Under a Wild Sky (32 page)

One day as he walked down a back alley to avoid being seen with his bulky portfolio, Audubon was stopped by a woman wearing a veil. She seemed young, perhaps only in her teens. She asked Audubon about his
work, and what he charged for portraits. She then wrote down her address and asked him to call on her in half an hour. When he arrived and went inside, the young lady pulled back her veil. Audubon thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She asked if he could draw her likeness. He assured her that he could. Then she asked if he could draw her naked. Audubon, later confiding his reaction in his journal, was speechless. “Had I been shot with a 48 pounder through the heart,” he wrote, “my articulating powers could not have been more suddenly stopped.”

After a walk around the block to steady his nerves, Audubon went back and began to prepare his drawing equipment. The woman disappeared behind a curtain, undressed, and arranged herself on a couch. When Audubon pulled the curtain back, he dropped his pencil. She smiled at him and he started drawing. Audubon worked for an hour. When he stopped, the woman dressed and then talked with him at length, offering suggestions for improving the uncompleted drawing.

Every day for the next week and a half, Audubon returned to work on the drawing. When the subject of payment came up, Audubon—who would have happily worked for nothing—said she could pay him whatever she liked. The woman answered that she would buy him a new gun and have it inscribed. On the last day they met, the woman wrote her name at the bottom corner of the picture, as though she were the artist and not the subject, and together they framed it. When Audubon received his gun, the barrels bore an engraving in French that, translated, read: “Do not refuse this gift of a friend who is grateful to you—may it equal yourself in goodness.” Though he called at her apartment several times after that, the woman was never in and Audubon did not see her again.

Did this all really happen—or was it one of Audubon's extravagant lies? There's no proof that it isn't the truth, and there are a handful of reasons to believe that some episode at least similar to this did, in fact, take place. Audubon gave the woman's last name as “Andre.” His journal entry dated February 21, 1821, mentions his drawing a likeness of a “fair Lady” named Andre—and includes a hint that he may have more to say about this picture at a later date. Then, on March 11, 1821, Audubon reported a shooting excursion with Mason on which he tried his new “Souvenir Gun.” He later gave his old gun to Mason, so he must have gotten a replacement for it. Perhaps more important is the fact that Audubon did
not compose his written account of his sessions with Andre for publication, and never spoke of them as a way of advancing his career or burnishing his ego.

Instead, it seems to have been written for an audience of one—his wife. Audubon often juggled letters and diary entries, sometimes copying sections of his journal into his correspondence.
In a long letter to Lucy that he composed over a period of days toward the end of May 1831, Audubon included a section from his journal that he called “The Fair Incognito,” which told the story of the Andre drawing. Audubon scrawled a note to Lucy at right angles across the letter, saying he was providing this account for “my only friend.” He admonished her against “participating” in the story—whatever that meant—and asked that she share it with no one, except her brother William if he would promise not to repeat it.

During this long period of separation—and others they endured—the Audubons were sometimes impatient and cranky with one another in their correspondence. But neither was ever intentionally cruel. Audubon, though he was on occasion insensitive in relaying events that could have aroused Lucy's jealousy, surely would have seen that this incident could have been especially hurtful. For him to have invented the story—or to have added salacious overtones to a more benign episode—for the purpose of wounding Lucy's feelings would have been quite out of character. What seems more probable is that this was actually a kind of preemptive confession—Audubon's effort to erase any tinge of guilt he may have felt about what happened.

Lucy, many miles and two rivers away, tried hard to look on the bright side of their lengthening separation. It could not have been easy. Victor and John Woodhouse, whom she was now teaching, consumed all of Lucy's time.
Weary and losing weight, Lucy said she was often too tired even to play the piano.
Her father had recently died, and in her grief Lucy had begun to dwell on “happier times” when she was growing up in Derbyshire. She said she could still picture her favorite places there “as if no time had elapsed.” Of course, much time and many events were now between Lucy and her childhood. During a springtime visit to relatives in Louisville, she wrote to her cousin in England, going over recent
events with an economy of emotion that didn't quite match the circumstances of “the various losses and misfortunes of my husband's affairs,” as she put it.

