Sargent's Women by Donna M. Lucey

Author:Donna M. Lucey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Elizabeth and Jack secretly shared a correspondence of the grandest, most heated, and forbidden passion. She kept all of his letters locked up at Rokeby so that her siblings wouldn’t find them. She told Jack to tell her when he received each one of her letters lest it was unaccounted for and fell into the wrong hands. In the summer of 1897, Chapman brought his children to the seashore on the main coast of Rhode Island—close enough to Newport, where Elizabeth would be staying, so that the pair could meet. Conanicut Island in Narragansett Bay, reachable by steam ferry, was the perfect midpoint. Elizabeth could slip away for the day and no one would know (though she feared that her sister Alida was already beginning to get suspicious about her relationship with Jack). Four hours alone on Conanicut. Such joy!

Jack teased her about her enjoyment of all the “mystery and clandestine meetings. . . . You shall have all the fun of it. I’ll wear a cloak and give the countersign, evade the eyes of hotel clerks, pass you in public, and leap through your casement to the sound of twangling instruments.” It was all very romantic, but brief encounters and letters were not enough to sustain her. Sitting beneath a tree on a breezy August morning in Newport, Elizabeth wrote passionately, “I crave more habit of you Jack—I need the close waking & sleeping intercourse of every moment of life. . . . And this living apart in our bodies delays that day,—though it must be going to make it more perfect when it comes. . . .”

In New York they met surreptitiously in out-of-the-way places like the Paulist Roman Catholic church on Tenth Avenue. Surely, no one would recognize them there. But on one occasion, Elizabeth dared to rendezvous with Jack at Grace Episcopal on lower Broadway, a religious outpost for their own social set. Jack had been writing poetry of late and he read some to her in church. She was so enthralled by his presence—“these blessed visions of your bodily nearness”—she could barely hear the poems. Their being together was all that mattered—“It was less than two hours, but it held days of fulfillment & verification. . . . For when I am away from you my own, all joy & peace seem prophesies of our meeting. And so they are.” She was transported with love, “my soul all full of you.” Elizabeth wrote this in New York City just before setting off for Rokeby, where she was to spend the fall, but she assured Jack that “every field & wood & brook will shine with you! Bless you, bless you my treasure—God keep us. . . .”

It was essential that Elizabeth go to Rokeby, but she couldn’t tell Jack why. A family scandal was brewing. The Chanler siblings were hunkered down, bound together with a secret only they knew. Though Jack was in the dark, he sensed something was wrong and asked about it in a letter.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.