The Forest Lover (22 page)

“It's not cynicism, Millie. It's priorities.”

“If I had the chance to live the last thirty-odd years over again without my father's influence, if he had died on my seventh birthday after he'd given me my first watercolor set, what then? I probably would have made the same choices.”

“Maybe he saved you from the longing.”

“No. Not entirely.”

“Oh?”

“There was a Frenchman.”

“Here?”

“No. A fur trader at home. I was naïve and afraid and lost my chance. It was all tied up in a foolish hope to go north with him.” She lit a cigarette and inhaled. “But it was enough to show me what loving feels like.”

Frances met her steady gaze. “Are you religious?”

“Yes. Not that I go to church. I'm the rebel in a family inflamed with piety. Those scowls glowering down from the pulpit used to wilt me like boiled spinach, and then some clergyman in a London pew slithered his hand onto my thigh. Disgusting, liver-spotted old sexpot. This country's crammed with cathedrals and I've hardly gone into a single one.”

“But you say you're religious.”

“God breathes in the forests. Oh, Fanny, I wish you could see them. The boughs so far above, like the vaulting of Notre Dame, and that same sacred stillness except for the sighing of wind through pines, like a sustained organ chord. If there's any kind of prayer in my life, it's that if I seek Him enough, He'll breathe His Spirit into my work.”

“
You'll
breathe His Spirit into your work.”

• • •

On the last night before Emily's return to Paris to collect her canvases and winter clothes, she and Frances lingered at the restaurant on the quay, sharing a tureen of mussels and a carafe of red wine. Emily gazed at the harbor. Lights winked on anchored boats and the moon cast a column of dancing silver on the water.

“You saved me from a lonely summer,” Frances said.

“You saved me from a wasted one.”

“It's the loneliness of what we've chosen that . . .”

“Cuts into the joy?”

“Like a claw in my chest.” Frances leaned on her elbows on both sides of her cheese plate with sudden urgency. “Why don't you stay here, Millie? Paint with me in Paris this winter. We can share a
studio. Live there together. I'll introduce you to the painters at La Rotonde. And dealers.”

“And never paint another cedar or totem face to face? Give up the one relationship that has fed me for years—with a place? How many poles have been sold or destroyed since I've been gone?”

“In New Zealand women painters band together for support.” Frances's words rushed out. “They go on painting trips together. We could do that.”

Together in BC? No. She didn't want that responsibility.

“An army of two,” Frances went on. “We're free as field mice to live the way we want to here.”

“I need to get home, Fanny, to use what I've learned here on what I love. Paris isn't where I belong. I'm not myself here.”

“You don't know that for sure. I tried to go home once, but I was too radical after Paris. So they said.” She laughed. “Me radical! They haven't seen the Cubists.”

“So you're never going back?”

“No.”

Frances's fork scraped the inside of a shell, a shrill sound.

“When did you decide that?”

“Last week. Hearing you talk about British Columbia. I realized there's nothing at home I can't find to paint here. There's nothing there I love enough to put up with the narrowness. As of now, I'm a woman without a country.”

“That's the difference between us. If I'm to paint out of my soul, I have to do it in BC. You seem to find things anywhere that stir you to paint.”

“Your art will die there, Millie.”

“But my soul won't.” She took a long drag on her cigarette.

“Your own expression will pale before those poles you worship, and you'll fall back to documenting them.”

“I don't worship them. I love them. That's all.”

“Why? What makes them so God-blessed important? Your romanticized love for Indians? It's not love. It's—”

“Fanny! Stop!” She gripped the edge of the table in shock.

“Patronizing. Great White Woman saving totem poles of ruined Indians.”

“Is Gauguin patronizing? Is Picasso?”

“It's in the way you talk about them. Do-no-wrong children of nature living nobly in the dirt. You need distance to see how you idealize them.”

“You're wrong.” Her temples pounded.

“The center of the art world is Paris, Millie. Not some far-flung edge of the wilderness.”

“You think I don't know what I'm giving up? The one place where things happen in art? The closest friend I've ever had? I never knew such joys of friendship. Yes, closed up like a walnut. Words weren't enough to say how I felt when you massaged my foot. You think I haven't considered that you might be the last intelligent person I'll ever talk to about art? Loneliness gnaws like a rat there. I'd give my other big toe to have a soul pal like you back home, someone I could lay bare my heart to, tramp the woods with, talk about anything, like we do, you and I.” She took a long, uneven breath. “British Columbia may be the edge of nowhere, but it's my center.”

