Girl with Brush and Canvas Read online

  The art lessons with Mrs. Mann had come to an end, but alone in my tower room, like a queen in her castle, I filled page after page of a sketchbook with pencil drawings: flowers and trees and cows, the big cow barn, the springhouse, and the barn where bundles of tobacco leaves strung on wooden laths were hung to cure. None of those sketches satisfied me. I tried watercolors, too, but they turned out no better. I crumpled most of my pictures into balls and tossed them away, and sometimes for days I didn’t paint or draw anything.

  Lena had seven brothers. Two of the older ones—silent, hulking boys who hardly ever said a word to me—worked as hired hands for Papa. When Lena wasn’t helping her mother wash our clothes, she stayed at home to take care of her baby brother. Buddy was thin and pale and couldn’t walk, though he was old enough that he should have. Something was wrong with him, but they didn’t know what.

  One day Lena came by with Buddy on her hip and let him crawl around my tower room while Lena and I sat and talked. Pinned to the easel Papa had built for me was a picture I’d been working on, a watercolor of a woman hanging a sheet on a clothesline while a man in a cap watched. One end of the rope was tied to a tree, because I thought there ought to be a tree somewhere in the picture, but I hadn’t decided what the other end of the rope should be tied to. The woman wore a red cloth around her head, because I wanted something red at exactly that spot.

  Lena stared at it. “What’s this supposed to be a picture of?” she asked finally.

  “A lady hanging up laundry,” I said.

  “Is that supposed to be you with the red scarf? Or me? Because it doesn’t look like either one of us.”

  “It’s not supposed to be anything except an interesting picture with some people in it.”

  “All right.” She shrugged, and it was plain that she didn’t much care for it.

  Buddy tried to grab Boots’s tail, but the cat wouldn’t allow it, and Buddy wailed until Lena picked him up and carried him downstairs. I stayed in my tower room and worked a little more on the watercolor, but it didn’t improve much. Once you did a watercolor, it was done, and you couldn’t do it over.

  I turned thirteen that fall. The months went by without much happening, except for the usual freezing-cold winter that Papa hated, until spring planting season came around again. The next September Francis got ready to start his second year at the little country high school in Sun Prairie. I assumed I’d go to the same high school, and Lena would too, and we’d see each other every day, as we always did. Maybe we’d even share a desk again, although Francis said in high school everybody had a separate desk.

  “I want to go,” Lena said, “but my pa says I’ve had enough schooling. I’m needed at home, what with Buddy being so sickly. You can tell me what you’re learning,” Lena added wistfully. I promised I would, though I was disappointed.

  But then everything changed for me, too. I wouldn’t be going to the high school in Sun Prairie after all.

  “I have enrolled you at Sacred Heart Academy,” Mama informed me. She’d come up to my room where I was making a sketch of Boots. “It’s a Catholic boarding school for young ladies in Madison.”

  I could hardly believe it. I was being sent away! Away from the farm, away from my family! I stared at Mama. “But why?”

  “The nuns are excellent teachers, and you’ll learn more from them. We are paying an extra twenty dollars for you to take art lessons, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy that,” she said. “I wish we could afford to pay for watercolor lessons, too, but that’s not possible.”

  I didn’t care about art lessons! I could paint and draw all I wanted right here! “I’m not Catholic,” I muttered, as though that made a difference. Mama wasn’t Catholic either.

  And I had to go all the way to Madison? Madison was the state capital, twelve miles from Sun Prairie, an hour’s drive in the John Deere. It might have been as distant as the Pacific Ocean. I’d never been away from home. It felt like a knife in my heart.

  Why must I do this? I wanted to call after her, but Mama had already gone back downstairs. I crumpled the drawing into a ball and threw it across the room as hard as I could, but it wasn’t hard enough to make me feel any better.

  2

  Madison, Wisconsin—Fall 1901

  BOARDING SCHOOL WAS MAMA’S IDEA. PAPA would not have wanted to send me away—I was sure of that. He liked having his girls around, especially me, although he never said so. He didn’t have to say it; I just knew. Mama was different. She was determined for me to get a better education than I could in Sun Prairie, and whatever it was, Mama usually had things her way.

