Katherine Keenum (22 page)

Jeanette stopped dead. Emily bit her lip. Ignoring them both, Robbie insinuated Effie’s arm through his and smoothly headed her into the flow of pedestrians. Then he looked over his shoulder and cocked his head. Jeanette started to stalk away, but that would give him too much satisfaction. Worse, it would leave Cousin Effie with him unchecked. “Come on,” she said, harshly, to Emily.

In a block or two, Robbie led them around a corner to a newly opened patisserie called Le Petit Honoré, which had a few tables, a dazzling display case of baked goods and sweets, and a short luncheon menu. Throughout the meal, Emily stared at her plate and ate little, while Effie—who had reason to feel let down, but who was also wise to the importunities of poverty—laughed at Mr. Dolson’s jokes and made the effort to chatter away. At first, Jeanette indulged her anger but gradually suppressed the worst of it in order to be able to eat (as Robbie had so rightly pointed out, there was the rest of the afternoon ahead). When Robbie’s attention to jollying Cousin Effie effectively foiled her every attempt to confront him, she pulled out a little pocket notebook and below the edge of the table made a rapid sketch to catch his expression.

“You’re pinning my soul to paper, aren’t you, Miss Palmer?”

“Only Lucifer could do that, Mr. Dolson.”

“Has done, I think you mean. What would you say I received in return?”

Something genuinely haunted lurked in the shadows and weary lines around his eyes. No distant amber lights in their gray sea-green depths today. On the surface he was all suave irony; below dodged an arrogant furtiveness, a reliance on his ability to escape; deeper still lay a bleak watchfulness completely outside Jeanette’s experience. Robbie Dolson was utterly unreliable, utterly selfish, and she knew it, yet all of a sudden she found herself still half hoping he would live up to the promise that was part of his peculiar appeal. What sad bargains, what compromises, had he had to make, she wondered. Nevertheless, she was not in a forgiving mood.

“The Devil is prodigal in his gifts, Mr. Dolson, but you are fishing for compliments. Here’s the best I can do.” She propped up her sketchbook on the table.

Robbie clapped his hands once, loudly, and rocked back in his chair. “Me to the life!”

“As drawn by a featherbrain from Hicksville?”

“What? Ah, so
that’s
the rub, my dear. But surely you weren’t really rankled by my fictional ingénue.”

Jeanette hesitated. To admit she had been offended was to risk looking humorless and vain; to back down was to injure her sense of herself. “I trusted you when we talked on the train last summer, and you made me look silly.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I could say you now know better than to trust me again. Oh, but no one else could possibly associate you with that particular jest; put it out of your mind. You are hardly a featherbrain, nor even an ingénue. In fact, we are destined to be partners in crime. Listen—” He leaned forward and dropped his voice. Hardly aware that she did so, Jeanette leaned forward, too. “I understand that you were more than a little vexed about my borrowing your cartoon.”

“Borrowing?”
Jeanette sat back, disbelieving.

“All right, purloining if you prefer. Unforgivable liberty, dastardly deed, haste and a deadline, mea culpa, mea culpa. No, but that article can be a breakthrough for you as well as for me. Anonymous, of course, we shall use a nom de plume; neither of us wants to be known primarily for trivialities. But I want you to come in with me on a series of regular little feature columns. ‘Unexpected Paris’; ‘Off the Boulevard Beat’; ‘The Paris Nobody Knows’—I’ll come up with the right column title.” (Effie stiffened, opened her mouth to say something, and shut it again.) “Meanwhile, we start right here, right now; you can use this sketch. Go ahead, add in a detail or two of decor. I do up a few paragraphs on the soon-to-be discovered sensation among the more knowing Parisians at midday—”

“It would not be anonymous if your caricature were the focal point of the illustration, Mr. Dolson,” said Jeanette. She was aware of Effie’s agitation but chose to ignore it as she tried to sort through her own puzzlement.

“Clever girl. Not me, then—use that modish Parisienne by the window; it’s a better idea anyway. Why don’t you put in a bit of the lettering backward to identify the spot?”

Toying with her pencil, Jeanette was silent. She knew she was in the right and he was in the wrong, yet somehow he was gaining the upper hand. She made an effort to sound worldly and bantering.

“Well, supposing we did go in together—just supposing—what other sorts of things do you plan to write up?”

