Of Irish Blood (24 page)

The woman in the painting wears brown all right, and the hair’s pulled back, but the face …

“You don’t think it captures me,” Gertrude Stein says.

“I don’t,” I say.

“Leo told Pablo I didn’t really look like the portrait. ‘She will,’ Pablo told him. He was right. I’m growing to resemble the painting more every day,” she says. Pleased with herself.

“Dorian Gray in reverse,” I say.

“So,” Gertrude says, “you do have some education. The University of Chicago?”

“Sister Veronica’s English class,” I say. “St. Xavier’s High School. And now I’ve been studying at the Irish College and…”

“Dinner is ready,” Alice Toklas says.

“I better go,” I say. “Thank you for showing me these.”

“Stay! Share our meal, Miss Kelly,” Leo says.

“Impossible,” Alice says. “I made no allowance for guests. Really, Gertrude, tell him!”

“Easy, Alice.” Gertrude walks over and touches Alice’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Miss Kelly. But you must come at another time. Perhaps one of our Saturday night salons?”

“I don’t think she’d enjoy those evenings,” Alice says, then turns to me. “Intellectuals attend, you see, writers and painters. You’d be very uncomfortable. We’ve never invited Madame Simone.”

“I issue the invitations, Alice,” Leo says. “I began the collection, and I’m the one who decides who views it.”

“Do you see how he speaks to me, Gertrude?” Alice asks. “When all I’m trying to do is make a home here for us.”

“Really, Leo,” Gertrude says. “You know how sensitive Alice is. Apologize right now.”

“Apologize? Why should I?” he says.

“Excuse me,” I say. “I’ll see myself out.”

But Leo walks over to Gertrude’s desk, takes her pen, and writes something down on a piece of paper. “My brother Mike’s address. Go by and see their Matisses. A most hospitable woman his wife Sally. She’ll offer tea or invite you for a meal.”

“Listen to him,” Alice says. “Compares me to Sarah Stein, who has a maid and a cook. How can he…”

“Now Alice, he didn’t mean…”

I hear them arguing as I practically run out the front door.

I think of Henrietta and me bickering and poor Mike trying to get a moment’s peace. Do brothers and sisters ever grow beyond the battles of childhood? And then to add someone like Alice. But the paintings! Dear God, worth a bit of contention to see those paintings. And more by Matisse at this other place. Somehow I feel like I did when I touched the page from the O’Kelly manuscript. Another world inviting me in.

“Can we really just go up and knock on their door?” I ask Madame Simone two weeks later as we eat dinner at L’Impasse.

“Of course,” Madame Simone says.

Neither Madame Simone nor I cook much. I live on omelettes, cheese, and bread. So two or three times a week we come here for a proper meal. Tonight Monsieur Collard serves us a salad of early greens and then a pot-au-feu. I’ve slimmed down. Tim McShane couldn’t pinch a roll of fat on me now. I push the thought of him from my mind. And then I think of Peter Keeley. Not a word from him. Stop dwelling on the fellow, I tell myself. He’s forgotten you

“The Steins promote painters,” Madame Simone is saying. “They are determined to make their favorites famous. So, yes, they are generous and enthusiastic but the more well known the artist, the more valuable the paintings. So they will welcome our visit. We will tell people who will tell people.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Please don’t say because I’m from Chicago.”

“No, because you are not yet a true businesswoman.”

So that next Saturday, we set off. The Steins live on rue Madame only a few blocks from rue de Fleurus. Madame Simone insists we take the métro to the Rennes station. Now, I am still leery of the métro. Just riding under the ground is bad enough, but what if I go by my stop and end up who knows where? Better to stick to rue de Rivoli and stay above ground. But not a bother on Madame Simone. I suppose the métro’s really trams, after all, if you forget the tons and tons of earth overhead. I’ll say this for the Parisians. They can decorate anything. The stations are handsome and even the letters spelling “Métropolitain” are lovely.

I had seen New York subway stations when I waited for the S.S.
Chicago
to leave. Very plain altogether.

“Here,” Madame Simone says, and we’re out of the train, up the stairs, and on the rue Madame.

I follow her along the narrow street. At first, we think we’ve made a mistake because 58 rue Madame is a church. Not as grand as a Catholic church, but a place of worship nonetheless.

