I Always Loved You (27 page)

And yet.

The dissonance of her situation kept her from work, which had already been compromised for far too long. The past three days she had come every morning to her studio in hopes that habit would revive the muse that had inspired last year's extraordinary portfolio. But the room's neglected disarray, its echoing emptiness after the circus of Edgar's comings and goings, even the different light, once serenely familiar but now perturbingly foreign, engendered not comfort but unease. She occupied herself with sweeping and dusting, taking inventory of her brushes and supplies, counting her blank canvases, sorting her paint tubes, but the domestic flurry was of little help. From time to time, she had to keep herself from dashing to the exhibition and pulling everything of hers off the wall, restraining herself with the hope that the disaster of her showing would soon be forgotten, erased from all memory but hers. And daily she returned to her family, whose questions she could not answer. Where was Edgar? What had happened? Had he apologized? Had he changed his mind?

Lydia, always observant, asked her what the matter was.

He is being difficult, Mary said.

Surely he'll come round to see you soon.

I doubt it, Mary said.

He always comes back.

Perhaps not this time.

When Berthe came to collect Mary for Manet's exhibition, the first thing Berthe said was,
My dear, take care. It's you who has to keep on living
. Mary did not know how Berthe knew, but if anyone would see, it would be her.

Mary decided that she would not contact Edgar. She would avoid anywhere he might be. She would wait him out. This would be her act of courage, confronted with such a morass of difficulty. Edgar's would be to face her. She half-expected never to see him again. But if he did come, he would need to persuade her that his passion had meant more than a momentary respite from the devastation of his failure, that it was not need that had driven him but worship of her, which, she decided, would be the only acceptable absolution in these circumstances. He had only to come. It was a small thing to expect of a man who had made love to her. She would give him a month, knowing his reticence. He had only to decide that he wanted to.

Y
ou don't want to marry, do you? All that complication and commitment? The obligation and boredom?”

One expected such bluster from Degas; one waited for it, prepared for it by rehashing old conversations, as Mary had done, planning the perfect retort to any forthcoming imagined parry, but when he arrived at Mary's studio door two weeks after their affair and this was what he said, her hoarded armory was no answer for a proposal that denied itself in the asking.

It pleased her that he looked terrible. Through his glasses, his eyes were dull, and his skin had become pallid in his isolation. No one had seen him. This was reported to her all over Paris. He had even skipped his night at the Opéra, a development that gratified her, for he never missed a performance. Since their encounter, she had taken more care than usual with her appearance. It was a matter of pride: She would make him sorry if, or when, he finally chose to see her. So when she opened the door this morning and it was he, she preened just a little, because the reflection in the mirror that morning had been especially kind.

And then he spoke.

She slammed the door in his face.

He opened it and stepped inside.

She could not, she discovered, bear to be near him. She crossed to the windows and stood in the comforting warmth of a ray of morning sun.

He stayed by the door and held his hat in his hands. “That was a shabby thing to say,” he began. “I apologize.”

It had been a very long time since Edgar had been to her studio, and he looked around now, as if surprised to see a canvas on an easel, a palette prepared, and Mary at work.

“I meant to say that I will marry you if you wish.”

“That is the kind of proposal a woman never wishes to hear.”

“And what kind of proposal is that?”

“The kind the speaker is sorry to have made.” There had been some relief. She was not with child. The overwhelming solace of that reprieve fed her indignation now.

“I am not a normal man. Surely you have come to understand this.”

“What do I care of normal? Surely you have come to understand that I have never been a woman who wanted a quotidian existence. But none of this has anything to do with love, does it?”

“Édouard is dying.”

“You cannot prevent his death by marrying me.”

He looked up then, savaged.

“The world is not that kind, Edgar.”

Degas stared at her, aghast, and she let him suffer for a minute before she shook her head.

“The point is, Edgar, that we don't know what to do with one another. And I can't trust you.”

His face, already mournful, collapsed into hapless need. She was shaking. She put her hand on the windowsill to steady herself. He remained uncharacteristically still, arrested at the doorway, where he could just as easily leave as stay. The light from the window fell on his glasses and concealed his eyes. It was all him now. With a swift denial, he could controvert the difficulties of the situation, could refute the realities she perceived, could persuade her of the depths of his devotion. In the long silence, the noises of the street reached into the room, as if to remind her that time was passing, that life went on, that the ordinary really did reign. She could not remember a longer silence between them, but she would not break it. He had to declare himself. She wasn't even certain what she wanted him to say, but she wanted him to say something final, because she was tired of the uncertainty.

