Levon lit the burner under a kettle on the small kitchen stove. “Would you like some tea?”
“No, thank you.” She paged through a volume on Matisse before placing it back on a different shelf. Levon opened his mouth to say something but busied himself with his tea preparations instead. He was so easily provoked, for a moment she regretted teasing him. Any artist who so tightly controlled his studio—the alphabetized books, carefully spaced jars, and scrubbed floors—was trying to keep something else in check, and she wondered what it could be.
Eventually, he approached one of the easels and gently lifted the dustcloth from it. “I’d like you to see this, Miss Darden.”
She waved one hand at him. “Please, call me Clara.”
He gave her a solemn nod and stepped back, offering her the prime spot in front of it.
She’d expected another wild, Picasso-like flight of fancy, not a portrait. Two figures looked out from the canvas, a boy holding something in one hand, standing beside a seated woman whose gaze was as dark as death. A boy and his mother. The boy had a dark mess of hair and the same pointed widow’s peak as Levon’s. He wore a yellow overcoat and a funny set of slipper-like shoes, his feet turned slightly away, as if he hoped to escape as soon as possible.
The woman, though, was solid, unmoving, going nowhere. Her hands rested on her knees but appeared unfinished, as if she were wearing mittens. The lack of detail existed only from the neck down, however, as her face had been drawn in with an elegant line from eyebrow to nose, heavily lidded eyes, encircled by an ocean-blue headscarf.
The boy, unsure and self-conscious, was turned in on himself, while the woman’s energy was directed outward at the viewer: accusatory yet hopeful.
“This is you and your mother?”
He nodded.
“It’s beautiful, heartbreaking, Levon. Why didn’t you show this tonight?”
He pulled the cloth back over it. “It’s not finished.”
On a table nearby, she spotted a photograph. “Is that what you’re working from?”
He snatched it up and stared hard at it for a couple of seconds before reluctantly passing it over. Clara held it carefully at the very edges. The same figures, but filled with details. The woman’s hands had thick, working-class fingers. The boy held a small bouquet of flowers. The boy looked more certain and the woman less so. “Tell me the story behind this.”
Levon prowled away from her, then back. “My father was a cobbler; he came to the United States from the shores of Lake Van, in Turkish Armenia. He was going to send for my mother, sister, and me once he was settled. While we waited, my mother had this photo taken in the hopes that he wouldn’t forget us.”
“Why wasn’t your sister in the photograph?”
“Girls were not as important. I was the boy, his son. My mother hoped it would remind him of his duties.”
“I see.”
“But before we could send it to him, we were forced out by the threat of a civil war, and headed east. My sister wore boy’s clothes, for safety’s sake, and together we made it to a city called Yerevan, where we lived in an abandoned building. If it rained we got wet, and we tried to make do, but it was very difficult to find food.” As he spoke, he circled the entire room several times. Clara stayed still as he grew more and more agitated.
“My mother became ill, and one day she died. She’d given all her food to us, and we’d eaten it. Taken her life. We were selfish.”
The day’s complaints and petty jealousies fell away. “She would have wanted to feed you first. Any mother would have. When did you come to the States?”
“Soon after. As orphans, we were bumped up to the top of the list. We lived with relatives in Providence, and I never did find my father. Never cared to. Our relatives said he’d taken up with another woman and moved away. I drew, went to art school there, and then came here. I studied at the Grand Central School of Art and became a teacher within months.”
The return of his bravado cheered Clara. “Of course you did. This painting is remarkable. You must continue.”
“You must as well.”
“How can you say that, when you’ve never even seen my work?”
“I can see in you that you are like me. Strong. I must give you my advice, though.”
“Okay.”
“Get out more. Don’t sit in your studio all day; it’s not good for the soul. Also, don’t let your students come first. Your work comes first, always.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“And when you come to my class, don’t worry if you don’t do very well. These students, my students, are trained by the very best. Me.”
And the pomposity was back with a vengeance. “I’ll see you tomorrow at ten.”
As she left, she saw him reach for the mop leaning against the wall. His voice, singing some kind of folk song in a foreign tongue, rang down the stairwell. She imagined him mopping away their footprints, scrubbing away his sad tale, well into the night.
CHAPTER FOUR
April 1928
Clara walked into Levon’s studio at the Grand Central School of Art ten minutes early. She’d woken with a burst of nervous energy and wanted to get this ridiculous bet over with. If she was going to make a fool of herself in a roomful of his students, so be it. She’d torture him in her own class. Although, looking around the studio, she saw that her humiliation would take place in front of four times as many onlookers.
Levon’s class was held in one of the biggest studios in the school, a testament to his popularity. A couple of dozen easels encircled the model’s platform in the middle of the room. Nadine, as class monitor, directed Clara to an easel in the front row, with a scowl.
“Levon wants you here.”
Clara shrugged off the girl’s rudeness and busied herself with organizing her brushes and paint. She’d loved everything about being in a studio ever since she’d attended her first art class several years earlier. The sharp tang of turpentine, the oily residue of paint on a palette, and even the scuffed-up floors awed her. You never knew what might come to pass after four hours of diligent concentration: a work of art, or a canvas to be scraped and reused for next time?
Soon after her family had fled to Tucson, she read about a new art school in the newspaper. Located in an abandoned factory just outside of town, where every summer, monsoon rains pounded the shellacked earth, the school attracted a fair bit of notice and Clara begged her father for permission to go. She’d filled notebooks with silly doodlings as a young girl, and later, when the family’s fortunes fell, the act of drawing had become an escape of sorts. Her father allowed her to go to one class—that was all they could afford—but the director, Miss Alice, recognized her talent and allowed her to come back whenever she liked. Miss Alice taught her to be quiet for a moment before putting brush or pencil to paper, to wait and listen to the voice in her head before beginning. Once Clara discovered her passion for art, there was no going back. She was determined to make it her career, her life.
Levon entered in a rush, shouting out for Nadine. She leaped forward and took his coat, hanging it on the rack near the door. Levon looked about. “Where’s our model? Not here yet? Well, let’s not fret about that.”
Levon stopped in front of Clara, blinked a couple of times, and moved on. She was relieved he didn’t call attention to her. Being parked in the front of the room was bad enough.
For five minutes, Levon spoke in a torrent of ideas, touching upon the best works to view in the Met and Gallatin’s Gallery of Living Art, of Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque. He called on students to offer their opinions before shredding them to pieces. What had she been thinking? This was no painting class; it was a cult.
The students appeared to enjoy the show. Several tried to offer counterpoints, and Levon prodded them into expanding on their ideas before shooting them down, always with a smile on his face.