Girl with Brush and Canvas

by Carolyn Meyer

  “You know I’d send you back up to New York if I could,” he told me. “But right now, I can’t do it. Pretty soon, though, things will work out.”

  But things did not work out. There was nothing left to send any of us back to school, except Alexius. Although Mama badly wanted Ida and Nita to have another year at Chatham, she explained that it was more important for Alexius to finish at the academy. I was almost twenty-one, and I couldn’t expect my family to keep on paying for my education. I would have to figure out some way to earn enough money to support myself.

  But how? Doing what? I had gone to New York with the idea of eventually going on to earn a teaching certificate, but I needed another year of training to achieve that. What school would hire me without it?

  Mama, I knew, would be pleased if I’d make a good match and get married. She’d hinted at it. Jetta Thorpe, the only girl I knew in Williamsburg, was making wedding plans. It was what most girls did. Susan Young sent me an announcement of her engagement, and most of the other girls in my class at Chatham were probably either married or planning to be. I’d insisted then that I would not marry, because I would have no time to paint if I had a husband and a family, even if I married a rich man and had servants.

  George Dannenberg would soon be on his way to Paris to study and paint. I wished I could go with him, but that was impossible. I had time now, but I could not paint. I stopped drawing. I had no energy. I had no idea what to do.

  As if on cue, along came a new pastor at Bruton Parish Episcopal Church.

  The Reverend Tucker Lawrence was tall and blue-eyed with a winning smile. All the girls at Bruton must have been setting their caps for him, their mothers wracking their brains for a way to snare him. For some reason I, of all the possible candidates available, was the one the pastor chose to call upon. Mama encouraged this, going so far as to invite him for an evening meal, without even consulting me. I wanted nothing to do with any of it.

  In those lean days, we were living mostly on vegetables from Auntie’s garden accompanied by plenty of rice and cornbread, but for this important occasion Mama sacrificed a chicken and made it stretch to feed all of us. There were also deviled eggs and sliced tomatoes and a lovely peach cobbler.

  Conversation was strained. “I understand that you’ve come here from Michigan,” said the pastor.

  “Wisconsin,” Papa said. “My parents came over from the Old Country in 1848 and settled in Sun Prairie. Bought land from the government for a dollar an acre. My brothers and I were all born there. My wife is descended from Hungarian nobility.”

  Alexius kicked me under the table. I expected him to burst out laughing.

  “And your people, Pastor Lawrence?” Mama asked pleasantly. She’d learned in the five years she’d lived in the South that talking about ancestral roots was the best way to start a conversation with a new acquaintance.

  “My grandfather served with Robert E. Lee in the Mexican-American War and again in the War Between the States. My father was a drummer boy during that conflict.”

  Mama tried again. “And your mother’s family?”

  “Mother is a Beauregard from New Orleans,” he said, pronouncing it Nawlins. “Her father, General Beauregard, was a great friend of General Lee.”

  The conversation lumbered along, all of us being excruciatingly polite, and excruciatingly dull. My classmates from Chatham would have been mad for him.

  A week later, without waiting for an invitation, Pastor Lawrence stopped by when I was not at home and left a bouquet of flowers and a note inviting me to go canoeing on the York River.

  I was foolish enough to agree to the boating expedition. As if I hadn’t learned my lesson crossing Lake George in a rowboat! But it was a bright September day, and I was happy for an excuse to get away from the gloom of the concrete house—until I discovered that Pastor Lawrence hadn’t the least idea how to handle a canoe. I had mastered that skill at Amitola with George, and it must have been hard for Pastor Lawrence to accept that I was the one who grabbed a paddle and turned the canoe around before we could be swept out to sea.

  Mama surely knew that the project was hopeless—I could not settle for a man I didn’t love. It was the Man from the Far West, George Dannenberg, who occupied my thoughts as our letters crisscrossed the entire country.

