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Lydia
Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper
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Chapter
One: Woman Reading
Paris, septembre 1878
i.
"Could
you model for me tomorrow, Lyd?"
May's looking at me with a kind of urgency and hopefulness.
I've been showing her some new dress patterns, as we
linger at the table after breakfast. She looks sweet
for a moment, and worried, and I say, "I think
so."
"Mother thinks it will make you too tired."
"Yes, I do," calls Mother, from her room.
"N'importe quoi. I'm so much better now."
I drink my coffee, picturing the walk to May's studio.
It's only a few streets away, just off the place Pigalle,
but I haven't been well, and in any case I've become
attached to this perch, our apartment on avenue Trudaine,
in the gème arrondissement. We're in Paris, and
yet we're also in our own world, five stories up; we've
become a bit like a nation, The Cassatt Nation, small
and besieged, at times, and independent. In the kitchen,
the new maid Lise is clattering the dishes. Father rustles
the paper in the parlor; he's been reading us bits out
of Le Petit Parisien.
I rise to look out the window. Over the tops of the apartments
across from us, I see the white and cream buildings scrambling
up the hill of Montmartre, among trees and gardens. Looking
down to the avenue Trudaine, I see a girl in a royal
blue coat and a redhat race along the street with a dog.
I'm in love with all of this, this bright and foreign
life.
"I could have the carriage brought round, Lyddy."
"Such a short distance, May! Don't be silly!"
"The carriage is a good idea," Mother says,
coming into the dining room. She's wearing her specs and her old white morning
gown, with her light wool shawl. How old she's begun to look, I think.
I know May needs me to model. It's partly the cost,
of course, to hire someone else. To pay a model—well,
it adds up, and Father's at her constantly now about
making her way, and covering all of her own expenses,
for the studio too. "Think for yourself, May," he
said this morning, as we sat down to breakfast, "think
what this costs us, and tally up your sales this year.
Got to consider this."
I glimpse two young men on the avenue, elegantly dressed,
talking and gesturing energetically as they stroll. I
open the long window and lean over the small balcon for
a moment, to catch a better look. Perhaps May knows them.
Maybe they're on their way to one of the cafés
at the place Pigalle, to smoke cigarettes, and drink
coffee, and argue about art. I see such men, often, sitting
outside a café like Degas' favorite, Le Rat Mort.
Women too go there; sometimes, as I walk with May, I
see mothers and grandmothers sitting happily, with pretty
children, eating sliced melon or apricot pie.
Once I saw a woman sitting close to a young man. I
glimpsed him nuzzling her, kissing her neck, and, before I could
look away, I caught the expression on her face, a mixture
of coolness and knowledge and pleasure.
"I think I'll go to the Bois today, give your horse some exercise," Father
says cheerfully to May.
I look over May's shoulder. She's studying a pattern
I chose at Worth's, for an evening gown with an off-the-shoulder
décolleté.
"It would look delicious on you, in a yellow silk," I
say.
May looks up. I can see she's studying me with her
painter's eyes. Inwardly, I flinch; I feel shy, always, when someone
looks at me. She's my younger sister, by a full seven
years, I remind myself, even if she's thirty-four now,
and yet I feel so much younger than May sometimes. I
can't help wondering what she sees. I'm as plain as a
loaf of bread.
As if divining my thoughts, May smiles. She peels an
orange with a little knife. "You can look away.
You can be reading this time."
"Ah, yes." I smile as I sit down across the
table from her. May knows me well, for within this Cassatt Nation, my own small
acre has treasures of books stashed everywhere, in the elbows of trees, beneath
berry bushes, on benches by streams. My little house is composed of books: English
and French novels, and books of poetry too, gold-edged, I, who am moderate in
so much, who bend myself to family life, am most immoderate once I'm in my acre.
I read for hours, with passion, ardently wishing the stone wall around me to
hold, the little gate to feel the pressure of no hand, the latch to grow rusty.
"I wish we had brought more of that honey back to Paris from the country," Mother
says, her specs slipping down her nose. She's writing a list for Lise's shopping
today.
