I Always Loved You (11 page)

“Your adulation will give me a power over you I do not want to wield.”

“Desire is not deference. Admiration is not capitulation.”

“It always has been in the past. And it always curdles to envy.”

She turned. “I promise you, nothing terrible will happen between us because I admire you.”

“You must speak to me differently,” Degas said. “As if you are accomplished. As if you need nothing from me.”

“But I don't know how to do what you do. And I want to know, more than I want anything.”

“You must understand. Every day I awake and wonder how I'm going to get through the day. I have to draw and redraw endless lines upon endless lines, tracing within grids to get the perspective right, to perfect the proportions, to establish the composition. And even then I get it wrong. I have nothing of talent. I have only desire and dogged work. I doubt myself every moment. If you do not allow me my weaknesses, if you do not acknowledge my pain, then I am alone. Do you see?”

“You're not alone. I feel the same.”

“But you won't believe that I do.”

He was right. The something, the leap an artist makes so that his painting is more than its technique, he had already achieved. And she wanted that. She wanted his brain to seep inside hers, his vision to be her vision, his skill to be her skill. She wanted to hear him talk about everything, and by doing so, help her make that elusive jump. Was that wrong? Perhaps it was, if she couldn't offer him anything in return.

No master in need of disciples he, only a man afraid of being alone. How different he was in private. She could hardly reconcile the public man of banter and repartee with the pleading man before her. She thought about what Berthe Morisot had said to her, and decided that Berthe didn't know the real Edgar Degas, who was as needy as anyone.

“Skill is only an accumulation of attentive work,” he said, his hands falling to his side. “I cannot teach you how to work. I don't know how to save you from the pain of it.”

“I don't want you to tell me how to work. I want to divine the mystery.”

“But mystery is indefinable, and therefore divine.”

“This moment. This is all I want. To speak of the divinity of art,” Mary said.

“The precipice of eternity—”

“Is where artists work.”

His gaze sharpened as he assessed her, calculating, she thought, how much credit he might give to her for divining his thoughts, for finishing his sentence, for understanding him.

Degas gestured then. A simple but elegant turn of his wrist, almost balletic in its grace. “I just want to lay my head somewhere.”

“What do you think salvation is if not respite?” Mary said.

He held her gaze a long while, a perfect light now falling through the tall windows of the courtyard, a light to covet, a light to work by, a light to compel an artist to rush into the street to hire a model, anyone, to take advantage of its beauty; he said, “Would you sit for me?”

The rasp of the charcoal on the sketching paper, the tear of the sheets and their falling to the floor, his furious crumpling of paper, his exasperated shouts of frustration, his terse orders to hold, goddammit, he wasn't getting it, could she do it again, the turning of her head, the dropping of her chin, the smell of dust and turpentine in the sunlit studio, the plaintive wail of an infant across the alley resolving to a gurgle of pleasure, the hour in which he could look at her as intently as he liked and she could allow him to do it, even the fatigue of sitting on the stool, the undoubted cramp in his hand—all this carried them beyond intimacy. She remained clothed; he asked for nothing.

It seemed as if she had known him forever.

•   •   •

Maybe she had always been hurtling toward him. Maybe her endless arguments with her father at the dinner table in Philadelphia had always had as their end that moment, when the dust of pretense fell away and she surrendered. She turned her mother's letter to the next page, certain that Degas would not have mourned this development as she was, certain now that having lost his father, he would cherish his company if he could only have him back, despite his financial troubles. Her father's primary motivation, it seemed, was money, yes, but life did come down to economics, as Degas had so brutally learned. In France, the exchange rate was five francs to the American dollar; living here was cheaper than in America. And Lydia,
darling Lydia
, would be back—not forced, like Degas's sister might be, to move to Argentina to be able to eat.

Since returning to America from her visit to Paris last year, Lydia hadn't been well. The French doctors seemed better able than the Americans to hold Lydia's malady at bay. Back home, her illness had flared and retreated without reason, much like Degas's eye problem. But their parents, particularly their father, had wanted Lydia with them. He could be so selfish, her father, with his daughters' lives, no matter that they were grown women. For medical reasons alone it would be better for Lydia to be back in Paris, to say nothing of Mary's happiness at once again having her sister's company. And since they would all live together, Mary would only be responsible for her studio expenses. And her mother had never failed to be lively, good company. It might not be too bad, Mary thought. But then she tried to imagine her parents and Lydia at the Manets' salon and sighed.

