The Artist Colony Page 4

  Rosie poured her another cup of tea. When Sarah picked it up, it took both her hands to hold it steady. She put it back down.

  She suddenly sensed her sister watching them from the entryway and turned to look, but of course she wasn’t actually there.

  “It was very brave of you to come all this way, dearie, not knowing what you’d have to face when you got here.”

  “I don’t think I had a choice,” Sarah said with unexpected irritation.

  Rosie’s brows furrowed at her tone and was about to say something when Sarah said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’m very glad to be here and I’m grateful for your invitation. It’s just my sister’s death was a terrible shock and then to find out it was a suicide. And now for you to suggest it was a murder is a bit too much for me to take in right now.” She shifted to the edge of the couch and was about to cross her legs when Albert came bounding back into the room and jumped into her lap as if she’d called him.

  “It’s me that should be apologizing,” said Rosie. “I shouldn’t have brought this up when you just got here.”

  She brought out her blue packet of Gauloises and looked around for an ashtray. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Not you too! Why do all you girls have to smoke those stinky coffin nails? I can’t stop you, but I do have my rules and one of them is: No smoking in my home.”

  Sarah slipped the packet back into her pocket and tried not to show her irritation.

  Rosie stood up and straightened her apron. “Why don’t you and Albert take a walk on the beach? Get to know the place a little.” She smiled down at the small dog who jumped off Sarah’s lap and stood in front of Rosie wagging his tail. “He’ll be pleased to show you around.” Albert cocked his head at Sarah when she stood up.

  “That’s what Ada would do when she needed a cigarette,” said Rosie. As if on cue, Albert ran into the kitchen, came back with a leash hanging from his mouth, and balanced on his hind legs. Ada had told Sarah how smart Albert was and how quickly he learned, but seeing him actually do such an entertaining trick made her laugh, which was a relief to both women and probably Albert, too.

  “Go on now, dear girl,” said Rosie. “An afternoon constitutional is just what you need. I’ll show you your room upstairs when you get back. Tomorrow we can talk about Ada. I’m here to help you in any way I can.”

  —3—

  In Rosie’s front garden, a budding scarlet rose caught Sarah’s attention. It was a pigment found in the cinnabar mineral used in Renaissance paintings, an expensive pigment she coveted in her sketch box. She breathed in the various fragrances. Monet’s impressionistic pigments of yellow, orange, vermilion, crimson, violet, blue, and green were all visible in the blooming garden. This was her world and she hesitated to step out of it, but Albert was leaning against her leg, the leash still in his mouth. She bent down and clipped it on his collar.

  Outside the fenced garden, Camino Real was an undulating dirt road that stretched in either direction. In the afternoon light the Bay’s cresting waves could be heard and seen between a few cottages widely separated by scrub-covered empty lots. She felt uneasy, even frightened by these isolated cottages, where behind their walls cruelty could easily go unnoticed.

  She recognized the Monterey cypresses from Ada’s paintings. The sinewy silver trunks made strong by coastal gales, their masculine limbs twisted into mythical forms by the forces of nature.

  Nose to the ground, Albert pulled Sarah across the road, stopping to sniff the wide trunk of an ancient oak.

  Sarah lit a cigarette and exhaled the blue-gray smoke skyward through the oak’s gnarly limbs.

  Albert stopped in front of the closed gate of a brown-shingled cottage. Weeds were beginning to sprout on the pebble path leading up to its covered porch. The geraniums planted in pale blue window boxes had lost their blooms, their leaves burnt to a crisp under the relentless hot sun. The locked and shuttered windows indifferent to their thirst. No one was at home to care.

  The little dog scratched on the gate and whimpered. Sarah knelt down and anxiously said, “What’s wrong, Albert?”

  And then she saw it. A rough wooden plank was nailed to the gate. Its carved letters spelled out The Sketch Box. Her heart clenched. It was the name Ada had given her cottage. Albert was begging Sarah to open the gate so he could go home.

