Lydia Cassat Reading the Morning Paper

by Harriet Scott Chessman

  And yet, something else emerged as he asked me questions. “Had I begun to feel better?” he asked, and “What was I reading?” When I told him, “Jane Austen,” he looked curious. “Ah, lequel?” “Persuasion,” I said, and then, surprisingly, his eyes lit on mine. A feeling connected us, quickly and with an absorbing depth. I wondered what he felt. In allowing myself to look at his face, which had seemed so arrogant and almost ugly a moment before, I discovered a sadness, maybe, or a sense of pain. It was as if I had rounded a corner, in a strange city, and had come upon a scene of terrible intimacy: a man weeping, a child ill. Yet, before I could think of something to say, the city rose up before me again, with its elegant avenues and public spaces, its overwhelming buildings, looming, sharp-edged.

  I wonder about May, for she seems to welcome his presence. Certainly, he seems to have made of her—and of me too—an exception, and yet this sensation of being protected from the Cyclops by the Cyclops himself, while he eats everyone else in sight—well, it’s fragile at best. And he does eat people, I know, one friend after another.

  And yet I could see what he meant to her, from the beginning. His invitation to her, a year ago, to join his group of Independents, came to her as an invitation to live, to create the art she knew she could create. Her whole desire now is to have her début in the Impressionist Exhibition this spring.

  At tea, on that first meeting, I saw something else. In the air between him and May, I sensed something bright and resonant. She smiled, and he bent toward her. In May’s studio, my arms ache again. May and I have been quiet for some time. I catch myself almost sleeping when May’s voice cuts into the drowsy air.

  “I might go to the Louvre this afternoon, Lyddy. Could you come too?”

  “I’d love to, if I feel able.”

  “We could look at the Dutch collection again.”

  “Oui.”

  “Maybe May Alcott will come with us. We can go by carriage, and fetch her.”

  May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s sister, is married to a Swiss man now, so we see her much less, but I welcome our outings with her, and with our young and wealthy friend Louisine Elder. To go about Paris with this small crowd makes me feel young and careless, or, as careless as I can be.

  Love comes, or illness. Last summer, my life changed, all in a day. After asking me questions, with his little pince-nez glittering, the doctor took May and Father aside to discuss my situation. Mother was ill then. When May returned to my room, her face a map of worry, I knew in a moment how bad it was, and I knew too how she would fight this truth, how everyone would fight it. I could not hear all of her words, because the world seemed to become unreal, as if I were miles away, looking through the small end of a telescope, just as I used to do with Robbie’s when he got a toy one for Christmas one winter at Hardwicke. I would sit in the window seat, behind the curtains, and point the instrument out to the meadow, and at first I could see the horses so clearly that I could watch the breath coming out of their nostrils, and then I’d turn the telescope around, and suddenly the meadows, and the road, and May’s snow castle, and the flower garden—dry sticks in snow now—would become tiny, a perfect miniature. Only this time, when May spoke, the miniature held her and me and my bed, in my room in Paris, and all around the world had vanished, and I felt myself too to have no substance, but to be made of air. Pain and air.

  “Bright’s Disease,” she said, and I almost laughed, thinking how ridiculous that a disease of the kidneys should be associated in any way with brightness. “But, Lyddy, even a French doctor can be wrong. We must simply watch your diet, and keep you well rested. That’s all there is to it. You must simply be careful.”

  But how can carefulness make this all right? It’s not up to me. Heaven knows, I’m nothing if not careful. This illness is inside me. I feel that I live on a plank jutting out over an ocean filled with sea monsters. Sometimes I think I’m better. But maybe it’s just that a pavilion has been created around my little plank, right by this ocean, sea monsters or no, and so much goes on in it—jugglers, singers, romance—that I am merely distracted and amused.

  “Lyddy, did you hear me?”

  “Désolée, I must be daydreaming.”

  “I can tell! I have to pull you back, Lyd, right back into that chair. You left me quite alone there, for a few minutes. Where did you travel to?”

