Sofie & Cecilia

by Katherine Ashenburg

  “Because when I brushed your suit this morning, I found women’s hair and animal hair.”

  For a second, he looked confused. Then he laughed.

  “Of course. There were skins put out on the divans, for us to relax on with our champagne. Some of the women danced for us, in gauzy white gowns. And don’t look like that, Cecilia. I took my beauty in to dinner and escorted her home, as politely as could be.”

  So, a dinner “for men only” really meant that wives were not invited. She did not want to know whether or not Lars was lying. Or perhaps she did not care. Of course he was lying. But she had work to do: she had to write to a client in Boston and explain that Lars’s fee was not negotiable. If the man in Boston declined to commission a portrait, there was no lack of other people who would be happy to take his place. She was looking forward to the courteous thrust and parry of their correspondence. And she wanted to get a letter off to Lars’s Stockholm dealer as well as to Sofie before she went to a lieder recital in the afternoon. Isabella Gardner was coming from Boston, and she and Cecilia were to meet at the recital. There was no time for a scene.

  Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City

  5 March 1907

  Dear Sofie,

  How good it was to get your news from home. It sounds as if Nils is making great progress with his portrait of Gustav Vasa, and I’m confident all his years of preparation will pay off handsomely. But, as usual, you say nothing of your own work. What original and unexpected thing will excite my admiration on my next visit to Askebo? (And to the aforementioned admiration, you will say, “Oh, it’s just a little experiment I’ve been toying with…”)

  Although we are having a most interesting trip, I confess I miss Sweden. Lars likes America more than I do, saying he is at home in a country where a man with no forebears can be an enormous success. Which is silly, since his success in Sweden is undeniable, but he says it feels different in America. For me, something raw seems always on the point of revealing itself here. I do remind myself that Europeans have had a longer time to work on the strength of our surface. Perhaps more important, we seem to want a surface, at least more than the Americans.

  It’s also a terribly busy trip for Lars. Although I am nowhere near as busy myself, I have had some work here, too. You are lucky that Nils does not paint portraits more often—those who do encounter rough waters with their subjects, and sometimes I am assigned to smooth them. Or to decide when it’s time to sail away.

  This is brief, as I have a few business matters that won’t wait—just to let you know that we are well. We send our love to all at Askebo, and look forward to more news when you have the time. It’s possible that I will leave before Lars, and I’ll let you know if that happens.

  Your friend,

  Cecilia

  The most recent “rough waters” had concerned the old New York banker Moses Loewe. Lars had etched his portrait a few years ago, and Mr. Loewe seemed content enough with the result. But his children had become increasingly dissatisfied, and now that Lars was in New York, their complaints intensified.

  “Cecilia,” Lars called to her from the sitting room of their hotel suite, “will you come here and tell me what you think of the etching?”

  She left the bedroom, already too warm although it was a frosty morning. If she came again to America, she must remember to pack some very thin summer blouses, the rooms here were so overheated. She sat down next to Lars on a broad sofa, its brocade upholstery dimpled with buttons, and looked hard at the portrait. Two tufts of white hair hedged Mr. Loewe’s round, balding brow. The eyes at first looked penetrating and worldly, and were finally sad.

  She said, “He looks guarded, but noble.”

  “The family wants me to etch another portrait. I have refused, and I want to return my fee in exchange for the fifty prints I made. Do you agree?”

  It could have been more than awkward, especially since Lars’s relationship to the Loewes and their Cassel and Warburg connections had begun through Cecilia’s family. But that was not his concern, and she realized that it was not hers either.

  “I don’t understand their objection.”

  “His son-in-law complains that I have distorted their elegant father into what he calls a ‘hunch-backed Shylock.’”

  Oh, the intricate web of Jews and our family feelings, Cecilia thought. We want to be seen and respected for what we are by gentiles, but our hackles rise quickly and God forbid that they should see us as stereotypically Jewish.

  She looked again.

  “Dearest,” she said, “in the future I think you should take more careful notice of your male subjects’ clothing. Women usually seem to know what clothes will paint well. Here, where the Loewes see a hunchback, I see a heavy fur-lined coat that rucks up in the back and seems too large for Mr. Loewe’s small head. That is your only mistake.”

