Girl with Brush and Canvas Read online

  Each Sunday at the end of Mass the priest called for any girl who would observe her birthday that week to step forward and receive a blessing. Four days before my fourteenth birthday in November I knelt by the railing at the front of the chapel, and the priest laid his hand on my head. His hand was warm and smelled of lavender.

  After Mass, we trooped over to the dining room for our Sunday dinner, liver and onions with custard for dessert. If I’d been at home, Auntie would have baked a cake—we each had our favorite; mine was devil’s food—and my younger brother, Alexius, would have turned the crank on a freezer of ice cream made with cream from our cows. It was raining hard that day, too wet to go down to the lake, and we retreated to our dormitory room. Maureen gave me a bag of sugared almonds that her grandmother had brought her, and I shared it with the other girls. Agnes left a drawing of a four-footed animal on my pillow, one of our class assignments. I think it was a horse.

  At Christmas we were allowed to go home for three days. I had not been back to the farm for more than three months. The house smelled of gingerbread that Mama always made from a recipe she’d learned from her mother, who’d learned it from her mother, who’d come to America from Holland long ago. There was the scent of the fir tree Francis and Papa had cut, and we decorated it with the homemade ornaments we’d made every year. I inhaled deeply, happy to be there again.

  I had painted a tiny watercolor for each member of the family, and one for Lena, too. We hung ours on the branches of the tree. On Christmas Eve Lena and her mother came by with jars of grape jam, and I gave her the little painting. As we sat drinking mugs of hot apple cider, I happened to catch the look that passed between Lena and Francis. I saw his face turn deep pink and wondered about it.

  The next morning we opened our gifts—knitted scarves and caps and matching mittens for each of us—and I was given the fine sable brushes I’d been wishing for. Mamie had stuffed and roasted a goose, and Auntie baked mince pies. Ida and Nita made little sugar pies with the leftover scraps of dough. Everything seemed just as it had always been, and yet I had missed all that had been going on in the family without me. Claudie was walking now, Catherine proudly showed me that she was learning to read, Alexius was trying—unsuccessfully—to teach Boots, my cat, to ride on his shoulder, and Francis had made a high score on a mathematics exam.

  Two days after Christmas, Papa drove me to Madison in the John Deere. He tied Danny Boy to a hitching post and walked with me to the entrance of the “cathedral,” hugged me tight, called me his dear little Georgie, and told me he’d be so glad when it was Easter and I’d come home again.

  I waved goodbye and hurried inside, as happy to be back at Sacred Heart as I’d been to go home three days before.

  Spring came. Sunny days gradually replaced the dark, cold ones, and the air lost its bitter bite and began to warm. One fine day Sister Angelique announced that she was taking our class down by the lake.

  “Young ladies, today we are going to do plein air painting. That’s French for ‘open air.’” Painting out of doors was all the rage in Europe and among certain American artists, she explained. Winslow Homer was her favorite. She had a book of chromolithographs, “chromos,” like those Mrs. Mann had shown us—not only the seascapes for which Homer was famous, but also his rural scenes.

  Sister Angelique especially admired Homer’s painting of two farm boys in a pasture. She pointed out the brightness of one boy’s white shirt, and how the two are gazing at something beyond the edge of the painting. She liked to quote Homer: I always prefer a picture composed and painted outdoors. The thing is done without your knowing it.

  “That is the reason we are going to the lake,” she said.

  With our sketchpads and charcoal sticks and pencils we followed Sister Angelique down to the shore of Lake Wingra. A weathered statue of the Virgin Mary contemplated the dark water, and someone had draped a wreath of flowers around her neck. Perched on a log with the sketchpad on my knees, I drew the statue from straight on. Then I moved around behind it and tried another angle. From a third angle the light slanted on the Virgin in a different way. By the end of the afternoon, as we were preparing to climb up the hill, I had done a whole series. Now I understood what Winslow Homer meant: The thing is done without your knowing it. Light changed everything, and you didn’t even think about it—you saw it and felt it. I knew that someday I was going to paint in plein air whenever I could.

