Ron Nyren

Dictionary of Departed Artists
by Ron Nyren

(Originally published in Beloit Fiction Journal, vol 35, Spring 2022) 

Before I met Gladys Marie Hobart, I’d experienced the world beyond only once. Early Christmas morning, 1904, I woke to someone climbing into my bed and knew without looking that it was my little brother William, who had died that spring.

It thrilled me to hear his snuffling breath again as he fell asleep beside me. I wanted to roll over and watch his eyes roaming under his closed lids, but I feared he would disappear. When I couldn’t stand it, I turned. He was gone. Silence filled the bed. I wept, cursing the dog who had bitten him, furious because we’d been too slow to save him.

I took no pleasure in opening my presents: a dress my mother had sewn, colored pencils from my father. Winter in Elyria, Ohio, had silenced the world with snow, and my parents spoke little. Later, I curled in bed and pretended to hold William in my arms. But I knew his soul had gone far away.

For several Christmas mornings after, I listened intently on waking, hoping to hear him. Eventually, I told myself that I’d only been dreaming, that the spirit world remained hidden until we passed away, as our church taught.

•

I didn’t introduce myself to Gladys until February 1913, the middle of my second year at the San Francisco Art Institute, though I knew of her before then. Most other students moved gracelessly through the halls—slouching, preening, skulking—but she glided. The dreaminess in her gaze must have kept a cordial boundary around her, because I rarely saw anyone link arms with her or gossip in her ear. She’d won prizes for her sculptures, and each year she’d received a scholarship. As far as I could tell, no one resented her.

I found her eating lunch on the school’s back steps. When I sat next to her, she said hello as if I were an old friend, though we’d never spoken.

“My name is Jenny,” I said. “Would you tell me, what’s the secret of your talent?”

“I don’t know that I have talent. I’m so young.”

She couldn’t have been much older than I. Slight of stature, she had a delicate pallor, her face too long for beauty yet compelling all the same. Her mildness softened me, and I blurted, “My father lost his job and can’t pay my tuition anymore. I need to win a scholarship or go back to Ohio. But I’m not very good.”

She touched my arm. “Practice sketching whenever you can—always have pencil and paper with you. Listen carefully to what the teachers say, because often underneath the surface there is another thing they are trying to tell us. It’s all a matter of time.”

“The other top students told me the same things. Please. They say you have a secret. I promise I won’t share it. I’ll die if I have to go home.” My voice shook. An image came to me of my father a year and a half ago, on my last day in Ohio: he stood hopeful before the mirror, knotting the tie he insisted on wearing to take me to the train station, as if seeing off a visiting dignitary. Two months sober, he turned his lopsided smile on me, and I almost told him I’d changed my mind, I wouldn’t leave.

Gladys studied me, as if to see if she could trust me. Glancing around to make sure we couldn’t be overheard, she said in a low voice, “I have help from the spirit world.” She kept her eyes on mine, as if to dare me to laugh.

“Do you mean from God? If God’s the secret, I’ll have to give up art altogether.” My landlords, the Carmichaels, took me to the Presbyterian church each Sunday, and whenever the minister described the torments waiting for the wicked, Mrs. Carmichael nudged me awake. I kept to myself my opinion that God had let William die, and therefore proved He was not omnipotent, or not omniscient, or else indifferent to us all.

“I mean artists who have gone before us—they give me advice from the other side.” She finished her sandwich and licked her fingers. “One in particular visits me often. I think many artists receive help from the other side, but few acknowledge it.”

“How do you persuade the spirits to talk to you?” I asked. When she hesitated, I added, “My brother died when I was 11, and once he came back to me. But perhaps I only dreamed it.”

To my surprise, she embraced me. “I’m sure it wasn’t a dream,” she said. “Some people are more receptive to seeing spirits than others. The borders between the worlds are thinner than people know. You’re lucky to have had a final goodbye.” She pulled out a card with her name and address. “Are you free tomorrow afternoon?” She closed my fingers around the card with an artlessness that touched me.

I walked back to the Carmichaels’ bungalow at the foot of Russian Hill, where I rented a small room off the kitchen. Just as I turned onto the street, two young men exited the house with the air of children escaping the principal’s office, climbed into a furniture delivery van, and drove away.

The Carmichaels had only recently bought this bungalow, having lost their home in the earthquake and fire seven years ago, and Mrs. Carmichael still scoured antique stores trying to recreate her old parlor. Now I wondered what new monstrosity awaited.

