I Always Loved You (10 page)

B
erthe Morisot's studio occupied a back room of her apartment, bordering an interior courtyard with views of the building's maids gossiping amid a tangle of water pipes and clotheslines. Paintings, many of which Mary had already seen at the Rue le Peletier, hung one on top of the other on her studio walls, which were flooded with light. Whether landscape, interior, or portrait, the paintings vibrated with femininity, in feeling as in color, the brushstroke so loose and lively that even when the palette included black, applied not as shadow but as color, the pictures radiated an ethereal aspect unmatched by anyone else. Mary thought them glorious. She was especially fond of
The Cheval Glass
, a portrait of a woman dressed in a slip and black neck ribbon, regarding herself in a mirror.

“Did Monsieur Manet influence you?” Mary said. “About the black, I mean?”

Berthe was standing by the windows. It had been two weeks since the salon at the Manets'. This morning, Berthe had sent Mary a note to ask her to please come to see her at her home on the Avenue d'Eylau. Mary had hesitated, then acquiesced. She still carried with her the hurt of Berthe's
stray
comment, with its implied declaration if not of war, at least of its threat. Now the soft light from the windows fell on Berthe in such a way that the deep black of her raven hair glimmered with indigo and ivory. She stood very still in her white lace dress. A red sash was tied in a large bow around her waist.

“Yes,” Berthe said, “though Édouard uses it far more than I. I don't know why. It's as if he courts death with that color.”

Mary turned back to the canvases. “
The Cheval Glass
reminds me of his
Nana.
Do you ever collaborate with him?” Mary again turned to her hostess, whose face, in the light, so beautiful a moment before, had taken on a pained expression.

Instead of answering, Berthe sat on the long couch under the wall of paintings, indicating that Mary, too, should sit. Above Berthe's head, a sweet pastel of her in blue and ink was signed “É. Manet.” She rang for tea. The maid, who must have been hovering outside the door, hurried in with a tray. Berthe poured and handed Mary a porcelain teacup, its thin edges nearly transparent.

“Mademoiselle Cassatt, I invited you here not to talk about my paintings, though I am grateful for your careful observations.” Her face was unsmiling as she poured milk into her own teacup. The heightened bon vivant, the coquette, the sociable hostess from the salon had disappeared. “I invited you here because I wish to warn you, with respect, that Monsieur Degas can be mercurial. You haven't known him long enough to know that his regard can easily be withdrawn. You must understand, he is not fickle as much as he is paradoxical. One really never knows what he intends when he says or does anything.”

“Are you saying his offer to exhibit is insincere?”

“What I am saying is that you must be careful. I do adore him,” Berthe continued, appearing to erase all her life's earlier
adores
, all the truth of that perilous word. “But he can be terrible.”

“I'm not sure I understand,” Mary said, in as even a tone as possible, unwilling to commit to betrayal on so little evidence.

“What I mean is that you should own yourself. Don't rely on Monsieur Degas. And besides, he is French, and he is a man, and on that basis alone, a woman should take care.”

It was impossible to discern Berthe's motive. It seemed that one moment she was attacking, and the next merely trying to be of some help, as if she believed that an American woman afoot in Paris could benefit from this kind of cryptic guidance.

“I am not enamored of him,” Mary said. “I merely admire his art.”

“Well, he admires you. He could speak of little else the last time I spoke with him.”

“Is that true?” Mary said. She held herself very still.

Berthe nodded. “I hope you'll forgive my intrusion. I think women owe one another this, rather than condemnation.”

A furtive confession, Mary thought, or perhaps an inquiry to see whether or not she suspected anything. She wouldn't have, not at all, but for Berthe and Édouard having disappeared during Suzanne's performance.

“It is always wrong when women judge one another in situations where they, too, might slip, given the chance,” Mary said. She meant the sentiment, but not that she would ever be in that kind of danger herself. Berthe's dark hair, spilling over her shoulders, was caught in a loose ribbon tied at her neck. Mary thought she now knew why Édouard Manet loved black.

“I don't know why I said anything,” Berthe said. “A woman who can stand toe-to-toe with Degas, a man whose withering wit exhausts even the most caustic man in the room, is due a kind of reverence.”

