Katherine Keenum (21 page)

“Someday?” prompted Mr. Renick.

Hoping not to sound presumptuous, she went on: “I’d like to copy this picture.”

Mr. Renick made a half bow. His face remained as impassive as always, but Jeanette caught a pleased glint in his eye. “Of course, you must copy it when you are ready, my dear. We shall be glad for any of you to work in the house. Apply for appointments with Hastings.

“And now, before the light fails—”

Mr. Renick led them up a back staircase to a bedroom rendered highly adaptable to his purpose by a vogue in the previous century for bedroom alcoves, embrasures, and little rooms of all sorts. A dressing room or small study had become a secular chapel for a carved altar, Flemish triptych, and painted wooden statue of an angel. A shallow closet with the door removed now housed a variegated marble column on which sat an alabaster bust of a lady. Above and behind her was mounted a monochrome enameled Madonna and Child.

“Luca della Robbia,” said Mr. Renick, gesturing toward it. “Our only example of his work, but we also have an Andrea della Robbia and several polychrome pieces from their studio.”

“And this?” said Sonja, letting her gaze fall back reverently to the alabaster sculpture.

“Florentine; fifteenth century; artist and subject unknown.”

“May I?” asked Sonja. Her arms were at her side, but her hands were cocked at the wrist.

“Of course,” said Mr. Renick, watching her keenly.

Sonja’s kid gloves were disgracefully spotted, but they had once been fine and were delicately thin. Her fingers in them ran lightly over the smooth, barely modeled planes of a face elegant, aloof, serene. The archaic smile was almost Attic; the almond eyes were suggested largely by thin crescent lids.

“If I try for this pure simplicity, ideal, so perfect,” said Sonja, “I fear a blank. Ah, but Lucca della Robbia: the face he models has more detail. For this nineteenth century of ours, so nervous, so full of change and quickness, clay must portray movement, a moment, nothing ever exactly the same, but true, true.” Sonja took the tour out of Marius Renick’s hands. All the while she talked, she bent, examined, and measured things with her eye. Perfectly capable of wresting back control if he wanted it, Mr. Renick seemed instead to enjoy viewing his own collection through the prism of Sonja’s idiosyncrasies.

“Enamel finish, does it not make a piece fine, debonair? Dr. Murer, you tell me the other day you investigate glazes in Germany, yes? A revival of pottery, it will be a good art to take to the wider audience of this democratic age. Many people should own beautiful things.”

“Would you consider undertaking glazed terra-cotta portrait plaques yourself?” asked Mr. Renick. “I have a son and daughter . . .”

Sonja pursed her lips in thought. “In this I am not specially trained. Never have I fired glazes. Perhaps I could line up time at a kiln, but—” She lifted her shoulders, unsure.

“Perhaps you will do me the honor of giving it a try on Miss Palmer and Miss Pendergrast first,” said Edward.

“Us!” exclaimed Jeanette.

“To be honest, I feel I owe it to Mlle. Borealska’s former landlord—”

“To that
crétin
you owe nothing, nothing!”

“Well, but I owe it to you,
mademoiselle
, for making this day possible. Let me commission a pair of portraits, just among friends. If you will notify me when you are going to fire them, it will be my great pleasure to come watch and I might be of technical assistance. I return to Freiburg this week, but I’ll go with a lighter heart if I know there’s something special to bring me back to Paris.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Noggins

O
n Monday at the studio, Emily set up in a back corner, an oddly distant vantage point for someone who always made highly restricted studies. Jeanette put herself at an angle she preferred, closer to the model; but at the first break, she asked, “Is everything all right?”

“Almost,” said Emily. “Not quite.”

The next day, Emily was still withdrawn when the two of them walked to the Louvre for a half day of copying drawings in the Department of Prints, something they now did regularly on Tuesday afternoons.

On Wednesday, Jeanette climbed the last staircase from the Rue Vivienne to an excited buzz in the classroom. It quieted when she came through the door.

“Jeanette, how could you?” demanded Amy.

“What?”

