by Diana Forbes
Dispensing with the pink dress, I snatched the valise from under the newspaper on the bed.
He apologized profusely, claiming that he was only trying to complete a rough sketch before the light dimmed. Turning his bandaged face toward the latticed window, he grimaced at the gray sky. “The light in Boston is terrible for painting. You don’t paint, do you? If you did, you would never live here.”
“No. I only paint with words.”
“I admire that,” he said. “You paint with words. I paint with oils.
“Yes. We both create unflattering portraits that most people probably don’t want to see,” I said with a grin. “And through our art, try to change people’s minds.” I caught the corner of his eye and felt pleased that Mother had brought him back after all.
A pleasant lull descended on the conversation, which neither of us seemed eager to break. I felt I had found a kindred spirit. At long length, I asked if he wanted me to bring his painting closer to him, so he might see it better without his glasses.
“Not necessary. But if you could remove that hideous drop cloth, it would allow the painting under it to breathe.” He scowled at the sheet, which must have been expressly placed there so Mother could avoid seeing his masterpiece.
I pulled away the flowered sheet. The sky portrayed in his canvas was a mixture of black, gray, and charcoal gray. “Do you really require so much light, Sir, to paint your Manhattan sky?”
“Do you find the topics I paint too dark for your tastes?” he asked, suddenly sitting up very straight; and I thought I detected a defensive note, almost as if he’d said plebian tastes.
I studied the prostitute depicted in the painting. She wore a great deal of eye shadow, powder, and rouge. Her hair shimmered like a gilded frame around her childlike features. Her clear blue eyes seemed to say, Save me. Meanwhile the urchin’s face resembled Stone Aldrich’s. Yet he didn’t strike me as suffering from low self-worth.
“I don’t like the painting,” I admitted at last, choosing my words carefully in case he responded poorly to criticism. “Your brushstrokes are sure and supple. But the whole of it depicts a scene most of us would rather avoid. What’s the purpose? Are you trying to make this resemble a photograph?”
“That’s the ticket! I wish we had more women like you who could explain our Ash Can philosophy. I am so tired of trying to explain my art to neophytes.” He ran a world-weary hand up to his temple, and blinked his unbandaged eye. “If you have to explain something, then on some level it’s not working. Not working at all.”
I walked around the painting to give it another chance with me. It was working; it just wasn’t uplifting. The subject matter was very dark. I picked up on my mother’s theme and asked him what had brought him to Boston.
“I came for the trash cans,” he said. “And you can call me Stone.”
“That’s an unusual item to paint, Stone.”
“When your mother knocked into me, I thought I’d finally found my perfect trash can. I looked at it, thinking, What a bold item for me to capture. And then, a moment later, there it was staring down at me.”
He sat up straighter in the bed, leaned his bandaged head against the dark headboard, and watched as I opened drawers from wooden chests and extracted various items I’d wear later that morning. I lay the garments at the end of the bed near his covered feet. I wondered if his feet were very large.
“But why trash cans? Do you find them beautiful?”
“Not at all.” He scratched an itch under his bandage. “The point is to paint what’s there. Art should reveal instead of covering up.”
I asked him if there were any trash cans to paint in New York.
“Oh,” he smiled broadly. “There are plenty of trash cans to paint there. But I painted this canvas in Philadelphia.” Apparently his mentor at the Ash Can School had advised him that the trash cans in Boston were far better than any he could find in Philadelphia.
“Aha! So, it’s not a photograph after all. Because you found parts of it in different cities and later composed the pieces into a whole. More like a collage.”
“I love smart women,” he said, nodding.
I hoped it wasn’t idle flattery. If sincere, I could get used to a man like that. He was a man in a city of women, and compared to all the other men of my acquaintance, he seemed much more charming.
I needed to head over to Tremont House to take a proper bath. I started to pack my outfit—my chemise, shoes, and stockings. When it was time to toss in my corset, though, my face felt hot. “Er—would you mind turning around while I pack up the rest of my things?”
