Table Of ContentAlso by Robin Oliveira
My Name Is Mary Sutter
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) LLC
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A Penguin Random House Company First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014
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ISBN: 978-1-10160488-5
This is a work of fiction based on real events.
Version_1
For Noelle and Miles
Contents
Also by Robin Oliveira
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1926
Prologue
1877
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
1878
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
1879
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
1880
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
1881–1883
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
The Rest of Time
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
1926
Prologue
M
ary Cassatt lifted two shallow crates of assorted brushes, pigments,
palettes, and scraping knives and set them atop the paint-smeared table
shoved under the arched, north-facing windows of her untidy studio. Someone
less stubborn than she might have packed up years ago, but she liked to have her
tools out and ready, as if at any moment she might turn and begin again, though
she had not painted today and would not paint tomorrow and had not painted in
some years, the scourge of the continuing betrayal of her eyesight, which she
feared had become nearly as bad as his at the end. And then there was the pesky
matter of confidence, which she’d discovered, to her disappointment, had not
solidified over the years as her younger self had expected but had instead
revealed itself to be an emotion that was more ruse than intention. The truth was
that there was very little she could control anymore, except this one last thing,
which made her feel very old.
She turned in a circle, suppressing the unfamiliar swell of panic rising in her
throat, an emotion to her so exotic that she wondered how other people—those
who yielded daily to weakness or fear—coped.
Oh, where was the damn thing?
She was certain she’d hidden the box among the blank canvases and tin
water cans, where no one, not even a sly model bent on discovery, would have
guessed she’d secreted the prize. But she was not as keen as she had once been
and now feared that both her eyesight and her memory may have double-crossed
her. Had she, in a fit of sentiment, concealed it somewhere upstairs in her
bedroom in order to keep it close? She dismissed the thought. She could not
imagine herself committing such a romantic act.
Daily, light flooded the stone-floored glassed-in studio at the back of the
Château de Beaufresne, but now the winter afternoon was fading and her eyes
were succumbing to fatigue. Time evaporating. The doctors said she was to
prepare herself, meaning, she supposed, that they wanted her to sell her
remaining canvases, attend to museum requests, visit relatives one last time—
what people imagined had been her life. It mystified her that that was what they
all thought was important to her. Of course she valued her work, and she had
kept careful track as the prices for her paintings rose—prudence required such
attention—but did they suppose that in touching brush to canvas she tallied only
coin and admiration?
The world blazes along with its critical tongue and shallow impatience, not
understanding the moment, the breath, the seeing.
She adjusted her thick-lensed glasses. What a necessary bother they were.
Such goggles, but it was true that if she were still as careful a housekeeper of her
studio as she had been in her youth, she could find what she wanted in an instant.
What detritus a life leaves. She would have to call Mathilde to help her if she
couldn’t find it. Look for shape, she scolded herself. The thing is not the thing. It
is instead form and light. After all, what are faces but hollows and swells,
spheres and lines? She had learned that very young. And now? She removed her
glasses and wiped her watering eyes. Oh, to see as she once had. Some mornings
upon waking, she indulges herself: Today I will paint the lace on the dress, finish
the flowers in the background, and then concentrate on the way the sun plays on
the girl’s hair. And then she opens her eyes, and a milky scrim obscures even
the bedposts.
Mary replaced her glasses and willed her blurring eyes to focus on the
jumble of brushes and palette knives and dismantled easels. Under this
purposeful gaze, their forms sharpened and fell away and became the contour
and outline she needed them to be. For half a century, she had shifted sight like
this at will, though when she was young, when she was first beginning to paint,
the effort had pained her. It is a way of thinking, her instructors had said. It is a
way of being in the world.
And with that shift, the half-moon shape of the box revealed itself,
protruding from under the edge of the tarpaulin. Kneeling, she felt its rounded
edge and exhaled. Tucking it under her arm, she shuffled to the far end of the
room, where Mathilde had left the tea tray for her on the table by the hearth,
along with the magnifying glass she required.
Mary sank into the chair and opened the lid. It was the kind of box that
harbors forgotten photographs or mismatched buttons, so ordinary that after her
death they might have tossed it without checking the contents, but she couldn’t
take that chance. And besides, their curiosity had dogged her all her life; she
would not let it dog her death. She was not sentimental, though people believed
she was, seduced perhaps by the expressions she had rendered in her paintings.
But she didn’t know, really, what people thought of her. And she didn’t care.
Her work, like his, was all the legacy she cared to bequeath to the world.
But she had kept these letters, as he had kept hers, though what they had