“Oh, any little sight seen serendipitously will do. Behind-the-scenes oddities like the dismantling of the World’s Fair—there’s an opportunity missed, but you see the point. No, wait: In fact, that one can still work. I’ll trace what happened to some extravagant
objet
from the exhibition.”

“The head of Bartholdi’s Lady Liberty.”

“Too obvious.”

“Jacquemart’s rhinoceros?”

“Splendid! I told you we were meant to collaborate. You do a witty illustration; I shall sparkle. Once we’re known, we’ll be invited everywhere—to restaurants, to theaters, to gallery openings, just you watch.”

In spite of herself, Jeanette had fallen for a moment into playing along with him, but she had not forgotten the intensity with which he had evicted her from his and Emily’s lodgings. Also, something besides the sheer effrontery of his suggestion perplexed her. “Why me?” she asked. “You have an artist in the family. Wouldn’t it be easier to coordinate the pieces if you and Emily worked together? More lucrative, too: You could keep both fees in the family.”

“Money, money. Oh, you Americans.”

Far from cowing her, his rebuke put her back up. “Why me and not Emily?” she persisted.

“Oh, well, then, if you must—and who is fishing for compliments now, my dear Miss Palmer? Dash and speed. Emily, darling, your gifts are not those of the cartoonist, are they?”

Without lifting her eyes, Emily shook her head. Jeanette felt cold in the pit of her stomach. Which was Robbie dismissing—Emily’s work or hers? There was something unpleasantly close to what Amy always said, both in Emily’s meekness and Robbie’s way of undermining his sister’s confidence. But it also might be that he was enticing her into something from which he shielded Emily, something fit only for a vulgar American.

“Anyway,” he said, abruptly sitting back and sounding bored, “the editors liked your bit; that’s why they ran it. But if you don’t want to . . .”

Cousin Effie squirmed harder in her seat.

“I’ll have to think about it, Mr. Dolson; but if you can use this, it’s yours,” said Jeanette, determined to prevent one of Effie’s wild shots. She tore out the sketch she had been working on while they talked. It showed a table by the window with a bit of backward lettering as ordered. A modern young woman and a dandy sat across from each other, arms crossed over chests, heads turned away, noses in the air. “And now, I think, my time will be more profitably spent in the Louvre.”

Outside, Jeanette rounded on Emily. “What is going on?”

“Oh, Jeanette, Robbie is quite desperate to get this column accepted or to find some other source of regular income.”

“I thought he’d sold his long story about the Alps.”

“He did, but he’s . . . he’s run into difficulties of some kind. I don’t know. It has happened before; and when he’s distracted by worries about pennies and farthings, he becomes . . . temperamental. The worst is, he can’t get on with his real work.”

Real work, the big project into which you poured all of yourself that mattered. For a moment, Jeanette wished Robbie nothing but time to work, unbroken time, time free from all outside demands, from fits and starts and interruptions. If he was the genius Emily and Winkie believed him to be, he deserved it. And even if he was not, it was still what any artist or writer needed in order to achieve something good. “How much are his worries worrying you?” she asked. Like Amy, she sometimes wondered why she felt protective toward Emily, but they both did.

“I cope,” said Emily, and closed into herself.

*   *   *

“Mr. Dolson was about to tear up that sketch of yours,” Effie told Jeanette that evening, “but I stopped him. I told him he should add a caption—something like this.
She: Why did you bring me somewhere nobody knows? He: You’d better eat fast before
tout le monde
arrives.
”

“You gave him a caption?”

“You gave him the picture.” Effie’s face was alight with the eager, wide-eyed chipmunk look that made her chin disappear.

“As a taunt, Cousin Effie! I didn’t really mean for him to use it.”

“Now don’t be angry, Jeanette. I couldn’t sit by and let him tear your picture up. Besides, if all goes well and he gets it published, I have an idea.” Jeanette glared, in no mood for one of Cousin Effie’s ideas. “It was really Mrs. Renick’s. She suggested that you and I collaborate on some stories for American newspapers.”

“You never told me that.”

“Well, it seemed so unlikely, I let it go. But this afternoon, while Mr. Dolson was talking, it came to me, thump, just like that: ladies’ magazines. A story about your class at Julian’s or living in a
pension
or visiting a butter shop—there are all sorts of things we could do. And it came to me clear as day that two samples of your work in print would be better than one for showing editors.”

“But I don’t want to be a cartoonist.”

“You won’t be. We’ll submit a regular drawing, but it will help if you can show that you’ve already been published. People are cowards; they want someone else to give a stamp of approval before they commit themselves to anything.”