"I'm sure we can find good honey somewhere in Paris," May says drily. "You
didn't have any orange this morning, Lyddy, did you?" she asks, holding
out a section of hers. The peelings make a sphere on her plate.
I accept the orange sliver.
"Maybe you can just do the back of my head," I
suggest.
"Mais non, Lyddy. I want your lovely face."
She looks at me teasingly, and for a moment I am riding
in the country again, in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
It's early spring, snow still on the ground in places,
and we must have been back from our long stay in Europe
for a year or so. We had buried Robbie in Germany. I
picture myself riding with Aleck and his friend from
Yale, Thomas Houghton. The day is chilly, and, once we've
dismounted, I take off my gloves and rub my hands together,
holding them to my mouth. Thomas is close to me. "Cold?" he
asks, catching my hands in his, chafing, bringing them
halfway to his mouth.
"How about a profile?" May asks.
"If it helps you out, May, yes."
"You're helping me immensely. We'll begin tomorrow
morning."
I think of the quiet day tomorrow would have been,
West Chester swirled away into the past now, along with Philadelphia
and Pittsburgh, my life a new one here in Paris, talking
to Mother and Father, reading a novel, looking through
my patterns, hoping through it all to make some miraculous
leap out of my condition, to become healthy again. I
contemplate the slow descent down five flights to the
avenue, and the slow walk by May's side, through a late
September morning. I prefer the longer journey, along
avenue Trudaine to the park at the place d'Anvers, because
of the trees, the green island. Then up we walk to the
busy boulevard de Rochechouart and the boulevard de Clichy,
coming at last to the place Pigalle, my body increasingly
assaulted and aroused by a myriad of things: the trolleys,
the laborers, the shop assistants, the pavements in front
of cafés still damp from being washed, the scent
of coffee and bread, and of manure too.
"Tomorrow morning, yes," I say, feeling worried
but brave, and picturing my little boat, leaks and all, bobbing along in the
wake of my sister's grander vessel, sailing to Heaven knows where.
ii.
I sink into the plump green chair in May's studio, holding
the paper.
After breakfast
this morning, Mother asked me a dozen times if I really
felt well enough, demanding that May paint only for
an hour, or at most two. As I put on my bonnet and
gloves, Father too began to fret. "Are
you warm, Lyddy?" he asked. "Make sure she
stands up to stretch, at least every half-hour, May." Then
he called to Lise to "bring Mademoiselle Cassatt's
slippers, and—what about a small pillow?" After
all this fuss, as always, I questioned the entire idea
of modeling. If I became exhausted before I arrived at
the door of our apartment, how could I possibly think
of helping May?
I listen
to the city's constant clatter and clamor outside the
windows of May's studio, and I think of the shops we
passed this morning, so much more seductive, even in
this gritty district, than those I remember in the
States. Each shop window lures me with something delicious
or fine: prâlines, cut flowers, linens and silks. "It
makes America look pretty bare, doesn't it?" May
said to me last week, and she's right, in a sense. Certainly
shops like the ones near the new Opéra and the
Tuileries amaze the wealthiest of our American friends.
All of them flock to the Bon Marché too, and the
other grands magasins, filled, layer after layer, like
the inside of wedding cakes, with things to buy. Philadelphia
can't compare, and yet I sometimes miss those modest
shops. Something appeals to me in restraint.
Le Petit
Journal becomes absurdly heavy in my hands, and my
arms ache. I've read all the articles, and editorial
opinions, and advertisements too, and now I'm wishing
I had my book. "Women are always pictured reading
books," May said, as we set up this morning. "A
newspaper is perfect. And what could be better than Le
Petit Journal? It's so modern. It shows you're a thinking
woman." I yearn, though, for the novel I began yesterday
and left sitting on my bed—Madame
Bovary. I'm reading
it for the second time, and I relish it even more now
than I did when I was younger.
iii.
