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Show I looked into her closet instead, probably just as snoopy. It was a good-sized closet and only half full, shoes lined up on one side on the floor with more dust than I would have expected, and I had already seen most of the clothes on the hangers. For a well-dressed woman she did not indulge herself with clothes. While we were getting the tour of Ben and Amelia's fixed-up apartment I had noticed that Amelia's clothes filled a closet this big, bulged in it, and I wondered how there had been any room for Kate when Amelia lived here. On one side of the shelf were the clean linens, on the other a paper sack with the store's name, "Carson, Pirie, Scott," the sack dusty and containing a summer straw hat. Kate wore wool hats against the Chicago winter winds but I had never seen her in a hat in summer. Opposite the shoes and leaning against the wall was a large portfolio filled with sketches and drawings. I carried it to the bed and slipped them out and went through them, a miscellany, a couple of charcoal sketches of a man who I later discovered was Mark Wells; pencil drawings of city buildings; a sketch of a woman in a peasant costume; and then a considerable group of western landscape scenes which looked somehow tentative, as if done from memory. My own memory of my lost fields and meadows told me something was wrong about them, yet even so they made me remember and yearn for the real thing, the open skies, the mesa and the wandering river, the domestic fields and the distant mountains. I felt a sharp pang of homesickness. There were some pen and ink drawings of horses too and I went through them remembering the ones I had seen years ago and which she had destroyed like a woman destroys her girlish poems. Unlike the landscapes these were good and true. Whether remembered or directly observed, she had them right, and I felt she had been excited doing them. A couple had a blurred intention that made me put them aside but of the others, one looked natural enough to |