  Across the road, on the second floor of Rosie’s lodge, a curtain fluttered in an open window. The bedroom window where Ada had written letters to Sarah describing the Sketch Box as it was being built. Sarah’s grief erupted into anger and resentment. This is the cottage that had been built with the money Ada made by selling their apartment in Manhattan, and Ada had never asked Sarah’s permission to sell it. As always, she’d never considered what Sarah wanted, and then assumed her sister would enjoy hearing about the construction. Sarah never wrote back.

  She saw a shadow behind the curtain. She waved, but it was just a trick of light. No one waved back.

  Albert kept scratching on the gate and moaning. Sarah’s unwilling hand opened the latch and he ran up to the front door. He barked and jumped up trying to turn the doorknob.

  Sarah ran up to him. “She’s not here, Albert. Ada’s not here. She doesn’t live here anymore. Nor do you.” He wasn’t listening.

  She finally had to pick him up and didn’t set him down until they were back on the other side of the closed gate. Fortunately, Albert perked up when he saw a squirrel and took off with Sarah holding on to the leash. She stumbled over the knobby roots of oak trees as he chased after his prey. If only she could be so easily distracted by a squirrel when her feelings for her sister turned into unwanted resentment and bitterness.

  When they reached the dune overlooking the beach, Sarah dropped down on a bench in front of the Carmel Bath House to catch her breath and fan her flushed face. The wood-framed structure was spacious and had a gorgeous view of the Bay through its wide, glass windows. Ada had told her the Bath House was a gathering place for Carmel’s artist colony. Through the open door, she watched carefree men and women laughing. Near a radio console, two young women were singing along to Al Jolson’s hit song, “California, Here I Come.”

  A seagull cawed and soared over the turquoise surf breaking on a beautiful stretch of white sand. Swimmers and sunbathers were scattered along the beach to the south. Sounds of delight were carried in the breeze from children as they flirted with the waves and threw sticks to their dogs to fetch.

  “Carmel Bay is a rich palette of blues and violets and titanium white hues worthy of a thousand or more brushstrokes,” her sister had written. “You have to come see it for yourself. You’ll be so happy here.”

  It was her attempt to reach through Sarah’s resentment with their shared love of pigments, another attempt to share her artist paradise with her sister.

  Sarah looked up at the cloudless sky. I’m sorry, Ada. I should have answered your letters, but I couldn’t forgive you for selling our apartment, not even now.

  The sun’s rays were hot and Sarah took off her jacket and let her blouse hang outside her skirt. What was the point of raking over the past, she thought. I can’t change what happened.

  Directly below and to her right, a dozen or so young women stood in front of sketch boxes unfolded into easels propped up on tripods stuck in the sand. They dipped their paintbrushes into large handheld palette boards and brushed dabs of paint across their canvases.

  She and Ada had often spent summers on the New England coast painting together like this. And now you’re gone and I’ve come to bury you. Why did you do it, Ada? When you had so much to live for? And why, when I so desperately need you to talk to me, are you silent?

  Sarah frowned at her shiny black patent pumps, unbuckled the straps, stuffed the stockings in the jacket pocket, and dug her cramped toes into the warm sand while watching a slightly stooped gentleman in a Panama hat stop behind each painter, point at the canvas on her easel with a teacher’s pointing stick, speak briefly, and move on to t
he next student. All the women nodded deferentially when he spoke.

  She recognized Henry Champlin, the renowned pleinairist and art teacher. Sixteen years ago, Ada was a student at his summer art school in Rhode Island.

  When her sister came home, brown from the sun and feeling sassy, she hung the portrait she’d painted of him over her bed and pointed out to Sarah his handlebar moustache and rusty orange beard that ended in a sharp point on his chest. “His upper whiskers tickled when he kissed me. He’d get so angry when I giggled.”

  Fourteen-year-old Sarah, still too young to have been kissed, was put off by the thought of Ada kissing a man twice her age. She wouldn’t have wanted his scratchy whiskers anywhere near her face, or Ada’s face for that matter. But his portrait had been painted by her talented sister and she made a study of it as she did with all of Ada’s paintings.

