Chapter 4 #2
“She was ostracized when she converted,” I explained.
My voice was shaking less now. This was good.
This was like being in the classroom. I could do that.
I could talk about God and art, even with only two of us here.
I still had a hard time with him looking at me—I had to keep my eyes mostly averted so we wouldn’t accidentally make eye contact—but I could talk at least. “Her husband was dead, leaving her and their five children with nothing, and the new faith she’d found solace in meant that she was cut off from her relatives and society.
Parents withdrew their students from her school.
Her husband’s family tried to get her legally exiled from the state of New York.
She kept going anyway and founded some of the first Catholic schools and women’s religious communities in the United States.
But I didn’t want to erase her pain. Erasing the cost of her work felt like cheapening it. ”
“Do your clients ever ask for more, ah, traditional depictions of your subjects? Less intense?” Bell asked. He was wandering over to a cloth-covered block in the far corner of the studio and peeking underneath.
“Sometimes” was the honest answer. “But most people who hire me are hiring me because they like my work already. Most clients find me because they want something different.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then I tell them I can’t take their commission.”
It had always baffled Kaitlyn, my inability to just make something a client wanted if I felt personally uninspired. I supposed as a lawyer, she rarely took on work she was inspired by, so she was used to work being fungible output, a consistent extrusion of effort.
But that was what the bookshelves and coffee tables were for. When I was making something for God, I couldn’t not listen to him while I was carving. That was a sort of blasphemy to me, and I had little in life I could lay claim to, but not being a blasphemer was one of them.
Bell paused. “Truly?”
“I know that’s not how we teach the students at Evelyn to think about commissions, and my life would be easier if I could just produce the kinds of carvings those clients ask for.
But it’s not even that I don’t want to. It’s that I simply can’t.
It would be like if I tried to speak French at this very moment.
It wouldn’t matter how badly I wanted to—the words wouldn’t come because they couldn’t. ”
“And you’re okay losing work because of this?”
He didn’t ask it the way Kaitlyn would have—incredulously, offended even, on behalf of capitalism. He was asking like the idea had never occurred to him that someone might choose inspiration over compensation.
“The residency gives me a buffer, even if it’s not large, and I take some other work, like small pieces of furniture, to make up for what I might otherwise lose.
But yes, I’m okay losing work. I might not be a priest or a nun or an anchoress, but I see this as a vocation too.
This is my calling, so why would I denature that by making art that’s someone else’s to make? ”
I’d been lulled into a flimsy kind of courage by him looking at the carvings more often than he looked at me, by his direct questions that were easy to answer, so when he looked at me again, his eyes intense and searching, I wasn’t ready.
My face burned, and I moved my eyes down as quickly as I could, terrified that I’d said something ridiculous.
Why else would he be looking at me like that? Why was he looking at me at all?
And why—why—did his looking feel like it did? Like the air around us had been turned to glass? Like the moment was a plucked string on a harp, thrumming still?
I was strange and broken because of course he felt none of this and was just a normal, friendly young man, and when he spoke again, his voice was still easy and informal and relaxed. “What’s this going to be?”
He was holding up the cloth covering a block of basswood. A fully carved hand emerged from the otherwise untouched surface, the first finger slightly outstretched, like it was indicating something. Summoning someone.
“It’s supposed to be an angel,” I said, trying to just be like everyone else in the world who can have a regular conversation without panicking that they were screwing up somehow.
“It’s hard to find American linden—basswood—in the size I need, and I usually have to laminate pieces together to get a block I can carve from.
But this came from my house, actually, a tree that blew over during a storm eight years ago.
It felt like God wanted me to have it, and when I had it taken to the mill to get it cleaned up, the wood was so pure and unknotted inside that it felt like an angel was all it could be. ”
“You wouldn’t save this pure, God-given wood for a statue of Jesus? Or Mary?” he asked, finally letting the cloth drop.
“They were human,” I replied softly. “I like the wood to show their humanity, so I don’t mind impure materials.”
“Why stop after the hand? I feel like an angel would be the easiest to carve because it can be anything.”
“That’s less freeing than you might think.”
“Have you already had someone sit for sketches? That’s part of your process, right? Using a live model?”
I nodded. Somehow I’d shuffled closer to the wall of the studio, a rabbit pressing close to the side of its cage.
“It helps me make them real. But I haven’t found someone to be the angel yet, and I thought maybe I could get started anyway, but I was wrong.
I’d rather wait for the right model than waste a tree I climbed on as a child, and…
well, I’m not sure I even know what this wood wants to be anyway. Look at the inside of the hand.”
Bell squatted and peered up. “Oh.”
The wood—which had seemed to be miraculously unblemished when we’d readied it at the mill—had hidden inside itself a secret knot.
Tight and hard and coffee brown. I almost never started a project without a sketch, this was the only time, and it felt like God had been tweaking my nose for my hubris.
Here was an angel’s hand, elegant from every angle save for underneath, where it looked like the angel had scraped up a handful of shadows to fling at the world.
“I have to think about it longer,” I added unnecessarily.