The Other Alcott

by Elise Hooper

  “These are yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re good.” Her pronunciation of “good” was clipped with her German accent. “Ernest says you have studied art for the last decade. It shows.” She sat down on one of the chairs and accepted a glass of lemonade from Sabine. “I’m relieved. This visit would have been awkward otherwise.”

  “I appreciate that, thank you.” May stretched a smile across to her mother-in-law.

  “Mother never minces words,” Ernest said to May, chuckling.

  “Ernest wrote that you studied French all summer.”

  “I did. I can no longer get by on English alone. I’m always impressed by how many languages Europeans speak.”

  Frau Nieriker gave a dismissive shrug. “When you live in a country as large as America where everyone speaks the same language, why bother to waste time learning anything else? Here, we’re all together in a small space. We speak each other’s languages only out of necessity.”

  Herr Nieriker had been outside studying the plants in the garden before joining them in the drawing room. “It’s a lovely afternoon. We should go for a walk.”

  Frau Nieriker stood. “I agree. We’ve been sitting since we left Baden this morning.”

  “Good idea, there are some lovely paths here in the village’s park.” May rose to walk into the kitchen to give directions for dinner to Sabine.

  As the foursome left the house to walk the paths around Saint Cloud, Ernest pulled May behind. “See? They tell you exactly what is on their minds.”

  May smiled, but was not sure she wanted to know exactly what was on their minds.

  THAT EVENING, THE foursome settled into the drawing room. Frau Nieriker concentrated on her needlework while May knit. Herr Nieriker paced around the room; he had not remained still all day. On their earlier afternoon walk, he had blasted ahead of them. Impatience? A search for solitude? A simple desire to stretch out one’s legs? May couldn’t tell. He stopped in front of the mantel to inspect the small collection of flowers that surrounded a small photograph of her mother.

  “What’s this?”

  “Oh, that’s my shrine to my dear mother. I miss her dreadfully.”

  May was surprised to find Frau Nieriker reach forward and pet her arm in sympathy. May’s eyes misted with unexpected tears, and she looked down at the muffler she was knitting. Keen for a distraction, she said, “Ernest, how about you give us a little concert?”

  Frau Nieriker’s right arm froze as she had stopped her needle. She lifted her gaze quickly from her embroidery hoop. “Yes, we would love that.”

  Herr Nieriker stopped moving and stared at the rug.

  Ernest did not look up from his newspaper, but his nostrils flared and he clenched his jaw. “No.”

  “Son, please.”

  He peeled his gaze from the newspaper and looked back at his mother. “No.”

  May had never heard her husband speak so sharply. She looked back and forth from Ernest and his mother. Frau Nieriker slowly balled up her stitching before standing.

  “It is time for me to say good night.” She spoke with formal precision, pronouncing each English word carefully. “Thank you for welcoming us into your home.”

  “Good night,” May called back as she watched Frau Nieriker retreat to the art studio, repurposed into a guest room for the weekend. “I shall follow suit and head upstairs. Good night.”

  Once in bed, May waited for Ernest to join her, but he remained downstairs. Eventually she fell asleep alone, Ernest’s terse refusal echoing in her head.

  THE NEXT DAY, the group decided to go into Paris to explore the city. On the train, May watched her husband and his parents for any sign of uneasiness; yet unperturbed, they all read through sections of the newspaper. The four arrived in the Left Bank and strolled down rue de Sèvres, along the long front of Au Bon Marché. Frau Nieriker reached for May’s arm and nodded up at the department store’s domed entrance on the corner.

  “Let’s go in and browse.”

  The two men decided to visit the store’s reading room, while the women entered the main shopping gallery. May wandered the aisles of umbrellas and shoes and came upon Frau Nieriker at a counter fingering some silk scarves. The contrast between seeing the woman clad in black from head to toe admiring a dainty silk scarf the color of red geraniums made May smile.

  “Are you looking for a gift?”

