Lydia Cassat Reading the Morning Paper

by Harriet Scott Chessman

  I’m used to these insects. I seem to own them, after all. They occupy a special place on my acre, complete with bee-boxes I myself seem to tend, in my veils and gloves. I’m their queen, as much as I’m the sorry object of their attacks. They fatten on my clover and apple-blossoms and honeysuckle, and they practice their songs in the warm sun on my meadow. So I can’t blame anyone but myself when they come to sting.

  “I think Degas might come by today, Lyddy.” May says this carefully, for I know she thinks I’m shy around him.

  “Ah.”

  “He’s eager to see the painting.”

  “Mm.”

  “He likes you very much. Only the other day he asked after you. He thinks so highly of you, Lyddy.”

  “Certainly he likes what he knows of me,” I say. But I think to myself, maybe he’s like my bees made visible? Can’t May see how he could sting?

  “He has been telling me he’d like to paint you one day, in fact.”

  “You must be joking, May.” I almost slip out of my pose, to look at her.

  “Why would I joke about that? You’re a splendid model, he sees that.” She adds, “He hopes to paint me, too.”

  Now I can’t help breaking my pose to stare at May.

  “You would pose for him?”

  “Actually, I already have.”

  She has pulled her stubborn look, like a veil, over her face.

  “Don’t look so shocked, Lyddy. I don’t show a bit of flesh, you know.”

  She’s teasing me now; she pushes me to my limit, and then she smiles, her impish smile, polished to perfection since childhood, and I can’t tell if she’s making a fool of me or not.

  Her face softens.

  “Ne t’en fais pas. I’ve only modelled once or twice, Lyddy. Really, it’s nothing to be worried about. He just needed someone to understand the pose, and I happened to be able to help him, when his other models couldn’t.”

  “His other models?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “Don’t be so old-fashioned, Lyd. It’s utterly comme il faut. Look at Berthe Morisot; she often sat for people, didn’t she? She sat for Manet.”

  “Yes, and look at the women who are ruined by such men.”

  “Ruined! Lyddy, you sound as if you’re in a novel.”

  “There’s nothing fictional about it, May. It’s ordinary life.”

  “Well.” May looks at me soberly. “All I was trying to say was that Degas admires you.”

  “I am overwhelmed with gratitude.”

  As I move back into my pose, my head begins to hurt.

  xi.

  As the clock ticks the seconds, I find myself remembering the little girl who posed for May last spring, sitting in the blue armchair. I met her only once. She was shy and polite, the child of a friend of Degas.

  How can I describe my uneasiness? It’s just that, observing her, I saw freshly how a child has little real say about what happens. If my sister suggests she pose, so, and if Degas suggests she pose, so, and the child attempts to do what these grown-ups say, well, I suppose that’s a child’s life. And if the pose is indelicate, well, who is she to say so?

  When the girl and her father left the studio that day, I attempted to bring this up with May, but she became furious and would hear none of it. “Could you not move her legs closer together?” I asked, in a gentle way. “Oh, Lydia, how can you be so—American?!” May exclaimed, her face growing red, just as it used to do when she was little. “I am thinking simply of the child,” I said. “But what of the child, Lyd? The child is all right, she thinks nothing of the pose. Stop being so puritanical!” I felt my face grow hot when she said that, for I thought she might be right. I can’t help having grown up in America, and I know May had to leave all that if she was to become something more than a lady portraitist or engraver. Yet I felt shame and anxiety for the child’s situation. “The pose is natural,” May urged. “She might loll in a chair like that at home. Who’s to say a little girl should sit up straight, her hair brushed?”

  But May was deliberately misconstruing my meaning. To see those young legs, spread so widely apart, her arm bent back as if she were offering herself up as a small odalisque. May should have paid more attention. The child was not, after all, being painted by Degas.