  I told myself that art lessons might make this new school tolerable. Maybe watercolor lessons would have made it better, but I understood that I could have some things but not everything, and it was useless to wish for what I didn’t have.

  The Mother Superior at Sacred Heart had sent a list of the things I needed to take with me: a certain kind of underclothes, two white shirtwaists and two blue woolen jumpers for everyday, two sets of bedsheets, two towels and two washcloths, and a knife, fork, and spoon. I would also need a black dress that came down to my ankles, “without trimming or any trace of white or color,” according to the list, and a veil of black silk net exactly one yard square and edged in narrow black lace. This was what I was required to wear to Mass every Sunday.

  I helped Auntie sew the clothes; I had been a good seamstress since she taught me how to stitch outfits for my dollies. Auntie knew I wasn’t happy about leaving, and while we sewed she tried to cheer me up with the story of how she, Jennie Wyckoff, just seventeen, had married Ezra Varney, and the two had headed west to California to make their fortune in the Gold Rush. But soon Ezra fell sick and died, carried off by consumption. Brave Jennie was only nineteen and a widow when she booked passage on a schooner that sailed from California to the tip of South America, where storms and raging seas threatened to dash them all to their deaths on the rocks. The ship sailed up the east coast of the Americas and arrived in Boston six months after the voyage began. Auntie’s hair was gray now, but her eyes sparkled the way they must have when she was a young girl setting out as Ezra Varney’s bride.

  I tried not to think too much about leaving home. Ida and Nita were being especially nice. I suspected they’d be sneaking into the tower room while I was gone. Claudie was just a baby, and Catherine, only five, didn’t really grasp that I wouldn’t be around for a while. Francis, as usual, ignored my existence, or pretended to, but dear eight-year-old Alexius rushed up to hug me whenever he had the chance. Francis might have been Mama’s favorite, but Alexius was mine.

  Papa laughed and slapped his knee when he found me trying on the black dress while Auntie pinned up the hem. “You look like a nun, Georgie!”

  Papa was Catholic and knew about nuns. Mama was Episcopalian and didn’t. They sometimes argued about which religion was better, each of them insisting the other’s church made no sense. I didn’t understand their arguments, but soon I would learn about nuns and what Catholics did.

  In early September Mamie, our cook, fixed a farewell dinner of chicken fricassee and apple pie, and the next day Mama drove me to Madison in Auntie’s buggy—a treat, because it was just the two of us, and we were hardly ever alone together. She reminded me again how important it was to get a good education, worth whatever sacrifices had to be made.

  “Sister Mary Margaret is expecting you,” she said. She told me—unnecessarily, it seemed to me—to be a good girl and patted me on the shoulder; she was not one to kiss her children, except when we were babies. She flicked the reins and Penelope trotted off, leaving me alone on the stone steps of Sacred Heart Academy.

  I gazed up at the pointed arches, square turrets, and narrow windows with little colored glass panes. Papa would admire this building, I thought; it was like a small cathedral. I picked up my suitcase—Auntie’s old leather one—and stepped into the entry hall. Only one dim lamp was burning. It was like entering a tunnel that would lead to someplace far awa
y, maybe another country. I hardly ever cried when I was a child, and I didn’t now, but I did feel something cold and hard buried inside my chest.

  A nun with glinting glasses emerged from the shadows. “Welcome to Sacred Heart,” she said. “My name is Sister Mary Margaret.” As she led me through silent corridors to the dormitory, she explained the rules.

  On the farm we’d all been expected to do our regular chores, but otherwise we did pretty much as we pleased and nobody said anything about “rules.” Sacred Heart Academy was going to be a different story. There were rules for everything.

  Attendance required at chapel every morning, evening prayers after supper, Mass on Sunday and on special holy days—Epiphany, Ascension, Assumption. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I nodded. Visitors, allowed only on Saturday afternoons, must be approved first. Visits home permitted only at Christmas and Easter. Letters to parents to be written once a week, and the letters read and corrected for spelling and punctuation errors by Sister Claire, who taught English. Letters addressed to us would be opened and read before they were given to us. “To prevent undesirable correspondence,” Sister Mary Margaret explained, but she did not explain exactly what kind of correspondence was undesirable.