“You want it both ways, don't you? Just like your totem paintings. Accuracy and expression. You want everything both ways. Friendship and independence too.”

“Yes, Fanny, independence. Your credo.”

Frances sat back in her chair as if struck.

Emily looked out across the dark water, across the Atlantic, across the plains, the bosom of her country, to the wild, wet, fecund West. She snuffed out her cigarette, bending it.

“I won't apologize because I know that irritates you, but I'm going home.”

Frances tipped her face toward the pool of dark wine left in her glass, and swallowed it in one gulp. She placed her hand on Emily's. “I think I knew that all along.”

Emily stepped out of the
métro
at Montparnasse station and looked up. Ironwork in sinuous tendrils arched over the stairway, and slim metal stalks unfolded gracefully into leaves and lilies. Why hadn't she noticed before?

A woman singing and a man wearing an eye patch were leading a baby jaguar on a leash. Paris. Unbelievable!
“Bonsoir,”
Emily said, but they didn't answer. Two whores in low-cut dresses came toward her, their faces painted in red and blue. They had none of the sidling carriage of the Indian women of Cordova Street in Vancouver. These women sauntered, owning the boulevard. Emily didn't sidestep to let them by, and they brushed shoulders.

The red awning of Café de la Rotonde was pulled back for any mid-October sun, and chestnut trees were dropping leaves on the tables. She spotted a tattered portfolio propped against a table where four men talked and gesticulated. She sat at the closest free table. Fanny would talk to them if she were here.

Fanny. In their last moments there had been words of counsel and praise, bolstering each other for struggles ahead, well wishes, promises to write. Already she felt a hole in her heart, as though she'd left behind a part of her and would never be able to recover it.

She ordered a
plat du jour—
half a pullet and
asperges d'Argenteuil
. Fanny loved asparagus. It was more expensive here than in the student restaurants on St-Michel where waiters wrote the amount with grease pencils on butcher-paper table covers.

A russet leaf fell on her wrist. She twirled it between her thumb and forefinger and glanced at the men. One was natty in dress, but the others were shabby, with worn shoes. A smear of cadmium yellow screamed from a frayed sleeve. One wore a rumpled felt hat tilted forward. She understood a few words of their conversation—
perspectif multiplex, peinture a l'huile, coup de pinceau
—and occasionally a name—Henri, Georges. Even if she could speak French, what would she say? My name is Emily, I'm an artist and I've run out of money so I'm going home?

Still, it gave her keen pleasure to take sidelong glances at the portfolio not five feet from her foot. Maybe one of the men would pull out something to show the others. The tone of their conversation changed as they counted out francs, bickering like old women over a few centimes, even the well-dressed one. The man in the rumpled hat left in a huff. The man with paint on his sleeve grumbled and then finished off the wine of the man who had left. They'd probably have the same squabble the next day. She finished her
café
and put the leaf in her handbag, a
souvenir de Paris.

• • •

The next day, she paused at the pont Alexandre. Under a cloudy sky, the water lost its full range of hues and glinted only in greens. Was she ready for that submergence into the dark, cool tones of home after a year of warm ones? Ready to paint totems without fussing over details, but with Fanny's sweeping strokes, Gibb's distortion for personal vision, Laffont's modeling of shapes with hue changes, Fergusson's rhythm through repetition, Fauve and Impressionist coloring, but her own vision? She smacked the stone bridge wall. Like Sophie with her native belief and Christianity, she would take what she wanted.

She joined the horde going into the Grand Palais. Room after room shouted hundreds of names. She looked for Fanny's work, Gibb's, Fergusson's. Nothing. Instead, Léger, Vlaminck, Duchamp—names she didn't know and would soon forget, maybe the work of yesterday's arguers.

In one room the range of color was subdued and objects were fragmented. Figures were sliced apart, opened, and rearranged, showing all sides of the object at once, like laying flat an orange peel. The bird panel in Chief Wakias's house and Eagle on her drum had done this to a lesser degree. These took the idea further. One thread of connection between Paris and British Columbia—was this what Gibb was so insistent that she see?

