Sargent's Women

by Donna M. Lucey

  But Lucia’s overtures to her mother-in-law fell on a hard-hearted soul. Agnes Higginson Fuller had access to ample funds: as part of her Higginson inheritance there was a pot of money set aside for use in family emergencies. Surely Lucia’s hospitalization would qualify. Lucia wrote to Agnes in desperation in 1914 and received no answer. She wrote again in April, listing her anticipated expenses before October—the total bill for rent, school, taxes, doctor, and hospital would come to $1,750; she didn’t even include food. “It is the list I am going to beg you to take off my hands,” she pleaded. “Dear Mrs. Fuller, stop and think it over! If you do this for me now you will probably be spared further demands from me and my children . . . if you do not do it, probably what will have to be done in the end will amount to greatly more.”

  Lucia appealed to Agnes’s sense of justice: Don’t you think you owe it to me? And to your own grandchildren? Surely, if other Higginson family members (who had even more money) knew of Lucia’s predicament, they’d be willing to help. “If you explained to them that I had always supported the children, even to earning the money for the doctors’ and nurses’ bills when they were born; and that for seventeen years you did not even have to pay anything toward Harry’s support.” And what of the emergency fund for family members? Couldn’t money from that be used in the name of the children? Lucia pointed out that Harry had dipped into that fund once before, supposedly to cover medical bills for the children, but truth be told, Lucia had already paid those bills, and Harry used the money instead for a rather pricey studio for himself. Not that she wanted to point an accusatory finger at Harry. In fact, Lucia went out of her way to absolve him of any responsibility for their pathetic plight: “This letter does not mean in any way to be blaming of Harry. . . . I realize that his one preoccupation is his work, and that the reason that he has never helped toward the support of his children is not in the least because he does not care for them, but quite simply because he is an idealist, wrapped up in his vision, without what is called worldly sense.” And as for the children, “they don’t criticize him at all, as they did at first when they began to notice that ‘other mothers didn’t have to work all the time.’ They are fond of him, and admire his talent and wit. But they feel, and [my physician] Dr. Dana feels keenly, that I need help now, and ought to have it. Much help.” She begged Agnes: “I hate to ask it of you. But it seems that my strength is really at an end. And it seems better to patch me up while I can be patched, doesn’t it, then to leave me to go ahead until I become a thing in a wheeled chair, with the children who are so splendid and so promising—not yet able to support themselves.”

  Agnes was unmoved by Lucia’s plight. She went directly to New York to confront Dr. Dana, and told him that Lucia’s illness was her own fault—it was because she smoked. The doctor strenuously disagreed, but Agnes had already made up her mind, and she was damned if she was going to help. Agnes wrote to Lucia with the following advice: sell your place in Plainfield (Lucia had already tried and failed, and the house was so heavily mortgaged it would never earn anything anyway), and “put the children to work at once.” Lucia was stunned. She couldn’t even respond to Agnes’s letter. “I feel too bitterly her eager readiness to sacrifice my children,” she wrote to a family friend.

  Within several years Lucia had to give up painting altogether because of her failing eyesight. She resorted to working for an interior decorator in New York, dashing about town picking up paint, wallpaper, and fabric samples. She was treated “like a slave,” according to her daughter, and her condition worsened.

  Worn out, Lucia yielded to Clara’s entreaties to move in with her family in Madison, Wisconsin. Twenty-three-year-old Clara had left Bryn Mawr for the University of Wisconsin, where she married an English professor. They welcomed Lucia into their household in November 1918. After a time, Jessie Morgan, Lucia’s very rich and very devoted childhood friend, bought her a house in Madison. Clara’s friends, much like the children of Cornish, embraced Lucia, charmed as they were by her good nature and warmth. They called her “M. F.” (Mrs. Fuller), and Clara’s own friendships seemed to improve because of her mother. Lucia had that way with people.

