“Whistler's Daughter”

Daddy was a painter. I grew up knowing this about him, and little else. He didn't live with us, “us” being my mother and I. He had a mother of his own to live with, on the other side of the ocean. The ins and outs of my parents relationship remain, to some extent, a mystery to me. I do know for certain, however, that my mother wished the two of them could be wed and live together, happily, properly.

For a long time I was too young, too naïve, to realise what it meant to be the child of a woman who had no husband. Our home was a happy one, in its own way. Father would visit us as often as he could, usually bringing a doll for me to play with while he took my mother into another room. Sometimes he would be carrying art supplies – paints, brushes, a portable easel – and sometimes he wouldn't.

If it hadn't been for my brief glimpses of his etchings, images of my mother that shocked and confused me, I might never have known the nature of his work. He never told me, and neither did my mother. Whenever he did spend time with me, he said next to nothing. He never drew me.

One of my clearest memories of him, perhaps my most vivid memory ever thanks to its being seared into my young mind, took place when I was four. He had arrived at our house, no doll in his hand, no painting supplies either, and he instantly began yelling. My mother had to drag him into another room, and from my position on the floor it seemed ridiculous that she could force him to go anywhere. He was like a wild beast; his mad hair was uncombed, the white streak seemed to flare out like a bolt of lightning. His eyes were crazed. On that day, and every day after it, I was a little bit afraid of my father.

Shortly after that day, I remember asking the cook what certain words meant. Why had my father been talking about my mother baring her “femininity” to the world, and what exactly was a “femininity”? The cook said that my father was probably talking about a snatch, before checking herself and shutting up. That was no help either – how was a four year old girl supposed to be able to decipher such language?

I grew up with an aversion to art, something that caused no end of arguments between me and my mother. She couldn't understand how the offspring of a muse and a genius could shun the aesthetic calling; after all, had I not swum in amniotic paint as an infant?

It wasn't just painters and their creations that I had a problem with. All academia irked me, but I couldn't just avoid my schooling the way so many youngsters did. My mother taught me at home, drilling numbers and names into my mind until they were tattooed in right next to the image of my father and his white lightning hair.

Boys talked to me a lot, but I never went anywhere alone with just one, like some kept asking. I was a tiny bit scared of all men, all boys, because in the back of my mind I felt that at any moment they could get the dangerous look that had possessed my father so many years before. That, of course, had been anger, but to a woman child with no knowledge of sex, anger and lust might as well have been one and the same.

The bits and bobs that I eventually learned about sex weren't exactly instructional. To local women I was “that whore's daughter”, words that I became familiar with long before I learned their meaning. Asking my mother was no use, either. She seemed adamant that I would remain untouched by the outside world when it came to that.

Years and years later, after I became the kind of person to read newspapers and visit museums, the kind of woman who knew all kinds of words, I came across a painting called L'Origine du Monde

I spoke French, unlike many other Irish girls – something I owed to my mother's relentless tuition. So I could tell from the title that this picture was supposed to portray the place from which all life in the world came. According to this artist, everything came from between a woman's legs. I had a flashback to when I was four, sat playing on the floor, hearing my father use the word “femininity”, and I suddenly felt ill. The subject of this painting, this was where my life began.

I was conceived in a studio in Paris, in the midst of a freezing cold winter. I don't remember this, obviously, and nobody ever told me. But I knew enough about my parents to know that this particular winter was when my mother called herself his White Girl, and soon after carried a baby in her belly.

There are plenty of books written about my father nowadays, and maybe one or two about my mother as well. Nobody knows about me, though. I was kept a secret. I don't blame either of them, I know that they were doing what they thought best. My grandmother, his Ma, never approved of my mother and certainly would have had a few things to say about me. As would the society who adored him and his brush.

No, I didn't mind being the daughter that didn't exist. The love was there, if I looked hard enough. I didn't mind being the whore's little girl, because my mother was probably the cleverest whore in Ireland, and her brains were possibly the only quality that she succeeded in passing on to me.

I'm still not a huge appreciator of art. I do like languages, though. My French is impeccable, naturally, and I've learnt a couple more on top of that. I want to know every word there is, some day, every word ever spoken out loud or written down since people started talking all that time ago.

Back at the origin of the world.

Author's Note: The narrator of this short piece is a figment of my imagination, as the artist in question, to my knowledge, had no daughter. In my world, she is the child of James McNeill Whistler and his lover Joanna Hiffernan. My imagined timeline has the girl being conceived sometime in the winter of 1861-62, while Joanna was in Paris modelling for Whistler's painting The White Girl. The girl's memory of the argument would have probably happened in late 1966, after Whistler found out about Gustave Courbet's vaginal portrait L'Origine du Monde, reportedly modelled by Joanna.

The title of this story is a wink and a nod to that most famous of paintings, “Whistler's Mother”.