His encouragement: He had arranged for Edwin to study at the Academy. Yet beneath Samuel’s ostensible willingness, a price. Something Edwin cannot name. And not just a portrait of Alice, though that, he was sure, would do for a start.
The painting under Edwin’s arm bothers him. For this one, he has no excuse. Once, he was not bothered by failure. Didn’t stop long enough to judge himself harshly. Would simply get up again in the morning and start another painting, another money-making endeavor, another building, another invention. But this painting is so bad that the influence of it has carried over into another day. He—stammers to think of it. He is tempted to kick it under bushes at the edge of the park and cover it over with leaves. He’s not signed it. He won’t. Its falseness a poison to him. Yet how could he have done any better? The Academy picks the models. The Academy doles out the assignments. This model was the fashion—and what of it? If, in New York, fashion has greater authority than in the countryside, that is no cause for submission. Why then does he bow to it? Because Samuel has paid for their apartment; because this is his last chance; because Mary is at home making whip-snap after whip-snap. Because, because.
Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius! she’d read to him once, after he’d stumbled out of bed and felt his way down the stairs and then to the kitchen door, where she sat, naked, fire burning in the middle of the night. Reading Emerson. Laughing. She thought that was funny. The whole thing: the passage, his squinting at her. She drew comfort from examinations of human foible and weakness; he did not. But perhaps Emerson had it right: The factories of his youth have exhausted his river, and all that’s left to him this trickle.
He does not know how the days passed. Sitting on the steps he and Samuel and Cousin John had put in, he painted in the early dawn while time waited. Nothing else anywhere but the movement of his brush. Until, gradually, their stirring. And then Effie would leap into his arms, bringing back his pulse, and all the seconds ticking away. Mary went on ahead to the kitchen while Effie helped put away his brushes and paints. Then, giddyup! down the stairs on his back. Papa can we grow the same grapes you paint. Papa can we swim today. Papa can I ride Her Excellency. In the kitchen, steam and flame and cornmush and the sweetness of maple sugar and Effie’s chatter and constant movement. The city people not far behind, wanting food and advice.
For many mornings he had painted on the walls of that hallway, rendering a grapevine along the banister and, in the foyer, the marble columns of the ancient world. A fashion, too. Still painting someone else’s world. Yet then his feeling had been so pure! (Hard to imagine, now, with this poison under his arm). Pure or corrupt, no matter: Could he say the painting of his youth was any better than this Arab tucked under his arm? He’d painted quickly then (a facility he’s not lost), wanting to make enough progress to surprise Samuel at the end of the week. The marble columns for him, really. Their grandeur a reminder of the brothers’ shared past. Samuel would see them and think of their time in Cleveland. It wasn’t Paris—but they’d been away. In Cleveland, life had grown larger than chores and turning the day. Silk thread was going to buy them the world, near enough. Spool after spool traded for freedom. For marble, not New England schist. For scholars’ centuries, not a farmer’s seasons.
He had found the figures and sketches of the marble columns in his notebooks when he was packing for New York. A record of the precision with which he’d calculated the growing lengths of each column’s shadow.
After Effie had died, he had fled that house, with those marble columns rising from floor to ceiling, echoing the Corinthian capitals flanking the front door. He had left behind those particular aspirations. That worship of the Greeks—a fashion the other students in his class mocked now. Satterlee himself already a relic to them—and what, then, of his middle-aged apprentice? But was it any different, really, this new obsession with the Orient?
None of this had mattered then. He had simply painted. There had been, then, the promise of time. There had been Effie. Now, of that promise, only his yellowing notebook remains, with its meticulous numbers and measured shadows in fading pencil. And this Arab under his arm. He forgives himself the columns. He had been so young! He forgives himself and Samuel the billiard room, the oyster rooms in town, the house perched too proudly atop the hill, his portrait of the singer Effie Ellsler—all their showy attempts to bring the city home. To prove their difference from their forebears. Nothing to be gained from that. Not where they all are tending.
The picture of Effie Ellsler—his first portrait—still under sheets in the Whiting attic. Then, his youth was excuse enough for its failings (had he, in those days, admitted either youth or failing). But he has no excuse for this painting under his arm. This, the test to be admitted to the Life class. The latest of the week’s three models. The Woman. The Urchin. The Arab. So-called. Misgivings strike him. Something stiff—false—in this practice.
What is this life he has chosen? He—a fifty-year-old man. Probably with more of life behind him than ahead. And he’s now one of a circle of pretentious slicks and—. His mother’s words come to him. Give them the benefit of the doubt. But he is old this morning. Everything irritates. Samuel and his new wife—her smiles, her touch. She’d held his hand until he had felt his palm turn sweaty in hers. Paint’s slow to dry. Skies gray, wet everywhere. And it should be colder. It’s almost as if the seasons are scrambling—as they had when Effie had died, when the rain had melted January’s snow in what should have been its hour of dominion. No, it is not the fault of the other students. He has laughed with them. Shared a drink, once. They are only as young as he and Samuel were, building the house. Already done with Cleveland. Already after first love. They are not so young. It is only that he is old, and he will not see the day—
He has been here before. With cause all the world would grant (their only daughter, dead before her tenth birthday) and none at all. Despondency the same at any age at any place. Worse now. He almost chuckles, to think how bad he feels. Good. Enough light left in him to imagine laughing—if only because now is always the worst and he always the unluckiest.
He had never been convinced that traveling to New York held the promise Mary and Samuel thought. Whatever decision he makes, sadness comes after. To Alaska. To New York. Or taking in his hand the magnifying glass he’d used a hundred times before to inspect the ruffles and wrinkles and eye-sets of the deceased and then turning it upside down in the drinking glass and finding half a tiny world upside down and half a tiny world upright, seeing that and knowing how to paint it, thinking of nothing else until he’d rendered it onto canvas. And then, it was only—a thing done.
“Strange, how absolute the blackness surrounding,” she had said to him.
“Meant it,” he had grumbled.
She hadn’t said she didn’t like it.
But it was strange, probably—and he was strange, to paint that way, with the facts of his life (logs to be stacked, orchard to tend) seen through the window, shrunken and divided in the magnifying glass, which takes up very little of the canvas where it rests in Alma’s glass sugar bowl. Not nearly as much as the expanse of dark around. As if he’d taken it upon himself to embody his father’s monocular vision, with its exacting, compensating stare on the one side and dark on the other.
Neither his father nor he will live to see the day.
He will not live to see the day. He does not know why this phrase comes or what future he mourns. But he is not the only one on whom the calendar weighs: With the century about to turn, all the day’s greatest minds are bent on summation. He’d read last year Albert Michelson’s assessment that most of the grand underlying principles of physical science were firmly established, that further advances were to be sought “chiefly in their rigorous application.” Though he does not recall the exact words, he remembers the sense: Though Michelson had granted the possibility that further marvels were in store—it was good science, to admit the limits of one’s own knowledge—mourning