It was a federal empire sofa, upholstered in gold striped fabric and resting on four claw feet. The mahogany crest rail at the back terminated in carved pineapples. My parents had raised us among practical surroundings, the walls unadorned, the furniture plain. It surprised me Mrs. Carmichael hadn’t turned Anglican, if this was how she liked her rooms.

Mrs. Carmichael clasped her hands on her stomach as she beheld the sofa. “Isn’t it marvelous?”

“Is it comfortable?” I asked.

“We must never sit on it, of course,” she whispered, though I couldn’t see any reason for whispering—perhaps she was trying to impart a rule without seeming to be the maker of the rule, as if suffering under the sofa’s interdiction as much as I. “When we invite Carroll’s colleagues to dinner, I’ll seat them here, and we’ll watch them closely to see if it’s comfortable.” She patted my arm. “It’s just as well you’ll be leaving this wicked city, Jenny,” she said. “I’d go back to Elyria myself, if I could.”

I escaped to my room. The claw feet haunted me. They extended outward on each side, so if the sofa magically gained the ability to walk, it would pace and pace without going anywhere.

My mother’s letter lay on the dresser. I reread the local newspaper clipping she’d enclosed. One evening, when the eastbound No. 10 train shot through the Mill Street crossing, a patrolman noticed the gates hadn’t dropped over the road. The patrolman found the watchman—my father—unconscious, an empty whiskey bottle at his feet. He had to be lowered from the window. No one would employ him now.

I had just started life class this year. To step behind that curtained door and at last draw a living body—not a dead fowl or a plaster recreation of an ancient statue—made me believe I’d entered the true realm of art. I felt such tenderness for the models baring themselves. Sometimes I got so caught up in sketching that I forgot to swallow. When I glanced at Kamasuka Hiraga’s sketches next to me, I envied the way muscles and wrinkles seemed to flow from his hand to the paper.

I picked up the check my mother had written to pay my fare back to Ohio. I considered her plea. But how could my return be of any help to my father?

I wrote, “I’m so sorry Father isn’t doing well. Please don’t worry about me—I’m going to win a scholarship at the end of the term, so I’ll be able to stay here. Thank you for sending money.” I mailed my letter on my way to cash the check.

•

The institute held classes in a plain one-story structure, hastily erected after the 1906 fires. Some students shone, others could hardly muster a straight line. Most were middling. I middled. Our professors appeared to believe little would come of any of us: Professor Foster issued genial praise, Professor Bowman gave mild corrections, Professor Silliman napped while we painted portraits.

The exception had been Professor Mattin, the drawing master for the morning still life class my second term. A short man with a ruff of dark hair ringing his bald head, he’d built his reputation on paintings of Navajos in New Mexico. His classroom smelled of the dead fish and fowl and rotting vegetables we drew with charcoal. We erased with tufts of stale French bread, chucking them to the floor once they grew too sooty. He would circle the room as we sketched, pointing out errors in his dry voice. If he said, “Commence again!” you had to erase everything and start over.

This made me defiant. I rendered pears in a bowl as frogs, drew dead quail walking as if in conversation. Sometimes I would hardly have started before Mattin was at my elbow roaring, “Commence again!”

One afternoon, as I sketched a trout, Mattin gave me the command for the fifth time. I said, “I’ve commenced enough!” and threw my charcoal down.

He gestured at my easel, sneering. “Scribbles.”

To my embarrassment, I wept.

“The studio is no place for crying,” he said, dabbing my cheeks with a wad of bread from the floor.

He resumed his rounds as if nothing had happened. When he stepped into his office, I toppled my easel and hurried out.

Ignoring stares at my dirty smock, I rode the streetcar to Sutro Heights, the magnificent Italian-style garden where I often drew the statues overlooking Ocean Beach. Beside the stone shepherd boy, I assessed the drop and considered, not for the first time, if the cliff rose high enough that a fall would kill me. Why should I have been the one who lived, when everyone in my family, including me, had loved my brother William best?

A little girl exclaimed at seagulls. It seemed cruel to test my fate in front of her. I could always come back. I stepped down and went home, hoping to creep into bed unnoticed.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Carmichael was pickling radishes in the kitchen. “Back early, I see. Painted the Mona Lisa already?”

