Free Men and Angels by Mary Gordon

moved her shoulder half an inch, he would immediately have understood. And there was no way of writing about sexual desire, no proper words for body parts that felt drawn up, stretched, emptied out. There was no such thing, she thought, as an honest letter for a modern. We no longer need wait months, years, for the sound of the actual voice, the glimpse of the actual body. Therefore we cannot sit without self-consciousness and write a letter.
    It was very different for Caroline’s age, she thought, turning to a packet of her letters. At twenty-four, Caroline was writing to her father from Paris. Dissatisfied with her instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy, she had battled for two years to go abroad, to work at the Académie Julian.
You can save your fears about my debauched life for your friends at the Atheneum. I arrive at the Academy at eight, where I work all day beside a Miss Oglethorpe of Bangor, Maine, with the demeanor precisely of a boiled owl, and a character to match. On the other side is Mlle. Dubuffet, of a good Norman family, whose complexion is, I assure you, the shade and grain of a raw beefsteak. I work till the light fails, what there is of it, and dine in a heatless pension with the inestimable Aunt Addie, on a soup and meat. For which you ought to envy and commend me, for reasons at once gustatory and economic.
    At night it is so cold that we retire early to our beds, unless we are invited out by one of the ubiquitous Americans, tipped off, one supposes, by you or your minions, to keep an eye out for the health and safety of two American ladies from the right sort of family. I assure you, our family tree takes on a stature here it can in no way aspire to in Philadelphia. But then the soil is poorer here, the forests thinner, the branches less leafy and the leaves less lush. This, of course, applies only to American species. Of the native nothing can be said yet, since this correspondent has dined out only with Americans!
    That I have discovered Rembrandt in the Louvre, that his Christ at Emmaus made me reach for the excellent linen of my pocket handkerchief, so awash was I on the flood tide of feminine artistic feelings, cannot, I know, interest you in the least. Yet since I have crossed the ocean on the magic carpet of your banknotes, I feel you’ve a right to know of my doings. I am one of the best in my class.
    Did she love her father? Did she hate him? Such a letter made it impossible to know: the tone made the question seem irrelevant. The weak concerns of a weakly spirit. On the same day she had written to her sister:
Dearest Magpie,
    I have only now begun to live. I am excited as a baby. From the moment I got off the boat at Antwerp, everything entranced me: impressions cling to my skin like sea spray. Just off the boat at Antwerp I saw the Rubens on the ceiling of the Cathedral. Maggie, there was never painting like it—blues and reds of richness indescribable. All the canvases in America have been painted with mud. Everything inspires me here: the rooves, tawny, alive as sleeping animals, the faces, the girl who does my laundry with the arms of a goddess. That I can see my breath in my bedroom, that we have had no sun in a fortnight, means nothing. I work all day and sleep like a farmer, unless I have spent the night being dined by some odious Yankee. I speak less French here than I did at Miss Thwaite’s. I long to meet the natives. Come join me, dearest mouse, there is nothing to look at in America. I miss you all, though I haven’t much room in me for that sort of thing right now, so stuffed am I with the joy of this new life. Yet I wish to know that you all cannot do without me, including our Reverend Father.
    To her father, she was baiting, forced, bullying of him and of herself. Her passions were “feminine artistic feelings,” in which he would not be interested. She was right, no doubt; he never wrote a word to her about her work. Yet she could say to him what she could not say to