  She enjoyed it when Lars looked slightly worried and even bewildered, as he did now—it was rare. She kissed him.

  “I congratulate you on a poignant character study.”

  Relieved, he kissed her back.

  “My Cecilia. What would I do without you?”

  He did not undertake another portrait of the old man. And the Loewes, who had promised that Lars’s decision would make no difference to their friendship, behaved beautifully, unlike some of his more bumptious American clients.

  * * *

  —

  The lieder recital was given by the Brookfields, both of whom had been painted by Lars, in their Fifth Avenue palazzo. The butler led Cecilia to the salon, where she found about two dozen people drinking champagne and waiting for the music. The salon was generously upholstered, as were most of the guests. Isabella Gardner and Cecilia, neither well padded, sat together. When the contralto began, the women guests looked soulful. Their husbands looked resigned to a late afternoon of culture and tiny sandwiches. The contralto sang of love, death, disappointment, morning light, waterfalls, and more love. Cecilia paid attention with half her mind, and admired the singer’s phrasing. At the same time, she thought of Lars’s forthcoming show in Stockholm, and of a new and troublesome client who had commissioned Lars to paint his wife and two young daughters. The plainer girl was the client’s favourite and now he wanted Lars to prettify her, widening the space between her eyes, lengthening her forehead. How to convince him that truth was best…because Lars would never make those changes.

  During the intermission, Cecilia looked longingly at the lobster tarts, the shrimp quenelles and the petits fours at the buffet, but Isabella ignored them. She had moved her gold-painted chair diagonally across from Cecilia’s and cut off her exit. Sotto voce, she asked, “Have you heard the news about Gervase Williams?”

  “What is it?” The artist Gervase Williams was a great friend of Lars’s.

  “Mrs. Williams has discovered that he is keeping a second family in New Hampshire, a mistress and a son who is not much younger than Mrs. Williams’s boy.”

  Cecilia raised her eyebrows, as she knew was expected. Shadowy second families were not unknown in that set, and another friend of Lars’s, the architect Stanford White, was rumoured to have had a similar arrangement. The marriage of Gervase and Margaret Williams had begun as a great love match not much more than a decade earlier, and he had painted many ardent portraits of her. Cecilia felt her left eyelid flickering, as it did when she was tired. Was everyone’s story the same?

  “Poor Mrs. Williams. How is she taking it?”

  Isabella had slung her arm around the back of her dainty chair. Now she moved in closer and tightened her grip on the chair.

  “She is distraught. But it is her husband’s response to her that is so infuriating. Apparently he has written her with the greatest coolness, reminding her from a great moral height that sweetness and patient dignity become a woman most, and that his sins are mere peccadillos compared with Stanford White’s or others of their circle. He writes that he has suffered greatly in this. And finally he begs her, more for her sake than for his,
not to descend from the pedestal where she lives in his imagination.”

  Isabella was as worldly as they came, but clearly even she felt that Williams shifting the responsibility for good behaviour onto his wife was shameless. The two women ran through all the conventional expressions of wonder, scorn, disillusionment and cynicism. They flicked their fans shut and snapped them open for emphasis. Cecilia was not sure how outraged they really were. Superficially, she enjoyed the drama and the camaraderie with Isabella, but underneath she felt weary. Her eyelid quivered again. “Poor Mrs. Williams.”

  Isabella rested her hand just for a second on Cecilia’s beaded bag. That was as close as she came to suggesting Cecilia might have more than the usual sympathy for Mrs. Williams. Then the contralto began again: Schubert’s Winterreise, another unhappy love story.