  I began to believe that art was not a practical path for me to follow, and I tried to quit thinking of myself as an artist. For the sake of my family, and for my own sake as well, I had to make my way in the world. Without a teaching certificate, I would have to seek some other kind of work.

  In November, after three months at home and two days before my twenty-first birthday, I boarded a train for Chicago—not to return to the Art Institute, but to hunt for a job. When I left, my mother looked even wearier and Papa gloomier than when I’d returned from Lake George in August, but Aunt Ollie and Uncle Charley were exactly the same as the last time I’d seen them, immersed in their own affairs but willing to have me stay in their apartment. This time I was not their only boarder: Aunt Lola had moved there from Madison, and I had to share the spare room with her and her off-key singing.

  I found work almost right away, drawing lace and embroidery illustrations for fashion advertisements in newspapers. The supervisor would distribute renderings of women wearing plain, unadorned coats and dresses, and I would add highly detailed fancywork to sleeves, collars, necklines, and hems. I was fast—I’d learned that from doing a painting a day in Mr. Chase’s class—and since it was piecework, I earned more than slower girls, but the company paid such a low rate that I ended up with very little. It was tedious and boring, foolish and meaningless. I dreaded going to work in the morning, and I had no energy left for painting, even if I’d wanted to.

  Chicago no longer appealed to me. It was dirty, noisy, cold, and gloomy most of the year, with none of the tremendous excitement and constant stimulation I’d found in New York. And I thought I’d go mad if I had to listen to Aunt Lola warbling “Beautiful Dreamer” one more time.

  I stuck it out for two years—two years of doing work I hated, in a place I didn’t want to be, with people I could barely tolerate. Two years of my life, gone. Two years in which I did not make one painting or one drawing of my own. I felt numb.

  Then I came down with measles. I was sick for weeks. Measles weakens the eyes, and even after I’d recovered, I could not see well enough to draw fine lace and dainty embroidery. I told my employers I was leaving, thanked my distracted aunts and uncle, and boarded the next train out of Chicago for Virginia.

  Pastor Lawrence had been charmed by another young lady, and that was a good thing—one of the few good things about going home. Papa had become even more morose; no matter how hard he worked, the results were dismal. His plans to open a creamery had come to nothing. Even more worrisome was Mama’s health. She had looked pale and tired when I left for Chicago. Now she rarely had the strength to get out of bed. She coughed and coughed.

  “Consumption,” Papa explained dully. “It carried off my father and my three older brothers, and I feared it would come for me as well. I brought my dear Ida here so as to avoid all that, and now it has come for her!” His voice cracked, and he turned away.

  “Why did no one tell me this?” I asked.

  “We didn’t want to worry you. There’s nothing you can do.”

  I hurried to the clinic to find Dr. Hunter. He ushered me into his office, pointed to a seat, and sat down on the opposite side of a cluttered desk. “I’ve come about my mother,” I said. “My father thinks she’s consumptive.”

  The doctor sighed. “I’m afraid your father is correct, Miss O’Keeffe. Your mother is exhibiting the early symptoms of tuberculosis. It is a terrible disease, as your family knows from tragic experience. There is no cure. Progress of the illness is inexorable and ultimately fatal. The dampness here will only worsen her condition. I have recommended to Mr. O’Keeffe that your mother be removed to a higher, dryer climate.”

  And so that’s what
we did. Mama, my four sisters, Auntie, and her horse, moved to Charlottesville. They chose Charlottesville not only because it was in the mountains but because Ida and Nita had attended a summer class at the University of Virginia and found the town more to their liking than Williamsburg had ever been. All our lives we had been used to having almost limitless space inside and out, and the house Mama rented in Charlottesville had neither. But it was close to the university, and Mama decided, weak as she was, to take in table boarders to help cover expenses. Her illness had to be kept secret, or she would have had no customers.

