Portrait of Annie

By BJ Kussow

Portrait of Annie is a fictional biography. Ann Elizabeth Richards, born in rural Ohio in 1943 to a family of limited means, wins an art scholarship to the Ohio State University. The novel begins as she starts her academic career on the cusp of the Sixties, a decade that was dominated by controversy over the Vietnam War, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and civil rights struggles.

            In her junior year, Annie falls for one of her instructors, a graduate student, with whom she has a short-lived marriage. On the rebound, she enters a relationship with a charismatic poet, who is involved in counterculture drugs and dissent.

            Annie bears witness as protest on the OSU campus reaches anarchic proportions and the Ohio National Guard is called in to quell the violence with tear gas and Billy clubs. The situation culminates with the closing of the University for a two-week period to prevent rioting after the Ohio National Guard opens fire on student protestors at Kent State University.

            She goes to the infamous 1969 Woodstock Festival and participates in the March on Washington. At the end of the decade, Annie decides to make portraiture her life work. She embarks on a stable existence, but her life is yet to be rocked by personal tragedies.

            At its heart, Portrait of Annie is about coping with loss, enduring, and eventually finding a measure of contentment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BJ Kussow
• Release date: Feb 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737607618

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

BECOMING AN ARTIST

The first time Annie Richards saw Hopkins Hall, the gleaming, new Ohio State University Arts building, she stood dumbstruck, gazing at its many windows which seemed to hold the secrets to her future.

She’d read in a brochure that the building had been completed two years ago in 1959 and was named after James R. Hopkins, an acclaimed painter who had been head of the Fine Arts Department and had done portraits of former OSU Presidents. Annie regarded this splendid building with equal parts anticipation and trepidation. It had treasures to discover—intangible treasures such as newfound knowledge, appreciations, and techniques—but there was also the possibility that she would be exposed as a fraud—a small-potatoes person with an inadequate arts background.

Her arts training had been in a small high school in southern Ohio near the Ohio River. The arts room was housed in the basement. The contrast between that high school basement and this imposing structure made for an uneasy transition.

∞∞∞

Annie remembered clearly the first day she visited that basement. It was a turning point.

She and Evie O’Neal were sitting in Evie’s family car, which she, having just turned sixteen, was allowed to drive to school sometimes. It was lunch hour on a handsome fall day with just a touch of chill in the air. The schoolyard was aflame in hues of red, orange, and gold.

Evie was a plain, large-boned, pleasant-looking girl, who lived on a farm near Annie’s home, and she sometimes gave Annie rides to school. Evie, a sophomore, had taken freshman Annie under her wing.

Well, I just can’t study this stuff anymore. Evie said, closing her algebra text with a definitive thud and dropping it on the floor. I just hope I make a ‘C’ on the test.   

What are you doing? she asked, twisting around to look at Annie in the back seat of the car.

Oh, just drawing. I should be starting my English composition, but I don’t feel like it right now. I’ll do that tonight.

Let me see, Evie demanded.

Well, it’s not anything great—just the front of the school. I just like to draw sometimes. Somewhat reluctantly, she handed the notebook to Evie.

Evie examined the drawing that showed students lounging on the front steps of the high school in an exaggerated, droll way.

Annie, this is really good! Are you going to take Art for an elective? You can do that next year when you’re a sophomore.

Well, I hadn’t thought anything about electives, but it’s something I like. She paused, as though giving it some thought. Sometimes she felt that Evie managed her a little too much.

Thanks, Evie. That sounds like a good idea.

Definitely! Let’s you and me go to the art room and look around this afternoon a few minutes after school is out today.

∞∞∞

The Arts room occupied a large part of the basement. On the wall in the hallway, Annie saw an abstract painting of an owl, a self-portrait done by a senior, a landscape, a still life, and a funny spoof of Superman and Lois Lane. Evie peeked in the room and Annie stood behind her feeling a little shy. A man, presumably the art teacher, growled, What can I do for you ladies? His tone was mockingly stern.

Hi, I’m Evie, and this is my friend, Annie. She’s an artist.

Annie blushed.

Raising an eyebrow, he said Well, if you’re an artist, let me see your portfolio?

Portfolio? Annie wasn’t sure what a portfolio was.

She was embarrassed but knew that he was teasing her.

If you’re an artist, I presume you’ll be taking a class or three from me. Mr. Raines, they call me. All my students are required to have folders with samples of their work. Are you a freshman?

She nodded.

Show him the sketch you were doing at noon hour, Annie, Evie interjected.

Annie reached into her book bag, afraid that her hands were trembling, and pulled out her notebook that held the sketch drawn on lined, three-hole notebook paper.