  * * *

  —

  On that American trip, Lars produced fifteen oil portraits, ten etchings and some watercolours of nudes. He was so fast that he could make up to $15,000 a week, so he took advantage of his popularity. As well as her own responsibilities piling up in Siljevik, Cecilia had to supervise the packing of Lars’s canvases for the spring Salon in Stockholm, so she left New York in late March. Their leave-taking was tender. Lars wrote her that his eyes were red with tears when he returned from seeing her off, and he asked for a different suite in the hotel, one without memories. “My own loving woman,” he wrote, “I shall never forget your searching eyes when I left the ship.” Cecilia felt, not elation—by now she was too realistic for that—but satisfaction. They had narrowly escaped throwing out something they both valued.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  1909–10

  LARS MARKED THE feast of Saint Cecilia in November by giving her an eighteenth-century French portrait for her study. The picture, from the studio of François-Hubert Drouais if not from Drouais himself, was of an unknown woman whose neck and lightly powdered head rose from her blue gown like a flower just on the point of blooming. She had a French gloss and knowingness, a way of making the most of what nature had given her.

  More interested in Saint Cecilia than this French woman, Cecilia took Lambert’s dictionary of saints from the bookshelf. “Saint Cecilia, virgin and martyr, and patron of church music.” The daughter of an aristocratic Roman family, she read, which had converted to Christianity, Saint Cecilia begged her father to let her remain a virgin, but he betrothed her to a pagan named Valerian. After a vision in which he saw Cecilia’s true love, an angel with fiery wings, the compliant Valerian accepted his wife’s wish to live as a virgin. The two did good works in the Christian community until Valerian was martyred. The Romans’ attempt to behead Cecilia failed, but she died of her wounds three days later. She bequeathed their house to the bishop to be used for prayer.

  As Aunt Bette used to say at weddings, every couple invents their own marriage. Cecilia imagined Cecilia and Valerian’s union, a mixed marriage that never became carnal, dedicated to a higher cause. It almost made her smile, although poor Cecilia’s martyrdom was gruesome.

  It was Valerian who had done the accommodating in that marriage. But together he and Saint Cecilia had a divine purpose. And Lars and I, she thought, what is our purpose? Not Christianity, not children. Lars’s work, certainly, and Swedish things and Siljevik. Was it enough? Viewed in one way—the way she would have viewed it as a bride—it definitely was not. Looked at in another way, it was not what she would have wished, but she had not known herself terribly well as a young woman. Now, at forty-two, she would say that her life was full, richer, more demanding and perhaps even more absorbing than she had imagined. What she had engaged her thoroughly. But was it enough? Silly question. Of course it was not enough.

  * * *

  —

  In March, Cecilia went with Lars to Gothenburg for the reopening of the Furstenbergs’ gallery. She chose a dress with the fashionable S-shape, thanks to the new corsets, and with it she wore the necklace Lars had designed for their wedding anniversary. It looked as if everyone who cared about art in Sweden was wandering through the Furstenbergs’ big rooms, including, she was glad to see, the Olssons. But something was amiss between Nils and Sofie—he must have said or done something that annoyed her. Cecilia could see it in the way Sofie turned away from his usual jokes and did not even pretend to laugh. Hanna Pauli was there, and she often brought out the worst in Nils. So perhaps the unpleasantness had something to do with Hanna?

  Hanna’s portrait of the Finnish sculptor Venny Soldan hung in one of the main galleries, and Cecilia and Lars stood looking at it for a few minutes with Sofie and Nils. One of the things Cecilia found irresistible in Lars was the way he looked at other people’s art. Now she listened to him appreciating the scope and the details of Hanna’s portrait, and she loved him again. Generous but shrewd. Critical, but from the vantage point of what the artist had tried to do, not what Lars would have tried to do. He could always show her something she had missed.

  Sofie, too, listened intently, angling herself between Lars and the painting. Cecilia wondered what it felt like for her to see this large work, prominently displayed, by a friend and fellow student. Was there no envy, no sense of failure? Pontus Furstenberg had never bought a painting by Sofie Falkner, much less Sofie Olsson. Except for the laboured oil of her teacher Malmstrom that hung in the corridor at Askebo, Cecilia had never seen a painting by Sofie.

  By now Nils had gone off with some former students. Lars was still looking at Hanna’s painting, which reminded him of something he couldn’t quite remember. Inclining his head toward Venny, he asked, “Did I hear that she and Hanna were lovers?”