“Is she?”

“I mean the concern kindly, Mademoiselle Cassatt. I get carried away when the men are sparring. They are so cruel to one another. It can change the way I behave. Forgive me?”

“Only if you explain to me how you keep your brushstroke so light and yet communicate so much.”

•   •   •

Later, from the parlor window, Berthe watched Mademoiselle Cassatt stride toward the Place de l'Étoile, feeling certain that she had not done her new acquaintance a service at all by falling into the oblique. But what could she have asked that the woman would have answered with any amount of truth, especially after she herself had been so careless as to reveal herself? What could anyone have asked her about Édouard that she would have answered, oh so many years ago, when she had been too young to know the consequences? In the end, it was you who suffered anyway. You, who had to keep on living.

T
he single vellum envelope in her mother's hand arrived on a Thursday at the end of June in the early morning post as the street sweepers and night soil carters trudged toward the outskirts of Paris, lugging the city's refuse and litter with them toward their new slums, having been excommunicated from their old ones by Haussmann's scythe. Mary was often up as the city shed its nighttime identity, greeting the postman, awaiting her maid Anna's stumble down the stairs from her room in the building's eaves, marking the pink light of dawn as she drank a first pot of tea.

June 15, 1877

Darling Mary,

Your father has ended his dithering and decided once and for all that we are to give up our home here and move to Paris. He says that if you won't come to us, we will come to you. That we are leaving behind our grandchildren, your father does not seem to consider an impediment. (I believe he longs to be closer to your brother Robert's grave, in Germany. His death is so long past, twenty-two years now, that I think of him only as an angel who visited us once.) I know it is a lot to ask to take time from your painting, but could you please find a suitable apartment for us all, including our darling Lydia, of course, preferably near the Champs-Élysées, in the new American quarter, if you can possibly manage it for a decent rent? We would do best, I think, with five rooms, considering how you have crowded yourself into that tiny studio where you work, too. The turpentine! We should faint if we had to suffer such smells all day long. Your father is pressing me now to tell you that in our newly reduced circumstances we cannot possibly pay for the rent on your studio in addition to an apartment, and since your father has decided that we will continue to pay your living expenses—a not unwelcome burden, my darling—it is imperative that you alone pay the lease on a studio from your earnings.

Mary met this news with ambivalence. She was furious that her father had refused her declaration of independence in favor of more control, but on the other hand, though the commission payment from the Ellisons had come in, it was by no means enough to ensure her financial autonomy.

Your father believes this new state of affairs will force you to focus and thereby guarantee your success. To date, we have engaged passage on the
St. Laurent
of the General Transatlantic Line on October 4th, and will arrive on the 14th; from Le Havre we will then take the express train to the Gare du Nord and hire a hack to whichever address you eventually engage. Please send the address as soon as you can so that we can ship ahead. As you know, my French is excellent, but all the same I shall write down the address for the driver, who should be able to find it but they can sometimes feign ignorance as I remember from my last visit—

In the early morning silence, Anna was bustling in the kitchen, making another pot of tea, slicing bread, spooning jam. These domestic clatterings were the only sound Mary heard in the dreamy haze of morning, before she began to work. Today, before the postman had delivered the letter, she'd been staring at a blank canvas, preparing herself, agonizing over tone and hue, brushstroke and subject, perspective and line. Maybe she suffered from her subject matter, as Degas had recently suggested after another evening at the Manets'.
Paint what is real
, he had said,
what you see before you, the grit life is made of, not some formal ideation. Paint the men and women who travel up and down the street; paint the hod carriers. Or better yet, paint what people hide. What people hide is more real than what they show.

She had to give up this constant thinking of him. She liked to believe that whether or not Edgar Degas had ever entered her life, she would have changed the way she painted in the end, perhaps not as soon, but eventually. His encouragement might have been the reason she had decided to stay in Paris, but she would have gone on painting in Philadelphia, though whether or not even this was true was a question she might never answer. But she was not stupid. She knew the extraordinary when she saw it. Edgar Degas painted in a way that negated all art before it.

Careful, dear. You are exaggerating.

But if you don't devote, if you don't commit, then is anything really worth doing?

