by Nancy Horan
“Was he a soldier in Lincoln’s war?” Mr. Gerhardt had asked one evening.
“Yes.” She understood why he asked it. Sam had gone off with the Indiana Regiment to fight in 1861 and had come back a different man. Probably just as all the soldiers in Belgium and China and Greece, in every war since the beginning of time, returned home: changed. The small faults in Sam’s personality became enlarged. He was bent on getting rich quick. He drank more. He was still loving and sweet to her, but he was restless in a new way. With the gallant intent of getting her sister’s consumptive husband to better weather, Sam left her and the baby and headed out to California. George, their brother-in-law, died on the journey. Sam hadn’t turned back. He’d buried George and kept going, on to the gold fields.
Fanny reached across the space between seats and felt Hervey’s head, nestled in the crook of Belle’s arm. His cheek was warm, but so was her own hand. She couldn’t tell anything by feel just now.
“Don’t look so worried all the time, Mama,” Belle said. “It puts creases in your forehead. Go to sleep, why don’t you?”
Fanny closed her eyes and returned to musing. How trusting I was in those days.
When Sam sent for her, she didn’t hesitate. She sold their house and sent him the money so he could buy a claim in a Nevada silver mine. His letters were full of stories about gold and silver miners turned to millionaires in the space of a month. Once he sent her a chunk of ordinary-looking rock that had a seam of silver in it. Excitement ricocheted around inside her when she held it in her hands. She and Belle would have to take the same route Sam had, by train to New York and then a ship down to Panama, where they would cross the isthmus by land, then sail up the Pacific coast to San Francisco. It would take twenty-nine days. People worried aloud to her parents about malaria and bandits, about a comely twenty-one-year-old girl traveling alone with a child. Jacob Vandegrift gave his daughter a derringer pistol to put in her pocket. “Carrying all that cash,” he told her, “you’ll feel safer with a gun on you.” Her father didn’t know she’d already sent most of her money to California. She was short on funds from the moment she set out.
Despite Jacob Vandegrift’s sober countenance and his occasional outbursts of temper, a sentimental heart beat beneath his barrel-hard chest. That day at the train station in Indianapolis, he looked bereft when he handed over the free tickets he’d secured as a stockholder of the railroad.
“What will we do without you, Frances Mathilda?’ he said. “You are the glue.” Her mother had shown characteristic calm. “You’re a sensible girl, Fan. You will be just fine. The world has a way of taking care of you.”
Even then Fanny had looked younger than her age. At the beginning of the journey, when she walked down the train aisle comforting three-year-old Belle, someone said to her, “Where is the child’s mother?”
Fanny shook her head as she remembered it. That whole trip had been full of mishaps. She’d run out of money at one point, and a sympathetic passenger passed a hat to help her. Somehow she and Belle survived the journey. When the ship from Panama spat them out onto San Francisco soil, penniless, Sam had been waiting, and a few days later, they’d charged off to Nevada in a stagecoach, dreaming of glory. During that first year in Nevada, they’d lived in a miner’s shack in Austin, where they watched their savings disappear down barren shaft and then another before Sam gave up chasing silver. Discouraged, they moved on to Virginia City, where he took a job as a clerk of the court. Fanny sewed for the wives of luckier miners, and for a while, it looked as if they might get themselves upright. Then Sam began keeping company with the local prostitutes who populated the bars. It was a habit he repented of, only to take it up in grander fashion in San Francisco.
Why didn’t I leave him sooner? After all the discoveries of his betrayals during their eighteen years of marriage—the love notes stuffed in pockets, the gifts that weren’t for her—every time he swore he would change, she eventually reconciled with him. The last time was different, though. Fanny had been sitting with Belle in the Oakland cottage’s parlor with the door open. It was a warm day, full of April smells. The young woman had come up the walk to the porch—how she balanced a hat on that preposterous chignon was a mystery—and announced she was there for “a friendly visit.” Fanny knew from the clownlike rouge on the strumpet’s face what she was dealing with. “Don’t come a step closer,” she warned. When the woman put her foot on the threshold, Fanny shouted “Get out!” and the brazen creature turned tail, revealing a bustle the size of a wheelbarrow on her ruffled behind. Fanny glanced around to find Belle, who had witnessed the whole thing, shaking.
