I Always Loved You (2 page)

M
ary Cassatt was often mistaken for being tall, but she wasn't. She was small boned and finely made, the perception of her height being formed primarily on the force of her personality. People often said that she was beautiful, too, but a careful examination of her heart-shaped face, with its too-narrow chin and unfortunate exaggeration of the forehead, revealed that its most prominent feature, her large eyes, and the other, a pair of sculpted cheekbones, were the deflecting mirage. None of this mattered at all to Mary, who bore her somewhat illusive ordinariness as a kind of weapon. It had served to sharpen her tongue, and when she was lost, as she was now, only her sister Lydia, her mother, and her close friends could detect the terror that coursed through her. To the rest of the world, she remained formidable, and to her friends she was always a stalwart defender of their person, and this combination, along with her lively intelligence, made her the best kind of companion. You loved her or you hated her, and Abigail Alcott loved her. It was a friendship that Mary Cassatt cherished.

Abigail and Mary were attending the last day of the impressionist exhibition on one of the rainiest days of the spring, their umbrellas dripping as they climbed the marble stairway to the apartment on the corner of the Rue le Peletier and the Boulevard Haussmann.

“Paris is raining,” Mary said. That was how she spoke about the weather since settling back in Paris:
Paris is raining
, or
Paris is shining
, because the city seemed to dictate weather the way it dictated art.

“It always rains in Paris,” Abigail said.

Mary suspected that her friend was vaguely worried that by coming with her today she had crossed to the wrong side of the artistic tracks. The two had met when Abigail had come to study in Paris the year before, two years after Mary's decision to return to the art capital of the world. In the Louvre, they copied paintings in the mornings with the copyists' licenses they had obtained from a pale, sickly clerk officed in a damp little closet in the museum's dungeons. In the afternoons they sketched in the Tuileries, perfecting their drawing. Always, they hoped their work would be accepted at the Salon, the state-sponsored academic art exhibition that was considered the height of artistic success. Held every year under the glass ceiling in the grand Palais de l'Industrie, the Salon was every artist's ambition, for the jury was made up of the most prominent artists in Paris.

Now, they paid for their tickets, bought a catalog, and passed through the turnstile into the apartment that was serving as a temporary gallery. Abigail's thin, vaguely aristocratic face lit with both anticipation and apprehension as they linked arms and surveyed the parlor. This was the renegade artists' third exhibition. Labeled “impressionists” by the hostile critics, they were refugees from the Salon who despised the state system of juries, believing that no judge should separate an artist from the viewer. Today there was no sign of the mocking crowds that had mobbed the exhibition in its first weeks, and Abigail seemed to relax. Despite it being the last day, the apartment was mostly empty. Devoid of any furniture or other domestic trappings, the rooms did resemble an art gallery. Someone had tacked sheets of thin muslin over the windows to keep out the direct sunlight, giving the room a soft, elusive light.

The apartment was large for Paris. Mary and Abigail took a preliminary turn, peeking in from the central hallway through the doorways, checking the numbered paintings against the catalog, noting the canvases they wanted to come back to study: Renoir's sumptuous portraits, Monet's vibrant oils, Pissarro's feathered landscapes, and the stunning canvases of Berthe Morisot, which seemed, on first look, to be spun purely of light.

“Did you know a woman exhibited with them?” Abigail said.

“Yes,” Mary said. “She's Édouard Manet's sister-in-law.”

“Not
the
Édouard Manet, enfant terrible of the art world?”

“
The.
”

Any painter in Paris knew of Édouard Manet. For more than a decade, he had been painting provocative canvases of such notoriety that he couldn't be ignored, which everyone supposed was his object all along. The newspapers printed cartoons and caricatures of him all the time. Last year, after both his paintings had been rejected from the Salon, he'd displayed them in his studio for two weeks, advertising his private exhibition in
Le Figaro
. Unruly lines trailed around the block waiting to see the artist's latest scandalous
taches
, causing an uproar in the neighborhood.

Abigail flipped the pages of the catalog. “Why doesn't he exhibit here? The Salon rejects him all the time.”