  I smile. “Oh, well, I go anywhere I wish, May: Pennsylvania, Germany …”

  “Not Germany!”

  “Actually, I was probably thinking simply about our apartment, and lunch.”

  “Lunch can be an absorbing subject, I know.”

  “Yes, and that pattern for a new gown.”

  “Another absorbing subject.”

  I can’t always tell May my thoughts, because she can’t bear to face illness or death. My whole family’s like that.

  I think May’s sadness, when she heard my diagnosis, was increased by her memory of earlier sorrows. The doctor, even, may have reminded her of other doctors, like the fat German one in Darmstadt, who looked at Robbie’s legs, and told us there was nothing seriously wrong with him. All we had to do, he said, was to make Robbie exercise with regularity, and take some medicine to strengthen his bones. For awhile we could all look at each other as if the world were an ordinary place.

  Woman Reading (Femme lissant), Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska.

  But if something comes to someone, and makes of their body a house to waste and gnaw at, doctors can do nothing, and love can do nothing either. The baby, George, died too, only a month old, when May was just beginning to walk, and, before I was born, the baby girl, Katherine, named for Mother. Once the youngest, Gardner, came into the world, three years after George, I could hardly bear to look at him, for fear he too would be still and cold.

  “I think that’ll do for today,” May says. I can tell she’s pleased with her start.

  I rouse myself, and shake off my thoughts. To be in May’s studio, now, in Paris, and not in Darmstadt, or in Pennsylvania either—to have come this far—well, it’s lucky.

  “May I see?” I ask.

  “It’s only a start,” she says, and I look at a swath of white paint—the fichu around my shoulders—and the beginnings of a woman’s face, in profile, the nose and mouth painted with delicacy, the eye a darker line, and a sketchy band of brown for her hair, whitish-pink broad strokes for her cap.

  Something about this woman, half-suggested in oil, makes me bend toward her. Who is this? I ask myself, for I can’t think it is I, and yet I know, with exquisite pleasure, that it is.

  vi.

  As I sit in my armchair, reading Flaubert, later, the image of this woman, the one May is painting, comes to me again and again. I discover a yearning to be close to her, to be present as she comes closer to the surface. It’s like watching someone swim toward you, only it’s much slower, and you see her at first underwater, a moving blur, and you wait for the moment when you’ll see her arms, and then her face, her hair streaming wet in the light.

  I could never confess this to anyone, and I can barely even think it, but I’m aware too of another sensation, the feeling of May’s eyes on me, as she painted this morning. Do other women have such feelings? It isn’t that I feel beautiful. It isn’t something outward or visible, really, at all.

  Such sensations make me think of my girlhood. I look closely at each memory, in my own gallery, as if to discover some clue, some fresh element in the story: a hand on an arm, a glance, a glove left on a seat, maybe. It still surprises me that I never married.

  Of course marriage isn’t the solution to all of life’s ills. It can bring boatfuls of ills, if one is unlucky—think how unhappy people can be, yoked together. That’s what I admire about Flaubert, how he sees that, and makes even the dullest marriage into an interesting story. He creates poor Emma Bovary, full of restlessness and vague dreams, romantic wishes, and here she is (I’m halfway through), caught in life’s meshes already, an absurd marriage, an impossible love affair
.

  How does one go about this business of living? I dwell on this question often, now. One’s life looks different, terribly sharp and clear, when one begins to comprehend the fact of one’s very particular, looming death.

  vii.

  Sitting in front of the mirror in my nightgown, brushing my hair, I look younger than I feel, as always, although I can see, these days, hints of the old woman I might become, if I’m lucky. I study my fine crows’ feet, the shadows under my eyes. My hair, in waves, looks reddish blonde still in this lamplight; only in the day can I see the change, especially at my temples, to white.

