Girl with Brush and Canvas by Carolyn Meyer

Author:Carolyn Meyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boyds Mills Press
Published: 2019-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

15

Williamsburg, Virginia—Fall 1908

DURING THE YEAR THAT I HAD BEEN AWAY, MY father had changed into someone I hardly recognized. The fun-loving Irishman who had once played the fiddle and danced with his children, the forward-looking businessman who was the first to install a telephone in his Sun Prairie house, had now become withdrawn and silent. After the grocery and the feed and grain business folded, he had launched O’Keeffe & Sons Building Materials. But people in Williamsburg wanted only traditional houses of brick and sometimes clapboard, and they were not interested in buying the concrete-and-clamshell blocks. He still owned the nine-acre strip of land next to the gracious old mansion we’d once lived in, and he decided to use the inventory of unsold blocks to build a new house on it.

He’d made a few rough sketches of what he wanted. Francis, newly graduated with a degree in architecture, helped with the construction. Fourteen-year-old Alexius pitched in as well.

“What do you think?” I asked Francis. “Did you advise him on the design?”

Francis rubbed his eyes. “It’s what he wants. He didn’t ask for my advice, and when I made some suggestions, like the placement of the doors and windows, and eliminating the awkward gables, he didn’t want to hear anything I said.”

“Maybe Mama can get him to listen.”

“She says it’s his project and he’ll do what he wants.”

“That two-story concrete porch on the front—”

“I know. It’s clumsy; there’s no other word to describe it. And the design of the roof is all wrong—it will let rainwater leak down inside the concrete blocks, so the house will likely always be damp. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to live there.” Francis looked at me with a wry grin. “Except those oddball O’Keeffes.”

The oddball O’Keeffes moved into the house, and we tried to make the best of our situation. Almost all of the money Papa had made on the sale of the property in Sun Prairie was gone, and he had not yet hit upon a way to earn more. A partnership set up to sell land came to nothing. An arrangement to ship peanuts and watermelons from a pier rented on the York River went nowhere.

“You know I’d send you back up to New York if I could,” he told me. “But right now, I can’t do it. Pretty soon, though, things will work out.”

But things did not work out. There was nothing left to send any of us back to school, except Alexius. Although Mama badly wanted Ida and Nita to have another year at Chatham, she explained that it was more important for Alexius to finish at the academy. I was almost twenty-one, and I couldn’t expect my family to keep on paying for my education. I would have to figure out some way to earn enough money to support myself.

But how? Doing what? I had gone to New York with the idea of eventually going on to earn a teaching certificate, but I needed another year of training to achieve that.

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