Katherine Keenum (40 page)

“Jeanette—”

“We’d better walk on.” She took his arm again. “Life is so complicated, and I want this afternoon to go on being simple and perfect.”

“But you do care. You could learn to care.”

“Can you doubt it?”

“Oh, I can doubt any thing of joy.” There was bitterness in his voice. In a wordless attempt to understand, Jeanette held his arm tighter and looked up at him earnestly. He pulled his arm free to wrap it around her shoulder and tug her toward him, just for an instant, before offering her a very proper bourgeois elbow again. “I am also accomplished at self-pity,” he said, with a wry half smile.

“I realized something in Pont Aven,” she said. “I realized that you know far more about me than I do about you. Let’s go across the next bridge and find a seat in the Tuileries Garden. I don’t even know much about what happened to you during the war. Cousin Effie was telling me about her fiancé—”

“Miss Pendergrast was engaged?” Mirth danced at the corners of Edward’s mouth and in his eyes.

“Don’t laugh! Polycarpus—” At the sound of the name, Jeanette had to stifle a giggle. She also had to contend with the image of a gawky boy with bulging eyes and big ears, but loyalty to sex and kin made her resume in a scolding tone. “Yes, she was, and he was killed in the war.”

Edward subsided. “Poor devil,” he said, and fixed his eyes on the hulk of the Tuileries Palace across the river. “A lot of men died in that war, Jeanette. If you made it back home, half the boys you grew up with were dead and the rest were crippled or gone buggers. Some of us both.” Hastily, he pulled himself back. “Not everyone. Can you guess with whom I discussed this most recently?”

“Mrs. Renick.”

“A good guess, but wrong, they’re still in Normandy. No—your M. Carolus-Duran.”

“Carolus! When?” She stopped dead.

“Maybe ten days ago.” They walked on. “He was in town on an errand, and I happened across him in the garden over there. We fell into conversation about our two wars.”

“And he told you about finding Henri Regnault’s body,” Jeanette put in quickly.

“How did you know? Tells it often, does he?” said Edward, answering his own question with a chuckle. “He also told me about building snowmen during the war.”

“That’s one he hasn’t told in class!”

*   *   *

By the time they had crossed the Pont Solferino and found a bench on the south side of the Tuileries Garden, Edward was telling her about the homemade swords with which he and Theodore had skirmished, and from there he branched out into other stories about his childhood in Cincinnati and Kiel. There were things in his later life he did not want her to know, but he willingly talked about his father and mother, about the drugstore and Theodore’s larger business, about his childhood in Cincinnati and Kiel. “Theodore grew rich off the war.” Edward paused and gazed out at a silvery fountain, green lawns, and people on wide gravel paths, at handsome buildings on the Rue de Rivoli facing them over the treetops. He lightly kicked the tip of his cane with the toe of his shoe.

“And you were maimed.”

He ceased tapping and tensed. “Is that how you think of me?”

“No, of course not. I’m sorry! I was being melodramatic. It just seems so unfair for one brother to profit in a big way while the other suffers.”

“It was better than fighting on opposite sides. I never resented Theodore’s luck or acumen,” said Edward, settling back at an angle to turn toward her. “One thing war does for any sane man is strip away illusions about reason or justice. And sometimes”—his eyes lingered questioningly over her face—“we may be given much more than we deserve.”

Carolus spoke of an envelope of vibrating light surrounding a face, the lack of hard, fixed outlines in nature, the need for the brush to blend form into atmosphere. Surely such light can envelop, can join two people, thought Jeanette, or rather she thought nothing so coherent.

“Tell me the worst.”

“No.” Maybe he had raved to Sophie about the worst long ago; he couldn’t remember; he thought not. No woman could understand the worst, nor any man who had not endured it. Nor would he let that old darkness overwhelm this day. “Jeanette, don’t let’s talk about war at all.”

Too much had flashed across his face for her to persist. As much as she wanted to understand him, she decided it was safer to rise to the surface. She propped her head on one hand at an angle. “Then tell me about your month.”