“Headache.” I slipped into my room.

Afterwards, Professor Mattin criticized me less often. Once, when I sketched a vase to his liking, he muttered, “Good.” It seemed grudging, for what I’d been thinking of as my best effort. I erased it and drew a grotesque version that bore no uncertain resemblance to his own round form. I expected a biting remark, but he only rolled his eyes, and I blushed.

One Monday toward the end of the term, Professor Foster greeted us with the news that Mattin had died. Mattin’s landlady heard his cat mew without ceasing and discovered his body on the floor by his bed.

My hatred leached away. As we tied on our smocks, the girl next to me whispered, “I know it’s horrible of me, but I’m glad he’s gone.”

“You’re right, it is horrible of you.”

“I thought you’d be glad too.”

I shrugged. “At least he held us to a standard.”

•

The day after I cashed my mother’s check, Gladys met me at the end of my drawing class. She took my hand, swinging it as we walked. I wasn’t accustomed to anyone being so pleased by my company. As we rode the streetcar to her apartment, she told me she lived with her mother, who worked for a real estate office; Gladys’s father, an opera singer, made his home elsewhere.

“When I was seven, he visited a medium,” she said. “The spirits told him to change his voice from baritone to high tenor—tenor robusto—one of the most difficult feats.” The family moved to Paris so he could study under a professor who’d similarly transformed the voice of Jean de Reszke, a Polish singer who now commanded $2,000 a performance. But once they returned to the United States, success as a singer continued to elude him. He worked for Union Pacific for a while, then returned to Paris to study until money ran out. After years of this, Gladys’s mother divorced him “on the grounds of desertion and failure to provide the necessaries of life.”

“It was the right thing for her,” Gladys told me. “But oh, ‘the necessaries of life,’—how do you define them? Isn’t devotion to art a necessary? Aren’t boundless curiosity and keen appreciation of the world necessary? My father may not be practical, but he is an inspiration. It broke his heart that he couldn’t provide for us. But he couldn’t, any more than an egret could drive a team of oxen.”

“Do you see him?” I asked.

“In the fall, he’ll be moving to New York City, and I’ll be joining him there after I graduate.” She spoke with confidence, her face radiant. However, when the streetcar slowed and we stood to get off, a sadness came over her. “I wish my mother would agree to come too,” she said.

The Hobarts lived above a florist shop on Valencia Street. It was a small apartment, everything visible from the doorway—kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom. Did she share a bed with her mother? But the living room was nicely furnished, with pink curtains and every surface tidily crowded with books and candlesticks and clocks. While Gladys made tea, I studied the walls: charcoal sketches of shoulders and torsos and heads; perspective drawings of cafés and houses; nudes captured with precision. I admired a still life painting of a green wine jug wrapped in raffia and surrounded by a wine glass, three pears, and an apple on an ivory tablecloth folded in creamy billows—I wanted to stretch out on its softness. I would have believed it the work of a professional artist, but there was Gladys’s signature in the corner.

Over tea and dry shortbread that powdered under my teeth, she told me that in her first year at the institute, she’d asked her mother if she might seek out a medium for advice about how to improve as an artist. Her mother said money was too scarce. Gladys decided to hold her own séance. She didn’t know what to do, so she simply drew the curtains, closed her eyes, and chanted, “Spirit, come.”

“After a while, I opened the curtains and went out for a walk. Later that afternoon, a face appeared in the mirror over the mantle—a warm, wry face, nothing frightful in it. He had flowing golden locks. When my mother brought me a cup of tea, he lifted a finger to his lips. As soon as she left, he stepped out of the mirror, and we began talking as if we were old friends.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“He asked me never to reveal his name. He died too young to have had the chance to fully develop his work. Each afternoon, I sit here, where the veil between the worlds is especially thin, and wait until he appears. My mother can’t see him, but she believes me.” She laughed, as if at the strangeness of it all, and bit her cookie. “He gives me advice and inspiration, tells me what books to read. Sometimes he guides my fingers—not physically, of course.”

“I understand,” I said, though I didn’t. “I wish someone would guide my fingers.”

She peered at me, as if assessing my seriousness. She cleared the table, drew the curtains, lit a stick of incense, sat across from me, and clasped my hands. Hers were warm. “We’ll call on the spirit world for help.”

Excited, terrified, I said yes. She drew herself up and closed her eyes. I did the same.

