Painting the Light Read online

  Dedication

  For Tom, always, for everything

  Epigraphs

  There is only one way to have light. Have dark to put it on.

  —William Morris Hunt, 1876

  If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.

  —Mark Twain, 1894

  Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.

  —Susan B. Anthony, 1896

  Massachusetts women as a rule adhere too strongly to old-time conventions.

  —Julia Ward Howe, 1900

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sally Cabot Gunning

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  1893

  The Museum of Fine Arts School, Boston

  Ida Russell brought her heels down hard as she walked past the closed door of the life drawing class. She wanted that roomful of promising young men to lift their heads, to suspend their pencils, to ask themselves who was passing and wonder if it was someone important who might have helped their careers more than Mr. Wirth, the instructor of the class they were attending. And of course it would be someone important, they’d think—only an important person would dare to walk by with such a commanding stride—and here they were listening to the renowned Mr. Wirth, who despite his reputation was imparting very little and very poorly. Or so Ida fantasized.

  Childish, yes, but it burned, burned like a careless hand on a hot iron, that when she’d tried to enroll in the class she’d been told by the Museum School registrar that it “wasn’t for ladies.” She’d gone straight to the dean, and when he’d said “unthinkable” in response, she’d foolishly interpreted it to mean that it was unthinkable for a woman to be barred from the class; what it really meant—and what had been made humiliatingly clear soon after—was that it was unthinkable for a young woman to enter any room where a male model posed without his clothes.

  Fueled by that remembered burn, Ida reversed course, stopped before the offending door, and cracked it open. She could see only a slice of the model—one long, glorious line of elevated heel and sinewy leg rising into a clenched buttock; just looking at that reaching, striving form Ida could feel the pencil in her hand as it flowed over the paper, perfectly capturing that line. But the renowned Mr. Wirth had seen her; he was marching toward the door making shooing motions with his hands; and the look on his face made Ida want to laugh and cry at the same time: A lady ruined! Ida moved on.

  Inside her own classroom Ida found her space, set up her easel, pulled her smock over her knees, and picked up her charcoal. Her instructor, the less renowned Mr. Morris, had taken up a position between her and the stuffed owl they’d been told to sketch, but as he was more interesting to look at than the owl, Ida didn’t mind. She allowed her charcoal to take a quick likeness: attenuated form topped by long face and bulbous forehead, paralyzing eyes, a sparse beard that he drew to a point under constant, probing fingers.

  “Let me give you a few simple rules for learning to draw,” he began. “First, establish the fact of the whole. Next, put in the line that marks the movement of the whole. Don’t have more than one movement in a figure!”

  And what movement was there in a stuffed owl? Ida wondered, already grieving for her nude runner down the hall. She slid her sketch of Mr. Morris under a clean sheet of paper, turned her charcoal on its side, and had just roughed in the shape of the whole bird when Mr. Morris surfaced behind her to bark in her ear.

  “Is that what you see as the whole? Just the bird? What of the rest of the paper? The white shapes? What shapes have you left around your bird? Do you see how ignored your white spaces are?”

  Remarkably, Ida did; this was what she loved most about the Museum School—that she was learning to see; shapes, spaces, lights, darks, textures, values. She amended her owl shape until it had divided the paper better, but now the bird had lost some of its owlishness, particularly in the wings and tail. “I’m afraid I’ve turned my owl into a roast chicken.”

  Morris didn’t smile—he never smiled—and yet something perverse in Ida’s nature persisted in attempting to change his nature. “Don’t paint a thing as it is,” he said now. “Paint it as it seems.”

  But once Mr. Morris left, Ida saw at once where she had gone astray with her shape, and better yet, how to amend it; she worked busily until he returned. It struck Ida that over the last few classes Mr. Morris seemed to loom over her particular easel more often than some others, but she wasn’t sure if this was a good sign or a bad.