  It was Champlin who had introduced Ada to Carmel. He had closed his Rhode Island school and taught here in the summers. When he offered Ada a teaching position, she jumped at the opportunity.

  By then, Sarah and Ada were both living in New York with Aunt Helen, their mother’s sister. She’d offered to share her Manhattan apartment with them after Ada had graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and gotten her first teaching job at the Art Students League on 57th Street.

  Sarah had been jealous of Ada’s first summer spent in Carmel while she stayed behind in the stifling hot apartment to take care of Aunt Helen, who had become an invalid. After their aunt died, Ada continued to teach summer classes in Carmel and Sarah, never invited to join her, found work in Manhattan on her school vacations.

  Albert tilted his head and gazed curiously up at her as if to say, “Why are we stopping here? I want to run on the beach.”

  Sarah freed him from his leash and he scampered down the sand dune. She contemplated the steep drop and decided to take the rope handrail that led down through the sunbathers to the water’s edge.

  As she dipped her feet in the water, a hefty wave took her by surprise and splashed water on her skirt. She laughed, pulled the skirt above her knees, and pedaled backward like the children dancing and laughing around her.

  As children, she and Ada had often played like this on Lake Michigan. Ada had taught her to swim, if throwing her into the water and letting her fend for herself was teaching. If not a swimming lesson, it was certainly a lesson on survival.

  But now Sarah shrank back from the waves, afraid of the strong current that had dragged Ada underwater.

  She walked southward along the shore, throwing a stick to Albert who happily retrieved it over and over again. Eventually a granite promontory, half buried under the incoming tide, blocked their progress. Another Ada painting, she thought. Being in Carmel was like walking through an exhibition of Ada’s work.

  They turned back.

  When Sarah saw the student painters again, the mid-afternoon sun had cast their shadows across the sand. Several were sitting and others were standing, posed like Georges Seurat’s painting Un Dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte—Parisians wearing sunhats and straw boaters or berets, staring out at the sailboats on the Seine river.

  Women’s fashion had noticeably changed since Seurat’s pastel painting of corseted silhouettes. These women on Carmel Beach had lived through the Great War, had earned their right to vote, and thrown away their corsets, bustles, layered underclothes, padding, and somber fabrics. Their blazing red, yellow, and orange blouses were like freedom banners waving in the sea breeze.

  Several men in shirtsleeves and rolled-up trousers were squatting nearby next to a rocky outcrop. Their hands were underwater and when they brought up large black shells shaped like human ears, they raised them above their heads and shouted, “I got one!”

  Sarah was fascinated by the colorful beach scene and would’ve sketched it if she’d brought her drawing pad.

  Albert seemed to recognize some of the students lounging on a beach blanket next to their folded-away sketch boxes. He hurried over to say hello.

  A robust young man came over to Sarah wearing a wide grin. “Hi! My name is Tony Mac Ginnis. My friends call me Mac.” He stuck out his hand, ready to shake hers, seemingly not intimidated that she towered over him.

  “Sarah Cunningham,” she said, brushing the sand off her hand before shaking his.

  “Well, you arrived just in time, Miss Cunningham. We’re just about to fry up some abalone.”

  “I’m not sure I know what that is?”

  “What is abalone? Holy cow! Where have you been?” His eyes roamed curiously over her couture suit and her polished pumps hanging by their straps in her hand. “Hmm. A stranger to our exotic shores I see. C’mon over and meet my friends.”

  “Are you sure it’s all right? I don’t want to intrude on your party.”

  “Don’t worry. There’s more than enough abalone to go around.”

  “Hey everyone, we have a visitor,” announced Tony. “This is Sarah Cunningham. Pour her a glass of wine and make her welcome while we men fire up the barbecue.”

  “Wine?” As an expatriate living in Paris, she was often teased about the absurdity of Amendment Eighteen. If there had been laws in France outlawing alcohol consumption there would’ve been another revolution. “I thought it was illegal to drink alcohol in the States?”

  “Why, Miss Cunningham,” said Tony, “you really are new here. Carmel is wine country. It’s not illegal to harvest your own grapes and drink your own wine.”