“This,” said Amy.

She jerked a magazine open, face out. Inset into a double column of type was a cartoon—a lady artist under a tree recoiling from an insect stuck to her canvas, Jeanette’s cartoon from Pont Aven. Her own work in print! Jeanette’s tiny clap of pleasure sank into bewilderment—how?

“Let me see that,” she said.
Noggins
, it was called, a magazine in English. Her eye skipped up to the opening paragraph:

From the Continent comes word of a dire new contagion. Emanating from the capital of all that is fashionable, the fever has now spread beyond the environs of Paris. Fair ladies, beware, for the malady is very catching—and, gentlemen, oh, be warned of how very fetching it is upon ’em! If not checked, this infectious mania must soon cross the Channel. Indeed, an incipient outbreak among Albion’s daughters abroad has been witnessed personally by Your Very Own Correspondent on a recent holiday excursion to Brittany. Out with the telescopes, on the alert! First symptoms of the bewitching disorder are a palette, a paintbox, and a deliciously coy straw bonnet.

A satire of women artists painting out of doors: The resemblance of the cartoon lady to Amy was enough to explain her anger. When Jeanette came to a paragraph about an American naive waxing lyrical on a train, her face flushed. “Robbie Dolson wrote this, didn’t he?”

“Who else? Don’t pretend you didn’t know about it—you must have supplied him the cartoon. It’s yours. That’s me. I was there when you drew it, remember?”

“But I didn’t give it to him! I gave it to Emily. She had painted a bee on the lip of a gladiolus trumpet—don’t you remember that, too? We swapped.” Jeanette skimmed the rest of the article. “You don’t suppose she gave it to him on purpose for
this
,” she said. “How could he write such an insulting piece about his own sister?”

“How could he use your work without permission? If what you say is true, that’s what you should be worried about. It’s flat stealing. And for your reputation, you do want to control where your work appears, you know.”

“Where’s Emily?” asked Jeanette, fiercely.

“Well, if she knows this hit the stands yesterday, she’s hardly likely to come here today, is she?”

But Emily did come. Once Amy had explained, in French, that Jeanette was a victim of piracy and not the perpetrator of the offense, the magazine passed from hand to hand again for everyone to take a second look. They debated the cartoon’s merits as a drawing, as a joke among friends, and as a likeness to Amy. Everyone agreed that Emily had been either a traitor or a fool to let her brother publish a friend’s work without asking.

Emily seemed to expect the worst. At the midmorning break when the room was half empty, she crept to her easel, hidden under the hood of a cloak. She was so drained of color that she had never appeared mousier or more unwell.

“Has Amy seen it?” asked Emily, barely above a whisper.

“If it’s
Noggins
you mean, yes; she brought a copy to class.”

Emily hung her head. “Robbie showed it to me Monday night. He—”

“Don’t try to make excuses for him, Emily! There aren’t any good enough. And I should warn you that Amy is just as mad at him as I am.”

“She would be.” Emily stood bent over her stool, silent for a moment. “Do you know why Amy hates Robbie so much?”

“No,” said Jeanette, taken aback by the non sequitur. “And I’ve asked!”

“We were all three good friends at first. She used to encourage me.”

“She still does when you let her.”

Emily clutched herself under the cloak. “She and Robbie would wrangle tongue-in-cheek. Beatrice and Benedict. I suppose she was in love with him; most people are.” Her soft voice grew lower. “Until he called her a second-rate talent who substituted plod for genius.”

“How could he!”

“She was stung to the quick. It hit home.”

“Emily! That’s a horrible thing to say!”

“Well, it’s true. But she’ll have her successes all the same. She’ll be in the Salon, if not next spring, then the year after that. M. Julian will see to it. And so will you, and so will everyone else in this room, every single one of you. But I won’t.
There will be two more revolutions in taste before she finishes a single canvas
—oh, yes, I heard someone say that the day M. Bouguereau complimented me.
Comme Ingres
, he said, but it doesn’t make any difference. He won’t sponsor me, and everyone despises me. And now this, this—!” She bit her lip.

