Walking with the Muses

by Pat Cleveland

  Henriette took my hand in hers as she led us indoors and up the stairs toward the guest room. I looked down onto an enormous open space and saw a living room dotted with red velvet sofas and a very old-looking baby grand piano covered in a large Spanish shawl. There was art everywhere. Even the wood-paneled walls had been painted by Henriette’s husband with family portraits and pictures of flowers and forests.

  We went upstairs past the book-filled loft library, then a room that was empty except for a round table with a vase full of red roses, before arriving at our room, which was wallpapered in an intricate floral pattern and flooded with sunlight. It was so quiet that I could hear the bees buzzing softly just outside the window.

  I climbed up on the big four-poster bed and immediately conked out. When I woke up, I went to look for my mom and found her in the room across the way, sitting at an easel touching up a portrait of a young man. I wanted to watch her, but she said I was distracting her and sent me away to play.

  Wandering back down the staircase, I found my way into the garden. There, strung up between two birch trees surrounded by wildflowers, was a hammock. I climbed in, leaned back, and discovered something I’d spend the rest of my life searching for: peace. I lay there for hours, swinging gently and looking at the sky, daydreaming and inhaling the perfume of the natural world. Eventually, Madame Metcalf returned and introduced me to her three adorable gray poodles, who wriggled into the hammock with me, licking my face and making me laugh. Then Madame Metcalf led me to a tree house furnished with checked curtains and a child-size rocking chair. I gasped in pleasure. “You can play here,” she said. “I had it built for my grandchildren, but they hardly ever come anymore.”

  As I played, I wondered why some children had all these fine playthings and I didn’t. It was a troubling thought, and in retrospect, I see it as my first conscious perception of class, of the existence of haves and have-nots. At the time, though, I shrugged it off and simply enjoyed the luxuries at hand.

  The next morning, as my mother painted, Madame Metcalf showed me her doves, twenty in all, which she kept in a walk-in birdhouse. I held several, stroked them, and learned how to coo exactly as they did. Next, she brought out a pony, which I rode around the yard. She showed me her garden and Mr. Metcalf’s collection of bird eggs. She said the name of every bird, egg, and flower in both English and French and made me repeat the words after her.

  It was a three-day weekend, and Madame Metcalf had charity events to attend (she was fond of any cause involving animals), so with Mom hard at work, I had the run of the place. Until Mom decided to do a painting of me. “I don’t know why I’m painting everyone else’s children,” she said. “I want a portrait of you.” She stretched a canvas, sat it against a chair, took out her paints, and asked me to sit in a puddle of light in the middle of the bed. She handed me a large storybook. “Here, Henriette wanted you to have this. It’s called Madeline, and it’s about a little girl who lives in Paris.” She pointed to the cover. “See, there’s the Eiffel Tower; it’s a symbol of the city.” Then she sat back down behind her canvas. “Now you can pose for me.”

  How do I do that? I thought, shifting and moving my body into all sorts of positions.

  “Just sit without moving,” she said in a soft voice. “You can do that.” And I could. I could do anything she wanted me to, as long as we were together. So I sat there without moving, the book open on my lap, as if I were reading.

  “That’s good,” Mom said. “Just read your book.”

  I kept my eyes glued to a page that showed the little red-haired girl with the big yellow hat staring at a tiger in a zoo. I wanted a hat like that. Without looking up, I could hear my mom’s brushstrokes. I’d move just my eyes to look up through my eyelashes, and I’d catch her stealing a glance at me from behind the canvas. It was like a game of peekaboo. Every time our eyes met, she smiled, and I felt like the most important person in the world.

  I asked, “Am I a good model, Mommy?” I was trying so hard not to fidget.

  “You’re a very good model.”

  I knew I was a good model, because my mom said so. She finished that portrait in one day, and the next morning she had to go back to work in the city. So there I was in that big barn house with Madame Metcalf, her menagerie, and the silence, broken only by the sound of the doves and the grandfather clock chiming out the hour.