“[F]or the last year he has supported us by his talent in drawing and painting which he learnt from David as a recreation in better times,” Lucy wrote, stretching the truth with every syllable. Whether Lucy actually believed that Audubon once studied with David or she was merely an accomplice in perpetuating this myth, Lucy clearly intended to place her husband in the best possible light. Left on her own with two children to raise however she could, Lucy managed to make it sound as if Audubon were taking care of everything.

“This last year I have spent in Cincinnati where Mr. Audubon combined a drawing school with a situation at the Museum, and taking portraits of various sizes and kinds,” Lucy continued. “[A]t the same time he is prosecuting a large work on Ornithology which when compleat he means to take to Europe to be published. The birds are all drawn from nature the natural size and embellished with plants, trees, or views as best suits the purpose. It is his intention to go first to England and I hope it will be in my power to accompany him . . . Mr. Audubon is now out on a tour of research for the birds he has not. At present he is in New Orleans and it will be a year before he returns.” In what was perhaps an attempt to ensure that she and Audubon were in agreement about all of this, Lucy mailed the letter by way of Audubon, who got it ten days later and added a postscript, sending his best wishes to England.

Here, of course, was still more proof that Audubon's plans for publishing his drawings had developed long before his trip to Philadelphia and his meeting with Charles-Lucien Bonaparte. But Lucy's letter to her cousin was more telling for what she left out.
That same spring, Lucy was writing to Audubon that she was running out of patience with his vague plans to travel to England and his ineffectual attempts to land a position with an expedition to the West.
Her letters, he wrote in his journal, “ruffled” his spirits. Lucy begged Audubon not to return to Kentucky a failure, and demanded that he at least give some thought to how they could put together enough money for Victor to go to college. Audubon, who was living hand-to-mouth as it was, sent back an exasperated reply. He told Lucy she was much too timid. If he had to go to England without a penny in his pocket he would do it, he said, confident that he would always find a way to get by. What really annoyed him were Lucy's endless
demands for money. Where she seemed now to see him solely for his ability—or inability—to provide for his family, Audubon said he thought of Lucy only as the object of his undying love.

“Wert thou not to give me hints about money I should be sorry,” he wrote acidly, “as I know it is as necessary for the support of
thy life
as thy affection is to the comfort of
mine
.”

In June of 1821, a family named Pirrie invited Audubon and Mason to spend the summer and fall at their home near Bayou Sara, about 125 miles upriver from New Orleans, near the town of St. Francisville. Oakley Plantation, as it was called, was a revelation. On the day he and Mason arrived, Audubon saw that the land was different from the level country around New Orleans. There were hills and long ridgetops dense with hardwoods. Beautiful flowers grew on immense magnolia trees, and Audubon reveled in walking over the hard, red-clay ground beneath soaring beech trees. He grew dizzy at being “surrounded” by thousands of warblers and thrushes, and—too entranced to think of unpacking his gun—admired a fine Mississippi kite that glided by high overhead. A few weeks after their arrival, on the Fourth of July, Audubon composed a long, detailed inventory of the birds he was studying at Oakley—more than sixty species. All of these were of interest, though Audubon seemed quite partial to mockingbirds, which readily imitated every kind of sound and bird call—sometimes confusing him. Mockingbirds were also unusually bold, willing to chase every other species of bird except for the larger raptors.

Early one Sunday morning in August, Audubon and Mason hiked to a lake about five miles distant from Oakley and on their way discovered a landscape unlike any Audubon had ever seen—a world of water and gnarled forest that would become an important backdrop of his work. At first they passed among the crowded trunks of a vast magnolia woods. Audubon shot two wood ducks on a small pond and watched as a pair of red-shouldered hawks descended and made off with them. A little later, he and Mason stopped to watch a large, brilliantly colored spider spinning a web coffin around a fly it had just caught. Audubon surmised that this was how the spider preserved its food when it was not hungry.