  Maybe my questions lingered in her, for she chose not to try another pose like that one. She even declined to have the little girl as a model again, although the child’s father asked her many times. I’ve wondered, since then, if May herself began to feel apologetic toward the child, to have made such use of her. Not that she would ever say as much to me, or to anyone. She likes to feel she’s right.

  May confessed to me later that she’d allowed Degas to work on the background of that picture. I might have guessed, because of the strange cutting off of the chairs and windows by the picture’s edges, and the dream-like proliferation of blue, flowered armchairs. Instead of one chair, three appear. A couch appears too, covered in the same blue material, not like any couch May owns, and all these pieces of furniture, placed at odd angles to each other, make a tense, unhappy family, having nothing to say to each other. May probably painted most of this, but I sense Degas’ presence. He has a way of making a picture stirring and strange, like an unsettling dream.

  She told me hesitantly. “He helped me today.”

  “Helped you?”

  “He helped with the background.”

  “Did you ask him to?”

  “I was surprised,” she said, “but I felt flattered.”

  Flattered! This was May talking, fierce and independent May! “Well, do you like it better now?” I asked.

  She looked at me then, a long, intricate look, and finally she said slowly, “I think he’s added a certain brilliance to it, yes, and an unusual feeling.”

  “I know he’s brilliant, May, and he paints unusual pictures. It’s just that that painting is yours.”

  xii.

  As we walk home this afternoon, arm in arm, I think about how I’ve created something with May, something that was not on earth before. As the crowds along the boulevard Rochechouart jostle us, I think I could fly home instead of walking.

  Sitting in the lamplight, I try to read about Emma Bovary, whose life has swung terribly out of control, but all I can think about is May’s picture. I miss something now, I’m not sure what. Maybe it’s the posing I miss, or maybe it’s the woman herself I’m missing, the one in the picture. I wish I could ask her a question, see her look at me. She has her own world now, a quiet and enchanted place, small and pleasant, composed of a few simple things: a chair, a newspaper, light. Sickness holds no place there. All is rose and white and cream, the gorgeous and simple here and now, the shimmering surface of things.

  Yet at least she’s safe. May has placed her in a world apart from the sting of bees and sickness, mortal life.

  May has just asked me about my wishes. It’s our old game. Each of us can say three. May’s are easy; I could have spoken them for her. “To become a famous and brilliant artist; to make lots of money; and to own a château to which all of us can retire in style.” You don’t have to tell the whole truth, in this game; half or less will do. I know some others of May’s, I think, the ones she can’t say, something about how love could still come to her, in some astonishing form, on the glint of a wing, cutting through air, and how those she loves—her sister, for instance, and in a different way, the terrible Degas—could hold the course.

  She leans on my knees, looking up at me with a comical face. “And your wishes, Lyd?”

  I think for a moment. “To become a famous and brilliant model,” I say. (“Oh, I promise you that,” May laughs.) “To live well, I mean mindfully. And”—I hesitate—“to have as much health as possible.”

  “Oh, make that a bigger wish, Lyddy,” May says with sudden fierceness. “Say, ‘To be utterly healthy, for fifty years at least.’ ”

  “Touch wood, May,” I say, an
d I think how health is only the beginning of my most ardent wish. To live in that world you made, I wish to say, that creamy world of no difficulty, no blood. To know another’s touch, and to have children of my own, like Aleck’s, and a life like a shell curling in on itself, glistening and clean on the sand, rolled in salt water, rolled and rolled, spent and spending.

  May brings her face closer. “Model for me again.”

  Tea

  I stand in an unmown meadow, green-gold, rimmed with dark green woods. I’m looking in the high grass—for what? A ring? A bracelet? I look at my hands and see I’ve forgotten my gloves

  A raft of clouds, the line of trees darker

  Paris, avril, 1880

  i.

