I Always Loved You (14 page)

É
douard and Eugène Manet were seated on a bench in one of the many alcoves along the vaulted hallway of the Île de la Cité hospital, awaiting Édouard's turn with Monsieur Siredy, the family's doctor friend who would no doubt have come to the house had Édouard asked. But Édouard had not wanted to alarm Suzanne, who could be impossible when she was frightened, and he deemed it better, on the whole, not to arouse trepidation in a household full of women who might feed his barely contained panic. He was having a hard enough time as it was. His note to Eugène had been deliberately cryptic. Would Eugène meet him, please, on the Pont Neuf, the following morning at nine o'clock? Eugène had only learned of their destination after Édouard had picked him up and given further directions to the hack driver.

The pain had attacked one morning when Édouard had been wandering down the Rue de Rivoli, following a fetching laundress he had spied. He'd been enjoying the undulations of her hips and the plump strength of her arms when a lightning bolt struck his leg, traveling from his hip down the inside of his leg to his ankle, a pain that caused him to buckle and cry out as the girl swayed away, oblivious. Two passing men leapt to help, asking whether he'd been shot and where was the blood, but there was no blood, only the sharp memory of pain.

It happened again a week later, a violent assault that, because he feared its return, terrified him. Once was an aberrancy, but twice was a warning. The pain inhibited Édouard's favorite aspect of life in Paris. The pleasure of Paris was to be outside and to walk its narrow streets and wide boulevards, to swagger along the Rue de Rivoli and peer into the shops, to wander the quays of the Seine to look down onto the river and the sequestered lovers on its shores, to navigate the places and squares on his way to a café, to experience the delight of the women of Paris—to look at them and dream of them and flirt with them.

The pain struck a third time one day as he stood at his easel, painting. A third time was a prophecy: It would happen again and again. To deny it was to invite destruction.

He told no one but Eugène, and only just this morning. To display his weakness to his younger brother was the kind of odd development that the pain was engendering. But he could not have sat so calmly in the bedlam of the hospital were it not for Eugène's diffident company. If Eugène suspected Édouard's love for Berthe, it did not seem to impinge on his brotherly sympathies. They sat waiting together, Eugène stalwart and present, for the better part of an hour, until the doctor called him in. Eugène went into the surgery with him. If the doctor thought the brothers unusual for coming together, or for coming to see him at the hospital rather than requesting that he see them at home, he did not say.

Édouard told his story, and Eugène, unaware of the multiple occurrences of the attacks, listened with an impassive yet attentive affect. When Édouard was finished, the doctor asked a series of questions. Of late was he particularly irritable? Was he prone to ideas of grandeur?

Édouard shook his head and the doctor looked to Eugène.

“He is a painter,” Eugène said, shrugging.

Monsieur Siredy pulled a rubber hammer from his coat pocket and tapped Édouard's knees. His legs flew off the table and swung back in a display of limitless exuberance. The doctor asked more specific questions. Had his speech changed? Had he become forgetful? Had his muscles weakened and that was why he had fallen?

“No and no,” Édouard said. “The pain made me fall.”

“Are you having trouble forming sentences?”

“Do I seem it?” Édouard said.

Again the doctor looked at Eugène.

Eugène said, “I have never known my brother to be at a loss for words.”

“And, how often, my friend,” the doctor asked, “do you visit the brothels? Have you had any rashes, any sores? How long ago? Did you ever lose your hair? Think, now. This could have occurred some time ago.” Though the police regularly examined the brothel denizens for venereal disease, there was always the chance a prostitute could blossom into fulminant contagion the second she stepped outside the doctor's surgery. It was a chilling thought, one that sobered every Parisian male whenever the prospect was mentioned, and it was mentioned often, usually in asides and whispers, whenever an entertaining night on the town was proposed.

With a rush of terror, Édouard understood what the doctor was implying. His father had died of Neapolitan disease; he had suffered enormously. But how did a man remember a rash? When it appeared, its nature? When he'd been young, when his father had banished him from art to force him to find a more respectable career, Édouard had joined the merchant marine. They'd sailed to Rio. There had been the carnival, the freedom. And afterward, there had been Paris and the brothels, Suzanne, and other willing women. But he was careful. Some of the time. Most of the time.

Édouard said, “A man lives. You understand.”

The doctor nodded. “We can watch this. It's possible there is another explanation.”

“Something benign?” Édouard said.

The doctor pressed his lips together. “Come to see me if the pain recurs.” He turned to Eugène. “Are you having the same troubles?”

Eugène shook his head, and Édouard thought that it must be the first time in Eugène's life that he was happy not to have imitated him.

Outside, Édouard said, “Don't tell Berthe.”

“She would only worry,” Eugène said. “Will you tell Suzanne?”

“And suffer her hysteria?”