  In bed, with the lamp out, I find myself remembering the War at home. It still feels fresh to me, the tearing up of our cousins’ land in Gettysburg, the long and bloody list of young men who entered the fight: John Chandler, James Endicott, Andrew Lyman, handsome William Dabney. At least Robbie was spared such a challenge. And when I heard of another death, of someone young and fine, I felt another door close inside me, a breeze blowing it shut. I had written letters to each of them, attempting to sound cheerful, as if the world had not opened up a hideous wound, and as if they were not positioned to fall, limbs blown off, chests yawning red, their horses foundering in the mud. We urged Aleck to hire a substitute, and thank God he did, or he too might be bones, like our cousin Frank. It isn’t fair, Heaven knows, and Aleck will carry the knowledge with him all his life, but look at him now, vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, with wealth and a full, rich life, a country house, a fine marriage, four children.

  And Thomas Houghton, whose eyes were the color of hazel, and who almost brought my hands to his mouth, who kissed me one summer night in West Chester, moulders now beneath Pennsylvania soil.

  All those lives, all those lives, and I felt my life too whisked away, in the shot of a cannon, the tearing apart of flesh from bone, heart from rib, my brains blown and scattered into a thousand pieces, the green fields turned to blood and muck, my life over at twenty-seven, for how was I to live, them? To live, afterward, I thought at first, was to walk always on graves, hearing the whisper of ghosts. Not Robbie’s ghost only, now, or the babies’, but thousands of others too, and in my dreams each night I’d see a meadow of men, mowed down, moaning, and I’d look into the face of each, searching for one face, and sometimes I would find that face only to see it crumble, or shatter, before I could touch it.

  I wake frightened, and for one wild moment, seeing only dark, I have no idea where I am: in the root cellar at Hardwicke? In Germany? In West Chester? In the new house we built in the country, when I was twenty-three? In Allegheny City, when I was little? Yes, in Allegheny City, in our maid Cora’s room, at the top of the house, her face impossible to see in the darkness—or else on the sleeping car of a train, hurtling somewhere headlong off a trestle into a river thick and black as tar.

  I try to think about something calm: the new picture May’s painting of me reading, or the apples and honey Aleck has promised to send to us from the States, for Christmas.

  Restless, I come to the memory of the summer when I was twenty-two—a good memory, this one is; maybe it will help me sleep. It’s of the summer day Thomas came on a picnic with our cousins and us, to a lake. We were living then in our new house on Olive and Fifteenth, in Philadelphia, and we took the train to the country, and hired a carriage. Once we arrived at the lake, we spread out our baskets: eggs, a big jar of sassafras tea, apples, biscuits and honey. After we swam, we sat on the blanket and ate our fill. Thomas looked at me often, and after lunch we walked together up the slope. He brought a book out of his pocket—Emerson’s essays, wasn’t it?—and began to read. Maybe this is what marriage will be like, I thought: to sit together on a hill, in Pennsylvania, looking at the edges of a lake, now blue, now greenish gray, and to read to each other, thinking of large things—of Nature and Spirit—as we sit wrapped, rapt, in a cloud, a net, of affection.

  My ceiling grows a dusky blue with dawn approaching. Of course I knew, even then, that marriage was more real, more difficult, than a romantic afternoon. I had seen all that Mother had been through, with so many moves—once every year or two, often, difficult even to chart or remember—and her children’s ill health, and her own fragile health, and Father’s restlessness and impatience. But I found it hard to imagine my future in fuller detail, with Thomas half-leaning next to me, his hair still wet from his swim.

  And when people see me now, what do they see? Certainly they can’t know about a lake in Pennsylvania, or how a young man lay on his back, pulling me toward him, after reading for an hour while clouds scudded south.

  viii.

  Only the second day of modeling, and this picture is halfway done. I’m surprised by the urgency of my wish for this to continue: my sitting here, in this chair near the window, the lamp just over my shoulder, May painting, and the whole world at bay. Perhaps May feels something like this too, for she teases me now about my new profession.

  “Be careful, Lyddy. You’re such a good model, I’ll find it difficult to let you go.”

  “Nonsense,” I say, but I can’t help smiling.