  Madame Metcalf encouraged me to go up to the library to select a few children’s books. As I browsed the shelves, I noticed lots of old-timey photographs propped among the books. I was so deep in exploring them that I didn’t hear Madame Metcalf come up behind me.

  “They’re lovely, aren’t they?” She bent down to my height and put her arms around me. “I was young once, my dear, and living in Paris.” That place again: Paris. She took a deep, sad breath. “That was when my husband was alive. He was an artist, like your mommy.” She took a round-framed photo off the shelf and held it next to her heart. “We didn’t have much money, but we had art and many friends. We knew the greatest artists, actors, and opera singers of the era. And ballet dancers, like the great Nijinsky.” She pointed to a picture with handwriting on it. The man in it was dressed in tights and wearing lots of eye makeup; he looked like a forest fairy.

  One by one, she showed me her friends in the old photos: Sarah Bernhardt, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso. She picked up a photo of a woman named Helen Keller who, according to Madame Metcalf, had picked blueberries with my mother before I was born. Then there was Isadora Duncan (“A dancer and an American like you,” Madame Metcalf said, “who fled to Europe for artistic freedom”) with her arms stretched up to the sky. I loved the way she looked: so free. I wanted to dance with her. Oh, let’s face it: I wanted to be her.

  I had fallen in love with the glamorous expat life of 1920s Paris that Madame Metcalf described—a life that, even at five, I yearned for so fiercely I could taste it. It would be another fifty years before I found out that Madame Metcalf’s adventures in Paris had been a bit more complicated and a lot more scandalous than she’d let on. (I chalk up her less than total honesty to my being too young to understand.)

  In actuality, the Metcalfs divorced in 1920, after nine years of marriage and two sons, and in 1921 Henriette, who worked as a translator and as an editor for French Vogue, embarked on a tortured sixteen-year love affair with Thelma Wood, an American sculptor who lived in Paris and was part of Gertrude Stein’s inner circle. Thelma was the inspiration for the classic novel Nightwood, written by her former lover Djuna Barnes, who considered Thelma the love of her life. Barnes never quite got over the fact that Thelma left her for Henriette, who was the model for another character in Nightwood. Still, when Willard Metcalf died in 1925 (not long after the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, mounted a huge retrospective of his work), he left all of his money and most of his extraordinary paintings to his ex-wife.

  That first stay in Connecticut lasted for two weeks. Madame Metcalf explained that she wanted to instruct me in social correctness. She spoke in French and introduced me to egg cups and the soft-boiled oeuf, which I had to carefully break open with a little silver knife. I ate it with a silver teaspoon embossed with a coat of arms and a fleur-de-lis. “Etiquette, Patricia,” she’d say, “it’s all about etiquette.”

  Surrounded by both nature and culture, I experienced a tangle of strange new emotions: Being without my mom made me sad, but so did the thought of leaving this world and being back in our apartment in the hot, smelly city.

  Fortunately, Mom and I visited Madame Metcalf almost every weekend that summer. Country life in Connecticut became a part of our routine, and it was heavenly. My mother was happy, too, because her social life was heading in the right direction. Madame Metcalf introduced her to Carl Van Vechten, the famous photographer and patron of the Harlem Renaissance; he loved my mother’s art and photographed her many times. Once she took me with her to his studio, and he photographed the two of us together.

  Mom met another new friend through Ma
dame Metcalf—an opera singer who lived in a nearby Connecticut town. On our visit to the singer’s house, Mom told me that I need to be extra well behaved, and that I should curtsy and say “pleased to meet you” when I was introduced. The house was on a little hill, and when we arrived at the door, we were greeted by a black woman dressed in a black uniform with a white apron and a little white hat. Mom whispered that she was the maid. I’d never seen a maid or a house as grand as this one. It had a marble foyer and a big chandelier and a tall staircase. The maid led us up the stairs to a pink room with pink shag wall-to-wall carpeting. The room was round—something else I’d never seen—and up on a round platform rested a round bed. The maid closed the door behind us, and as we stood there, a lovely brown lady walked in. She was dressed in a fancy pink dress and had shiny black hair and dark, intelligent eyes.

