I Always Loved You (6 page)

“But just there,” Degas said, leaning into one of the canvases, his finger hovering above the bodice of the dress, “is where you strayed. The loose brushstrokes, the play in the rendering of the silk, the way you captured the light. That's what the jury hated. That's why you were rejected. And it's the best thing in the painting.”

Mary nearly buckled under Degas's praise. She reached for the back of a chair.

“I am not in the habit of flattery, mademoiselle,” Degas said, “but I will tell you that I have admired your work for a long time. I saw a painting of yours once that has never left me.” Not, he thought, just for the way the lace mantilla in the portrait shimmered with light and color, but for the thoughtful face it framed.
C'est vrai
, he remembered thinking at the time.
This is true.
“Tell me, would you like to join our group, Mademoiselle Cassatt? Exhibit with us next year? You might find a home with us.”

“Exhibit with you?” Mary said. “Next year?”

“You will no longer have to subject yourself to the parsimonious Salon jury; you will paint what you wish to paint; you will show what you wish to show.”

Mary looked from Degas to her paintings, which now seemed the muted muddle of all her hopes. “I accept,” she said.

Tourny uttered a little gasp.

“Ah. Good. You will see, mademoiselle; you will see,” Degas said, and sat down at the table and took a sip of tea.

A
fter taking leave of Mademoiselle Cassatt, Tourny and Degas walked down the narrow Rue de Laval in the direction of Degas's studio on the Rue Frochot.

“Take care with her, Edgar,” Tourny said. “She is not French; she is American, with American values and a mother and father who care about her. Unlike the other women you violate with your attentions, this one is defenseless.”

“Don't be absurd,” Degas said. “You've been listening to rumors again. And she is not at all defenseless, just pummeled a bit.”

“I mean it, Edgar. I made her mother certain promises in Belgium, and I intend to follow them.”

“You completely mistake her. That American is perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Did you not read her carriage? She is made of steel.”

“She is both vulnerable and serious and I do not want her hurt.”

“If you didn't want me to know her, then why did you introduce us?”

Why, indeed? Tourny tried to think now of why he had thought this was a good idea but he couldn't recall his reasons. Not all connections were good ones, and though he loved Edgar, his artist's temper could sometimes turn savage.

“Be kind,” Tourny said.

The problem, Degas thought, with cultivating a reputation as a man of severe wit was that people believed it. He did not mean to batter; he traveled around Paris with all the good intentions of genuine interest, but people could be so
disappointing
. What did people do with their intelligence? It mystified him.

“She is a fellow artist, Tourny.”

“And you don't want to take her to dinner?”

“No.”

“Nor to bed?”

“This one wouldn't go to bed.”

“But you won't ask?”

“Dear God, Tourny, I haven't gone insane.”

Recently, Tourny had heard that Degas had bribed an attendant at the Saint-Sulpice baths to let him observe women at their ablutions through a peephole, and that many of his pictures—the awkward poses, the absolute honesty of their unflattering positions—had been sketched in that dark wall space while the women, unknowing, washed themselves, believing themselves to be alone. Tourny supposed the ugly rumor had begun because Degas was fond of saying he liked to look through keyholes. No doubt Degas had been deliberately misleading, to titillate, but he didn't really know. Edgar wasn't puerile, or at least Tourny didn't believe so. But he was in many ways unknowable, unpredictable.

“I've heard things, Degas. But this one is special, you understand?”

“You wound me, Tourny. You of all people know who I am.”

Tourny's steady gaze turned back up the street toward Mademoiselle Cassatt's flat. He wanted to believe Degas.

Degas cocked his head, his right eyelid drooping as he examined his friend. “I need to ask permission, then, to talk to her? To speak to her of the everyday? To ask her how she is, what she thinks of the new minister from the United States?”

Tourny put on his hat. “I will see you soon.”

“Or maybe,” Degas said, following, “whether the weather is treating her well? Has she been to the Opéra? What kind of soap does she use? No, perhaps that's too personal. Who is her butcher? Am I allowed to ask her that?”