  “Good, good, but go on! Don’t be afraid. The moment you’re afraid you might as well be in Hanover Street shopping.” Mr. Morris crossed in front of her and bent down till his eyes rested level with her own. His eyes always appeared blackest when closest. “Do you want to be in Hanover Street shopping, Miss Russell, or do you want to learn to draw?”

  Ida had been in Hanover Street shopping, too many times, taking the carriage from the family town house on Beacon Hill and stopping for tea at the Parker House on her return. It was what idle rich ladies did on the long, dull days of winter. Or spring. Or summer. Ida had likely bought as much silk and drunk as much tea as any lady on the Hill until one day she happened to read about the Museum School in her father’s newspaper and experienced a sensation much like a luffing sail as it caught a fresh wind. She’d collected her sketches and watercolors—the other thing idle rich ladies did—and laid them out on the table in front of her father. She picked up the portrait of her mother. “Is it like?”

  Ida’s father possessed one of those faces that looked stern no matter the underlying emotion; his mouth under its mustache twitched in the way it did whenever he humored this odd, restless daughter of his, but—give him his due—he studied the likeness with care. “There are elements that are quite like.”

  “And elements that aren’t like. Which? Why?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, Ida.”

  “Neither do I. But I want to. I want to go to the Museum School. I want to learn to draw.”

  And this was what Ida said to Mr. Morris now. “I want to learn to draw.”

  “Then draw!” Morris cried. “Go on! No, no, no, don’t stop! You’ll look at this picture in two years and see what’s good and bad in it, you’ll see right through it to its center, you’ll see what’s true in it. And do you know what will happen then? You’ll take up another work, and in it you’ll leave off the false and take up the true.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “You spoil a lot of paper, Miss Russell. But I beg you, spoil it cheerfully. Boldly. And do it again and again until you make no line that isn’t true.”

  1

  November 1898

  Vineyard Haven, Martha’s Vineyar
d

  Ida Pease, formerly Russell, looked out the window at dark ocean against darkening sky and worn-out grass dotted with sheep. It was wrong. All of it. The water should still be reflecting the idea of sky; the sky should still be reflecting the idea of sun; the sheep should be crowded around a full rack of hay. But Ida’s husband hadn’t gotten around to filling the hayrack before he left, and according to his logic that meant the sheep could get by on dead grass until he got home. And the only reason the colors were wrong was because Ezra should have been home hours ago to eat a Thanksgiving goose that had been roasting way too long for its own good or anyone else’s.

  So perhaps the only thing wrong was Ezra. Ida looked at the clock again. Quarter to five. Not that she needed to wonder where her husband was—his usual route home ran through the back room at Duffy’s where he played cards and “did his part to fill the spittoon,” as he told Ida back in the days when she’d bothered to ask what took him. But today was Thanksgiving, and Ezra’s aunt Ruth and his cousin Hattie had been sitting in the parlor for two hours, Ruth casting looks at Ida that implied it was her fault Ezra was late, that Ida should have learned to herd her husband the way their sheepdog herded sheep. But in truth the old woman was looking at Ida the way she always looked at Ida.

  Two years ago at her wedding Ida had gone up to her and said, “I’m pleased to know you, Aunt Ruth.”

  “Ruth will do,” she’d said.

  Ruth’s daughter Hattie worked at the telephone exchange and was friendlier to Ida but with a telephone exchange kind of friendly, as if she were more concerned about where Ida was going than who Ida was. Ida preferred Ruth’s severe gray suits to Hattie’s blousy shirtwaists, and at least when Ruth spoke, she said something with a little wind behind it; Hattie preferred to blow wisps of smoke at Ida’s eyes.

  “We’ll eat now,” Ida said. She crossed to the stove, pulled the potatoes off the heat, and, as if he’d smelled the earthy steam, Ezra banged through the door with his partner Mose Barstow. Mose smelled of whiskey; Ezra did not. Ezra saved his drinking till he got home, believing—truly believing—that if kept his mind sharp he could make his fortune at cards. At Duffy’s.