We sat in silence. An electric pulse seemed to circulate from her hands to mine. “Now,” she said. “Chant the words.”

I repeated “Spirit, come, spirit, come,” until the syllables lost their meaning. I felt foolish. But Gladys’s grip held firm, and I kept chanting.

After five minutes, Gladys let go, and I fell silent. Briskly she rose and pushed open the curtains, surprising me with a spill of light. “I know the spirits heard your call. They’ll pass the message on until it reaches the one destiny has marked out for you.”

She saw me to the streetcar stop. I didn’t know what to think. But even if Gladys’s intervention had no result, it cheered me to have her believe in me.

•

I hadn’t told Gladys I was to blame for my brother’s death. I was walking home from school with him along a road with houses on one side and the river on the other. He snapped off a pussy willow branch so he could poke me with the furry catkins. “Run ahead,” I told him, “and stay at least 20 feet in front of me.”

He slashed the air with his branch until he spotted a dog. He trusted all dogs, and they loved him. But this one lay oddly on its side, legs stretched straight out, front legs crossed, panting and twisting his head skyward uncomfortably. He knelt beside the creature.

“I think he’s sick,” William said as I approached. The dog’s jaw hung open, dripping silvery strands of saliva. I called out for William to be careful—too late. The dog nipped my brother, so lightly William was still petting the dog’s flank when I pulled him away. A pinprick of blood formed on his arm.

As soon as we got home, I told my father what happened. When he said the word “rabies,” terror took hold of me.

He took William to the doctor for treatment right away. The wound healed, and everyone said he was lucky: he could have died. In my prayers, I thanked God for saving him.

Two weeks later, when my mother gave William a glass of water at dinner, he pushed it away saying, “Mama, I see a dog in it.” He scratched his arms, tapped his fork on the table, rolled his head. My father took him to the hospital in Cleveland. When he returned the next day, he walked alone, stooped like an old man. I knew God had not given me a reprieve after all.

My father reopened his tailor shop after a month, his hours irregular, his stitches erratic. He began visiting the tavern in the evenings, returning unsteady, pausing as he approached our door, as if uncertain it would not vanish when he tried to go in. For a while, townspeople continued to come to him out of pity, or in hope of his recovery.

I threw stones at dogs and once drew blood from the flank of a neighbor’s mutt. When my father asked me to leave the poor beasts alone, I said, “Why didn’t you take William back to the hospital right away?” He went silent. I wished I could reel in my words. I promised not to harm any more dogs, and he said, “Thank you, Jenny,” with a lifelessness that cut me.

Some nights, my mother and father went into the basement to argue. We were all suffocating slowly, like Pompeiians smothered by ash.

I drew pictures of William, his missing front teeth, his wicked look. I drew him commanding a battalion of friends, stick rifles on shoulders. I drew him on a stone wall, conducting a choir only he heard. I drew pretty stones and branches and clouds, thinking he would see whatever I sketched.

As I finished high school, I told my parents I wanted to study art in San Francisco, the way a schoolmate’s cousin had. My mother opposed the plan, so I pleaded with my father. He was working at a lumberyard then. I told him I wanted to study art for William’s sake, and he relented.

•

Back in my room at the Carmichaels’, I arranged a still life with a vase of dried flowers, a stone, an apple, and a skull from the school’s attic. This would show the spirits I had no fear of death. I felt uneasy, but I reminded myself each of us had a skull in our heads. I picked up my charcoal and waited.

I lacked a mirror, but Gladys said it was not essential, her spirit had appeared in it only as a game. I sketched, my hand shaking.

I worked until dinnertime, endured the Carmichaels’ silent munching, and spent the evening reading. I went to bed knowing I’d failed to interest even the dead.

But in the middle of the night, I woke to see a man in my chair, silhouetted in the streetlight through my curtained window. He rocked from side to side. In terror, I lit the lamp beside me. The room was empty. I walked all around it to check.

I calmed enough to climb back into bed, leaving the lamp on just in case. Eventually, my eyes closed.

“Commence again!” came a voice.

In the chair, in defiance of the lamp, sat Professor Mattin. His bald head gleamed, his fierce black eyes fixed on me from behind his spectacles. I would have shrieked, but his gaze stopped me.

He pointed at my easel.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

He stood. “You have talent, but you’ve been lazy. Now that will change. Do you want to stay at the institute? Or do you wish to return to Indiana?”