  The women lounging on the beach were very friendly—not like in Paris or New York where people were generally suspicious of one another. She returned their smiles and took the generously poured glass. They made room for her on the blanket and she tried to make herself less conspicuous by folding her pale legs under the tight skirt that was far more appropriate on the Champs-Élysée than on the beach in Carmel, California.

  The students were discussing the paintings of the abstractionist Arthur Dove, whom Sarah had met in Manhattan. At seventeen, she’d been lucky enough, with her sister’s help, to get a job as a receptionist at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, on Fifth Avenue. Dove frequently visited 291, a magnet for modern artists whose work wasn’t accepted at the more traditional galleries. When Stieglitz exhibited Dove’s abstract paintings based on natural forms, it was a revelation for Sarah—the first time she’d seen any work similar to what she was trying to express. Dove and the other artists she met at the gallery were a major influence in her decision to study modern art in Paris. But then the war came, and she didn’t have a chance to fulfill her dream until several years later.

  It seemed odd that Henry Champlin’s students were talking about Dove with such enthusiasm, when the traditionalist believed you should paint only what you see and not express what you feel inside. She listened to the women while driftwood logs crackled in a nearby fire pit and sparks flew through the azure air. Her body finally relaxed.

  Tony and the other men brought their abalone catch to the fire pit, scooped out the shells, hammered the flesh, and laid them on the red-hot grill where they hissed and sizzled.

  As promised, her host brought her slices of grilled abalone, their luminescent shells for plates. She made the mistake of asking for a fork.

  “A fork?” He laughed. “What do you think this is, the Ritz? We eat it with our hands. It tastes better that way.”

  The abalone puckered its slimy gray lips and Sarah’s stomach turned over in revolt. When she finally managed to fight off her revulsion and bite down on the crunchy gray shellfish, her bravery was rewarded with a satisfying buttery taste.

  “This is really good,” she said between mouthfuls.

  “Spoken like a local,” said Tony. “That’s why the Japanese and the other immigrants came here in the first place. And us poor artists, too. We all feed off the Pacific. You can’t tell by looking out there, but all of Monterey Bay is a giant fishbowl. You can eat a different kind of fish every day if you’re clever enough to catch them. Then all you ne
ed is a vegetable garden in your backyard and you’ll never go hungry. A working artist’s paradise, I’d say.”

  She held up the empty abalone shell to the sunlight. It reminded her of the inlaid mother-of-pearl cigarette lighter that Ada had lit their cigarettes with at Keens; she said it had been a gift from deVrais. After Sarah had admired it, Ada wanted her to have it. But after Ada had told her what a despicable person he was, Sarah gave it back.

  Her thoughts were interrupted when Henry Champlin squatted next to her on the blanket. He was as overdressed as she was, maybe even more so. A finely weaved Panama hat, a buttoned-up dark brown waistcoat, and rolled-up linen pants similar to what he wore in his portrait. Way too archaic for an art class on the beach, but he was known for his eccentricities. She hid her smile at the incongruity of his bare feet.

  Up close, the manicured moustache that had tickled Ada’s young lips sixteen years ago had thinned and the orange beard had faded to gray, but his light brown eyes hadn’t lost their teasing, mischievous glint that Ada had duplicated so well in the portrait that Sarah had copied.

  He leaned toward her. “Hello, I’m Henry Champlin.”

  “Sarah Cunningham,” she said, reaching out her hand but then quickly pulling it back when she realized it was covered in abalone juice. She refused his offer of a pressed linen handkerchief and wiped her hand on the corner of the blanket she was sitting on.

  When she settled back down, he put on his monocle and leaned uncomfortably close. “Haven’t we met?”

  “No,” she replied nervously, “but you knew my sister, Ada Davenport.”

  An awkward silence fell between them.

  “Why of course,” he finally said. “The likeness is obvious. You must think I’m an old fool not to recognize you even with this silly contraption.” He put away his monocle. “I am so sorry, my dear girl. Every day I ask myself if there wasn’t something I could’ve done to prevent Ada from—”