Buried Seeds

by Donna Meredith

  “You must come with Nellie,” Mindy said. “You do support the cause, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes!” I did believe—fervently believe—that women should have the right to vote—and the right to draw pictures of anything they desired—and to marry whomever they chose—and to control the purse strings so that shop girls paid proper attention. I welcomed the opportunity to meet others who supported these ideas. Nellie made arrangements for us to attend. I was going to love it here after all.

  A few days later, I was so tired I could barely drag myself from bed. I attributed it to being in the family way, but Nellie thought it more than that, had argued that I should call in a doctor even though she didn’t trust them. But whatever was wrong passed, and I was glad I hadn’t wasted money we didn’t have. Jack still hadn’t returned. I was both broke and bored.

  Finally I realized I could stand there looking out the window at the cable cars below, feeling sorry for myself, or I could remedy my situation. I secured my hair in the latest Gibson girl style (copied from Miss Mindy Kenneson, though her hair leaned toward light honey while mine was more caramel) and positioned a large rose-colored hat on top of my head. I tripped down the stairs to the kitchen, where Nellie was stirring jelly in a six-quart stock pot. The heated air was thick with the scent of sugar syrup, purple grapes and melted wax.

  I tilted my chin up with purpose. “I’m going to the newspaper office.”

  Wooden spoon in hand, Nellie sweated profusely over the stove. “Which one—the Examiner, the Chronicle or the Call? Surely you’re not planning to walk down to Market Street in your condition.”

  “Walking’s good for a woman when she’s expecting. You told me so yourself.”

  Nellie wiped her brow with a kitchen towel. “But you’ve been so sick the last few days. You’re still a little peaked. Take the cable car.”

  “I’m feeling better, and I can’t go on living here on credit. I’m going to place an ad offering to give art lessons. I might not earn much, but I can at least pay for the food I consume.”

  Nellie pushed a wilted strand of hair back into a net and dabbed at her face again with the towel. “Let’s sit somewhere cooler.”

  I followed her into the parlor.

  “May I see something you’ve drawn?”

  I hesitated. Since coming to the city, I had shown no one my work. Everyone here seemed so sophisticated. What if she scoffed? Oh not openly, she was too polite for that. But I would know if she found my art wanting.

  “Please—I’d really like to see what’s inside that sketchbook you work on every day.”

  Reluctantly, I trudged upstairs to retrieve it. When I returned, I presented it, anxiously scouring her face for any reaction. She lingered over a pelican and another of Jack’s profile. What was she thinking?