  In January 1924, while living in Madison, Lucia received news that her mother had died unexpectedly at St. Paul’s. It’s unlikely that Lucia, now unable to see or to walk without crutches, could attend the funeral. Sally wrote to Lucia that their mother had passed away peacefully. “Mama looked so beautiful & just asleep.” Sally took solace in the fact that their mother’s most ardent wish had been granted: that she would die before another one of her children did. Lily had cherished the memory of her travels in Japan, so Sally laid a Japanese iris in her casket. She also put into her mother’s hand a postcard from the Temple of Heaven in China that Nelson had sent to her before his suicide. (Lily had specifically told Sally that, in death, she wanted to clutch his card.) Sally put other meaningful items next to her mother: a bronze Gizo statue from Japan, a glass cross from Rheims, and a small silk American flag she brought with her wherever she traveled and kept by her bedside when at home. Sally cut off pieces of her mother’s hair and encased them in lockets for family members. She also sent her sister other items that had belonged to their mother: a diamond pin and ring, an Egyptian necklace, and a picture of Mount Fuji that Lily had kept on her dressing table mirror. Sally and Gordon both agreed that Lucia, who suffered so, should have the watercolor of Christ carrying his cross by John La Farge.

  In the wake of their mother’s death, Sally’s letters to Lucia—once prickly and demanding—turned introspective and apologetic. Now middle-aged at fifty-five, Sally admitted that her entire life had been about caring for her mother. She didn’t regret it, as from the age of fourteen that was all she had wanted to do. “My whole inner life has been in reference to her,” she wrote, and even since her death, “I have felt no sense of separation.” Yet, Sally confessed that she had been too rough in dealing with others. She had created a tiny universe around her mother and tried to keep everyone else at bay. In the process she had been “too hard, or intolerant, or impatient,” and her behavior had hurt many. Lily herself had been wounded by Sally’s conduct, wishing her eldest daughter would be more gracious and sympathetic toward others. Sally acknowledged her faults to Lucia, the sister she had always treated so shabbily.

  At first, Sally worried over her future. She couldn’t imagine being alive when her mother wasn’t. Life goes on, she wrote—“I sleep and eat just as usual”—but it was hard to put up a good front. The day-to-day commotion around her at St. Paul’s—students rushing about and playing their phonographs, parents visiting their sons—was a welcome distraction. But if a friend approached Sally to comfort her, “I find how little self control I have.” Feeling in control, and superior, and more privileged and beautiful than others, had always been essential to Sally. She recognized that Gordon had loved their mother as much as she, but “far more sensitively.” Now she had a new role. Gordon would become the central being in her life. She would care for him, support him. He had plunged right back into the daily activities, saying grace at supper for the assembled students within days of Lily’s death. Sally expected that she would spend the rest of her life on St. Paul’s bucolic campus.

  Among Lucia’s papers is a handwritten note that begins, “This evening I had a revelation.” No longer “strong and proud and able to work,” she had nonetheless found peace: “My knockout is the chance for my children. All the world will see the beauty and the splendor of their goodness.” People will say, “ ‘How good they are to their mother,’ ‘Did you ever see anything finer than Clara and Charley and the way they take care of their mother?’ ‘Aren’t they fine about it!’ ‘Aren’t they splendid!’ ‘Aren’t they unselfish and noble and superb!’ Oh, happy heart, remember this,” Lucia wrote, “and cease to grieve at the burden you have become.” At last Lucia had found the terrific love she’d always sought—love unmarred by hate.

  Lucia died of pneumonia on May 20, 1924,
not yet fifty-two years old. Notices in the Boston papers reported on the passing of the well-known miniaturist. Though Lucia had always thought of herself as an agnostic, in the last year of her life she was drawn to Catholicism and converted. She was buried in Madison after a Catholic funeral service. Even Harry came to mourn his brave wife. Lucia left behind a note for Clara saying that, if she could, she would return to her after her death.

  In mourning, Sally and Gordon went abroad, staying at their brother Blair’s apartment in Paris. They then continued on to the fashionable Pointe-au-Pic in Quebec province, where their mother had planned a family reunion for that summer. The rustic outpost on Murray Bay, a place they’d often visited as children, inspired “healing and blessed memories,” according to Sally. On July 7, 1924, Sally wrote to a friend how grateful she was that her mother had been spared the sadness of Lucia’s death. To Sally, the loss of Lucia seemed even more real than the loss of her mother, but at least her sister had been released from suffering. Lucia had died believing that her work on this earth was finished, as both of her “adoring children” were settled into their own lives. Sally, once such a critic, wrote of Lucia’s “wonderful courage” and her “generous heart & mind.”