She walked into another room and gasped.
La Colline!
Her hill painting with the patch of red poppies she'd left with Gibb. She clamped her hand over her mouth. Next to it,
Le Paysage.
Hers. Gibb's French title but her name. Her choice to outline the foreground trees in the Indian red she'd used for the trunks. Her vision of the blue roof reflecting the sky. She hadn't allowed herself to imagine why he'd wanted them. Her knees went weak.

No one to tell it to. No one to be with her here and recognize what this meant. Not Fanny or Gibb or Fergusson. Not Alice. Not Jessica, but especially not Fanny. Even though this wasn't juried, to her it was no small thing. Fanny would know that. So would Jessica. Dede would never know. Emily felt for a bench behind her and sat, planting the moment in her mind to pull out later when she would need it, telling herself that now she could face anything—scorn, loneliness, anything. She had been well hung in the Grand Palais, in the
center of the world. And now she was going back to the edge of nowhere with only Gibb to know her paintings were here, Gibb who thought that someday she'd be a fine painter—for a woman.

Her paintings sparkled before her, then blurred. She waved air at her cheeks. A gallery floor guard bent over her, offering her a paper cone of water.

“I'm all right. It's just that—” She pointed, her voice tightening. “They're mine.”

His eyebrows raised.
“Ah! Formidable. Brava, madame.”

Formidable,
Claude's word. And eyebrows too.

She nodded her thanks, smiling as she wiped her eyes.

“Vous êtes américaine, non?”

“No. Canadian!”

Emily found Sophie digging in her potato patch on a foggy November morning the day after she arrived back in Vancouver. “Sophie, Sophie, I've missed my good friend Sophie,” she sang out.

Slowly Sophie stood up, her hand pressing against the small of her back. She was hugely pregnant. “Em'ly!” A clash of emotions streaked across her face. “Annie died.”

A roaring rose in her. “No, Sophie, no.” She opened her arms and, for the briefest of moments, Sophie's hard round belly pressed into hers before Sophie drew back. She saw Sophie's lips move but didn't hear a sound.

How could God . . . ? No one could say that was a full life—only seven or eight years, only a beginning. Had Annie Marie ever known how much her being mattered? How Annie had loved to ask questions.
You like painting or trees?
she'd asked.
They are the same.
As though she'd known it already. Dede didn't know. Are they the same? No, Dede and Annie are not the same.

She'd felt like Annie Marie's auntie. How could Sophie keep breathing, in and out, in and out? She wanted to shoulder some of Sophie's grief, to carry it for her until time dulled its sharpness. Why was it she couldn't keep a child alive?

“What do you think it was? Pneumonia? Tuberculosis?”

“I don't know the name. Just sick with coughing.” Sophie held the door open for Emily, as if to avoid that question.

How hard it was to enter a house where a child has died. She was afraid it would be unbearably spare, but inside there was the basket cradle hanging expectantly.

“I got lots of baskets to sell.” Sophie held up a huge rectangular one with her church coiled in darker strips, and on the roof, two tall triangles. “See? Our church house has two steeples now.” She grinned. “Two steeples are better than one. And it has electric lights too.”

How could she change the subject so blithely? Where did she store her pain?

“Do you have electricity here too? And water?”

“No. A tap on Third Street, same as before. But streets have names now.” She opened her eyes wide and mocking. “Just like a white lady. Now I have an address.”

As Sophie rummaged through piles of baskets, Emily noticed a new hooked rug on the floor. It had two figures in full skirts, large and small, both with braids, holding hands—Sophie's grief in every knot of fabric.

Sophie handed her a round basket big enough for apples. “For you.”

“Really? It's lovely. What are these?” She pointed to a row of animals running around the rim.

“Billy dogs. Frank's idea.”

“Ah, no tail. Of course. Thank you.”

“Did you learn what you went for?”

“Yes, but it was hard to hear a spirit song away from the big trees. I'm itching to get out woodsing with you, as soon as I pay the sisters a proper visit and get Billy dog.”

“You came to see me first? Before your sisters?” Sophie's eyes opened wide in astonishment, and her hands shot up to cover her mouth.

Emily raised her shoulders and smiled. Slowly, they walked to the church.

“See? Two steeples. Twice as Christian as before.” Sophie laughed at her own joke. “Named for Saint Paul now.”

