Breath and Bones (54 page)

“He is tall and thin,” Famke said, as if through description she could will him into being. “He has green eyes like a frog. He paints enormous pictures.”

But none of this information meant anything to the members of the Bohemian Club. “Are you a model?” asked one man after another, measuring her hair, height, and bone structure with their eyes. “Or an artist?” the occasional
woman added, clutching a shabby purse or a half-empty glass and blinking fiercely up at her.

Famke stamped her feet impatiently. “I am looking for Albert Castle.”

Famke enjoyed no more success at the Old Supreme Court House than she'd found with the Bohemians.

“Not a Castle among us,” declared a hirsute young man on the ground floor.

Famke recognized the feeble pun, but she continued to stare him down until he agreed to take her through the building. They knocked on locked doors and walked freely through open ones, inspecting canvases covered with fruit and flowers or decorously draped women; they spoke to artists in spattered smocks and models who cleaned their toenails when not required to pose. Their answers were always variations on a few themes:

“Never heard of him.”

“The name sounds familiar, but . . .”

“Did he ever work in Colorado?”

“Try the Bohemian Club.”

Famke refused dozens of visiting cards offered by men who hoped to awaken her to her own potential as a model. She had no interest in posing for anyone but Albert, and she did not trust these avid young men in their beehive of art. The hirsute fellow was becoming what Sariah used to call “overfamiliar” with her, and she even thought she felt his hand on her waist as they climbed their third set of stairs. She ran the rest of the way up and stood panting at the top.

“Keep soughing like that,” said her escort, “and you'll sail away on the last of your own wind.”

Famke leaned against the wall. She was tired and itched to be free of the corset, and she'd never realized how heavy a roll of painted canvas could be till she tried carrying
Hygeia
around for a day. She thought incidentally that poor
Hygeia
was no worse than the ugly French-style paintings she'd seen today; it was rude of these so-called artists to pucker up their noses and smile at it. She also wished she'd had the foresight to ask for a second sandwich.
“This is not the last of my wind,” she said stubbornly, and she led the march down the hall.

“Never heard of him.”

“The name sounds somewhat familiar, but . . .”

Eventually they exhausted the possibilities at the Old Supreme Court House. The sun began to sink, and Famke's guide said he must return home to his wife. He pressed his card upon her and told her that, really, the painting she carried was not so bad. If she would ever like to pose for another, or learn some artistic techniques herself, she had only to call on him.

As he disappeared into the moil of the street, Famke at last weighed up the ugly facts. Sometime during the afternoon her last coins had disappeared, and she literally had not even two cents to rub together; all she owned in the world was the clothing on her back and the painting in her hand. She had nowhere to spend the night, and she was cold now and hungry again. It was time to contrive something.

She could not do here what she had done her last night in Hygiene; not only was it shameful, but it was too dangerous in this unknown place—and besides, there was a chance that Albert would hear of it. So she began to pick her way back toward Mrs. Iovino's store, where earlier in the day she had noticed several pawnshops doing a brisk trade. The gas lamps glowed gently, lighting her path, and at the end of the street, the Thalia Festival House was lit like a red rose, with the letters on its poster bills glinting golden dewdrops. But Famke did not need to go that far; only Acropolis Pawn was still open, and she was its last customer.

One final time she unrolled
Hygeia
and looked at the lines she had labored over, the delicate details, the whole truth of a woman's body. After a brief discussion, she accepted six dollars (this for the canvas that had once fetched seven hundred!) and stuffed the limp greenbacks down into the tight corners of her corset, where they felt hot and dirty.

“I will be back to redeem her,” she vowed, looking again at the painting that had filled so many hours of her life.

“Sure you will, sister,” said the pawnkeeper, a second-generation Greek with a waxed moustache. “Just you keep hold of that ticket.” He twirled thoughtfully at one sharp point of hair, wondering where best to display the enormous, ragged thing.

The San Francisco Art Association is a delusive title. Rambling through their rooms last week one would have noticed [ . . . ] contusions in black-and-blue, and ravings in yellow ochre; tropical horrors and dropsical Niagaras; several degrees of poisoned pup and some freaks in cattle. There were some paint which resembled flowers, and some still-life which resembled paint; some convalescent landscape, and some hopelessly incurable architecture
.

T
HE
W
ASP

Famke plunged into the San Francisco art world with both feet and her whole heart, clutching at anyone who might guide her toward Albert. At city prices, her six dollars lasted precisely three days, and even then she felt herself suffering from poor diet and a burst of unaccustomed physical activity, as she walked from the Bohemian Club to the Supreme Court House, from one gallery to another, attending public auctions of what those in the know called buckeyes and potboilers—in other words, hackwork—and looking for solid clues that did not appear. First she obtained a list of professional models from the Bohemian Club and visited them one by one. None of them knew Albert, either, though again a few called the name familiar. She allowed a tall New Yorker to serve as her guide for a day, riding the famous electrical cable cars up and down nauseous hills until it became clear he was leading her about for his own amusement, not for her benefit. She wasted another day trying to get into the classrooms at the San Francisco Art Association, where she thought for some reason Albert might be either teaching or taking classes.

Famke could not give up the conviction that he was here somewhere. So she continued to dig and prod and try to survive until she had exhausted every possibility.

One possibility came in the person of Miss Hortense Dart, an English lady artist who had come to this liberated city in order to take lessons and
who was known for painting the fantastic castles of popular fairy tales. A spotty model mentioned those castles to Famke in a way that convinced her they were worth a try, though she was aware of grasping at straws and trying to turn them to gold.

