Hard White - Book Tour

 

Literary / Historical Fiction

Date Published: 09-25-2202

Publisher: Woodpecker Lane Press

 

In this vividly-rendered novel, Melanie Dugan reimagines the life of Alice Neel, a groundbreaking American painter who revolutionized the art of the portrait in the twentieth century. Born in 1900 into a straitlaced middle-class family, Neel charted her own unconventional path. Her lifetime spanned World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic, women winning the right to vote, the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy Era, the Civil Rights Era, and second-wave feminism. She worked for decades in obscurity, wrestling with depression, poverty, and misogyny, loving the wrong men, fighting to live life on her own terms, and above all to paint.

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About the Author

Melanie Dugan is the author of Bee Summers (“a carefully wrought portrayal of the way we carry trauma with us through life.” Brenda Schmidt, Quill & Quire), Dead Beautiful (“the writing is gorgeous,” A Soul Unsung), Revising Romance (“heartwarming, amusing and…downright sexy,” Midwest Book Review), and Sometime Daughter (“Stunning debut,” Kingston Whig-Standard). Her short stories have been shortlisted for several awards, including the CBC Literary award. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

 

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Excerpt from "Hard White"

Hard White

I.             Self Portrait (1980)

 

I start with wood and canvas, the wood assembled into a stretcher, the canvas stretched over the wood frame then primed with a ground of white gesso (chalk, glue): hard white, I call it. Hard white because it doesn’t allow for errors or a change of mind. If you go back and re-draw something, the ghost of your earlier idea is there for everyone to see. You can try to erase what you drew, but the ghost image will still be there, so why bother? You have to just work over it. But I like that. It keeps you honest. And it’s like life — our errors and changes of mind, our detours, our wrong turns are what make us who and what we are.

Some painters like the canvas stretched loose; I like it tighter, with a little more play, a springiness under my brush.

I begin with drawing. Drawing is the essence of painting. Drawing is seeing; seeing is the beginning of knowing the world.

Those people who look at Jackson’s work and say, “My two-year-old could do better than that” know nothing. They don’t know how to see. They don’t understand the structure he’s created, the layers he’s applied — the same way life applies layers to us all, gradually shaping us into the people we become — so that each of his paintings builds to a symphony, that’s what makes them sing.

In the same way, each of my paintings is layer on layer of knowing, knowing learned through hard experience, knowing myself, knowing the individual I’m painting. Insight is another word for knowing. Earned is another word for learned.

 

1.            Beginning (1900)

 

I am born with the century: 28 January 1900, in Merion Square.

Merion Square is in Pennsylvania, which is a square-ish sort of state, and during the time I live there I learn the people who live in Pennsylvania are square-ish sorts of people. “Virtue, Liberty, and Independence” is the state motto. Just try to find any excitement there.

January, the month that I am born, is a monochrome month in Merion Square: there is snow on the ground, and overhead the sky is a white-ish shade of gray. The trees are bare, their black branches snaking up into the dull sky like veins. Some days are brilliantly sunny and clear, but many are overcast and smudgy.

There are six people in my family when I am born: Mother, Father, Hartley, Albert, Lillian, and me. After I am born my eldest brother, Hartley, dies of diphtheria. He is eight years old when he dies. This leaves a hole in my family. It is there through my childhood, a dark, blank hole in the background of family life. It is not mentioned often, but it is present behind many conversations. When I am two another brother, George, arrives, but the darkness remains.

My first memory is the color red. It is the color of the walls of the living room in our house. Later, Mother tells me, “Nonsense. It’s impossible you could remember that. We moved from that house when you were six months old.” But she’s wrong: I remember it — a red like bruised cherries, like the purpling sky when sunset slips deeper into night. Bruised walls and a family with a hole in it is where I begin.

We move away from the house with red walls, and then we move again until we finally settle in a bigger, nicer house in Colwyn, where people live in square houses and doze away their days. The air in Colwyn is thick, and time there moves as slowly as a deep, sluggish, muddy river does. Father works for the Pennsylvania Railroad; this may be why we live near the railway tracks.

 

Father is descended from opera singers. He turned his back on them and embraced the gray and the dull, and yet, when Mother says, “None of us will ever be remembered,” he says, “Well, I’m not so sure about Alice.” Maybe he recognizes in me whatever he turned away from in the opera singers, some tongue of flame, some spirit of revolt. At any rate, it tells me Father sees me differently than Mother does. His comment suggests he and I share a connection I do not have with Mother, and perhaps he understands me in ways she does not.