Of course not, but do entertain some perspective.

Already her father's voice was in her head, before he was even in France. She imagined suffering his daily scrutiny, his unwelcome opinions, his scorn. What might he make of the Manets' salon, of Renoir's less than genteel poverty, of the tangle of the Manets' familial relations that both Berthe and Degas had alluded to?

And what might her father make of Degas? Neither he nor his paintings shied away from the brutal: nudity as professional uniform for the demimonde in the most unflattering postures; ballet dancers more strangely ugly than beautiful. He had shown her more of these last Thursday, when he'd invited her to his studio and apartment on the Rue Frochot, his studio two railroad rooms separated by an alcove, up a spiral staircase off the building's entry. The first room was a dim place fraught with chaos: unframed canvases three and four deep lining the wall on the floor, stacks of notebooks and portfolios teetering on tables too small for their burdens, sketches and drawings toppling from the fireplace mantel, studies pinned to the walls, their subjects drawn over precisely graphed penciled grids, others spilling from half-open drawers, their triangle corners draped over the bureau hardware. Shutters covered the casement windows and the close confines smelled of turpentine and oil paint and dust, a miasmic cloud of familiar scents that made Mary feel at home, though the disorder confounded. As she looked about the room, Degas hung back, his tweed coat threadbare at his wrists, his smile an invitation of agitation and pleasure. He'd removed his glasses when they'd come in and he peered at her now to see how she was taking the shambles.

She said, “How do you find anything?”

He shrugged. “Frightening, isn't it?”

Through the alcove, a second room opened to a wall of windows that betrayed mean balconies opening onto an alley, where neglected pots of straggly carnations and limp baby's breath suffered on the edges of broken flagstones. Cardboard boxes of sculpting wax dominated the space under those far windows. Two easels, their wooden poles like masts at sea, supported two paintings, but they were turned, so Mary couldn't see the canvases. A small intaglio press, its drum and wheel glinting in the noon glare, was pushed against the wall.

“You do prints,” Mary said. It wasn't a question, but a memory, rising. The work her friend Louisine had purchased had been a monotype, enhanced with pastel and gouache, the shock of color against the black and white an astonishing surprise.

“Tourny taught me. I'm surprised he didn't offer to teach you.”

“Have you seen the Japanese prints at that new shop on the Rue de Rivoli?” Mary said, turning. “Off center, color-blocked, flat perspective? They're stunning.”

“I haven't. You'll show me. We'll go together.”

They returned to the first room. He offered her a seat, not bothering to dust from the deflated seat cushion the powdery residue of months of scraped paint. In his old studio on the Rue Blanche he would have had his sitting room and its luxurious appointments to welcome her—well, he wouldn't allow himself the pity. One made do, and one didn't complain, because you couldn't change anything, especially the actions of careless parents. How could his father have calculated so badly? And not to tell him. Such a mess.

He did not open a window to let in light or fresh air. Instead, he lighted a lamp, its dusky wax intimating the musky skull of the sperm whale that had donated its life so that Degas could see. Hunched over, he began to flip through the thicket of canvases lining the wall.

“I used to have an Ingres and a couple of de La Tours. Not Fantin's, you understand, but two gorgeous pastels by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. You know him, don't you? He drew Voltaire and the Marquise de Pompadour, Louis the Fifteenth's mistress.”

“Of course I do.”

“But I had to sell them,” Degas said, as plaintively as if he had said,
I had to sell my children
. “When my father died, I discovered that he was not as skilled a banker as he had led me to believe. You don't suspect these things will ever happen. These are swords falling from the sky. And now I find myself hindered. We, my sisters and brothers and I, are shackled to grubbing for money to pay my father's creditors when all I wish to do is make art. One of my sisters might have to move to Argentina to live just to be able to feed her children. Can you imagine? My Ingres fetched a great deal of money, but not enough, it may turn out, to keep her here. And oh, how I miss my Ingres. It hurts me to be without that perfect drawing. As if someone had lopped off my finger. I don't understand money. It just disappears into a great maw, somehow, and you are left with nothing in the end, not even your family.”