  At last she closed the book and beamed. “I have a more suitable idea than an advertisement. Take off that hat and help me put up this jelly. Then I’ll send for a carriage.”

  ~~~

  My eyes flitted from one luxury to the next, awed by the display of sybaritic wealth in the Spanish colonial-style house. Later Nellie labeled all the unfamiliar furnishings for me. A large oriental rug. Dentil-molding around fourteen-foot high ceilings. Peach satin-stripe covered sofas with graceful out-curving feet. “American Empire chairs—Duncan Phyfe,” Nellie whispered. What did she mean? I had never heard of this Phyfe fellow. My eyes finally rested on a well-executed painting framed in ornate gold. It was an art style I’d never seen before, impressionist, I later learned. All the while I was absorbing my surroundings, I remained acutely aware of Alexandra Underwood’s expressions as she studied my sketches. The furrowed forehead as she studied an egret. The lift of her well-formed brow as she examined Jack’s face. I felt as if I were baring my soul to a stranger, a woman who carried herself with the supreme confidence of one born to wealth. She was not beautiful, the planes of her face too sharp, too rigid, yet I suspected few men would be able to resist her commanding presence.

  I rose and walked closer to the painting so I wouldn’t have to watch this potential patron any longer. The painting’s subject was a young woman, perhaps my age, in a white dress. She lay in the grass, her legs bent and slightly apart, which I ascertained even though her limbs were hidden by the folds of cloth. The painting created the impression of innocence, yet the bent legs suggested a careless sexuality, one the young woman was unaware she possessed. The girl was granted the freedom to enjoy a summer sky sheltered by a leafy canopy without worrying if her legs were modestly arranged. As an artist myself, I realized another artist, no doubt male, stood over her as she posed for that painting, probably for many weeks—and then exposed her to public view. My father would be scandalized. I bit my lower lip to still the twitch in my jaw as I heard the rasp of another page of my sketchbook turning. Though I was listening acutely, no other sound escaped until finally—after what seemed like hours—there came the soft slap of the book closing.

  I returned to my chair. Alexandra Underwood set my sketchbook down, the white lace cuffs of her plum silk gown brushing against the coffee table. Say something, I pleaded mentally.

  “You seldom draw portraits, Rosella.” Her voice, rich and dark, carried an aura of burgundy and purple. A royal voice. Used to getting what she wanted. “Just this one man.” One eyebrow raised. “A very handsome man.”

  Oh, no, no, no. This woman didn’t like my work, didn’t like it at all. Why had I let Nellie talk me into coming here? This was beyond humiliating.

  “My husband.” I forced the words out without making eye contact, my arms pressed so tightly against my sides that the stays of my pregnancy corset felt as if they were cutting into my skin. I risked a glance up. Mrs. Underwood’s cheeks were dimpling.

  “Your love for him shows. Such a handsome fellow.”

  The tension left my arms. She liked my work.

  Mrs. Underwood poured more tea from a sterling baroque pot into porcelain cups with a pastel floral design. All the cups matched, unlike Nellie’s. “Can you manage equally good portraits of my children?”

  A flitter of uncertainty tickled my throat. I had far less experience with faces than with landscapes, flowers, and animals, though I had sketched my brothers and my mother long ago.

  Nellie folded her hands across the low-hanging monobosom of her blue gown. “I’m sure she could. That’s why I brought her to you, Alexandra.”

  What could I do but agree? Nellie had been good enough to arrange this meeting, and besides, I couldn’t afford to be choosy. I’d taken an instant liking for the little boy who reminded me of my brother Timmy. But I’d taken an equally intense dislike for the little girl, a light-haired child of about nine, who already carried herself with that entitled air children of privilege sometimes acquired.

  “And art lessons for Lydia,” Mrs. Underwood said. “It’s important for girls her age to develop appreciation for art and music. Contrary to popular opinion, we haven’t abandoned the finer things in life in the West, Rosella, but they can be more difficult to come by.”

  I tried to show sympathy, though I suspected the kind of money the Underwoods had caused every heart’s desire to magically appear. Their ten-bedroom house stood out with its clay-tiled roof and the verdant lawn sided by evergreens. Here, in Russian Hill, there was at least a touch of the greenery I missed so much.

  Among the benefits of employment by the Underwoods, the estate would present an amazing variety of sketching subjects. A splendid garden, orange trees, a cat ready to give birth to kittens.

  “Yes, art can bring so much enjoyment,” I said. “It certainly has to me.” I thought of the destroyed sketches. Art could bring grief, too. And resentment.

  “It’s settled then. I’ll send the carriage tomorrow morning at nine.”

  On the way back, Nellie smiled wistfully. Her voice rose in volume so to project over the clatter of Mrs. Underwood’s horses. “That could have been me. Our husbands were business partners. Mine caught pneumonia and d
ied. Hers lived and became wealthy.”

  “What business were they in?” Following Nellie’s example, I covered my nose and mouth with a handkerchief to avoid breathing in the dust kicked up by the horses.

  “Brick kilns. All the buildings you see downtown—our house, lots of these houses—they were built with our bricks. The streets— paved with our bricks.”

  Wasn’t it odd, though, that the Underwoods had chosen stucco for their own home?

  “Ro, you don’t have to take my advice, but if I were you, I’d keep my little income a secret from your husband. Squirrel it away with your unmentionables and you’ll always have that little notion of independence, money that is yours and yours alone. Once your husband knows about it, he controls it.”

  Hardly fair, but it was the law. Nor did it seem fair that Nellie had to take in boarders and sell needlework. She should have inherited her husband’s business. Life was so much harder for women than men. Our carriage passed by fleets of working women in their drab dresses walking home, most with hands coarsened by hard labor. They were the maids, factory workers, store clerks, and teachers. A woman had to be prepared to take care of herself in this world. A memory surfaced of my father’s hands tugging on the overalls and boots he wore to tend the cattle, an ordinary act of love I had taken for granted. I swallowed and shook my head, dismissing these thoughts lest I become sentimental. I still found it hard to forgive the way he scorned artwork as useless. It wasn’t useless if it brought pleasure and joy. And it wasn’t useless if it paid the bills. Then, as if he were sitting beside me in the carriage, I heard my father’s admonition: You wouldn’t have to worry about paying the bills if you’d married someone steady like Gunner Beck.