  This morning, the place d’Anvers looks covered in feathers, all shades of yellow and green. May and I walk up to the boulevard Rochechouart, through the cool air, and then the boulevard Clichy, past the cafés and boutiques. I’m wearing the dress I bought at Worth’s before Easter, as deep pink as the inside of a conch shell. Whenever I’m about to pose for May now, I feel as if we’ve created a new holiday; I imagine marching along with banners flying.

  In May’s studio, I enter the pose she decided on yesterday. I hold a gold-rimmed cup and saucer in the purple-and-black striped satin armchair, near one of the long windows.

  Looking through this window, holding this cup and saucer, I contemplate a slice of blue sky above the gray building opposite May’s studio, a sheet of light clouds moving slowly. Near me, I know, hover white and grape hyacinths, although I can see them only out of the corner of my eye: a gift from Degas. I breathe in their scent.

  May’s skirt makes a rushing sound as she moves. I cherish the way the room fills with quiet, like a bowl filling with milk.

  ii.

  When Degas rings the bell, and a moment later bursts into the studio, our calm scatters. As I move out of my pose to greet him, I note his energy and elegance. His walking coat is the color of sand. He looks almost handsome.

  “You’re beginning a new one?” he asks in a moment, looking at the canvas.

  “We began it yesterday,” says May.

  Degas studies the picture.

  “The composition’s all right.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” May says wryly. She turns to me. “Shall we begin again, Lyd?”

  “Certainly, May.” I lower myself into the chair and pick up the cup and saucer. May touches my hand to bring the cup an inch closer to my face. “C’est bien. Just like that.”

  “The line of the arm—,” Degas adds. “Well.”

  “Well?”

  “Et bien, you might wish the angle—just there—of the elbow—to be sharper.”

  Looking out the window, I picture May standing next to Degas, her head cocked as she looks at the painting, and at me. He’s quick to make suggestions. He can make jokes at her expense, too, as he does with other friends. Once he told her, in front of me, that something she’d just painted—an oil of a young woman in a theater—looked sweet and bland, like an English trifle. “One might like the first taste, but then, after a moment, one longs for something more—what?—nourishing.” May retorted, “I think it’s nourishing enough, thank you.” She is not easily thrown off balance, although, in the privacy of our household, she sometimes lets me see how furious she is at him, or how distressed she feels by one of his remarks.

  “If you were to move her arm just—so—you could make a more unusual effect.”

  “I like the angle of her arm. I think it works well.”

  “Oh, well, of course if you like it.”

  “I do.”

  iii.

  Once May begins to paint, I hear Degas light his pipe, and I smell the pungent tobacco, as the pigeons whirr and the light in the studio grows brighter. I’m surprised he’s staying so long today, and I’m not wholly happy. His presence changes things. For one thing, May becomes more self-conscious and alert. And I suppose I’m jealous of her attentions to him.

  “Have you seen the reviews of our exhibition?” he asks May.

  “Yes.”

  “Most of the critics are idiots.”

  “You come across rather well, though,” May says. “Huysmans adores you.”

  Degas gives a short laugh. “Yes, and what did that elephant Ephrussi write? My subjects are ‘bizarre,’ the features of my dancers ‘repulsive’?”

  “He said more than that. He praised your drawing.”

  “Oh, well, then. I’m much in his debt.”

  “All of it was harder this year, with Monet at the Salon instead, and Renoir too.”

  “The world is full of self-serving people, attempting to puff themselves up. What does art matter to them? If they want to parade in front of a stupid public, at the official bazaar, I have no need of them.”

  May isn’t quite as irritated about friends like Renoir, but she too feels insulted, I know, by some of the reviewers of the 5ème Impressionist exhibition this month. They find her colors too dark, her pictures not as interesting as the ones she presented last year, when she made such an astonishingly successful début. Henri Havard claims her originality has dimmed. Philippe Burty thinks her drawing misses “tonal strength,” which is ridiculous, and he even blames her for—how did he put it?—“aspiring to the partially completed image.” “He simply doesn’t like what I’m trying to do,” May says, throwing the newspaper on the couch. “Critics can be such fools.”