Fanny walked out into the yard that day and paced frantically. She looked with new eyes at the ivy-covered house and her beloved garden, just breaking into bloom. The papery orange poppies that had delighted her the day before seemed pure mockery. For so long she’d tried to make a happy household for her children, despite the rancor when Sam was home. She’d been putting a pretty face on this life of lies, telling the neighbors that her husband had to keep an apartment in San Francisco for the sake of his city job, that he regretted spending only weekends with his family. When she was among their artistic friends in San Francisco, Fanny held her head high, pretending her husband’s philandering no longer hurt. Sometimes she flirted defiantly with Sam’s friends; other times she affected a worldly hardness. In fact, every betrayal she discovered was a humiliating wound.
Staring at the cottage that day, she knew she had to leave, for in staying, she felt as tawdry as the whore at the front door. The strain of Sam’s unfaithfulness brought low the whole tenor of life inside the walls of the cottage, even when he was gone. Fanny carried his dishonor like a sign on her back. How long would it be before the children, too, bore the shame that was rightfully their father’s?
From their earliest years, Fanny had read to the children, put clay and paintbrushes into their small hands, taken them to music and dancing classes with high hopes that they would acquire a sense of beauty. She wanted Belle to have the advantage of the best art training. She wanted Sammy and Hervey to become educated gentlemen. She wanted a creative life for herself. But in the oppressive atmosphere of the house, where was the air for dreams to breathe?
It was with these thoughts filling her mind that Fanny had packed their trunks, announced to the children they were going to Europe, and made a dash.
Their time in Antwerp had been too short, only a few weeks. When she announced they were moving to Paris, Sammy protested, “But we just got here.” He looked out the window of their flat and asked fretfully, “Will there be dogs?”
Gazing at her little brood as they rattled in the train coach toward France, she felt a streak of optimism. Hervey will be back to himself in a few days. We probably should have gone to Paris from the outset. She shook her daughter’s knee. “Are you awake?” The girl opened her eyes, nodded. “You know,” Fanny said, “I have the best feeling, Belle. I just know something good is about to happen.”
CHAPTER 5
Fanny and Belle sat side by side at the atelier, sketching. On an elevated platform, a nude model rested her elbow on a fluted column. Rodolphe Julian, the proprietor of the academy, circulated among the aproned students who had positioned their chairs at different vantage points around the model.
“Pas mal,” Fanny heard Monsieur Julian say as he examined a Russian artist’s drawing. The teacher frequently said it while observing her work, too. She believed she fell roughly in the middle of these women: not even close to the best, though certainly better than the wealthy dilettantes passing the year in Paris.
She and Belle had hurried over to the studio early this morning. On Mondays a new model began posing, which meant vying with other early birds for the week’s best positions. Fanny attended the classes spottily at first. But Hervey had improved so quickly under the care of the American doctor that she was free to come with Belle. In the morning, the students worked on studies of the head; in the afternoon, the nude f
igure. One week it would be a man, whose private parts would be covered, just. The next, it would be a fully nude woman.
This afternoon a soft light from the studio’s overhead windows fell on the model’s voluptuous body. The woman had bright red hair, but her face and breasts were not visible from Fanny’s vantage point. So she made a study of the woman’s round buttocks and full thighs, narrow ankles, sharp scapulas, and slender waist, where the impression of a skirt band remained. An elderly French student rose with a tape measure in hand and, without touching the model’s flesh, measured her legs. “Don’t torment the woman, Marie,” someone remarked in a dry tone.
