The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [32]
“That body,” Spotiswode Worthen managed slowly to speak, “was found, with a large rock tied to the neck, in the river, downstream a ways.”
I tried to lose myself in my riding: with all the fervor I had devoted to painting and drawing, I studied and practiced manège, a fancy word for fancy horsemanship. At a time when most women still rode sidesaddle in their long dresses, I raised eyebrows with my jodhpurs and English jumping saddle. I took Géricault for long rides in Pulaski Heights, west of Little Rock; I rode out as far as Pinnacle Mountain, and I rode back so fast and furious that passersby thought I was being pursued. Sometimes mounted policemen did pursue me, to see if I needed assistance or to find out why a woman was wearing pants in the city limits of Little Rock, but they never could catch me or stop me. I jumped ever-higher fences and walls and fallen tree trunks, anything that got in my way. It is a wonder I didn’t break my neck. I took lessons in how to fall, and I had several falls, and more than once I was cut and bruised but never broke anything…except, eventually, one of Géricault’s legs, broken so badly that he had to be shot.
The day after Géricault was shot, in August of 1908, I packed a trunk and took a train for Chicago. I had been gone for several days before my mother or sister or the one brother still at home, Henry, noticed that I was missing, and Cyrilla wrote to tell me how they expressed astonishment that Daddy had not only permitted me to leave but had wired a Chicago bank with funds sufficient to keep me there for a year. Was he mellowing in his middle age? Did he feel guilty for depriving me of my art? He wasn’t simply letting me leave the nest, was he? How would they all do without me? How would Daddy do without me? He was saying he hoped that Cyrilla could learn to take my place, and nobody knew then, yet, just exactly what he meant, but Cyrilla knew, and she asked me in the letter if it was true that she was going to be expected to substitute for me in that regard as well. I told her I would not let him do that to her.
Two bronze lions flanked the entrance to the Chicago Art Institute, a huge new building in the popular Italian Renaissance style. I felt when I passed between the lions the same way the ancient Hittites and the Mycenaeans felt at their lion gates—that I was acquiring the animals’ strength and energy, that I could do anything I wanted, that nothing was going to stop me. Thus I was prepared for the shock of the pictures I saw inside the museum. Remember, now, I had never seen art in the original before, except for a few paintings of his own that Spotiswode had shown me. There were no museums in Arkansas. The poor reproductions in black-and-white in the cheap art books I owned or could borrow had not prepared me for encountering the originals. Now I saw why Spotiswode had abhorred the Impressionists: they violated all the rules he had drilled into me. And the modern artists, more recent than the Impressionists, were even more extravagant. I stood a long time before an enormous tapestry-like park scene done all in tiny dots by an artist named Georges Seurat. But even his color was mild compared with that of another Frenchman by the name of Paul Gauguin, who, I was sad to discover, had died five years before. If only I could have studied with him instead of with Spotiswode! I spent a very long time standing in front of the paintings by Gauguin.
Finally I tore myself away from the museum and visited the classrooms and studios. The fall semester had not begun, but the rooms were ready, row upon row of easels like a factory of some sort, and the walls held examples of student work from the previous year. I examined these, finding the drawings and paintings staid