I Always Loved You (28 page)

L
ater, when Mary looked back, she marveled at the equanimity of the year after her triumphant exhibition, though had she been paying attention, she might have seen Caillebotte's desertion of that same exhibition as the harbinger of all the pain to come.

After the summer of 1881, when Mary's other brother, Gardner, made a trip to Paris for the first time since he'd been a child, and they rented Coeur Volant in nearby Marly-le-Roi, and all had seemed well for a good long time, rumbles of disquiet began to reverberate through the ranks of the impressionists. Caillebotte wanted to eject all Degas's pet artists: Raffaëlli, Forain, and Zandomeneghi. It was a matter of principle, Caillebotte said. They were terrible artists, and Degas was a stubborn, power-mongering fool. This was what Caillebotte told Pissarro. “Monet and Renoir might return to exhibit with us,” he opined, “if we could just rid ourselves of the trash Degas drags around behind him.” Pissarro tried to quiet the exasperated Caillebotte, but Caillebotte was out for blood. Retaliation or no, the thing was settled in his favor. Degas's favorites were out, and Monet, Renoir, and even the outlier Sisley were back in. That Degas withdrew in protest only served to embolden Caillebotte, and he managed somehow to keep Gaugin, Degas's other darling. Then he called on Mary.

“You are asking me to choose against Degas?” Mary said.

“Hanging one's pictures on a wall is not a political act.”

“Don't be ridiculous. Of course it is. It always has been and you know it.”

“He has not been good to you.”

“Don't use the past against me, Gustave.”

She withdrew. Mary could not side against the man who had invited her into the world in which she now thrived.

But soon little of that mattered. Lydia took a turn. In the winter, Lydia and her mother journeyed to the South of France, to Pau, where the warm weather and the Pyrenean springs were said to heal anyone. Her mother was in need of a cure too, for her heart had begun to trouble her. It had been little things at first: occasional dizziness and having to pause on the stairs for breath. Then the palpitations started and a hacking cough that never ceased. Something about the air in Pau was good for Katherine, but not for Lydia. When they returned in the spring, just as Mary renounced exhibiting, they all hoped that another summer back at Coeur Volant visiting with the Manets, who had taken a house in nearby Versailles, would heal Lydia, but instead she began to drift in a haze of illness and pain.

In October Lydia took to bed. Mary stayed up nights with her, sitting at her bedside, reading her poetry to distract her from the pain. The doctors prescribed arsenic and morphine, but it did not forestall the nausea and headaches. Lydia slipped in and out of consciousness, her swollen hands worrying her coverlet in feverish restlessness, her skin darkening, her befuddled mind causing her from time to time to cry out some vague endearment, directed at no one specifically but cherished by all her hearers as meant for them. In a single moment of clarity, she begged to be buried in Marly-le-Roi, and the family, stupid with hope, said, “Don't be silly; you'll be well soon, our darling girl.” When hope failed, they brought her back to Paris in a rented victoria, propped up against the padded red leather seat and swaddled in blankets for the slow ride into the city. As they approached the outskirts, it began to rain.

At home, in her own bed, Lydia rallied, reviving their unreasonable hopes, but the next day she succumbed. She just left them—no lovely last moments, no farewells, no lingering laughter to treasure. The air in the bedroom, heavy with heat, pressed down on them, and for a good while they all sat weeping at her bedside, not believing that she had gone. Mathilde and Anna, who had been vigilant with tea and sandwiches that no one would eat, opened the bedroom window to the rainy Paris afternoon to let Lydia's soul fly away. Katherine bathed her body. Robert stood and sat and stood again. In the past month, he had prayed that he might die instead of Lydia, but his plea had failed, and from that moment he lost faith in the rescuing power of grace. Katherine thought of the boy they had buried in Germany and could not finish the bathing. Mary took up the cloth and washed her sister's lifeless legs and arms. They changed the sheets under Lydia and combed her hair and put on her prettiest day dress. They tied a ribbon in her plaited hair. Mathilde went to the store to buy black-bordered stationary and black bunting that she draped on the door. Mary wrote a note to the funeral home to come the next day. Robert went to the telegraph office and sent a note to Gardner and Aleck. They were both in the States, but Aleck was about to board a boat for Paris. Then there was nothing else to do. They sat into the night with the candles burning, contemplating a lifetime without Lydia, the girl they all adored, and they thought,
Where will we find love now?