He made an exaggeration of examining it closely, and then smiled. Well, I can see you have a sense of humor, Annie. That’s good. We’ve got too many artists who take themselves too seriously.

He went to his desk, pulled out a partially used sketch pad, tore off the first few pages with drawings on them, and handed it to her.

Next time I see you in the hall, I expect you to have a portfolio.

For the first time, he smiled. I like the sketches. I’ll look forward to seeing you in a class. Next year?

Annie nodded. Th . . . thank you, she stammered, and turned to go.

As they walked upstairs, Evie said, See I told you the drawing was good. And you’re going to have fun in Mr. Raines’s classes. Wish I had some artistic ability so I could take a class under him.

Annie hardly heard her. In that brief exchange, Mr. Raines had given her a delicious new concept of herself. She had some artistic talent, and she had a sense of humor in her drawing.

At home, her brother Jack derided her little pictures, and her parents viewed her constant drawing as a symptom of mooniness or sometimes as a diversion to postpone or avoid chores. For them, the content of the drawings was something akin to the clothes she’d once designed for her paper dolls, or when she grew out of that, a subversive way of making fun of people that made them slightly uneasy. It had never occurred to Annie that an Art teacher would have a positive view of her sketches.

She was seized by a flash of intuition—a mixture of ambition and conviction. In that moment, she was sure art would be consequential in her future.

Suddenly, she grabbed Evie’s hand in a playful swing, proclaiming, I’m going to have one of my drawings on that wall next year!

∞∞∞

Though a mere freshman, Annie was already in the embryonic stage of a guerilla campaign to attend college. She’d given little thought to what she might study there, but she had three years ahead of her to figure that out. Art, she thought, would be, at the least, something fun that she could turn to for a breather while concentrating on other subjects. She intended to study hard and make good grades so that she would be accepted by a college. Her ambition had grown from a seed planted by another teacher, Mrs. Singer, a grade schoolteacher, and it had continued to thrive without any encouragement from her parents.

Mrs. Singer came into Annie’s life several weeks after she started seventh grade in the one-room school that housed grades one through eight. The teacher she replaced either resigned due to health problems or quit in disgust, depending on whose tale you believed. That teacher was petite and reminded Annie of an earnest puppy yapping at the misbehaving students. Before her, there had been Mrs. Beadle who was tall and hawkish and able to handle the students well enough through yelling and glaring, but she fell in love with the neighborhood school bus driver, a married man, and became emotional, sometimes crying at her desk during noon hour. The bus driver was quite a Romeo, who flirted with Mrs. Beadle, though he was having an affair with Annie’s Aunt Rhonda. When she found Annie drawing a picture during a study period when she was supposed to be reading her history assignment, Mrs. Beadle humiliated her by making her sit in the corner by the blackboard at the front of the school room. Years later when she studied psychology, Annie realized that she had been the target of displaced anger toward Rhonda.

Annie had been classmates with most of the students for several years. Some of them were hard to handle, particularly three children from the Willet family. They defied teachers and sassed them, and when teachers tried to discipline them, their parents went to the school board and made scenes.

Mrs. Singer was different. One look at her told you she had a serious dignity and didn’t take any guff. She was tall and thin with fierce, dark eyes. She rarely smiled, so when you were the beneficiary of a smile, it was special. She wasn’t unkind, didn’t shout, but she was all business. Besides, she had the support of the school board who were fed up with the Willets.

Annie loved the order and the challenge that Mrs. Singer brought to the school. When she found out that Annie was a good reader, she brought books from the town library and asked her to do book reports on them. Books like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. A new world opened to her. At home, there were only True Romance for her mom, Popular Mechanics for her dad, and the local paper, the Gazette. At her grandparents’ home, she had her choice of the King James Bible and Successful Farming.

One day during free time in class, Annie did her own version of an illustration from a Jane Austen novel. Mrs. Singer looked over her shoulder, and said, Annie, that’s very nice. You have artistic talent. Copying is a good way to sharpen your skills.

That winter, Annie had the bad luck to get chicken pox. She was very ill. When she tried to get out of bed on the third day, she fainted. After a week of absence from school, Mrs. Singer showed up with homework. She sat at the kitchen table going over the materials with Annie’s parents, Billy and Alma. Annie managed to get out of bed and go to the living room couch where she could listen but not be seen.

Annie, you know, is a very good student. She is college material, I’m certain.

Alma murmured approval.

Good to hear, said Billy.

College material! The phrase seemed magical with possibilities—a door that, if opened, might offer a new life to fulfill an unnamed yearning in herself.

