Santa Fe

Santa Fe serves as both a landscape of retreat and a place where Eveline Hutchins’s attempts at artistic and emotional independence meet the demands of family life. Its dry surroundings accompany her early despondency; later, the town becomes the setting for her caregiving responsibilities and her relationship with the painter José O’Riely, whose household obligations ultimately separate them.

Setting and Family Visits

After school let out in June, Eveline and her family went to Santa Fe to visit her mother. The surrounding hills were eroded, dry, and dusty, and the heat intensified Eveline’s depression. Her mother had become pale and was absorbed in theosophy, speaking about God and the spiritual beauty of Indigenous people and Mexicans in ways that unsettled the children. Santa Fe thus appears not as a restorative family refuge but as a place where Eveline feels increasingly out of sympathy with her surroundings and home life.

A Summer of Reading and Withdrawal

During that visit, Eveline read extensively and disliked going outside. An old copy of Trilby, which she read three times, shifted the images through which she imagined stories: she began to picture them in the style of its illustrations rather than as tales of knights and ladies. When she was not reading, she lay dreaming up long stories about herself and Sally Emerson. She also endured private distress that she did not explain to her sisters, despite their attempts to advise her. In one crisis she contemplated suicide and began composing a poem, but fell asleep before finishing it. On waking the next morning, she went back to bed and resolved to keep the means of suicide for a future moment; that decision temporarily reassured her. The episode makes Santa Fe the setting for a serious but uncompleted crisis, not a place where her unhappiness is resolved.

Caregiving and Artistic Work

Eveline later returned to Santa Fe with Dr. Hutchins while he recovered from illness. Her mother was frequently sick, her sisters were married, and her brother had taken a job abroad with Belgian relief work; the responsibility for the older couple therefore fell to Eveline. She spent an unhappy year managing meals and household work, making laundry lists, and dealing with servants. The landscape offered horseback rides and subjects for her watercolors, including Mexicans and penitents, but these activities did not free her from the daily work of care. The contrast between the expansive setting and the repetitive domestic duties defines this period of her life there.

José O’Riely and the Desert Retreat

The painter José O’Riely was the only man in Santa Fe who made Eveline feel alive. She met him while he was painting the garage doors and asked him to pose for her. After criticizing her pastel, he apologized, offered to teach her to draw, and showed her his religious-style paintings of working-class martyrs in the small house he shared with his wife, Lola, and their children. Eveline was moved by the work and believed she had discovered a genius. Their relationship developed through repeated meetings in a deserted cabin in a rocky canyon outside town, which they treated as a private retreat. It ended when Lola found numerous drawings of the same unclothed model and confronted the Hutchins household. Eveline’s father believed her account that she had posed but denied a sexual relationship, and the family kept the matter from her mother. Eveline saw José only once more: he explained that he could not leave his wife and children, who depended on him, and that Lola had made him promise not to see Eveline again. Eveline left before he had finished speaking. Santa Fe’s apparent refuge had become another setting in which her artistic admiration and desire for intimacy were constrained by other people’s obligations.