  “No,” her mother-in-law answered without lifting her eyes from the scarf. Letting it slide through her fingers and fall back onto the counter, she looked at May with a sheepish expression. “I’ve always wanted to wear something like this.”

  May reached for the scarf and sighed at the softness of its texture. “It’s a wonderful color. You should buy it for yourself.”

  “No, I would never wear it. My whole life, I have looked like this.” She gestured at her squat shape. Her gray eyes ran across the silk scarves below the glass with longing. “I’m too old. But on you . . . I will get it for you.”

  “That’s kind, but I don’t need it.” May placed it back on the counter in a careful rectangle, Frau Nieriker’s large hand closed on top of hers, holding it in place. May found herself looking down into her mother-in-law’s square face.

  “I am so happy to hear Ernest plays the violin for you. You saw how he refuses to play for us anymore.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  Frau Nieriker removed her hand from May’s and smoothed down the front of her dress before speaking. “For years we encouraged him to play the violin, we paid for his classes, we sent him to the finest instructors. Everything was for his music. And then my husband lost our family’s savings in a failed investment. He told Ernest art was no way to make a living and demanded that he go into business to help support the family, even though Ernest was offered a position in a symphony in Dresden. Ernest followed his father’s wishes, but he has never played for us again.”

  The two women stood in the swirl of shoppers, looking away from each other. Tears pricked at May’s eyes as she considered her husband’s sacrifice. No wonder he insisted May travel into the city daily to study at the Académie Julian.

  “I’m sorry,” said Frau Nieriker.

  May shook her head and tried to clear her eyes by blinking.

  “I’M SORRY I asked you to play for us on Saturday night. I didn’t realize why you stopped playing until your mother told me.”

  May and Ernest were lying in bed later that evening, both on their backs, facing up at the ceiling.

  He was quiet, and she wondered if he had fallen asleep. He had the enviable ability to drop off at a moment’s notice.

  “Why didn’t you tell me what happened?”

  “I didn’t want you to dislike my parents from the outset.”

  “And you didn’t tell them about my age, because you didn’t want them to dislike me?”

  “I never worried about them loving you. Your age means nothing to any of us. I knew your charm would help to bridge the gap between my parents and me. But still, I’ll never forgive them for making me give up my music.”

  May closed her eyes and conjured a memory of her laughing with Louisa over cups of rich hot chocolate in Dinan. She missed her sister with an intensity that made her unable to breathe. She tried to loosen her jaw and sighed past the burn in her lungs. “You might. Someday.”

  FALL AND WINTER passed by May in a blur, as if she were watching her life from the window of a fast-moving train. She spent every waking minute painting, shipping artwork to her galleries, or traveling back and forth to Paris; the harried routine was wearying her, and now the mid-March deadline to the Salon show hovered in her mind. Almost every woman in the Académie Julian had a painting to submit to the show, except May. She sat at the desk in her studio and glanced at a group of canvases leaning against the wall—she could enter one or two of those into the show, but none of them represented what she was capable of, and this frustrated her. Her thoughts were interrupted by the front door banging open. Er
nest leaned inside, grasping the doorway as he stomped mud off his boots before entering.

  “This is a treat—you’re home early.” May smiled as she looked up from an invoice she was creating for a package of paintings that would soon be on its way to an art dealer in Lille. She rubbed her eyes. “I could use a break. Shall we go for a walk?”

  Ernest tramped across the drawing room, threw his hat to the ground, and kicked it. He raked his hands through his hair before meeting May’s gaze. “I have bad news.”

  She looked at Ernest’s dented hat on the floor in surprise and then up at her husband. “What in the world happened?”

  “I’ve been taken in by scoundrels.” Ernest rubbed his hands over his face. “A team of rogues out of Brussels have robbed me. Robbed me blind. The deal they promised me on a shipment of tobacco was too good to be true, I should have known, but I fell for it.” Ernest collapsed into a chair.

