by M. J. Rose
A Woman in Movement
ALYSON RICHMAN
The blue ink from the printmaking press was still visible on Emma’s fingers when she ran down the steps of the Art Students League. Only after she emerged into the blazing sunlight of Fifty-Seventh Street did she stop and tuck the stack of flyers underneath her arm and pull on her gloves.
A surge of adrenaline rushed through her. No longer in her artist smock, Emma felt transformed, wearing a long sage-green skirt and the white cotton blouse that she had dyed lavender the week before in the bathtub of her boardinghouse. Emma aspired to embody the suffragette movement as much as possible, and while some chose to wear white in its honor for that afternoon’s parade, Emma chose the more vibrant colors of its political party because they made her feel confident and bold.
She believed color and images were another form of language, just like poetry or music. For months she had juggled her classes at the league with her part-time job at the ad agency, hoping to find a way to put her artistic skills to good use. It had not been as easy as she thought it would be when she first left the safety and security of living with her parents. New York City was a far cry from the bucolic setting of her Connecticut childhood. The bustling streets, the expense of living and studying in the metropolis, and the need for her to gain street smarts were all things she had been forced to navigate on her own. Under Ida Sedgwick Proper’s mentoring, she had learned so much, and now she realized all the hours she had spent in the printmaking room, perfecting the illustration that would not only be printed on the flyers, but also on the cover page of The Woman Voter journal, had not been in vain. She felt quietly victorious, not just because Ida had ultimately chosen her image, but because she knew she was now stronger and more confident after having created it.
For months, Emma had worked on her print for the contest. After several misguided attempts, she arrived at her final version, one of three female figures: a little girl in a pinafore, a young woman close to Emma’s age, and an older woman, with a carefully detailed face, whose lines were meant to represent wisdom. All three had their hands interlocked and were facing an enlarged wooden ballot. “Fight not just for one generation,” it announced in bold black letters. “But for all!”
As Emma started walking down Fifth Avenue, she pulled out flyers from beneath her arm, offering them to men, women, and children alike; she believed she was channeling a little bit of Ida’s spirit with each hand that reached out for one of the sheets of paper. “Come to today’s parade!” Emma added with boundless enthusiasm. She wanted everyone to feel the sense of purpose that she now felt. Ida’s energy and determination had been infectious, affecting nearly everyone who came into contact with her. It was hard for Emma to believe it had been only four months since she’d first walked through the office doors of The Woman Voter to find out more about them before crafting her submission for their contest. The journal was seeking an original image to be printed on all the promotional flyers for the suffragists’ October twenty-third parade in Manhattan. It was the lure of the fifty-dollar prize that first caught Emma’s attention when she saw a notice about the contest, as that amount of money would be more than three months’ salary at the Speyer Creative Agency, where she had been working part-time to pay for her studies.
Emma had been desperate to find an extra source of income to support herself and prove her father, who had remained skeptical of her artistic pursuits, wrong. When she first arrived in New York at the start of the school year, she combed the classifieds looking for work. How many times had she arrived at the reception of a particular creative agency, only to be turned away when they saw she was a woman? Emma didn’t have enough fingers to count the rejections. It was only after she had nearly given up hope that she found herself in the office of Lewis Speyer’s ad agency.
Speyer had greeted her himself, claiming his receptionist had already left for the day. A large man wearing a wool sack suit that was far too small for him, the buttons of his jacket strained to keep his voluminous belly locked beneath the chalk-striped fabric.
“You must be Miss Kling.” He appeared to appraise her before his eyes settled on her face. Then with an exaggerated flourish of his hand, Speyer motioned her to follow him to his office.
* * *
“So … you’re the artist applying for the job?” he asked her briskly, and told her to sit down. “Studying at the Art Students League? Is that right?”
“Yes, sir,” she answered. Emma was proud to respond affirmatively. She would have struggled to have the confidence to call herself an artist when she lived at home. But now that she was officially a full-fledged student at the league, she felt she could legitimately claim the title.
“I’ve been sketching ever since I could hold a pencil in my hand.”
Her eyes scanned the framed newspaper ads from New York’s leading department stores that Speyer displayed on the office’s buttermilk-colored walls. These ads featured hand-drawn illustrations of women wearing beautiful dresses and hats, their hourglass bodies exaggerated for effect.
Emma knew she was capable of creating similar sketches; she just needed Mr. Speyer to give her a chance. As she looked at him perched like an overstuffed owl at his desk, forehead glistening with perspiration, she forced herself to remain focused. She would see past his rapaciousness if he’d just see past her gender and give her the job. She loved drawing fashion sketches. Her mother had always sewn her own clothes, and Emma knew how to re-create the drape of fabric and the movement of a skirt on paper. She was confident she could make those fashions come alive; her imagination began to spin with the excitement of the unfurling possibility of being employed there.
“I brought my portfolio.” She handed him the leather case with her drawings and watercolors. She had also brought along her sketches of models that resembled the ones framed in Speyer’s office. “As you can see, I love capturing a woman in motion.”
