I look at Al.
“I think it’s you,” he says.
I look back at the painting. The girl is low to the ground but almost appears to float in space. She is larger than everything around her. Like a centaur, or a mermaid, she is part one thing and part another: my dress, my hair, my frail arms, but the years on my body have been erased. The girl in the painting is lithe and young.
I feel a weight on my shoulder. A hand. Andy’s hand. “I finally finished it,” he says. “What do you think?”
I look closely at the girl. Her skin is the color of the field, her dress as bleached as bones in the sun, her hair stiff grass. She seems both eternally young and as old as the land itself, a line drawing in a children’s book about evolution: the sea creature sprouting limbs and inching up from shore.
“It’s called ‘Christina’s World,’” he says. “Betsy titled it, like she always does.”
“Christina’s world?” I repeat dumbly.
He laughs. “A vast planet of grass. And you exactly in the middle.”
“It’s not quite . . . me, though, is it?” I ask.
“You tell me.”
I look at the painting again. Despite the obvious differences, this girl is deeply, achingly familiar. In her I see myself at twelve years old, on a rare afternoon away from my chores. In my twenties, seeking refuge from a broken heart. Only a few days ago, visiting my parents’ graves in the family cemetery, halfway between the dory in the haymow and the wheelchair in the sea. From the recesses of my brain a word floats up: synecdoche. A part that stands in for the whole.
Christina’s World.
The truth is, this place—this house, this field, this sky—may only be a small piece of the world. But Betsy’s right: It is the entire world to me.
“You told me once you see yourself as a girl,” Andy says.
I nod slowly.
“I wanted to show that,” he says, gesturing at the painting. “I wanted to show . . . both the desire and the hesitation.”
I reach for his fingers and draw them to my lips. He’s startled, I can tell; I’ve never done this before. It surprises me too.
I think about all the ways I’ve been perceived by others over the years: as a burden, a dutiful daughter, a girlfriend, a spiteful wretch, an invalid . . .
This is my letter to the World that never wrote to Me.
“You showed what no one else could see,” I tell him.
He squeezes my shoulder. Both of us are silent, looking at the painting.
There she is, that girl, on a planet of grass. Her wants are simple: to tilt her face to the sun and feel its warmth. To clutch the earth beneath her fingers. To escape from and return to the house she was born in.
To see her life from a distance, as clear as a photograph, as mysterious as a fairy tale.
This is a girl who has lived through broken dreams and promises. Still lives. Will always live on that hillside, at the center of a world that unfolds all the way to the edges of the canvas. Her people are witches and persecutors, adventurers and homebodies, dreamers and pragmatists. Her world is both circumscribed and boundless, a place where the stranger at the door may hold a key to the rest of her life.
What she wants most—what she truly yearns for—is what any of us want: to be seen.
And look. She is.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, growing up in Bangor, Maine, my father gave me a woodcut by a local artist inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. It reminded him of me, he said, and I understood why: our shared name, the familiar Maine setting, the wispy flyaway hair. Throughout my childhood I made up stories about this slight girl in a pale pink dress with her back to the viewer, reaching toward a weathered gray house on a bluff in the distance.
Over the years I came to believe that the painting is a Rorschach test, a magic trick, a slight of hand. As David Michaelis writes in Wondrous Strange: The Wyeth Tradition, “The down-to-earth naturalism of Wyeth’s paintings is deceptive. In his work, all is not as it seems.” Andrew Wyeth’s paintings always have an undercurrent of wonder and mystery; he was fascinated with the darker aspects of human experience. You get glimpses of this in the arid, dry-as-bones grasses rendered in startlingly precise detail, the wreck of a house on a hill with a mysterious ladder leading to a second-story window, a lone piece of laundry floating like an apparition in the breeze. At first glance the slim woman in the grass appears to be languidly relaxed, but a closer look reveals odd dissonances. Her arms are strangely thin and twisted. Perhaps she is older than she appears. She seems poised, alert, yearning toward the house, and yet hesitant. Is she afraid? Her face is turned from the viewer, but she appears to be gazing at a darkened window on the second floor. What does she see in its shadows?