Inside, a new Gothic rose window cast colored shapes across the pews, and dust motes floated in the still air. Emily leaned forward until her head touched the pew in front of her. An ant shouldering a burden twice its size paused in its jagged course across the floorboards. She felt helpless in giving Sophie any comfort. She wondered whether Sophie had saved Annie Marie's clothes, if she'd kept a lock of Annie's hair.

She closed her eyes and saw Annie drawing in the dirt, saw Dede thrusting open the windows in November—for character-building. Annie, with only the character of simple happiness, would be harder for her to get over.

At the cemetery they walked past the oversized marker for Margaret Dan's son, past the grave of Casamin, Sophie's first son, where Sophie straightened the stick, to Tommy's. Emily lingered there but
Sophie urged her onward to a new little grave where the wooden marker read,
Annie Marie Frank 1903–1911.

“She lived longer than Tommy. I'm going to buy her a big white gravestone with a cross carved in like Joseph Dan's. For Tommy and Casamin too. God will be happy when they all have Christian headstones and then He won't take them more. I almost have enough for Tommy's, the graveman said.”

She imagined Sophie walking among her graves, her back plumb straight, listening for her children's babble working its way upward through grains of earth, happier babble if the child had a headstone. What could a person say about that logic?

“Another baby's coming by and by,” Sophie said jauntily, her nose in the air, her eyes looking sideways for a reaction.

Emily took a noisy, exaggerated breath. “I'd never have guessed it.”

Sophie's hand went to her belly. “Big, huh?” The corners of her mouth, her cheeks, eyebrows, all her features lifted in a smile generated by something beyond belief, a smile that gathered Emily into it.

• • •

“No, Lizzie, I really don't want to visit Dede's grave on the way home. I just got here.”

Lizzie snapped the buggy reins and they lurched away from the ferry landing in Victoria. Emily watched a hardness slide across Lizzie's face to fester as an internal wound which would, she knew, work itself to the surface and, at some unexpected moment, erupt.

The reunion with Billy was more joyful, full of welcome-home barks, drooling excitement, a rousing game of roll-the-rubber-ball, and a little mutual tousling on the dining room floor. Even Lizzie laughed at his antics. It seemed to break the pall from her refusal to visit Dede's grave.

After supper, Emily and Lizzie carried her bags upstairs. “You can sleep in Dede's room,” Lizzie said at the landing. “She left a note for you on the top of the dresser. Maybe after you read it, you'll be more reasonable about paying proper respects at her grave.”

“When did she write it?”

“The night before . . .” Her chin quivered.

“I'm sorry. You don't have to say.” Emily held her until Lizzie pushed away, and then she entered Dede's pale blue bedroom alone, closing the door softly behind her.

A hairbrush, talcum sprinkler, toilet water, and pewter-backed hand mirror were marshaled in a row equidistant from one another, and in front of them, an envelope positioned squarely on the dresser scarf. She took off her shoes and lay down, hoping to doze, but five minutes later, she tore open the envelope and read Dede's upright handwriting.

Emily,

I suppose you'll be happy to hear that there are some few things I'm sorry for, but only a few. You have to recognize that our dear parents worried about leaving you. “You see to it that Millie minds you,” Mother told me often. She trusted the others to act respectably but not you, so you see, since you were so intractable, I had to force you into obedience. Perhaps now you can spend some time reflecting on the grief you caused and the heavy responsibility placed on me. I have put my family first in all things, to my own self-denial. You have done everything you wanted. We shall both have to answer for our actions in the hereafter.

Dede

A wallop as precisely aimed and full of ire as that first kick under the dining room table. Hadn't Dede had her say in life, but she had to speak from the grave as well? How pathetic that the bagful of life Dede had collected was so limp that she was still hoping to stir up a pot of guilt in her last dying breaths. She put the letter in her carpetbag to read again later, and crawled into bed under Dede's ice blue coverlet.

• • •

Hoping Lizzie wouldn't demand that she visit Dede's grave, Emily went tiptoe around the house for the next four days. She made Dede's bed first thing in the morning, smoked only on the back porch while she painted, kept her turpentine outside because it nauseated Lizzie, and made a point to be prompt at mealtimes and not skip afternoon tea even if she was in the heat of painting. On the fourth morning, a delivery truck came into the gravel driveway.