“Église Réformée,” Madame Simone says. “Protestant. Must be the wrong place.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I thought…”

I get the piece of paper Leo gave me from my pocket. Yes, 58 rue Madame.

I show it to Madame Simone. She shrugs. Next to the church is what would be the rectory if this were a Catholic church. Big, with arched windows. I guess the minister of the Église Réformée wants to live as well as Catholic priests do. Maybe he’ll know something about the Steins.

We knock at the door and a woman opens it. The minister’s wife?

“Welcome. Welcome, I’m Sally Stein,” she says.

“Oh,” I say. “I thought…”

She laughs. “We bought the parish house. The church was glad of the money. They send missionaries to Africa. Though the Africans have perfectly good religions of their own … but come in, come in. Leo said to expect you.”

Smiling, dark-haired, a pleasant face and conventionally dressed. No Carmelite habit for this woman or for her husband either. “Call me Mike,” he says.

A teenaged boy stands just behind them. “And this is Danny.” Mike, Sally, and Danny—Bridgeport names. In fact, the Harringtons had a Sally, a Mike, and a Danny. But this Mike has a trim Vandyke beard. Not much like his brother Leo.

Madame Simone and I introduce ourselves. “Leo said you’re from Chicago, Nora,” Sally says.

“Yes.” Here we go.

“Such a shame,” she says.

“Now wait,” I start. I’ve had enough of this insulting of Chicago.

“Unconscionable,” she says, “for students to burn paintings.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Well, both Steins trip over themselves to explain that when the New York Armory Show moved to the Art Institute of Chicago there were ructions.

“Some of the New York critics were dismissive, but in Chicago…” Sally says. “Students from the Art Institute staged a mock trial of Henri Matisse, accusing him of committing crimes against Art, called him Monsieur Hairy Mattress,” she says.

Don’t laugh, I tell myself. Do not laugh.

“And then burned three paintings!”

“No,” I say. Now, that is bad.

“They were only copies, Sally,” Mike puts in.

“But still,” Sally says.

“Copies?” I ask.

“Yes, by some students,” she says.

“Pretty good ones from the photos in the paper,” Mike says.

“So no real harm,” I say.

“No harm?!” Sally is furious.

“You have to understand,” I say. “Chicago’s, well, a kind of meat-and-potatoes town.”

“Sally,” Mike says. “Nora’s our guest. I don’t think she is responsible.”

But Sally continues. “The ignorance, the bad manners.”

Finally Mike intervenes. “Chicago,” he said, “is a fine city. Industrious. I’ve invested in companies there. My father was a streetcar man, not on the scale of your Yerkes of course.”

“Not my Yerkes and
not
very popular in Chicago,” I say.

“Pioneers never are,” he says.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
Madame Simone asks, but I’m not about to describe fights about Chicago transportation. Ed used to go on about how the city would never move forward until there was some kind of unified transit authority instead of a scramble of different competing companies. But try to put that in French.

Sally has calmed down now and Mike urges us toward their atelier.

Now where Leo and Gertrude’s collection contained different artists’ work, the paintings on these walls are all by Matisse. Exuberant, I think, the colors so bright and vivid.

“They make me smile,” I say to Sally, who nods her head. She runs her hand over a frame the way a mother might stroke her child’s shoulders. And, in fact, the painting is of a young boy holding a butterfly net.

“You?” I say to Danny, who stands in the doorway.

“So they say.” Nearly a man now. How does he feel about this younger self on display? Next to the painting is a photograph. I look back at Danny.

“You too?” I ask.

“Yes,” he answers. Beautiful lighting, very different than the wedding photos displayed in Chicago parlors where the bride and groom are always stiff and staring.

Mike comes up to me. “My uncle David Bachrach has a photography studio in Baltimore.” We stand looking at the portrait.

“I guess there’s no point in painting realistically if a camera can give us this,” I say.

“Exactly. Well said, Miss Kelly. The camera captures reality. Matisse paints the soul of an object, of a person.”

“Très grand, Michel,”
a voice says. A tall man enters the room and comes over to us.

“The master,” Mike says to me. “Henri Matisse.”

I don’t know what I expected. But Matisse looks no different than most of the French men I pass on the rue de Rivoli; nondescript suit, neat beard.