It was a rare moment of thoughtlessness on Abigail's part. Mary shrugged and looked away. “I don't know.”

“I'm sorry. What a stupid thing to say.”

This carelessness and Abigail's quick apology were the first hints of any pity on Abigail's part. This year, Abigail's painting, a still life, had been accepted for the Salon, while Mary's had not. Every year for the past four years, Mary's work had been admitted, but now, just when she believed her painting had finally begun to take on a life of its own, just when putting brush to canvas, so long an exercise in study, had become a joy, the Salon had rejected her. But if anyone besides Abigail had received more pleasure from an acceptance, Mary could not imagine it. Abigail had written home to tell her family of her great success. A little oil, of which she was so proud. And why not? In the past, Mary had done the same, had bought catalogs and clipped any mention of herself in the newspaper and sent the notices home, proving her success to her father in the concrete way he understood. And Abigail, after all, had her famous writer sister to compete with. But Abigail had neither gloated over her victory nor patronized Mary, though the rest of the members of the American art community had not been above glee at Mary's failure. At the Palais de l'Industrie, where she had gone to wrap her rejected paintings for the carter, she had seen several of them laughing. Not one friend had come to console her.

“If anyone deserves happiness at beeing accepted by the Salon it's you, Abigail.”

“Why don't we start with Edgar Degas? You know you only want to see him,” Abigail said, her voice steeped in the regret of having reminded her friend of her failure. “He has the two back bedrooms.”

Degas was the single reason Mary had wanted to come to the exhibition today. She had admired him for years, seeking out his work in small galleries and colorists' shops, always hoping she might stumble onto one of his canvases displayed for sale in a window. Now she followed Abigail down the hall, and upon entering the first of the bedrooms, was overcome. Degas's was a point of view so particular, so specific, so separate from the others' that it struck her once again as modern mastery. Not that he painted beauty. No. The others painted beauty. Degas painted life.

Abigail said, “But you don't want to paint exactly in his style, do you, Mary? You don't want to imitate him?”

“No, of course not, but do you see what he does? Do you see how remarkable the composition is?”

“I see. I think.” Abigail cocked her head, studying the painting of a woman seated at a café table, her hand resting listlessly on a glass of absinthe. “
In a Café
, he calls it. Actually, looking at this makes me uncomfortable.”

“Degas provokes and reveals our prejudices. Wouldn't you like to be good enough to unsettle someone in this same way one day?” Though “good enough” was a shameful understatement. Instead, Mary wished she had said, wouldn't you like to be
skilled
,
sensitive
,
gifted
,
brilliant
,
generous
enough, all the things that she, Mary, was not.

“Do forgive me, but I don't see it. I've hardly just begun to understand all that is necessary to paint really well in the old way, let alone the new.”

“The Salon would disagree,” Mary said, but she said it without rancor.

“Do you mind if I go back and peek at the Renoirs instead? I think I might feel more accord with him.”

As Abigail made her escape, Mary began, like the insatiable student she was, to try to discover Degas's secret. For there was one, she was certain of it, and she believed that if she studied each of his paintings one by one, her ravenous eye might discern the workings of his mind, might detect how he translated his vision to his brush, might appropriate his vision as her own. But as soon as she began, unflattering comparisons between her work and his inundated her mind. The anatomy of an artist's heart is a desire for perfection, at least hers was, and barring that, at least the ability to express a certain truth, but now she feared that no amount of hunger would infuse her with the ineffable vagaries that made an artist an artist. It wasn't imitation she was after, as Abigail had suggested. It was that she had been trying for half her lifetime to find her soul, and still she hadn't, while this man painted with his. It was not a lucky thing to want something as much as she did. To fear that no matter how hard she worked, no matter how much she studied, she might lack the essential talent of
seeing
. For true art lay in seeing. This was what she had come to, after years of study. A properly chosen palette, a true sense of proportion, an effective brushstroke: These were not gifts; these were technique, obtainable by tireless observation and practice. But sight? Sight, it seemed, was a gift from God. She stood for a while longer, turning in a circle, then drifted from Degas's room as if she were leaving a funeral.

