Someone to Hold

“Avery,” she said as they reached flat land. “I was courteous when you and she called at my grandmother’s house on your return from your wedding journey. I was courteous last evening. I wished her well this afternoon. I told her I was delighted for her, and I meant it. Why would I not? How could I wish her ill? It would be monstrous of me. And why single out me? Will Abby and Jessica and Harry be recipients of this admonition?”

He winced theatrically. “My dear Camille,” he said, “I hope I never admonish anyone. It sounds as if it would require a great expenditure of energy. Anna craves the love—the full, unconditional love—of all four of you, but yours in particular. You are stronger, more forceful than the others. She admires you more and loves you more—though she scolds me when I say such a thing and reminds me that love cannot be measured by degree. One might have expected that she would be chagrined or contemptuous or any number of other negative things when she heard that you were teaching where she had taught and then that you were living where she had lived. Instead she wept, Camille—not with vexation, but with pride and admiration and love and a conviction that you would succeed and prove all your critics wrong.”

Camille could not recall any other occasion when Avery had said so much, and most of it without his customary bored affectation.

“Avery,” she said, “there is a difference between what one knows and determines with one’s head and what one feels with one’s heart. I was taught and have always endeavored to live according to the former. I have always believed that the heart is wild and untrustworthy, that emotion is best quelled in the name of sense and dignity. I am as new to my present life as Anastasia is to hers. And I am not at all sure that the first twenty-two years of my life were worth anything at all. In many ways I feel like a helpless infant. But while infants are discovering fingers and toes and mouths, I am discovering heart and feelings. Give me time.”

What on earth was she saying? And to whom was she saying it? Avery of all people? She had always despised his indolent splendor.

“Time is not mine to give, Camille,” he said as they turned onto Northumberland Place. “Or to take. But I wonder if the advent of Anna into your life was in its way as much of a blessing as her advent into mine has been. It is enough to make one almost believe in fate, is it not? And if that is not a wild, chaotic thought, I shudder to think what is.”

Camille, what happened to you must surely have been the very best thing that could possibly have happened.

. . . I wonder if the advent of Anna into your life was in its way as much of a blessing as her advent into mine has been.

Two very different men, saying essentially the same thing—that the greatest catastrophe of her life was perhaps also its greatest blessing.

“Ah,” Avery said, “the lovelorn swain if I am not mistaken.”

She glanced up at him inquiringly and then ahead to where he was looking. Joel was outside the orphanage.

“The what?” she said, frowning.

But Joel had spotted her and was striding toward her along the pavement. He looked a bit disheveled as well as shabby.

“There you are,” he said when he was still some distance away. “At last.”

* * *

Joel had been to an early church service but had decided to spend the rest of the day at home. He felt the urge to work despite the fact that it was Sunday. He was ready to paint Abigail Westcott. He could not literally do that, of course, because first he would have to pose her in the right clothes and with the right hairstyle and in the right light and setting. He would do that one day in the coming week if her time was not too much taken up with the visit of her family. But he could and would work on a preliminary sketch.

This was different from all the other sketches he did of his subjects. They were fleeting impressions, often capturing only one facet of character or mood that had struck him. In them he made no attempt to achieve a comprehensive impression of who that person was. The preliminary sketch was far closer to what the final sketch and then the portrait would be. In it he attempted to put those fleeting, myriad impressions together to form something that captured the whole person. Before he could do it, however, he had to decide what the predominating character trait was and how much of each of the others would be included—and, more significantly, how. He had to decide too how best to pose his subject in order to capture character. It was a tricky and crucial stage of the process and needed a fine balance of rational thought and intuition—and total concentration.

He started it on Sunday morning rather than observe the day of rest because he was sick of the fractured, tumbling thoughts brought on by the various events in the last couple of weeks and wanted to recapture his familiar quiet routine. And soon enough he was absorbed in the sketch.

He wanted to paint her seated, straight backed but leaning slightly forward, gazing directly out at the viewer as though she were about to speak or laugh at any moment. He wanted her face slightly flushed, her lips slightly parted, her eyes bright with eagerness and . . . Ah, the eyes were to be the key to the whole thing, as they often were in his portraits, but more than ever with her. For everything about her suggested light and cheerfulness and the joyful expectation that life would bring her good things and an eagerness to give happiness in return. Even the eyes must suggest those things, though they must do a great deal more than that. For he must not give the impression that she was just a pretty, basically shallow girl who knew nothing about life and its often harsh realities. In the eyes there must be the vulnerability he had sensed in her, the wistfulness, the bewilderment, even the pain, but the essential strength of hope in the power of goodness to overcome evil—or, if perhaps those words were too strong for what he sensed in so young a girl, then the power of light to overcome darkness.