“Shhh, stop it! They’re coming back in.”

Emily’s face crumpled, and she leaned over, flattening her hands against the stool. Her shoulders heaved. “Now you hate me, too; I won’t have any friends left. I’ll—”

Seeing Amy in the doorway, Jeanette signaled alarm.

Amy came directly over. “Emily Dolson, we’ll worm the whole story out of you later, but for gawd’s sake, buck up now,” she said. “The less this
Noggins
nonsense disrupts the class, the better.”

“I think she ought to go home,” said Jeanette over Emily’s head to Amy.

“What do you say, Emily?”

Emily nodded.

“Well, be back here tomorrow or you’ll lose your nerve altogether,” said Amy. “I mean it: Be here.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Jeanette.

“No, they’ll only hate you, too.” With her head down, Emily brushed past Jeanette and Amy.

But Jeanette grabbed her coat and followed. When they reached the street, Emily leaned against the door lintel and said in a choked voice, “Life is so cruel.”

“Emily—”

“Cruel.”

“If you mean the class . . .”

“Oh, they’ll never understand what I do, or care. No, it’s being poor and working hard with nothing to show for it, and then something happens and we have to leave. And yet sometimes the work is good, his and mine, both of us. We have to keep at it, don’t we? We have to make it come out right, otherwise how do we know who we are? That’s what you said this summer. You said something like that in Pont Aven.”

“Hush, Emily, not on the street.”

Emily hung her head, weeping.

“It is hard,” said Jeanette, soberly. She took Emily’s arm. “Which way?”

Emily started south, and they walked toward the river in silence.

No one had ever known exactly where the Dolsons lived, only that they picked up their mail at a stationer’s shop on the Île Saint Louis. Near a bridge to the island, the Pont Maîre, Emily said, “Thank you, Jeanette. I’d better go on alone from here.” She sounded calmer. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to jump in the river.”

“I’m still coming with you.”

“No, if Robbie is at home—”

Jeanette’s suppressed anger flared. “Then he’ll just have to explain himself in person.”

Emily clutched her arms under her cloak and, without speaking, turned to cross the bridge. Jeanette stuck doggedly with her. As they passed under an archway into the courtyard of a mansion once grand but now neglected, Emily gave Jeanette one more beseeching look.

“Go on,” said Jeanette.

She turned her key. The door opened into an ill-lit room with moisture-blotched murals and flaking gilt. The ceiling was far too high for the room’s width, which was narrowed by a gimcrack partition wall that cut its one window in half. Robbie rose from a couch. His hair was tousled, his beard unshaven; his generously cut dressing gown of blue velvet was rubbed bare in places.

“Emily, my dear, at this hour? Unwell?” His expression of concern congealed to hostility. “Ah, Miss Palmer. To what do we owe the honor of this invasion of domestic privacy?”

“To
Noggins
, Mr. Dolson. Amy Richardson brought in a copy this morning.”

“How quickly is fame bruited abroad! You don’t look pleased.”

“And you don’t look apologetic.”

“I don’t apologize for work that pays my bills.”

“What about my work, my bills?”

“Oh, please, don’t quarrel, please don’t!” sobbed Emily. “I can’t stand it. I can’t, I can’t.”

“There, there, dearest, no more.” Robbie drew her to his side and blocked the way into the apartment. His face became dangerous. “Miss Palmer, I must ask you to leave.”

Shaken, Jeanette left. On the way back to Julian’s, she was still angry with Robbie but also stunned by his animosity. He often slid into dismissive boredom, but such rancor was something new.

Walking steadied her nerves; and somewhere along the way, a thought of Dr. Murer floated across her mind—Dr. Murer with his inquisitive look, his air of courteous attention. The contrast to Robbie could not have been greater. Dr. Murer wanted the portrait plaque of her; he was coming back to Paris for it. She soothed herself with thoughts of seeing him again.

*   *   *

Jeanette took home Amy’s copy of
Noggins
, showed it to Cousin Effie, then tore up Robbie’s article and threw the magazine away. Behind her back the next day, Effie bought another copy.