  My head began to ache.

  “And this is our dormitory,” said the nun. Two long rows of white iron cots faced each other, each cot with a plain wooden cross nailed above it, each cot except one made up with a dark blue blanket. “You are the last student to arrive,” she said, pointing to the unmade cot. “The other girls are having their daily exercise with Sister Clothilde. You may join them outdoors when you’ve unpacked.”

  I made up my cot, mitering the corners of the sheets and blanket the way Auntie had taught me, hung my jumpers and shirtwaists and black Sunday dress on a row of empty pegs, and went out to look for the other girls. I expected to find them playing ball or running races; instead, they were marching back and forth in pairs while a tall, skinny nun barked orders. That was Sister Clothilde, and I knew right off that I would not like her.

  At the end of the first week I wrote the required letter home, not mentioning my dislike of nearly everything—not just the Exercise Nun. I was used to the privacy of my tower room, and now I had to share space with nineteen other girls.

  I was also used to breakfasts of eggs from our chickens, bacon from a pig Papa had slaughtered the previous fall, bread baked by Auntie and spread with butter made with milk from our cows and strawberry jam that Mamie and her helper, Hannah, had put up during the summer. The first morning at Sacred Heart Academy we served ourselves bowls of cornmeal gruel. The second morning, the gruel was made with oatmeal; the third morning, rice gruel. Then the cycle began again. On Sundays we were each allowed a single boiled egg and toast that was cold when it came to the table. Noon and evening meals were equally monotonous. Not really awful—just awfully tiresome.

  But before we ate any of it, we had to give thanks: Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive …

  When I told one of the older girls that I found the meals dull, she shrugged. “During Lent there won’t be any butter on the gruel, or molasses either.” I knew nothing about Lent. Papa had never mentioned it.

  After I submitted my first letter home, Sister Claire called me to her office. There was a problem with my spelling, and my punctuation was untidy—too many dashes, she said. I was instructed to copy the letter over with corrections. After two more tries I got it right.

  Sixty girls were enrolled at Sacred Heart—no rowdy, disruptive boys—and divided into four levels. I hadn’t been much of a student at Town Hall School and hadn’t learned anything of importance. Mrs. Edison’s time was spent keeping track of forty boys and girls of different ages and all levels of learning, and being ignored had suited me. This was different. Algebra, ancient history, composition, geography, and geology were my required classes. Every one of them was a lot harder than anything I’d studied before, but I managed to keep up.

  There were seven of us in the art class taught by Sister Angelique. One was a thin, nervous second-year student named Agnes; the rest were third-year students. Tall windows looked out onto trees, gardens, and a lawn reaching all the way down to the lake, but our stools were placed at a long table facing the front of the light-filled studio, so that we sat with our backs to the view.

  Sister Angelique’s skin was very pale, with no lines or wrinkles. Her hands were graceful as doves. She placed a white plaster cast of a baby’s hand on a pedestal. “Young ladies,” she said in a fluty voice, “this is your first exercise: draw what you see here.”

  I bent over my sketchpad and set to work with a stick of charcoal. Sister Angelique lurked behind us, peering over our shoulders. One of her shoes squeaked a little, skeek … skeek, a warning that she was close by. The squeaking stopped near my stool. I glanced down at the polished black shoes standing beside me.

  “That is much too small, Miss O’Keeffe,” said the nun. “And much too black. Why have you made the infant’s hand so small and black? It looks like a lump of coal.”

  Her words stung. I was not used to having my work criticized. No one had ever, ever, said anything like that about my drawings. Miss Belle had praised them; Mrs. Mann said my work was excellent; Mama framed my pictures and hung them in the parlor. But Sister Angelique said my drawing looked like a lump of coal.

  I tried to explain why I’d drawn the tiny hand the way I had—because it was tiny!—but the nun was not interested.