He shifted on his feet. “Perhaps if we were different creatures,” he said, “less alike.”

She heard her voice breaking. “It seems a strange reason not to love one another.”

“I didn't say I didn't love you.”

She waited for him to steal her courage by saying next that he did love her. She might do anything then, if he did. She might even disappoint herself. She looked at him, but his gaze faltered. Only for a moment, but it was enough.

“Good-bye, Edgar,” she said. “You can fix your dancer. I know you can. It will only take love.”

He hesitated a moment, then opened the door and left.

She waited at the windows until she saw him step onto the street. She did not want him to see her. She moved to the canvas and tacked to its edge the study she had made of Lydia last night. The only solution to heartbreak was to paint the thing she knew she would never have.
Paint love
, he had once said. He had at least given her that. She squeezed paint from the tubes and took up her brush and began, as if she had never known him.

A
year later, on the sidewalk at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, Édouard Manet waylaid Berthe Morisot under one of the leafy maples that lined the street, persuading her to come into his closed carriage so that they could talk in private, away from the stream of people, friends and otherwise, entering and leaving the building. Today was the opening day of the sixth of the impressionists' exhibitions, hung in rooms at the top of the building, whose wide windows let in the most extraordinary light, an ambient shimmer that showed Berthe's canvases to perfection. The whole of the exhibition glimmered: Degas was finally showing his dancer and the place was alive with astonishment; Mary Cassatt's canvases exceeded anything she had ever done; Pissarro's usual array of bucolic landscapes impressed with their mastery; and Monet and Caillebotte and Renoir had seceded over yet another argument with Degas, who had organized the show around his favorites and had seemed, somehow, to push the show away from technique and into a celebration of modernity. Manet thought he was even a little sorry he had not eschewed the Salon this year to show with the impressionists, but he quickly dismissed the thought. He was thrilled to have been accepted to the Salon: two pictures, promised to be beautifully hung.

Berthe wore a straw bonnet trimmed in silk and decorated with a spray of flowers at the crown that deepened the black of her hair. The breeze had teased a few tendrils from her loose chignon and they played around her face, softening the sharp darts of her cheekbones that defined her beauty. Édouard resisted the overwhelming urge to whisk her to the station to board a train to Italy. He would alert no one until the deed was done, until life was what it could have been, had he been less circumspect: a flowered refuge in Venice or Madrid, Berthe painting beside him, the air exquisite, their days filled with the intoxications of body and soul. He rubbed the head of his cane, restless. It would take only a word to his driver.

Berthe studied him. He could hide nothing. She tucked the loose hair under her bonnet and said, “Eugène is coming back for me soon.” After years of searching for a position, Eugène had a chance in the Finance Ministry. “He is going to pick me up after his interview.”

“Upstairs there are a dozen people who will recognize my carriage.”

“You cannot frighten me. I won't leave with you. If Eugène comes, we will tell him you were keeping me from the wind.”

“If he gets the job, he will no longer be an embarrassment to you,” Édouard said.

“That is unfair.”

“And also true.”

“We are leaving Paris, Édouard. We've decided. I've come into some money after my grandfather's death, and we are leaving.”

Édouard fought to keep his voice under control. “Where are you going?”

“Not far. Bougival. But it is out of Paris.” The plan had come to her after the dinner when Eugène had made his point, just over a year ago.
Prepare yourself, darling
, indicating that he understood everything about her and Édouard.
But the lack of money had been an impediment. Now that she had come into her inheritance, and Eugène had a chance at a job, she could repair the damage, could endeavor to worship Eugène in all his frailty and peculiar moods, as wives did, she supposed, when they loved their husbands. She had wanted to go farther, to the south, far enough from Paris with its terrible weather and impossible longings, where the sunshine might scrub Édouard from her memory, but those plans seemed impossible now that Eugène might have a job.

“You would leave me when I am ill?”

“Bougival is not that far. And you will be in Meudon again. We will see you in the summertime as we did last year.” Édouard had relented, finally, to treatment, and had spent last summer taking baths at Belleville, where he had chafed at his exile and painted in the garden. The treatment seemed to have done him some good, or so he claimed. “But this is the last time you will ever see me alone,” she said.

“This is ridiculous. A half hour by train from the Gare Saint Lazare is no distance at all.”

“It is enough to keep us from being expected at your mother's Thursdays, enough to keep you from dropping by, enough to keep me from the pain of you.”

Tears gathered in his eyes.

“Please, don't pretend you are an innocent. If I am to live with my husband and treat him as one, you will have to face the truth, not play with it.”

“Motherhood has made you unkind.”

“It has made me chaste.”

