she would not survive, had been but a dream, she must be herself something even less. “Come now,” she hears Emeline saying. “You don’t mean that.”
Depend upon it: There are always the Sensibles to comfort the Aggrieved. (She would write that.) She once suspected Emerson’s sincerity about his son Waldo, and longed to surpass the years and miles to bang on his study door and voice her protest. Or was it comfort she wanted to give? (The intertwining of comfort and protest—that may be useful.) He had been left too long alone among his books. Though surely he had Emelines of his own to dust off his desk and dispense the occasional “Nonsense!”
What is Thought, what an Idea, at the family table. (She could start there: all the family at dinner.) If daughters and sons are but dreams, then words less still. Less than dust. Anyone knows that. Emerson, the most dearly beloved professor of her college by the stove, gone from this world longer than Effie. Yet his words seem real inside her: It does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. So he’d said of his son Waldo. (Though Emerson was lucky to have another, and daughters, too.) He grieved that grief could teach him nothing.
Mary, full of admiration, hesitates to argue. She sits, at 51 First Avenue. She has a pen, and a book, whose pages are mostly empty.
Emerson’s great scouring instinct—the vigorous circles of his thought, scrubbing away crust and convention—the light he shines on his own appetites and ways give her a vision. He is a man who found a Method (conversion of thought to object, she names it, her hand on her pen.) If Edwin can bind off the last row of her lace collar, and Emerson get up his old heart again, then why shouldn’t she impart and invest her own ounce? As he puts it.
Here is my Grief, she will write.
And here are its lessons, she would like very much to tell Samuel.
“Sketch quickly,” the drawing instructor says, as he weaves in and out of the row of students’ easels. In front of one; behind the next. Such deliberate pattern amuses him. He holds a chalk in his hand and taps it against his palm as though he is a musical master marking tempo.
“When your time is up,” he tells the class, “commit the Arab to memory.”
Ward the Lesser, the students call him, in unkind comparison to his older brother, the sculptor John Q. A.
“When your time is up,” Edwin mutters. “Sketch quickly”—that’s what he’s done his whole life, so why should he sit in a classroom to be so instructed? The framing for the bay windows drawn in dirt with his foot. First drawings for the Patent Office finished one night while everyone else slept. “The Arab.” Ward’s tone no different than if he’d said “the vase” or “the rose” or any inanimate thing. “Commit to memory.” To the asylum, more like.
Edwin is irrevocably, poisonously, irritable, and though his irritation did not begin in this class, Ward has deepened it, distracted it, blown it up into a bluster of angry confusion. Edwin takes Ward as interlocutor— though he does not want him, does not want his terms, and knows that in accepting them he has lost, whatever argument he makes.
Does he have a name? Edwin thinks to ask. Because he admires the model’s concentration. Especially in such circumstances. For an hour, his hand nestled in his thick beard, holding up his head, he has appeared to think deeply—about—what?
Edwin will never know. The man’s own language must have gestures of title and respect and without knowing even these, without any place to start, Edwin sees very little reason to speak of memory or its committal.
He wants a fight (Samuel would not be so easily pushed to fury). Show us what you can do, Lesser brother.
While Edwin imagines what Ward might do, with paper and chalk and memory, a picture comes to him: He is in the middle of Goodnow stream in the early spring, carefully balanced atop a moss-slicked rock, trying to divert the water’s path with a log. What is he doing there? He does not remember. Memory holds only this: a heavy, man-sized shape of futility, shivering, holding a log at an impossible angle, and the water bubbling on around him, unfatigued. In the picture, his own figure would be secondary to the churn of river. (Men could harness the power of water—he had only to walk down the hill into Shelburne to see that. But that is not what interests him.) Feeding the Trout, he will call it.
“Quickly.” Ward jolts Edwin from his reverie, and he bristles.
If he wants quick, let him go to the photographers. If it’s a race, Edwin would rather bow out now. The drone of his uncle praying comes to him: He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. Here, he has come to be an artist. Everything is wrong about the Academy—stale and old and used up. This much he knows. He should not have left home. He should not have come to New York.
But Mary had wanted it. Mary and Samuel both. Though it is no recompense to be near his brother again. Edwin halfheartedly scribbles in the jagged edges around the man’s headband. The cloth has been cut with pinking shears. Must be from a costume shop.
Samuel would be perfectly comfortable with Ward. They would sit together in some paneled clubroom, drinks in hand. Samuel would lean back, stretch his feet out, listen without judgment—he would let Ward be a fool, or not. Under his steady gaze, the shape of Ward’s character would emerge.
That’s not the only place he’s seen her with her clothes off, I’ll warrant, Edwin had heard another student say of Ward and one of the models.
It had startled him.
“Why do you think he keeps having her back? The light’s better in the studio.”
The students laughed, but Edwin did not join them.
He wants to see Ward alone on the world’s most beautiful hill with his paper and chalk. See what he is made of there, under the unforgiving sky.
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