I didn’t dare say Ohio. Shakily, I clutched my nightgown. At least he’d never been one of the professors who ogled.

I began a new sketch. One part of my mind said, yes, I’ve been lazy, this is what I need, and for a while I lost myself in drawing.

“This line is entirely wrong.”

I erased, moved the rock to the other side to freshen myself, began again. He let out a cry of pain. I erased.

By dawn, my neck and arms ached. Blackened bread littered the floor. I turned to see if my drawing satisfied him, but he’d vanished.

Gladys found me on the back steps at lunchtime the next day. “You look awful. Are you all right?”

I’d been torn whether to tell her. Of course a handsome spirit would be drawn to Gladys—the epitome of an art student. I couldn’t reveal an old professor had come back to give me remedial lessons.

“My little brother came to me,” I said.

“You saw him?” She threw her arms around me. “Oh, glorious. What did you talk about?”

I said I would tell her later, and she said, “You’ll see how luminous things can be with a spirit to guide you.”

That afternoon, in her apartment, I concocted tales: after death, William had visited Africa, swooped through the Milky Way, talked with fish. He had taken up painting too, and we’d discussed the artists we loved. I felt ashamed for lying. But no one had listened to me with such avidity before.

She told me her spirit guide had been discussing the works of Flavius Josephus with her, pointing out where the ancient scholar had been in error. I wished I’d attracted such a learned tutor.

That night, I dreaded going to bed. Either Professor Mattin would appear, and I would have to endure his tutelage, or he would not, and I’d never have a chance at a scholarship. After the Carmichaels went to bed, I stayed in the dark kitchen until my head kept dropping forward.

Once I entered my room, Mattin rose from the chair. “The skull is too advanced for a student of your level,” he said. “Substitute something else.”

•

Every night thereafter, Mattin visited me, and I did my best to meet his demands. I tried to ask him questions.

Had he talked to William?

“Why would I?”

Was my brother lonely or frightened?

“No one is frightened in death.”

What was the afterlife like?

“That is not your concern. When I lived, I focused only on improving my own art. To gossip with other artists and speculate on abstract matters, these all lead one away from looking at the thing in front of you.”

He instructed me to fill a basin with ice water so I could plunge my face into it whenever I grew sleepy. He departed four hours before dawn, and I fell deeply asleep, woken only by Mrs. Carmichael pounding on my door.

At school, I dropped my satchel, lost paintbrushes, forgot my sketchbook. To pay for my room and board, I’d taken a job shelving books at the library three afternoons a week, and I sometimes dozed amidst the stacks until my supervisor tapped my shoulder. An automobile nearly struck me one morning as I crossed a street—the driver shouted “Look alive!” and flung an apple core at my legs.

Gladys didn’t understand why William only came to me at night. She said I was growing pale and losing weight, which was true, but I’d lost interest in food. When I brought my fork to my mouth, I imagined worms entering coffins to eat excess flesh. You must be as unlike the worms as possible, I told myself.

My instructors grew more encouraging, and I was confident when, in the first week of April, the list of students who’d won prizes and scholarships appeared in the front hall.

Gladys had not only received a prize for the best figure in clay in the modeling class, but also a scholarship to attend the Art Students’ League of New York—an honor granted to only a few students in the country. I scanned the list twice, but didn’t find my name.

I’d dried my tears by the time I met her in the hallway.

“There must have been a mistake,” she said.

“No. Because you will be going to New York, and that is as it should be. Are you excited?”

She named the teachers who should have given me awards in their classes, describing their blind spots. Finally, she whispered, “My father plans to be in Manhattan by September too. We’ll be able to spend time together!”

I wondered if she would see him as often as she’d hoped.

That night, by the time my shadowy mentor arrived, I’d already drawn most of a still life—candles, two pears and an apple on a plate, the skull—and was halfway through an element that didn’t appear in the arrangement: a face.

“There are irrelevant lines on your pad,” Mattin said.

“That’s the skull’s owner, studying the bone that once housed him.”

“What have I told you about painting your fancies?”

I turned to a fresh sheet. “Then you must be my model.”

He folded his arms. “Absolutely not.”

I began sketching him: the shelf of his brow, his untamed eyebrows, the eyes full of intelligence and menace. “You can’t tell me I’m not faithfully rendering the world as it exists.”