“Oh dear God, you can be a bore,” Tourny said, glancing across the Boulevard de Clichy, hoping to dine in peace at the Nouvelle Athènes before he returned to his afternoon of polishing his latest sculpture, a bust from a piece of marble so glorious that its pink undertones shimmered with every swipe of his polishing cloth.

“I am never boring,” Degas said. “That, my friend, is a far worse insult than all the other injustices you just flung my way.”

“I apologize.”

“But still you must pay for your insults.”

“Don't you have work to do?”

Degas stopped dead in the street. And without even saying good-bye, he hurried up the Rue Frochot to his rooms.

•   •   •

In her studio, her little Brussels griffon at her feet, Mary Cassatt picked up a palette knife and stared at the Salon canvases upon which she had lavished so much hope. During the past twelve years, she had felt at home nowhere, not back in the States, not in Paris, not even in the sunlit hills of Tuscany, where she had studied for a year after the second time she'd left Philadelphia, before she'd returned to Paris. Hers had been a peripatetic, self-crafted education in search of an excellence that had eluded her most earnest efforts. At least Degas had not said
that
word. Her father had said it once.
You are so
earnest
, my dear.
As if to aspire to excellence was a capital offense. Earnestness carried with it the scent of amateur devotion, the shame of which had dogged her from the first moment her father had uttered that insufferable word.

Her return home to Philadelphia after she had first moved to Europe had been forced on her because the Prussians had begun bombing Paris. She'd lived in Europe for five years, cobbling together an education after the ateliers of Paris had disappointed her. She studied in Ecouen, outside Paris, painted in the Alps, and finally, accompanied by her mother, studied in Rome, always dragging with her her paint box and easels. But the Philadelphia homecoming in 1870, rather than being a triumph, had turned out to be an endurance test of head tilts, nods, and condescension forced on her by her parents and their friends.

Well, at least you've spent some time in Europe. And you have some finished pictures. Bravo! I could never have done that. You should be proud of that accomplishment, my dear.

Or,
Oh, would you draw me? I'd love to have a little sketch to hang in my bedroom.

And she'd complied. Like a circus animal, a trained seal. In despair, she'd fled to Chicago with her work after Goupil's in New York had not been able to sell it and the galleries in Philadelphia had refused even to hang it. One night in Chicago she awoke to screams and smoke and a maid pounding on her door; the city was engulfed in a conflagration so fast, so hot, that she'd only had time to escape down the stairs of her hotel with a coat over her nightdress and a handkerchief pressed to her nose. Her artwork was irretrievable, locked in the jewelry store that had agreed to display it, and as she ran, she imagined the paint bubbling and boiling off the canvases. She had avoided the Prussian army lobbing shells into Paris, but halfway around the globe she was running through raining cinders, gasping for breath, jostled by crowds who ferried their mattresses and trunks and crates of squawking chickens while she had left her work—her work!—to the omnivorous scarlet and purple flames painting a vicious midnight sunset. People had grabbed her elbows and carried her along eastward to Lake Michigan's edge, where drifting embers singed their clothes, set the mattresses on fire, and drove them all across the railroad tracks and into the lake to splash water into their eyes.

If only she had thought to capture that memory on canvas, she would not now be staring at canvases dull enough to make Degas wonder if she had been
afraid
when she'd painted them. True fear had been running through the streets of Chicago. But what she feared now was that he had diagnosed instead a deficit of imagination, a much worse diagnosis than fear, one he had probably been far too considerate to point out. One she believed might be the true problem of her work. The true problem of
her
.

Would she ever truly see?

She stared at her canvases, remembering her blunders, the inadequate corrections, the agony over proportion, the francs and francs paid to the unremarkable models, the hours invested, the renunciation of friends in order to work. A dedication as earnest as her father had surmised. She shut her eyes and opened them again, and thought,
Truly, these paintings are not bad. They are even good.
She could say this without irony, as someone educated enough to see that she had employed the academic techniques she had learned, had rendered light, shadow, expression, emotion, all that she had been striving for. No one, not even she, could say that she hadn't achieved technical competence.