Mother’s family is full of stories; stories were what she brought to her marriage. In the stories, her family is populated by signers of the Declaration of Independence, by Revolutionary War heroes, by a rich liquid-soap magnate. She brought many stories to the marriage, but not much money, only tales of former wealth. Wealthy ghosts (supposedly wealthy, Mother says they were wealthy) hover in the background of our family. It seems my parents are in thrall to those old stories, those old ghosts — my mother certainly is.

There are standards those ghosts feel must be maintained, Mother tells us. She speaks for the ghosts, her voice lodges in my head, transmitting their opinions: a lady must have clean fingernails, clean hair brushed smooth every day, a lady needs to be clean in thought, word, and deed. A lady always sits with her legs crossed at the ankles, and she never touches her face. So many rules. A lady could spend her whole life remembering and following the rules, and at the end of her life where would she be? Sitting inside — ankles neatly crossed, fingernails clean, face untouched — and she would discover life had raced past and left her behind. At least, this is how I see it. This causes some friction between me and Mother. I try to do what she wants, to be the ladylike girl she wants, but it never works; despite my best efforts, my fingernails are dirty, my hair is messy, my clothes are stained and grubby — how they end up that way is a mystery to me — and the part of the room I share with Lily is messy; I move too fast, bump into things, bruise myself. Careless, careless, careless, Mother says.

It seems to me, when Mother tells me all these rules, the ghosts have a lot to say about how I should behave, but not too much to say about how my brothers should behave. (Lily is not part of the ghosts’ conversations; for some reason there is none of this friction between her and Mother, Lily needs none of the guidance that I do. Mother and I are like flint and tinder, between us we create sparks that flare into fire; Lily and Mother are like two voices linked in harmony. I think of Mother and Lily as two different voices for one person — but I have to admit there are instances Lily surprises me. Sometimes when Mother has been harsh with me Lily takes me to the bedroom we share and reads me a fairytale.) The brothers are allowed to come and go as they wish, they are not required to help with the housework. Or maybe Mother missed those messages from the ghosts.

The house we live in is really two houses, which share a dividing wall. The building is built of brick and each house has two windows on the top floor and a roof sloping down towards the back away from the street. The neighbors live in their house on the other side of the shared wall. Our house is not big, but it is fine, and inside it is nice: there are heavy drapes that muffle the sounds from outside and make the light in the front room murky; there is a breakfront with Mother and Father’s good china that is only used on special occasions. There is a Tiffany lamp that hangs over the table in the dining room; there are books; the furniture is solid and shiny. We are not rich, but we are not poor, and according to Mother, we have wealth in our background, and we may find ourselves wealthy again, so we need to know how to be it when our fortune arrives.

The houses stand in what was once a pear orchard. Sometimes on a hot summer evening I think I can smell the pear blossoms, or the memories of the pear blossoms: pear blossom ghosts.

If our house were not attached to the other it would sit on its own with a lawn like an emerald carpet unrolling all around it. Instead, both houses are crammed onto a small lot, and each has its own tiny yard. The house feels squashed in place; it feels cramped inside.

Behind the house run the railway tracks. Sometimes when she is doing housework Mother hums, “The railroad comes through the middle of the house and the trains are all on time.” Every time a train goes past — rattling the walls, shaking the china in the china cabinet so the plates clink against each other — it’s a reminder there is a larger world out there, past the town limits, maybe in Philadelphia, which is not far away, maybe beyond the square border of Pennsylvania entirely, a bigger, more varied, more exciting world than Colwyn. Things are happening in that world, things are changing there while I sit in our house — dark, the curtains drawn against the neighbors’ prying eyes (Mother is convinced they spy on us), cramped with the collections of heavy flatware, and porcelain plates, and bowls — or in a schoolroom, with my legs crossed at the ankles, following the rules.

 

There are things I love and things I hate. When I am four years old Mother gives me a skinny gangly doll with a head flat like a pancake, and round, sightless button eyes. I hate it. It is a bit scary; its hair is strands of wool sewn on, and they look like snakes; its eyes are dead. Mother says, “That’s ridiculous. It’s not dead — it’s a doll. It was never alive so it can’t be dead.” The doll wears a dress that is bright red — fire engine red — and spring green. The colors make a jangling noise in my head. I tell Mother I don’t want the doll — I want a coloring book. She shakes her head and frowns and mutters something about ungrateful children, but eventually Father gives me a coloring book.

