The Sculptress

tell Charlene—and Kurt.
Her mother rose stiffly from her chair and followed the sculptor while Emma and her father walked behind. As they left the studio, she and her father exchanged a look that meant they both understood the trouble ahead. George smiled as if to say, “We’ll get through this,” and proceeded to his wife, who brushed him away with her arm.
* * *
The carriage ride home was as frosty as the chill that had crept into the air.
Nothing was said that night, but a silent, ever-building tension between her parents grew with each passing day until the living room exploded when Matilda left for the evening the following Sunday.
Emma had never heard an argument like it, and the heated and hateful words exchanged downstairs left her shivering and crying in bed, afraid that she had created a terrible and unalterable rift between her parents. Even after pulling a pillow over her head she heard shouted snippets of the conversation:
“How could you encourage her?” her mother railed.
“Emma’s talent is art—she should be encouraged!”
“Art is fine for men of means—not women . . . a girl working as a sculptress?”
“You would doom her to a life of servitude in the kitchen?”
“Better that than a life of poverty with miscreants.”
The argument burst not with a bang, but with an unendurable silence that left the house cold and hushed as if the lonely meanderings afterward were sounds created by melancholy ghosts. Her father moved into what had been a guest room, leaving Helen alone in the marital bedroom that had been theirs since they’d moved in. In the following weeks, cold greetings were exchanged between them, even extending to Emma, while her father took refuge in his own sad counsel. A separate living arrangement might linger until spring, Emma believed, when the land, and possibly hearts, thawed. In her loneliness, she wrote several letters to Kurt—none of which were answered.
* * *
Daniel Chester French sent periodic letters to her parents throughout the winter encouraging Emma’s studies. At first, Helen ignored them until an invitation to meet another well-known neighbor in Lenox, Edith Wharton, was issued by the sculptor. The chance to meet the writer of The House of Mirth was too much for her mother to brush aside. Helen spent many days in Wharton’s company in the spring and also in the months when the novelist wasn’t traveling abroad. Their unexpected friendship seemed to usher in the long-awaited reconciliation between her parents Emma had hoped for.
“She seems so sad for a talented woman,” Helen told them one night at the dinner table. “Both she and her husband . . . no married couple should suffer so.” She reached out her hand and for the first time in months touched her husband’s arm and the next evening they reconciled, moving again into the same bedroom.
Throughout the summer, Emma rode her horse three times a week to Chesterwood to receive instruction. As the sculptor worked on plans for his outdoor statuary, he looked over Emma’s shoulder and critiqued her work with the modeling clay, noting her innate ability to create the form, but fail in the details. She created maquettes of clay and plaster, and even learned techniques for carving marble under French’s guidance. Emma learned to love the process of bringing an idea, a drawing, to full form, and marveled at the process of creation.
Although thoughts of Kurt lessened during her tutelage, he was never far from her mind, especially after receiving an invitation in the autumn from Charlene to spend time between Christmas and New Year’s at the Vermont farmhouse. Emma learned that Kurt also was invited and arranged for an immediate positive response.
* * *
“You never answered my letters,” Emma said, fiddling with the red sash of her robe.
Kurt, reading a magazine, sat in the overstuffed wingchair in front of a dying fire of birch logs, his long legs stretched across an equally plush ottoman, trying to feign indifference to her attentions. Charlene and her family had already retired, leaving Kurt to keep watch on the fireplace until the embers died. There were four bedrooms upstairs: Charlene and her parents each occupying separate rooms on the front of the house; Emma’s and Kurt’s rooms faced each other, at the end of the long upstairs hall. Patsy and Jane were not at the farmhouse; instead, they were at home in Boston.
Frustrated, Emma pulled a chair near the fire, blocking Kurt’s view of the flames and the warmth emanating from them.
“I will be very cold and cranky if you don’t move,” he said and drew up his knees, exposing his gray wool socks extending down from the cuffs of his pants. “It was twenty-five degrees outside when I checked the barn thermometer two hours ago. It’s colder now.”
“You might as well spend the evening with the horses, for all the attention you’ve shown me.”
He leaned forward, the magazine crinkling in his lap. “What would you like me to do?” He rested his hands in his lap. “We can’t play the Edison—we’ll wake the family and Charlene’s father would be angry. We can’t dance because we don’t have music. We can talk but I suspect you’re tired, as it’s nearing eleven, past your bedtime I’m sure.”
“I’m not a child, Kurt,” Emma huffed. “It’s been a year and a half since we’ve seen each other. At least tell me what you’ve been doing.” She took in his form. He had lost none of his attractiveness since she’d seen him last; in fact, the last vestiges of his boyish good looks had been replaced by the features of a handsome man: his shoulders had broadened, the beard darkened to a noticeable stubble, the chin and cheeks firmer, the eyes still a lively and lovely sky blue. She hoped to draw him.
He sighed and sank back in the chair. “Studying, studying, and more studying in order to get into law school. My father will disown me if I don’t get into Harvard. I consider it an almost impossible