  ~~~

  Three rough sketches of Lydia lay on the coffee table. One straight on with Lydia’s haughty chin tilted up; the next a profile, a pose that again emphasized the chin; and the third, purely my invention, because the royal princess Lydia never held her head in that sweet, humble pose. Yet I intuited the child appeared this way to her mother.

  Sure enough, Alexandra chose the third sketch. “You have captured my Lydia so beautifully. Work it into a larger piece to match the one you did of Will.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I scooped up the preliminary drawings and sought out Lydia to continue her art lessons. We went outside to sketch the chrysanthemums sprawling out of urns on either side of an arch leading into the gardens. I had to admit Lydia was capturing a fair representation of the shaggy blooms. She paid attention when I suggested she hold the pencil at a different angle.

  A large pink ribbon gathered the girl’s straw-colored hair at the nape of her neck. A few short tendrils curled over her ears. “Mother says these lessons are a good place to start. Next year I’ll move on to oils. Mother says a lady is expected to have certain accomplishments if she wants to make a good marriage.”

  “I’m sure she’s right.” What qualified as a good marriage? Not in the sense Mrs. Underwood meant, but good meaning happy. Jack had finally come home and seemed pleasantly surprised by my rounding abdomen. Flush with cash he’d won at poker, he advanced Nellie three months rent and paid our other bills as well. Slyly, Nellie returned the money I’d given her for rent. I followed her advice and kept it in a hatbox on top of the chiffarobe.

  In a romantic mood, Jack whisked me away to a deserted stretch of coastline to sketch the gulls and seals. I shivered, with equal parts fear and delight, remembering how, despite the chilly October air, he made love to me on a blanket laid across the rocks—such a terribly uncivilized thing to do. The blood had thundered through my head, nagging, What if someone sees us? My thoughts had nearly drowned out the surf and stolen my pleasure. Nearly, not quite.

  Another morning, he drove a carriage to Cliff House so I could see the mansion jutting out above the ocean. I sketched the rocks, the crenellations, the waves breaking on the beach. He took me shopping for new gowns, one of which I was wearing today. Jealous? Of Mindy Kenneson? You will never need to be jealous of that prissy little thing again, he told me. I’m shocked that her father allows her to work in his art gallery. It’s unseemly for a well-off woman to work. Nellie, I knew then, had been right about keeping some secrets. Jack needn’t know I was earning money with my portraits and art lessons. I defended Mindy and her desire to help her father, but Jack silenced me with a kiss. He laughed and we made love. And I laughed and we made love. Laugh and love, love and laugh—our life had been perfect for two weeks, and then he took off again, this time to Tucson.

  So here I was, back to teaching Lydia. Not because I needed the money now, but it gave me something constructive to do with my days. I had several other students, two recommended by the fellow on the third floor, Val Martin. He often stopped to talk in the parlor, tossing Tootsie Rolls onto the coffee table and filling my head with amazing facts or discoveries. He could rattle off the average salary of a factory worker ($489 a month) and segue straight into a recitation of Marx Brothers’ jokes or Will Rogers’ quotations or an analysis of how Harry Houdini performed his great escapes. Listening to him was an education. Many evenings he played his cello for Nellie and me, sorrowful yet soothing pieces, while I sketched flowers and birds from memory and Nellie crocheted. I began to feel a sense of being at home. A home without Jack, I realized sadly.

