Lydia Cassat Reading the Morning Paper

by Harriet Scott Chessman

  xi.

  After lunch, May comes to the threshold of my room, where I am threading a lavender floss to begin Elsie’s clover. She buttons her summer coat.

  “You’re going out?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  She comes in, and quietly takes her burgundy gloves from my embroidery frame.

  “To your studio?”

  “To a gallery, first, and then to my studio.”

  I look at her, and she returns my look with her own, teasing, profound.

  When she kisses me, I smell her cologne, her freshly washed hair. I catch a glimpse, under her fur collar, of a necklace I have not seen before—pearl, with tiny rubies.

  “Merci, Lyddy.”

  “What have I done?”

  “You’ve posed. You’ve helped me paint.” She adds, “I hope you’ll be able to pose again soon.”

  “I hope so too,” I say.

  Here is what I write. I write it as a letter to May, but I do not wish her to see it, not yet. I put it into my pattern box.

  My sister, my soul—when I dissolve, in my heart’s blood, I know you will think that you will dissolve too. Your heart will be sore; it will scatter into brushstrokes, fragments, feathers, and you will think you too will vanish. But here is what I wish to tell you. Listen well, May. You will remember me, then, bent over my labor, at my embroidery frame, on a hot June day in Paris, my dress like a field of flowers, my face calm. You will remember me, because you caught my soul in paint. And one day you’ll pick up your brush again, and stretch a new canvas, you’ll bend to your work again, and the world at your elbow, or crying from the newspapers, or whispering in the shadows near you, will become quieter for a moment, and you will put all these things aside, to make again a world to stand next to that other world, the one we think we know, and you’ll hear me whispering, Courage, May, and you’ll bend to it, again and again.

  Je t’embrasse,

  Lyddy

  Writing this, I feel almost happy. Sometimes one can have a glimpse of the future, and, frightening as it is, it can have in it an element of consolation. Terrible, to imagine a world continuing beyond my own dissolving; yet what if I am a presence for May, and for others too, leaving a trace, like the swath of white light on the top of this embroidery frame? Maybe I should not be so afraid of vanishing, after all.

  x.

  In the morning, after May has left, I walk into my room to look at Elsie’s pillowcase, stretched out still, on my frame, with my designs, yellow, blue, green, purple, lavender. This too is a letter. Poignant but sturdy, this desire to touch another, to reach across an ocean, or a city, or a room. (Tell me how to live as you do, he said, with such grace. I know nothing about grace.) My wildflowers look most imperfect. But, slowly, I thread my needle, with a red for the Indian paintbrush, and I begin to sew. Soon, I will create the bee balm too, and then I’ll be ready to cut the threads and send this silk field sailing.

  I yearn to be simply present in this day, filled for the moment with color and shape, my own hand urging the needle through the silk.

  Lydia Cassatt became very ill in the summer of 1881.

  She died in Paris on November 7, 1882, of Bright’s Disease.

  Mary Cassatt painted and created prints for over thirty more years.

  She died at her château in Beaufresne, in 1926.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I am indebted, in this work of fiction, to the superb scholarship on Mary Cassatt and the Impressionists. I am especially indebted to the work of Robert Herbert, Anne Higonnet, and Nancy Mowll Mathews. The recent exhibition of Cassatt’s oeuvre, organized by Judith A. Barter, and the rich accompanying catalogue, Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, have contributed to my understanding of Cassatt’s art, family life, and relationship to the world of late nineteenth-century French culture. I wish to thank my research assistant, Jennifer Boittin, for her valuable help.