Jeanette thought a moment. A way to add to her and Effie’s purse without their having to fall back on family charity appealed. Even small sums would help. “If Robbie peddles that picture and it’s accepted, I wonder whether he’ll pay me this time,” she said, slowly.

“Ah,” said Effie. “Well, I admit I pointed out to him that you had given him the cartoon free and clear—which you did, you know. He isn’t obligated. But then again if he’s smart and wants more of them, he’ll pay you this time.”

An image of an attenuated, sinuous dandy a lot like Robbie lolling on the blocky back of Jacquemart’s rhinoceros sprang fully formed into Jeanette’s mind. She pulled out her notebook from the World’s Fair. Working quickly in her broadest cartoon style, she copied and distorted a sketch of the sculpture, then placed her dandy on top. It pleased her. If Robbie wanted dash and speed, voilà!

“Cousin Effie, what if I made Robbie a running character? Not so much a series of jokes as comic decorations like this.” She held up the drawing. “If each picture put him in a different pose with an item or two out of his piece—well, it would be easy to do. I’ll send him this for bait. I know what the next one should be, too. And, if he doesn’t want it, it will do for you and me. What do you say we join Amy at next Monday’s slave market?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Models

O
ne of Amy’s weekly duties as
massière
was to hire models. She could stay a week or two ahead by booking the reliable, expressive models who posed in one atelier after another at Julian’s, but new faces and new physiques were always desirable. While she lived in northwestern Paris, she made a point of passing often through the Place de Clichy, where models on the Right Bank congregated to look for work. From the Rue Madame, she must revise her habits. Eastward in Montparnasse, models gathered at the foot of Rue Nôtre-Dame-des-Champs, but that was the wrong direction for heading back over the river to Julian’s. For the time being, she was exploring a third major venue, the gates of the École des Beaux-Arts, where Mondays saw the biggest crowds of job-seekers.

“I wish you wouldn’t call it a slave market,” fretted Effie, as she and Jeanette fumbled tiptoe down the staircase from their rooms to meet Amy the next week. In the brown darkness, a shoulder and hip sliding down the cold wall were almost as much guide as the feeble light of their candle.

“It’s just studio slang,” whispered Jeanette. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

“It’s ugly slang. Dear Polycarpus died to put an end to such things.”

Talk about firing cannons to kill gnats, thought Jeanette, grumpily, although deep down inside she knew that she used the term to tease Cousin Effie.

They crept silently through the lawyer’s antechamber on the floor below and down into the stale, darkened chill of the rest of the house (with windows shut against the weather, the
pension
smelled of mice and mold). Outside, they could breathe easier again, although they remained silent in the prevailing predawn hush. Mist from the river drifted in wisps over dark paving stones, wet where street cleaners had hosed them down. The narrow strip of sky above the center of the street was still dim. As they walked along, each footstep on the pavement, each creak of a handcart or clank of a bottle sounded separately and was magnified by an echo. Butchers, bakers, and grocers grunted
bonjours
to each other as they took down shutters or rolled out awnings; a few nodded to Effie and Jeanette. A block or so on, they turned into the Rue Bonaparte to reach the square in front of the church of Saint Germain-des-Prés and found Amy standing at the stall outside a
crémerie
, drinking chocolate from a white china bowl. “Join me?”

“Please,” said Jeanette. “It was too early for breakfast at the
pension
.”

“Well, feed up quickly. I’ve got to hire people today.”

Mingled among the local inhabitants and delivery men passing by were others: gymnastic young men in light clothing that showed off their bulging muscles; striking older men with military bearing and pronounced features; women in the native costumes of many regions of France and Italy; bold, pretty girls; eleven-year-old boys with cigarettes dangling from their lips. As Jeanette, Effie, and Amy joined the movement toward the river, a young man pulled astride them and tipped his hat. “Poaching, Richardson?”

“Rescue work, I call it,” answered Amy. “Give a model a chance to pose to talent for a change.”

He laughed and walked faster.

“Who was that?” asked Jeanette.

“Lad in Cabanel’s class at the Beaux-Arts.”

Near the school’s high, wrought-iron gates, street and pavement became crowded. The young men strutted more obviously; the military men stood even straighter. Some models talked among themselves, but most tried at the very least to appear interesting. The more animated called out, flirted, or struck poses.