—and so you will arrange for our lodging as soon as is convenient for you, won't you? Which I hope is very soon as it would be very expensive to have to spend a fortnight or even a week in a hotel upon our arrival, and since we are moving to Paris to conserve money, we (just you, I'm afraid) must be vigilant on our behalf. Oh, and if you could please have the new apartment furnished before our arrival? Your father will wire you the money for this task as soon as you've found us an appropriate domicile and I do trust you, darling, but not any furniture that is too dark or too heavy, and if you could, something beautiful but not too dear? I do hope that you will enjoy this distraction from your painting, which I know cannot occupy you all day long or your eyes will suffer as I know you know. More to come very soon, but until then, keep us posted on all the arrangements and your father will send the money for the lease as soon as you have everything firm.

Your loving Mother,

Eager, as ever, to see you again, and soon, with no more separations to suffer. I am so happy, darling Mary.

She would have to explain Degas to them.

She would say,
He is my colleague; he is part of the new school of painting; he is brilliant
.

But she would not say,
He is someone I suddenly
need
. I cannot live without him.

And then she realized she would have no way of explaining him.

She folded the letter, placed it in its envelope, and secreted it in the desk drawer where she kept her correspondence.

T
he residence Mary chose for her parents rose in splendor from the Rue Beaujon just off the Place de l'Étoile, the neighborhood her parents had requested. The increasingly fashionable charms near the Champs-Élysées had lured American expatriates from their traditional stronghold of the environs of the Palais-Royal. The Étoile neighborhood was so new that the tongues and grooves of apartment buildings thrust themselves into neighboring empty lots waiting to be attached to new facades. The rent was forty-five hundred francs, or nine hundred dollars, for the year, but Mary persuaded the reluctant
portier
to let it month-to-month, uncertain whether her parents would approve of the expense.
She could never anticipate her father's moods, and did not want to commit to a flat that her father might dislike, whatever his reasons.

But surely, her father could not object to the gold brocade couch, elegant wing chairs, and the round Louis XIV dining table that graced the sunlight-filled rooms. Her mother had written before their departure to say that Lydia had again fallen ill, and that she feared the ocean voyage would be hard on her, so Mary decided that Lydia should have the bigger, brighter bedroom that fronted the street and she the smallest bedroom in the back, with only the dim courtyard to illuminate its claustrophobic confines; she installed a shade to ward off the inquisitive glances of the neighboring building's maids, who spent their days gazing out the kitchen windows into neighboring apartments while scrubbing pots and preparing meals. To her parents, she assigned the large bedroom at the end of the center hall, with its two sets of windows along the courtyard and the street and a long wall that accommodated two wide wardrobes. While installing them, the movers had scratched the parquet floors, and poor Anna, eager to make a good impression with the extended family, had spent an afternoon rubbing varnish into the unsightly scratches with a rag.

All July and August, Mary despaired of finding a new studio whose light and situation were conducive to work. The long months were an odyssey of grumbling
portiers
who tended promising buildings with glorious facades that turned out to harbor shabby, ill-lit apartments. At 6 Boulevard de Clichy she finally found a large room on the top floor of a squat building that nonetheless included tall windows to the north, promising good light, though the omnibus clopped outside the door and shouts from the street reverberated against the plaster ceiling. It would have to do, though. It was all she could afford. Until she made more money, Mr. Ellison's check would have to stretch for a year, and her old apartment studio was far too expensive.

Her summer of diligence was interrupted by several outings with Abigail Alcott, who was soon to leave for London to study watercolor, hoping, too, to find a better market there for her paintings, because, she told Mary, they were in the same boat. An artist had to face fiscal reality. Louisa's money wouldn't last forever. Her sister's success with
Little Women
had provided the kind of financial help Abigail had needed to study abroad, but it was limited, though now there was some income from Abigail's own book, a guide for art students in Paris. But Mary suspected the move had far more to do with poverty than Abigail was letting on, though Abigail glittered with happiness; at thirty-seven, she said, it felt as if life was finally beginning. And, she said, they were kinder to Americans in England, especially if they painted in watercolor.