But transcendence?

She fingered the palette knife. What care she took with her instruments. How faithfully she cleaned them. Meticulous is what her father had called her, a rare admiring comment.

She stabbed the first of the two paintings, slashing its center. Then she picked it up and ripped the cloth from the tacks. Slowly, methodically, she tore the painting into smaller and smaller pieces. The second picture, with its thicker paint, took longer. Flakes of pigment floated like colored ash to the floor. She had destroyed canvases before, but none this good. She squinted at the ruin: All her work was now a formless collage of color and light.

Scraps of the destroyed artwork clung to her silk dress. Mary brushed them off and called for the maid to bring the broom. She took it from her, swept the pile of her past into the dustpan, and dumped her work into the trash without explaining anything to her maid, Anna, who watched openmouthed from the corner and wished, beyond anything, that her mistress would have given her the canvases, for she couldn't remember ever having seen anything so beautiful in her life.

D
ays later, Berthe Morisot alighted from the omnibus at the Gare Saint Lazare. She had written Édouard a note requesting a private audience because she needed to tell him something in person. At least she told herself that it needed to be said in person, that a mere letter wouldn't do, that friends did this sort of thing all the time, that the fact that she missed him had nothing to do with this sudden need to see him privately. The note was a necessary precaution because Édouard loved to have visitors while he painted, gossiping as he worked, his paintbrush flying as fast as his tongue, entertainer as much as artist, beloved and revered by both the demimonde and the erudite writers who came to see what the irreverent Édouard Manet might say while he painted the portrait of some half-clad girl or actor. But Berthe did not want to be discovered in his studio by anyone or to share him with anyone else, either. There were already enough whispers. In his review of the impressionist exhibition at the Rue le Peletier, Karl Huysmans had accused her of being Édouard's pupil when she never had been, and Albert Wolff had written that she suffered from a frenzied mind, possibly from her close association with the rebellious Édouard Manet. Berthe's husband, furious, challenged Wolff to a duel, but Wolff apologized and Berthe persuaded Eugène to accept this unusual concession from the famously pompous critic. The world had cultivated an opinion of her relationship with her brother-in-law, and today she did not want to feed the ravenous dogs.

Berthe circumnavigated the train station and headed toward the Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg. Below, to her left, an open bay of tracks extruded from the roofed sheds of the station. Locomotive steam billowed in the cool morning air. The ubiquitous rumble of the engines frothing to be gone always made it feel as if a subterranean monster were going to consume this section of Paris, and some days Berthe wished that it would, that something would prevent her from ever alighting at this station again to make the walk she traced in her sleep at night. But the familiar path to 4 Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, though less than half a kilometer, did not clear her head. She had made many such resolutions in the past, firm, clear resolutions of inarguable good sense. But the memory of her dead mother's despair proved futile, gossip she tried to ignore, and not even Édouard's expression of satisfied triumph when she knocked on the door could dissuade her from entering.

“I needed you at the Salon,” Édouard said, after opening the carved door that marked for Berthe the entrance to both heaven and hell.

“I came the second day with Eugène. You know I did,” she said, relieved that Édouard had not seen her the first day. She lived by these little lies of omission, withholding the fullest truth, preserving the delicate gauze of her tenuous life. She removed her gloves and laid them on her purse, which she had set on the table by the door. Little had changed since she'd last been here. The long red curtain still decorated the high far wall; the brocade armchairs for Édouard's guests still occupied every corner not taken up with drying racks and supplies. The piano occupied center stage, next to a freestanding cheval glass. Paintings massed together hung in Victorian splendor on every inch of wall: Degases, Renoirs, even hers, a small oil that he had hung on the line. A dozen Turkish rugs were scattered about, giving the place a rakish air, even among the marble tables and crystal lamps that made Édouard's studio feel less like a workplace and more like an opulent café.

