Eight Girls Taking Pictures (22 page)

“You think you won’t get sent home, but I assure you, Miss Van Pelt, you think incorrectly.”

Miss MacMurray believed that when Lenny had stepped outside during the trip to Santa Croce she had snuck off for something more
than a smoke. Not that she could prove it; call it intuition. And when she discovered Lenny sitting, alone, at a small café with an empty cup of espresso and the remnants of cigarettes, she knew her suspicions to be true.

“I’m so sorry that I can’t provide anything to your liking,” said Miss MacMurray.

In truth, the church was Lenny’s favorite place of all their stops in Florence: She loved the high contrast of the black-and-white facade, which reminded her of a photograph, and the incongruous Star of David. She loved the simplicity of the interior, the Giotto frescoes, the sixteen chapels, and Michelangelo’s tomb with its three statues, which were meant to represent painting, architecture, and sculpture but which looked to her like a weird little dinner party.

“You think,” said Miss MacMurray, “you’re so much smarter than everyone else.”

Lenny took a last sip of her coffee. “It’s funny that for someone so interested in what I think you get it so wrong.” She dropped some coins in a dish as she picked up her bag.

“Where do you think you’re going?” asked Miss MacMurray.

“With you. Right? Isn’t that what you want?”

“Don’t patronize me,” said Miss MacMurray.

“I wasn’t.”

“You must think I was born yesterday.”

Lenny sighed. “Can we stop talking about what I think?”

“I am wiring your parents today to tell them they can expect you home on the first ship to New York.”

Lenny began walking away.

“Stop!”

“Look,” Lenny said, “do you want me on the first ship to New York or not? Because if you do, then I have to pack. And if not, then I need to get back with the other girls.”

Miss MacMurray was startled to see the seven girls watching them, which made her self-conscious and angry. Lenny’s patiently waiting to be told what to do made her even angrier. “Fine!” she said. “Now I have your
attention!” Then, instead of elaborating on what she wanted to say to Lenny, whose attention she now possessed, Miss MacMurray stormed off in what she hoped was an attitude of power: She was leaving Lenny, not the other way around. Only to realize that, because she was their chaperone, it really wasn’t in her best interests to leave any student to her own devices. In fact, wasn’t that the very essence of the problem with Lenny Van Pelt in the first place?

Why was that girl so maddening? Miss MacMurray thought it was because she turned heads with her slender figure, her boyish haircut, parted on the side, so neatly tucked behind her perfect ears. Or maybe it was the blue eyes, with their slightly heavy lids, which showed intelligence and amusement and seemed to be a little secretive, and more than a little seductive.

Some would say that she resented Lenny for her moneyed family, her exquisite aspect, her youth, her lack of concern, but it wouldn’t be true. What Miss MacMurray envied, like any teacher on a teacher’s salary who has watched her own extravagant dreams diminish with each passing year (and those students who never seem to age), was Lenny’s freedom. The freedom that beauty (yes) affords but, more than that, that money can buy. This was the reason Lenny didn’t get upset when Miss MacMurray threatened to send her home.

Miss MacMurray was aware of how Alexander Van Pelt indulged his daughter, and somehow she knew that sending her home would actually brighten his world instead of throwing it into a tailspin over what to do about Lenny.

For all these reasons, Lenny was not on the next ship home to New York.

And so, for the remainder of the trip, Lenny continued slipping away from the arranged tours of museums, gardens, and monuments to meet Alessandro. Then sometimes disappearing quickly after her sexual encounters to stand before a painting, a fresco, a statue, a sculpture, a door, an altar to take in alone what she was supposed to be learning
about in the moving classroom led by Miss MacMurray. Not only had Lenny decided on her first day at the Uffizi Gallery to eschew painting but she had realized that she enjoyed looking at the various artworks only if she could do so in silence and solitude. Miss MacMurray’s voice, no matter how informed the lesson, grated and distracted.

In this way, Lenny had visited the Uffizi (meeting Alessandro in the Piazza della Signoria); the Boboli Gardens (Alessandro in a copse near the allée); Santa Croce (Alessandro in an alley); the Ponte Vecchio (where a shopkeeper argued with a customer and Alessandro and Lenny slipped into the back room); the Duomo (behind a rather large pile of seemingly forgotten building materials on the upper platform, near the roof, as tourists trudged by, unaware of the lovers); the Gallerie dell’Accademia (in a janitor’s closet); and the Battistero, with Ghiberti’s gorgeous
Gates of Paradise
, so named by Michelangelo (very late at night, against a wall, where they were sure they were seen but didn’t care).