  I know she faults Degas, in part, for the haphazard air of this spring’s exhibition. She worked all winter on prints to be published in the arts journal Degas envisioned, Le Jour et la Nuit, only to discover a few weeks ago, right before the exhibition was to open, that Degas felt his own prints were not ready. And, because he was not ready, the whole journal was abandoned. She had only eight oil paintings ready for the show; so much of her effort had gone into her printmaking.

  May felt angry with Degas, just as Pissarro and the others did. Yet she has not stayed angry. “After all, I could have painted more,” she says. “I’ll have to do more this year, that’s all there is to it. I’ll have the critics on their knees next spring.”

  As a girl, of course, she proved she could hold herself the equal of anyone, including Father, who has never been one to hold back his thoughts. He tried to prevent her from doing so many things: taking art classes in Philadelphia, studying and travelling on her own in Europe, living in Paris. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t simply stay in Philadelphia and marry. “You could keep painting, May. We do have some culture in America, you know.”

  She holds her own with Degas too. Something teasing and fierce is in their friendship. Although she acknowledges that his wit can be too caustic, she relishes it sometimes, and she certainly admires his intelligence and his devotion to art. All year, she has seen him almost daily, making use of his printing press, experimenting with various methods, brushing shoulders with him at his studio or hers, at museums or dealers, and of course at our apartment too. She even began to pose for him more often in the winter (and May Alcott died just after Christmas, the memory glancing into my mind like a bird, and flying off again, her face pale, the infection from childbirth ravaging her).

  May still poses for Degas, probably more than I know. Of course, she’s not like his other models. I’ve often been with her in his studio as she poses, looking into a mirror, trying on a hat, sitting with her folded umbrella. These pictures bear almost no resemblance to the others I know he’s painting now, of dancers, their arms and shoulders bare, their legs muscular in tights. Awkward these figures are, ugly sometimes. He shows them in harsh light, from unflattering angles, laboring to raise their legs, or resting, exhausted from their labor.

  I’ve heard rumors about other pictures he’s working on, of subjects too risqué for public view. I wonder if May has seen them.

  Looking out the window, for all the world like someone at a party, I hold a pretty, empty cup and gaze at the ribbon of blue sky. I watch quick brush strokes of birds
, rich gray against blue, and listen to the subtle tones in my sister’s conversation with Degas, the shadings, the slow move off into another color. How close to May does he stand? I wonder. How do they look at each other?

  “You’ll both come to my soirée this Saturday, I hope?”

  “Of course we will, won’t we, Lyd?”

  “I hope so.”

  To brush shoulders with his and May’s friends—Renoir, Caillebotte, Pissarro, and others—to feel alive in that bright, crowded space, makes a heady kind of joy. If the ticket of entrance is the risk of the host’s acid wit, well then, I suppose I too am willing to pay the price.

  “And I am hoping you’ll sit for me again one day, Mademoiselle Cassatt.”

  “I’m honored,” I say, holding my pose. This is at least a partial truth. The pleasure I felt, in modeling for him last January with May, surprised me. In his studio, he posed me sitting down, holding a guidebook. The idea, he explained, was that we were in the Louvre, possibly the Etruscan gallery, two visitors, one standing, one sitting.

  How can I describe the sensation of being looked at by this man? His look felt, at moments, like a storm on a coast, stirring the trees to wildness, shifting the dunes. I hadn’t felt prepared.

  The thickness in the air of May’s studio becomes palpable. I imagine opening my mouth to eat it like bread.

  “I’m sorry, May. Did you say something?”

  “Lyddy! I thought you were listening! We were just talking about this summer. I’m encouraging Monsieur Degas to come out to the country to visit us, when we rent our house in Marly.”

  “Ah. Of course. That will be lovely.”

  “You must enjoy the country, Mademoiselle Cassatt.”

  “Oui. It can be so hot in Paris in the summer.”