The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (29 page)

“We’ve been talking about it for days, but no matter, I’m sure you can trade your farmer’s clothes for one of my father’s suits. Mother must have some of his clothes around the house. Let me go see.” She walked towards the kitchen.

“No, please,” he called out.

Chloe stood in the kitchen doorway, conferring with her mother. Louis could not see Isobel but could tell from the tone of the conversation that she was not pleased. Finally, Chloe returned, wiped her hands down her dress, and said, “Sir, will you follow me.”

“But—” Louis began.

“Come on, Grandfather, we can’t celebrate with you in those plowman’s clothes.”

She led him down the hallway to the small room where she slept. It was full of boxes and picture frames covered with drop-cloths. Chloe stood in front of an armoire and opened its doors to reveal a few dozen suits, immaculately hung, each with a silk cravat flowering from a breast pocket.

“My father had a suit for every day of the month. At the bank, they knew how business was doing by the color of his cravat.”

Louis looked at the suits. He remembered the image of Gerard at the opera all those years before, but these suits belonged to a much larger man. “I’m not entirely comfortable wearing the clothes of a dead man.”

“He won’t mind. He’d be glad that they were being put to some use.”

“And what did your mother say?”

Chloe ran a hand inside the lapel of a worsted blazer. “She said you have fifteen minutes before dinner is ready. And you don’t want to keep Mother waiting.”

Louis sighed. “Very well.”

Chloe kissed him on the cheek. “Excellent, I knew you’d be a sport. Now hurry and dress.” She walked out into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

Louis ran his hands over the shoulders of each suit and pulled out a charcoal-gray one. It smelled of verbena and old newspapers. He put on the jacket, and just as he had suspected, it was too long in the sleeves and too wide in the chest. Had the man been barrel-chested or simply fat? He tied the cravat—a stately blue—and stood before a mirror. He looked like a man in borrowed clothes, a sick uncle come to live with his moneyed kin. Something protruded from the pocket of the jacket. He put his hand against the cool satin lining and retrieved a half-smoked cigar and a piece of paper with numbers scrawled across it. The chewed cigar and the spidery numbers reinforced his image of Gerard—the tycoon calculating his wealth in a haze of cigar smoke—but then Louis saw a few lines of verse on the other side of the paper. It read:
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day, / Kiss her until she be wearied out.
It was from a Shelley poem, though Louis could not remember which one. He read it several times, shocked at this display of romanticism in the banker; was he a man who also brought home roses and recited verse at the dinner table? What if he had been worthy of loving? What then? Or was this a message from the grave, from a man who’d never possessed Isobel’s heart and mind? Perhaps Gerard was telling him to pursue Isobel until she surrendered.

“Are you coming, old man?” Chloe hollered from the hallway.

“Yes,” he called back. He put the cigar and paper back in the pocket and went out into the living room.

Isobel was still in the kitchen. Chloe handed him a glass of wine, trying not to laugh at the suit. “It’s a little big,” she said.

“I’m swimming in it,” Louis said. “I feel ridiculous.”

Chloe looked over her wineglass at him. “You look dashing.”

Isobel came into the room to announce that dinner was ready. She looked at Louis in her dead husband’s suit and wondered if this was not disrespectful to his memory.

“Mother, doesn’t Louis look dashing, even if the suit is much too big?”

Isobel shrugged. “Dinner is ready. We’ll be eating in the kitchen.” She brought her hands to her sides.

Louis looked at Isobel. She had dressed somewhat formally in a navy dress, her hair pinned up in a chignon. She could have passed for a diplomat’s wife, he thought, if not for the hands. They were maid’s hands—calloused, suntanned, nails bitten to the quick.

They went into the kitchen and sat at the table. Isobel served them plates of beef and herbed carrots. Chloe refilled their wine-glasses and said, “Louis, would you make a toast?”

“If your mother doesn’t mind.”

“As you wish,” Isobel said.

Louis stood and raised his glass. He felt the cigar in his pocket—had the banker been a man of wedding toasts and brandied tales? “Ladies, there is so much that I am grateful for. This last week you have cared for me and saved my life. The world is different now…I can feel that there is a whole new beginning upon us…I see it in doorways and windows—” He lost the thread of his remarks and discovered he was looking down at his carrots. “I am not good at speeches, forgive me. Mostly I’d like to say thank you for your hospitality. And here’s to the future—ours and the nation’s.”