As I pose,
I remember how Mother loved sitting for her portrait
last spring. She would make light of her contribution—"All
I do is lounge in a soft chair and read the paper," she'd
say, waving her hand—but she would seem happier
than usual, as if she had been granted a second life
in the studio, more carefree, more glamorous, than this
one. Father's irritations and demands seemed to reach
her only through a haze. "Yes, my dear," she
would say happily, "I'll be sure to come home tomorrow
well in time for lunch," or "Of course I'll
write to Aleck and to Gardner tomorrow."
When I first saw Mothers picture, the painting seemed
reckless, May's brushstrokes bold, Mother's déshabillé a
harum-scarum wash of colors. I felt wonder, and jealousy
too. This shimmer, this feeling—how under Heaven
had she created this? The painting showed Mother, simply
herself, with her specs, reading the paper as on any
ordinary morning. Yet May had caught a feeling, a whole
moment, in paint. It was every bit as striking as Berthe
Morisot's pictures, and more appealing to me than any
of the ones I'd seen by May's other new friends, even
Renoir.
How courageous May had become! To paint the ordinary,
a woman in her morning dress reading Le
Figaro, and to
make the picture dance like this, to feel unbound by
all the things one had been taught, or by the paintings
put up each spring at the Salon, so dark and classical.
Mother praised Mays painting in her offhand manner—"Lovely
light, don't you think, Lyddy, and look how May used
the mirror!"—but I knew she felt proud.
iv.
Around the rectangle of Le Petit Journal, the parquet
floors of May's studio shine. I can see the edge of one
of her Turkish rugs, the rose and gray one, in intricate
patterns. My arms and shoulders feel sore.
"A cup of tea, Lyddy?"
"Thanks, yes."
"I've made you pose for over an hour. Mother would be furious."
As I put the newspaper down, tiny pinpricks run into
my fingers. The little gold hands on the clock above
the mantel say half past ten.
May moves about the studio with her usual quickness.
She darts, like a bird, She's slender, almost too thin,
really. As she opens the tin of tea, I think of Mother,
when she was younger and healthier, making tea for us
on Sundays, wherever we lived, and I picture May too,
as a little girl on a pony, her face stubborn and shining. "Let
me try," she's saying to Aleck and me, as Robbie
looks on from the gate. She's four or so, and I must
be about eleven, Aleck nine, and how old would Robbie
be? Seven? We're in the meadow by our country house,
Hardwicke, before our move to Philadelphia. Aleck and
I love to jump our horses, small jumps. The meadow at
Hardwicke's just been mown, and the ground is uneven.
Robbie swings on the gate, and "Let me try," she
says again. "You're too little," Aleck says,
but in a moment she's in the air, her small figure rising
inches above her pony's back, and soon she's jumping,
again, and again, and Aleck shouts, "Good jumping,
Mame!" and I shout, "Careful!" I'm angry
with her, because she never listens. At dinner that night,
when I begin to tell the story, May and Robbie interrupt,
and then Father says she should bare lessons with us
if she's so bent on jumping.
As May brings me my tea, she reminds me of a mermaid;
something about her floats, skims the waves. For a moment
I wonder what it would be like to be an artist. How does
a woman make such a choice? Or is it something that comes
to one, like a gift from heaven?
"Et bien, you look thoughtful, Lyd."
I smile, brushing the air in front of my nose as if to
say, It's nothing. Sipping my tea, walking about May's
studio, I study some of her pictures a woman holding
out a treat for a dog, a woman reading, sketches of Mother
by the lamp at home. I come upon one of May's self-portraits
too, the little gouache on paper, and think how much
more striking it is than some of the other pictures,
and how odd she looks in it, not quite like herself.
She appears serious and jaunty, leaning hard into a green
cushion. Her dress is lovely, the white one Madame Ange
made for her, but her face looks sad, and stubborn too.
Bold she is, and not like other women.
"Do you like this one?" May is at my shoulder.
"I do. Well, `like' may not be the right word."
"No?"
"I find it formidable."
"Well, I don't mind being formidable!" May slips her arm through
mine.