  I’d studied hard, and that had earned me a place in advanced classes in the second term. Sister Angelique chose my drawing of a duck hunter with a gun, copied from a wood engraving, and it was published in the school catalogue. At the end of the school year I was awarded the prize in ancient history and a gold pin for improvement in illustration and drawing. I even won a medal for deportment!

  Sister Angelique pinned up several of my drawings on the walls of the art studio. On each drawing she had written G. O’Keeffe in black pencil. I stared at those bold letters. I had always been Georgie, a farm girl from Sun Prairie. But when I saw my name on those drawings, I felt different—as though “G. O’Keeffe” was some other person, the artist I was on the way to becoming.

  3

  Sun Prairie, Wisconsin—Summer 1902

  BACK ON THE FARM THAT SUMMER I RETREATED TO my tower room whenever I could get away. Ida, going on thirteen and bossier than ever, and Nita, eleven and doing whatever Ida said, were thick as thieves, whispering conspiratorially whenever I was around. I suspected they had made free use of the tower room while I was away, but they claimed innocence. I was already looking forward to going back to Sacred Heart in September, to my art classes, to Sister Angelique’s pale hands fluttering over my drawings and her fluty voice urging me to do it this way, Miss O’Keeffe, and try that.

  Lena came to help out with the washing from time to time. I was always glad to see her, but something had changed.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t write to you like I promised,” Lena said. “But you know how it is.”

  I said yes, I did know.

  “I have a beau now,” she confessed.

  “A beau?” Lena’s news surprised me. I’d never thought about having a beau, myself.

  Lena nodded, her cheeks coloring as pink as a morning sky. “William.”

  “William? William Traxler?” He was the big, brawny fellow Papa had hired along with two of Lena’s brothers to help with the farm work. We sold our milk to William’s father, who owned a creamery and several other businesses in Sun Prairie.

  William had hardly a word to say when I was around. Dull, I thought. I tried to imagine Lena keeping company with him.

  I knew that Francis didn’t think much of William either. “Traxler doesn’t really have to work,” he’d said sourly after a long day in the fields cutting tobacco. “His father always gives him everything he wants. He lets the rest of us take on most of the chores whenever he can get away with it.”

  “William wants us to get married as soon as he’s saved up enough money,” Lena said now. “He wants a farm of his own.”

  Married? I was shocked. Why on earth would she want to get married? “But you’re only fifteen! You won’t be sixteen until next winter!”

  “William is almost eighteen,” she said, as though that explained anything. “And I’ll be seventeen when we actually marry. That’s plenty old enough.”

  I couldn’t imagine why Lena wanted to get married. I saw what my mother’s life was like, even with Auntie helping out with the youngest children, Mamie and Hannah in the kitchen, Lena’s mother doing the washing, plus a hired girl when extra help was needed. Mama had scarcely any time to call her own. Lena’s mother’s life must be even harder, with no daughters besides Lena to help out.

  “Well, that’s nice,” I said, insincerely. I couldn’t think what else to say.

  Lena must have known what was in my mind, because she didn’t mention it again.

  But the next time Francis grumbled that William Traxler was as lazy as a lizard on a warm rock, I s
aid, without thinking, “The mystery is that Lena’s going to marry him.”

  “I know,” he said. “Traxler’s been bragging about it.”

  When I saw my brother’s face, I remembered how he and Lena had looked at each other at Christmas. There must have been something between the two of them then, and now there was not. Now there was William. I wished I could take back what I’d just said.

  I’d looked forward to those long, hot summer days on the farm. On the Fourth of July everybody in Sun Prairie turned out for the annual picnic at Town Hall School, Auntie and Mamie baked a half dozen pies, Papa played his fiddle, and we all had a good time—except, probably, Francis, because Lena was dancing with William. There were other girls who would have been glad of a partner, but my brother didn’t seem interested.

  But in August hornworms attacked the tomatoes and the tobacco, some of the milk went bad before it got to the Traxlers’ creamery, and to make matters even worse, the complicated corn harvester Papa had bought a couple of years earlier broke down three times. The third time, Papa clenched his jaw tight and said the corn would have to be harvested by hand, and he didn’t have enough help to do that. It seemed like just one piece of bad luck after another.