  She bent down to me and said, “So you’re the little girl Madame Metcalf told me about. I love your mother.” She hugged Mom and asked, “How does my dress look?”

  My mom noticed that the hem was slightly uneven and said, “I think you need to take it up a little on one side.”

  “Oh, goodness,” the lady said, sighing. “I don’t have time; I’ll have to change.”

  My mom said, “I can hem it for you.”

  “You can do that?” the lady asked, astonished.

  Of course she could. Mom was a master seamstress who spent hours every day dreaming up new clothes and creating them in our apartment. So she fixed the hem while the lady stood there. When Mom finished, the lady said, “I had this dress especially made for tonight’s party. You saved me. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Mrs. Anderson,” said Mom.

  “You know you can call me Marian.”

  “Yes, yes, I forgot,” Mom said, smiling sweetly.

  “We’ve invited several producers tonight. I hope they all make it. There will be a few new singers.” Marian turned to me and asked, “Do you sing?”

  “Yes,” I said, launching into “Twinkle, twinkle, little star . . .”

  “That sounds good,” she said.

  “Can you sing, too?” I asked.

  “Sometimes, but never at home.”

  I thought that was odd, because my mom and I were always singing at home. Then Marian took me by the hand, and the three of us went into the party. Somehow I ended up back in Marian’s bedroom, on her bed. My eyes flickered open and shut, and I saw Marian and my mom watching over me. Then Marian sang softly in my ear. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star . . .” And I woke up.

  That’s all I can remember of my first visit with the great Marian Anderson. My mom and I returned to Mrs. Anderson’s many times. She had no children of her own, and she asked to be my second godmother.

  Both these godmothers, Henriette Metcalf and Marian Anderson, just wanted to help my mom, a gifted but struggling artist. For me, though, these women were revelatory: They showed me a different way of living and gave me something to aspire to. And they spent time with me, explaining everything from nature to manners, crocheting, and—the most essential lesson of all—how to be contented all by myself.

  chapter 5

  TEACH ME TONIGHT

  My mom (seated) and Aunt Helen in our living room, getting ready for one of their costume balls, 1958.

  The following fall, just after I turned six, Madame Metcalf had the idea to send me to school in Switzerland. She offered to pay for it, thinking that it would not only give me a safe place where I could get a great education, but also, most important, it would free up my mom to work on her art.

  Mom nixed Switzerland but agreed that a private school in the city was a good idea. The next thing I knew, Mom and I were taking a bus to Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Ninth Street. When I asked where we were going, she said, “We’re checking on a really good school for you.” It was a cold evening, so I was wearing a plaid wool skirt, itchy kneesocks, a new pair of Mary Janes that felt heavy on my feet, and a navy blue reefer coat with gold buttons and a velvet collar. I looked every inch the rich New York City private school girl. In reality, of course, I was anything but.

  We arrived at an ornate limestone building that seemed palatial. But then I caught a glimpse of my first nun: She was tall and dressed in black from head to toe, except for a white band around her forehead and neck. Though she smiled, something about her scared me. She tried to take my hand, but I pulled away. Then she directed her first words at me: “You are not well behaved.” She showed us into an office where there was another, much meaner-looking woman dressed the same way. This nun said, “We should keep her here starting today.”

  When I heard that, I jumped up from my chair, howled, “Nooooo!” and flung myself at my mother and hugged her tightly around the hips. The first nun tried to pry me loose, but I howled some more. The scuffle escalated and Mom saw the terror in my eyes. That was when she looked the nun straight in the eye and said coldly, “Take your hands off of her.” I knew that tone: Mom was furious. She put her arm around me, and as we headed for the door, the second nun said, “You will regret this decision. Once you leave, we will not take her back.”

