Reaching out with my left hand, my fingers felt for the edge of the smooth paper. I had my boundary and began to draw. The air around me grew cooler and swirled like a vortex, as if I were caught in an unrelenting current, the way it sometimes did. A harbinger of disaster. I wanted to stop, but once I’d begun a session, I wasn’t capable of ending it prematurely.
Sittings for full shadow portraits, as I called them, took place over several days at the Tenth Street studios where William Merritt Chase had once had his own studio and I now had mine. This sketch was merely a party favor. An amuse-bouche of what I could do. A live advertisement for more work. I took every commission my brother Sebastian arranged for me, but it was difficult for him to manage my career from across the ocean in France. I needed to supplement my income.
The new year promised to be my best ever. I was becoming wildly popular. When I worked, I wore a uniform of a simple white smock over a dark skirt, but at parties I had the appearance of a chic guest—dressed in the fashionable slim shift that hit just above the knees with feathers and fringe, bejeweled in the bespoke pieces my sister Opaline created for me. I spoke with a French accent and provided just the kind of entertainment the city’s avant-garde hostesses craved. It was only February, and I was booked through May.
That cold night, with the guests partying on around me, my hand moved quickly as I filled the page with the image developing in the deepest recesses of my mind. The process, a mystery even to me, involved only two steps.
First, for a period of about three minutes, I studied the sitter’s face, noticing its planes and curves, lines and contours. I didn’t search. Didn’t question. Didn’t engage in conversation. I just observed. Usually, my sitter squirmed a little after the first ten or twenty seconds. Most people are unaccustomed to being specimens. My staring was often uncomfortable for them. Only Tommy Prout, the man I was engaged to, had enjoyed it, but he’d been flirting. And he—unlike anyone I’d ever met—had no shadow secrets. Not one. Probably what attracted me to him. That and his love of art. His parents were collectors, and he treated me like one of the masterpieces that graced the walls of their Beekman Place mansion. I, foolishly, thought that would be enough.
During a session, once I burned the sitter’s face into my mind, I would slip on my blindfold, shut out the noise of the party, and concentrate on hearing the sounds of the sea stored in my memory. And then, listening to the waves pound the shore, I would start to draw, letting my imagination take over. It is easier to describe it thus, but in fact it was my second sight that took over.
Because, you see, I was not just an artist. I was a woman who had been blinded as a child and whose sight had been brought back by magick. And in the process, I had been given a gift—or, depending on your point of view, a curse. I had the ability not just to see people for who they were but also to see the secrets they harbored. The darkest, most hidden desires of their souls.
And like a thief, I plucked those images from their hearts and turned them into a parlor game. Surrealistic caricatures they could take home and frame. Or burn. And therein lay the source of my compassion, my sorrow, and my own ruination.
Chapter 2
I had already sketched a dozen guests by midnight on that cold February 5, 1925, in Betsy and Fred Steward’s penthouse. I’d delighted and surprised my sitters with silly secrets and made them ask over and over again how I knew this or that about them.
“I hadn’t even told my wife I was planning that!”
“I only found out yesterday. How did you know?”
“Yes, yes, I had forgotten all about that little escapade, it was so long ago!”
Clara Schiff was the last portrait of the evening. Twelve was my limit, but my employer for the night had begged me to do just one more, for it was Clara’s birthday that week.
I agreed. But I shouldn’t have. I was a little tipsy and very tired. Is that an excuse? If I’d been more alert, would I have realized that the image I was committing to paper was so incendiary?
I’ll never know, but I don’t think so. I’ve never been adept at censoring the scenes that come out of the shadows. A little more than four years before, I’d done a painting that changed the entire trajectory of my future. It haunted me still. If only I were able to understand more about the images that came to me. Not just for poor Clara’s sake. But for my own.
She sat in the black velvet armchair Betsy Steward had set up next to my easel and stool, in the corner of the living room adjacent to the terrace doors. For ten minutes, I drew her portrait. Quite a long time when you are wearing a blindfold. Even longer for the person sitting and watching the artist draw and not being able to see the sketch.
The graphite in my silver pencil, number 5B, glided over the eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch cream-colored, smooth-grain stock as smoothly as swimming in a currentless sea. The movement of my hand, the pressure of the stylus, all part of the sensuous nature of the act. The paper took the line and held it in a lover’s gesture. The sensation never ceased to thrill me.
For that reason and more, I am particular about my supplies. In a pinch, I went to Sam Flax, where the quality and variety were the best I could find in New York. But I preferred the shipments my brother sent from Sennelier, on the Left Bank. My mother had bought her very first paints there in 1894 with money she made by pawning a jeweled jade frog she had stolen from my great-grandmother. It was a story I loved to hear her tell when I was a little girl. I’d picture her pocketing the bibelot, frightened that she was going to be caught but desperate to get money for her supplies. Then I’d see her standing on the line at the pawnbroker’s with my father, whom she’d only met a week before. As she described it all, I would experience the wonder of her walking into Sennelier’s marvelous shop for the first time. Looking around at the shelves and shelves of paper, paints, crayons, pastels, easels, canvases—an Ali Baba’s cave of treasures for any artist.
My mother and I are descended from a long line of artists going back to the sixteenth century, when my ancestor, a famous courtesan named La Lune, seduced an even more famous painter, Cherubino, into teaching her how to paint in exchange for being his muse.
For a while, the arrangement worked. Then La Lune made the mistake of falling in love with him. Cherubino returned her emotions, but then he cast her aside for Emperor Rudolf of Prague, no less.
Distraught but determined to win Cherubino back, La Lune traded her most valuable jewels for an old crone’s lessons in witchery. The plan was to cast a spell to make her irresistible to her lover once again.
But the spell failed.