  I pitched in with the chores along with Ida and Nita, but I also spent hours alone in my tower room, painting and drawing. Everything was a possible subject: vines of fat red tomatoes, regimented rows of corn, the cow barn and springhouse. A few sketches that I made of members of my family, especially one of Auntie, turned out nicely, but I didn’t much like to draw or paint likenesses of people. It was the natural world that made me want to paint.

  I loved the farm and thought I would never want to leave it, but as the time crept closer for me to go back to Sacred Heart Academy, I was glad. That’s the way it was for me: wanting to be in both places at once.

  Then, abruptly, I learned that I would not be going back. Francis and I were being sent to live with Mama’s younger sister, our aunt Lola, in Madison, and we would attend the public high school there. Ida and Nita were going to Sacred Heart instead.

  “I’m sorry, Georgie,” Mama said. “I know you’ve come to like Sacred Heart, but there’s not enough money to send all three of you. Your father and I believe you must each have the best education we can afford, and each of you must have a fair share. You’ve had yours, and now Ida and Nita must have theirs.”

  Ida would be given my black dress and my lace-trimmed black veil. The nuns had found a smaller dress for Nita from a girl who was leaving.

  I struggled not to show how upset I was, not to be going back to Sacred Heart, not to be with my friends Maureen and Agnes, not to be ridiculing the Exercise Nun or listening for Sister Angelique’s squeaking shoes and basking in her praise when she finally gave it.

  I could not stay on the farm and attend the high school in Sun Prairie, and I could not go back to Sacred Heart. I was being sent to a new school where I would know no one in a strange city. I dreaded it.

  4

  Madison, Wisconsin—Fall 1902

  I FLOUNDERED IN MADISON AS AWKWARDLY AS I had when our pond froze and I put on ice skates for the first time. Back in Sun Prairie, everybody knew I was Frank and Ida O’Keeffe’s oldest daughter. Now a river of strangers pushed past me on the bustling sidewalks of the state capital. From a small girls’ school where my life had been carefully supervised by nuns, I was plunged into a high school teeming with hundreds of students. At Sacred Heart I’d heard birds chirping and nuns singing their hymns. In Madison I endured the sound of clanging trolleys and Aunt Lola warbling her favorite Stephen Foster song, “Beautiful Dreamer.”

  It must not have bothered Francis, or if it did, he never said. But that was Francis.

  Aunt Lola lived in the drafty old house where Grandmother Totto had moved with her and her older sisters, including our mother, after Grandfather Totto went back to Hungary. Lola was a spinster schoolteacher. Being a spinster—an old maid—was not the same as being a nun. The nuns at Sacred Heart were the brides of Christ, they’d told us, and that’s why they’d never married. While Auntie was helping me pack, she’d confided that Aunt Lola’s heart had been broken by a man who’d asked her to marry him and then changed his mind and married somebody else.

  “Now she doesn’t trust men,” Auntie whispered. “Can’t say as I blame her.”

  Aunt Lola was what Papa called “high-strung.” Everything I did seemed to make her nervous, and Francis often drove her to distraction with his long, brooding silences. Her third-grade pupils must have been exceptionally well-behaved. She had a habit of talking to Francis and me as if we were third graders too.

  Still, we had a place to stay that didn’t cost our family anything except expenses for our board. Aunt Lola’s food was plain and sometimes not cooked quite enough—half-raw chicken—or else cooked a little more than it should have been—mushy vegetables—but there was always plenty of everything. Especially the vegetables.

  “Now, children,” she said in a schoolteacher voice, “it is important for us to clean our plates. Francis, will you have more beets?”

  My brother and I exchanged eye rolls. He detested beets.

  I felt guilty for even thinking of complaining, so I never did. But it was hard not to, and I was thinner than ever.

  On the first day of class, the art teacher, Miss Fellers, tripped into the classroom wearing yellow stockings and a hat with an untidy bunch of artificial violets drooping over the brim. She possessed none of the calm sensibility of Sister Angelique. The stockings and the outlandish hat together with her twittery voice made it impossible to take seriously anything she said.