“But you are deserting me,” Mary said. “You must stay in Paris. Think how upset you were with me when I said I might go home. Whom will I talk to who makes as much sense as you?”

“Perhaps Monsieur Degas?” Abigail said.

“He is away for the summer.”

“You're being careful, aren't you?”

“Oh, Abigail, there is nothing to be careful of,” Mary said, but she guarded her voice. Degas had decamped to the country, to Ménil-Hubert-sur-Orne, whence he wrote complaining that the weather was damp and cold. She received a letter from him every week, detailing the impossibility of painting while visiting people in their country homes and counting the days until he was back in Paris, where, he said, she was.

“Good,” Abigail said.

“But it's true,” Mary said.

“Then all is well. But soon you will have Lydia, and in her fine company, you won't miss me at all.”

As soon as Abigail and Lydia had met, their affinity had been immediate. Lydia loved fashion, as well as art, and could wax poetic on the various fashion houses where a starving artist might kit herself out for a small sum, information that Abigail, on her tight budget, had appreciated. Though the proceeds from Louisa's book had provided the money for study, they had not provided much for a Paris wardrobe. The gift had been made bittersweet, however, in that Louisa's health, damaged when she had nursed at the Union Hotel hospital during the Civil War, had not allowed her to come visit her more cosmopolitan sister. They had that in common, Mary and Abigail: sisters they adored who were ill.

“How is Lydia?” Abigail asked.

“Mother says she's not at all well,” Mary said. “But Lydia spares me her sadness, you know, as her younger sister.”

“Hardly that young,” Abigail said, smiling. Abigail was four years older than Mary, making her closer to Lydia's age than to Mary's; Lydia was turning forty this year. “Though by all rights you are the baby. She should spare you.”

They made the most of the summer. On especially warm August nights, they drove to the Bois de Boulogne, the old King's hunting grounds, with its newly installed lakes and paddleboats providing watery respite from the stifling confinement of a summer spent in the city. Only toward three did they make their way home, the eastern sky threading pink with the earliest hints of dawn. On one of Abigail's last days in Paris, they hired a carriage for an entire afternoon, sketching all over the city in the early September sunshine, directing the driver to stop at corners so that they could draw benches and lampposts, passersby, storefronts, and houses, recording all of Paris for Abigail to remember.

In late September, Mary saw Abigail off at the Gare du Nord, her trunks and easels piled around her. As she tearfully kissed her friend good-bye, Mary's only comfort was that Lydia was coming soon.

O
n a blustery day in mid-October, Mary climbed into the fiacre she'd hired to fetch her parents from the station and tried not to dwell on the fact that since she'd engaged the studio, no new work had sprung from her mind. She had hung her tapestries and carpets, filled the room with her easels and paint box, arranged the bureaus and paint-splattered tables, her basins and tins, discerned the best hours of light on days both sunny and dim, and yet, she had garnered no commissions. Her head ached so much that some days she could hardly get out of bed. But she did, Anna tiptoeing in to announce the time and prod her from the covers with newspapers and croissants. After breakfast, she took the omnibus to her studio. How she missed rising in her small apartment, reveling in its isolation. Not even visits from Louisine and the ever joyful Miss Ellison erased the cloud of worry. They often came together, bearing gifts of Darjeeling tea and
macarons
from Ladurée.

One afternoon, taking in the new studio, Miss Ellison said, “How do you get your ideas?”

“One imagines,” Mary said, “and then one constructs. One sees, and then remembers.”
One tries
, she thought,
and often fails
.

Now, traveling down the Rue la Fayette, she bristled. People were always asking artists that inane question.
Don't ask me how I do what I do
, Mary thought. But hadn't she asked Degas the same thing in his studio? It was the question her father asked of her, though he asked it in a far more fiscal way. Yesterday, a letter arrived that he must have posted a few days before they were to leave, listing an agenda of items to discuss upon his arrival.