  I asked May after breakfast this morning if I could pose with a book today, instead of the paper, and she agreed, as long as I read to her, and hold the newspaper again when she asks me. She added, “I’m not in the mood for Flaubert, though!” so I’ve left Emma Bovary at home, getting her thin boots muddy as she slips across the meadows to her shallow lover’s château. I’ve brought my Wordsworth instead.

  May asks for “Tintern Abbey,” so I begin: “Five years have passed, five summers, and the length / Of five long winters.” A splendid poem. It deepens as I grow older.

  After I finish, May says, “You used to read that to me.”

  “Did I, May?”

  “Yes, in Germany.”

  “I remember. I tutored you and Robbie, didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” May says, but then she’s quiet. She doesn’t like to talk about that year.

  When Robbie died, May was inconsolable. How old was she? Nine, ten. Ten years old, that must be right, because it was on May 24th, in ’55, that he died; two days later, her birthday came and she was eleven. So I was almost eighteen.

  She didn’t touch the little cakes I’d bought. None of us seemed able to remember how to celebrate, even in the smallest way. I gave the cakes to the maid, and she thanked me for them.

  It is at the funeral, in a cemetery in Darmstadt, where the minister speaks in German, and cherry trees blossom up and down a slope, that May begins to cry. I try to embrace her, but she runs down the hill. I follow her to a cherry tree, covered in white blossoms. She stands near the tree, shaking and sobbing, and then she begins to hit the trunk with the side of her fist. “He was going to take lessons in drawing with me, when we got back to America. He said so. We were going to share a pony.” She hits the tree with each sentence, pushing me away as I try to catch her arm and hold it. “I hate him for dying. He had no right to die.”

  I gaze at the page.

  On the banks of this delightful stream / We stood together.

  ix.

  “I think it’s almost done,” May says now. “I think you’ll be happy.”

  Bending toward the painting, I’m caught by its beauty. She’s added a cloud, a light of pink, rose, around the edges, which surely hadn’t been here, visible, and yet she’s made something splendid with these colors. The woman reading seems suffused with rose. She holds a sheaf of papers, and what she reads seems to have dissolved into gray and pink and white.

  “Alors?”

  “It’s lovely, May. Lovely.”

  “You like how the light’s coming?”

  “Oui.”

  “I think the colors have turned out well—the dress has been worrying me.”

  “The colors are splendid.”

  May turns to put away her oils.

  “Maybe one more day,” she says.

  x.

  May hurries to the studio this morning, and I walk as quickly
as I can. As we reach the place Pigalle, and the outdoor tables at the Nouvelle Athènes, she grasps my arm and slows down.

  “I’m like a race horse today, Lyddy, aren’t I?”

  I have to laugh. A race horse is just what she is, fine-tuned and restless, bolting for the finish. I glance across the busy place at Le Rat Mort, wondering whether Degas might be holding court today. Usually he waves to us, or rushes out to greet us. But Le Rat Mort shows no sign of him. I see only a couple of young men at a table, laughing, and a vendeuse gazing into the street, cradling a cup of coffee.

  In her studio, May opens the curtains, and light swings into the room.

  “Did you sleep well last night?” she asks.

  “Quite well,” I say, as confidently as I can.

  “You feel quite well today?”

  “Yes, May, quite well.”

  “I walked you here too fast, didn’t I?”

  “The walk was lovely.”

  “Have to keep you healthy, Lyddy. My best model.”

  “Mais non,” I say, but I think to myself, with hesitant pride, yes, I am, I am quite a good model, and as soon as I think this, I chasten and mock myself, sending my thousand little bees to sting me, and sing their disdain: How could you think, the song always begins, and the thousand bees hum and mumble and murmur into my ear, adding new verses as they find new places to thrust their stingers in. All you’ve done is sit here, they hum, and you’re not even pretty, you’re pale as a ghost and a bag of bones too, and then the fiercer ones sing, She’s changed you into a figure of beauty, through oil and canvas, but how can you think she’s pictured you as you really are?