  “Firstly,” she said, “you must learn to look at a plant or a flower if you wish to draw it or paint it. You must study it until you can truly see it.” Miss Fellers motioned for us to gather around her as she held up a jack-in-the-pulpit. “Please take note of the elegant shape,” she said, lifting the striped hood of the “pulpit” to reveal the “jack,” the stamen. “Observe the colors, students! The remarkable colors!”

  Jack-in-the-pulpits grew everywhere around the farm, but I’d never really looked at one before. And I’d never thought of painting a flower by looking at a real flower, not just copying a picture of a flower. It wasn’t easy to create the delicate greens and rich purples with watercolors.

  When I asked if we could paint in plein air, she dismissed the idea. “Oh dear dear dear, no! We don’t paint outdoors here,” she said. Miss Fellers was not an admirer of Winslow Homer’s seascapes and landscapes. She preferred still lifes, and the more realistic, the better. Week after week she brought bunches of flowers, piles of fruits and vegetables, armloads of dried branches, boxes of shells and stones, candles, pewter pitchers, and brass candlesticks and arranged them on a table in the center of a circle of desks, so that we each had a different perspective. If I’d chosen to paint the violets on her hat, she probably would have approved.

  One day she gave the class a new assignment. “Today you are to paint whatever you fancy, be it real or imagined. Let your inner eye see whatever it wishes to see.”

  By mid-October the temperature in Madison had dropped below freezing by nightfall, but my inner eye saw a lighthouse with foamy little waves cresting around it near a beach lined by palm trees. I’d never seen a real lighthouse or a palm tree, or walked upon a beach beside an ocean with waves breaking on the rocks, but I’d once seen a picture in a geography book, and that’s what I painted.

  Miss Fellers studied my invented scene. “You have a vivid imagination, Miss O’Keeffe, and you’ve rendered it well,” she told me with a smile so warm that I forgave her the silly hat. The violently colored stockings, too.

  In the evenings before Francis and I climbed up to our chilly bedrooms, Aunt Lola fixed us each a cup of hot cocoa. Francis was usually in a hurry to finish his cocoa and get back to his schoolwork—he was good with mathematics and didn’t have to struggle with essays the way I did—but I liked to stay at the kitchen table, nu
rsing my drink and warming my hands on the cup, listening to my aunt’s family tales until we were too sleepy to stay awake any longer.

  “Our father told our mother that he was going to Budapest to claim his lost inheritance,” Aunt Lola recalled, as though it had just happened. “I was seven years old. I remember how we waited for him to come home and make everything right.” Aunt Lola arranged three ginger cookies on a plate and set it on the table. “There were rumors that Father had taken part in a revolution when he was a young man, and perhaps after all those years he’d been arrested and thrown into prison. We didn’t know if the rumors were true or not. Our mother never stopped hoping, but Father never came back.”

  I bit into a cookie. It was as hard as a rock.

  “Our mother struggled,” Aunt Lola continued. “She didn’t have the least idea how to manage a farm. She rented the land to tenant farmers and used the money to buy this house. She wanted us all to get a good education and become successful. Or at least to marry well. But it was no easy thing to find successful husbands for all of us girls. Your mama was the lucky one. She married a handsome Irishman with a beautiful smile.”

  Francis glanced at me and winked. We knew that part of the story.

  “I was not so lucky.” Aunt Lola sighed and chased a crumb across the table. “One by one, the others moved away until I was left to rattle around alone in this old house. Then the two of you arrived!”

  The story I was waiting to hear was about the man who’d broken her heart, but she didn’t mention him.

  “You know, don’t you, that your mother wanted to study to be a doctor?” Aunt Lola asked.

  Francis and I gaped at her. Here was something entirely new. “No,” I said. “I never heard that.”

  “Girls can’t be doctors,” Francis declared flatly.

  “Of course they can!” Aunt Lola snorted. “But not many are. Well, let me tell you, children, your mother was the smartest of all us Totto girls. A real intellectual! But she followed a different path. She decided to marry Frank O’Keeffe and become a farmer’s wife. If she hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here, now would you?”