Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [46]
Her brothers protested when they were left in Alice’s care. She made them eat their dinner one at a time, all off the same dish she had eaten from first, so that she’d have to wash only one plate instead of five and would have more time to sit on the stoop and chat with Rita, or to go upstairs and draw.
“The food’s always cold by the time the plate gets to me!” Timmy would complain to their mother, who would then give Alice a lecture on the virtues of etiquette and cleanliness.
“You’ll make an awful housewife with an attitude like that,” her mother said once, and Alice felt almost proud. She couldn’t imagine herself as a mother or a wife. She had never taken to children, and she had too often been forced to care for the ones in her house—to look after them, to feed them, to scold them. By the time she reached high school, she was done with raising kids. She had begun planning her escape. Or, if not planning it exactly, then wishing for it.
No respectable lady Alice knew had done anything but have children. The only single adult women in their family were nuns, or Aunt Rose, who had divorced her rumrunner husband and moved to New York City, where she now worked at the makeup counter at Macy’s in Herald Square. Their father referred to Rose as “that selfish harlot” whenever her name came up. He wouldn’t allow their mother to see her. Alice wanted to run away to New York and live with her aunt, but Rose had told her in a letter that she slept in a boardinghouse full of derelicts and drunks, and that was no place for a young girl.
When she was fifteen, Alice was painting pictures with a babysitting charge one evening when his mother came home from work. Mrs. Bloom was a sophisticated Jewish lady with dark hair and eyes, and rumor had it she had married down. She and her husband owned a frame shop in Upham’s Corner, which always seemed to close for the day right after lunch.
She put her purse on the table that night and looked at what Alice had done.
“You’re very talented,” she said. “You know that? With the proper training, I think you might really blossom.”
Alice perked up at the comment, but immediately shrugged it off. She imagined her father and brothers laughing when she told them. She left the picture behind on the table when she went home, to show how little she cared.
The next time she came by, Mrs. Bloom said, “I showed that painting of yours to my husband, who may not have an ounce of business sense in his head, but what he does have is an excellent eye. He agreed with me. You’re good, Alice. You should study art.”
Mrs. Bloom gave her a quarter to take the boy to the Gardner Museum on the trolley. He fussed all afternoon, but Alice hardly noticed: she had never been there before and she was mesmerized. A plaque that hung in the vestibule revealed that Isabella Stewart Gardner, a great patroness of the arts, had built a mansion in Boston made to look like an Italian palace. Later, her home was turned into a museum and named in her honor. She had been painted by John Singer Sargent, and she threw the most elaborate dinners, full of great thinkers and artists. She traveled the world and studied in Paris.
This was the sort of woman Alice wanted to be. Right then and there, she decided that one day she would become a famous painter. She would attend college in Paris and sell her paintings to wealthy Frenchmen. She could get an apartment on the Seine and live in peace, without a hundred little boy feet rumbling around downstairs.
A year passed. The Bloom family moved to Brookline. When they left, Mrs. Bloom gave Alice a beautiful sketch pad with a real leather cover. “Don’t give up,” she said.
Alice promised she wouldn’t, though Mrs. Bloom’s tone sent a chill