After I finished writing my novel Orphan Train, I began to look for another story that would engage my mind and heart as completely. Having learned a great deal about early-to-mid-twentieth-century America as part of my research, I thought it would be fruitful to linger in that time period. I’d become particularly interested in rural life: how people got by and what emotional tools they needed to survive hard times. As with Orphan Train, I liked the idea of taking a real historical moment of some significance and, blending fiction and nonfiction, filling in the details, illuminating a story that has been unnoticed or obscured.
One day, several months after that novel came out, a writer friend remarked that she’d seen the painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and thought of me. Instantly, I knew I’d found my subject.
For the past two years I’ve immersed myself in Christina’s world. I sat in front of the actual painting for hours at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, listening to the enthused, perturbed, intrigued, dismissive, passionate comments of passersby from all over the globe. (My favorite, from a Danish woman: “It’s just so . . . creepy.”) I studied the work of all three famous-artist Wyeths—N.C., his son Andrew, and Andrew’s son Jamie—to get a sense of the rich and complex family legacy. In Maine I became intimately familiar with the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, which has an entire building devoted to Wyeth art, and the Christina’s World homestead in Cushing, an old saltwater farm that is now part of the Farnsworth. I interviewed art historians and American historians and was lucky to get to know several tour guides from the Olson house, who sent me articles and letters I never would have discovered on my own. I read biographies, autobiographies, obituaries, magazine and newspaper articles, art histories, art books, and criticisms. I read more than I needed to about the Salem Witch Trials, which play a role in the family’s history. (So interesting!) I collected postcards and even bought a print of Christina’s World to hang on my wall.
Here’s what I discovered. Christina Olson, descended on one side from the notorious chief magistrate in the Salem Witch Trials and on the other from a poor Swedish peat-farming clan, was uniquely poised to become an iconic American symbol. In Wyeth’s painting she is resolute and yearning, hardy and vulnerable, exposed and enigmatic. Alone in a sea of dry grass, she is the archetypal individual against a backdrop of nature, fully present in the moment and yet a haunting reminder of the immensity of time. As MoMA curator Laura Hoptman writes in Wyeth: Christina’s World, “The painting is more a psychological landscape than a portrait, a portrayal of a state of mind rather than a place.”
Like the silhouetted figure in James Whistler’s Whistler’s Mother (1871) and the plain-featured farm couple in Grant Wood’s 1909 painting American Gothic, Christina embodies many of the traits we have come to think of as distinctively American: rugged individualism and quiet strength, defiance in the face of obstacles, unremitting perseverance.
As I did with Orphan Train, I tried to adhere to the actual historical facts wherever possible in writing A Piece of the World. Like the real Christina, my character was born in 1893 and grew up in an austere house on a barren hill in Cushing, Maine, with three brothers. A hundred years earlier, three of her ancestors had fled
from Massachusetts in midwinter, changing the spelling of their family name to Hathorn along the way, to escape the taint of association with their relative John Hathorne, the presiding judge in the Salem Witch Trials and the only one who never recanted. On the scaffold, one of the convicted witches put a curse on Hathorne’s family, and the specter of the trials clung to the family through generations; it was said among the townspeople of Cushing that those three Hathorns had brought the witches with them when they fled. Another relative, Nathaniel Hawthorne—who also changed the spelling of his name to obscure the family connection—wrote about his great-great grandfather Hathorne’s unremitting ruthlessness in Young Goodman Brown, a tale about how those who fear the darkness in themselves are the most likely to see it in other people.
Another true story became an equally significant part of my novel. For generations, the house on the hill was known as the Hathorn house. But early in the winter of 1890, in the midst of a raging snowstorm, a fishing vessel bringing lime to make mortar and bricks became stuck in the ice of the nearby St. George River channel, and a young Swedish sailor named Johan Olauson was stranded. The ship captain, a Cushing native, offered to take him in. Olauson walked across the ice to Captain Maloney’s cottage, where he hunkered down for the winter, waiting for the thaw to melt the ice so he could put back to sea. Just up the hill from the cottage was a magnificent white house belonging to a respected sea captain, Samuel Hathorn. Johan soon learned the story of the family on Hathorn Hill: they were on the brink of “daughtering out,” meaning that no male heirs had survived to carry on the family name. Within several months, the young sailor had taught himself English, changed his name to John Olson, and made his presence known to the “spinster” Hathorn daughter, Kate—at 34, six years his senior. In a one-month span, Samuel Hathorn died and John Olson married Kate, taking over the farm. Their first child, Christina, was born a year later, and the big white homestead became known as the Olson house. The Hathorns had daughtered out.
