Free The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart

the sound of Lake Superior through a slightly open window. I couldhear Sara’s clock ticking steadily in the kitchen below. But what I really heard was just these icicles that I see before me now, slowly diminishing, dripping onto the lawn.
    The following summer my father returned to the verandahed house on the other side of Lake Ontario and I returned with him, somewhat less reluctantly this time, but still uncertain as to what a summer spent far from what I considered then to be intellectual stimulation might have to offer. My father stayed in Davenport for just a few days, however, before heading farther north to examine mining properties in which he had invested, trusting, and as it turned out correctly, that the threat of war in Europe would cause his stocks to rise. I was to be left alone in the summer house, after a year of New York City, a year of art classes with Robert Henri.
    Everything about the city had been charged with significance for me. Each stray cat, each garbage pail, the laundry swinging on lines strung between the sooty tenement walls. I loved the unceasing breathing hiss of the metropolis, the texture of the pavement, the sidewalk beneath my feet. For the first few months I had trouble sleeping, concerned that I would overlook some important aspect of the life that continued to churn all night around me. Often I would find myself at the window at two or three in the morning, mesmerized by an interchange taking place below me on the street: an explosive argument between lovers, a fist fight between two lurching drunks. The city was unmasked in ways I had never imagined possible; its nerve endings quivering a fraction of an inch beneath its surfaces. Though I spent hours andhours observing these flagrant acts of exposure, I was unable to participate, to enter the fray of experience.
    I was a tourist then. I sense that I have remained a tourist. My recollection is that if I wasn’t in my room in Greenwich Village or in Robert Henri’s life studios at The Art Students’ League, I was standing in the air or moving underground. The crossed iron bones of the Hudson and Harlem and East River bridges and the labyrinthian passageways of the new subway tunnels fascinated me. During the decades just prior to my arrival in New York, armies of labourers had knit the city together with threads of steel — tracks and girders and cables — and I was able to pass under and over rivers, to walk on the Brooklyn Bridge above the tarred roofs of factories, then slip beneath the surfaces of streets as if I were a needle, anonymous and shining.
    And then there was my teacher, Robert Henri. A tall man with a surprisingly small face, he was filled with the kind of certainties that bolstered my own reticence. Before I left the city for the summer, he had spoken to me about the value of solitude, had warned me about disappearing into others, letting their voices echo, pollute singular, clear thought. He had instructed me to contain my own reactions, to express my feelings to no one, nothing, except to the paper or canvas. “Each sensation is precious,” he would lecture. “Protect it, cherish it, keep it. Never give it away. You must develop that balance which allows all of the world to come in to you and only that which you have expressed in your art to move back out again into the world. When you are alone, without the distraction of community and affection, this will be easier to achieve.”
    My teacher had no way of knowing that neither community nor affection played a significant role in my life. His words merely gave me permission to remain aloof. This lofty promoter of American art with the affected French last name had sanctioned the voyeurism that had become, already, such a vital part of my personality.
    I remained alone in the summer house for eight ritual hours each day, drawing the still life of driftwood, bottles, and apples I had set up in the kitchen, or making watercolour sketches of the changing sky, the