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By Root 1984 0

and I could not borrow from my friends, who were no better off than I. I told Monsieur Lévy that I would have to drop out of the Académie Julian because I couldn’t pay the tuition. He suggested that I try to sell some of my paintings, and he arranged with a friend, the director of a small gallery, to give me a showing. I selected, with the help of Coco and the advice of Pablo and Max (Willy abstaining), my best fifteen paintings, including portraits of my friends, views of the Bois de Boulogne, but chiefly interiors of intimate rooms, usually without figures, and Pablo lent me some frames that fit, for the duration of the show. The gallery could give me only one week, and it was not the best season, and I sold only one painting, my portrait of Pablo, to a person who, I suspected, was simply a patron of his.

The profit from that sale lasted scarcely two weeks, and I was not able to help Coco meet the month’s rent on our appartement in Auteuil. The day I took down my show, the gallery had a last-minute visitor, my wealthy friend Marguerite Thompson. Marguerite admired the paintings although she did not want to buy one. The two of us had a Pernod together at a nearby café, and I learned that Marguerite had left the École de la Grande Chaumière, which had been too conservative for her, and was now at the École la Palette, where she was quickly becoming a little Fauve. Marguerite also wrote a weekly column for her hometown newspaper, the Fresno Morning Republican, a sort of “American in Paris” description of her experiences as an art student, and she wanted to use me and my show as the subject of this week’s column, in which she intended to mention my “famous” friends: Willy, Coco, and especially Pablo.

“I didn’t know they were so famous,” I said.

“Close friends are never famous,” Marguerite said, and took out her notebook and began to ask me questions about them.

“Do they pay you for writing the column?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Marguerite. “Ten dollars a throw.”

Without waiting to see if my father was going to answer my letter, I wrote to the editor of the Arkansas Gazette, enclosing a sample of one of Marguerite’s columns and asking if the Gazette might be interested in having me write something similar for them, on a weekly basis, or even daily, if they wanted it.

Waiting for a reply from the Gazette sustained me through a dark period of poverty that culminated in the arrival of this letter from home:

Dear Viridis—

Glad to hear from you at last. Wondered whatever had become of you. Sounds like you are doing okay. Always wanted to see Gay Paree myself but never could. Sounds like there is lots to see there and lots to do. Glad to know the teachers think you are doing okay.

Wish we could say the same but things are not going too hot here. Problems with your sister. The boys are all doing okay, Matthew got married in June, didn’t know where to send you the invite. Your mother stays over to Hot Springs just about all the time. Doctors don’t seem to know what to do, just keep her happy and reasonable sober.

Viridis, I am not dictating this to my secretary but writing it out myself. You should have known that Cyrilla could never match up to you. I don’t know why I let you think that. She just plain could not take it, and I didn’t know what to do. I guess I was desperate and tried too hard, and she couldn’t take it, and tried to do away with herself. You don’t want to hear the details, it would make you feel as awful as I did. I am going broke paying for her fancy treatments now on top of your mother’s.

So if you think I’ve got loads of money laying around loose to keep you in high style in Gay Paree, you got another guess or two coming to you, girl. I think you better just catch the next boat home. I mean this. You do what I tell you, and come right on home. The enclosed draft on Credet Lyonnaize (sp) is to pay for your boat ticket, and your train ticket from NY to LR, and not for anything else, hear me?

Your poor old father really does love you and miss you something terrible and can’t wait to hold you again