Sofie & Cecilia

by Katherine Ashenburg

  Looking forward to seeing you on Saturday in the village hall—

  Yours in friendship,

  Cecilia

  * * *

  —

  There was a good crowd in the hall soon after the doors opened, and by the time Cecilia spotted Sofie and Nils, around noon, it was full. Farmers and the local shopkeepers, who had never attended an art exhibition in their lives, stood looking at the pictures and fingering the books and pottery. Teachers at the local school and the Folk School, the pastor, and more middle-class people from quite a few villages away, drawn by Lars’s reputation, were also there, and willing to buy. If people could linger over coffee and sweets in the hall, Cecilia thought, sales would follow. So she arranged tables, chairs and trays of her cook’s best pastries. A bashful maid went from table to table with a large jug of coffee, under strict orders not to spill on anyone’s purchase.

  Cecilia sat down briefly at one of the tables with Sofie and Nils. Sofie wore one of her big, stylish hats, a beautiful boat that sailed on top of her wavy brown hair. It balanced the bulk of her loose dress and toned down its eccentricity. Nils had a painting wrapped in brown paper under his arm.

  “Well, what did you capture?”

  Nils unwrapped it. Painted by Lars in France in the early years of their marriage, it was called Cecilia Vogt Reading. She was caught up in a book, holding it close to her face. Her dress was quiet, striped in darker and lighter greys, and her hair was held back by a ribbon, exposing the big ears she inherited from her father. It was one of Lars’s most affectionate portraits.

  Cecilia laughed and went quickly to the cashier, where he was holding something for her on the shelf behind his table.

  Returning, she said, “We’re on the same track. Look what I bought,” before she pulled off the protective cloth. It was a painting by Nils of Sofie, wrapped tightly in a plaid shawl and reading under a shade shaped like a cactus flower.

  “I know that pose of yours,” Cecilia said, smiling at the woman in the picture, “thumb on your jaw and two fingers spread-eagled on your cheek.”

  Lars’s portrait had been painted by the soft light of gas, but in Nils’s portrait Sofie read in the all-over brightness of electricity.

  “Is the cactus-flower shade one of your designs?” Cecilia asked.

  “No, Nils made it.”

  The two women propped the pictures up side by side. Lars never cared for reading, but he was proud of his little bookworm. Nils, too, was not much of a reader. Two painter husbands, Cecilia thought, two bookworm wives.

  “Speaking of books,” Sofie said, “have you read The Odd Women? It made me think of you.”

  “No, I haven’t. Is it by Arnold Bennett? Why did it make you think of me?”

  “It’s by George Gissing. Its heroine, who is called Rhoda Nunn, is a New Woman who runs a secretarial college to give women without means a way to earn their living. Like you, she is terribly organized and effective.”

  “That’s promising,” Cecilia said. “I would like to read a novel about a woman who runs a successful business.”

  “But don’t hope for too much in that quarter,” Sofie said. “I’m afraid Mr. Gissing is much more interested in the fate of three poor sisters and their many troubles. He is devoted to the French school of realism, which paints life in very drab, undramatic colours.”

  “Sounds like the French school of realistic paintings,” Nils said, but the women ignored him.

  Cecilia asked, “But you enjoyed it?”

  “I did. It felt very true.”

  “I’ll see if I can borrow it from Bonniers,” Cecilia said.

  “If you two are going to talk about books, I’ll just have another walk around the exhibition,” Nils said. He went off to have a closer look at Prince Eugen’s landscape.

  * * *

  —

  When Lars left for America, his hope that absence might make them more “reasonable” sounded too optimistic. But to Cecilia’s surprise, once he returned it seemed too modest. He was glad to be home, glad to see her, grateful for her help in Siljevik. His drinking had slowed. He visited her room again in the night. They shared so much, after all. Many men, she told herself, lapse occasionally. They are contrite, and things return to what they were. But no, things did not return to what they were. And Lars could not really be described as contrite. The realist in her told her that the best she could hope for was that they would find an accommodation that suited them both. The dreamer in her hoped otherwise. She tried not to analyze it too much. If you kept taking a plant out of its pot to examine the roots, you would only harm it in the long run.

  That summer they returned to the archipelago and the house Mamma rented. Lars went off in his sailboat every morning with one or two models, and a picnic lunch. He worked all day in the sheltered coves, the women turning their nakedness every which way, at his command. Perhaps they put their clothes on when they ate their lunch. Or perhaps they just draped some cloths around themselves. When Lars showed her his work, Mamma exclaimed with pleasure at the light, the shade, the rocks, the water, the models’ hair or their arms. She did not remark on their private, female hair, although that too was in the pictures. Cecilia thought, If Lars spent his days looking at naked women but not putting them on canvas, Mamma would not have liked that.

  In the evenings, before dinner, Lars joined the family on the verandah. The men drank arrack, and Cecilia sometimes had a glass of white wine. They looked out on the same placid world of water and rock that Lars painted, only now from a substantial wooden house. Everyone was fully dressed and if her own skirt had been more than six inches off the ground, Mamma would have found that in very bad taste.

