Shadows of a Down East Summer

by Lea Wait

  “And people who vacationed at the big hotels on Prouts Neck called the area just Prout’s, said Kevin.

  “There’s also a wonderful book of essays called Winslow Homer in the 1890s: Prouts Neck Observed, that has a lot of information on the area. How did you get interested in art history?” asked Maggie. “Did your family take you to lots of museums when you were a child?”

  Kevin’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Actually, no. I didn’t have a father, and my mother...wasn’t interested in art. I spent a lot of time in the library, though, and loved looking through the big art books. They were more real to me than photographs. I used to imagine I knew the people in the paintings. I made up stories about them.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Maggie. “I know people who escape by reading books. I’ve never thought of escaping through pictures.”

  “It can be done,” said Kevin, very seriously. “I was in high school before I totally understood there were artists behind the paintings, and started looking for biographies of them. Usually I liked the pictures and my own versions of their stories more than their real lives. Then I got a scholarship to college and studied art history and found you could put it all together: the lives, the pictures, and the way it all fit together in society. I was hooked.”

  “Have you ever done your own artwork?”

  “Never. Well, not never. I tried a few times. It was a disaster.” Kevin smiled. “I’m a critic. An admirer. An historian. Maybe a professor someday. Not an artist.”

  “I understand. I can’t draw at all. But I admire anyone who can put shapes and colors together, or draw images that pull us into a world we’ve never seen or imagined,” said Maggie. “Homer’s work can do that. His wood engravings are like the Norman Rockwell illustrations of the mid-nineteenth century. Without him, how would we know young ladies weighed themselves on country store scales, despite wearing clothing that must have weighed twenty pounds? Or that even then, people scattered seeds for birds in the wintertime? Or that a former drummer boy would wear his uniform to work in cornfields after the Civil War?”

  “By the time he was at Prouts Neck he’d pretty much stopped picturing those sorts of scenes,” said Kevin, maneuvering through lanes of summer traffic.

  “Yes. Today people remember him most for his oil paintings of surf and ocean scenes. His paintings of Florida and the Bahamas. His Adirondack scenes. But he also did wonderful paintings of a black community in Virginia, and of fisherwomen on the coast of England.”

  “Did he do any wood engravings of the sea?”

  “Only three. My favorite, Homeward Bound, is of elegantly dressed passengers on board the deck of a clipper ship. He did that one on his way home from his trip to Paris. But he did quite a few beach scenes, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Long Branch, New Jersey, and Newport, Rhode Island. The ocean was a theme for him years before he heard about Prouts Neck from his brother, who honeymooned there.”

  “Winslow lived there more than summer months, didn’t he?”

  “He was there close to year-round, unlike his brothers and parents. But even Winslow usually left in December or January and headed to New York or Florida or the Bahamas for a couple of months, returning in March or April.”

  They drove through Scarborough, and followed the signs to Prouts Neck. The road narrowed as they passed swampy land and small modern homes. Maggie thought of the horse-pulled wagon Anna May and Jessie had taken, no doubt on this same road. Not many roads led to Prouts Neck.

  Kevin drove past the sign pointing TO FERRY BEACH, as Maggie wondered how far it was from Homer’s studio.

  He turned left, up a driveway to the parking lot of the Black Point Inn. “I don’t remember an inn of that name from reading biographies of Homer,” Maggie said, admiring the large white building on a small hill overlooking both the beach and the ocean. The sky was beginning to darken in back of the inn, making its whiteness look even brighter.

  “I looked it up on-line before we came when I was looking for directions,” said Kevin, turning off the car. “The Black Point Inn is a new name. It’s the only one of the old hotels still standing. In Homer’s day it was called South Gate House.”

  The same building where Micah Wright had raped Anna May Pratt over a hundred years ago. Maggie shivered, looking up at the elegant old hotel. How many other secrets did it hold?

  “Its website said some homeowners on Prouts Neck got together and bought the old hotel. They tore down part of the building and fixed up the rest. The restaurant is supposed to be excellent.”