The others in the room were all women. Monsieur Julian was progressive on that point. He accepted female students but kept them separated from his male students. Someone had told Fanny that the women students were charged twice the tuition. She simply shrugged. Monsieur Julian had clearly seen a business opportunity—the squeamishness of other art schools regarding the propriety of women drawing from the nude—and seized it. Female students barred from entering the École des Beaux-Arts flocked to this place for training in academic figure studies, and they paid whatever fee was demanded. That was how things worked, and she wasn’t going to change it.
The atelier was especially crowded on Mondays. The women shared stories of shoes bought cheap over the weekend, of romantic interests, of difficult roommates. They laughed about a previous model who had been forced to hold the pose of the Dying Gladiator for a full hour. He had patiently arranged his body as if it were collapsing but kept himself upright with one arm. He curled his lips and wrinkled his forehead as the expiring soldier did in the famous statue. One of the American girls shaped the model’s hair into clumps to appear sweaty from battle. When the poor man was due his break time, the old Frenchwoman, Marie, had handed him a robe and sent him to the basement for coals for the stove. He never came back. The mention of his name, and the image of the fuming gladiator stumbling out onto the snowy streets of Paris in a robe, sent them into bouts of wicked laughter.
The artists settled into quiet concentration. Fanny’s nose detected two or three perfumes, and coffee, and an unfinished salami sandwich buried in a lunch tin. She felt joyous to be working in this airy room alongside these gifted women. This is what I love, she thought. The beginning.… the possibilities. At the School of Design in San Francisco she had accompanied Belle to classes and, in the process, discovered her own knack for drawing, as well as a thrilling new social circle. She had thought herself rather sophisticated in her painter’s coat and white cravat. Virgil Williams’s school attracted some fine Califoria artists. But Paris drew pupils from around the world.
The schools here—the École des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Carolus-Duran’s atelier—were of a different caliber entirely. Brilliance was common in these hungry painters who’d found their way from Russia, Sweden, Spain, England, Belgium, Poland, and a half dozen other countries.
One of Fanny’s fellow students Margaret Wright, was an American journalist with a wry sense of humor. Twice widowed, she was living abroad with her daughter, an artistic girl who was Belle’s age, and a son just a bit younger than Sammy. Margaret had come over to Europe a year earlier and was supporting herself by sending articles to newspapers back home about life in England and France. Fanny admired her spunk and they forged a quick friendship. This morning she was sitting on Fanny’s left. “Did you go to the Louvre?” she asked.
“We did,” Fanny whispered. “Saw the actual Venus de Milo. It took my breath away.”
“I know. It just causes people to fall silent.”
Fanny began to laugh.
“What is so funny?” Margaret asked.
“I was just thinking about when San Francisco got a copy of the statue as a gift from the French government. When the crate was opened, they discovered the statue had no arms and there was a huge outcry. The Art Association sued the shipping company for damages. And do you know, they won.”
Margaret rolled her eyes. “Americans can be such boors,” she said.
Fanny scanned the room to see where Monsieur Julian stood among the easels. He came in every morning and spoke to no one as he rolled up the cuffs of his white shirt. To spare it from charcoal, he said once, though of course it was to enter his role as master, and to show off his arms, muscled as a barbell lifter’s. Monsieur Julian cultivated a mystery about himself, but everyone knew he was once a wrestler. His drawings were tacked up around the walls, along with the work of his students. The master was bent over an American girl’s drawing. “Proportion!” he exhorted as he slashed heavy charcoal lines on her composition. The girl, eighteen at best, with brown hair cut in a flat fringe across her forehead, blinked at the ruined sketch. “Hang it all,” she muttered, crumpling the paper and starting over.
The room held its fair share of Americans. Fanny suspected they were, as she was, positively gleeful to be out of their old element. When Belle learned one of them was the sister of Louisa May Alcott, she nearly fell off her chair. “It’s Amy!” she had whispered.
