The Eleventh Year (10 page)

Because of Bertrand de la Paume, Paul de Varenne had ceased to fritter away his time. He had made an entry into a new world. At first he had not known how to behave among the art collectors and the painters. He had gone with the chevalier to the house at 27, rue de Fleurus, in the
Sixth Arrondissement,
where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas lived, an odd couple if ever he had met one. They were both Americans; Gertrude was short, heavy, and masculine, with short crisp hair and a stentorious voice. Alice wore gypsy clothes and looped earrings, and on her upper lip grew what appeared to be a mustache. They were intellectuals, and Paul had never before encountered one of this species—particularly not one who took herself as seriously as Miss Stein. She had once studied medicine but had instead become a writer—in English, of course. Alice acted as her secretary and as buffer between her and the rest of humanity. They were known to every artist of note in Paris, and to every art broker. For it was Gertrude and her brother Leo who had discovered many a painter and enhanced the reputation of many others. On Saturday nights they held open house, and every literary and pictorial luminary knew that his status depended upon an occasional attendance.

Paul was fascinated. For the first time in his life, other people truly interested him. There was Picasso, the dapper little Spaniard, and the woman he loved, Eva. She seemed quite ill but very beautiful. There was Juan Gris and his wife Josette; he was a man of changing moods, a womanizer. There was the elfin Marie Laurencin, who painted in delicate pastels and had been the mistress of Guillaume Apollinaire, poet and critic. The great master of fauvism, Matisse, still came, although it appeared that cubism had replaced his style. He was a nice middle-class professor, Paul thought, taken aback by the master's bourgeoisie. But he himself still loved Matisse's odalisques, sprawling naked women with bodies that looked like real bodies. That, he thought, was life.

Bertrand de la Paume explained cubism to him. Paul saw that this encompassed a whole philosophy; there were the cubist painters, such as Picasso, Braque, Gris—and the cubist “thinkers,” such as the poet Jean Cocteau. Theirs was a parody of life. Monsters shaped like cubes embodied their sense of mockery. How different from the rounded, thick-ankled women sculpted in bronze by Aristide Maillol! And the individual interpretations of simple, casual scenes by Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard: They attempted to grasp the intangible, through their renditions of color and line. But always with grace. Their women were extraordinary, like poems. Paul watched and learned and asked questions.

Some people in this world are born with charm. Charlotte had acquired it to survive. Paul had possessed it from the cradle. The fitting comment came to his lips without effort. He could charm his way into a gallery and talk the owner into relinquishing a dusty canvas or a yet untested one. And he was discriminating. Once he had mastered the market, he could predict which artist would next rise to the forefront. And in the background, the Chevalier de la Paume watched, wryly smoking cigarette after cigarette.

The canvas trade was not accustomed to aristocrats of the Varenne and de la Paume breed. Mostly it was comprised of fat little round men with moist hands, like Adolphe Basler, who had sold the first Utrillo. Once the entire industry had been housed on rue Laffitte. Now the price of paintings was going up, and up—and as it rose to new and dizzying heights, the tradesmen left their old shops and moved to grander quarters. Rue La Boëtie displayed works offered by Chéron and Paul Guillaume; Ambroise Vollard possessed more than three hundred Renoirs in his ancient house on rue de Gramont. To these people Bertrand de la Paume had been an anomaly; but to the society queens such as the Comtesse Greffuhle, or the Princesse Murat, he was one of their own clan. And they accepted Paul at once, having known his mother and his grandfather Adrien. Of his father no one spoke.

Something else happened to Paul. He fell in love. Until Martine, Paul had loved only himself, beautiful
objets d'art,
and horses. At times Paul felt despair at his rootless existence. Bertrand de la Paume had opened up new worlds, allowed Paul to breathe and live by providing him with a work that tied in his appreciation of art and beauty. But on the night of their own meeting, he had also introduced the young man to his current mistress, Martine du Tertre.

She was certainly fifty. Next to the elegant chevalier, she appeared, in fact, older. Her complexion was not milk-white like Charlotte's, nor was her hair the magnificent thick, even gray of the Marquise's. Martine du Tertre was in no way stately. She was of medium height, and her brown hair was touched with henna, and her cat eyes, turned up at the corners but always half closed, were painted on the outside with kohl— merely a trace, yet enough to strike the young man Paul as quite exotic. She had a plump pigeon breast that was always propped upward and out so that it was inviting as it peeked up from the low bateau necklines that she most often wore. But she had a smile, warm and genuine and full of the joy of living, that actually made her imperfections amusing additions to her fascinating personality. For Martine du Tertre had been a reigning courtesan of the turn of the century. She had broken hearts and mended them with the grace and vitality of a Liane de Pougy or an Emilienne d'Alençon, the queens of the
Belle Epoque.

“You see,” Bertrand de la Paume had said to Paul. “One of the tragedies of today is that all the
grandes dames
of the
demimonde
have retired. Most of them have made brilliant marriages. After a while it ceases to matter that a woman has sold herself to the most distinguished bidder, and she acquires a style, a fortune, a manner that transcends social prejudices. That is Martine's situation. She was a mason's daughter in Lille and came to Paris as a very young girl. She met people. She met men. Each kept her for a while, until she chose to leave, with wit and charm, for the bed and board of a more enchanting lover. Her canny sense of business stood her in good stead. After a point she was richer than her first protectors, and then she bought herself a marvelous house on rue de la Pompe and ‘retired.' She could now choose her lovers according to the dictates of her heart.”

“So…you don't keep her, then?”

“No. She loves me, you see. Long ago I suppose I succumbed to her personality, but then, so did the rest of Paris. Every man of note has at one time been her lover. She's proud of that fact. You'll like her.” He had smiled then at the young man and dropped the subject.