Isobel and Chloe raised their glasses and drank. Louis sat down. An awkward silence fell over the table.

Chloe said, “This is delicious, Mother.” She leaned close to Louis and put a napkin in his lap.

“Indeed,” said Louis, embarrassed by the napkin on his pant leg. He scanned the table to see if there was anything else he had forgotten to do—where was the salt?

Isobel nodded but said nothing.

A moment later, Louis looked at Isobel as she was looking off at the stove. Her eyes were unnaturally fierce. He rifled through his mind for diverting conversation, ran a perimeter check on appropriate topics, but before he could speak, Isobel brought the silence to a point.

“Will you return to Paris, Monsieur Daguerre?” she asked. Her voice was flat and measured, an inquiry of weather.

Louis put down his glass and looked at her. The wine was the first alcohol he’d had since the shooting, and it loosened his chest and palate. “
Monsieur?
” he said. “Why so formal?”

“I wasn’t aware that calling a gentleman by that title was an offense.”

“No,” he said, sipping his wine. “But what is an offense is your amnesia.”

Isobel looked at her daughter and smiled, trifling Louis’s words. She faced him. “What am I supposed to remember?” She touched her wineglass. “That you were a gifted child in buckskins, a boy who went to the city and became famous? That we played out in the woods and one day we got drunk and kissed? That you wasted your affection on a woman who never asked for it?” Her face was burning.

Louis could not speak. He could hear a clock ticking from the hallway.

Isobel drew breath and spoke slowly. “You insist on reliving my days as a chambermaid as if it were a great beginning. I have left all that behind, Monsieur Daguerre.”

Louis looked down at his plate. He had wasted his life on this woman.

“He doesn’t mean any harm,” Chloe said.

“I wasn’t aware that this was your concern,” Isobel said.

“Pigeon, it’s all right,” said Louis.

Isobel flashed her eyes from her daughter to Louis. “That is not the first time I have heard you call my daughter by that abhorrent name. While you are in my house, you will call her Chloe just like the rest of the civilized world.
Pigeon
—it makes her sound like something you feed with breadcrumbs.”

“That’s what people called me in Paris,” said Chloe.

“Well, I can only imagine what circumstances gave rise to such a name. I imagine that posing as a nude model leads to all kinds of intimacies.”

Chloe looked at Louis; he could see the whites of her eyes.

“I think there has been some misunderstanding,” said Louis. He had rarely called her Pigeon but something about the wine and the domestic setting had made him feel more familiar.

“What’s to misunderstand? I found a naked portrait of my daughter with your signature on it. There were tuberoses scattered in that ridiculous picture, as if you were engaged in some epic fantasy. The whole thing is disgusting. If you have been as intimate with my daughter as that portrait suggests, then you’re a worthless old wretch. I should be glad when you go back to Paris and leave us alone.” The threat of tears hung in the back of her words.

“I worked for Louis, Mother. He never even watched me pose. He was nothing but a gentleman, believe me. It was I who begged to do it. And he paid me well.”

“I’m sure he did. Fame can afford a man his trifles.”

“This is not warranted,” said Louis, but he could feel the indignation in his face. Had he indulged the lust and vanity of an old man?

Chloe drank a long sip of wine and turned to her mother. “I worked as a whore in Paris. Louis was trying to save me from it by paying me to pose. But I kept doing it. I don’t know why I kept doing it. The money was the least of it. Until I walked into this house, I never felt ashamed.”

Isobel found it impossible to react. A self-loathing rose in her stomach, but nothing made it to her face. She sat stone-faced, her head tilted. The girl at the banister; the girl who fell asleep at the dinner table—stolen.
I have raised a harlot.
She said, “I may take a walk.” Now she felt the wine and humiliation in her face, flush on flush.

“No, you should sit here so we can talk about this,” Chloe said. Her voice was brittle, broken off.

Mid-swing, Isobel saw her hand in the air and felt her shoulders tense. Chloe’s head snapped to the right, her face abstracted by motion. The harshness of the blow left a crimson handprint. Isobel felt her hands shake. Chloe touched her face very slowly. A single tear appeared on her cheek. Isobel remembered her husband on his deathbed; when he was gone, a single tear had appeared from one eye. It had been the only time she’d ever seen him cry—in death—and this economy of sentiment had made its way to her daughter. Chloe stood and rushed outside.