The room grew frigid with his pique. “If you cannot learn to see and convey the beauty in the ordinary, you’ll never make anything of yourself.”

“Why go paint Indians in New Mexico, when you could have painted your landlady or your dentist?”

“A Navajo is as ordinary as a dentist, if you get to know him.”

I set down my charcoal and washed my hands in the basin. “I’m going to bed for the night.”

“When I was alive, I never needed more than four hours of sleep.”

“I’m not you.”

He shook his fist. “You summoned me, and so I will make certain you learn.”

I yanked the sheet and blanket off my bed and grabbed my pillow. “You haven’t moved on to the higher realms because you’re too in love with the sound of your own voice. Give advice to the easel all night, if you like.” I went out to the parlor, shutting the door behind me.

One full night’s rest was all I needed. I lay on the hard, prickly carpet but could not sleep. The sofa loomed, elegant and absurd. Who had first thought to carve a sofa’s feet into paws? Yet the animal quality made me want to stretch out on it. Surely I could. Dawn through the room’s thin curtains would wake me. If Mrs. Carmichael discovered me first, I would say I’d been sleepwalking.

I dreamed Gladys’s spirit mentor visited me, golden locks falling about his shoulders. “I’m not a ghost at all,” he said. “That was a misunderstanding. Gladys and I are lovers.”

Someone prodded my arm and woke me.

“Where am I?” I said sleepily. But it wasn’t Mrs. Carmichael who stood over me.

“You are evading your work.” Mattin snarled so loud I feared he would wake the Carmichaels. How had he poked me awake? I had assumed him incorporeal.

“I need to sleep,” I said. “I’m not a spirit.” Hadn’t I read somewhere that poltergeists could hurl objects out of cupboards and smear dung on walls?

“You are a lazy bag of mud,” he said. “You summoned me. Make it worth my while.”

“Go spend your precious eternity on your own art. You weren’t such a master you had no room to improve.”

He seemed to expand, eyes bulging, bald head gleaming in the moonlight. A sulfurous stench filled my nostrils, and the room’s temperature dropped so sharply the air cut my lungs.

“You’re nothing. Only I can make something of you.” He jabbed me.

I wished Mrs. Carmichael would appear. She would be a match for any spirit.

“Well, you are dead, and everyone was glad to forget about you.” I shut my eyes, hoping he could not see me shudder.

He seized my throat. I dug my fingernails into his icy hands with no effect, not even able to scream. More shades gathered, eager for me to join them. In my terror, my bladder loosened.

Why resist? He was right—I had no worth.

I was prepared to give in and join William in the other world, but my body struggled: my heel sprang free of the blanket and kicked him. He fell backward against the coffee table, dragging me to the floor.

The lamp went on, and Mrs. Carmichael appeared in her pink nightgown. “What is going on?”

Mattin vanished, leaving me gasping in a tangle of bedding, the coffee table overturned.

“I’m sorry,” I croaked. The words hurt my throat.

How I wished for Gladys to be here, to put her arm around me and reassure me. I almost cried out her name.

Mrs. Carmichael’s eyes widened at the wet darkening the cushions. She regarded me as if I’d slaughtered a pig on her sofa. “What have you done?” she said with dangerous softness. When I didn’t answer, she struck me on the ear with the back of her hand.

•

I didn’t sleep all night, fearing Mattin would return to finish me off. In the morning, Mrs. Carmichael said she was sending me back to Ohio. I would have three days to wrap up my affairs. She had written my parents. “There’s no point in your completing the term anyway.” She spoke without looking at me. “Sleepwalking, as you claim, is no excuse. If you’d killed my husband in your sleep, would you escape prison?”

I cast an appealing glance at Mr. Carmichael, but he screened himself thoroughly behind the newspaper.

Before hurrying off to the institute, I wound a scarf around my neck. I’d expected bruises, but I could see only the scratches I’d made clawing against Mattin’s grip.

I loved the school’s peaceful hallways, the sunshine through the skylights, the smell of paint and plaster and spoiled fruit. I tried to save everything with my eyes.