What struck Paul about Martine during their first evening, when the chevalier took him over to meet her in the house on the aristocratic rue de la Pompe, was her own appreciation of
him.
She moved with small easy steps, pouring him brandy, pouring him tea, stopping in her tracks to tilt her head to one side the better to appraise him. Then she would smile. “Bertrand,” she would say, “what a lovely young man you've brought! Such a magnificent young man, with such color and life to him! You don't find lively ones like that anymore, do you?” And then the frank laughter. No mockery, no coyness.

He returned home unable to sleep. Until then he had possessed any girl he pleased. Paul thought of Martine du Tertre, absurd with her hennaed hair, a woman thirty years his senior. She might have been his mother. She made no effort to hide her reputation: She'd been a simple girl from the North, who had warmed her heart and the soles of her feet within the charmed circle of Paris's most eligible bachelor apartments. These
garçonnières
had sometimes been occupied by married men. She had not cared. Free, and richly rewarded, she had enjoyed all her protectors and made herself unforgettable to each one.

The next day Paul received a note from her. “Would you consider dropping by for a sip of the finest Napoleon?” she had written in curlicued script. He laughed. She had made the first move. He would go.

In the arms of Martine du Tertre, that night, he found voluptuousness as he had never imagined possible. She was not, in bed, a fifty-year-old woman propped up by corset stays. She was a woman who relinquished herself to him with a fervor and passion unknown to inexperienced young girls. Paul was beside himself. She kept a scented candle on the nightstand, and in its flickering light he thought, amazed: She's beautiful! And then he touched her face, kissed her eyelids—gentle movements not characteristic of him, that made him suddenly shy.

In the morning she brought the breakfast tray herself and served him his
café au lait
in bed, ministering to him with the deft soft grace of femininity. “So many have loved you,” he murmured.

“Yes. I offer what I can.”

“And you love…Bertrand?”

“Bertrand is unique. His intelligence and his wonderful taste make the days seem brighter, more finely tuned.”

“Then—if you love him—why?”

She smiled at him. “Life is too short,” she stated simply, shaking her head. And once again he thought her beautiful. He was also aware of a new sensation: jealousy of the chevalier. And then a sadness: I am only an unformed youth, and this woman has lived fully. What could I possibly mean to her? He had never felt insecure before in the presence of any female.

But what to do about Bertrand de la Paume? It was she who finally resolved the situation. One evening when the two men had dropped by to visit her together, Paul uneasy in his role of young friend to her acknowledged lover, she came to them in a flowing satin gown trimmed with fur. She came to them on her tiptoes and settled herself on an ottoman by Bertrand's feet. Looking up at him frankly, she declared in her blunt fashion: “My dear, it's over. I've fallen in love with Paul, and it can't be helped.”

The young man swallowed and turned crimson. His stupefaction was so total that while he recovered, Martine took Bertrand's hand and began to run her index finger lightly over the knuckles. “We shall always be friends, you and I,” she said to him. “We've always been friends. As lovers we ran our course. You prefer younger women, and as for me…I've had the marvelous good fortune to find Paul.”

“It's as you wish,” Bertrand replied. A half smile came to his lips. “And I'm not at all surprised. Love him. He is shallow and self-centered, an egotist and a user. But he is also an original and not half the idiot he's taken for. Enjoy him, Martine. He is my present to you, my way of bidding you
adieu.”
And he brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. Then he stood up, summoned the valet, and walked out.

On August 1 of that year, when mobilization was declared, Charlotte von Ridenour sat numbly by her vanity, remembering when she had been young and beautiful. Her sons, through their ill-conceived involvements, had made her the laughingstock of her peers, and who would want her now? Two days later, the Germans declared war on France, and Alexandre immediately enlisted in the infantry. Paul followed, reluctantly deciding that if there could be no escape from combat, he wanted to be a flyer. But Charlotte heard the rumblings and saw the gatherings in the street, and thought of Alexandre's broken marriage to Yvonne, who had taken her money and gone to live in Florence with her lover; and of Martine,
née
Marie Leclerc, whose affair with Paul was making the rounds of Paris gossip. The world was setting up its battle lines, her sons were going to fight. Charlotte closed the door to her bedroom and pulled down the blinds, in order not to see her aging face reflected from the mirrors and the windowpanes.

J
amie had returned to Cincinnati
. Her father had found her a job in the public library, writing out file cards in the stacks. She needed the dollars.

The moment she came home, her mother said: “Willy is married. Did you know that?”

“How could I, Mother? Willy and I haven't been friends for years.” Still, she felt a kind of shock.

“Made a girl…with child. Can you imagine?” Margaret's piercing blue eyes drilled holes into her. Jamie panicked: She knows! Omigod—she knows! But no, I must be dreaming, she's just…Mother.

“Who—who was the girl?” she asked, trying to let her breath out normally. The unbearable heat was suffocating her like a pillow over her face.

“The same one. Probably the only one who'd have him. Eve—Eva? An immigrant, naturally.”

Jamie couldn't help it. “Daddy was an immigrant,” she reminded her mother. Then, touching the redness of her cheeks, she couldn't bear it any longer and left the room. If she had to, she would still defend Willy. She had been the one to leave; he had done nothing bad to her. Only one year ago they had sat in the park, under the flowering trees….

But she didn't want to see him, especially not now. And yet, of course, she knew she would, some time when she was least expecting it. It happened after work one evening, when she was leaving the library. She walked out into the balmy air of summer, feeling tired of the white lights in the stacks, of all the old dusty books with their fine print that hurt her delicate eyes. And suddenly he was beside her, carrying an absurd metal lunch pail, wearing absurd olive-green overalls. His black curly hair, his blue eyes—those were unchanged. His expression was sullen.