, you'll never paint the same again.”

• • •

Each week she felt more comfortable painting patches of contrasting color, and hues not in the natural scene. Each weekend when Alice came from Paris, Emily showed her something she was pleased with.

Late one morning in her room, Gibb held the bowl of his pipe and pointed to her canvas with the mouthpiece. “See how you've given contour to the hill by color, that yellow ochre next to that lime green? This is good work. When it dries, let me have it for a while. And yesterday's too.”

“Why?”

“I have someone I want to show them to. Don't worry. You'll get them back. I think you'll be a fine woman painter someday.”

• • •

When he left, she set to work stretching canvases, the only thing she felt like doing. Hammering. That good solid whap when she hit one dead center.
Woman
painter! She scowled at a tack she was holding in place, hammered at it and smashed her thumb.

Alice burst into her room with her small carpetbag.

“It just gets my goat,” Emily muttered. “Gibb said I'll be a fine
woman
painter someday. Might as well say, ‘Fine work for a child. Or a monkey.' ” She sucked on her thumb. “Haven't you noticed that he always has to smash a little spunk out of me?”

“Haven't you noticed that there's more to life than art?” Alice's voice trembled. Her face was blotched.

“What's wrong?”

“Haven't you noticed it's not the weekend and I'm here?”

Emily put down the hammer. “What happened?”

“A telegram came.”

“Not another of Dede's ‘come home immediately' demands.” Emily drove in a tack in one wallop.

“No!” Alice shrieked. “It's from Lizzie. Dede passed on.”

“Died?” It wasn't possible. Her throat swelled shut. She enfolded Alice with both arms, small against her chest, and tried to absorb her spasms. Alice's tears wet both of their cheeks.

“How?”

Alice collapsed onto the bed and handed her the telegram. Meningitis. Eight days and she was gone. Slipped away when Lizzie went out to make her tea. Lizzie would blame herself for not being there at the very last. The print swam. Dede loved her tea. She called it her cup of you-and-me, the Cockney slang. Emily rocked with Alice in her arms, crooning to her.

Dede dead. She'd hardly had a chance to live. Hosted a few Ladies' Aid meetings, helped the orphanage society, and kept the house, cooking for them all those years. Was that all there was to it? That easy to let it slip by? Fast as a blink. Fifty-five years. Older than Mother was when she died.

“I can't believe it.” Some thought shook Alice with new sobs and Emily held her tighter, her thumb throbbing against Alice's shoulder.

“Remember how Dede took old ladies on buggy rides in the country wrapping them up in blankets?” Alice said. “For their health, she used to say, when it was really that she loved the ride.”

“Those buggy rides were the times I liked being with her.”

“It's like part of myself gone, like she's been stolen out of the house,” Alice said.

“No. The mark she left on us will always be there.”

She saw Dede in her seated tin soldier position the day she announced she was going to France, the thin bones of Dede's hands rising and falling as she drummed her fingers on the arm of the chesterfield, muttering that Paris was infected with Bohemians. The energy it took to control her disapproval of most of the real world had sapped her of vitality, kept her brittle. Emily had understood then, watching Dede's fingers, the truth hidden under Dede's lethal dose of protection—fear that her unruly sister would get something rich and foreign and dangerous out of life that Dede would shrink from, wouldn't have time for among her good works.

She let go of Alice's shoulder and saw that her gaze was unfocused. “Even though Dede was such a stick, she meant well,” Alice said, sniffling.

“Working out her frustrations by scrubbing me raw in the bathtub.”

Alice snickered. “Because you needed it when you were smeared with cow-yard muck.”

“But she didn't have to whack me with the dipper handle when I squirmed.”

“You didn't just squirm. You scratched her. Be a little compassionate. She was only trying to raise us properly after Mother died.”

“And now that she's dead too, you make her into a saint? She didn't have to raise me with the riding crop. Compassionate! When I think of all those times she whipped me with it, how can I be?”

Alice winced at the memory.

“What hurt even more was when she had the police shoot Molly when I was away. Until Billy, I'd never had a dog so sweet-natured. What kind of a sister would do that?”

“Molly bit someone.”

“Barely. A puppy's mistake. Dede was vindictive, Alice. You can't deny it.”

Alice's eyes flooded.

Emily held her again and rocked. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you cry. It's just that life went crooked when Mother died and Dede took over with no one to stop her.”

Eventually Alice calmed and finished her tea. “Lizzie there all by herself. She's had to do it all.” Alice tapped the empty envelope against her palm. “I've booked passage for us out of London on Saturday. It's the soonest I thought we could manage.”

“We?”

She caught sight of the blank canvas she was going to use for a canal bridge showing the water's many colors. To give up splintered light off water just when she was beginning to grasp how to make it vibrate, to leave before she learned some elusive painting truth—that would be Dede's triumph from the grave.

She rested her hand on Alice's sleeve, and noticed that her thumb had developed a blood blister. Alizarin crimson. So sudden. Fast as a blink.

“Will you be all right if you go home by yourself?”

Alice fingered a pile of stretcher tacks.

“It's more important for me to stay,” Emily said.

Alice reached for the telegram and put it in the envelope and the envelope in her pocketbook, snapping it quietly.

“Then stay.”

“Harry's been detained in Paris,” Gibb's wife Bridget said.

“Detained,” Emily said with an edge to the word. Spring in Crécy had flown by. Now she didn't want to waste time waiting for him here in St. Efflam on the coast of Brittany. She counted out the francs for the summer session. Expensive but worth it.

With a playful smile, Bridget added, “He wants you to do five local subjects so he can critique new work as soon as he arrives.” Her smile became conspiratorial. “He assigned the other students only two. Of all of them, he talks about you the most.”