  It was a queer business, men making art.

  * * *

  —

  With Lars’s return came the return of their monthly disappointment. When would his optimism about a child end? When they still used privies, Cecilia would go out there to lament the coming of her courses. Now, with a toilet in the house, it was harder to get away but, she admitted, more comfortable. When she miscarried—once on the day of the visit to the Olssons’ and once about a year later—she went to the toilet and the baby seeped out with the tears.

  Now, once she had taken care of the monthly flow of blood, she often went next door to the church to sit for a while in its coolness. Its barrenness. One of the church’s few paintings was a small medieval picture of a strangely bare-breasted Mary with Jesus in a stable. Mary had thrown her red cloak open, probably to nurse the baby. A farmer and his wife were hurrying to leave their stable, awkwardly carrying a lamb like an embarrassment, and Joseph rushed in with a blue blanket, all thumbs but trying to be helpful.

  In his studio, Lars was also painting breasts, in a painting he called Getting Ready for Church. It was one of his favourite subjects, an older woman in folk dress, a younger one in the nude. The older woman adjusted her silver necklace, her big round calves in red stockings, her rump sticking out into the middle of the picture as she bent to see in the inadequate mirror. In the foreground, the younger one washed her gleaming shoulders and breasts in a small round bowl. Lars worshipped flesh, more and more these days. Sometimes Cecilia thought the big bums of the mature women moved him as much as the breasts of the young ones. What did it matter? She had neither.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  SEPTEMBER 1906

  CECILIA PUT ON her jacket and then, because rain threatened, she took an umbrella from the “Viking” stand in the hall. She doubted that Vikings used umbrellas, in spite of the dragons who circled the stand’s rim. The master miner’s house that she and Lars had bought for its murals was due to arrive in Siljevik that day, and she needed to meet the movers at its destination near the lake. She also had business at the Folk School nearby. On her way out, she put her head into the studio, where Lars was stretching a canvas. He sometimes used prepared canvases but for this painting, a peasant wedding procession, he wanted something longer and thinner than any of the standard si
zes available. Stretching canvases had been one of her jobs in Paris, but now she was too busy, and in any case Lars enjoyed every stage of making a painting. He made his own sizing, a starch paste, and after that dried he would apply one or more coats of white ground.

  “Cecilia, what do you think? How many coats of the ground?”

  “I like the smooth look you got with two coats for the bathhouse painting.”

  “I think this one calls for something a little rougher. Look at the difference here.”

  He held up two recent pictures for her to compare, one with a single coat of ground and one with two.

  But she was anxious to be gone. “I can’t stay. The house movers are due to arrive any minute. I prefer the more finished look—two coats.”

  Dubious, he looked at one painting, then the other. Without raising his eyes, he said, “I’ll try and get down to the lake myself later, to see how the house survived the journey.”

  But Cecilia knew she would not see him at the lake. Once he started working, he behaved like someone in a folktale who was under a spell. His feet could not leave the studio until the charm was broken, hours and hours later. That was fine, she did not need him.

  She walked through the street of shops on her way, and met Mr. Munten coming out of the baker’s. He was on the orphanage board, and always greeted her with several problems that he insisted needed her immediate attention. Since he considered all of them urgent, she wondered why he never contacted her, just filled her ears when they met by chance. She found it difficult to have a short conversation with Mr. Munten, he fretted so. Should siblings be separated when it came to adoptions, he asked her now, shifting his bag of bread and rolls from one arm to the other, or should the orphanage governors try to keep them together, risking the possibility that they would never be adopted, either singly or as a family? They had a case at the moment where people wanted to adopt the older girl in a family—she was useful as well as pretty—but not her younger brother. As Cecilia considered this dilemma, he charged ahead with another before she could answer. In the case of a family farm that was sold, did the money from the sale belong to the orphans or could the orphanage take a percentage for their support? And if so, what should that percentage be? Both excellent questions, she told him, trying to be soothing and brisk at the same time, and he must be sure to bring them up at the next board meeting. And she made her escape.

  Down by the water, the log buildings she and Lars had bought stood in dispirited clusters, and there was no sign of the house. The man in charge of the moving had sent a telegram yesterday saying he expected to arrive before noon, but a delay was always possible. Moving a house was easier in the winter, when ice smoothed the way, than in September, but the new owners of the property had been anxious to be rid of the house so they could start building its replacement. The moving was a complicated process that Cecilia understood imperfectly, involving screwjacks to raise the house above the foundation, rolling carriages on which it was secured with spikes, and a team of strong North Swedish workhorses to pull the carriages.

  The villagers probably thought they were mad to waste money and time on a house no one wanted, but she and Lars could not have stood by while the frescoes in the parlour were destroyed. An eighteenth-century master miner’s farmhouse was less local and traditional than the medieval log barns and storehouses they had collected, so perhaps they would place it slightly apart in the grouping. But she looked forward to seeing that room again, crowded with fantastical landscapes as a pilgrim walked steadfastly through the scene.

