The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley (11 page)

I was so interested in thinking just standing there that I forgot to put my clothes back on, which is really indecent but when I think, I think very hard. It seemed to me that the Adam problem could be solved by concealing all the parts I couldn’t draw behind leaves or a tree trunk or something because all the monks are really interested in is Eve anyway. Then an inspiration for a painting came to me that was very fine, and that is how I had the idea for
Adam and Eve Bathing in the Garden of Eden
, which is the first one I sold. Adam is in the water up to his middle and you only see his back view while he stares at Eve and Eve is lying on a big rock wringing out her long hair and making cow eyes at the viewer who is behind Adam. There is also a large, speckled snake hanging out of a tree and it’s got a very lecherous face which seems to be an important part of these pictures. When I got the idea I got very excited and sat down to draw and had nearly a whole rough sketch done when I heard Nan rattling and banging at the door.

“Susanna, what on earth are you doing in there?” she cried.

“I’m drawing Eve!” I shouted back, but then I remembered I was entirely undressed which is not proper and had to stop.

“Why on earth did you bar the door like that?” asked Nan when I opened it for her. I must admit I did look rather funny for my laces were done wrong and my face was still black. “Oh, you look like a chimney sweep!” she cried.

“I had to,” I said. “Adam and Eves are a lot more work than I thought. They’re awfully indecent, Nan.”

“And so you barred the door so no one could see you draw them? You are a funny girl, even if I did raise you myself,” she said.

“Nan, did you know the foot is the same length as the forearm?” I asked, my mind still on my wonderful discoveries.

“That’s exactly what I mean,” she answered.

It turned out that visiting the Lord Mayor’s wife was not as easy an idea as it seemed at first, because I had to have my new widow’s weeds in that good wool all finished so that the servants would not think I was a beggar and chase me away. So we stayed up half the night cutting and sewing and I designed some nice little touches, such as pleats on the back of the bodice that open into the skirt and some cutwork on the sleeves that brought that plain old black dress beyond the ordinary, though they were not as simple to sew as plain would be. All this work made Cat, who is really Catherine Hull who has no prospects, very angry. She cried and stormed and said she didn’t see why she had to help, because it was me that was getting the new dress and I always got everything and never had to help in the kitchen now that I was doing all that stupid painting, and it was no fair. Then her mother said that I was a sorrowful widow, and she said that was no fair, too, because at least I had been married once and she never got anything. And I said she deserved to be married to Master Dallet who was as mean as a snake, anyway. Then Nan said hush and we stayed up all night crying and making up, because it is hard to be women without money, even if you have plans for it later.

All these troubles meant two things, namely it took more days to finish the dress and also Cat got to go to the Lord Mayor’s with me to see the sights and her mother told her what to say so she wouldn’t make a mistake and spoil everything. She carried the picture because I was a sorrowful widow and supposedly too weak to carry anything, but it was not much trouble because it was not too big, being a table-picture, that is, a picture painted on a wood board, and it matched one the mayor had had done of himself which he liked perfectly well. A lackey in grand livery showed us into the mayor’s hall, where we sat on a hard bench and kicked our heels in the straw a long time waiting. Then the mayor’s wife came with two ladies attending her, and she was a big haughty lady with as many chins as Master Dallet had painted and a much fiercer eye. I told her all about my husband’s last desire to satisfy her above all things in the matter of her portrait, and unwrapped it, and she burst into tears.

“He has captured my true self,” she said, wiping away all the dampness and pretending she hadn’t cried. “I see I misjudged him. I thought him hard and cynical, but now I understand he was just seeking perfection. What a terrible loss you must feel.”

So I wiped at my eyes and said the pain was almost unbearable, but at least he had left objects of beauty like this behind him which was a consolation. All the while I really did feel great sorrow, because I think I could have made a fortune improving rich ladies with bad looks like this one because there are ever so many more of them than pretty ones. Besides it is not their fault they are homely, and every woman should feel pretty once. And looking at pictures of themselves more beautiful and spiritual might soften their dispositions and make them kinder, so it would really be a kind of improvement of the world that one would be doing instead of outright lying.