Édouard took the carriage, but Eugène crossed the Pont Notre-Dame on foot to catch the omnibus that ran along the Rue de Rivoli. Édouard envied his brother's galloping gait. Who would have thought after all these years that Eugène would be the lucky one in everything?

S
everal days after Mary and Lydia had seen Degas at the Opéra, Mary received a note at her studio.

My dearest M,

Are you alone?

D

She paid the urchin a sou to return her brief answer.

Oui.

Less than half an hour later, Degas was knocking at the door of her studio, holding the hand of a little girl he hoisted into his arms as they stepped inside. The girl flung her arms around Degas's neck and peeked at Mary from the safety of the folds of his plaid woolen scarf. He untied the child's hat, revealing a mass of dark curls that cascaded down her back.

“You brought a chaperone?”

“I did. You said you were alone.”

“Is she yours?” Mary asked. She had never seen him with a child before.

He laughed and petted the girl's curls. “She belongs to some friends. But she likes me very much—don't you, sweetheart? Eloise, meet Mademoiselle Cassatt. Mademoiselle Cassatt is very nice, but she is very sad because she doesn't know any little girls in Paris.”

Eloise squirmed in his arms and he set her down. The coal stove hadn't yet heated the studio, so Degas unwound his scarf and gave it to the girl. She dragged it across the floor and climbed onto the blue armchair Mary had brought from the apartment after her father expressed his distaste for its tufted flowered upholstery. The girl dangled her legs, her expression a cross between patience and boredom. Mary's dog circled the chair, then huddled into a mop near the stove.

“When I said I was going out of my mind at the Opéra, I didn't mean that I was pining for a child,” Mary said.

“You should paint her,” Degas said.

“Paint her?”

The girl's coat had scrunched above her knees, and she was kicking her legs, sprawled on the seat of the blue armchair, one hand propped behind her head, the scarf entwined about her waist. Mary set down the sketchbook in which she'd been struggling to devise an idea, any idea. She'd been staring out the window when she'd received Degas's note, wishing she painted cityscapes, landscapes, anything, just so that she could begin.

“Tell me the truth. Did her parents ask for you to do her portrait?”

“Yes, but I told them I would do their darling child no justice and that I had a friend who possessed the most sublime ability to express a child's spirit.”

“You want to
give
me an obsession? Obsessions aren't adopted. Obsessions seize your soul,” Mary said.

“I have no control or concern over what you paint next. But this child is beautiful and she deserves your brush.”

“But I've never painted a child before.”

Eloise was playing with Degas's scarf, singing to herself, calling to the dog, who sidled up to the chair and collapsed at her feet. Despite the cold, she threw off her coat, revealing a white dress and petticoats, and then slumped back again, dragging Degas's scarf across her dress. The tartan clashed with the upholstery in a beguiling contrast.

“Will she hold a pose?”

“Realism, my dear. How do children really behave? You don't need to lie. That's the problem with bad art. It lies.”

The exquisite terror of beginning flooded through Mary as an idea formed in her mind: something new, not quite a portrait, but something else, something about being a child in an adult world.

“It will be about the girl. It will be about the chair. Or rather—”

She broke off, finding it impossible to express what she saw only in her mind, what she didn't yet have words for, what describing in detail might destroy. The idea had to simmer inside her, find its own truth, even as she was seeing Degas's dancers, endless numbers of them, his pictures portraits more of moments than of the dancers themselves. Repetition and variation, forming a story larger than each figure's individual life, inducing a tremor of recognition in the viewer, who would understand the larger meaning without even recognizing that the parts expanded the whole. The inchoate vibrated in Mary's mind, as she dreamed the picture her imagination was painting. But she felt, too, a wash of sadness, for that sensation happened rarely for an artist, and was in turn fleeting. How quickly it would devolve into the punishing discipline of hard work. The vision she was entertaining would require technical prowess she was not yet certain she possessed or ever would possess. And the clarity of this moment, the glorious moment of the idea, would fade into doubt of the value of the idea itself, and she would be left working and reworking a canvas upon which her dream seemed as banal as her fear of failure, and which in turn seemed far more certain than success. This gift of Eloise, she knew, had been meant to spark just this moment of joy, but it was also a betrayal, because soon she would suffer a surfeit of agony.

But in this first moment Mary dismissed, as all artists do, the pain to come. She kissed Degas's cheek, an unconscious effusion of gratitude she wouldn't remember after he and Eloise had gone, though for the rest of the day Degas would touch his hand to the place where her soft lips had grazed his skin.

“I'll bring Eloise and her mother tomorrow,” he said.

“How can I repay you?”

“Someday, I'll need you.” He gazed at her a long while. “Come, Eloise, we're off to return you to your mother. How would you like to come to see Mademoiselle Cassatt again tomorrow? She will paint you and you will be remembered forever.”

The girl skipped to the door and he tied the ribbons of her hat and hoisted her once more into his arms, where she contemplated Mary with a gaze that was serious and patient, still clutching the scarf in her hands. Degas took it from her and wrapped it around Mary's neck once, twice, and said, “A gift.”