With an hour before my next class, I went to the library. Painters and Their Works: A Dictionary of Great Artists, Who Are Not Now Alive caught my eye, and I pulled the third volume from the shelf. Thomas Woodforde “composed well, drew correctly, and coloured better than most of his contemporaries…but he lacked genius, and his productions are at best those of a painstaking and laborious artist.” George Woodward “had a great reputation as a caricaturist, but led a most irregular life, and died at the Brown Bear in Bow Street, where he slept occasionally. He was so poor, he was buried at the expense of the landlord.” John Wood’s “early works gave promise of an excellence which they never attained: on the contrary, they became of less value as he advanced in life.”

I leafed through the book, finding few women in its pages. What could I hope for, if I stayed here—to graduate, rent an attic, and give private lessons to children? Or return to Ohio, work in a shop, marry an amiable fellow, go to church, raise children, keep them safe as my parents could not. Wasn’t that a better life than the one Mattin had lived, friendless in his apartment?

Gladys spotted me on my way out. “You look awful, what’s the matter?” She thrust her arm through mine and steered me into an empty classroom.

“I’m going back to Ohio on Friday,” I said. The room’s blinds, drawn against the sun, filled the room with golden comfortless light.

“What? Why?”

She was so distraught, I told her the truth: it was Professor Mattin, not William, who’d returned from the grave to tutor me; we had battled in the parlor when I asked for one night of sleep; Mrs. Carmichael had saved me, then exiled me. I didn’t look at Gladys, fearing she wouldn’t believe me. I unwound my scarf and showed my scratches.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Who did this to you?”

“Mattin.”

“But you said William visited you.”

“I couldn’t bear to tell you the truth. Please, ask your spirit friend for advice. What do I do if he reappears? How can I send him away?”

Her face turned white, and she sat heavily. At last, she murmured, “That explains why you’ve been smelling like him lately.”

“Like Mattin?”

“It’s faint. Like burnt rye.” She plunged her face into her hands. “I don’t know how to help you.”

“But your friend must know.”

“Something in you must have called to Mattin. You have to look to yourself for the answer.”

“I should have in the first place,” I snapped, lifting my satchel. “I wish you’d never embroiled me with the spirit world.”

She turned such a wounded face to me that I was overcome with an urge to spit in it. Horrified, I wrapped my scarf around me and hurried out.

My anger ebbed as I walked down the street, puzzled. Why had Gladys refused to ask her spirit guide? Did my predicament embarrass her?

At a religious shop run by Catholics, I bought a cross to wear around my neck. It gave me a sense of doing something.

I couldn’t sleep that night, raging against Mrs. Carmichael, my professors, Gladys, myself. I turned on the lamp and started sketching a still life, almost daring Mattin to show up. Every time the house creaked, I flinched, imagining it was him.

Then I wondered if Gladys’s own friend might not have been an invention all along. She’d dreamed him up for my sake, that day we met. Or she’d fabricated him to make her letters to her father more entertaining, or to convince him the spirits had a special destiny for her.

Perhaps she was mad.

Perhaps I was. I touched my throat, the scratches I’d made.

What troubled me most was the thought that if Gladys hadn’t had help from beyond, then her talent was truly hers, inherent, not acquired. Then no one could make me as gifted as she.

I put down my charcoal. I knew what I would do now.

The next three days, I skipped classes, spoke little to the Carmichaels, wandered the city with my sketchbook. I would render the city for William for a brief time. I called out silently to him, forgive me.

I sketched the Tivoli Opera House, a jay in mid-jeer, a man snoozing against a fountain. Everything I drew felt arbitrary, yet fury kept me going.

On Thursday afternoon, two young men carried the sofa back into the parlor, smelling of soap. Mrs. Carmichael was out, so I pencil-sketched it from different angles. Drawing it gave me great pleasure: the more I looked, the more I saw or rather felt it: the pompous golden stripes and patterns, the wood’s scalloped whorls, the tendons and claws of the preposterous feet.

When the front door jerked open, I hurried to my room before Mrs. Carmichael saw me.

On Friday, I crammed my suitcase full. Mr. Carmichael drove me to the Ferry Building; from here, I would cross the bay to the train station. He regarded me as if I might soil his automobile. He insisted on buying my ticket and hauling my suitcase to the entry gate, grumbling about its weight. He told me to be a good girl, then lumbered off.

I sold my ticket to a young man with untidy hair and the dazed glee of a poet. I sat on my suitcase on the dock, listened to waves slap wood, shut my eyes, and tried to summon the smell of William’s head close to mine, that potato odor. Soon I would board the ferry, slip stones out of the suitcase into my pocket, and drop myself in the bay to join my brother.