The afternoon wore on. They strolled again. Without paying much attention to hours or minutes, they wound up at the Rue d’Assas at five o’clock, by which time the third bouquet of flowers had been delivered. If Effie had not been present, there was no telling what Jeanette might have done. As it was, she turned from the flowers to Edward so meltingly that she need do nothing. For tea, Effie had laid out little ham sandwiches, pastries, and cakes, and she now brewed an excellent pot of tea (Matthew Hendrick had taught her how to select the best). Edward, as always, was in danger of forgetting to eat, and for once, Jeanette was so rapt that she had little appetite. Inside the apartment, shadows deepened. Eastward through windows kept open to let in the welcome evening breeze, the dome of the Pantheon reflected the sunset while everything else faded. Dusk flattened the skyline. When even the Pantheon faded, they realized how dark the room had become; but by now, each time the conversation neared a close, one or another of them would be reminded of something and it would pick up again. Effie went into the kitchen to fetch the cold chicken and also brought a bottle of wine left by the Reade sisters as a gift in July. Jeanette lit a candle. They ate informally, as though at an indoor picnic, and still they talked on. The clock on the mantel chimed nine. Now it seemed the party must break up, but not until it struck ten did they admit that the next day was Monday. Jeanette had to suppress a yawn. Leaning her head against the back of the sofa, she said resignedly, “I’ve promised to go with Amy to Julian’s first thing tomorrow morning to sign up for September.”

Edward rose. “Then it’s high time for me to leave. You will be drawing while Miss Richardson paints?”

“Ummnh,” said Jeanette, making a lazy affirmative sound while she smiled sleepily at him through another half-suppressed yawn. Her mother and Aunt Maude would have reproved such familiarity; it made Edward affectionate. She rose and followed him into the hall with Effie.

“M. Bouguereau again?”

“No, we’re transferring into Lefebvre’s studio, the full nude.”

Effie squawked in protest. Edward stiffened. Jeanette knew she had just spoiled her perfect day and wished she could take the words back, but fatigue and conviction made her obstinate. Ostensibly directing herself toward Effie, she said, “Well, it’s the class all the best students take.” She ignored the one question she knew burned hottest for Edward and Effie both: Were there ever male models? The answer was yes.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Nudes

I
f Jeanette had been subject to insomnia, she would have had a bad night. Edward had withdrawn into an airless silence. In the briefest, most conventional terms, he had bade them good night. As soon as he was gone, the cousins had a full-blown row about morals, decency, a man’s feelings, the nature of woman, and the primacy of the figure in art. It settled nothing. The next morning, reluctant to open her eyes, Jeanette dozed her way into Edward’s arms in the darkened hallway until in the dream Dr. Murer shook her off. She snapped fully awake. Finding little comfort in further thoughts of him, she went to breakfast armed against Effie.

“By light of day—” began Effie.

“By the light of day,” interrupted Jeanette, “I am going to make the best use of Miss Reade’s studio for a month by working here mornings until Carolus comes back, and get the most for Papa’s money by signing up for the hardest, most advanced class Rodolphe Julian has to offer in the afternoon. And there’s nothing prurient about what we’ll be doing!” At the word
prurient
, Effie ducked her head. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Cousin Effie. Write Miss Reade and Miss Isobel. They’ll tell you I’m doing the right thing.”

On a fast-clipped walk to the river, she continued to quarrel mentally with Effie and now with Edward, too (and with her mother, Hannah Lyman, and every small-minded restriction she had left behind in Ohio). When she met Amy at the corner of the impasse off the Rue Madame, she had hardly said
bonjour
before she started pouring out complaints. In a bitterly comic imitation, she exaggerated how much Edward had flinched.

“Don’t tell me he laid down the law and forbade you to take the class!”

“He didn’t stay long enough to try. No, all the vocal objection came from Cousin Effie.”

“Very silly of the old girl; she ought to know better by now. But no matter; she’ll come around. Not much she can do about it, is there?”

“She could throw me out, refuse to live with me—so much for respectability.”

“Then you could move into our chaotic establishment. We seem to be encouraging riffraff at the moment, Sonja and I. Can you imagine what home life is like when the resident ghoul recoils at the mere sight of one? I might as well be Genghis Khan lobbing skulls as I come—except that little Demonica, as I think we must rename the hell-kitten, is fast losing all fear, indulged as she is by Auntie Sonja.”

“Indulged by
Sonja
?”

“Well, tolerated. And then there’s the sudden intransigence of La Grecque herself. She’s having second thoughts about posing for us naked in front of the
bambina
. She claims it’s not the task itself—jolly right, too; there’s no knowing what she has compelled Sweet Innocence to behold or do. No, it’s her ribs showing and her lack of color; she isn’t pretty enough.
Thees ees not how a daughter should see a mother, Mees Richardson
—as if the child hadn’t had to clean her up and feed her as recently as a month ago.”

“Maybe vanity is a sign of returning health.”

“I daresay, but highly inconvenient. We
are
paying her to model, and I do so want to study that haunting ghastliness before it’s gone.”

