by Mary Gordon
Anne had started when she heard Jane’s voice; she had forgotten there was anybody in the room with her.
“It’s called Two Women Walking,” Jane said. “It’s one I would never sell; I can’t even bring myself to lend it for the exhibition. I put in your room for the weekend, so you can look at it. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
And now she could hear Jane stirring in the kitchen; perhaps that was what had wakened her. She could not dress, she feared, without waking someone, so she risked going downstairs in her bathrobe. If Jane was dressed, it would be awkward; it would indicate that Anne felt more intimate with Jane than Jane did with her. Anne feared friendships between women that began in intimacy and played themselves out in small talk. And she wanted Jane to like her in a way that made her feel both young and crude. For women such as Jane, liking, not liking, she imagined, was of little interest, at most a curiosity, like a bargain to the very rich. When she saw Jane in a red woolen bathrobe, she was prepared to read it as an act of the most perfect hospitality.
“Did you sleep all right?” asked Jane. “I hope my puttering didn’t wake you. It’s one of the useless blessings of old age to need almost no sleep.”
“No, I woke before I heard you. I was thinking of the painting.”
“It’s me and Caroline,” Jane said with pride, with a great, sure joy. But was it? It was as much about Caroline’s learning to move her figures off center, about using the Fauve palette but sweetening it, applying what she had learned from the Japanese. Could she say that to Jane? And what was the truth of it? Both were, the memory and the technique. It was possible that Caroline might have seen two other women, complete strangers, in that posture, in that light, and been taken by the accident of shape and color. Yet it was possible that had she not taken that walk with Jane each evening, the idea would not have come to her at all.
Jane was an intelligent woman, but Caroline’s paintings were the work of someone she loved; their meaning to her was singular, refracted. Perhaps the paintings were more truly hers because of that, perhaps she had been right to keep them to herself. But Anne couldn’t help thinking that more people should have seen them. Yet museums were often stupid, prejudiced; without collectors most painters would have starved or died unnoticed.
She thought of all the different ways a painting—one of Caroline’s paintings—could exist: as an object, decorative in its function, pleasing, not pleasing to the eye of the innocent stranger. The same painting was to Anne completely different; she could guess its history, it spun out from itself, like a spider, lines growing forward, backward. To Jane the paintings were themselves and Caroline; they didn’t spin out lines to other paintings, other painters; they spun, like a disk of sunlight, from the life of a beloved woman. And there were the collectors, for whom paintings were a different kind of object, an investment or a curiosity, a sign of something: power, taste, discernment. A painting was almost never itself. Yet it was her job to look first at each painting as if it were the only painting in the universe, then to trace the lines backward and forward. Only then could she think about the woman holding the brush, taking experience and making this of it, that of it: beauty that would endure, that would say to life, stop here, now; that would hold life, thicken it and make it valuable, enduring, hard.
And what she would say about the paintings—would it influence the men with money, coming to these objects to secure a name, a safe old age, a shelter against ruin? And here was Jane at the stove, her back to Anne, the back which, in the painting, leaned toward another woman as they walked into the wind.
Anne looked out the glass door. A small brown bird came dipping, pecking at the feeder on the porch. Stairs led down to the garden. Only the chrysanthemums were bright there. The brown leaves fell into dry, dull grass; a yellow maple leaf dropped into the birdbath, floated, and then disappeared. Juniper berries hung, opaque and rich among green needles. Jane handed Anne coffee, standing beside the door.
“It’s a lovely house,” Anne said, “it must give you great comfort.”
“Great comfort. I used only to be able to come here in the summer, but now I’m retired, I come here nearly every weekend.”
“When did you buy it?”
“In 1950. I was in a bad way when Caroline died, for quite a few years. Most people would call it a depression, but my family never went in for that, so it was said, ‘Jane is rather not herself.’ I was told this house would be good therapy.”
What did Jane want her to say? Was she one of those people who thought politeness consisted of asking the right questions, or of asking no question at all, of saying something about oneself, or keeping oneself completely out of the picture?
“What was the house like when you got it?” Anne asked.
“Rather a wreck. This kitchen was two rooms, a kitchen and a dining room. I had a wall knocked out. Come around and I’ll show you.”
She walked around her house as her ancestors must have walked around their estates. The living room, narrow and irregularly shaped, had four small windows and one large bay. Jane explained why she had decided on the bay, the window seat, had had the beams exposed. She spoke of doors and insulation, furniture and curtains, with the same familiarity. She had the androgyne’s pleasure in her dwelling: decisions of structure and of decoration both had been all hers. Anne thought with shame about her own fears in relation to getting the wiring fixed. But she was married, and she wasn’t rich. She could never inhabit a house with the singular freedom and mastery of Jane.
The house was squarish, solid; the furniture, with its bright slipcovers, the lamps with their cream silk shades, the Indian rugs, the absence of photographs, the walls full of books, the shameful lighter patches where Caroline’s paintings had lately been taken down, showed a calculated mix. The rooms were both austere and welcoming; one could work there or read for pleasure. One could come into these rooms quite properly and speak of the death of a son, killed in a war or on a motorcycle. One could get drunk here and talk of the betrayals of a business partner or a wife or husband, but it would not be imagined that one could be sick on the rug, or move, unconscious, to the sofa to find one’s way home in the morning. It was a house in which Anne felt she need not fear for her children; it was one she hoped they would remember when, in middle age, they thought about the houses of their childhood.
