Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 49

John Singer Sargent was ri?ing through Fanny’s wardrobe. The painter pulled out a goldthreaded white  sari she  had bought  on  a  whim in  London.  “Do  you mind?” he  asked, holding it up to the light from the window.

When she appeared in the sari, Sargent seated her in a chair against a wall. “The shoes, Mrs. Stevenson. I wonder if you might …”

“Am I to understand that you want me barefoot?”

“Now, Fan, you know perfectly well you go around here in bare feet,” Louis chimed in from the other side of the bedroom, where he was brushing off his velvet jacket.
“And the shawl,” the artist said thoughtfully. He lifted the shimmering fabric o? her shoulders, examined her without it, then draped it over her head so it partly concealed her face.

She had worked as a  painter long  enough  to know what e?ect he was after for the portrait of Fanny with her famous husband: Sargent wanted to present her as truly exotic. If  she hadn’t been  party  to draping  models herself,  she might have refused to pose.  It wasn’t that she was afraid to cooperate with another artist’s vision of “an artistic couple,” as he phrased it. But she suspected that, sweet as he was, she could not entirely trust him.
Earlier, Sargent had done a  portrait of Louis, and the end result was strange indeed. Louis looked like a weird, bony, girlishly pretty aesthete. Fanny had tossed the ?nished painting into the garbage bin after Sargent left. The artist hadn’t liked the ?rst painting, either, and was back to try again. The young man was a good friend of Will Low, and these sittings were a favor to Sargent in the wake of a scandal that had erupted the previous year at the Paris salon. He had painted a portrait of a socialite in a revealing black dress, with one tiny strap falling suggestively o? her white shoulder. The picture’s overt sensuality caused a furor at the exhibition and sent the painter scurrying to London, where he was now living and trying to rescue his reputation as a portraitist by painting his friends and acquintances. It would not help Fanny’s reputation among Louis’s friends if she appeared uncooperative or haughty. Still, she couldn’t dispel the creeping feeling she was about to be roasted and served up by John Singer Sargent.

Louis was more sanguine about the intrusion into their lives. He was feeling better, and the presence of the visitor summoned a burst of energy in him. To fend o? boredom, he

employed Adelaide Boodle to read aloud from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Louis had just ?nished reading a couple of nights earlier, already reread, and was ravenous to read again.

“A novel?” Sargent asked glumly.

“Ah, he’s brilliant!” Louis said. “You’ll love the story.” Fanny could tell the artist detested the distraction. Soon  Adelaide’s high-pitched English  accent was wrapping  itself around Huck’s American backwoods conversations, full of hain’ts and reckons and looky heres.
Now Sargent was arranging her husband in the foreground. Louis managed to stand still for a while, though she knew he couldn’t sustain it. In no time, he was pacing back and forth in his usual manner, one hand stroking his mustache as Adelaide read, the other hand ?uttering  in  and out  of  his  pocket,  while  the  artist’s  brush  darted like  a  hummingbird between his canvas and paints.

After the ?rst sitting, Louis and Fanny looked at the canvas of their dual portrait. Only Louis had been sketched in so far, but the lines already captured his fitful bursts of motion.
“I believe he has done a good job on my hand,” Louis said. “It appears to be moving even now.”

“It expresses the whole man,” Fanny said.

Three  days  later,  when  Fanny  viewed  the  nearly  ?nished  painting,  her  enthusiasm vanished.  Sargent  had  captured  Louis’s  youthful  face,  his  intense  brown  eyes,  his preoccupied brilliance. On canvas as in real life, Louis seethed with intellectual energy. The image of herself, however, deeply disturbed her. He had cast her as a sort of harem woman with painted rings on her toes and black lines around her eyes. It looked nothing like her. More disturbing was how insigni?cant she was in the painting compared to Louis. She was cut in half, pushed off the side of the canvas.

“I am a cipher under a shadow,” she remarked glumly to Sargent as she stared at the portrait on his easel.

“Yes, “ the painter admitted in a cheery tone. “Now that you say it, I suppose you are.” “I like it, though it is damned queer,” Louis said after Sargent had departed. “I look like a
madman—a caged maniac pacing about—”

“—while I sit at the edge looking colorful. An urn might have served just as well. Where on earth will it hang?”

“In one wealthy woman’s parlor behind a potted fern,” he said. “No one will see it.”

As it turned out, Sargent decided to give it to them. “I can’t stand it,” she told Louis when he hung it on the sitting room wall, “but at least it won’t be exhibited in some gallery.”
“Oh, come now,” he said, “it’s quite interesting. Let’s live with it for a while.” The painting annoyed Fanny whenever it caught her eye. No one else would notice, but
never had it been so obvious that she was being set out on the periphery.
It was not the ?rst time. People befriended them because of Louis. She understood; he was so lovable. But she had grown weary of letters written only to him, after all the e?ort she had invested in his friends. She received the occasional letter from Colvin or Symonds and sometimes a  cha?ng one from Henley criticizing her for some perceived misdeed— masked,  of  course,  as  friendly  joking.  To  Louis’s  old  crowd,  she  would  always  be  an interloper.

The exceptions were Sidney Colvin and Fanny Sitwell. When they came to visit in the summer, Fanny poured out her soul to the woman  she had least expected to become a confidante. And yet Fanny Sitwell was just that.

While Colvin sat with Louis in the garden to sit, the two women headed to town for a walk. Around Fanny’s neck hung a pair of ?eld glasses for bird viewing. They walked down the chine through a stand of pines where the smell of resin filled the air.
“Louis’s spirits seem good,” Fanny Sitwell remarked as they gingerly descended a rustic stairway.

“You always put the best face on things, my friend. His health is just plain bad.” “I’m so sorry for both of you. You must be exhausted.”

Fanny shrugged. “I have always taken care of other people. I suppose I am used to being tired. That’s not what frustrates me most.”

Fanny Sitwell’s eyebrows rose quizzically. “I have become invisible,” Fanny said. “Oh,” her friend responded.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Fanny said. “I haven’t any interest in blaming men. I happen to like them, especially educated men. That’s why it has come as a surprise to ?nd such offensive attitudes among my husband’s friends. Louis cannot see it. He thinks I imagine it.” If Fanny Sitwell was surprised by the outburst, she didn’t show it. She said,  “We were raised to be companions and mothers.”

“If I seek to make a mark of my own, am I not a woman, then?”

“You know how I feel about all this,” Fanny Sitwell said.  “You simply have to move forward despite all the notions about how we are supposed to be.”

“Heaven knows you have made a life for yourself …”

“I didn’t have a job when I ?rst met Louis, you know. It would have been unacceptable for a vicar’s wife to be out in the workplace. But when my ?rst son died … After the fog, a clarity arrives, as you know. I knew I would separate from my husband, and I had to ?nd work  to  survive.  The  secretarial  job  at  the  women’s  college  came  some  months  later, through friends. It freed me.”

They sat down on a bench. She took Fanny Sitwell’s hand in her own. “You are a boon to me. What would I do without you? Some days I feel like such an oddity in this place. “