  Fear descended upon her, and she dropped the pen from her shaking hands to the table. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I lost almost a thousand francs today.” Ernest’s breathing came in ragged bursts. “I sent money for the tobacco in advance of receiving it, and the shipment arrived today and is basically a crate of sawdust. Normally I would never send payment in advance, but their references seemed in order and the deal they offered was so good, I couldn’t resist.”

  “Well . . .” May shook her head, struggling to comprehend the enormity of the loss. “Where are they now?”

  “Who knows? Gone.” He shook his head angrily. “They’re long gone by now.”

  May dropped from her chair to kneel in front of him, and although the uneven floorboards cut into her knees, the solidity of the ground gave her comfort. She took his hands into hers speechlessly.

  “I wanted so desperately to make this money. I thought it could help us to settle in and be the foundation of our savings.” Ernest’s face flushed as looked down at her. “But now I don’t think we can spare the money for next month’s studio fee. I need it. I must cover this loss somehow, and it’s the only way.” His eyes looked red and frantic. “I’ve been trying to come up with an alternative the whole way home, but I simply can’t. I’m sorry; it’s no better than what my father did to me.” He choked on the last few words.

  “Don’t say that. This is a small setback. We’ll figure something out.”

  “Small? It’s a thousand francs!”

  The gears of May’s mind slowed as she absorbed his words. At first, the idea of stopping the demanding daily schedule of going back and forth to Paris appealed to her. She could say good-bye to the dreadful hectoring of Mademoiselle Bashkirtseff and Monsieur Robert-Fleury’s ill-tempered sneering. Here was an excuse to give up under the guise of sacrifice and selflessness. She felt tempted to acquiesce, but then her eyes fell onto a streak of red paint on the sleeve of her gray silk dress. It looked like blood. Indeed recently it felt like she was working herself into a bloody pulp, yet her work was improving. In fact, her work was good. Her gaze lifted in the direction of her art studio, landing on the painting of Orchard House. She could simply hand Ernest the check from Louisa and resolve everything. She could.

  “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “I can’t stop now. I’m too close. The deadline for the Salon is in two weeks. I know I can get a painting into it.”

  Ernest shook his head in disbelief. “I thought the Salon was a disappointment to you last time.”

  “Yes, but this time it will be different.”

  “Different?” Ernest dropped her hands and rose to stalk around the room, his fists bunched at his sides. “How can it be different?”

  “Because this time I’m making something that really shows how far I’ve come.”

  “You’re working on it now? The painting is already under way?”

  “Well . . . no,” May admitted, still kneeling, but she raised her chin. “I’m about to start working on it. Take the thousand francs for your business. I will pay my own studio fees.”

  Ernest let out a frustrated chuff of air. “How?”

  “I’ll get it.” The painting of Orchard House called to her, but she stayed put.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll earn it.” May stood. Her bare feet padded across the room to her studio. She took out a sheet of watercolor paper, willed herself not to look up at the painting of Orchard House, and dipped her brush into a jar of clean water. Even after creating hundreds of watercolors, the startling tingle of awakening that accompanied beginning a new piece ran up her arm as she began to paint.

  WHEN SHE ARRIVED back at the Académie Julian the following morning, a new girl took her place on the model’s dais. Her dark skin was the color of strong Roman coffee, and the whiteness of her chemise reflected off her arms, chest, and face, making her entire body shine. An orange scarf tied around her head gave her a youthful appearance. May guessed the woman to be around twenty years of age. The short chemise hung at an angle to expose long, lithe, toned legs. Her hands wrung together for a brief moment before she let them fall to her sides. The girl shifted her weight from one leg to the other, letting her pensive gaze sweep above the faces looking up at her.