  Maggie just stared, her mind changing the men and women in shorts and tennis attire chatting outside the sheltered entrance into elegant late-nineteenth-century visitors from Boston and New York who would have considered wearing anything that showed their knees, even on a beach, completely indecent.

  “We can walk to Homer’s studio from here,” Kevin was saying. “We can reach the path around the point through the parking lot.”

  Maggie remembered how long Will had said that trail was, and looked at the brooding clouds. “As I remember from the books, Homer’s studio is on this side of Prouts Neck. Why don’t we start at this end of the road.”

  Kevin nodded. “We’ll walk down the driveway and along the road to Western Cove, and up past Checkley Point.”

  “Where the old Checkley Inn used to be,” put in Maggie, as they started walking.

  “Exactly. Now the hotels and boarding houses are gone, replaced by private homes.”

  “I remember reading that the Neck was almost bare of trees in Homer’s day,” said Maggie, as they looked at the thick hedges and trees protecting the private homes and gardens they passed. “In the nineteenth century many towns just felled all the trees. They were used for building materials, or to sell elsewhere, as lumber. No one saw their value until later.”

  They walked on, admiring the sea view. They passed the Prouts Neck Yacht Club, and then moved off the main road.

  “Here’s where we join the old cliff walk established back in Homer’s day,” said Kevin. The trail was above a rocky beach, now swept by the rough sea. High grasses and brambles protected the privacy of homes on the land side of the trail. “The idea was that people wouldn’t be able to keep the Neck to themselves. The cliff walk would be open to all.”

  Maggie scrambled up and down some rough rocks, and made her way across two rotted boards placed across a muddy section of the trail. “This isn’t exactly a city sidewalk,” she pointed out.

  “No, but it’s maintained by the people who live here. If it weren’t here we wouldn’t be able to come and see the places Homer painted,” Kevin said.

  They stood on the edge of the cliff, looking out at the blue-black ocean topped with foamy whitecaps. Winds were blowing hard, and the surf, true to the reports Kevin had heard, was higher than usual. At low tide it would no doubt have been a quiet scene. Here on the cliff walk at high tide breakers were crashing in, and the air was white with mist.

  Maggie stood back. The walkway was only a few feet wide, and in some places less.

  She felt dangerously exposed.

  “Come this way; you have to see Cannon Rock. It’s near his studio,” called Kevin, who’d walked ahead of her on the trail.

  Cannon Rock! The subject of one of Homer’s most dramatic oil paintings. Maggie wondered whether she’d recognize it. Artists altered scenes, and depending on the day, she suspected this path and the ledges and sea-swept rocks below would appear very different.

  She caught up with Kevin where the rough trail narrowed above a deep chasm between rock ledges. “See,” he pointed at the ledge to the right, “that’s Cannon Rock.”

  Maggie squinted. It was hard to make out the distinctive shape of the furthest rock, pointed out toward the Atlantic. Raging waters and crashing surf almost submerged it.

  “At a lower tide, or when the seas were quieter, it would be easier to see, but yes, I can make it out,” she said finally. Homer’s painting also showed it below the
surf. He must have painted it on a day when seas were even rougher than they were now. Perhaps in a fall nor’easter, or after a hurricane that just missed the coast.

  She stood watching the wild surf for a few minutes, feeling as though she’d gone back in history, and was seeing the world as the artist had seen it.

  “Powerful, isn’t it?” said Kevin. “Breakers, crashing into the rocks like this.”

  “Yes,” Maggie answered.

  Maggie sensed Kevin tensing. She glanced at him. His expression had changed. On the pretext of zipping the front of her sweatshirt against the wind, she reached into the outside pocket of her bag and turned on her tape recorder, at the same time pulling out a tissue to wipe her face, now wet with sea mists.

  Kevin moved a half step closer to her. “Maggie, I want you to give me the journal.”

  “Journal?”

  “Let’s not play games. The 1890 journal Carolyn Chase gave you. I don’t know who wrote it, but I need it.”