Miss Dart's studio was at the top of a five-story building near the Woodward Gardens, where she caught all the sunshine that could squeeze its way through San Francisco's clouds. She was cleaning brushes when Famke came to call, and the smell of turpentine poured hot and sharp out of her open door. Peering in, Famke saw a short, fleshy woman of about thirty-five, with once-dark hair and pale eyes above a rumpled smock; the smock's neck was distorted by a goiter the size of a goose egg. After one look, Famke knew Albert would have nothing to do with this woman, however gifted and modern she might be. But Famke was tired, and Miss Dart offered quite calmly, as if hectic redheads presented themselves on her doorstep every day, “You look as if you could do with some tea. Shall I make a pot, Miss—?”

“Summer.” It seemed too much effort to say the last syllable. “And a cup of tea would be very nice.”

Famke sank down onto a hard chair. She thought now that the studio was really quite pleasant, small but clean, though with none of the clutter she had come to associate with artists' dens. A Japanese screen stretched over the darkest corner of the room, and Famke wondered if it hid a bed that must be as chaste and spare as a nun's—but a good deal more comfortable than the cot on which she herself lay at night, gritty-eyed from scheming and from the somnolent eruptions of the models with whom she shared a rundown room. Models, she had discovered, were no better than miners in a flophouse.

“Here you are.” Miss Dart put a hot cup in Famke's hand and pulled up a chair for herself. The liquid in her own cup looked even darker than Famke's. “I like a really strong brew,” she explained, blowing into the cup to cool it. “I hope you weren't wanting sugar or milk—”

Famke shook her head.

“They say we shouldn't drink milk anyway, as it passes on the tuberculosis.”

Both women sipped. The tea tasted remarkably like Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound; or perhaps it was the turpentine in the air that made Famke think so.

“Now,” Miss Dart said briskly, when she gauged Famke's spirits to have strengthened, “what did you say I might do for you?”

Once again Famke uttered the name that had become an incantation. “I have looked all over,” she added helplessly, anticipating another defeat, “and no one knows him. But I heard that you paint castles . . .”

“Oh, yes,” said Miss Dart, “I have met him.”

Famke stared at her—the pale eyes, the salt-and-pepper hair, the hideous goiter. She thought she must have misunderstood. “Are you sure?”

Miss Dart set her cup down in its saucer and put the saucer on a little table littered with paint tubes. “A tall man,” she said thoughtfully, “with light hair and green eyes? Who repeats the words one says to him?”

Astonished, Famke gulped her tea and scalded her throat. Her breath came fast and hot, burning her lips. “Where is he?” she croaked.

A veil of discretion fell over Miss Dart's face. “Forgive me, young lady, but why do you ask?”

The more Famke looked at this poor, ugly woman, the more far-fetched became the notion that she and Albert were somehow connected. And now she, Famke, was being called upon to explain herself. Which story should she tell? Should she portray Albert as deserting husband or feckless brother?

“He used to paint me,” she said, and her hands shook so that she nearly overturned her cup of faux Pinkham's. She noticed that the cup was a Flora Danica lily, and that started a flood of tears.

“My dear Miss Summer!” Now Miss Dart was kneeling with both Famke's hands in hers, chafing the rough thin fingers with her oily ones. “What can be the matter? Do you need money? Has he—forgive my frankness, but are you in a condition?”

Famke laughed through her tears. “No, no, nothing of that sort!” In fact, her courses had ended, leaving her with a clean feeling as if she were all new Down There. She did need money, but this was hardly the moment to admit it. “I only want to—” Now the tears set off a spate of hiccoughs, which turned to real coughs, and she accepted a rainbow-stained rag with gratitude. “I only want him to see me!”

Miss Dart had remained kneeling at Famke's feet, brushing the dirt off her hem. “To do that, Miss Summer, you must place yourself in a position to be seen.”

“That is what I am trying.” Famke blew her nose noisily. It seemed so obvious, but there was hardly any point in saying so to Miss Dart, who was now rummaging through a chest of drawers and scattering papers all over her sunny floor.

“Here we are.” Miss Dart returned and thrust a scrap at Famke.

It was a pencilled bit of Albert's signature, the “A” turret and the “C” fortress. And there was a small but significant deviation from the usual: A window had been cut in the turret, and a woman's head appeared there; her hair tumbled over the sill and nearly to the ground.

Famke breathed very carefully. It was all so delicate that a sigh would have erased the lines.

“I met him only once, when he was attempting to draw the Seal Rocks,” said Miss Dart, “none too successfully. It looked a great
pile
of rocks, really, with no seals at all. But I identified myself as an artist as well, and I showed him my sketches—no better than his, I confess; I do much nicer things with buildings and the human form—and we had quite a conversation about signatures. He drew me this as an example—Albert Castle, you see,” she said, pointing out the letters as if Famke had not chased them all around the puzzle of the West. “And that is Rapunzel inside, with a ladder of her hair to allow her lover to visit within the palace of art. Quite a pretty conceit, don't you think? It inspired me,” she added shyly, and poked another handful of paper at Famke, “to work on my own signature. Hortensia is a flower, and my last name—well, you see for yourself.”

Famke held Albert's little square above the others, which drifted across her lap like dirty snow. Miss Dart had done the obvious: a large and fluffy blossom pierced with an arrow. The “H” was found in the intersection of stem, leaf, and dart, and the “D” was of course the bow from which the arrow had sprung.

Famke wondered if lady artists, like their male counterparts, were generally much given to disquisitions on technique and philosophy, for Miss Dart was providing one now. “. . . the artist's place within the work as well as the work's within the life the artist,” she was saying, sitting on the floor with her arms clasped about her knees; “it has been woefully neglected. Mr. Castle made me see that, and he made me see castles themselves differently too, and the heroines I place in them. I have embarked, as you see, on a
series of paintings based on the old stories . . . The Goose Girl . . . Briar Rose . . .”