What I love is watching people and seeing their oddnesses that make them who they are. The old Black man, who arrives at unexpected intervals, walking from house to house, carrying rags, a pail of soapy water, a pole and a squeegee (Mother tells me the word: it sounds so funny it makes me laugh). Since we never know when to expect him, his arrival is always a surprise. He knocks on the door and asks Mother, “Washer windas?” I peek around from behind her. His skin looks dusty. His springy hair has white strands in it. His hands are large, shovel-like, pocked with calluses, his arms are ropy with muscles. Mother glances left, she glances right, checking to see if the neighbors are watching. “All right,” she says. “Around the back,” and shuts the door in his face.

Then there is the old woman who feeds the birds on the corner up the street. She carries a folding stool, that looks like an umbrella before she opens it, and she has a cloth bag slung over her shoulder. She flips her stool open and sits down. She is round, with pink cheeks and white hair pinned loosely up in a bun. Wisps of her hair float around her round face. She wears long, billowing, blowsy dresses that go down to her fat ankles.

After she sits down, she pulls a paper bag from the cloth bag and tosses seeds from the bag onto the ground. Birds, pigeons mostly, swoop down from nearby buildings and trees, their wings clacking as they fly, and peck at the seeds at her feet. After a while she stands, folds up her stool, and strolls away, rolling unevenly from side to side.

The birds ignore her and continue walking around, pecking at the ground. Sometimes the boy birds duck and coo for the girl birds, which are mostly interested in the seeds and ignore the boys.

I also love flowers: four o’clocks, violets, Roses of Sharon. As soon as I am old enough to help in the garden, Father teaches me their names. He grows them in the front yard, and in the back yard, nicotiana, that scents summer evenings with its lush, sweet fragrance, along with roses, and a hydrangea bush he feeds coffee grounds to so it will bloom blue.

The year I am eight, Father gives me a flower paintbook at Christmas. It is so beautiful. I mix colors and brush them on, and suddenly what was a plain, flat, white page becomes a radiant flower. It is easy to slip into this world. All I need are water, paper, paint, and a brush. In this world the jangling noises in my head grow quiet. This world feels nothing like the house I live in.

There is a tightness in our house, as if the air is stretched thin. Father comes and goes, pale and nearly invisible as a ghost; he leaves for work in the morning and returns at night to sit silently at the head of the table at dinnertime.

Mother is always present. She is a presence. She is also a puzzle. She is the absolute ruler of her sphere of influence, the house, and runs it the way a general organizes a military campaign. There are specific chores for specific days, and they must be done to her exacting standards — laundry on Monday, baking on Tuesday, that sort of thing. If someone flaunts these rules — if, for example, the neighbor hangs out her laundry on Tuesday or Wednesday instead of Monday — she suspects that person may be morally questionable, unreliable. One cleans not simply to keep things clean, but also to be seen to have cleaned, and to have done it the correct way. It is not simply about keeping the dirt at bay, it is also about propriety. It is more rules.

But to Mother, all these skills — her frugality, her tending to food and chores and to the inhabitants of the house — mean nothing: to her, she means nothing.

The world beyond the walls of her house seems to agree, and that world seems to intimidate her. In her mind, that world doesn’t value her or the work she does. She accepts that judgment. But at the same time, from the way she talks, it seems she thinks that is the world where real life goes on, where important things happen that she has no part in, where significant decisions are made that she has no say in or control over, decisions that affect her. My father — quiet, dull, abstracted — has a place in this outer world, has a say in this world, and this fact seems to fuel her fierce energy — her exclusion from that world somehow drives her.

 She thunders through the house, indomitable: dusting, washing, cooking, cleaning — the walls of the house can barely contain her enormous energy, which feels sometimes like anger. The family all walk on tiptoe, expecting an explosion at any minute. Even the brothers — usually loud and boisterous — move quietly when Mother is in one of her moods. In the background there is Lily, walking in and out of rooms, following in Mother’s wake, Mother’s second-in-command, and even further back (or maybe hanging above us all, remote and inaccessible), is Father, faint and shadowy. We all know that even though he is the head of the family, Mother rules the house and her decisions are final.

 I skate along the edge Mother’s unpredictability. I develop rituals to ensure the fragile balance will hold and won’t tip into one of her outbursts. Things hold terrors for me: if a fly lands on me I feel its legs prickling my skin, hear its insistent buzzing, I swat and swat and swat at it until I kill it or drive it away; at night I fear the dark, the shadows are erasure. At church, the story of Christ on the cross reduces me to shuddering sobs. I am sent home.