When they had gone, Mary brought the scarf to her face and breathed in the scent of turpentine and oil and the chalky essence of a newly opened box of pastels.

Degas.

•   •   •

It was soon apparent that the little girl could sit still for only a few moments at a time. It was like capturing the light at sunset. She wiggled and squirmed and twisted in the chair until her mother declared her spent and scooped her up with an apology and a promise of better behavior the next day. But the promised better behavior never materialized. After concentrating on the girl's face, getting the features just right, Mary then had to work fast, faster than she ever had, and this limitation forced from her hand a light, breezy portrait that somehow radiated both charm and the boredom Eloise had suffered in the sittings. It was the limitation that helped Mary. She wondered how Degas might have fared, with his deliberate technique of drawing and redrawing and beginning again. He might love children, but whether or not he could suffer their peripatetic dances was another thing entirely. But within a week Mary believed she had breathed life into the girl. All else in the picture she could paint without her.

But it was the rest of the picture that gave Mary trouble. She had sworn off plain backgrounds of no distinguishing feature. A good portrait was a picture in context, the background as important as the person, defining who they were. Just as she had painted Lydia at the Opéra, she was determined to make something more of this picture than any of her previous ones. The composition she had already imagined. She would repeat the blue chair as Degas repeated dancers, but she would vary its position, its appearance. Doing so would require forced perspective, a technique she had not yet mastered to her satisfaction. The prospect terrified and thrilled her. She could move the chair, rearrange it and paint it from either side, but there was the even trickier background of the room, the windows, baseboards, and walls—all derived from her imagination, for she had no similar room to model it after.

For two successive mornings, she stood before the canvas, eyeing the chair, eyeing the canvas. She thought,
I will crop the chairs except the one that holds the little girl
. But how large to make the room? How to draw the eye to Eloise? She had placed her to the side of the canvas, but that would not be enough if she didn't paint the chairs just so. Balance and emphasis. All of art was balance and emphasis.

She painted a second chair, then a third, not as a chair but as a couch. Variation. And then a final chair, painted almost as a doll's chair, forcing the perspective even more. And she had to place the chairs in a real room, with a floor and windows. What color for the walls? How much detail? In a picture already rife with flourishes and bright pigment, how would she make the whole work?

One day as she stood at the canvas, her little Brussels griffon fell asleep on the chair. She took the gift. His brown coat would echo the scarf and the little girl's socks, which she had painted to echo the tartan. The dark colors grounded the two figures in the frothy sea of blues and oranges, anchoring them with an arabesque of contrast.

She studied the tone of the background, which she had primed gray and which now seemed too gray. The darker brown needed echoing too, but the hue had to be lighter. She wanted Eloise's white dress to surprise. So yes, brown, but light brown, with an undercurrent of red to echo the orange in the chair. No wallpaper on the walls. And the windows a wall of light. She saw it all, but her paintbrush would not move.

A day passed. She went to the studio intending to work, but after an hour gave up and instead took the dog for a long walk. She did not want to admit that she was paralyzed, but she was. This painting was much more ambitious, much more complex than anything she had ever attempted.

Her walk took her home, where she made the excuse that she was ill, and felt ashamed when Katherine doted on her all afternoon. The next morning, she returned to the studio in the April drizzle and found Degas waiting for her at the door.

“How are you getting on?” he said.

She opened the door with her key and let the dog run in before her, holding the door open to let Degas see the painting aloft on its easel. Inside, he removed his hat and overcoat and studied the canvas. She stood behind him. The stove and spirit lamp could wait. She was cold, but warmth was not what she needed.

“The background is giving you trouble, yes? The perspective?”

She nodded.

He pointed with his finger. “There, the walls will intersect. There, the baseboard will run. Windows?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then start here, behind the chair, and then next to the couch.”

“I can't begin. I can't find it.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I literally can't.”

He regarded her for a long moment, then took up her palette. “Tell me which,” he said.

“I thought terre de Sienne, some white, vermillion, too.”

“Yes.” He squeezed dollops of paint onto the palette and mixed. He held it out for her approval.

“Yes, just that, but more poppy oil,” she said. She wanted a thinner wash for the back. At least she knew that.

“I will paint the lines. Remember, it is always line. Whenever you are stuck, go back to lines.” He took up a thin hogs hair brush as she hurried to pour him some turpentine.

He painted eight lines. In less than a minute his judicious brush had created an entire room.

“Do you see the windows now? Where the floor ends?”

“Yes.”

“I can go now, yes?”

“How did you know?”

“Because we all suffer,
ma chérie
,” he said.

“Thank you, Monsieur Degas.”

“Oh no. Not anymore. I am Edgar.” He leaned over, kissed her cheek, donned his coat, and left as quickly as he had come.