Speyer unlaced the leather folder and glanced at her drawings. He did not study them carefully like her professors who assessed her work, but rather looked quickly, shuffling through the pages like they were a card deck. He then folded his pink, pulpy hands in front of him.
“This is the deal, Miss Kling,” Speyer explained matter-of-factly. “You do the drawings for our clients … bold drawings of the models wearing the latest fashions for our large clients—B. Altman, Lord and Taylor, all the big names who advertise in all the major papers—and it’s great work.” He paused. “But, there’s just one other detail you should be aware of…”
He leaned back in his dark black chair, unbuttoned the two jacket buttons of his wool sack suit, and lit a cigar. “I sign my name to the drawings. You get paid, of course. But the client won’t know you did the work. Does that sound amenable to you, Miss Kling?”
Emma’s face reddened with indignation. Had she even heard Mr. Speyer’s words correctly?
“My clients wouldn’t feel comfortable knowing a woman was sketching the illustration … so I consider my offer a generous one, don’t you think, Miss Kling?”
She looked at Speyer’s face, which had now become engulfed in shadow as the afternoon sun descended in the window behind him. Had she a piece of charcoal in her hand, she would have sketched his face in dark, smoky smudges.
“What do you think?” he asked her again, fixing his gaze hard upon her. Little red embers burned at the end of his cigar as he rotated it between his two fingers.
Emma fell mute for a moment. She was still trying to silence the voice inside her head, which was raging: Wouldn’t being paid for your work and getting credit for it be a better deal? But she held her tongue. This was the first interview she had gotten in weeks. She needed the job.
“I just want to make sure I understand you correctly, sir.” Emma formed her words slowly. “Your clients believe they are hiring you to do their drawings for their advertisements?”
“Yes.”
She swallowed hard. “But, in fact, you employ others like myself to
do them under your name?”
“Correct.” He sucked at the cigar and blew circles of smoke in her direction. “A lot of ambitious, artistic women have been delighted to have the opportunity, Miss Kling.” He smiled again, his tobacco-stained teeth reminding her of a soiled paint rag. “It’s what I’d call a mutually beneficial arrangement, one that I’m happily extending to women exclusively.”
Emma knitted her hands together. A visceral repulsion swept over her. She was nauseated by his unctuous gaze and unfair work proposition. But she had been looking for a job like this ever since she arrived in New York, and had not found a single person willing to employ her at all. She needed the money, and Emma realized that if she was left with just this one option, at least it was a chance to do something she loved.
No matter what, she refused to entertain the thought that she would be forced to return home and admit to her father that she couldn’t support herself. That would mean the end of her dream of ever becoming an artist.
She thought of her parents back in Connecticut and how she had struggled to convince them to allow her to go to Manhattan for art school. Her father had been particularly resistant. Emma would do anything now to prove to him that she could manage on her own; she’d make nearly any sacrifice to achieve her goal of becoming a working artist. How many afternoons had she not eaten lunch because she wanted to save the money to instead purchase one of the more expensive tubes of pigment for her oil class, like cobalt blue or cadmium red? She knew her parents had made certain sacrifices when they decided to leave their home country and start anew in America.
Her parents, Elsa and Milos, Hungarian immigrants, had come to America before Emma was born, frustrated by the failure of reform and lack of safety in their home country. The deprivation they had experienced in their childhoods was hardly ever mentioned, as they forged ahead in a new country that inspired them with its sense of possibility, tolerance, and hope. Now they owned a small hotel in Stamford, where they channeled their European background into creating an ambiance of old-world elegance and hospitality.
Yet, even as they put the past behind them, they still experienced difficulties as they tried to adapt to their new surroundings. The English language proved difficult for them to master, and guests often struggled with their accents or sometimes seemed put off by the foreign-sounding dinner options of beef goulash and kohlrabi soup that Elsa prepared. But Elsa was determined that their guests see beyond their broken English and their foreign traditions. She had a natural sense of style and a talent for sewing, a gift she used to transform everything from her own wardrobe to the rooms in the inn, which she described as “nests of beauty.” Each guest room had its own palette. She pulled colors from nature for her inspiration, telling Emma that the blue in one room was meant to evoke the same shade as a robin’s egg. Another room was painted bright yellow to resemble marigolds in bloom. Emma learned to see the world through her mother’s naturally artistic eye. And although she did not inherit her mother’s talent with a needle and thread, ever since Emma was a child her hands were always grasping for a piece of chalk to draw on any surface she could find.
As she grew older, Emma yearned to draw from real life. She painted still lifes of the delicate Herend pitcher in the kitchen and the vase of seasonal flowers in the living room. Other times, she would sit in the kitchen with her sketch pad and draw the faces of those who came in to help her mother prepare the food and clear the dishes.
Soon she began to experiment with pastels and watercolors, and by the time she was eighteen, she had started to work in oils, learning to blend the pigments to re-create what she saw in her mother’s garden. It was a hotel guest who first took notice of one of Emma’s small landscape paintings framed and on display near reception, and told her parents she should consider enrolling in classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan.
The gentleman wrote down the name and address of the school, telling them that his own son had attended classes at the league and was now a successful portrait artist in Boston. The following morning, when he was having breakfast in the dining room, he pulled Emma aside and told her what he had shared with her mother and father.