People overwhelm me. It feels like they radiate energy that washes over me and obliterates me. I lose my sense of myself. I can’t hear my own inner voice. I am overrun by the other person’s feelings. Some people are more powerful than others: Mother is a tidal wave; Father a gentle breeze. I can sit in the front parlor when Father is there and read a book. If Mother is in the room, it’s impossible for me to concentrate, it’s as if dozens of invisible midges dart through the air from her to me to nip at me, distract me, irritate me. And if I sit in there when Father isn’t home — if I go in there to read or to sketch — Mother appears almost immediately. “Idle hands are the devil’s playground,” she snaps. “Put that away — there’s work to be done.” My first impulse is to say no, but the threat of her anger is always there.

It’s like I am a part of Mother. (I know she is a part of me; even when she is nowhere near I hear her voice, a sort of background hum in my head.) I am a tributary of her, a small stream feeding into and being swallowed by a mighty river, like the Ohio flowing into the Mississippi, which we are learning about in school. When she’s there — which is most of the time — it feels like she takes up almost all the space in the house; her thoughts, her opinions, her wishes are what matter. Mine are swallowed up into hers when she is there.

Except my wishes don’t go away. They sit inside me, fermenting. I want different things than she does, and different things than she wants me to want. I’m not always sure what it is I want, but I do know what I don’t want, and a lot of what I don’t want are the things Mother feels I should want.

I try to want what she wants me to want, I try to be a quiet and well-behaved girl. On Sunday afternoons I try to sit quietly in the front parlor the way she wants me to. She says my ankles should be crossed “in a ladylike manner,” my hands should rest “gracefully” in my lap, I should smile politely, say “please” and “thank you.”

But there are times when I feel like I’m going to explode at the unfairness of things, when I feel like I’ll blow up if I have to stay inside and help Mother clean while Albert and George get to run outside and play, or if I’m told I’m not allowed to do something because I’m a girl. If any of these happen one more time, I feel like I’ll pop, leaving only a plume of black smoke behind and an empty space where I used to be.

George, for example, gets a whole bookcase to himself, filled with books about dogs and flowers and birds — things he is interested in — while I have to beg for the few sheets of paper and the watercolor paints I want so I can make pictures — the one thing I am interested in doing. “What would be the point in spending good money on those?” Mother asks.

“George got books,” I point out.

“Because he will go to school and get an education and earn a living, but you are just a girl. You will do none of those things.”

“I might.”

She snorts contemptuously.

She and I engage in low-key skirmishes over what she calls my “attitude” about housework, her idea that I should help around the house while “the boys,” as they are called by the parents — even though George is older than I am, almost an adult — are exempt. (My brothers are like stick figures — curiously unformed, odd — and yet everything flows to them, and they are supremely unaware of it.) Between Mother and me there are struggles, tactical advances, strategic retreats, nothing overt, though.

Until one night hostilities break out into the open.

I am twelve years old. We have finished eating dinner. I sit at the dining room table staring at the white linen tablecloth. Overhead hangs the Tiffany lamp Mother is so proud of. I am thinking about how many times I have washed and ironed this tablecloth, and so has Mother, and so has Lily. The boys have never washed or ironed the tablecloth even though they eat off it every night the same way Mother, and Lily, and I do.

When the tablecloth is damp, which it must be to be ironed, it’s heavy and awkward to handle. I find it irksome. It would be easier for Albert to handle it, he is larger, he is stronger, so why doesn’t he have to but I must?

“Please clear the table, Alice,” Mother says, as she has every night for as long as I can remember. This signals the meal is over, the family can scatter — or the boys and Father can. Lily has already gone into the kitchen to get the after-dinner cleaning started; Mother’s comment is my cue to get up and collect everyone’s plates and glasses, the flatware, the serving dishes and implements. And for as long as she’s been saying this, I have done what she has told me to without even thinking about it.

But on this night I sit silently, gazing down at the tablecloth, noting the ghost of a mustard stain near Father’s place, a gravy stain in the middle of the table.

George, halfway out of his seat, stops, freezes, half-turns toward me, frowning. He senses something is out of balance, out of rhythm. My silence, my immobility have taken the room by surprise. I glance sideways and see his eyes — dark, like Lily’s, like Mother’s — dart in my direction, and then away, over to Albert. A tense silence settles on the room.

“Alice?” Mother says.

 “What about George?” I ask. “What about Albert?”

Mother’s mouth snaps shut, her lips grow thin. “They are boys,” Mother says, as if this is explanation enough. But it isn’t, not for me.

“They ate dinner,” I point out. “Why aren’t they expected to help, too? Why is it always me and Lily who have to help?”

At the other end of the table, the brothers exchange glances, stand, and scurry out of the room, away from the conflict — George heading up to the third floor to read about his interests, Albert disappearing — where? Both of them silent; neither offering to help. Do I blame them? No — who wants to do chores? But do I think it is a stain on their escutcheons, as Father would put it, taking advantage of the situation? Yes. The least they could do is carry their own dishes into the kitchen. Cowards, I think.