•   •   •

At the small cemetery at Louveciennes, next to Marly-le-Roi, in the shadow of Versailles, the January wind bristled through the denuded trees shading the clay grounds, whipping small pebbles and dust into the air. They had waited to bury Lydia until Aleck and his family arrived and the holidays had passed. Katherine, her face veiled in black, wept on Robert's shoulder, who stood shakily against the dual onslaught of grief and winter. Mary stood beside them, with Aleck and his wife, Lois. Louisine Elder stood with Edgar. Handkerchiefs clutched in their gloved hands, they each threw a flower onto the mahogany casket before it was interred in the little raised vault, far from Paris, far from home. The scrape of the casket sliding onto its shelf in the tomb was lost to the wind. The flowers blew onto the clay. Mary picked them up and laid them again on the casket. The grave workers shut the door, sealing Lydia in. Mary stood back as Katherine and Robert and Aleck and Lois walked back to the family carriage.

“Are you coming?” Robert called.

“I'll travel with Louisine and Edgar.”

The open hearse followed her parents' carriage out the drive. Mary watched it go, relieved now to be apart from her family, whose heavy sadness she could no longer bear. She pulled off a glove and placed her right palm on the cool, new stone and leaned into the vault.

Lydia was to have lived, to have kept her company after their parents died, to have eased her old age, to have charmed her until they both died at the same moment in the same blessed place, together, two unmarried sisters of two married brothers, comforting one another in the passing years, astonished at the affronts of age, shocked at the mordant relentlessness of time. Now the great gulf of the future, vast and empty, would have to be faced alone. Language yielded no word to describe what it was to lose her beloved sister. Mary laid her cheek on the cold stone and closed her eyes against the chill.

Edgar and Louisine each took her by an arm and steadied her as they walked to the carriage and helped her to climb in. All the way into Paris, Edgar held her hand and would not relinquish it.

B
ougival was not far enough, after all. As it turned out, Berthe and Eugène saw Édouard all the time. The rail line, as Édouard had warned, turned out to be no obstacle. So Eugène and Berthe moved south to Nice, where she painted and tried not to think of Édouard, not when she was using the pastel easel he gave her for New Year's, not when she agonized over composition or color or models, not when she rose and not when she retired, not when she breakfasted and not when she dined, not when she attempted the waters of the Mediterranean nor when she painted the wildflowers on the hillsides, not when she painted the beach and not when she drew the charming houses climbing the steep streets. She tried but she did not succeed, could not exercise the emotional fidelity that Eugène deserved, though she never once mentioned Édouard unless he wrote. Then she affected, in the most offhand way, a slightly bored voice of informality as she slit open his prettily decorated envelopes and related to Eugène the little trifles Édouard always wrote to her, all the while searching the letter for some opaque indication of his devotion. She tried not to reveal the catch in the back of her throat as she mourned any mention of his dwindling health. Sometimes she had to keep herself from booking passage back to Paris to comfort him; she especially had to resist the day he wrote to tell them of winning the Legion of Honor from the state, the coveted prize from the Salon he had desired for so long. They traveled to Italy, where Julie fell ill, and when she recovered they returned to Bougival for the summer and again spent the warm months chastely visiting the Cassatts and Édouard and Suzanne and Madame Manet in Rueil, just four kilometers away. She virtuously doted on her brother-in-law and cared for him and admired his landscapes and still lifes, all that he had energy for now. They painted Julie side by side while everyone ignored their affinity, watching from tea tables set up in the garden. Then suddenly it was the fall and Édouard and Suzanne and Madame Manet left and Berthe stayed behind in Bougival, because to be near Édouard was to love him and she could not stand the pain of him, she could not, even as he began to fail in earnest. When Berthe received the news of Lydia's death, she rued her decision to save herself from the abyss that was Édouard, but she stayed on in Bougival, until the spring of 1883, when the terrible happened and she rushed back to Paris.

