The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [33]
Chicago was such a huge place. I had prepared myself to find it a hundred times bigger than Little Rock, but I had not known it would be so dense, and so dark, and so vertical, and so flat, and so windy, and so crowded, and so smoky, and so dark, and so noisy. I had trouble understanding the way people talked, and they seemed totally unable to understand what I was saying and asking. After a particularly exasperating attempt at communicating with a streetcar conductor, I said aloud, “I might as well be in France!”
That casual remark stunned me into long and serious reflection.
Those bold artists whose work was hanging at the Institute, Seurat and Gauguin, had been French. Spotiswode Worthen had told me that all of the great painters of the last hundred years had been French, without exception (only before Fantin-Latour, of course). I had read an article in one of Spotiswode’s art magazines about an American woman with a French name, Miss Mary Cassatt, who was living in Paris, in her sixties, after having studied for years with the Impressionists, especially the one who could draw best, a man named Edgar Degas, now blind and in his seventies. Miss Cassatt was, like me, the daughter of a wealthy American banker. Would she be sympathetic to my story and situation if I could meet her and talk with her? Might she introduce me to Monsieur Degas?
I never enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute. I would never meet Mary Cassatt, let alone Edgar Degas, but I did put my trunk back on the train, after withdrawing all of the money my father had sent to the Chicago bank. I sent my father a telegram, which read: CHANGED MIND STOP GOING TO PARIS STOP YES GO AHEAD STOP YOU MAY HAVE CYRILLA STOP LOVE VIRIDIS.
The terrible guilt I should have felt for saying that was obliterated by the excitement of what I was about to do.
In New York I discovered that I would need a passport and would have to wait a few days for it, and I used the opportunity to visit the museums there, where I saw more and more of those Impressionists and the moderns. Some of the paintings had labels reading: acquired through the generosity of miss mary cassatt, and I had a constant fantasy of what the generosity of Miss Mary Cassatt was going to do for my life.
That fantasy sustained me during a horrible ocean crossing. Can you imagine the ocean, Latha? Can you picture water in every direction, with waves of it rising up fifty or sixty feet? The boat I was on, a steamship called the Lusitania, the same one that would be sunk by a submarine seven years later during the Great War, was a huge craft of over thirty thousand tons, but even with that great size it was tossed on the waves like a toy. The sea was so rough that the crew themselves became frightened and convinced that we would sink. All the passengers were sick or scared to death or both. I began to believe that death at sea would be my punishment for letting my father have Cyrilla.
But the voyage itself seemed punishment enough, and lasted nearly a week. When Nail escaped the electric chair that first time, I already knew the feeling of survival, of being given another chance. And the elation of survival stayed with me during some of the disappointments that came soon afterward: when I arrived in Paris eager to meet Miss Mary Cassatt, I discovered that the American lady had returned