Father sits silent at the head of the table. He is staring thoughtfully at the tablecloth, too.

“Housework isn’t their responsibility,” Mother tells me.

“Why not? They make as much mess — they make more mess than I do — there are two of them. It’s not fair that Lily and I have to clean up and they don’t.”

“The world isn’t fair, Alice.” Mother stands, her eyes narrowed. “And this is not up for discussion. It is your job to clear the table.” She stalks out of the room.

But that’s not a good enough answer for me. That night I leave the boys’ plates and knives and forks and spoons on the table. When I come down in the morning someone has cleared them away, probably Lily, maybe Mother. Certainly not George, Albert, or Father. 

 

I look different from Mother, my sister Lily, and my brother George; they are slender and dark, they are sharp angles. I am tall and fair, like my grandfather, Mother’s father. I am soft. Albert is a mix of both types.

Unlike Mother and Lily, who put their feelings out into the world — observing, commenting, issuing directions — I keep mine mostly inside, which is successful — until it’s not. Sometimes I feel like I am a changeling dropped into the family, a stranger stranded among them. When my feelings come out, sometimes they come out too strongly or too loudly. When they come out — often long after whatever caused them — they are frequently distorted and jumbled. It is not always possible to know what caused them or how to handle them, which makes things difficult.

Mother judges me fortunate. “You’re so lucky to be pretty,” she says. “Women are nothing unless they are rich and attractive, otherwise they are only useful as wives and mothers.”

“That’s not so,” I tell her. “I am not nothing. I am just as much something as Albert or George. I have as many ideas as they do — more than George does — and my ideas are just as good as theirs. I am just as smart as either of them.”

Mother purses her lips. “Don’t talk nonsense.”

“Well, it’s true. I am as smart. And it’s not fair I have to do things they don’t, like cleaning the house and helping with the laundry.”

Mother shakes her head. “We’ve talked about this.”

“Things should be fair,” I say. “Why not make them fair where you can, here, at home? It wouldn’t be hard to.”

She lets out an exasperated breath. “Oh, Alice,” she says, as if it’s ridiculous to hope for fairness, and I am silly to hope for it. Then she tells me to set the table for dinner.

 

Father is always doodling. Sometimes he sits in the front room and sketches the people he works with, or he scribbles pictures of dogs that interest him, if he thinks they are funny or unusual-looking. He shows me how to draw a face: make an oval; halfway down from the top is where the eyes go. There is the middle line around which the face is organized. Eyes are on either side of this line, an eye-width apart. Halfway down the face, between the eyes and the chin, is where the nose goes; halfway between the nose and the chin is the mouth.

For my birthday when I am thirteen he gives me some paper and a pencil and says, “Draw a picture of yourself.” I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and make a sketch of my face. Mother mutters something about vanity, but she also tells Father it’s the most peace she’s had in years.

I look at the sketches I made with Father then I add color to them. It’s like making a new world — a swipe of color and a dog springs into being, or a vase of zinnias glows.

This world of painting has none of the tightness of the house I live in. It is free of the strumming tension that’s always in the background at home. In the world of images things make sense to me in a way they don’t anywhere else. Red plus yellow makes orange. Blue plus yellow makes green. Blue plus red makes purple. This is a language I understand.

I realize I will be a painter or a sculptor — an artist. Where do I get this idea? I make it up myself! I invent it. If painting and drawing make me happy, then that’s what I’ll do.

I tell Mother this — excitedly, buoyant with the discovery. She frowns. “Why would you be a painter?” she asks. “Don’t you know you are just a girl?”

When she says this I think, so? So what if I am a girl? I am as clever as my brothers. I can see things, understand things, at least as well as they can. I may even understand some things better. About the parents, for example; I understand how they seem to know what they’re doing, but how, underneath their convincing exteriors, Father is absent-minded and Mother is furious. Furious at Father for his absent-mindedness, although she will never put it that way, an absent-mindedness that means most of the boring work falls to her; furious that the world is built this way; furious at us, her children, for being; and more specifically, furious at me, her daughter, for not being more like her, not respecting the rules she has followed so resentfully all her life because she was taught that is what you do, furious because I refuse to be just a girl and expect to be more.

When she says why would you be a painter, don’t you know you’re just a girl, I think: that’s why I can do it. I don’t have to get a job to support a wife and family the way Father supports all of us. I can paint instead. But I don’t tell Mother that. It will make her irritable and she’ll argue with me, insisting I see the situation her way.

I start to plan my escape.