  But Clara, still protective of her dead mother, continued to nurse a grudge against the arrogant and autocratic Sally, who had clashed so often with Lucia. When Sally traveled to Madison in 1928 to meet Clara’s new baby, named after her mother, Clara confronted her aunt, demanding to know if she still thought that Lucia had only been feigning illness and if her death had been merely a “hysterical gesture.”

  Sally returned East to her brother, but by 1930 they were no longer in New Hampshire. Gordon, discovered in the arms of a young boy, had been booted out of St. Paul’s. Sally and the disgraced Gordon slunk back to Back Bay. Heaven knows how they had the money for that—more paintings sold, perhaps, along with contributions from brother Blair’s wife. Like his father, Gordon became a stockbroker, but life had turned bitter for him. His portrait by Sargent as an adorable little boy clutching his pet guinea pig must have felt like a dream from a distant, unrecognizable past. Leaving Boston behind in 1932, Gordon set out on a long sea voyage. He jumped overboard as the ship crossed the equator. That made three out of five brothers dead by suicide—a fourth under puzzling circumstances. Gordon’s death was the hardest of all for Sally to forgive. How could he do that to her? She knew he had the right to take his own life, yet “his wanting to escape almost breaks my heart,” Sally wrote to Lucia’s daughter. It was, she said, “a real betrayal of our understanding and affection.”

  The litany of tragedy that befell the Fairchild family is bewildering. The siblings had grown up in a cocoon of privilege, money, and influence. As their wealth vanished, the scrambling survivors didn’t put up much of a fight. Except Lucia. She always believed art was her salvation. “Eat, drink, paint and be merry,” she had written to Harry early in their marriage. Yet she also understood the need to temper her aesthetic idealism with commercial reality—something Harry never learned. Lucia took Sargent’s grand view and distilled it into miniature portions. She worked tirelessly until, ravaged by her baffling disease, she could no longer see to paint her ivory portraits. Sargent had his enormous talent; Lucia had talent and raw courage.

  And what became of Harry after abandoning Lucia? When he’d taken refuge with his mother at the family farm, Lucia was grateful. He needed an oasis of calm to soothe his troubled soul.

  Harry’s mother died the same month that Lucia did. The year before, Agnes sent Harry off to Paris to rekindle his practically nonexistent career. Though she had refused to help her grandchildren and daughter-in-law, she had no such misgivings about spending money to set up her son in Paris. He established a studio in Montparnasse. The change of scene didn’t do much for Harry’s art, but it improved his social life, as it was much more exciting in France than in rural New England. Harry became a fixture in the bars and cafés of Paris that were frequented by a who’s who of famous artists and writers: Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Joan Miró.

  The death of his mother finally gave Harry his independence—the income from her estate left him well-fixed in Paris. “Was ever a man more suited to its artistic atmosphere than you are?” the executor of his mother’s estate asked Harry. “Your beautiful and lifelong devotion to your mother entitles you to whatever freedom you can enjoy for the rest of your life.” Freedom. Money. If anything, it led Harry even farther off the artistic path. He roamed from Paris to the Riviera to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. He took up with a hard-drinking coterie that included Lady Duff Twysden, a beautiful Englishwoman who ditched her baronet husband but kept the title. Tall, slender, and unconventional, she kept her hair closely cropped, her face beautifully made up and alluring. She could drink like a man—in fact, could drink most of them under the table. There were lots of men sniffing around her, including a besotted, but married, Hemingway. She did have one rule: no sleeping with married men. Hemingway based his character Lady Brett Ashley, the ultra modern heroine of The Sun Also Rises, on Duff.

  Letters from Harry to his son Charley in the fall of 1925 recount dissolute nights of drinking and gambling with Duff and her lover in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Duff proposed a winter plan: she’d move with Harry to the Riviera without her lover. Charley was alarmed at this turn of events, and begged his father not to take up with her, saying that Duff would destroy him, wreck whatever was left of his career. Harry, instead, took a ship to Algiers, and made his way back to Paris where, on an impulse, he married his extremely young model. She was so young, in fact, that before deciding to marry her, he had tried to legally adopt her. As he explained in a letter to his bewildered children, he was trying to protect this young woman from her cruel mother. The middle-aged man came back to New York with his child bride, moved into a Greenwich Village apartment, and then asked the executor of his mother’s estate to sell all the stocks and bonds he owned. “It is a life and death matter.” Clearly, his debts were overwhelming him. And soon his bride was gone back to France, likely because of those debts.