What happened next is difficult to describe. I was imagining William running up and down these planks. How he would have loved to watch the ships come in and chase the seagulls. A thought came, one that didn’t feel like my own. It arrived as if printed in large letters, although I didn’t see letters. It did not seem as if William spoke to me, or Mattin, or God, or an angel, or a devil. I felt no awe, terror, relief. The words came, or rather the sensation of understanding that follows the reading of words, and the message was this: YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED.

Another person might have interpreted this as a caring message, perhaps from some spirit or from within, insisting my failings didn’t justify my death. I interpreted it to mean I didn’t deserve to join William, to leave behind the vexation of life. And I wept.

A woman asked if I needed help. I shook my head and refused her handkerchief. When she’d gone, I threw my stones in the water. They sank with icy finality. I could always find other stones. In the meantime, I wouldn’t be run out of this city.

I rode the streetcar to Professor Bowman’s home and explained I’d lost my living situation. She urged me to bunk with a fellow student, the last thing I wanted. Professor Foster didn’t answer my knock, but Professor Silliman, whom I woke from a nap, turned out to have an elderly cousin who needed help with things she couldn’t manage.

I went back to classes. I drew and painted in the cousin’s attic. I washed her sheets and combed her hair, lived on bread supplemented by chalky-tasting apples from her backyard, and watched my money dwindle. In the summer I might get work in the dried fruit packing plants. Whenever I lost heart, I returned to the library and paged through the dictionary I’d found.

At the end of May, the school held the opening night reception for the annual student exhibition in the main gallery: sketches from life, paintings and clay models of the human form, charcoal sketches of antique sculptures, bas reliefs cast in plaster. One of Gladys’s sculptures occupied a pedestal in the central room: a nude kneeling on a stone, her head turned down and to the right, pensive, arms at her sides, bent as if to ready to receive something from above.

Visitors surrounded it. They commented on the flawless proportions of the anatomy, the serenity of the female form at rest. Gladys’s mother, a shorter, more careworn version of her daughter, stood near, smiling.

My contribution had been hung in the back hallway: a young woman lies on a federal empire sofa in moonlight, her face contorted by rage and terror. In the hallway’s dim light, you could just make out a half-transparent man gripping the woman’s throat. She is pushing him away. The sofa’s paws scrabble. One armrest takes the shape of a lion’s head, straining to see what is happening.

Professor Foster’s eye had twitched when I’d submitted this painting for the exhibition. Perhaps he’d recognized Mattin, and that was why he’d relegated me to the back hallway. I’d painted it in oils in my attic, surrounded by sketches, windows wide for air, working late, dipping my face in ice water to keep awake as Mattin had taught me. My leonine sofa pleased me in its gaudy moonlit glory, as did the menacing curve of Mattin’s back.

However, I now found the lion’s mane false and clumpy—copied from a statue. Lately I’d been studying dogs on the street and trying to capture the bewildering meander of animal hair. I was in the midst of painting a pair of black German shepherds on a stone hearth, their paws crossed, their eyes bright, their expressions potentially dangerous and potentially friendly. It was tricky to get the balance right.

I approached Gladys after the awards ceremony. We hadn’t spoken since her refusal to help me. Whenever I’d passed her in the hallways, she’d flinched as if I were a ghost. But now, she greeted me gaily. “I’m glad you finished your semester,” she said.

“When do you leave for New York?”

“Tuesday. Are you all right?

“I wish you well,” I said, and meant it. “Everything is fine.” I pulled out my cross. “This has kept him away.” Though I had no idea if it had. But I wanted her to see I’d taken steps. “What news of your father?” I asked. “When will you see him?”

She glanced across the room at her mother chatting with Professor Foster. “He’s back in Paris now. But by winter he’ll visit me, he’s promised.”

Forget him! I wanted to say. How little time anyone might have to work. The painter George Smith died in London at 36 of a ruptured blood vessel. At 37, Bartolommeo Schedone died from grief after losing a large sum at cards. Lizabetta Sirani founded an academy of women artists in Bologna only to perish, poisoned by rivals, at 27. The meekness of the woman in Gladys’s sculpture irritated me, an expertly carved model of longing. I wanted to smash it with a hammer. I seized Gladys’s palms, hoping to kindle—something. When she didn’t meet my eyes, I kissed her cheek and left my cross in her hands.