Jane led Anne into the kitchen. “Now, tell me what you really want to know about Caroline. You didn’t need me to tell you about Grünewald; you knew all about it, much more than I. You were merely being polite, or perhaps my letter frightened you.”
“Perhaps,” said Anne. “You see, I don’t know what I have a right to know. I don’t want to seem intrusive or to offend you.”
“My dear, I have the skin of a rhinoceros. I’ve been told a thousand times.”
“Still, she is yours in a way that she’s not mine. And certainly not mine to give to strangers, opened up and cut to pieces.”
Jane gave her a slow, comprehending look. She pushed her hair back off her forehead with the heels of her hands and sat, keeping her back beautifully straight, although it was a bench she sat on and she leaned on air. Anne saw that Jane wanted to tell her things but did not want to seem to be giving them away too easily.
“Tell me about Paris. The first time, I mean. How did she talk her father into letting her go?”
Jane laughed. “Plain stubbornness. My God, she was a stubborn woman. She was a person who could really hold out.”
Anne fingered the milk pitcher, an old-fashioned yellow with raised pink flowers.
“She was his favorite child,” Jane went on. “Henry, the oldest brother, ought to have been the favorite. He did everything his father wanted: went to all his father’s schools—Exeter, Amherst—he went into the bank and followed his father there. But his father didn’t like him; he despised him for not having enough spirit. What he wanted was a spirit he could break.”
“Did he want to break Caroline’s?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I’m rather unfair to him because I can’t forgive him for being so awful when Stephen was born.”
Guiltily Anne felt her own excitement. This, of course, was what she wanted to know about: the scandal of the illegitimate child. It lit up Caroline’s life with garish and unnatural yet pleasing color. Who was Stephen’s father? And then what happened? Soap-opera questions.
“Poor Caroline,” said Jane. “She wasn’t young, you know, when it happened. She’d lived on her own for six years; she was thirty-six. She felt she was proving something to her father—that she could be on her own and take care of herself. Then she got pregnant, and she felt it was the end of her life. Yet her father was the first person she told.”
“How did he respond?”
“All outraged honor. She had betrayed his trust, besmirched the family name. He retired to the library and wept, I believe.”
“You don’t believe he was really distressed?”
“Yes, partly, of course he was. It was, after all, a scandal. They were an important family and Philadelphia was not Paris. But he took great pleasure in having been right all along, in having his predictions come true.”
“I gathered that from the letters. Pleasure in correct judgment kept creeping through the outrage.”
“You do see things, don’t you,” Jane said, giving Anne one of her considered looks.
Anne blushed. “It wasn’t hard to see.”
“Listen, my dear, I must give you a piece of advice. It’s a kind of ingratitude not to accept praise when it’s offered. And it does no good to undervalue yourself. People are always ready to do that for you.”
“I guess in my family thinking too well of yourself was the cardinal sin. And then I had a sister who was much less successful than I, and my mother was always afraid she’d feel bad or jealous of me.”
“Yes, well, all that’s in the past, you’re a grown woman now, not a child. And so you must simply stop things that are not in your best interest.”
Anne felt embarrassed. She had revealed too much, and in a mode Jane did not find congenial. “You must simply stop things that are not in your own best interest.” Jane was not a person she would want to be around if she was feeling weak.
“How did Caroline feel about her father, do you think?”
“For years she was furious and wouldn’t speak to him, except in the way she had to. You know, of course, the situation with the money and with Stephen.”
“No.”
“Caroline had no money of her own until her aunt Adelaide died, which was 1907, and even then it wasn’t much. Her money came from an allowance her father gave her. She couldn’t afford to be cut off from him entirely, because she needed that money if she was going to paint.”
“And Stephen?”
“Her father agreed to be responsible for Stephen’s support as long as Caroline promised she would bring the child home and not take him out of the country until he was twenty-one. He kept saying it was France that was the cause of all this heartache.”
Jane walked to the door and rubbed a spot off the glass with her index finger. “It was a wicked thing he did. It caused terrible suffering.”
She sat down at the table. “Caroline hated America. Particularly Philadelphia. She had never been well received here, and she had been unhappy as a young girl. She said the light was all wrong: the sun was too high, the clouds were useless, there was no silver in the leaves. And there was no place, she said, where one could sit and talk and have coffee, because there was no place that would let you sit, no one you wanted to talk to, and no coffee that was drinkable.” Jane laughed. “Of course, it was more than that, but she couldn’t work there. She tried. She stayed at home till Stephen was two, and she couldn’t bear it.”
“What did she do?”
“She packed up and went back to France. It was a very productive period for her.”
1902–1908. The years she changed her picture plane, her palette. Those were the years she exhibited with the Fauves; those years showed her transformation from an Impressionist to a Modern, from an American to an international painter.