“Oh, the poor old soul!” said Effie, fumbling in her pocket for a coin. An old man in rags sat on a mat, propped against the stone wall with his head bowed, eyes lowered, and hand out.

“Put your money away,” said Amy. “Week in and week out, old Frederic there is Lazarus outside Dives’ door or Job or Priam in his sorrow. He’s posed for every painter in Paris and never missed a day’s work in twenty years as far as I know. Can’t think why he’s out here now—though it is a thought. If he’s available, what do you say, Jeanette—fancy tackling Gerontius? We haven’t had his type since you arrived. Oh, lord!”

Amy clutched Jeanette’s arm. Too late. Jeanette wasn’t quick enough to help her merge into a crowd around the corner. A woman was pushing a solemn-faced four-year-old toward them. It was La Grecque.

“
Buon giorno
, Miss Richardson. Am-ee,” she said.

Amy or
amie
? Jeanette wasn’t sure. So as not to seem too inquisitive, she smiled down encouragingly at the little girl, who responded with an unnerving glare. La Grecque said something to the child in Italian. The little girl twisted her whole body around, no! La Grecque jerked the child’s arm and rapped out a firmer order. The child screwed up her face in a pout. At another jerk of the arm, she glanced up at her mother’s menacing scowl, went limp, and then suddenly spread her legs apart. She cocked her head and rested her cheek on her hands, smiling a beatific smile.

“You see? She is perfect for your class: obedient, beautiful,” said La Grecque, picking up the child. “You hire her,
non
? You no take the bread out of my little cherub’s mouth again, eh, Miss Richardson? Her papa—”

“Her papa? Which papa? Twenty papas in Paris that wretched child has, and none!” roared a voice. “Away with you, Antonielli, you blackmailing bitch.
Va-t’en.
”

La Grecque clutched the child closer, whirled on the speaker, and spat. “You, at least, I cannot accuse of fathering children, M. Post,” she snarled.

Effie gasped.

“Andrea,” Amy began, but La Grecque stormed away, carrying the little girl, who stuck out her tongue over her mother’s shoulder. Amy shook her head regretfully and turned to the newcomer. “Well, Charlie Post, of all people.”

“Your humble servant, Miss Richardson. I hope I did right.”

“I hope you did, too. Can’t be helped in any case. Now explain yourself: You’re the last person I ever expected to see in Paris. What brings you here?”

“The very question I ask myself: Post, you son of a gun, what brings you to Paris? The road, I think. Made the mistake of stepping out onto it. All roads lead to Rome, they say; but those who say it are liars, fools. At the very least, out of date. All roads lead to Paris these days, Paris, glittering capital of the world once more. Prussians take note:
La ville lumière
is queen of cities, not Berlin. To be more precise and prosaic, Ragland and Nagg came up on business, and I seem to have tagged along.”

“You do, indeed; and here you are, at the crack of dawn, looking to hire a model, something else I would never have predicted. Very early hours you’re keeping, Mr. Post.”

“There I think you are wrong. I believe I’m up late. The model part, though, that’s very perceptive of you, but wrong again, wrong, wrong.” He rolled his head from side to side as he spoke. “Sometime ’long about four, I got this idea that a nymph, a naiad, a spirit of water would be found here. My art would take a whole new direction. Figurative from this moment forward or symbolical or something. It seemed important to stay up and meet my fate. Thoroughly bad, four-in-the-morning sort of idea. Deluded. Look around you: No nymph, no naiad, not a muse to be found. All hacks. Unless—unless, perhaps, it is
you
, Miss Palmer,” said Charlie, turning to fix his gaze on Jeanette. “I remember you; you are the discerning girl.”

To her surprise, Jeanette was not in the least disconcerted. She met his bloodshot eye. Underneath his alcoholic haze and ironic disillusionment prowled the keenness he had exhibited in Pont Aven, only frightened now, beaten down. “I’m not a muse, Mr. Post, and you don’t need one,” she said. “It’s the sickle moon you must not lose sight of.”

He took her hand between both of his. Remembering the press of his lips on her palm the previous summer, she pulled back hastily, but not before he had kissed the gloved fingertips and mumbled, “Discerning girl, discerning girl, bless you.” He stepped back, yawned extravagantly, and said, “I’m in my cups. Should be in bed. ’Night, all.”

As they watched Post totter off unsteadily, Amy said, “Whatever were you thinking, Jeanette? The sickle moon indeed.”

“What will become of him?” asked Jeanette, with her eye still on Charlie Post.

