Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/86

 of painting Lucy. One night Paul Vermillion, a New Yorker, had said at the Ddme it didn't matter where one painted. But it did. Who could feel like painting a Nebraska supper table? A table at which one had to struggle against being made to feel a child. Always that strain about coffee. He just couldn't drink it, as he used to, gulped hot and then lukewarm between bites of meat and potatoes. And the coffee was thin, Ma getting hurt when he told her. At least the coffee he got at the Italian store and made at the studio was something like the coffee at Florian's.

He buttered an ear of corn and nostalgia for Venice and Paris became resentment. Corn was good even though the French said it was fodder. Thought they knew everything. So damned patronizing, like when he had said he was a provincial and they had smiled. He'd show them. That Laurencin girl, and in Nebraska too. He'd show them he could paint as good, better than a woman at any rate.

Clem grinned and rescued a buttery drop from the corner of his mouth. Mrs. Brush smiled too. The territories of her long face were mapped with fine umber lines. Burnt, or raw umber? Did Dürer use either? Gothic Germany. The Bohemian Cellar in Congress was like a rathskeller, not as deep down, hollowed in the rock, as the Nelson Cellar in Nuremberg. Liebfraumilch. Big juicy breasts of Rubens. Nothing juicy about Nebraska. Yellow cornfields were more like—what? More like Brueghel. Yes, that's it, Brueghel. But what was done, was done. One must think up something new. Like Picasso. Every year, something new. But what? But what!

Brick Street cut by Venner Avenue had received its name in 1887 because of the several short blocks of Victorian brick residences on the avenue's west axis. These houses, smaller replicas of Omaha copies of Chicago's South Side, were now abandoned to real estate offices, lawyers, doctors, dentists, funeral parlors, in that order, since Brick Street's second generation had moved to the latest fashionable garden spots on River Road near the new country club.

Number 410 Brick Street was distinguished from its other two-storied neighbors by a sloping skylight. This had been installed in 1915 by an optimistic photographer of hazy sepia portraits and then abandoned because of the Philistine imperviousness of Congress elite to the new "art photography." One day Clem Brush while walking aimlessly, morosely longing for his old Paris studio, spied the 74