  “I don’t have the journal,” said Maggie, adding mentally to herself, “not with me.”

  “I need that journal,” said Kevin again, very calmly.

  “Why?” asked Maggie.

  “It would be much simpler for you if you just gave me the journal, Maggie. I know a lot of places where it isn’t. So either you have it with you, or you know where it is. Carolyn Chase gave it to you. And I want it today. If you give it to me, then no one else will get hurt.”

  “How do you know I didn’t give it back to Carolyn?”

  “It wasn’t in her house. None of the papers she talked about getting from her aunt were in her house.”

  Maggie tried to move back along the trail, away from the crashing surf, but Kevin stayed close to her.

  “How do you know?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Maggie! I’m going to get that journal, and the rest of the papers. I don’t want to hurt you, but if I have to, I will. I’m already in trouble.”

  Maggie backed further, talking as loud as she could, hoping the tape recorder would pick up her words, and trying to keep her balance on the trail. And her mind on Kevin’s words. “You’re intelligent. You have a future ahead of you. Why, Kevin?”

  “Have you any idea how much it costs to go to college today?” Kevin followed Maggie’s every step. “You teach at a community college. Big deal. I mean a real school. A four-year college with a good reputation. It costs forty thousand dollars and up, really up, to go to college today. Every year. Even with scholarships and grants. I graduated in the hole. A bachelor’s degree and over one hundred thousand dollars in debt. Then there’s graduate school.” He shook his head. “I don’t come from a wealthy family like the Thompsons. I worked for every penny. And there isn’t a long line of places looking for art historians today, even if I get my Ph.D. and my dissertation is published. No university or museum wants to hire thinkers anymore. They want people who write best-selling books on how Facebook is changing our culture, or how you can get your ten-year-old to love calculus, or what the relationship is between Leonardo da Vinci and fast food, or some other crap like that.”

  “You’re young, Kevin. You’re bright. You’ll find a way.” Maggie moved a little closer to the high bank of dense shrubs in back of her.

  “I did find a way! I found Betsy Thompson. Or Betsy Thompson found me. She found me on a listserv about art in New England. She said she’d pay my matriculation fees and a salary if I’d write my dissertation on New England twentieth-century artists, as long as I included her husband and his father in it.”

  “So you agreed,” said Maggie, beginning to understand. A published dissertation including the Thompson artists could add to the value of their art.

  “Sight pretty much unseen,” said Kevin. “Not the smartest move, but I was desperate. I was trying to get a topic approved. Here were two people no one had written about. And she kept dangling the Winslow Homer connection as an added inducement. If I could prove that, it would pretty much guarantee a book sale. And she’d pay me a bonus. She even offered to put me up at her place for as long as I needed to work.”

  “Then you met Betsy and her husband. And Josh.” Just keep him talking, Maggie thought. He’s not a bad kid. He’s scared. Just keep him talking. She backed slowly down the narrow part of the trail, away from the deep, narrow ledges above the swirling sea.

  Kevin followed her. “The whole family is pretty weird. Josh especially. I had to play their games. And keep my door locked at night. Her husband’s work isn’t earth-shaking. But his father’s is passable. Better than that stuff his friends painted that’s all over their living room. I could do something with the father’s stuff, and with the colony as a way he tried to keep art alive during the Depression. Maine art is a good topic, and I could compare Mirage to other art colonies in Maine. No one had ever written about it.”

  Maggie nodded. She could sympathize, so far. Getting a dissertation topic approved is not easy. For someone who was young, without income, finding a patron who would sponsor research and offer a place to live and work would be enormously enticing.

  “So you moved here.” He didn’t seem to have a weapon. But he was taller and younger than she was; probably stronger. Just getting away from the higher cliffs made her feel safer. She moved a step with every few words he said.