  May studied the downward tilt of the model’s face, how her eyes glanced away from the painters, and the way she chewed the inside of her cheek. Monsieur Robert-Fleury approached the model, and the two conferred in low voices about her positioning. One strap from the model’s white muslin chemise fell from her right shoulder, leaving the shoulder completely bare and the upper swell of her breast revealed. She moved to cover herself, but it was not the exposed skin that caught May’s eye. It was the model’s left hand. The girl’s left index finger and her middle finger were gone. They were cleanly severed and pink scar tissue peeked out from the place where the finger should have been, like the inner green of an emerging plant visible right before it blooms from its casing.

  A few years ago, May would have painted the woman as a study and focused on the long lines of her lean body and avoided any details. She would have sidestepped anything that felt too personal, but now May felt inexplicably drawn to the woman’s face. Later, she would see how her classmates all captured the exquisite lines of the exotic model’s entire body and posed her in historical and biblical settings—this was the expected, predictable course of action. After all, historical scene paintings were what launched careers. But May wanted an intimacy she had never attempted before in her compositions.

  She covered her canvas with a gesso mixture and watched the chalky primer harden into place before sanding it slightly. She then took a charcoal pencil and lightly sketched the understudy onto the canvas to get the basic shape of the skull, neck, shoulders, and chest in front of her. Before she could even begin to consider the model’s features, she needed to see the basic shape of the head. Starting with the skull, she sketched a cube with a slightly rounded top, almost like a loaf of bread, with the smaller wedge of the jaw underneath. After the overall shape of the head took form, she shadowed in its planes. The model was facing her in a three-quarter view, making the depth of the skull easier to represent. When the overall shape satisfied her, she divided up the skull to locate the features: first, there was the halfway point to mark the eye sockets and then she divided the face into thirds. May sketched a dividing line at her hairline, and then one-third of the way down the face to indicate the woman’s brow, and then the brow to the base of the nose. By this point, her canvas resembled a series of etched lines, some rounded but mostly long, straight, dark lines. Dr. Rimmer would have been proud at the precision with which she envisioned the skull below the surface of her model’s face before tackling the features.

  “Use straight lines here. The ramus should be almost vertical in this view.” Monsieur Robert-Fleury stuck out a bony finger and traced the far side of the face’s upper jaw. “The bottom of the body of the jaw should only turn in slightly.”

  May nodded and followed his sug
gestion, continuing to sketch in charcoal lines until she created a convincing shape of the woman’s portrait. Only when she finished this outline did she start to work on features. She could not see the details of the girl’s eyes from her vantage point, so she relied on what she already knew. Several times she stopped her sketching and felt the circular indentation of her own eye socket to help feel the shape under her own fingers. As the day neared evening, the model finished her posing and disappeared behind the curtain at the back of the room to change. Miss Klumpke appeared next to May, studying her canvas.

  “A close-up portrait? In oils? This is new for you.”

  “I know, but I think I like it.”

  “You have the beginnings of her tentative expression.”

  Mademoiselle Bashkirtseff stood back in a corner, but her voice carried. “We’ve had some ugly models before—some of those old people, ugh—but we’ve never used someone maimed before. Poor thing. One look at her hand and she’s ruined. What good is a woman if she’s not beautiful?”

  Miss Klumpke remained unexpressive as she faced the canvas, but May balled her hands against her hips and scowled. Along with everyone else in the room, she knew the young American was the real target of Mademoiselle Bashkirtseff’s cruel words. Everyone knew the Russian envied Miss Klumpke’s exceptional talent, but May would not tolerate her young friend’s lameness to be ridiculed. She spun to face the wretched Russian. “There are many ways to be beautiful. And ugly, too, for that matter.”

  Mademoiselle Bashkirtseff looked back at May with surprise and then scoffed. “I feel as though I am being scolded by my mother. My poor old mother,” she said, addressing the crowd around them with a triumphant expression. No one met the woman’s eyes, and the Russian, for once, sensed the room’s coldness toward her. She bent over to scoop up her little dog and swept out of the room, leaving the maid to scurry after her.