“Oh my, you just can’t think what trouble this has caused,” she said to Mrs. Renick on Friday. “Jeanette is still furious, and Emily hasn’t come back to class.”

Cornelia skimmed the article Effie had brought, laughed, and flipped through the rest of the issue. “Heavy-handed waggery seems to be the magazine’s style. The girls shouldn’t take it so seriously,” she said. “Of course, plagiarizing the cartoon is a different matter.” She made a mental note to tell Marius that he had been right about Mr. Dolson’s character. “Still, you know, Jeanette does have a gift for caricature. There was that skeleton on Mlle. Borealska’s catwalk, I remember. Darling, darling Effie, here’s an idea! Why don’t you two collaborate on illustrated articles? Two American ladies in Paris? Artists and how they live? If the New York papers wouldn’t run them, surely a Cincinnati or Columbus paper would. They couldn’t say no, not to Judge Palmer’s daughter.”

“But I can’t write!”

“You’re always telling me stories, Effie dear. Put them down on paper.”

“But it would be so
public
.”

“Use pseudonyms.”

*   *   *

On Saturday, a note arrived at the Rue Jacob, a note in jade green ink on expensive cream paper.
If the company of a chastened sinner is not wholly repugnant
, wrote Robbie,
I beg to be allowed to treat you and Miss Pendergrast to luncheon at the Café Tortoni, where atonement could take the form of the best ices in Paris. But no iciness from you, please, please, please, dear Miss Palmer. The prospect of spending time in the company of your meltingly sweet self would so restore me and ease Emily’s return to Julian’s.
He suggested a Tuesday, before Jeanette and Emily went for their regular afternoon at the Louvre.

Jeanette balled up the note and slammed it into the wastebasket.

“Who was that from?” asked Effie.

“From the insufferable Robbie Dolson. Emily must have let him know about the atmosphere in class. Someone should also tell him that drollery and blackmail don’t work together.”

Effie fished the note out of the basket. She shook her head. “He is an impertinent piece of mischief. Though give him the benefit of the doubt, Jeanette—maybe deep down inside he’s ashamed of himself.”

“He wouldn’t be so horridly facetious if he were.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Pride is sometimes a hard thing for a man to swallow. In any case, why not take the invitation at face value?”

“I believe you really want to go, don’t you?” exclaimed Jeanette.

Effie ducked her head. “Well, it might be our one chance to go to Tortoni’s.”

Jeanette was disgusted, but curiosity about what Robbie was up to nagged at her. After fighting it all evening, she finally gave in and wrote him a curt note of acceptance.

*   *   *

The next week, Jeanette and Amy tried to act as if nothing had happened when Emily returned to class, hangdog and coughing. The disdain shown her by the popular clique made them tacitly rally to her side. By the end of a week, the
Noggins
offense had been forgotten by everyone but Jeanette, and Emily was snubbed only out of habit.

At noon on the appointed Tuesday, Cousin Effie joined Jeanette and Emily at the Rue Vivienne to walk the few blocks to the Boulevard des Italiens. Mellow October had given way to overcast, raw November, lessening the appeal of ice cream, but Effie beamed.

Some way from Tortoni’s blue-striped awning, Robbie stood with his shoulders hunched against the weather, apparently examining the notices posted on a cylindrical Morris column. In the dispiriting gray daylight, he looked less a dandy from a bygone era than the shabby inhabitant of some other
arrondisement
, as handsome as ever but careworn—more than careworn, shopworn. A couple turned to go into the café just as Robbie came forward; the cut of the gentleman’s overcoat and the sleekness of the lady’s furs showed up a grease spot on his lapel. It’s the wrong setting for him, thought Jeanette, not in the least bit charitably. As if he could read her mind and resented it, Robbie said, coolly, “I think not Tortoni’s, after all. Too crowded for those with work to do later. Another time, Miss Pendergrast, when you and I can while away an afternoon? So much more agreeable. Besides I have made a discovery.”