“Oh, and you’re so polite,” Stone added with a mischievous smile. He closed his “good eye” and laughed. I did my best to ignore him even though the bedpost jiggled with each guffaw.
I ran out of the room with the valise, then paused in the parlor. Laying the pink dress carefully down on the couch, I stared at my nightdress. I couldn’t leave like this.
How would I ever get my corset on by myself?
Chapter 14
Boston Tea Parties
Friday, June 23, 1893, 5 p.m.
A flurry of suffrage activity followed with flyers to create, posters to hang, and speeches to craft. I spent my days at Verdana’s flat while Lucinda devoted her every waking hour searching for employment. According to the Boston Herald—which I skimmed in Verdana’s parlor to spare Mother’s nerves—the Panic was hitting the banking, railroad, and shipping industries hardest. But, with everyone talking about the crisis non-stop, the specter of it seemed to take on a new, larger life. People were starting to predict that this could be the Panic to end all Panics, and maybe it should be called a “Depression” instead. Absolutely no one was hiring. And although Lucinda was pretty, personable, and kind, she could not find a job.
At just about five o’clock each day, I’d return to our flat. Inevitably, Lucinda would be out, completing her last interview for employment. Our wounded visitor, still laid up, would hobble out from my bedchamber to the parlor. I had no way of knowing how Mother entertained herself until I caught up with her, but I suspected that she waited on Stone as much as possible—hoping he’d wake up one afternoon with marriage to me on his mind. And my view? I believed there could be no marriage without love, and no love without courtship. I felt she had rushed me into the disastrous match with Sam Haven, and I vowed not to make the same mistake twice. So, I was happy to let my rapport with Stone unfurl at a leisurely pace. To me, he seemed like a gift that had dropped down from the sky, and his strange diet restrictions and bizarre notions about art only made him more exotic.
From the beginning, I felt he deserved further study.
Mother observed the high tea ritual more faithfully than any British ex-patriot would have. She was of German ancestry, not British, and the Germans were not known for drinking tea. Not one to quibble over details, Mother laid out the chipped green teapot and cups anyway along with a plate of steaming biscuits. She fussed over the stranger in our midst.
“Stone Aldrich’s on the mend,” she warbled, perching on the torn green wing chair next to his. Mother waxed prolific on what a wonderful patient he had been when the doctor had visited him earlier in the day to pull out the head stitches.
Stone did look vastly improved, and I complimented him on it.
“It’s all on account of your mother,” he said, throwing her an appreciative glance. “Her tomato bisque heals all that ails me.”
There must not be all that much wrong with him, I thought.
Saturday, June 24, 1893, 5 p.m.
It was teatime, that special hour between lunch and candle-lighting that made the day more palatable. Mother, Stone, and I gathered in the parlor. He seemed cheerier, although Mother helped him into his chair like an invalid. The life had come back to his expressive eyes, though he frequently put up his hand to cover the injured one. His face also looked less bruised. It was the first time since the accident that I’d seen him without a bandage over half of his h
ead, and the uncovered terrain revealed another sculpted cheekbone, a swollen lip, and some cuts along the brow line I hoped would fade over time.
He leaned back on the moth-bitten wingchair. Stretching out long legs, he placed his badly scuffed boots on the needlepoint footrest. Mother dashed into my bedchamber and returned with some pillows. She fluffed them behind his head.
“I’ve been boring your mother half to death with the trials of being a painter,” he said with an apologetic grin.
“And a very successful illustrator,” Mother added, patting his hand with boundless enthusiasm. She leaned over him to pour some tea.
“I’m sure you could never be dull,” I said, thinking about George Setton, who quarreled during waltzes, and Willard Clements, who, worse, stepped on my feet during them. I peppered him with questions about New York and asked him where he lived.