“Why not shut Angelica in the back room for a couple of hours?”

“If you knew how piercingly that child can shriek, you wouldn’t ask.”

“Here’s an idea! Invite Cousin Effie to teach Demonica to read at the kitchen table. Appeal to her reforming spirit. Uplift. If she agrees, she won’t be so down at the mouth about my coming, too.”

“I do believe you’re onto something!” said Amy. Then her voice changed: “It isn’t really Miss Pendergrast who’s worrying you, is it?”

*   *   *

When he left on Sunday night, Edward was no happier about what had just happened than Jeanette. It made him feel old-fashioned and starchy, but he could not hide from himself that he was repelled by the idea of her sitting in a room with wholly unclad models—not merely sitting, but focusing on them, thinking about them, drawing them. Of course, he knew that in the past she had regularly drawn women’s breasts, men’s thighs—not that she had ever shown him examples (he was touched by her delicacy when he thought of it)—and he supposed that from time to time women who dressed and undressed in the same household must see each other naked. Certainly, occasions arose when even a sheltered young lady might encounter the bare arms or chest of a laboring man. But not genitalia. He didn’t think he worshipped the kind of pure-mindedness that required a girl to be kept in utter ignorance until her wedding night; but to his perplexed shame, he realized that a presumed innocence ran through Jeanette’s sunny appeal to him, a promise of the world made new.

Out on the quiet Rue d’Assas, he continued northwest from one tranquil pool of yellow lamplight to the next. On such a soft, late-summer’s night, despite all the walking they had done earlier, he wanted to end the day at the slow pace of foot travel, at least here on the Left Bank where, above the soft nimbus of gaslight, stars could still be seen. Paris was a city easy to perambulate at night—which streetwalkers knew, of course, and the bored women who sat in pairs in cafés, signaling availability. Usually, he was able to brush past the one and ignore the other without much disturbance to himself or them, but tonight on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, back among restaurants and theaters and restless pleasure-seekers, he could not avoid seeing how Paris painted herself after dark. At a café table on the sidewalk, beside a coarse companion who lewdly bit her thumb, sat a pretty girl, barely twenty, with eyes hooded in glum disillusionment, her skirt pulled up to show her petticoat and a bit of leg. She glanced at him. He returned her gaze a little too long. She gave him the requisite half smile and hungry, come-hither look. In a moment it would turn to flattery, though he knew she hungered for money, not for him. It didn’t matter. He felt an ache in his loins and nodded.

*   *   *

Jeanette was not quite so prepared for the full nude as she had claimed. On the first afternoon of the new class, she wanted to look away from pubic hair and the round, inward-turning curves of the model’s groin. Somehow it was easier at the Rue Madame.

Once Cousin Effie had been won over by the prospect of rescuing Angelica from illiteracy, she had, in turn, overcome La Grecque’s bristly opposition to interference by telling Angelica a Belleville joke in an atrocious accent. When Angelica cawed with laughter, her mother had given way with a convalescent’s sudden drop into apathy.

Regular meals and reduced access to alcohol had halted Andrea Antonielli’s weight loss, and as Amy had warned, her ashen skin was already less cadaverous. She posed listlessly, but day by day, her eyes regained some of their haughty, dark gleam. Jeanette saw that she could be partner to a great picture—of Medusa perhaps, or Electra. Yet at home, it was not La Grecque’s face that haunted her.

On the first Wednesday of classes, hoping against hope that she had misread Edward’s reaction, Jeanette made an excuse to Amy and detoured through the Luxembourg Garden on the way home from Julian’s. He was not there. On Thursday morning, while she worked at home on a canvas from Pont Aven, his three bouquets reproached her with what ought to be. That afternoon, she again routed herself through the Luxembourg Gate; again he was not there. On Friday, rather than risk disappointment, she went home another way.

Week followed week. By day, she nourished a stubborn, hurt pride rather than succumb to longing and tears (at night she often curled into a miserable knot in bed). To make use of images she had gathered at the Cluny, she began preliminary sketches for a literary painting. Her subject would be the Lady of Shalott, weaving at her loom as Sir Lancelot rode by. She encased Lancelot in rigid armor. Outside the tower window, he rode away between fields of grain sloping up to a miniature sky.