For every pas mal Fanny garnered from the instructor, her daughter received a more enthusiastic appraisal. It was slowly dawning on Fanny that it was too late for her to be an accomplished painter. When she first arrived at Académie Julian a month ago, she harbored fantasies of becoming good enough to make a little money with her art. She worked hard to improve, as she had done with her writing. Now she saw her talent with a brush was rather ordinary compared to others’ in the class. Oh, she may have won a silver medal for her work at Virgil’s studio in San Francisco, but here, she saw she was outclassed. Belle had a chance, though. More than once, Monsieur Julian had put up her drawing as the best of the day. If only she opened her eyes to it, Belle could experience a finer kind of beauty in Paris than Fanny had encountered in Indianapolis or San Francisco. With enough study, she could actually be a professional artist—a portraitist rather than a painter of pottery. That was what many of these women would do: return home and make a reputation by doing portraiture or pursuing teaching.
Fanny glanced at the clock and saw their time was nearly up. She worked faster, adding shadow to her study. But the model was breaking her pose. The woman stepped off the platform and slipped a camisole over her head. The sight of her red pubic hair caused Fanny to feel awkward. An underskirt came next, then a dress. This is no place for modesty, she reasoned. And yet it seemed somehow unprofessional for the model to be so abrupt as she slipped out of her classic pose and climbed into her clothes right there in front of all the students. The models should go behind a screen to avoid creating the reaction Fanny was feeling now—as if a lovely dream had been interrupted.
The apartment on Rue de Naples was in Montmartre, the highest point in the city. Fanny was pleased to get a whole floor for fifteen dollars a month, plus two dollars for the concierge. It had a formal dining room with tall mirrors, and a kitchen with a porcelain stove and a hydrant that brought artesian water up to the apartment at no extra charge. Her building was full of artists and poets who had formed a tight little community.
Once Hervey’s health was improving, Fanny went out with the surgeon she’d met on the ship from New York. He would show up with a liveried attendant whose sole purpose was to remove the surgeon’s elegant cape when he arrived, and put it back on him when it was time to leave. Fanny didn’t doubt Hendricks’s interest and delight in her, but she suspected he was only pretending to be a serious suitor, and that his annual trips were personal dramas in which he acted the dashing American abroad. He needed a ladylove on his arm, and she found it amusing to play the part as he gadded about Paris looking romantic, with his shirt collar turned up and his cravat tied in a bow à la Byron.
Mr. Hendricks would help Fanny into his perfect carriage and ride through Paris with her, seeking cheap furniture for her flat. They delighted in looking for the whimsical old painted tin signs that designated a particular business. Enormous gray eyes peering through round spectacles signal
ed an eye doctor. They saw huge scissors above a tailor’s door, a Napoleon-style red and gold bicorne hat outside the milliner’s, a black tin lobster for a fishmonger, and an enormous fork for a hotel restaurant. When they found a sign portraying a chair, they knew they were in the right neighborhood. Mr. Hendricks ordered the driver to halt.
“I’m an old hand at making silk purses out of sows’ ears,” Fanny told her friend, who looked confused standing in the middle of one dusty shop after another. Hendricks was clearly an innocent when it came to junk stores. “It just takes some imagination,” she explained. She bought the cheapest possible chairs and tables, after which the sweet fellow whisked her into his waiting carriage and called out to his driver the name of a restaurant in a better neighborhood, where he treated Fanny to a meal of oysters, mignonnettes d’agneau, and vintage Veuve Clicquot, interspersed with tender squeezes of the hand.
“You get good light in here,” Margaret Wright said the first time she visited Fanny’s apartment. They stood looking out the window of her parlor, with its view of windmills at the top of the hill, and below, the city’s battered buildings.
“It’s not the Paris my friends back home crowed about,” Fanny said. Dora and Virgil Williams had seen Paris in the days before the Prussians blasted the city to rubble.
“It’s a ruined battlefield,” Margaret observed. “I know a woman who was one of the Commune people. She’s quite poetic when she talks about those glory days. All the workers rallying to be heard in the new government after the siege, women demanding new rights … This neighborhood was a main outpost for them, you know. Awful how it all ended. So many Communards executed, maybe right around here—and only, what, five years ago?”