They came finally to a place where the land fell off, and beneath them in the dawn light spread a fantastic swampland of red and white cypress
trees, their kneelike roots rising up from the mist-shrouded water by the thousands. In the distance was the lake. Audubon and Mason trudged through the mud and ooze of the swamp. At the lakeshore, they saw a number of big alligators lying in the shallows, obviously unconcerned at their approach but perhaps not unawares. Audubon studied a beautiful ibis perched on a log some way out from shore, but thought better of shooting it, as he had no boat with which to retrieve it and was afraid the alligators might come to life if he sent his dog in.

The woods near the lake were filled with birds, including a blinding variety of fat, vividly hued warblers. Audubon shot several species, including a stunning male specimen of the yellow-throated warbler. Later in the day, Audubon heard what he thought was surely a wood pewee, but he was unable to find the bird. When he went back a few days later, he heard it again. It turned out to be a young Mississippi kite. Audubon shot it, but the baby bird did not fall and instead remained high in its tree. Suddenly its mother returned, carrying a large grasshopper—which the wounded bird refused. The mother then carried her offspring away to another tree. Audubon followed and killed both with a single shot.

Audubon went back again and again to the cypress swamp, awed at its richness. Perhaps it was about this time that he began to think how pleasant it would have been to have grown up on a sprawling plantation in such a place—a fantasy he eventually decided to claim was the truth.

In late August, Audubon worked on a drawing that would later be incorporated into one of his most famous images—and the focal point of a raging controversy. The finished drawing, which was probably completed several years later, depicts a group of mockingbirds seemingly under attack by a rattlesnake coiled among the branches of a yellow jessamine tree. It's a startling, imaginative picture. Audubon, eager to display the reptile in a posture that would “render it most interesting” to other naturalists, showed the snake—mouth gaping and fangs bared—striking at one of the birds. The mockingbirds, meanwhile, are shown in varying attitudes to illustrate different aspects of male and female plumage—Audubon's trademark technique. The bird closest to the snake recoils into the air, a look of terror in its eyes.

In the swelter of late summer in Louisiana, Audubon painted only the snake—a 5½-footer he killed for the purpose—laboring sixteen hours straight, until the stink of the corpse's rapid decay forced him to stop.
Eliza Pirrie, at fifteen the youngest member of the Pirrie family, worked eagerly by his side making her own drawing of the snake. Eliza had become Audubon's prize pupil and sole excuse for staying on at Oakley. She had six brothers and sisters, all but one of whom—a married sister not living at Oakley—had died. Audubon was teaching her drawing, and also music, dancing, and arithmetic. Audubon enjoyed this work. Eliza had a sweet disposition, and although she was not pretty, the thirty-six-year-old Audubon took note—perhaps not appropriately—of the “good form” of her mature body.

In the fall, Eliza fell ill. Relapses kept her bed-ridden for an extended period, and the Pirrie family physician finally ordered her to cease her lessons. Audubon observed a special affection between doctor and patient, and surmised that this was the real reason Eliza was no longer permitted to study with Audubon. The doctor meanwhile said she could eat as much as she pleased—a treatment, Audubon dryly noted, to which Eliza eagerly applied herself. In October, Audubon and Mason were fired. The Pirries allowed them to stay on for a bit as guests, but everyone seemed cool toward their continued presence in the house. Audubon busied himself with ornithological studies, particularly in going over the mistakes he had found in Wilson's
American Ornithology
—which, knowing Wilson was highly regarded in Louisiana, he prudently kept to himself. When it finally came time for Audubon and Mason to leave, Mrs. Pirrie objected to the $204 bill Audubon presented for his services. She accused him of trying to cheat her. Audubon listened patiently and then wrote up an invoice for her husband. Mr. Pirrie, a good man who tended to drink too much, was apologetic about his family's behavior and assured Audubon he would be paid in full. He never was.