“My crates! My French paintings!”

“Just in time,” Alice said. “You can unpack them at teatime. We invited a few friends. It was going to be a surprise.”

Talkative and expectant, the women took seats in the parlor, balanced their teacups and waited while Emily pried open the crate. The first canvas happened to be a pensive young girl in a Concarneau wine shop. Bad choice. No wonder no one said anything. She pulled out another, the Brittany kitchen with Héloïse knitting a sock by her fireplace. It was acceptable subject matter, but still no one made a comment.

“That's Héloïse. Her orchard had such sweet peaches.”

Alice and one woman nodded.

A landscape with elms and cottages was next. “I remember that place, in Crécy,” Alice said. “That long walk we took along the canal.” She smiled at the memory. “That's a nice cloud.”

The cloud was the only pale thing in the painting.

“Did Gibb tell you to paint the water with red smears?”

“No, Alice. The water told me.”

Seeing the canal painting again was like seeing an old friend. She turned to the crate to choose another. The church near St. Efflam should please them, at least the subject matter. She lifted that out. There was dead silence. It could not have hurt more if they'd thrown stones. She thought of Fanny and felt as though she were playing out a scene in Dunedin. When they'd seen them all, a missionary wife said, “I don't know, Emily. You used to paint quite sweetly.”

“But she was in the Paris salon,” another woman said. Her voice reeked with utter bafflement.

Quickly, Alice changed the subject to French food, a tactic Emily knew was to save her from being argued over, or, worse, to avoid confrontation about something of which she, Alice, had been a part. Emily stacked up a load of canvases and took them upstairs to Dede's bedroom.

She hated herself for doing it as soon as she set them down. She was not ashamed of her paintings. She was ashamed of her sisters. Of their tea parties with art as an excuse to show off baking skills and china patterns, of their narrow lives all ticketty-boo without a doily out of place. Underlying that, and worse, was their disinterest and incapacity. She sprawled onto the bed. What had happened to
Alice? Had France not penetrated, that as soon as she came home, provincialism set in and filmed over her eyes? And Lizzie, bare-nerved, Bible-breathing Lizzie hadn't said a word. It slid into her thought like creeping ice, while regarding the cross on St. Efflam's church, that nothing she would ever do would seem important to Lizzie. And nothing Lizzie would ever do would seem important to her. Fine. They wouldn't have to look at her paintings.

• • •

She went to Vancouver and rented a studio flat on West Broadway in a low-rent district, one light room large enough to hold a class, with a basic kitchen in one corner. Over the next several weeks, she moved her paintings and clothes from Victoria, got her furniture and easels out of storage, and hung her new work edge to edge all the way to the ceiling, like the Salon d'Automne. She would have covered the ceiling too, if she could have figured out how. And she placed two ads—one advertising children's art classes, and the other announcing a studio show. She collected Joseph at Jessica's, and Jessica had to come see everything right then.

“They're marvelous! Your colors shout to be noticed.” She put her hands on her head and squeezed hanks of hair. “It's like you're not afraid of anything. Now aren't you glad I made you go?” Jessica said smugly, teasing.

“You!”

“You!” Joseph squawked. “You. You. You!”

• • •

“Didn't I tell you they'd come?” Jessica said at the studio exhibit behind her tray of cookies. “Forty-eight people so far.”

They could hardly fit in the room. Emily whistled softly. Many of them were from the Vancouver Ladies' Art Club, but more were strangers, which was a good sign. She strained to hear individual comments in the noise.

“She paints like a man,” one man sputtered.

“But it was done in France,” his wife countered.

“Exactly. You can see she was influenced by that madman, van Gogh. You can't tell what anything is. They're the wrong colors.”

“Amazing that you know so much about van Gogh,” Emily said to him. “I lived there and don't know a bean about him.”

“My, France certainly had a ferocious effect on you,” a woman said, taking off her gloves, one precise finger at a time, to reach for a cookie from Jessica's tray.

What a sappy smile on that woman. She'd promised Jessica she wouldn't get on her high horse if she heard anything ignorant, but she hadn't promised she wouldn't return their sappy smiles.

A man elbowed his way in front of the woman. “Do you mean to claim that you actually see blue shadows in nature?” he asked.

“Yes, I do. Shadows can be any color, depending upon what's opposite them.”