“You have a gift, young lady,” he reminded her. “Don’t squander it. I see something in your paintings that I saw in my son’s work. I would hate to see your talent used only to decorate the walls of your parents’ hotel. That would be a real shame.”
His words affected her. For the past few years, her life had seemed particularly shuttered. Ever since Emma had graduated from high school, she had ceased to interact with many of the girls she had known since childhood.
Her mind had swirled with the prospect of traveling to New York to study art more deeply.
But the following evening, when she broached the subject with her father, he could not muster a single ounce of enthusiasm for the idea.
“Absolutely not,” he told her. “It is out of the question.”
Milos had a whole litany of reasons why he would not even consider Emma’s wishes. “It’s not a stable life for a woman to be an artist,” he retorted quickly. He imagined Emma following in her mother’s footsteps, using her gifts to make their surroundings at the inn more beautiful. He wanted her to marry, have children, and eventually take over running the hotel with her future husband, whoever he may be.
Emma had heard her father mention how friends and family members back in Hungary had cautioned her parents about leaving for a country they knew so little about. But Milos had not been swayed from what he believed to be the right course of action. He had been brave—some might even say adventurous. Now he was telling his daughter to be the complete opposite of what he himself embodied.
“Papa, I can’t improve as a painter unless I learn from others who know more than I.”
The possibility of a whole new world beckoned, and to Emma it was almost within reach. She had tried since she was a teenager to expand her horizons, finding enormous pleasure in the books she had taken out from her local library. It was in those pages she had first learned about artists like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, who were Impressionist painters just like the more well-known Monet and Renoir. Emma longed to travel to Paris. She imagined the energy of the big city. Her spirit yearned to be unbridled.
But Milos sought to diffuse the high emotions of his only daughter.
“It’s too dangerous,” he insisted. “You’d be living unchaperoned. Impossible.”
Emma’s mother stared at her hands, looking at them as though she had just let something slip through her fingers.
* * *
While her father’s words infuriated Emma, her mother’s silence pained her even more deeply. She had stormed off and retreated to her room after her standoff with her parents. The apricot-colored walls that her mother had painted years ago and then matched with sage-green drapes now seemed to trap her.
“Emma?” Her mother gently rapped at the door. “May I come in?”
Emma ignored the request, but Elsa turned the doorknob and entered cautiously anyway.
“Don’t be angry at him, darling.” She sat down on Emma’s bed and placed her hand on her daughter’s back. Emma pulled away from her mother and lifted her hand to wipe her tears.
“A stranger told me I had talent. He instructed me not to squander my gift!”
“I know. He told your father and me the same thing.”
“New York is only a few hours away. I am not asking to return to Budapest.”
Her mother squeezed her hand. “Your spirit reminds me of myself when I was your age.”
Emma could hardly imagine her mother acting in any way but that of the graceful woman with the high lace collar and sweeping skirt sitting behind her Singer sewing machine or arranging flowers.
“I will talk to him, I promise. Just let me figure out the best way to make him understand.” She threaded her fingers through Emma’s hand. “It’s not easy to be a woman with a dream that stretches beyond the living room or nursery.” Her ga
ze fell away. “I understand that more than you probably realize.”
* * *
Later that evening, Emma overheard her parents having a heated argument in their bedroom. “We came to America to have greater opportunity, Milos,” her mother pushed in her native tongue.
“You and I are supposed to be united on how we raise our daughter, Elsa. I want you to talk to her and stop this nonsense! I’m not telling her she has to stop her watercolors or sketches. She can do that right here in Connecticut.”
Elsa continued to try to convince him. “Just sleep on it, Milos. Please.”
Minutes later, her mother returned to Emma’s room.
“I’ve tried my best to get him to at least consider the possibility,” she lamented. “But your father can be so stubborn, you know that…”
Emma pulled herself up from under her covers. She was exhausted from all the fighting. “Yes … I do know that. But is it so wrong of me that I dream of another type of life than yours?” She did not say what she really thought, which was that she never imagined a life of domesticity like her parents’. She instead yearned for a life of infinite possibility, where every day presented itself like a blank page thirsty for new strokes of color.
Elsa fell silent. There was much she had never shared with Emma. Like the fact that as a girl back in Budapest, she had dreamed of studying costume design. She imagined herself creating the sumptuous costumes for the Royal Opera House or the National Ballet. Her imagination always flickered with her own interpretations on how she would dress Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Ring, or Papageno in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Elsa had even been granted a rare invitation to apprentice under the opera’s wardrobe mistress, an opportunity that still pained her because of her own parents’ refusal to permit it.
Her mother and father had spoken nearly the same words then as her husband did now. Elsa could easily recall that terrible memory of having her dreams cut down by the very people she loved the most. That feeling of despair, from over twenty-five years before, still felt like a fresh wound when she thought back to that time in her youth. And while she ultimately channeled her artistic spirit into making curtains and coverlets to evoke beauty and elegance at the inn, she knew it could never compete with the joy of fitting a live model or creating a gown that would come alive onstage.