He pulled from the jumble a canvas, presenting it to her cradled in his arms. The painting was a landscape of plowed fields, interrupted by three bare trees and two figures walking into a November horizon and the advent of an endless winter. “Do you know whose this is?”

She didn't.

“Pissarro's. Splendid, isn't it? I'm fond of neither peasants nor landscapes, but there is something so real about this. And look at this one.” After more hunting, he produced a canvas of peasants riding atop a brimming hay wagon drawn by two horses down a lane. “What I love in this one are his lines: intersecting, askew, varied.” He gazed at the unframed canvas, held now at arm's length. “I could learn to love landscapes if only Monet would paint like Pissarro. God, what Monet could learn from him if he would only pay attention.”

“You don't like Monsieur Monet?”

“His brushstroke is lazy.”

“Then why do you exhibit with him?”

“Because the Salon won't have him.”

“Are all these canvases by other artists?”

“No. Most of the rest are mine.”

“And you don't hang them?”

“God, no. If I had to look at them, I'd rework them all and never begin anything new. I see every mistake of composition, of brushstroke, of line. They are all flawed, every one of them.” He sighed. “I am weary. I will never finish anything.” He pulled from among the stacks images of the ballet: rehearsals and performances, prints, sketches, oil paintings, pastels, an obsessive profusion of devotion. On more canvases, laundresses scrubbed linen, jockeys rode horses; his much-referred-to hod carriers were not hod carriers at all, but jockeys and laundresses and ballerinas. The pictures lacked any specific romance: The laundresses were workaday rather than glorified; the ballet scenes objective rather than sentimental; but what they both captured was movement, as if Degas were not capturing the memory of the moment, but the viewer instead. And it was more than brushstroke, more than color, more than the play of light, the instruments of his colleagues; his perspective obliterated separation. The viewer was
in the room, the audience, the bathing room
with the subject, as if there were no distance at all between the viewer and the viewed.
As if the canvas didn't exist.

“How do you do this?” Mary's throat was raw, the scorch of desire so strong that she could hardly get out the words. “How do you make the figures move, the canvas disappear?”

“Gesture.”

“Held?”

“No. Made. Repeated. Modeled.”

“From life?”

“Yes and no. From what I observe on the streets, primarily, here and there, dinners, cafés, anywhere. I watch how people move; they have no idea that I am raping their lives. Then I make my models reproduce the gesture I want over and over again while I render it on paper. When I finally have it, I trace and retrace it until I can draw the line from memory. Voilà: movement.”

“Nothing spontaneous? Nothing from the moment?”

“Nothing in my art is ever from the moment. Nothing about it is ever spontaneous.”

“And yet it looks as if it is. As if you have deciphered the heart of motion.” Mary was near tears. Her pictures implied motion, but it was the motion of imagination—contrived, fanciful, false. His was the motion of life. “It's extraordinary. It looks effortless.”

“Effortless?” Degas's placid expression twisted into a fiery swirl of pursed lips and forehead. “What do you think? That this is easy for me? That I could decide to paint something and then it magically appears from my hand? That I have some gift, that my work arrives finished, that this is not a struggle for me?”

“No. Not at all, but—”

“It's an insult for you to think that I do not work. That I do not have to earn every painting, every print, every drawing I produce.”

“I didn't mean to insult you. I was merely asking—I was admiring—”

“You're not stupid. Don't say stupid things.”

“I wasn't.”

He turned away, the tails of his coat brushing a stack of tracings to the already littered floor. His sudden fury seemed to have enervated him, for within seconds he turned to face her, his shoulders drooping with regret, but Mary was already pulling on her coat, lunging for the stairwell, for escape. Up the echoing spiral of stairs, laughter floated from the street, where people were meeting for lunch, for coffee, going about their days, concerned only with the simple needs of their lives.

“Wait. Please,” Degas said.

Mary could not name what tide of emotion rooted her in place. Dust motes danced in the yellow light of the stairway; the clatter of a passing carriage made them shiver and shimmy in arabesques of beauty.

“You must know that if you treat me as everybody else does—as if I am not real—then we are lost, you and I,” Degas said.

“You are wrong. We are lost if you mistake my intentions. It is not an insult to wish to paint as someone else does. To admire someone. To be in awe.”