  “You must strive for delicacy, Miss O’Keeffe!” she said. “For lightness! And for goodness’ sake, do make it large enough to engage the viewer. One must experience the tenderness of each little finger, each dimple on the back of the infant’s knuckles!”

  Sister Angelique moved on to her next pupil, skeek … skeek, long skirt swishing, rosary beads clicking. I swallowed hard. Had she not seen that my drawing of the baby’s hand was well proportioned and accurate?

  I turned to a clean page in my sketchbook and began again, vowing that never again would I make a drawing that was too small!

  As we left the classroom, Agnes sidled up to me and whispered, “She’s mean! She didn’t like what I drew either.” She opened her sketchbook to show me her drawing of an object that looked more like a potato than a baby’s hand.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I patted her arm and said, “Maybe she won’t always be so mean.”

  Agnes nodded, biting her lip. “I hope you’re right,” she said, and slumped away.

  The next time our class met, Sister Angelique brought out a collection of wooden spheres, pyramids, cubes, cylinders, and twelve-sided figures, arranged them on the pedestal, and instructed us to draw them singly and then in groups. They were like the geometric shapes in Miss Belle’s drawing book, but those had been two-dimensional, and these were three. Week after week, more complicated casts appeared (she kept a closetful)—a nose, an ear, a pair of lips, a head. I struggled to draw a curly-haired Venus and a craggy-faced Beethoven.

  After the shock of Sister Angelique’s harsh words, I began to understand that if I truly intended to become an artist—and not just wished to become an artist—I would have to learn to accept criticism. Not everything I did would be worthy of admiration, at least not in the beginning. But that was hard. I dreaded the sound of the squeaky shoe.

  At first even mild criticism was like a painful cut, but I slowly got used to it, even expected it.

  “Try this, Miss O’Keeffe.” “Still not quite right, Miss O’Keeffe.” “Ah yes, you see? Much better!”

  My drawings did improve. They became lighter and more delicate. Better.

  Life at Sacred Heart Academy was orderly and calm. The nuns swished through corridors and classrooms in long black robes, black veils worn over stiff white coifs. They looked elegant and dramatic, and I decided that someday I would dress in stark black and white.

  But I wondered about the nuns’ hair. I wore mine plaited in a single thick braid th
at hung down my back. Did the nuns have braids tucked under those coifs? Or was their hair pulled back into a knot, like Auntie’s?

  I asked Maureen, the green-eyed, freckle-faced girl assigned to the cot next to mine.

  “They shave their heads,” she said matter-of-factly. “They’re bald as eggs.”

  Maureen had become my friend on the first day, when I discovered that she disliked Sister Clothilde nearly as much as I did. After weeks of daily exercise that was administered as if it were punishment, my dislike had grown even fiercer. Normally I would have looked forward to the freedom of being outdoors, but there was no freedom with the Exercise Nun. She shouted at us for most of the forty-five minutes we were allowed. I had always been a fast runner—faster than my brother—and I could throw a ball, climb a tree, or skate across a pond as well as any of the girls and some of the boys at Town Hall School, but Sister Clothilde found fault no matter how well we did. Poor Maureen was terrible at everything. The nun gave her no peace, and she often ended up in tears. “You really try,” I’d said to her. “That’s what counts.”

  “Bald as eggs?” I said now, laughing, not sure I could believe her explanation about the nuns’ hair. “Can’t you just picture Sister Clothilde without the coif and veil—her naked skull and that long horse face?”

  “Georgie, you’re just terrible!” Maureen said, smothering a giggle, and soon my comment had been repeated to all the girls in the first-year dormitory. We were united in our loathing of the Exercise Nun.

  I was homesick when I first arrived at Sacred Heart. I missed my family, and I missed Mamie’s delicious meals. But the homesickness melted away like a late spring snowfall. I loved the school’s small chapel with the stained-glass window that glowed like the little rubies and sapphires in Mama’s Totto family jewelry. The rumble of the priest’s voice chanting Sunday Mass in Latin, and the nuns’ soft voices singing the hymns and responses. The candles flickering on the altar. The mysterious smell of incense.