“In the wilds of Chelsea,” he said, reaching for his repaired spectacles. He was one of the few men I had ever met who looked more attractive with his glasses on. Perhaps his rounded iron frames lent him a professorial air or flattered his eyes in a way that made them sparkle. He also seemed truly passionate about art, and there was something stirring about that even if his art only portrayed the beggarly streets. “I grew up in St. Louis, but my father moved us around a lot,” he was saying, “eventually settling the family in Philadelphia. I have five sisters living there whom I support financially.” (Mother favored him with her most radiant smile at the words support financially. Cringing at her blatant fawning, I tried not to watch.)
“And how do you feel about the name, ‘Ash Can?’” I asked him. “It sounds rather harsh, doesn’t it?”
Mother expressed her disdain for my question with a sharp hiss, followed by elongated tsk-ing sounds.
“No, Penelope’s right,” he said. “It’s not a compliment. Impressionism is considered the prettier art form, but at Ash Can, we’re not striving for prettiness. We aim for real.”
“But in a composed way,” I added.
He tossed me a secret smile that Mother didn’t catch. “I mostly work from memory,” he told me. “Memory and imagination.”
He reached into his dark brown suit and extracted a cigar. He waved it back and forth at Mother who nodded her approval although I knew she detested smoking. Insisted the habit created wrinkled skin or some such nonsense.
“Yes,” he continued, clipping the end and drawing hard on the brown cylinder. A rich chocolate incense filled the room. “At Ash Can, we’re trying to bring attention to the poverty afflicting our cities. There’s so much garbage in New York. The streets teem with detritus: paper, sewage, empty bottles that I almost have to paint my street scenes when I’m physically elsewhere, or the only thing my paintings would capture would be the trash.”
“I applaud your ambition, Mr. Aldrich,” cooed Mother, studiously avoiding glancing at the painting that was now set up in the parlor sans drop cloth. “But don’t forget to tell us all about your employment at Harper’s Weekly.”
Although she had never once picked up the magazine, she couldn’t wait to read the next issue.
Later that night I steered Mother into the kitchen for an urgent meeting. I wanted her to explain why she pretended to admire Stone’s paintings when I knew she despised everything they portrayed. She wouldn’t even look at an urchin. Yet, his paintings would capture beggars for all eternity.
Her eyes narrowed as if she were a paid fortune-teller who could see into the future. “Ash Can is only a phase,” she declared. My mother, the soothsayer, predicted his trash can subjects and scuffed boots were all temporary. “He’s a great artist, dear,” she assured me. “I just know I can talk him out of this silliness eventually. Hopefully trash cans will give way to flowers, and he’ll end up becoming an Impressionist.”
Clearly she viewed him as a work-in-progress, much like his painting.
She has underestimated him, I thought. I won’t make that mistake.
Sunday, June 25, 1893, 5 p.m.
For teatime, our positions never changed. I took the threadbare couch in the parlor, Mother commandeered the wingchair across from it on my left, and Stone sat in the wingchair next to hers on my right. Sometimes the tea changed, and occasionally the biscuits changed, but the three of us—we were immovable. Compensating for the lack of mobility were the patient’s moods, which rose and fell faster than a barometer. However by sticking to the subject of painting, I could often will him into a good mood.
“Oh, Stone,” I said, “I saw a delightful trash can on West Newton and Tremont earlier today. Very paintable.”
“Pen-el-op-e.” (There was a direct relationship between the amount of time Mother spent on each syllable of my name and her level of annoyance.) “I’m certain Mr. Aldrich is quite capable of finding his own trash cans to paint,” she sang out.
In the faraway voice of a dreamer, he rhapsodized about the painterly qualities of trash cans.
I jumped up and retrieved a fountain pen for him, then watched him copy down the street names I’d mentioned on a torn piece of tracing paper.
“Is the Ash Can School a movement?” I asked him, “like my suffrage cause?”
He laughed his deep-chimney laugh. “It depends who you ask. Journalists started calling it Ash Can because we portray unromanticized realism.”
Mother coughed loudly. “But being a realist would never prevent you from becoming romantic, now would it?” she asked, as I felt my face blanche.
Monday, June 26, 1893, 6 p.m.