  Thereafter, Harry moved from place to place. In 1932, in his mid-sixties, he drifted south in search of a warmer climate. At a diner somewhere in the Carolinas he met a young blond waitress named Susie and took her along with him. He wrote to his children that she was to be his assistant and apprentice—he’d teach her everything he knew about arts and crafts. Adventures and misadventures followed them on their journey. In Savannah, Harry got quite ill and went to a local doctor who told him that he should limit his drinking to only four whiskeys a day—this during Prohibition. The doctor also warned that it would be considered scandalous for Harry and young Susie to share a cottage alone without a chaperone. Enough of Savannah. They pulled up stakes and moved on.

  Around that time a bit of good news came for Harry: unexpectedly, he was named the beneficiary of a Higginson trust fund. He and Susie moved to a cottage in Sarasota, Florida, where no one seemed to care about their sleeping arrangements, but he soon grew restless. Debts were still following Harry, and the lawyers up North, taking their own healthy fees from his new assets, were slow in sending checks. Rather than wait patiently for funds and pay his bills, Henry came up with another crackpot scheme, circling back to his original dream of being an itinerant artist living out of a caravan. Forty years earlier he and Lucia had their disastrous horse-drawn contraption; now he invested in the modern version: a 1929 seven-passenger Buick that could pull two trailers behind. He shelled out $450 for the car.

  Harry began spending his money faster than he got it. He ordered a customized trailer, wired for electricity, from a factory in Dayton, Ohio. It would be his mobile workshop. Though it was, in his words, “only a shell,” the trailer cost an extravagant sixteen hundred dollars. And then there was the expensive equipment he needed, from electrical tools for making furniture to a complete photographic outfit including a Graflex camera and enlarger, though he didn’t have the slightest experience
in photography. He envisioned himself and Susie making a handsome profit as they traveled across the country selling their arts and crafts: paintings and etchings, photographs, even sea shells that they collected. He was so sure of success, he planned to take along a maid to clean and wash.

  Harry, who had so little time for his daughter, Clara, when she was a child, now sent her one thousand dollars for a car and trailer, with detailed instructions on exactly what she’d need to outfit it properly. He wanted her to join them on the road. He was distressed when Clara wrote back to say that, rather than investing in a trailer, she’d used his money to pay off some debts. He wouldn’t do that, arguing it was better for him not to pay off his debts. “Trailering,” as he called it, would cut his living costs and surely give him a better chance to make money: “even in these hard times” during the Depression, art could be profitable. Harry spent several more months in Florida, buying gear, and preparing for the trip.

  Harry and Susie arrived in New Orleans in mid-March 1934, and ended up in the crowded, unkempt Dixie Tourist camp. The manager of the trailer park moonlighted as a high-wire entertainer. Their campmates were a rough bunch. One night the manager had to come to the rescue of a woman being beaten by her husband. Bonnie and Clyde checked into the camp. The celebrity outlaws were recognized, sneaked out, but then returned again in the morning to retrieve a cushion they’d left behind in the cabin. Later that day the outlaws were ambushed and killed by a posse on a country road in Louisiana.

  Harry had been working on a new painting for months and it was going nowhere. He was waiting for inspiration to kick in. Harry longed to get on the road again. As for income, Susie had taken up woodworking and she was making frames for reproductions of Harry’s Christian Science painting. There were Mary Baker Eddy true believers everywhere, some of them eager to buy such an image. Susie was also learning to make wooden lawn ornaments—ducks, and that sort of thing—which they would paint and sell. Harry saw this particular business as a surefire moneymaker. So this was the final apotheosis of Harry, the aesthete: reduced to making lawn ornaments in a trailer park. (This from the man who deemed his wife déclassé for doing commissioned portraits.) It was a far cry from John Singer Sargent and the life of the artist that Lucia had imagined so many years before. Quoting from Montaigne, Harry wrote to his daughter in March 1934, “We must make ourselves comfortable with the faults we have.” Not long after, he died of cardiac arrest.