“I meant the first day,” Édouard said.

“You knew I couldn't come alone,” Berthe said. “Besides, you weren't showing your
Nana
.” That painting, after its summary rejection and subsequent residence in a shop window on the Boulevard des Capucines, now hung on his wall among all the other pictures he was unable to sell, infamous canvases that exuded rebellion and panache,
Olympia
and
The Luncheon on the Grass
and
The Balcony
, for which she had modeled. That painting was hung high up, as if to simulate the balcony it pictured, and Berthe's painted eyes followed her now as she made her way to a chair to sit down.

“I didn't show her because the jury didn't admit her.”

“She is so beautiful,” Berthe said.

“You have come to compliment me? For this you requested privacy? Or have you come to tell me that you love me still, no matter that the Salon hates me? Eva Gonzalès refuses to come to see me now. I think she believes me too radical to associate with. Soon, I shall be all alone.” Eva had been Édouard's student, and in Berthe's eyes had already spent far too much time with Édouard.

“Please, Édouard, no one believes that you will ever be alone.”

His sleepy, smiling eyes were enough to undo her even without the reddish-blond curls that crowned his head like a halo. Berthe longed to touch those curls. Perhaps it had not been a good idea to come to see him; she already lived in an odd world in which she pretended that her husband, who looked like Édouard, was Édouard, a world in which she prayed that one day Édouard's soul would miraculously surface in the body of her husband.

•   •   •

It was three years ago, the summer that her father had died, that Berthe and her mother went north to Dieppe to spend July and August at the beach in the breezes of the North Atlantic. Édouard had been ordered to stay away, to not even visit for a day, on pain of serious maternal rage. Instead, it was Eugène and his mother who joined Berthe and her mother at the idyllic seaside haven. There was a problem to be solved, and the mothers, apparently tired of the dallying of their misdirected progeny, planned to solve it in an imposed exile disguised as a summer retreat. That Eugène looked like his older brother was only to the advantage, Berthe's mother told her, a boon that would go a long way toward concealing Eugène's deeper problems, not the least of which was that he had no profession and lived off his family's money. But she declared the gangly young man with minimal prospects to be the single unmarried answer to Berthe's marital question. Paris, she scolded, was filled with men, and yet somehow Berthe, admired for a Spanish beauty that no Parisienne could rival, had failed. Not to fall in love, but to fall in love with someone
possible
. So she arranged for Berthe and Eugène to be much thrown together, aided by glorious weather, a circumstance that encouraged long hours outside at twin easels, where Eugène, lacking talent, praised Berthe's, and made good use of their unchaperoned isolation.

At least, Madame Morisot said, the young man knew when and how to take advantage of privacy.

For Berthe, the marriage had been not a capitulation, but rather a subsidence. Something over which she did not exert even the slightest bit of will. She simply would do as her mother wanted because all the light had gone out of the world. But before she married Eugène, she enacted one last rebellion. On their return to Paris, Édouard declared that he wanted to paint her one last time, and Berthe acquiesced. Every morning in October she left her mother's house on the Rue Guichard in Passy to catch the omnibus. Her mother's warning screed followed her out of the house and down the still-countrified lane. “Haven't you made enough of a fool of yourself over that man? What will Eugène think if you continue? Will you jeopardize everything?” It wasn't enough, it seemed, that Berthe had given in and finally agreed to marry. No, her mother wanted her to be happy about it too, the insistence upon which seemed to Berthe to be more than unfair.

The dress Édouard chose for the portrait was black bombazine, with a sharp V-neck that showed off her décolletage, unlike the dress she had worn when he had first painted her four years earlier. That dress had been as virginal as a bride's, high-necked, white, embroidered with miniature rosebuds. This dress was nothing less than brothel chic, fit to be worn in public only by a café chanteuse.

When Édouard presented it to her on the first day of the sitting, he said, “I went to your dressmaker. She had your measurements.”