One afternoon, I arrived home later than usual. As I mounted the stairs to the parlor, I overheard our ailing resident artist telling Mother that he’d attended a school in Philadelphia where he’d befriended several other artists who were interested in shining a light into the way things really were in the cities. She said something, which I couldn’t quite make out, no doubt trying to redirect the conversation to his current employment as an illustrator at Harper’s Weekly. Crisply, he told her not to belittle his life work.
“One painting is worth a thousand illustrations, Mrs. Stanton,” I heard him yell.
“Well, then maybe the suffragettes should try it,” Mother said, clapping her hands. “Oh, Mr. Aldrich, you should paint Penelope.”
“I don’t know,” I heard him say. “She’s not a trash can, and I’m only here to paint—”
I tore into the parlor, almost tripping over my long skirts in my haste.
“She can be your Muse,” mused Mother, now spreading her plump arms and reaching out her hands to me as if she were giving me away.
“Mr. Aldrich doesn’t need a Muse,” I shouted. “He paints from memory, so a Muse will do him no good whatsoever.”
“I don’t paint portraits anymore,” he said, favoring me with a broad wink. “But make no mistake, Penelope, I can always use a Muse.”
Chapter 15
My Short-Lived Career As A Muse
Tuesday, June 27, 1893, 5 p.m.
When I arrived for tea the next day, Stone balanced a small sketchpad in the crook of his elbow. He reached into a box and extracted a long, menacing charcoal stick. “If you would just take a seat and act completely natural, I’ll sketch you,” he said peering at me through his rounded spectacles.
I had no idea how to do that.
I felt like an object, and wondered how the prostitute had felt when he’d painted her. Wasn’t it going against the goals of the Women’s Movement to be objectified in this way?
For the first time I questioned if the Ash Can Movement and the Suffrage Movement should even try to co-exist in my parlor. I crunched down on the couch and started fiddling with my hair, brushing the coils with my fingers this way and that. I moved and fidgeted, fidgeted and moved.
“Don’t worry about how you look,” he coaxed. “I want to capture your inner essence—what you think about more than how you appear on the outside, as pretty as you are. What will your next talk cover?”
“Verdana and I speak out on Rational Dress. How women�
�s clothes should allow us to breathe,” I said feeling my breath catch as I looked at him. I noticed his chestnut locks shining in the fading afternoon light.
Dear Lord, I hoped I wasn’t starting to regard Stone as an object.
His hand moved rapidly across his sketchpad, and I heard the abrasive sounds of charcoal scratching across the paper.
Mother rested her chin on her hands as she beamed at him drawing me. “Be sure to capture her eyes. They’re her best feature.” She rose from her wingchair to inspect his progress. “Give her higher cheekbones, Mr. Aldrich. Oh, and smaller lips, please. As for her eyebrows…”
“Leave her be!” he retorted. “Your daughter is ravishing just the way she is.”
Wednesday, June 28, 1893, 5 p.m.
Never had I encountered so much talk about Movements while being permitted so little movement. In Verdana’s parlor, I could walk about freely, even if my skirts confined. But in my own parlor, I was forced to sit on the couch for hours at a time and barely blink an eyelash all so that Stone could capture my essence, just so.
He was guarded about sharing some of his sketches with me, though. “No,” he would say, holding up the likeness so only he could see it, “this isn’t you.” The drawing he did finally show me revealed a girl. Her face startled me. She looked younger than my seventeen years. Her eyes were too big for her face and her lips looked as pouty as my sister’s. He sees me as a little girl, I thought sadly, not as a potential sweetheart. But behind my charcoaled eyes was a certain fire. I have the fire to change his mind, I thought.
As his sketches threatened to give way to oil paints, I had an idea. I suggested we venture outside the flat, stretch our legs, and locate that perfect sagging picket fence or decrepit tenement for him to paint me against. Shouldn’t we find the parts of Boston that proved it to be the moral nightmare he claimed and capture it on canvas? The Ash Can painters weren’t portrait painters after all, and I was feeling the colors drain out of me sitting on that couch.