  Kevin didn’t seem to notice. “Late last spring I started going through all the papers and paintings at Mirage, and looking through the Waymouth Library archives. That’s when I found Helen Chase came from Waymouth. She had nothing to do with Mirage or the Thompsons, but she’d stopped in at the colony a few times, so that was huge. Worth a chapter or so in the book, especially when her daughter, Carolyn, started to come to those meetings at the library and mentioned Helen had painted Maine scenes that no one knew about. Carolyn invited me over to her aunt’s house once or twice to look at them.” Kevin stopped, remembering. He looked as though he’d seen heaven. “They were incredible. Fantastic. And almost no one had ever seen them before. I had to write about them!”

  “So you saw the paintings at her house.”

  “There were four of them, stacked in one of the second floor rooms. When her aunt was sick they’d rearranged the first floor to make a bedroom for her there. Carolyn planned to hang them all over the house, if the house was hers. I was blown away by those paintings.”

  “Did she say anything about selling them?” Maggie had finally reached flat land, a part of the trail by a rocky beach. The breakers were close. She and Kevin were both drenched with spray and mist.

  “Carolyn? Sell her mother’s paintings? No! She wanted to keep them. She said they were family art.” He shook his head. “They were only for her to see. And special friends.”

  “Like you,” said Maggie.

  “Yes,” Kevin agreed. “Remember the night you came with her to the library, and she told us about that trunk full of papers? Betsy was there, too. Betsy said she was sure information in that trunk would prove the Thompsons were Winslow Homer’s descendants. The old man, Homer Thompson, had told his friends at Mirage that Winslow Homer was his father, and Betsy keeps repeating that. Homer Thompson said his mother had posed for Homer, and slept with him, and then married the rich railroad guy, Wesley Thompson, as cover, but named him after his real father. It was sort of a joke, from what I could tell. But Betsy took it very seriously, and I think her husband did, too.”

  “She wanted proof?”

  “I told her I couldn’t write it in my dissertation as anything but a family legend unless we could prove it.”

  “What about DNA tests?” asked Maggie.

  “She went to a member of the Homer family a few years back and asked, but they just laughed at her. They said Winslow Homer had no direct descendants. Period.”

  “Why don’t we head up toward the road?” Maggie asked, walking in that direction.

  Kevin just kept talking, following her, as she stepped off the path and walked across someone’s lawn and up a driveway toward a road.


  “Betsy wanted me to prove it. She said that was what she was paying me for. To prove the Winslow Homer connection. When Carolyn said she had a journal from 1890, Betsy went crazy. She was sure that was the piece of evidence she needed.”

  “So?” Maggie kept walking, away from the sea.

  “I called Carolyn after the library meeting. I told her how excited I was about the papers she’d found, and she invited me over for a late supper. I’d been there before, so that wasn’t unusual. We talked about art, and her mother, and her book, and my research. Then I asked to see the journal.” Kevin stopped walking.

  “What happened, Kevin?” said Maggie. She could speak quietly now that they were away from the ocean. The pounding waves were at a safe distance.

  “She told me you had it, and that no one could see the other papers. She’d decided they were family papers. She was going to use them in writing her biography of her mother, but wasn’t going to share them with anyone else.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “I was furious! They were American art history! I was her friend. My future depended on writing my dissertation so Betsy Thompson liked it, and it got published. I told Carolyn, she could use the papers first. After all, they were hers! But she owed it to the world to share them. To have them available to scholars in a university or museum archives.”

  Maggie nodded.

  “Carolyn said she didn’t think it was any of my business. She said if I were acting for Betsy Thompson, I could forget it. Her aunt had told her Winslow Homer hadn’t fathered any children. That she had a journal that included information proving Jessie Thompson hadn’t been pregnant with Homer’s child, she’d been pregnant with someone else’s. And Jessie’d probably breached a confidence and caused the deaths of two of her closest friends, one of whom was Helen Chase’s grandmother. So Betsy Thompson had better just shut up about her ‘Winslow Homer legacy’ because her family’s legacy was a nasty one, and Carolyn had decided to write about it in her biography.” Kevin just stood, as though reliving the horror of the moment. “I panicked. I knew Betsy would be livid. She might stop sponsoring my dissertation.”