"Yes, and I admire the dress too."
"You helped me find the material for that dress, Lyddy, tu
te souviens?"
It occurs to me that May has in this self-portrait an
air of someone looked at—looked at by someone else,
I mean, and not me, or Mother. I think of Degas. She's
with him so much now, and certainly she admires his painting
immensely, and she's learned from him, about color, and
angle, and brushwork, and capturing the ordinary life.
The picture holds more than all this, though; it's as
if May painted it as he looked over her shoulder.
v.
As I sink
into the green chair again, taking up le journal, May
says, "You look
splendid today, you know, Lyd."
"Thank you. Maybe it's your eyes."
"Mais non, anyone would agree with me, Lyddy. You've always been beautiful."
As I find my pose, I think about how, when I first met
Degas, he gave me the impression of an intelligent but
fierce dog—well-dressed and utterly comme
il faut,
but a dog nonetheless. He bit into subjects—the
foolishness of one artist or another, the insipidity
of someone's latest effort, I can't remember—and
all the while his eyes lit on things in our apartment,
with an air of studying and maybe breaking them: the
tea set, the Japanese vase on the mantel, me. I felt
sure that if I opened my mouth, he would pounce. It's
a kind of brutality.
And yet, something else emerged as he asked me questions. "Had
I begun to feel better?" he asked, and "What
was I reading?" When I told him, "Jane Austen," he
looked curious. "Ah, lequel?" "Persuasion," I
said, and then, surprisingly, his eyes lit on mine. A
feeling connected us, quickly and with an absorbing depth.
I wondered what he felt. In allowing myself to look at
his face, which had seemed so arrogant and almost ugly
a moment before, I discovered a sadness, maybe, or a
sense of pain. It was as if I had rounded a corner, in
a strange city, and had come upon a scene of terrible
intimacy: a man weeping, a child ill. Yet, before I could
think of something to say, the city rose up before me
again, with its elegant avenues and public spaces, its
overwhelming buildings, looming, sharp-edged.
I wonder about May, for she seems to welcome his presence.
Certainly, he seems to have made of her—and of
me too—an exception, and yet this sensation of
being protected from the Cyclops by the Cyclops himself,
while he eats everyone else in sight—well, it's
fragile at best. And he does eat people, I know, one
friend after another.
And yet I could see what he meant to her, from the beginning.
His invitation to her, a year ago, to join his group
of Independents, came to her as an invitation to live,
to create the art she knew she could create. Her whole
desire now is to have her début in the Impressionist
Exhibition this spring.
At tea, on that first meeting, I saw something else.
In the air between him and May, I sensed something bright
and resonant. She smiled, and he bent toward her.
In May's studio, my arms ache again. May and I have
been quiet for some time. I catch myself almost sleeping
when May's voice cuts into the drowsy air.
"I might go to the Louvre this afternoon, Lyddy. Could you come too?"
"I'd love to, if I feel able."
"We could look at the Dutch collection again."
"Oui."
"Maybe May Alcott will come with us. We can go by carriage, and fetch
her."
May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott's sister, is married to
a Swiss man now, so we see her much less, but I welcome
our outings with her, and with our young and wealthy
friend Louisine Elder. To go about Paris with this small
crowd makes me feel young and careless, or, as careless
as I can be.
Love comes,
or illness. Last summer, my life changed, all in a
day. After asking me questions, with his little pince-nez
glittering, the doctor took May and Father aside to
discuss my situation. Mother was ill then. When May
returned to my room, her face a map of worry, I knew
in a moment how bad it was, and I knew too how she
would fight this truth, how everyone would fight it.
I could not hear all of her words, because the world
seemed to become unreal, as if I were miles away, looking
through the small end of a telescope, just as I used
to do with Robbie's when he got a toy one for Christmas
one winter at Hardwicke. I would sit in the window
seat, behind the curtains, and point the instrument
out to the meadow, and at first I could see the horses
so clearly that I could watch the breath coming out
of their nostrils, and then I'd turn the telescope
around, and suddenly the meadows, and the road, and
May's snow castle, and the flower garden—dry sticks in snow now—would
become tiny, a perfect miniature. Only this time, when
May spoke, the miniature held her and me and my bed,
in my room in Paris, and all around the world had vanished,
and I felt myself too to have no substance, but to be
made of air. Pain and air.