“Bombazine? The cloth of mourning?”

“You are in mourning for your father.”

Berthe spent the sittings reclined on the divan, holding the pose though her muscles ached to move. This repose was his last gift to her, Édouard said, before she ruined her life.

She wasn't ruining her life, she said, she was trying to find it, though she held her expression as he wielded his palette and attacked the canvas.

Édouard's plump wife often swept in with a market basket over her arm, always knocking over stacks of blank canvases in her haste. After relaying some triviality about her youngest brother, Léon, she would venture, “That is quite a dress, Berthe. Whomever did you persuade to knock off such a tarty thing?”

Édouard would roar at her to get out and Suzanne would leave, but not without an accusing glance over her shoulder at Berthe.

Sometimes, Suzanne would sneak in and stand quietly in the corner, but Édouard had a feral sense about her, and after a short while he would mutter, without turning around, “What is it?” and Suzanne would claim that Léon wanted to ride to the
bois
with him, to which Édouard would always answer, “Tomorrow.” Suzanne frequently slammed the door on the way out, and Édouard would sigh, “Why does she care
now
?”

Berthe said nothing. Édouard believed that his flirtations had no effect on anyone, and that his serial desertions, for her, for Eva Gonzalès, for Méry Laurent, were none of Suzanne's concern, or Berthe's. Berthe's eyes often drifted to the door as she tried to recall how many times she had fled a room, a party, a gathering, the gnawing grip of humiliation and shame hobbling her. A hundred times she had sworn that she would turn away from him, that she would never again allow him to charm her.

“Lift your chin,” he would say.

She would.

“Higher. Now look at me that way you did that one time. After the ball at the Opéra, when we had so much trouble with your dress.”

“That look is no longer for you.”

“My dear Berthe, that look will always be for me.”

“I hate you.”

“There. Just so.”

And so their days had gone.

•   •   •

Now Édouard leaned on the table, his long, languid body lazy as always, waiting. He had had to wait for so few women in his life that he affected patience as a matter of courtesy. “Where does Eugène think you are?”

“Please don't be vulgar.”

“Why did you come?” he asked. “What do you want?”

“I came to tell you not to give up,” Berthe said. At the Salon, from across the room, she had seen the dismay on his face as the acclaim his portrait failed to garner instead washed over Sylvestre, who had won the Prix du Salon. The crowds marched past, indifferent, as Édouard's manner escalated from ebullience to bravado, teetered on hilarity, then crashed into melancholy sorrow once Degas had left him. She had wanted to run to him, had wanted to hold him up, to stand by his side, to declare to passersby the damage their ignorance was causing. “People don't understand,” she said, “what they see.”

He started then, all semblance of composure fading. His gaze fixed on hers. “Ah, my Berthe, if only it was you I came home to.”

“She is beautiful, your
Nana
is; she is fearless. You should be the same. Don't let them say things that hurt you. They don't know what they are doing. Or perhaps they do and say it only to hurt you. I don't know. But they are wrong, in every case. There is no greater artist than you alive today.”

“You are alive.”

“I am not you.”

“I could never have painted
Nana
if it weren't for your painting of the girl in the cheval glass. Such command of light you have. Such delicate glimmers of beauty.”

“You are the one who shines.”

“My love—”

“I'm going now.” She picked up her purse and gloves.

“But no one is coming today.”

“Please,” she said, holding up her hand. Sometimes, all it took was a mere glance from him for her to surrender, but she had made resolutions.

“Then let me walk you.”

“No.”

“I will hire you a cab.”

“No.”

“Don't tell me you came on the omnibus again. Your departed mother will haunt me if I allow you to travel like that. To say nothing of Eugène.”

“I'm caged enough as it is, Édouard. Let me go.”

“I looked for you, that first day,” he said. “I needed you. No other.”

One hand on the doorknob, she turned to face him. “I was there.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Degas chased after a woman.”

A ghost of a smile broke across Édouard's face. “You
were
there,” he said.

She nodded. And was gone.