  The fresh night air outside was such a relief. We walked east in the chill and caught the bus home. There was no more talk about private school, in Switzerland, New York, or anywhere else. A few weeks later, I enrolled at the regular public elementary school down the block from where we lived.

  As far as I’m concerned, my true education centered on the creative mess that existed in our living room. And what a glorious mess it was: There were sequins, strings of pearls, peacock feathers, large exotic fans, beads, and bent wire coat hangers loaded down with fabrics. The floor and sofas were covered with colored paper and tulle, as Mom and Auntie Helen went into a creative frenzy trying to make the deadline for various costume balls they hoped to attend. And I was in the middle of it all, absorbing everything, loving every minute.

  I’ll never forget a costume they made for New York City’s Beaux Arts Ball in 1958, not long after the Soviets sent the first satellite, Sputnik 1, into outer space. Sputnik 1 was followed a month later by Sputnik 2, which had a dog on board. In our living room, Mom and Auntie Helen were working on a four-foot-high replica of Planet Earth; the big round ball was covered in tulle, with green fabric representing the continents and hundreds of light blue sequins indicating bodies of water. As usual, I was prancing around the room, twirling ribbons and waving feathers. But I stopped midtwirl when my auntie lowered the globe over my mom. Her legs, covered in fishnet stockings sewn with hundreds of rhinestones, were the only part of her that showed. “Turn the light out, so we can see how it looks in the dark,” Mom said. I ran and flicked the switch.

  There she stood, my mom as Earth, lit up from within, legs glittering like the brightest constellation in the night sky. Attached to the globe by a wire was a little toy dog inside a transparent plastic ball, lit by a tiny bulb. As my mom the Earth stood still, the little ball started to orbit her.

  “Can you see the Sputnik going?” her muffled voice asked. “Is it going?”

  “Yes, yes! It’s working!” Auntie Helen cried, jumping up and down and clapping.

  It was magical. My mother could figure out how to make something look so real that I felt I was in outer space, gazing back at a wondrous world. That was my space travel—living within my mom’s boundless imagination. I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher.

  The next day, the newspaper carried a photo of Mom in that costume. The caption read, “This year’s winner of the Beaux Arts Ball, Lady Bird Cleveland.” The prize was a trophy and some cash, which we always needed.

  There were many competitions, many nights out, and many interested suitors coming to call on Mom and Helen, who were attractive young single women. Sometimes Mom would go out and Helen would stay with me, and sometimes it was the other way around. (They were both nurse’s aides at Bellevue Hospital, but they worked different shifts.) I loved to watch them get ready. I’d sit at the kitchen table, and Mom or Helen would
stand in front of the small mirror on top of the refrigerator, applying makeup. “Painting your face is a lot like painting a canvas,” Mom would say. “You have to consider the image from every angle.” Then she would highlight her eyes and add a little beauty dot just below her right eyebrow. “There, I’m finished,” she’d say with satisfaction. “The beauty mark is like the period at the end of a sentence.” Then she’d punctuate that statement by giving me a kiss on the cheek.

  One night Mom took me to the Apollo Theater in Harlem to see a show called the Jewel Box Revue. A friend of hers, whose portrait she’d just painted, was performing in it. We sat in the first row, so close to the stage that I could see the dancers’ hairy legs. I was totally confused. Suddenly, I realized the entire chorus of dancers was made up of men in dresses, moving and singing like women. Then a lady in a sparkly red gown came out to the middle of the stage and sang “Santa Baby.”

  Mom nudged me and whispered, “That’s my friend.” Just then, the lady spotted us and turned to sing in our direction. Looking directly at me, she purred the words “hurry down my chimney tonight.”

  The lady’s name was Eartha Kitt, and she was just one of dozens of big-time musicians Mom hung out with. One night Mom came home fuming. “I will never go to her house again!” I heard her say to Helen. “I told her she was being nasty.” Years later, my mom explained what had happened. The person she was mad at was Billie Holiday, who had pressured Mom to shoot heroin with her. When Mom refused, their friendship ended.