Annie didn’t say anything to her parents about the college material comment. She kept waiting for them to bring it up. Finally, one day at supper time, she broached the topic

Mrs. Singer told me I might be college material someday, she said. Well, they should have said something, she thought, justifying her fib.

Ain’t much money around here for things like that, said Billy. You study hard, do good in high school, and you won’t need college. You can get a good job keeping books or being a secretary. Girl I know keeps books and does office work for Baker’s Construction. She does real well.

Her mom looked at her as if to say, What can I do if that’s your dad’s attitude?

She said, Well, that’s a ways off, ain’t it?

Annie said, I thought you’d be proud of me.

Oh, sure, we are, but like I say, it’s a long ways off, her mom replied.

At that point, Annie knew Billy would never pay for college. He was a mechanic, who thought secondary school was adequate training for a vocation. He himself had quit school after eighth grade and had learned his mechanical skills from his father and other mechanics. Because he was temperamental, her mother Alma was not likely to defy him and take her side about college.

She resolved secretly that she would manage to put herself through college some way. She hadn’t any idea what college was like or what she would study there, but she knew that it would make her different from her family, and she knew with certainty that’s what she wanted.

∞∞∞

By the second semester of her sophomore year in high school, the basement Art Department had become a refuge.  By the end of the year, she had achieved what now seemed her modest goal. One of her charcoal sketches hung in the hallway outside the art room, and she was becoming proficient in the use of acrylics. She’d

She’d found her métier, and she’d begun to daydream about bigger things—her art hanging in galleries or being purchased by private buyers.

In the middle of her junior year, she was told that she was one of a handful of students who were eligible to apply for a small scholarship to the Ohio State University based on artistic talent. The school counselor, who informed her of the scholarship, suggested that she get a summer job and save some money. That, along with the scholarship, might get her through the first year at the university. The counselor also suggested that she change from the vocational to the college prep curriculum meaning she’d take a biology class, an advanced English class, and a second algebra course.

Annie had a plan to achieve her dream, but she didn’t tell her family yet. She was convinced that they would sabotage it if they knew.

That summer, Annie went to work at the local Dairy Queen, which had undergone a renovation and an expansion. Instead of the small boxy structure that sold only ice cream concoctions, it was now a full restaurant, a brazier that sold burgers and fries and had several booths for people to sit and eat. She couldn’t believe her luck. She loved going to work. What she loved most of all was making and serving the cones and sundaes with the trademark curl on top, referred to as the Q by employees. Three- and four-year-old, saucer-eyed kids smiled shyly up at her while reaching for their treats, insisting to their mothers that they were big enough to carry it all by themselves to the booth. There they sat like grownups with table-high shoulders and dangling feet. The mothers hovered anxiously with napkins while the kids happily got their face, arms, and clothes sticky with soft serve sweetness. Annie frequently had to do a comprehensive clean-up of the table, seat, and floor after they left. She wondered if one day she would be a mom who brought such a beguiling, messy imp to a DQ.

By September, she had money in the bank and was proud of herself. As a senior, she had an identity as an artist.  One of her drawings appeared in the school paper—a caricature of anxious football fans when the school team was losing to their main rival before they managed to eke out a win in the fourth quarter. After that, people who hadn’t noticed her before found pretexts to talk to her. 

CHAPTER 2

AT OSU

It was not just the Arts building that intimidated her the first quarter at OSU. Annie was both thrilled to be a student and anxious that she might fail. She feared that her high school classes had not prepared her adequately for the university. Whether seated in lecture classes in auditoriums with how many—two or three hundred other students—or a nondescript classroom that held less than fifty, she couldn’t shake the feeling of being out of place. She loved being among the throng of students that crisscrossed campus going from one class to another, but she often felt terribly alone and unsure of herself.

In November, she witnessed incidents of activism when students protested a decision by the Faculty Council to decline an invitation to the Rose Bowl. The reason for declining was the council felt there was an overemphasis of football at the expense of academics. Hundreds of students gathered on the oval, marched on the Faculty Club, blocked traffic in downtown Columbus, tore down traffic signs, and tipped over vehicles. Annie wondered why students would jeopardize their futures by committing acts of vandalism over a football game. The demonstrations finally ended when football coach Woody Hayes made an announcement accepting the Faculty Council’s decision.

An incompatible dorm mate made her first quarter less pleasant. Lisa was going to major in English, maybe and was obsessed with pledging a sorority and hanging out with girls who either belonged to the sorority or wanted to belong. She spent many evenings going to the taverns on High Street with these girls and flirting with guys—fraternity guys, of course. That she was seldom around suited Annie. It made it easier to study, but, still, the chilliness was perturbing.