  Cecilia let out a bark of laughter.

  “So,” he teased her, “nice girls from the Stora Synagogue don’t take women lovers?”

  “It’s not that,” Cecilia said quickly, although it was partly that. She reminded him what Ellen Key had told her, reluctantly, about the ménage à trois in which Venny lived with her husband and her sister.

  He remembered, and was titillated.

  “Pity I never fancied your sister,” he began, but stopped when he saw Cecilia’s face close down.

  Sofie excused herself—she has had enough of misbehaving men, Cecilia thought crossly—saying she wanted to see the paintings of Vasterbotten by the young artist who had impressed all the critics. But Cecilia took her arm firmly, and led the way to the buffet.

  While they chose from the Furstenbergs’ bounty, they talked not about Lars or Nils, but about Jane Austen’s Emma, which Sofie had been reading. Sofie complained heatedly of Emma’s meddling, and Cecilia thought, She is the perfect reader—she relates so directly to the character she forgets that Emma is the carefully constructed creation of the writer. Then she repented: that was patronizing. She did not share Sofie’s dislike of meddling, but perhaps that was because few people attempted it with her.

  After she had eaten a few canapes, Sofie went in search of the works by the young landscape artist, and Cecilia found Lars in front of On Place Pigalle, his portrait of the woman in Paris caught between two kinds of light. He was staring hard at it, still trying to decide whether he had captured the difference between electric and gas illumination. Cecilia concentrated on the woman’s face, with its look of swagger and disappointment. She didn’t know if her suspicions of the model had been right, but now it hardly seemed important. Not because Lars’s liaisons were over, but because these days the individual women rarely mattered.

  Cecilia continued strolling through the galleries until two extraordinary paintings stopped her. One, called Interior, showed a room with two pieces of furniture and completely empty of people. The room was painted pink, a competitive, disturbing pink, with lighter trim. The mouldings and plasterwork were heavy and classical. The desolation of it. The elegance. The disappointment. The other painting had a single person in a room, a woman with her back to the viewer. The same Greek Revival moulding. The same frightening, truthful emptiness. She stayed in front of them for a long time and finally
left. But she kept returning, unable to get enough of their beautiful sorrow.

  Lars found her there, and said, “What do you see in those blank rooms? Come here and look at Liljefors’s animals.”

  The pictures she loved were by a Danish painter called Vilhelm Hammershoi. As she and Lars were saying their good nights, Pontus Furstenberg said, “Mrs. Vogt has an eye. If Hammershoi comes again to Gothenburg, I will have a dinner and invite you.”

  But she did not want to meet the painter, only to look at his pictures. Gothilda Furstenberg smiled at her, as if she understood.

  In the street, as they waited for a cab, Lars said, “The Furstenbergs seemed very happy.”

  “With their gallery, or in general?”

  “Both,” he said. “Don’t you find them a devoted couple?”

  She shrugged. A marriage was like a country. It might look thoroughly mapped, but there were always unknown and unstudied regions, even for those who lived in the country. It would not surprise her to hear Lars describe their own union as devoted.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  SEPTEMBER 1911

  NO OTHER WOMAN ever threatened Cecilia as Lydia Barnes had. What happened after Lydia was a slow wearing away rather than a dramatic rupture. In spite of the rapprochement with Lars, the old pattern resurfaced, and there were too many nights when he came in late smelling of other women. (Why did these women insist on wearing perfume that was so dense and clamorous?) There were a few models who startled more than necessary when Cecilia met them in the hallway—she never went to the studio when a model was there—while Lars brushed his hair down on his forehead into a reverse widow’s peak and looked unconcerned.

  Once she and her cousin Eva took shelter from the rain in a Stockholm restaurant and stumbled into a tryst between Lars and Klara Mertens, a client’s wife. (Cecilia had to assume that this was rare, it was bad for business.) Lars and Mrs. Mertens were being shown into a private dining room off the main one. The woman, whose husband Lars had painted in his riding clothes, trailed a fur as if flaunting a guilty secret. Lars and Mrs. Mertens did not see Cecilia and Eva, and Eva pretended not to notice.