  Papa and my two brothers stayed behind in Williamsburg, and I stayed too, to keep house for them while my father searched doggedly for work and tried to sell the house. I learned to bake biscuits and to make soup from most anything that was handy and cheap—we ate a lot of almond soup that winter. We took turns traveling up to Charlottesville to visit the other half of our family.

  The one thing that kept me going during those dispiriting months were my letters from George Dannenberg. George was in California, trying to earn extra money and preparing to leave for Paris, where he planned to stay for as long as he could. His letters were affectionate, showing concern for my eyesight, encouraging me to continue painting. He hinted that he wanted me to be with him.

  I long to have you as the little black-haired girl I knew at the lake. You stunned me into a daze that I can’t shake off. I read his letters over and over, building castles in the air based on what he wrote: I want very much to see you before I sail. I wish I could take you with me. It is not so very impossible, so don’t laugh.

  I didn’t laugh. I dreamed. When a week went by with no letter, I entertained the fantasy that he might be making his way across the country to see me. At any time I might hear a knock on the door and open it and find him standing there. Another week passed, and another, with no word from him. At last a letter arrived, postmarked Paris. Paris! He had gone there without coming to see me first, without even telling me that he was on his way to France.

  So it had been impossible, after all. I could hardly bear to open it, or to read his bold script on the flimsy blue paper.

  The night before I sailed from New York, I sat all night on a bench in the Battery, trying to decide if I should come to see you or not. But in the morning I sailed without seeing you—crazy, or maybe stupid, because if there is anything in the world I want, it is Patsy.

  If he had come for me, I would have married him. But he didn’t. I was disappointed and hurt. This was the first man I had cared for, and he had done this. He may have wanted me, but he didn’t want me enough.

  Nevertheless, we continued to exchange letters. I should like to have you here, he wrote.

  What did that mean, I wondered, and then decided that it meant nothing.

  Later I wrote to him that I had given up painting. It had nothing to do with him, I said—I simply had come to understand that I didn’t know what to do that was any different from what I had been doing. I’d been repeating myself, and I could see no way forward.

  It’s all or nothing for me. If I can’t give myself to it completely, I cannot do it at all.

  He replied, The fact that you have abandoned painting does not mean that you have given up art. You are and always will be an artist.

  PART IV

  “Art is the way you see things, the choices you make.”

  16

  Chatham, Virginia—Spring 1911

  I WAS TWENTY-THREE AND FEELING UNMOORED AND adrift. What could I do? I still was not painting, but if I couldn’t paint, perhaps I could teach children to paint. I applied to the Williamsburg public schools for a position. They refused to hire me without a certificate.

  Then, a small miracle: Mrs. Willis wrote that she planned to take a temporary leave from the Institute for six weeks in the spring. Would I be willing to teach the art classes in her place?

  Of course I would!

  How happy I was to be back at my old school, happier still to find that Susan Young was living nearby with an aunt and teaching a class in painting china. It was almost as though no time had passed since we first became friends. Susan had returned to Chatham after our graduation, while Ida and Nita were there, and she’d met Walter Wilson, a teacher at a nearby boys’ school. (Had there been a boys’ school when we were taking turns as “boys” at our dances? I couldn’t remember.) Susan and Walter were to be married in June.

  I enjoyed teaching more than I ever thought possible. I hadn’t forgotten what it was like to be very young and subject to all sorts of silly rules. Those rules no longer applied to Susan or to me: we walked into town together at least twice a week, and I went off alone into the beautiful countryside whenever I felt like it. Both were harmless activities that were absolutely forbidden for students. I had been given a small private room in the dormitory and routinely turned a blind eye to girls who thought they were terribly daring to sneak down to the kitchen at night to raid Elsie’s icebox. They seemed bolder than we were as sixteen-year-olds.