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, from an early age Christina was an active and vibrant presence. She had a lust for life, a fierce intelligence, and a determination not to be pitied, despite the degenerative disease that stole her mobility. (Though she was never correctly diagnosed in her lifetime, neurologists now believe she had a syndrome called Charcot-Marie-Tooth, a hereditary disorder that damages the nerves to the arms and legs.) Christina refused to use a wheelchair; as she became increasingly immobilized she took to dragging herself around. Several years ago the actress Claire Danes portrayed Christina Olson in an hour-long tour-de-force dance performance that emphasized her ferocious desire to move freely despite her devastating disease.
Quick of wit and sharp of tongue, Christina was a force to be reckoned with. Late in life—with her straw-like hair and hooked nose, her spinsterhood and independent nature—she was rumored among some of the townspeople of Cushing to be a witch herself. Andrew Wyeth variously called her a “witch” and a “queen” and “the face of Maine.”
Wyeth first appeared at Christina’s front door—along with Betsy James, his future wife, who’d been visiting the Olson farm since she was a girl—in 1939. He was twenty-two, Betsy seventeen, Christina forty-six. He began coming around almost daily, talking with Christina for hours, and sketching and painting landscapes, still lifes, and the house itself, which fascinated him. “The world of New England is in that house,” Wyeth said “—spidery, like crackling skeletons rotting in the attic—dry bones. It’s like a tombstone to sailors lost at sea, the Olson ancestor who fell from the yardarm of a square-rigger and was never found. It’s the doorway of the sea to me, of mussels and clams and sea monsters and whales. There’s a haunting feeling there of people coming back to a place.”
In time, Wyeth began incorporating Christina into his paintings. “What interested me about her was that she’d come in at odd places, odd times,” he said. “The great English painter John Constable used to say that you never have to add life to a scene, for if you sit quietly and wait, life will come—sort of an accident in the right spot. That happened to me all the time—happened lots with Christina.”
For the next thirty years, Christina was Andrew Wyeth’s muse and his inspiration. In each other, I believe, they came to recognize their own contradictions. Both embraced austerity but craved beauty; both were curious about other people and yet pathologically private. They were perversely independent and yet reliant on others to take care of their basic needs: Wyeth on his wife Betsy and Christina on Alvaro.
“My memory can be more of a reality than the thing itself,” Wyeth said. “I kept thinking about the day I would paint Christina in her pink dress, like a faded lobster shell I might find on a beach, crumpled. I kept building her in my mind—a living being there on a hill whose grass was really growing. Someday she was going to be buried under it. Soon her figure was actually going to crawl across the hill in my picture toward that dry tinderbox of a house on top. I felt the loneliness of that figure—perhaps the same that I felt myself as a kid. It was as much my experience as hers.”
“In Christina’s World,” Wyeth said, “I worked on that hill for a couple of months, that grass, building up the ground to make it come toward you, a surge of earth, like the whole planet . . . When it came time to lay Christina’s figure against the planet I’d created for her all those weeks, I put this pink tone on her shoulder—and it almost blew me across the room.”
In becoming an artist’s muse—a seemingly passive role—Christina finally achieved the autonomy and purpose she craved her entire life. Instinctively, I believe, Wyeth managed to get at the core of Christina’s self. In the painting she is paradoxically singular and representative, vibrant and vulnerable. She is solitary, but surrounded by the ghosts of her past. Like the house, like the landscape, she perseveres. As an embodiment of the strength of the American character, she is vibrant, pulsating, immortal.