*   *   *

Edward knew that no man in France would condemn his lapse with a prostitute; but although the night’s pleasure had been intensely real at the time, the transaction for money was sordid. He felt defiled by his own actions. He must stay away from Miss Palmer, whom he had betrayed, until—until what? Until his overly scrupulous conscience subsided, Hippolyte Grandcourt would have told him, and the sooner the better. In the meantime, he left Jeanette to pick up the threads of her busy life unmolested, thankful that he had routines of his own to follow, thankful also that the botany lectures at the Jardin des Plantes were finished so that he had no call to go anywhere near the Boulevard Saint-Germain. On the first Sunday in September, he considered attending the American chapel but was irked by the hypocrisy of his motive. The Madeleine did not beckon. He began to feel blocked, useless.

One day toward the end of the second week, he went to the Luxembourg Gate, just in case. Perhaps if he and Jeanette could resume their casual summer habit, everything would come right naturally; she need never know about his vice. But she did not appear. The longer he did not see her, the more he wanted to and the less able he was to approach her. Other desires stirred: He wanted that girl again; he wanted to kill pain; he wanted to stop the shadows lengthening; he wanted laudanum.

When the Renicks returned in the middle of the month, he called on Cornelia late one afternoon when she would be attended by a stream of other visitors.

“Darling Edward! Effie Pendergrast was here this morning; she’ll be sorry to have missed you—unless you have been seeing her regularly elsewhere?” Cornelia raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

“Not lately. I have dodged recruitment into the McAll Mission this fall.”

Cornelia, wise to his deflections, let it go; but when he took his leave after the socially prescribed quarter of an hour, she whispered, “Has there been a quarrel?”

He hesitated. “No.”

“Come some morning to the Poutery, soon. I see we must talk. I mean it!
Chère Thérèse, bonjour!
”

Edward escaped that afternoon without having to commit himself. Thereafter, he remained simultaneously restless and paralyzed. He finally allowed himself some laudanum, though only in the evening, only a small dose to help him sleep. Mornings, he knew enough to get up and drink coffee, but he began asking Marianne for toast instead of the brioche he had enjoyed all summer, for one soft-boiled egg instead of two. She frowned and served his toast with saucers of her mother’s plum or apricot confiture; he ate a little to please her. He continued to carry out experiments already under way as meticulously as ever, but ideas jotted down in his notebook during the summer were left unexplored; he added no new ones. He called on Cornelia. He fenced. He walked. In the evenings, he fidgeted through wordless games of chess with the collector of prints. As long as there was sun as often as rain, as long as the increasingly intense late-afternoon light extended into early evening, he could honestly tell himself that if he must stare down the black dog, he would rather do it in Paris than anywhere else on earth. And he wanted to do it with a clear mind, at least during the day.

*   *   *

Effie decided to look for an apartment with a studio that would lure Jeanette away from the afternoon class at Julian’s, and the coarsening effect of nudes, by tempting her to continue working half a day on her own once Carolus’s class resumed. She found one at a price she was willing to pay. Three flights up on the southern back of a building on the Rue du Fleurus, it would be hot in summer and the light, though abundant, would change throughout the day. It was dirty, and even after a good scrubbing, the gray walls would still be dingy. Its one bedroom was in the attic above; it had no sitting room, no kitchen, no bathroom, only a shared toilet down the hall. But there was a sink and running water; the stove, which was meant primarily for heat, had a griddle on which they could cook at a pinch. And the studio was large: thirty feet long by fourteen wide with a ceiling high enough to accommodate a giant canvas, large enough to accommodate a sofa and some chairs at one end and still leave plenty of room for Jeanette to work. Moreover, if they ate a simple breakfast at home, picked up lunch at a charcuterie, and dined in the evening at a nearby Duval restaurant, they could save the expense of a full-time maid of all work and spend less than they would at a
pension
.

Jeanette saw it and agreed that it would do, though she wished it lifted her low spirits more. “Just think how a clean coat of paint on the walls will help!” said Effie. “Yellow, like Mr. Whistler’s room at the fair. I’ll put my screen over there and find some peacock feathers.”

Jeanette was about to object that cool gray was considered necessary in a studio to ensure true color on the canvas but was stopped by the thought that this would be Effie’s first apartment, too. “As neutral as possible,” she said, “not bright.”

Edward heard about the move from Cornelia and ordered a bouquet of yellow roses and golden autumn lilies to be sent to the Rue du Fleurus on the Friday they would move in. The black dog turned in a circle and settled down.

*   *   *

The flowers came while Effie was out shopping for secondhand furniture. Jeanette did not even notice that they had been sent anonymously. Oh, Edward! What did he mean by it? Where had he been? She scrabbled through unpacked boxes, hunting for stationery and a pen.
Dearest
, she wrote (who cared what anyone thought), then hesitated:
Dr. Murer?
No!