I look from him to his creations. You never know. In fact the fellow following him in, who wears blue overalls and has long hair, more closely matches my image of an artist. Except he carries a load of wood and turns out to be the carpenter come to build crates for the paintings.

“You came just in time,” Sally says to me. “Fritz Gurlitt’s gallery in Berlin plans a Matisse show. So exciting. I’m sure the Germans will be more accepting of the master’s work.”

“Than the people of Chicago,” I finish.

She laughs.

And Matisse smiles. He repeats—“Chi-ca-go”—and chuckles. “Hairy Mattress,” Matisse says.

Very funny, I think. Then Madame Simone says that if the Germans don’t like Matisse they’ll burn the real thing. Matisse says something to her in too-rapid French, but she responds slowly so all can understand, “They will attack France,” and starts on about the war in Les Balkans.

“You are wrong, Madame,” Sally says. “Berlin is full of cultured people, forward-looking. We have many relatives there.”

All the while the carpenter sets out the wood and his tools.

Sally speaks a mix of French and English I can follow. Convincing herself her pictures will be safe.

Matisse takes off his coat, walks over, and lifts a painting off the wall. He holds it up for us to see.

“Oh no, Henri,” Sally says, “Don’t send
Le Luxe
.”

The canvas shows three figures. One, a man, I guess, bows before the two women. Nice colors. Blues and browns that match the pattern in the window drapes. Does Sally want to keep the canvas because it complements her décor?

But Matisse waves her objections away.

“It will return to you worth many times more. Fritz is not selling, only showing.” And he hands the painting to the carpenter.

I move to a large canvas almost as tall as me.

A windowsill with pots of flowers and beyond the outline of a building. And that green smudge—a tree?

“And this is…?” I ask Matisse.

“A painting,” he says, and smiles.

Oh great. A comedian. I turn away but he takes my shoulder and turns me back. In slow French he explains how he was looking out the window of his hotel room in Morocco and wanted to present the view as blocks of paint so the colors themselves, the shapes, could engage the viewer.

“And are you engaged?” he asks me. And funnily enough, I am feeling something, though what I’m not sure.

“You experience the picture directly,” he says. “You see?”

And I do kind of.

“I go inside the picture,” I say.

“Oui! Oui!”
he says. “You wish to study with me? My fee is
pas cher
.”

“No, no. I’m a guide really. I take women around Paris to see the sights and shop.”

“And you are from Chicago?”

“Yes.” Here we go.

“My friend Jean Renoir tells me in his family a really big meal is called
‘un repas Chicago’
because after the ladies from Chicago bought his father’s paintings they had money.” he says.

“Here.” He gives me a calling card. “My studio. You may like to see me paint. And your clients too.”

Not so hard to enter this world after all.

We do not get invited for a meal, and there is no salon that night. The pictures must be shipped.

“They are very naive,” Madame Simone says as we walk back to the métro. She tells me she feels war with Germany coming in her bones—the way people with arthritis anticipate rain. Maybe not this year, she says, but soon. It will be terrible, beyond anything we have ever known. And I think how sad that she always seems to expect the worst. Europeans!

“The Steins will never see their paintings again,” she says. She predicts Gertrude and Leo’s collection will be broken up, too. Not by war but by the conflict between Leo and Alice.

A month later Madame Simone tells me Leo Stein has moved out. He took half the paintings with him. “He claimed Cézanne’s
Apples
,” she says. “Gertrude will never forgive him for that. He left her the Picassos, which he said will never be worth much.”

“I guess I’ll never be invited to the Saturday salon,” I say.

And I wasn’t.

Still I’d met a real, living artist. No fashions to copy in Matisse’s paintings though. I wonder is Peter Keeley interested in painting?

*   *   *

Belinda Lawrence has plenty of money. Happy to order three “Old Master” ensembles from Madame Simone and set out to discover Paris with me.

I take her to Ambroise Vollard’s gallery on rue Lafitte and point out the Matisses. Doing my bit to make up for that Hairy Mattress upset in Chicago. Belinda’s not interested. A quick stop at the Louvre for the
Mona Lisa
and then shopping, shopping, shopping. Hats and silk hose, and toys from Au Nain Bleu.