  “Sorry to be late,” he said.

  “Not late enough.”

  Ezra paused on his way to the pantry. “What’s that you’re saying to me, Ida?”

  “She’s saying she enjoys your absence more than your presence,” Mose said. He pushed into the room and kissed the women, first Ida and then Ruth and last Hattie, the only one who seemed to appreciate it. Ezra kissed Ruth and Hattie, but after meeting Ida’s eye he left her untouched and moved around her to the pantry.

  Ida followed. Inside the pantry it smelled of yeast and cornmeal and dried apples, smells that had once given her comfort when faced with a long island winter ahead. “Out of useless curiosity,” she said, “what time do you think it is?”

  “It was Mose. He was winning.”

  “And this is how you keep time. By whether or not Mose Barstow is winning at cards.”

  Ezra whipped around. “You know, Ida, you’ve worked up quite a tone of late. Mose wanted me to leave for the Boston office today and I said no, it’s Thanksgiving, I’m not leaving my wife to eat alone on Thanksgiving. I told him we’ll just have to leave in the morning. And Mose having nowhere to go to eat Thanksgiving dinner, I told him to come along home with me. I’m pretty sure now he’s sorry he did.”

  From the other room they could hear Ruth mumble something to which Mose barked out a laugh. Ezra snagged a bottle off the shelf and went for the door, but he paused there. “And in case you were too busy carping at me to hear what I said, I’m leaving for Boston in the morning. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Maybe you like that way of keeping time better.”

  “Go,” Ida said. “Stay there forever if you like. But first feed your sheep.”

  Ida looked out the window the next morning and watched the steamer Monohansett with Ezra and Mose on board glide toward the horizon over an ocean as smooth and pale as ice. As she watched her mood ricocheted between relief and resentment—relief because Ezra’s voice pounding at her all evening had left her feeling physically bruised; resentment because over the course of the evening it had come out that Mose hadn’t tried to get Ezra to go to Boston at all, that in fact he’d been expected for Thanksgiving at his brother’s in New Bedford and that Ezra had waylaid him at the boat.

  “Why didn’t you just say so?” Ida had asked Ezra later in bed, nothing of her body touching anything of his body, a maneuver that required some effort considering the way the bed sagged. “It would be better if you’d just said so. ‘I saw Mose at the boat and wanted company for a quick game.’ Or ‘I wasn’t in the mood for Aunt Ruth and Hattie.’” Or I wasn’t in the mood for you, Ida. That tone of yours. Which might not have been a tone at all if Ezra had just told the truth. But Ezra hadn’t answered either Ida’s spoken or unspoken questions. Instead he’d rolled farther away from her in the bed and snuffed out the lamp.

  Now Ida shifted her eyes from the distant water to the closer-at-hand flock: a Cheviot ram, twenty-three ewes, and eighteen lambs had spread themselves over ten acres of rock-strewn, walled-in hillside, as if convinced the grass would be better over the next rise or down the next gulley. Ida had once viewed her marriage in much the same way, but nowadays she saw nothing beyond the next rise but another barren gulley. Even so, as Ida stood at the window looking at the sheep, she had to admit they were a handsome flock, solid-bodied with upright, pink-lined ears and intelligent black eyes set off by dense, snowy fleece. The lambs were now six months old, their bodies grown into their knobby joints but still good for a frolic; Ida watched them chase one another over the rocks, but even as she watched she saw a phenomenon that Lem Daggett, the part-time hired man, had taught her to interpret: as a rule the Cheviots grazed individually or in small groups, but now, as one, they turned and headed for the lee side of the hill. Weather coming. Ida tapped the glass on Ezra’s barometer. It nosed downward.

  By early afternoon a businesslike north wind had dropped down over the island and within the half hour it had roughed up the sea and flipped over the remaining beech leaves, the usual calling card of a classic northeaster. Two years on the Vineyard and Ida knew what came next.