Louis sat for a moment. “I will return to Paris as soon as the roads are open,” he said, head down. He wished she had slapped him instead. He looked up and saw a deep bitterness in her face—the desire to be hated, to steep and wallow. She was a selfish, indulgent woman, always had been. Standing, he set his napkin on the table and went out into the night in search of Chloe.

Isobel sat there and felt the room slip away. The thought burned her insides, scoured her through. Of course it was her fault. In her widowed vengeance, in the bleakness of her regret at not having married for love, she’d ruined her daughter’s chances, sent her out into the world penniless. Her daughter had paid the price for her own safety.

Twenty-Three

T
he widow’s house stood in silence for two weeks. The fog rose off the marsh. It surrounded the house at dawn and dusk. Spring advanced. Bands of militant peasants drifted along the roadways, a ragged formation returning from Paris—boys with bandaged heads, old men with blankets draped around their shoulders. It grew warmer. Plow-men rode the fields in preparation to seed. But Isobel kept her house shuttered and the fire stoked. Condensation gathered in the herbarium. It was the perspiration of overtended milkweed, the breath of rampant lilac and chamomile. Chloe found the air stifling and slept by an open window each night. Louis, no longer an invalid, took to sleeping in the barn, huddled beside the stableboy.

Isobel and Chloe passed each other, eyes down, passengers on the decks of some lost ocean liner. Isobel was adrift in self-loathing. Moving about the house, she dredged the image pool of Chloe’s childhood: the girl in her first dress, the birthday princess presiding over her gifts. Where was the moment of undoing? She saw Chloe at the threshold of womanhood—standing at the top of the stairs, lavender-frocked and shoeblacked, a basket of gathered flowers in one hand. She’d blushed when boys looked her way. At sixteen, she’d spoken of boys the way a skeptic speaks of God—such strangeness, such fuss in all their difference, their spindle-legged energy and defiance. Then Isobel saw a depiction of her daughter beneath a seaman, some ham-fisted merchant, a man grabbing at her neck and hair. The images came unbidden, appalling in their detail—a scuffed wallet on the nightstand, the bicep tattoo of a serpent.

Chloe felt pent-up. She imagined the respiratory fumes from the herbarium to be blue and vaporous, the plants exhaling her mother’s angry out-breaths. In their beds at night they were being poisoned by a cloud of remorse. She wanted to scream, to tear down the pinned curtains. She would return to Paris with Louis, pick up the thread of a new life. It was distraction she desperately wanted, but she couldn’t sustain a simple task; her attempts to read and chop wood ended abruptly with book throwing and cleaving the ax into a rotten stump. She spent hours on her back beside the marsh watching clouds, looking up through the proscenium of branch work. She looked out at a dusk-shot field of turnips and waited for the mercury moment, the sun kiss.

She went to the barn in search of Louis, but he was off with his camera and tripod. She saw the portrait and unwrapped it. Her body was foreign to her—her shoulders sloped, her thighs dimpled—but these imperfections seemed to blend with the Paris twilight, the chimney cowls aslant, the tar smoke pluming across the skyline. She saw her mother’s body in the picture, the foreboding of age.
I will die childless, ruined.
If only she could undo time, set things right, reclaim her body before it had become the empty flat where men lodged their desires. She remembered their names, the ones who gave them—George, Pascal, René, Manuel, Esteban, Charles, Phillip, Andrew, Bernard…British, Portuguese, Spanish, so many Frenchmen she could have formed an army. The international language of the unpeeled bed. She remembered their faces; the averted eyes or the cajoling stares, the ones who asked for permission to touch her; the ones who pressed bruises into her wrists. Some wanted to know her real name and where she was born; they wanted another strand, the veracity of her life. “Marie from Marseille” was what she’d told most of them. This alter ego had taken on proportions of the living over the years; Chloe knew where Marie went to school, how her parents died of typhoid when she was very young. Chloe felt a sisterly affection for this invented personage; she could see her building the pine house in the South she’d always wanted, long-haired daughters running in the yard, the simple and kind grocer husband who believed she’d worked as a nurse in Paris.
At some point kindness is better than love.
The truth was she had no idea why she did it.
Punishing my mother, declaring love a hoax, the emptiness of losing Richard—none of these explain it. Because I could do it; because I had something they needed; because one man had a bandaged eye; because one called me the girl among the roses; because one made me frightened; because one bought me coffee—there are as many reasons as there were names.