In the second quarter, she took an introductory zoology class—a flunk-out class that she should probably not have taken until later. She felt ill-prepared for this difficult science course, and, one day, after a lab session, she went to a bathroom and sat in the stall crying. But she spent many hours studying and was relieved to get a C on the first major test. She also began to appreciate the course because it was helping to perfect her artistic skills in drawing the human body.

A nascent familiarity with the interior of Hopkins Hall and the Arts Department helped her overcome her performance anxiety. She started to feel more at ease when she took her first Art class. The instructor took notice of the humor in her drawing and commented on it in front of the class. He said half-jokingly that she should consider becoming a cartoonist.

Annie didn’t agree. I can never think of captions for my drawings, she told him. Still, she knew that the subtle humor in her drawing—also noted by Mr. Raines, her instructor in high school, the first day she met him—was a definite asset.

Lisa’s replacement was much better—a journalism major who Annie liked and wanted to know better, but she was gone a lot. Occasionally, she would sit and tell Annie about her assignments—chasing down stories for the Ohio State Lantern, the university student newspaper.

Annie browsed the course catalogs and was delighted when she found an English class that taught Pride and Prejudice. She decided that she would probably minor in English.

During summer break, Annie made a short visit home, then returned to the university and took a job as a waitress in a small café, putting her DQ experience to use, mostly working during the busy noon and dinner hours. Evenings, she liked going to classic films shown by a theater she’d discovered near campus. Two evenings a week, she took a French course as a start on meeting her language requirement. Try as she might, her French pronunciations tended to have a country twang, but how elegant French made her feel. Using everyday words was like being escorted to a gala ball by a tuxedoed Cary Grant. Her favorite word was enchante meaning delighted to meet you.

Voici mon frère Jaque.

Enchante.

She was amused to think of Jack’s redneck scorn if he heard that.

Annie eyed some guys in her classes but she was not in a sorority or any other group that gave her opportunity to meet people outside of classes. So, mostly she kept to herself, just gratified to be in the university milieu.

First quarter of her sophomore year, she got a great dorm mate—a Jewish girl named Rachel. She was an unusual person with lofty goals. She was enrolled in a pre-med curriculum and wanted to become a pediatrician. Her boyfriend, Jacob, was an upperclassman, also in pre-med, who planned to be a heart surgeon. High achievers, both. They were admirers of President John F. Kennedy and quoted him: Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. They talked about taking a year off to join the Peace Corps program he had initiated. Sometimes, they asked Annie to eat dinner with them, and they educated her about their religion and Jewish matters. They told her that shiksa was a term for a non-Jewish girl, but it was often used disparagingly, so they would not call her a shiksa. But Annie sometimes referred to herself as their shiksa artist friend, and it became a standing joke between them. Judaism encompassed many different practices and their families’ beliefs were closest to reform Judaism, or Liberal Judaism. It preserved tradition but allowed for innovation. They believed in tolerance and interfaith dialog—that is, seeking to understand and cooperate with people of other faiths.

They told her the tale of Jacob and Rachel in the Bible, how Jacob loved the beautiful Rachel at first sight, but her father demanded that he work for him for seven years before he could marry her. Then, the father deceived Jacob by disguising his eldest daughter Leah and sending her, instead of Rachel, to him on his wedding night. He let Jacob also take Rachel as a wife but demanded seven more years of servitude. Jacob did not love Leah, but nevertheless impregnated her seven times. Rachel remained barren, but finally was able to have two sons. She died in childbirth with the second. Annie found the tale sad and a little disturbing, but, for Jacob and Rachel, the important part seemed to be the love between the characters for whom they were named.

They explained the concept of in loco parentis which meant in place of a parent, and were scornful of university policies based on the idea. The university believed they had the right and the responsibility, absent parental supervision, to govern the behavior of students, especially coeds.

Have you read your copy of ‘About Buckeye Coeds’? Rachel asked Annie.

About Buckeye Coeds was a booklet that all students received; it contained university rules and other information deemed helpful.

Well, er, sort of . . . She’d given it a cursory reading and knew about curfews, dorm behavior, etc.

Get it out and look at the seven pages of single-spaced ‘dos and don’ts’ under the topic, ‘Things We Live By.’ It’s ridiculous.

They disapproved of the WSGA, the Women’s Self Government Association, the organization that decided on rules for coeds, and referred to it as the Girl Gestapo.

The rule they regarded as most onerous was the Apartment Rule. A woman who visited a man’s apartment unaccompanied by an approved chaperone could be suspended. They defied the rule regularly. In the early afternoons, while Jacob’s roommate was in class, he took Rachel to his apartment.

Annie admired Rachel and Jacob—how they were equals, each with professional goals. She thought that