“Mary?” Abigail asked when Mary found her in the parlor.

“I'll never be as good as I want to be, Abigail,” Mary said.

“Every artist thinks that.”

“But compared to him, I am nothing.”

“I think you ought to meet him. I'll write him a letter,” Abigail said.

“You will not.”

“Or perhaps you could write to Berthe Morisot.”

“No one is writing any letters. Besides,” Mary said, distracted by the absurdity of Abigail's scheme, “you know what it's like to try to meet a French person. It's as if you were proposing war and not an introduction.”

“We need your sister,” Abigail said. “Lydia would charm them all in half a second. Soon you would be fast friends with all these artists.”

“Lydia
would
charm them, wouldn't she?”

They both missed Lydia, who had returned home to Philadelphia last summer after visiting Mary twice in the previous two years. Though she was older than Mary by seven years, Lydia never seemed a chaperone. She was instead comfort and conviviality in a city that sometimes overwhelmed. But she was often ill, one day well, the next doubling over in pain. Sometimes Mary wondered whether it was coping with illness that had made Lydia the family's acknowledged center of calm.

They lingered a moment longer, gazing at Renoir's canvases, then wandered back through the rooms, Abigail asking Mary question after question, the two of them marveling at the bright palettes and thickly textured paint, elements so different from the strictures of Salon art that it was as if these artists had set themselves free. Suddenly it was clear to Mary, in a way it hadn't been before, that these artists were
playing
more than they were working, playing at exposing some vision of life that defied convention, exuberant in a way that her painting was not, and could never be, weighted down as she was by the Salon's censorious rule. Nor were these paintings amateur, as the scolding reviews in the newspapers had admonished. Instead, they were lively, inviting, celebratory. After a while, Abigail urged her to return to Degas's rooms. Their arms linked, they strolled past the pastels and oils, awed and speechless, Abigail by the strangeness of Degas's vision, Mary by its mastery. Unlike the other artists, Degas didn't play, though he was not reverent, either, not unless you believed that you honored life by exposing it.

Outside, they unfurled their umbrellas against the soft rain and kissed one another good-bye, French-style, on the cheeks. They were going in opposite directions, Mary to her apartment at the base of Montmartre and Abigail to the attic room near the Tuileries that she shared with two friends. The Parisian evening glow of glistening raindrops and gray light had just fallen, and despite the gutter's accumulation of litter and horse droppings, the scene reminded Mary how much she loved the city and how much she would miss it if she were to leave.

“You're coming tomorrow, aren't you, to opening day?” Abigail said. “I'll need your support.”

“I'll be there,” Mary promised. “I'll come to the Salon and admire your painting and make everyone look at it.”

“Are you sure you don't mind?”

“I promise I'll be there,” Mary said.

“And you must promise me you won't go back to Philadelphia.”

Mary looked away. “I didn't say I wanted to go home.” Though since the rejection, she had been trying to decide whether or not she ought to.

“Paris is the sanctuary of art,” Abigail said.

“And its battleground,” Mary said, kissing her friend once more. “The place where artists live or die.”

“I don't know what those idiots were thinking,” Abigail said, squeezing Mary's hand. But as Abigail hurried down the street, Mary knew it wasn't the rejection that bothered her, not anymore. She turned and looked up at the apartment window, now darkened in the gloaming, yearning for the artist's vision she feared she did not have and would never have. She was not being defeatist. She was being practical, a distinctly Cassatt trait, one her father would admire for its resolution even as she mourned its pragmatism. To paint or not to paint. That was the Shakespearean conundrum. Even her father considered this question one of life and death. Once, he had said to her that he would rather see her dead than be an art student in Paris, a statement that had sent her fleeing from the dinner table. And at thirty-three, one had to assess. One had to come to terms. One had to confront dreams. The fading daylight blackened into darkness, and the lamplighter lit the gaslights in succession, and pearls of glassed flame flickered like warm stars.