  She walked away from the lake up to the Folk School, leaving word at reception that she should be called as soon as the house arrived. First, she drank coffee with Miss Hagans, the principal, in her office. The office did triple duty as a storeroom and archive, so the two women sat close together on a loveseat between filing cabinets and shelves filled with carved ladles, painted jugs, embroidered ribbons and lace pattern books.

  They began talking about the divide in the Folk School between the adult literacy classes and those that concentrated on folk arts. The people who came to learn how to spin, weave, carve furniture and do folk painting were mostly middle-class women, while the adults learning to read and write were from the working class, from Siljevik or the nearby countryside, and often only fluent in the local dialect. Cecilia had an idea for bridging that gap.

  “Why don’t we enlist some of the people in the literacy classes to help teach the traditional arts?”

  Miss Hagans looked at her in confusion.

  “But how could that work? Their Swedish is often not up to the mark.”

  Cecilia covered her irritation by accepting, with thanks, another cup of coffee.

  “Surely that is no impediment,” she said crisply. “I don’t think there is anyone in the school who does not understand the Dalarna dialect.”

  “But the people in the literacy classes do not have the pedagogical skills or the organizational ability…”

  “Of course, we would still have the main teachers but the literacy students could demonstrate, assist, criticize their fellow students’ work, and so on.”

  She knew Miss Hagans did not like the idea, but would warm to it. It was a good idea, and when Cecilia was certain of that, objections did not touch her. After her coffee, she visited a few classrooms and looked in on the choir practice. The teacher was telling Cecilia about an upcoming concert when the groundskeeper came to the door. The house had arrived.

  It looked like something in a dream, this farmhouse standing on rolling carriages. Cecilia could not wait until the house was taken off the flatbed to see the murals, so a tall chair was brought over and she climbed up and looked through the windows. There they were, the treasures hidden within the pedestrian house, their deep blues and garnets and creams just as she remembered them. And there was the pilgrim walking with his staff except when his guiding saint appeared in the clouds. Then he knelt, sending his thanks in a diagonal line of Old Swedish words up to the saint. She directed the movers to a likely spot, and watched them settle the house almost casually, as if it were an immensely large piece of furniture. She must write to Sofie and remind her of the day in June when they had seen the murals together.

  It was late by the time she returned home but Lars, as expected, was still in the studio. The blank white canvas stood on the easel, waiting. While the sizing dried, he was making some rapid sketches. There would only be one coat of the ground, he told her.

  She waited for him to detach himself enough from his painting to remember the rest of the world. He had always been like that. After thinking out loud for a few minutes about possibilities for his wedding procession, he asked, “Did the house arrive safely?”

  She told him the full story of her day—her encounter with Mr. Munten, the visit to the Folk School and finally the wonderful arrival of the house.

  “Is there a single pie in Siljevik in which you do not have a finger?” he asked while his eyes ricocheted back and forth between the white canvas and his sketches of a happy, untidy procession. Behind the self-conscious bridegroom and the triumphant bride, he began rubbing out a child so he could advance him into the road and make him more prominent.

  “We will go tomorrow, first thing, to see the house,” she said. “Before you go to the studio.”

  She left to see about dinner, unpinning her hat in the hall and returning the umbrella, which had not been necessary after all, to the Viking stand. The day had been so satisfactory that she looked at its silly dragons with more affection than usual. Lars and I have something in common, she thought. We both have a canvas, but mine is Siljevik. But she would only say that to herself: if she heard it out loud, it would sound pretentious.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  1907

  WHEN LARS MADE his next trip to America, Cecilia went with him. On the ship going over she reread Martin Chuzzlewit, trying not to take it too seriously. After all, it was more than sixty years since Dickens had first visited America and n
o doubt the constant bragging and tobacco-spitting he described were things of the past. And, indeed, as she settled into their hotel rooms in New York and Boston, she found that many of Lars’s American clients and patrons behaved like prosperous people the world over—she enjoyed her visits with the Boston collector Isabella Gardner, for example. New York and Boston had music, some of it very good, and she became a regular visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was, astonishingly, more than thirty years old. And yet, she had to admit that she found America a bit rough-and-ready.

  Men there were probably no more sensual than European ones, but Lars’s American friends took less trouble to disguise it. One night she and Lars went to the opera in New York, sitting in a client’s loge. Lars disappeared during the second act and reappeared to take her back to the hotel. Then he went out again, explaining offhandedly that Arthur Caton, a Chicago man whose portrait he had painted, had come to New York to give a party for men only, twelve of them, with Lars as the guest of honour.

  At noon the next day, when he woke, she asked him, “Were there women at Mr. Caton’s party?”

  “Yes, twelve beautiful ones, one to go into dinner with each of us. We were introduced to them only by their Christian names.”

  “And were there animals?”

  “Animals? Why do you ask that?”