  Susan happened by one evening when I was stitching a shirtwaist with pintucks down the front and a bit of lace trimming on the sleeves. She admired it enthusiastically, amazed at how I’d finished the seams on the inside. While I sewed, she described plans for her wedding, which would be a grand affair at her home in Roanoke. Details of the church ceremony and a reception at the Youngs’ private club were often the subject of our conversations. I could not afford to attend the wedding or give her a proper wedding gift, but when I finished the shirtwaist, I wrapped it carefully and presented it to her.

  “For your trousseau,” I told her.

  “Oh, my dear Georgie, how very kind of you! How I wish you’d come to the wedding!”

  I hoped she’d understand that I couldn’t, without my having to explain.

  By the time I left Chatham at the end of the term, I recognized that I was a good teacher—even an excellent one. The students respected me, and I knew they had learned from me. Maybe teaching was how I could earn a living and make a life for myself. I had no work of my own to show for those six weeks in Chatham, but I felt as though I was waking up from a bad dream. I could see a way forward. I still didn’t have a teaching certificate, but I did have experience, and I resolved to use that to get to where I wanted to be.

  Papa finally sold the house he’d built in Williamsburg, and he and Alexius and I joined the rest of our family in Charlottesville. I was not sorry to leave.

  With the bit of money he had left after he’d paid off his debts, he opened a creamery, an idea he’d first had in Williamsburg. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s cows,” he said. He bought milk from dairy farmers and then sold the milk, cream, butter—even ice cream—to private customers. But the O’Keeffe Creamery struggled from the beginning.

  Ours was the poorest house on an otherwise fashionable street of gracious homes belonging to Charlottesville’s aristocratic old families, including the president of the university. If we had never been accepted in Williamsburg, the social structure of Charlottesville was even more rigid, and the O’Keeffes even more rigidly excluded. Auntie still had her old carriage horse, Penelope, but we no longer owned a carriage. No one in Charlottesville was impressed with Mama’s Totto jewelry. They would have been appalled if they knew she took in boarders.

  The University of Virginia had changed its “gentlemen only” policy and for the first time began admitting women, but only to the summer sessions. The courses were aimed at girls from around the state who wished to become public school teachers. Ida and Nita had taken a drawing class the previous summer, and they’d signed up for another. Both of them had always shown a great deal of artistic talent, and I was pleased that they were continuing to study.

  Nita could not say enough about her instructor, a New Yorker named Alon Bement. “You must come with us, Georgie,” Nita insisted. “One class with this man and you’ll want to start painting again.”

  “He’s almost too peculiar,” Ida warned me. “He’s vain
, he puts on airs. And he’s short and round, and dresses in outrageous outfits, and he speaks in such a funny, squeaky voice. Nobody likes him. You probably won’t either.”

  Ida’s description was enough to make me want to turn right around and go back home, but Nita wouldn’t hear of it. “Never mind what Ida says,” Nita insisted. “He’s a brilliant teacher, and he has some unusual ideas. I learned that just from the first class.”

  Nita was twenty, three years younger than I was, but she had a good head on her shoulders. I’d learned to pay attention to what she said, and not shrug her off as I often did with Ida. I agreed to go with them to the art building on the campus, listen to what Mr. Bement had to say, and make up my own mind.

  I attended Mr. Bement’s class the next day. Although Ida had described him to a T, Nita was right: his ideas and theories about art started me thinking about painting in an entirely different way. He’d learned these ideas from an artist named Arthur Wesley Dow. My teachers at both the Art Institute in Chicago and the Art Students League in New York had taught us to learn how to paint by imitating the work of the old masters. Arthur Wesley Dow challenged that idea. He believed that copying was the wrong way to approach painting. What interested Dow—and Mr. Bement—was filling a space, any space, in a beautiful way. Art should be grounded in personal experience and harmonious design, Dow said. Interpretation is more important than representation. I would always remember that.

  Mr. Bement agreed with Dow’s theories. “Art is the way you see things, and the choices you make,” he said. “Even about something so simple as buying a cup and saucer.”