So we parted with a nice little purse of money, and Cat was walking on air because that lackey who was young and good-looking made eyes at her and pressed her hand as he showed us out, and I felt like dancing because I had done my part very well indeed. When we got home, Mistress Hull and Nan felt like dancing, too. So we all joined hands and did for a while, while Mistress Hull called out the steps.

“Whew,” said Mistress Hull, wiping her brow as she sat down. “It’s been a long time since I danced. Oh, I used to have such a light foot! But a widow can’t be too careful in this wicked world. Did I tell you that the handsomest young man in some lord’s livery all hidden beneath a plain black cloak came hunting for Master Dallet’s apprentice while you were gone?”

“An apprentice? What did you say?”

“The truth, that he had none.”

“And then what happened?”

“He looked at me in the strangest way, and then said he’d get to the bottom of the truth even if I wouldn’t help him.”

“Then he must have been up to no good. Maybe he’s serving someone else who’s trying to collect one of Master Dallet’s old debts.”

“That’s what I thought. He had a big hat pulled down over his eyes, as if he were being secretive, and when he thought I wasn’t looking, he wandered about pretending to be doing nothing, but looking ever so closely at Master Hull’s paintings. And, can you imagine? He rolled his eyes! Such rudeness in the face of sacred works! Young men today are sunk in sin, I tell you. After that he asked about the apprentice. It all sounded very dubious to me, so I told him that I’d suddenly remembered that there was an apprentice long ago, but he’d gone to Antwerp to serve some master whose name I’d forgotten.”

“Apprentice,
humpf!
” exclaimed Nan. “It was undoubtedly a trick by someone else who wants money. There’s no end to the devices they’ll use.”

“At least he wasn’t from the guild. That would be trouble and a half,” said Mistress Hull. “Now, remember, ladies, every painting that comes from this shop was painted by a dead liveryman of the guild.”

“Thoughtful of them to leave us so many,” I couldn’t help remarking.

“Most considerate gentlemen,” Mistress Hull said, laughing. “Especially since they are going to buy us a dinner in celebration.”

“Not at the Goat and Jug, I hope.”

“A low place like that? No, we’ll have the best. Those good dead men are going to take us to the Saracen’s Head.”

I suppose I have made it sound easy about painting
Adam and Eve Bathing in the Garden of Eden
, except for the bodies which I cheated on. But there was another problem about this kind of picture, too. That is, who knows what the Garden of Eden looked like? You cannot make it like England because it should seem faraway and more beautiful than anything on earth because it is Eden. Now I had always been bored with landscapes anyway, and painting Eden is a lot of landscape. Some people do Adam and Eve very large to omit the landscape but I would have to paint bodies better, and not make do with so many leaves and vines because they could not be coming out of nowhere just for my convenience but had to be attached to plants and trees, which gets back to the problem of Eden.

Fortunately, my father was a terrible taskmaster when he was alive and never let anything get by. One of the things he didn’t let get by was landscapes, which I hate because they are dull. He had made me copy one of his landscapes that he had done on his travels over and over, for practice in trees and color perspective and also rocks and mountains which are the very dullest of all and nobody should ever have to paint them. He used to say I would thank him someday and now I wished I could. I just took that old landscape because it didn’t look like England and loaded it up with flowers and it made a good Eden. I had to fix a few things, for example, the strange tall rocky mountain in the back, behind all the greenery. It had a castle at the top. But since there were no castles in Eden, I just took away the castle and put a golden light on top of the mountain coming out of a cloud as if God were up there. I used that foreign place in all my Adam and Eves, one way or another. It was a kind of joke, especially on Father, who took that landscape very seriously and said if people appreciated landscapes more than portraits of themselves, they would see it was a masterwork.

I had just gotten the landscape done and was putting another glaze on Eve to make her nice and pink when Mistress Hull came up to inspect.

“My, you’ve been working away up here. Let’s see.” Eve’s hair had come out especially nice, in long, dark ripples, and I do know how to give expression to eyes, even a “come hither” expression which is how I imagine that Mistress Pickering lured my husband to his early but not undeserved doom. There were still a few little problems, but I thought I had covered them over pretty well. “Humpf! That Eve is a hussy! Who would have thought a woman could paint a thing like that! Did you mean for her knees to be that fat? Oh, no, don’t look so worried. I know my customers. They all like fat knees. Ha! I could sell a dozen of these! How fortunate you are to be so talented!”