When it came time to leave Florence, Alessandro casually brought up the possibility of returning with Lenny, who caressed his face—the only tender gesture she had ever displayed toward him, which made their parting even more fraught. He watched her board the train, saw her sit down next to a boy who looked about her own age. And when she smiled at the boy without even a glance out the window at him, he saw himself as just one more thing she did on her summer vacation; he was a memory that would last only as long as the Atlantic crossing. This realization made him understand that he would be slow to forget her no matter how hard he tried, and he would try.

The Girl in New York, 1927

Lenny Van Pelt spent the rest of the summer on her parents’ farm; her pet pony had changed its alliance and now favored her twin brother. Boredom read in her face, her figure, and her short conversations with her mother and father. Mrs. Van Pelt, frustrated from trying to spend a day with her daughter, shopping and having lunch in the city, blurted out, “What is it you want, Ellen Van Pelt?”

At first Lenny thought that taking classes at the Art Students League and working on theater design would somehow quell the restlessness and dissatisfaction within her. New York wasn’t Paris, but it wasn’t Elysium either, and that was something to be grateful for.

The times when she felt both agitated and at rest were times spent with her father. When she posed for him, or when she stood next to him in the red-hued, intimate space of the little darkroom, or maybe when they discussed something one of them had read, or when he was explaining his latest health interest, such as having the gardener put in an organic garden (“no chemicals,” he said, “getting into the plants and the soil and us”).

They would repair the miniature train together, with Alexander replacing parts and tightening bolts as Lenny handed him the tools. She had been trained to be by his side, and, in exchange, he shared all his knowledge, enthusiasms, and worldview with her. They, as her mother often said—a statement that would be bemused or wistful or a little sad, depending on to whom she was speaking—were a world of two.

If asked, Lenny would say the only person who understood her was her father. She trusted him. How else to explain her willingness to remove her clothing and place her hands behind her beautiful back while he made her image on film in three dimensions?

Still, she longed to get back to Europe. In Europe, she believed she could relax. She could calm that restlessness that propelled her from place to place, person to person. She needed to put miles between her and her home, because home for her wasn’t like home for other people; home for her was the reason for her flight and her rebellion. As long as she remained in New York, she believed, she would never be free.

It was an exceptional spring day in the city. Lenny had been dutifully painting the stage flat of a play set in Heaven (which, in this case, resembled
a room in Versailles) when her thoughts were so far from where she sat painting that each stroke slowed, slowed, slowed until she stopped. There she stood, no longer seeing the wall in front of her, her hand poised over the tray of paint.

Her memories and dreams were crowding in, including the one thing that she didn’t want to think about; that one encounter, undiminished by all the years, that she always had to keep at bay.

She dropped the brush into the tray. As she fished for her cigarettes in the pocket of her paint-spattered overalls, she was already rushing out the door of the art school. Someone called her name, but all she could respond to was that one thought, that one moment that had shaped her life, and from which she was so often running.

Outside, the warm day had her unzipping her overalls, letting them drop to her waist, revealing the fitted, sleeveless white cotton undershirt that left little to the imagination. She smoothed her hair, tucking it behind her ears, exposing her long, elegant neck to the sun.

It was when she briefly closed her eyes (inhaling the passing scent of someone’s expensive perfume, so expensive it was barely in the breeze at all) that she was bumped in a way that caused her to lose her footing and sent her into the gutter.

Pitching into the street wasn’t such a momentous occurrence in sleepy Elysium, but in New York, finding yourself flailing into traffic could be fatal. And with Lenny’s usual luck, someone threw an arm across her upper chest, hauling her back to the safety of the sidewalk as if she were a mythical creature drawn from the deep.

“God, I’m sorry,” said Lenny, who was face-to-face with a man dressed with the precision of someone who had a valet; that is, his appearance was too elegant and too extravagant to look like the result of one person’s efforts. He was tall, and had a face that resembled a drinker’s, with a slightly enlarged nose and the faintest broken capillaries. Or maybe what she was seeing was the gourmand in him, the results of a life of fine dining and drinking for the past (she guessed) sixty years, if his midsection were any indication.

“Don’t be. No reason, actually.”

As she tried to collect herself, she was suddenly aware of her dirty, multicolored overalls hanging from her hips, revealing her skinny white undershirt. Without a word, she yanked the overalls up over her body.