“What happened to Stephen then?”
“He lived at his grandparents’ house. He had a governess. And his aunt Maggie looked after him.”
“Did Caroline ever see him?”
“She came home in the summers. She bought a house on the Hudson—you know it from the landscapes. It was the only place in America she liked. She said the Rhine couldn’t touch the Hudson; it was second only to the Loire. But she didn’t like having a small child around her. They were not good times for Stephen.”
“Did she ever like having him around her?”
Jane looked uneasy. “Stephen wasn’t always easy to be around. He wasn’t a happy person, he became morose quite often. And he was worst around his mother. He never believed she loved him.”
“Did she?”
Jane set the cups down in the sink impatiently. “Mother love. I haven’t the vaguest idea what it means. All these children claiming their mothers didn’t love them, and all these mothers saying they’d die for their children. Even women who beat their children say they love them, they can’t live without them, they can’t live without them, they wouldn’t dream of giving them up. What does it mean ‘I love my child’?” She turned quickly. “Come in, my dear, don’t lurk in the doorway like that.”
Anne turned around and saw Laura, hanging back at the entrance to the kitchen. She was smiling at Jane, but Jane wouldn’t look at her.
“Have some coffee, my dear,” Jane said, handing her a cup.
“I don’t drink coffee, thank you,” Laura said.
“Well, then, tea,” said Jane, pouring the coffee down the sink as if it had been spoiled by Laura’s refusal of it.
Anne wanted to protect Laura from Jane: her quick, angry movements, her refusing looks. Jane had decided she didn’t like Laura, and she wasn’t the kind of person to try to be nice to someone she didn’t at first take to. But Laura was no match for her, and Anne didn’t want to see Laura hurt.
“Laura likes cocoa in the morning. I’ll make it for her. We usually have a cup together.”
“Well, I can’t see the point of it,” said Jane. “It’s no stimulation whatever, and it’s terribly fattening. You should learn to drink coffee or tea, my dear. It will make life much easier for you in civilized society.”
Anne and Laura drank their cocoa silently while Jane moved around the kitchen peeling potatoes, chopping vegetables. Anne looked at Laura; Laura smiled from over the edge of her cup. Anne could see that there would be no more talk about Caroline with Laura there. But she didn’t resent Laura’s presence; she saw her as a small, colorless bird about to be swooped on by a hawk who made beautiful downward cuts through the morning sunlight. She was delighted when the children came down dressed and ready, they said, for a walk on the beach. Ben had said he would take them for a walk on the beach before breakfast.
“But Ben’s not up yet,” Anne said. “Let him have his rest.”
“Of course I’m up,” boomed Ben, coming into the kitchen. “Just give me a cup of tea and we’re off. Good morning, my darlings,” he said to Jane and Anne. “Good morning, Miss Post,” he said to Laura.
“Why don’t you all go,” said Jane, not looking at anyone as she gave Ben his tea.
“I’ll stay and help you,” Anne said.
“Of course you won’t. I prefer to do things by myself anyway at this stage of the meal.”
“All right,” said Anne. “I’ll go and change.”
Anne knew by the set of Jane’s back that she was angry. Her back was impatient, like the back of the woman in the painting. Some high door had closed; the gate had, as Anne knew it would, come down. Anne didn’t know how it had happened, but she was glad to be walking out the door. The air was salty; they were only two miles from the sea.
The children knew the ocean in summer, but in all other seasons it ceased to exist for them. To fin
d it still intact when they had been to school was a sign of richness and benevolence, a treasure hoarded, opened up for them now. Anne worried about Laura, about Jane, worried that she didn’t have it in her to do justice to the paintings, worried that the dinner would not be a success, that they would go to bed disappointed, the betrayal of a holiday gone wrong coating their tongues like too much sugar. But she didn’t worry about her children. They walked far ahead of her. She saw them as she saw the sea: high, brimming, whole. She held the shells they gave her to collect, the stones she knew would grow uninteresting as they dried; she saw the colors rise on their faces. She ran after them, embraced them, felt, through their thick clothes, the quick, light beating of their hearts.
She thought of Caroline with sadness. She had never felt this for her son, and it was luck, bad luck. Or was it some deficiency of spirit, some inexcusable coldness at the center that cast doubt on all the rest of her life? How could she not have loved her two-year-old child? Jane said he wasn’t easy to love. But a child didn’t have to earn its mother’s love by being attractive or enjoyable or easy to be with. You loved them simply because they were. And because they were yours. Caroline was not an unloving woman. But the child was a bad accident born of the body, fathered in secret, by a stranger whose name no one knew. How primitive it was, this love of children: flesh and flesh, bone, blood connection. The spirits of children flickered, darted: one caught glimpses of them only, streaks of light in the thick forest of their animal lives. She was able to love her children’s bodies because her own body had not trapped her; she could treasure the glimpses of spirit since she loved their flesh. And since she loved the body of the man who’d fathered them. Could Caroline have loved her son more if she’d loved his father? She’d died keeping his identity a secret: it was impossible to know.