I felt so gratified, I showed her the best of my sketches, and Mistress Hull inspected them with a shrewd commercial gaze which impressed me very much.

“
Hmm. Eve Tempts Adam
. It’s nice, that lecherous look you give him while he stares at the apple. But why is he all covered up with vines? That Eve—my, she is generous up top; that’s excellent. Oh—my—this one! Ha! You must do several. I’m sure this one will go for double. How did you ever think of it?” Her eye lit up as she spied my sketch for
The Temptation of Eve
. It was altogether my most daring work, which featured my improved ability to draw Eves in such a way that you hardly missed that there was no Adam at all. That is, Eve is lolling back on a grassy bank immorally intertwined with the serpent and a really unregenerate look on her face, and the bitten apple is falling out of her hand which is all limp because she is just so carried away. I’m surprised I thought of it at all, but sometimes these things just come to me and besides, I got all angry thinking of how my late husband was such a snake spending all my dowry money to cut a figure for that dreadful Mistress Pickering that he deceived me about and said she had a club foot.

While I was showing her my drawings Cat came up to snoop around, because she is convinced I just lie at my ease upstairs instead of scouring pots whereas I actually work very very hard except that it is a lot better work than rubbing sand around in a lot of dirty old dishes. Even she was amazed, and when you can amaze a sour unmarried girl who thinks unkindly of everything, that is something.

“Mother, this bathing picture looks just as if a man did it. And it’s not too big to hide behind a curtain, the way they do. You can sell that one right away, I think.” She looked at it from another angle. “But the colors shine too much. They don’t look like Father’s at all. How are you going to keep the beadle away?”

“Trust your old mother, dearie. These are paintings by Master Dallet representing his secret tendencies that he hid from his wife. It’s only natural, considering what they’re about, and her so young and newly wed and all. He had them in storage, and a friend returned them all. See that shiny glaze? It looks just like his portraits. It’s not his poor widow’s fault they’re so suggestive—the poor thing has a right to eke out her pension.”

Cat gave a wicked laugh. Widow Hull looked again at the bathing picture with her shrewd birdlike eyes, and I took away the sketches because I did not want to see the look on Cat’s face if she caught sight of
The Temptation of Eve
.

“It’s the medium you use, isn’t it?” observed Mistress Hull. “It lets the colors shine through. My husband told me about it once when he was drunk. It’s each painter’s secret. My husband was always afraid someone would bribe his apprentices and pirate his. But then, along came Browne, and then Hethe, and he tried to pirate
theirs
. Yours is especially fine—it makes the colors shine like the stained glass in Saint Paul’s. You’re lucky. If you’re ever
really
hard up, you can sell the secret of it.”

“Who’ll buy it from me if the paintings are Master Dallet’s?”

“
Hmm
. You’re right—oh, what a tangle it all is. It’s a pity women can’t be Masters.”

“I couldn’t be one anyway,” I said, thinking of Adam’s torso, which still resembled a sausage, no matter how many ribs I painted on it.

Spring kept pushing on, with flowering apple trees shining all light and sweet against the rolling gray sky and green blades pushing their way out between the stones of garden walls. I think that painting Eden so much must have drugged my senses, because the idea of color started to take over my mind as if I were drunk. I would just stop sometimes and stare, because I was looking at the exact color of the clouds or the way a mud puddle shines. And all the while I’d be thinking something like what I needed was a good burnt umber, but it costs so high and where can you get the real stuff from Italy and not some fake? Everybody thought I was crazy even in my own house, but really I was just thinking. Nan gave it out that it was the terrible grief, and that made me something of a tragical figure in the neighborhood. Then people would touch their heads with a forefinger as I went by and make clucking sounds, but I hardly had time to enjoy the sensation I made because I was thinking too hard. Also sometimes I forgot to put my clothes on right and once I put my bodice on inside out because I really wasn’t noticing, which made people think I really was crazy. Also dogs followed me because they seemed to think I was a sympathetical figure and sort of wandered the way they do.