For many reasons, this was the most difficult book I’ve ever written. Christina Olson was a real person, as were—and are—many of the people in this novel, and I did a tremendous amount of research into her life, her family, and her relationship with Andrew Wyeth. But at a certain point I had to let the research go and allow my characters to move the story forward. Ultimately, A Piece of the World is a work of fiction. Biographical facts regarding the characters in this book should not be sought in these pages. I hope readers intrigued by the story I tell here will explore the nonfiction accounts I mention in the acknowledgments. And above all else, I hope I have done this story justice.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WAS BORN in Cambridge, England, and spent my early years with my parents and younger sister in a small nearby village called Swaffham Bulbeck, in a house built in the thirteenth century. When you stood in the living room and looked up, you could see the circular outline of what had once been the hole in the roof above the space where the original inhabitants had built fires. There was no refrigerator or central heating; we used an icebox and a small gas heater that required coins to operate. Several years later we moved to Tennessee and lived on an abandoned farm, in an unheated house that had only recently been wired for electricity. Eventually we moved to Maine, into a normal house with basic amenities. But we spent weekends, holidays, and summers at a camp my father built on a tiny island on a lake with an outdoor pump for water, gas lanterns and candles for light, a fireplace for warmth, and an outhouse. We snowshoed across the frozen lake in the winter and chipped ice from the front door to get inside. My sisters and I would huddle in our coats around the hearth until the fire my parents built was robust enough to warm us.
So I want to thank my father, William Baker, and my late mother, Christina Baker, who taught their four daughters that living close to the elements can make you more attuned not only to the world around you, but to the world within. I have no doubt that my unusual childhood shaped me as a writer. And in my last two novels, Orphan Train and now this one, I’ve drawn explicitly from those early experiences to create characters who live
simply, without the modern-day amenities that most of us have come to expect.
One sunny afternoon in July 2013 I took a tour of the Christina Olson house in Cushing, Maine, led by a young woman named Erica Dailey. Erica noticed that I was taking notes and asked if I was writing an article; I confessed that I was thinking about writing a novel. As I was leaving the house, another docent, Rainey Davis, pulled me aside, slipped her card into my hand, and told me to reach out if I had more questions. I did—and Rainey and I became fast friends. We met in Rockland, Maine and even Sarasota, Florida, where she has a house and I was giving a lecture. Some months later, another docent, Nancy Jones, sent me an email offering to introduce me to some people close to Christina. Through her, I met Andrew Wyeth’s nephew David Rockwell, whose knowledge about the Wyeths and the Olson House is encyclopedic; Jean Olson Brooks, Christina’s niece, who knew her intimately for many years; ninety-year-old Joie Willimetz, a distant cousin of Christina’s who shared her childhood memories of visiting Christina in the 1930s and ’40s; and Ronald J. Anderson, M.D., a Harvard Medical School professor who, in The Pharos medical journal, argued persuasively that Christina had a hereditary motor sensory neuropathy called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. Nancy and I attended his lecture “Andrew Wyeth and Christina’s World: Clues to Christina’s Secret Illness” at the National Society of Clinical Rheumatology conference in 2015 that happened to be in Maine.
As I worked on this novel I read everything I could get my hands on about the Wyeths and the Olsons. Two biographies were my touchstones: Christina Olson: Her World beyond the Canvas by Jean Olson Brooks and Deborah Dalfonso, and Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman. Both books became so tattered that I needed to buy multiple copies. (Special thanks to Elizabeth Meryman and Meredith Landis, Richard’s wife and daughter respectively, for their help along the way.) Betsy James Wyeth’s beautiful book of paintings, pre-studies, and reminiscences, titled simply Christina’s World, was also tremendously important to my research. Other relevant sources were Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography, with an introduction by Thomas Hoving; Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, and the Olson House by Michael K. Komanecky and Otoyo Nakamura; Wyeth: Christina’s World, a MOMA publication by Laura Hoptman; Rethinking Andrew Wyeth, edited by David Cateforis; Wondrous Strange: The Wyeth Tradition, with a foreword by David Michaelis; and Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic by Anne Clausen Knutson. For details about Christina’s life and rural life in general, I turned to John Olson: My Story, as told to his daughter, Virginia Olson; Old Maine Woman by Glenna Johnson Smith; We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich; and Farm Appliances and How to Make Them by George A. Martin, among others.