A
s Édouard traveled the middle distance, somewhere between mortal depletion and immortal plenty, he felt the light trickling away. It seemed that he would not be able to survive the ambush of the last prescription, written for him by a quack he had visited in hopes of a last-minute cure. The quack had given him rye ergot, promising it would shut down his pained nerves, but instead insects began creeping up his skin, and his limbs burned and swelled and he suffered from unrelenting cold. And soon after, the skin on his feet and legs began to pucker and desiccate and blacken. And then the doctor took off his leg. Gangrene, he said, though Édouard heard the condemning diagnosis through the gauzy haze of suffering and could not protest. His fight was over and he knew it and he could not speak.

This mortal lucidity did not surprise him. Life, he now knew, was a fleet sprint from birth to death, revealed at twilight to be astonishingly brief. This truth arrived as a terrible certitude, his lost days sparkling like gems of squandered clarity. Enlightened as he was by the affront of the finite, he could not imagine why humanity suppressed this verity. What had once seemed so necessary evanesced too: the struggle and the striving and the wild gabbling of intellects arguing about brushstroke, subject matter, color, all now revealed to be mere taste, preference, choice. He hoped, though, that his paintings might endure, but this no longer troubled him as it had troubled him in life. All of it was vanity. The question of what life is, of how one should live one's days, and to what one should pay attention no longer puzzled him, either; it was as clear as light. He saw, on this unexpected brink, the certainty of what life should have been: a life with Berthe. Though he once thought this selfish indulgence, he knew it now to be honest. Love was not the obligation to Suzanne and Eugène that he and Berthe fulfilled out of chivalrous fastidiousness. While loyalty was no shabby stepsister, a form of love some claimed superior to all others, it was not
love
. Love was not, either, the sum of all his casual distracting dalliances, which was the reason he was dying, all the willing women who had made him feel alive and joyous spurring this ironic death. Nor was love the more justifiable of his infidelities, rooted in the sincerest, if briefest of affections. Love was instead an affinity so pure he wept as he thought of it. That cleaving to Berthe would have been further infidelity, disloyalty, and betrayal, he found oddly incongruous, but he could not help the ways of the universe.

Now he grieved for his beloved, who must witness the agony of the gnawing, voracious pain that clawed at his flesh. She wept at his bedside and claimed his mortifying hands, her unabated grief coursing through them, the fragments of his life ebbing as she mourned with abandon, forgetting decorum, forgetting that she was betraying herself. Her grief sanctioned their ardor. I love you, she said. I love you.

He could not speak, but he wished he could tell her the comforting truth that seemed to be reserved only for the dying. Though his soul trembled at her sorrow, her endless tears soothed his pain and hastened his mortality, and he wished, upon crossing over, that he could voice his utter astonishment at the grandeur awaiting befuddled humanity, wished he could return and suffer all the folly again to whisper,
It is love, my frightened ones. Love.

•   •   •

Sitting at Édouard's bedside, watching the light leave him, Berthe could not stand the injustice of losing the man she loved. She could not purge the horrors of the agony of his dying. She could not imagine a world that did not succumb to grief in his absence. Afterward, when five hundred people came to his funeral and his illustrious friends carried his coffin to the mournful dirge of bagpipes to Passy, where they laid him in the earth outside the village of Berthe's birth, there was still not enough grief in the world to mark his passing. The cemetery inhabited a hill behind high walls, and the sun shone on the grave where she vowed that she would one day be buried too, not knowing that Eugène and Suzanne would be buried with them and they would all be entangled throughout eternity. Eugène's unknowing revenge would be that he would haunt her, for he was Édouard's pale ghost, a muted wash of the ebullient and clever man she loved.

A year after his death the École des Beaux Arts, the Academy, the Salon, put on a display of all of Édouard's work. All his genius was acknowledged, from his first radical canvases to his last masterpiece,
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
, painted before the final onslaught of pain. They all helped: Renoir and Monet and Degas and Mary Cassatt, whose attentions and kindness forged an even greater friendship. But friendship was not love. Nothing consoled Berthe. Life, she knew, would drag on with childhood illnesses and exhibitions to attend and paintings to paint. She would adore her child and tend her husband, but love, that elusive prize, had left her now. What a horror it was to be mortal, she thought, subject to such appalling weaknesses and needs. What a horror it was to be alive.