Free Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende Page B

ready to redouble her zeal.
    "There's this painter following Lynn around. He wants her to pose for a painting of Salome," she announced to her husband one day.
    "Who?"
    "Salome. The one with the seven veils, Tao. Read the Bible."
    "If she's in the Bible, I suppose it's all right," he murmured absentmindedly.
    "Do you know what the fashion was in the time of Saint John the Baptist? If I don't keep an eye on her, they'll be painting your daughter with her breasts bared!"
    "Then keep an eye on her." Tao smiled. He caught his wife about the waist and pulled her down onto the large book open on his knees, telling her she shouldn't be frightened by tricks of the imagination.
    "Oh, Tao! What are we going to do about Lynn?"
    "Nothing, Eliza. She will marry one day and give us grandchildren. "
    "She's still a child!"
    "In China she would already be too old to get a bridegroom."
    "We're in America, and she's not going to marry a Chinese man," she said with conviction.
    "Why? Don't you like Chinese?" the zhong-yi teased.
    "There isn't another man like you in all the world, Tao, but I think Lynn will marry a white man."
    "Americans don't know how to make love, I'm told."
    "Maybe you could teach them." Eliza blushed, her nose in her husband's neck.
    Lynn posed for the portrait of Salome wearing flesh-colored tights beneath her veils and scrupulously supervised by her mother, but Eliza Sommers could not take the same firm stand when her daughter was offered the enormous honor of modeling for the statue of the Republic that was to be displayed in the center of Union Square. The campaign to raise funds had lasted for months, and people contributed what they were able: schoolchildren their pennies, widows a few dollars, and magnates like Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz fat checks. Every day the newspapers published the amount raised the day before, until enough had been gathered to commission the monument from a famous sculptor brought especially from Philadelphia to carry out that ambitious project. The most distinguished families in the city competed by giving parties and balls to allow the artist the opportunity of choosing their daughters; it was known that the model for the Republic would be the symbol of all San Francisco, and every young girl aspired to the distinction. The sculptor, a modern man with bold ideas, looked for weeks for the ideal girl, but none satisfied him. To represent this vigorous American nation composed of valiant immigrants from the four corners of the world, he announced, he wanted a model of mixed blood. The financiers of the project and the city officials were alarmed: whites could not imagine that people of another color were entirely human, and no one wanted to hear of a mulatto girl presiding over the city from atop the obelisque in Union Square, as the artist intended. California was in the vanguard in questions of art, said the newspaper editorials, but the business of the mulatto was a lot to ask. The sculptor was at the point of succumbing to the pressure and selecting a descendant of some Danes when by chance one day he went into Eliza Sommers's pastry shop, planning to console himself with a chocolate eclair, and saw Lynn. There was the woman he had been seeking to pose for his sculpture: tall, beautifully proportioned, with perfect bones, and not only did she have the dignity of an empress and a face with classic features, she also had the stamp of exoticism he desired. There was something about her beyond mere harmony, something unique, a blend of East and West, of sensuality and innocence, of strength and delicacy, that seduced him completely. When he informed Eliza that he had chosen her daughter to be his model, convinced that he was bestowing a tremendous honor on that modest family of pastry makers, he encountered firm resistance. Eliza Sommers was fed up with wasting her time chaperoning Lynn in the studios of photographers whose only task consisted of pressing a button; just the idea of