  Ida went out to the dog yard and whistled up Bett; the dog leaped up and planted her feet on Ida’s chest to have her ears tugged, a thing Ida wasn’t supposed to allow in a working dog but did anyway because they both liked it. She rubbed Bett’s ears, undid the gate and sent her off, using the commands Lem had taught her that would send the dog counterclockwise around the flock and drive them back toward the barn: Away to me! Hold ’em! Bring ’em! Walk in! Bett lit out like a sable flame, and the sheep knew better than to argue; Ida barely reached the barn door ahead of the flock. But as she lifted the bolt one of the lambs veered off, forcing Bett to circle behind it and nip at its heels, sending it after the others with noisy complaint.

  Ida followed the lamb in, dropping the bolt behind her, thinking as she did so that Ezra would have told her she should have left the sheep out—they’d been bred to withstand the rough English hill weather and cooped up inside they would only fret—but the ram had kicked out the east wall of the field shelter and the hayracks were again empty. It would be quicker for Ida to fork hay from barn loft to barn floor than to hitch up the oxcart, especially the way the wind was coming up. Ida hauled the back of her skirt through her legs and jammed it into her belt. She climbed the ladder to the hayloft, pitched down the hay, and dreamed of being in the Parker House in Boston drinking sherry and eating little cakes frosted in lemon ice.

  Ida had just finished herding the chickens into the chicken house when Lem came up the track in the wagon. He swung to the ground and greeted Bett. “I saw Ezra at the boat. How’s my dog? Still teaching you tricks?”

  Ida smiled. Lem had raised and trained Bett and sold her to Ezra, but Lem was no fool—after Ezra had been off on a job for the better part of a
month Lem had figured out he’d best train Ida as well. Ida was never sure if it was her accomplishment or the dog’s, but she was proud of how they’d begun to work together.

  Lem set in helping Ida fill the wood box, piling extra on the porch. Lem was built like Ezra, square and solid, but with close-cropped gray hair and a weather-creased face. Ida had often speculated how the thirty-eight-year-old Ezra might age into the fifty-two-year-old Lem, and the thought had never bothered her, but lately she’d begun to think with dread of all those years she’d be lying beside Ezra as he creased and grayed and of how old she’d be by the time he did it. She’d been twenty-nine when she’d married Ezra; she already felt twice that.

  “I’ve got coffee,” Ida offered.

  “You hang on to it. Ruth needs a door hinge reseated.” Lem turned around and looked up at the house. “Still no shutters,” he said, as if he were keeping score on Ezra. Or maybe Ida only thought so because she was.

  Ida went inside, stirred the fire, and made herself roasted cheese, the kind of supper she preferred but only got to indulge in when she didn’t have to cook for Ezra. After she’d washed up she spread the Gazette under the lamp and began to read, another thing she could only enjoy when Ezra wasn’t home because he’d always have to read it first, and if the paper hadn’t already disappeared by the time Ida got around to it, Ezra would find some way to disrupt her reading, as if her knowing a thing made him not know it. Ezra. Again. Perhaps that was the thing Ida resented most of all—that he used up so much of her time even in his absence.

  In Ida’s first life she’d been a painter. She’d attended Boston’s renowned Museum School and had been making good progress, particularly in watercolor; one of her still lifes—although not Ida herself—had been accepted at the prestigious all-male Boston Art Club, and Mrs. Percival McKinley herself had commissioned a portrait. Mr. Morris had even asked her to teach a class once when he’d been called away. But once Ida arrived on the island, Ezra and the farm had somehow managed to get in her way. Even on a day alone, if she set up a bowl of fruit and sat down with her sketch pad, she found herself unable to focus, as if Ezra were still hovering, as if he’d walk in any minute to divert her to a torn coat or a sick lamb or a storm threatening the harvest. Of course, her inability to focus even in Ezra’s absence was not his fault, but so many other things were his fault that sometimes that one leaped aboard unnoticed.