“Paint a great picture and hang himself, I’d say.”

Cousin Effie shook her head. “Hanging takes a special kind of willpower. He’ll die of drink.”

“You’re heartless, both of you!”

“Forget Post; we’re here on business,” said Amy.

Old Frederic, as it turned out, was between major engagements and happy to sit half a day for a week. While he and Amy negotiated a fee, Effie took notes on the going rates. “So that’s the full figure taken care of,” said Amy, as Frederic enfolded himself in a wide cloak and headed off across the river.

“May we do a child’s face for contrast in the afternoon?” asked Jeanette.

“Not Andrea Antonielli’s cherub, if that’s what you mean. But you’re right, a future of children’s portraits looms large for most of us. We’ll scout the fringes. Bound to be some other poor girl with a baby.”

Sure enough, hanging back at the edge of the crowd toward the river stood a forlorn girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen, cradling an infant in her arms under a shawl. With a little gentle questioning, Amy drew out her story. As a newcomer to the city, she had felt lucky to model privately for a painter; she cooked for him a little; she kept house; they kept company. Now there was the baby and, and . . . she found herself without his support. Oh, yes, she knew what she was doing; she could sit very still. The baby was so good a baby, very quiet.

It was only her face that was needed, explained Amy. Suppose she were paid a daily five-franc fee and, for every afternoon that the baby was quiet enough to sketch him also, a bonus of another two francs. But only if he was quiet!

Worship replaced tension in the girl’s face as she received Amy’s directions for finding the atelier and three francs in advance to buy food.

“We can’t have her passing out this afternoon. Between our class and the class for the dressed model, we can give her two weeks’ work in a warm studio with her clothes on,” sighed Amy. “It’s something, anyway. The baby, of course, is too young to be trained; one must hope it sleeps a lot.”

“Oh, he’ll sleep, all right,” said Cousin Effie. “She’ll put poppy syrup on his gums.”

The girl with the baby proved to be only a so-so model, slumping all afternoon in maternal dejection and mortal fear that the baby would move. Only Emily responded with a notable study. Having requested a child, Jeanette felt obliged to skip her Tuesday at the Louvre and sketch the baby from a series of angles around the room. Her drawings did not add up to anything worth showing M. Bouguereau, but she was pleased with the set for reference.

“It is well you think about what makes the good model,” said Sonja, late in the week, “for now it is time for you yourself to sit. We must not forget the good doctor in Freiburg who awaits his portrait medallions. Tomorrow you and Miss Pendergrast walk home with Amy; we eat at La Poupée en Bas and begin.”

In mid November, with Christmas packages to be assembled and overseas shipping to be paid for, a Friday night dinner at La Poupée was as much indulgence as Jeanette and Effie could allow themselves, but it was all the more welcome for coming when early darkness and drizzle had increasingly confined them to evenings at the
pension
. Effie had begun spending more time with fellow boarders after supper in the parlor, where a coal-burning stove was lit for a few hours; but Jeanette preferred to wrap up in shawls and work by the light of an oil lamp in their unheated room. She lied to herself that she enjoyed the romance of the garret.

On Friday night, when Jeanette, Effie, Sonja, and Amy arrived at La Poupée en Bas, fire in charcoal braziers was blessedly knocking the chill off either end of the half-subterranean room. The subdued amber glow of oil lamps added an illusion of warmth if not exactly coziness to the deeply shadowed room. (
There is no word for
cozy
in French
, Jeanette had observed in a letter to Becky,
and with good reason
.) Throughout the meal, a Milanese
cassouela
suffused the air with a meaty odor, fragrant of rosemary and bay, while feminine voices kept up a pleasant hum. It was tempting to linger.

“Who will fetch coffee?” asked Amy. “Jeanette, you’re the youngest.”

“No,” proclaimed Sonja. “We have no time.” Her chair grated as she pushed herself to her feet. “Amy, you will make us your admirable coffee at home.”

“Oh, bother, Sonja. There is admirable coffee here already made.”

“And paid for,” said Effie.

“Three against one.” Jeanette rose to head for the coffee urn.

Sonja stopped her with an imperious gaze. “These two stay behind. You and I go. Cold air will knock sleep out of you. We work.”

*   *   *

Outside the damp cold was silvery; shadows were invisible rather than black. A mizzly evening, as Amy would say. Gauzy aureoles burred the lamp globes overhead; a little light filtered down to the wet pavement.