Skeleton Key(4)

“So,” she said. “Abigail van Dern sent you. But you could have come on your own, you know. Because of your mother.”

Bennis Hannaford was wearing a pair of canvas jeans and a cotton rollneck sweater, as if she were about to model for the cover of the J. Crew catalogue. She had her legs crossed like a man’s, and she was leaning forward to get at the demitasse. She turned her head sideways and coughed twice into her hand.

“I think my mother was part of Abigail’s thinking,” Bennis said. “Although, of course, I had no idea if the two of you had been in touch. And mother has been dead now for several years.”

“Yes. Yes, I heard about that. It’s terrible when someone we love has an illness like that. Incurable. And debilitating.”

“Yes. Right. At any rate, Abigail was feeling a little diffident about it, you see, because it had to do with your husband’s family instead of yours. I’m not entirely sure what kind of difference that was supposed to make—”

“I am.”

“—but she kept stressing that I was to tell you that she didn’t mean any offense of any kind, and that it was just because Julia Anson’s paintings are having a vogue at the moment. I feel as if I’ve been left out of the loop here a little, if you know what I mean. I think it’s wonderful if Julia Anson’s paintings are having a vogue.”

“Oh,” Margaret said. “So do I. So do I. Abigail really has nothing to worry about.”

“Anyway, Abigail just wants to know if you’ll lend the ones you’ve got, so that she can hang a show in Philadelphia. The museum would be very grateful, you know, and it would be for a good cause. It would bring people in to look. Because of the publicity value, if you know what I mean.”

“Mm,!” Margaret said. She picked up her own demitasse cup and put it down again. She really did not like this young woman, with her straight gray eyes and too-straight spine. She didn’t like her at all. It was just too bad that she couldn’t do anything about it, instead of just sitting here being polite.

“You know,” Margaret said, “I think what Abigail is worried about is Viveca Bell. Have you ever heard of Viveca Bell?”

“No.”

“She was a painter, too. In Paris. In the late twenties and early thirties. She was my great aunt. Of course, she wasn’t like Julia Anson. She didn’t know those people.”

“Those people?”

“Yes, you know. Hemingway and those people. Gertrude Stein. Picasso. Viveca was really quite a great lady in her time, and she didn’t see the point of walking away from everything she had ever known just to call herself an artist. It’s really a twentieth-century idea, don’t you think, this business about the artist as an outsider. It came in with existentialism.”

“I think existentialism came later, after the war.”

“Did it? Well, Viveca was a lot like Edith Wharton, if you know who that is. Edith went to Paris to be a writer, you know, but she was true to her class. She lived among her own people. She was a friend of Henry James’s.”

“I think it’s all fashion anyway,” Bennis said. “Who gets hung and who gets reviewed and all the rest of it. There’s a tremendous vogue now for all the women who were working in Paris at the time that Julia Anson was. For all the women in that group of people.”

“For all the lesbians, you mean.”

“Were they lesbians?”

Bennis Hannaford seemed to swallow hard. No, Margaret thought, I do not like this woman. I do not like anything about her. Margaret had a sudden vision of something terrible happening here—of Bennis choking until she died and lying in a heap on the floor, of Bennis struck down by an aneurism or a stroke and rendered unreal, but the vision passed.

“They were all lesbians,” Margaret said, “all the women in that group, and I’m not just saying it the way some people do, to make them illegitimate. But it was an organized thing, the lesbianism of that time. It included Stein and Toklas, of course, and Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. And it included Julia Anson.”

“Did she have a regular lover?” Bennis asked. “I’ve never heard of one.”

“She was part of Natalie Barney’s set. Natalie had a house with a garden in the back where she used to hold pagan rituals of some sort. Goddess worship. It’s odd to think that all kinds of perfectly respectable young women want to worship the Goddess now.”

“I don’t think it’s anything very serious.”

Margaret put her demitasse cup down and smoothed the skirt of her dress. “Quite frankly, if it were up to me, I would turn down this request. I know Abigail means well, but I do think she’s encouraging a cultural vogue that could turn out to be very dangerous. It doesn’t do any of us any good when women run off and chuck their responsibilities, all for the sake of becoming artists. In spite of the fashions, Miss Hannaford, I don’t really think any woman has ever been an artist. At least not a great artist, like Michelangelo or Raphael.”