“The virgin Berthe.”

“Don't make me be cruel to you.”

It was perhaps a mark of his illness that he surrendered, when he never would have before. He climbed out with his cane and stood guard outside the carriage, waiting until Eugène arrived to collect her. He spent several minutes in solicitous conversation about Eugène's job prospects and the exhibition before he said good-bye to them both, walking them to their carriage even though his legs bothered him. He planted his cane on the sidewalk, his legs astride, his top hat and morning coat impeccable as he stood there, resolute, lifting a hand as they drove away.

I
t's too much pudding, Father,” Mary said.

“Now, Mame,” her father said. “Not even you can be this quixotic. The last time you received bad reviews we had to resuscitate you. Now you are lauded in every review, are celebrated as the epitome of ‘grace, delicacy, and femininity,' and you say the praise is too much. I will never understand you.”

“That is because you are not an artist.”

“What does Edgar say about your triumph?”

“I have no idea.” She'd been saying this to queries about Edgar for a year, though she saw him everywhere. They talked. They visited. They critiqued one another's work. She modeled for him. He painted her. But everything had changed. Had she noticed anything, everyone asked her? Was Edgar being as vile to her as he was to everyone else? She always said nothing, only gave a vague shake of her head and smiled what she hoped was her most enigmatic smile. “Ask him yourself when you see him,” she said, determined not to imply any intimacy other than the mostly public friendship they continued.

“But when will we see him again?”

“He is coming for dinner next week.”

“And who else is coming?”

“Everyone.”

“Everyone? God help us. You know I disapprove. You will exhaust Lydia gadding about Paris with her like you do.”

“We do not gad. Lyddy, do we gad?”

“Oh, I think we do.” Lydia was knitting in the parlor, smiling through the open doorway at her father and sister.

“We do not,” Mary said. “We attend the Opéra, parties, openings, salons. None of this is gadding.”

“Then what do you call it?” her father said.

“Living.”

“And what do you call rejecting a tidal wave of praise?” he said.

“Reason.”

“It is unreasonable,” her father said. “Isn't it, Lyddy?”

“Entirely unreasonable.” The brisk click of knitting needles raced along in the parlor.

Lydia, newly well and thriving, had become Mary's constant companion in Edgar's place, charming artistic Paris with her generosity and observant intelligence, rendering even Émile Zola an admirer, no mean feat for the sister of the
Américaine
. Sometimes Louisine, on her frequent trips from the states, joined their trips to museums and shows, and together they mourned Abigail, whose husband had indeed sent Abigail's infant to the states to live with Louisa. Mary's joy at her sister's burgeoning strength compensated for that sorrow, and far exceeded her happiness at this year's redemptive success at their exhibition, which she nonetheless relished far more than she would ever let on. On the first day, she sold everything, even pictures of the family, which she then had to buy back when they protested. The memory of last year's failure receded, and in its place resided only the normal, quotidian terror that every artist faced.

Degas's dancer, delayed a year, her head reconfigured, caused a sensation, as she ought to have done. Whistler, who had come from England for the show, stood before the now occupied vitrine and uttered unintelligible croaks of adoration. That so many critics called her ugly only fed Degas's pride in his creation. Caillebotte, fed up with Degas's “antics,” as he called them, had not exhibited this year, furious with him for turning the impressionist exhibition into a realist exhibition, or so he said.

Mary's paintings were the fruit of the summer. Her brother Aleck, his wife, Lois, and their children had come from the States to spend the summer with them out in the country, where they had rented a house. Mary painted all summer long: Lydia crocheting in the garden, Lydia drinking tea, Lydia seated on a bench, mother and infant embracing, her mother reading to her grandchildren, her brother in his austere magnificence, her nephew playing a violin, babies and their mothers recruited from the town, painting after painting about love. She painted love into the autumn and through the winter, and when the pictures were hung in rooms on the Boulevard des Capucines and the reviews poured in praising her work and Pissarro and Berthe and even Édouard Manet declared her pictures sublime she did not think about Edgar, except that, of course, she did. Her art had soared after she had broken with him in the most essential way, a convoluted outcome that haunted her.

But Lydia, dear Lydia, thrilled to be well, went everywhere with her; they crisscrossed Paris in the family carriage; they gadded about.

“Do not try me so, Mame,” Robert said. “Just accept your well-deserved praise for the sake of your father's heart and allow me to rest for once in the thought that you are pleased with your efforts. Give me that, at least?”

“All right,” Mary said. “For one moment, I will let you believe that I am well pleased.”

“My God, you are a lot of trouble, darling,” he said, and kissed her.