Gifts: A Novel

With but hours to live, artist Anne Goldthwaite reveals to her sister long-forgotten stories of the past, some true and some embellished, while still hoping for the return of her long-time lover from the war in Europe. Anne is proud of her Southern roots. Born less than a year after occupied Alabama's return to the Union, Anne's earliest Montgomery memories are fond ones. Her grandfather, U.S. Senator George Goldthwaite, hosts family meals daily at his Church Street mansion. But her father, Richard Goldthwaite, runs afoul of city fathers and in 1872 packs up his family to try his luck in the booming railroad town of Dallas. That's where the memories grow dark with family tragedy. The four orphaned Goldthwaite children are sent back to Montgomery and split up among their relatives. Anne, the oldest, is fourteen. In her unfinished memoirs, she speaks of this time: "I always carried a load of melancholy that I could feel tangibly pressing on my heart, especially if I went off to have a good time on some cotton plantation. The night was so sad it was almost unendurable." Kindly Aunt Molly is the first to notice Anne's talent and when no suitable marriage match can be found, she sends her niece to study art in New York City. This was the Gibson Girl era, Twain's Gilded Age and the fight for Women's Suffrage is at full tilt. Anne settles in to Greenwich Village with a house full of single women and signs on to the fight. Paris is her next stop, and where she falls in with Gertrude Stein's flamboyant crowd and falls for the man with whom she will discreetly spend the next thirty-seven years. World War I sends her back to New York, but it takes a long time to arrive as an artist. There is a price to pay for a woman trying to butt in to a man's profession while simultaneously fighting men for the right to vote. She paints for a time under a male nom de plume. Anne pays for her beliefs with pieces of her career but her triumph is in never giving up. Not for a day. Her prolificacy is in evidence by the number of works in private homes and fine museums across the country. Anne once explained her astonishing work ethic with the following statement: "Every time I open my eyes I see a possibility for a picture."