  A sudden kick against my ribs riveted me to the present moment. I held one hand against my belly and couldn’t suppress a giggle. Lydia Underwood looked up, a question in her eyes, but I wasn’t about to explain. Already her mother had dictated that this would be the last lesson until after

  my delivery lest the girl question the rounding abdomen my clothing barely disguised. I directed Lydia’s attention to a problem with her drawing, holding my own sketch up for her to see. “Make the front bloom larger, the back smaller.”

  Lydia’s chin went up. “But they’re almost exactly the same size.”

  “True, but you’re trying to create perspective. See how narrow I’ve made the edge of the urn as it curves away? It’s the same size all the way around in reality, but your eye wouldn’t see it that way. Perspective.”

  It all came down to that, didn’t it? When Jack was here, he dominated the canvas of my existence. When he was gone, though, he didn’t shrink away like the edge of the urn. Instead the focus of my existence was missing. His absence was like removing the chrysanthemums from the sketch. All that was left, an empty urn. But I was learning to fill my life with other people, other activities. Nellie taught me to embroider garments for the baby. I even invented my own pattern for the front of an infant gown, a whimsical frog catching a ladybug with its long tongue. Embroidery was like sketching with thread. The design wouldn’t be all that appropriate for a girl, but I was certain I was carrying a boy.

  Lydia thrust her revised drawing in front of me. “Is this better?”

  “Much. Now we’ll try sketching the same thing from a different spot.” I led Lydia to a low concrete bench. “Really look at the urn and flowers and see what’s changed. From a different perspective, everything changes.”

  Working as an artist had changed my own perspective. An income of my own nurtured not only confidence, but also my independent spirit.

  ~~~

  Dozens of fashionably dressed women crowded the Kennesons’ parlor, decorated with furnishings every bit as lovely as the Underwoods’ but understated rather than flamboyant. A carousel of conversations spiked with laughter swirled around the room and down the hallways. The palpable energy barely contained by those pale green walls electrified me. The only events I’d ever attended that aroused anything close to the same excitement in a crowd were tent revivals my father held each summer. These women assured me that they would continue the campaign until they won the vote. Eight years earlier, the referendum had failed, a crushing defeat, especially here in San Francisco. It was distressing to know women in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho had already secured their rights. “We will succeed this time,” Alexandra Underwood declared with a
queen’s assurance, her arm resting on a handsome man’s sleeve and looking up at him with approval bordering on adoration. “George is organizing all his friends, aren’t you, darling?”

  “We men will march with you on the capital one of these days.” The only male in the room, he clasped his hand over Alexandra’s.

  I had seen a man’s portrait in the Underwood’s home and this fellow seemed a decade younger and far more handsome, and unless I was mistaken, they were more than mere acquaintances. “Is that her husband?” I whispered.

  Nellie shook her head, eyebrows raised. “Later,” she whispered back.

  With Nellie’s encouragement, I became a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association that night. “Don’t you see, Ro, it’s important not only that women get the vote, but also better legal protections in divorce cases,” Nellie said.

  “And equal pay for work and the right to control any income we earn,” Mindy Kenneson chimed in, her voice as flouncy as her dress. “Why should a husband get to control his wife’s income? Mama took me to hear Aunt Susan speak, and I intend to follow in her footsteps. I shall never marry.”

  That was a bold assertion. “Aunt Susan?”

  “Miss Anthony,” Mindy clarified. “She’s been in practically every town in California encouraging women to fight for the rights stated in the constitution. Aunt Susan says those rights were granted to ‘we the people,’ not only men, but all people. San Francisco had a lot to do with why we were defeated in ’96, but as Aunt Susan says, ‘Failure is impossible.’ It’s up to us, her lieutenants, to make sure we win this time.”

  Lieutenants—I liked the sound of that. Mindy, I was learning, was far more than the pretty face (well, semi-pretty—there was that odd concave shape to consider) in the society pages I had first taken her for. Mindy had drawn her own friends into NAWSA and they were passing out brochures of their own design all over the city. She introduced me to two young women close to my age. When they made plans for a shopping expedition that was to include distribution of brochures, they included me. Even though I lacked their wealth, I was thrilled to make connections in my new city. It didn’t cost anything to window shop or campaign for equal rights.