We'll outline your business plan for selling your work, also peruse your budget, including any completed sales for this calendar year and projections for the remainder. A debit and credit ledger will be prudent, for accounting purposes.

As if art were a railroad timetable, or a commodity to be traded on the stock exchange. Not that she was averse to selling, not at all. She wished she could persuade her father that she had a healthy respect for money, that it was only the being checked on that galled, the watching over her shoulder, the assumption that she could not manage things herself, but there was also the bald truth that despite her efforts, she might always be reliant on them economically. How she would much prefer to welcome them to Paris on her own terms, as an independent woman of means, supporting herself, able to be gracious without the pall of her father's suspicion.

Outside the
salle des bagages
in the Gare du Nord, having already waited an hour, Mary paced in front of the doors to customs, wondering whether perhaps her parents had missed the train from Le Havre. She was trying to decide whether or not she ought to telegraph the hotel there when her parents and sister emerged, trailed by a harried porter pulling a handcart heaped with trunks. Her father was leaning on a cane, breathless and appearing far older than when she had last left them in Philadelphia. Lydia walked beside him. Even accounting for the exhaustion of the journey, Lydia was very pale. Her mother was shepherding the two of them, efficient and brisk and stolid, turning back often to make certain that the porter hadn't lost them in the crush.

“Oh, my darling! But weren't we coming to you?” her mother said, her eyes alight, embracing Mary with a sigh of pleasure. Her mother's soft skin, cross-hatched with time, was nonetheless pink with health. She always appeared ready for a brisk walk anywhere.

“I wanted to surprise you,” Mary said. “Aren't you surprised?”

“Of course I am. You are wonderful. But it was a nightmare about the baggage. The customs men move as if they are dead. And poor Lyddy isn't well; the passage was miserable. Days of storms. You know how that can affect a person. If you'd been with us, you would have made them turn the ship around.”

Lyddy, as she'd been called forever, managed a rebellious declaration of health through a smile that nevertheless grew quickly wan. In the gray light of the echoing train station, she appeared far older than her forty years, an alarming change from the last time Mary had seen her. Her cheeks were puffy and an unmistakable patina of exhaustion dulled her skin. Mary fought back a sudden well of tears.

“Don't cry, Mary,” Lydia said. “We're here.”

“I'm not crying,” Mary said, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. She took her sister by the shoulders. “You should see your room. I had Anna fill it with flowers.”

“Mame.”
Mame.
Her father whispered his affectionate nickname for her as he embraced her.

Mary gestured at his cane, which he dismissed with a shake of his head. Since she had last seen him his hair had grown completely gray.

“I'm perfectly fine, darling Mame; this is nothing but a necessary nuisance. But do get us home; we're all on the brink of collapse. You have a fiacre, don't you, waiting for us? Trying to hire one now with everyone vying will be difficult.” He looked over his shoulder at the pressing crowd, and this small action sparked a memory from a long time ago, when Mary was six and she and her family had first come to live in Paris. She remembered walking along the platform beside the train, grasping her father's warm and solid hand, terrified as the steam blasted from the locomotives. It was she who had been anxious then, not her father.

“I've taken care, Father, not to worry. And Anna is making us a lovely dinner.”

The look of relief on his face shamed her even more. The six years since she had last seen her father seemed a century. He was seventy-one years old now, and the vibrant competence of her mother, ten years his junior, revealed how the tide of time had dragged on him. All this time she'd been thinking their arrival would mean that they would expect her to accompany them about Paris in pursuit of their interests, dismissing her need to work, or that they would disapprove of the Manets and Degas, but it was clear now that these would be the least of her worries. She feared her parents—even her energetic mother—were far less vital than they had once been, when they had regularly changed residences on a whim from Altoona to Philadelphia to Paris, living for four years in Europe when their children had required schooling and governesses, relocations that had demanded energy and stamina and ingenuity. And now her father was fretting about a fiacre, and Lydia looked as if she needed to sleep for a fortnight.

She took each of their hands in hers and kissed their cheeks three times, formally welcoming them in the French way, ignoring her father's embarrassment and the porter's impatience, before leading them out to the conveyances and helping her father into the cab.