"Brights Disease," she said, and I almost laughed, thinking how ridiculous
that a disease of the kidneys should be associated in any way with brightness. "But,
Lyddy, even a French doctor can be wrong. We must simply watch your diet, and
keep you well rested. That's all there is to it. You must simply be careful."
But how can carefulness make this all right? It's not
up to me. Heaven knows, I'm nothing if not careful. This
illness is inside me. I feel that I live on a plank jutting
out over an ocean filled with sea monsters. Sometimes
I think I'm better. But maybe it's just that a pavilion
has been created around my little plank, right by this
ocean, sea monsters or no, and so much goes on in it—jugglers,
singers, romance—that I am merely distracted and
amused.
"Lyddy,
did you hear me?"
"Désolée, I must be daydreaming."
"I can tell! I have to pull you back, Lyd, right back into that chair.
You left me quite alone there, for a few minutes. Where did you travel to?"
I smile. "Oh, well, I go anywhere I wish, May: Pennsylvania,
Germany ..."
"Not Germany!"
"Actually, I was probably thinking simply about our apartment, and lunch."
"Lunch can be an absorbing subject, I know."
"Yes, and that pattern for a new gown."
"Another absorbing subject."
I can't always tell May my thoughts, because she can't
bear to face illness or death. My whole family's like
that.
I think May's sadness, when she heard my diagnosis, was
increased by her memory of earlier sorrows. The doctor,
even, may have reminded her of other doctors, like the
fat German one in Darmstadt, who looked at Robbie's legs,
and told us there was nothing seriously wrong with him.
All we had to do, he said, was to make Robbie exercise
with regularity, and take some medicine to strengthen
his bones. For awhile we could all look at each other
as if the world were an ordinary place.
But if something comes to someone, and makes of their
body a house to waste and gnaw at, doctors can do nothing,
and love can do nothing either. The baby, George, died
too, only a month old, when May was just beginning to
walk, and, before I was born, the baby girl, Katherine,
named for Mother. Once the youngest, Gardner, came into
the world, three years after George, I could hardly bear
to look at him, for fear he too would be still and cold.
"I think that'll do for today," May
says. I can tell she's pleased with her start.
I rouse myself, and shake off my thoughts. To be in
May's studio, now, in Paris, and not in Darmstadt,
or in Pennsylvania either—to have come this far—well,
it's lucky.
"May I seep" I ask.
"It's only a start," she says, and I look at a swath of white paint—the
fichu around my shoulders—and the beginnings of a woman's face, in profile,
the nose and mouth painted with delicacy, the eye a darker line, and a sketchy
band of brown for her hair, whitish-pink broad strokes for her cap.
Something about this woman, half-suggested in oil, makes
me bend toward her. Who is this? I ask myself, for I
can't think it's me, and yet I know, with exquisite pleasure,
that it is.
vi.
As I sit in my armchair, reading Flaubert, later, the
image of this woman, the one May is painting, comes to
me again and again. I discover a yearning to be close
to her, to be present as she comes closer to the surface.
It's like watching someone swim toward you, only it's
much slower, and you see her at first underwater, a moving
blur, and you wait for the moment when you'll see her
arms, and then her face, her hair streaming wet in the
light.
I could never confess this to anyone, and I can barely
even think it, but I'm aware too of another sensation,
the feeling of May's eyes on me, as she painted this
morning. Do other women have such feelings? It isn't
that I feel beautiful. It isn't something outward or
visible, really, at all.
(Continues...)
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Excerpted from Lydia
Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by
Harriet Scott Chessman. Copyright © 2004 by Harriet
Scott Chessman.
All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof,
may not be reproduced without permission. |
