The Painted Kiss (3 page)

When we got back to our father he was talking to a man we didn’t know. The man was wearing a threadbare sack suit and a pink daisy in his buttonhole. We had never seen a man wearing anything like that. He was not tall, but broad-shouldered and strong-looking. He was tan like the woman selling ices. He was carrying a leather case in one hand and what looked like a toolbox in the other.

We hung back shyly.

“He’s not wearing a hat,” whispered Pauline.

“Maybe he’s a Gypsy,” said Helene.

“Here are my daughters,” our father said. “Girls, come and meet Mr. Klimt.”

“How do you do, Mr. Klimt.” We curtsied as we had been taught, trying not to spill our ices. As I bobbed my head I could see that the man was laughing at us.

“I feel like an old man, or a prince,” he said. “Everyone calls me Gustav. And no one ever curtsies.”

“Mr. Klimt is a painter,” Father said, as if that would explain it all: the suit, the flower, the tan, the laugh, everything.

“I’m on my way to set up an easel near the art museum. My brother is already over there. It’s good publicity. And sometimes people pay us a little to make a drawing, which doesn’t hurt.” He winked at us. None of us knew what to do. Could we eat what was left of our ices, or was that rude? Helene tried to quietly sip the juice in the bottom of her cup, but Pauline kicked her.

He said he had some ideas about a new style of pipe. It had a smaller bowl with some complicated combination of walnut veneer and gold filigree. My father listened and seemed interested. He thought Klimt should come by the factory sometime and show him the drawings.

Then Father said we had to hurry on, and shook his hand. Klimt bowed and was gone, moving through the crowd, but he turned around once and smiled at us.

We walked on, toward the Rathaus. I was quiet, thinking about the man. New people did not appear very often in our closely chaperoned, narrowly circumscribed lives.

I wanted to watch Klimt draw. I knew Papa would never agree; we only had a few minutes to make it to our place.

“Papa, there’s Anna Vogel,” I said. “Can I go over and say hello?”

“Where?” said Helene, scanning the crowd for our school friend. I pinched her.

“Quickly,” he said. “Be on the steps in ten minutes.” I tried not to run.

A small knot of people was gathered behind Klimt and a thin boy with a smock tied on over his suit. That must be his brother, I thought. They were unfolding what looked like wooden music stands and clipping paper to them. I stood behind, peering into the spaces between men’s elbows, trying to get closer.

An old woman passed carrying two pheasants tied around her neck with string. Impulsively, Klimt called out to her and motioned to the birds. Money changed hands and Klimt wound up with one of them. The woman bowed her thanks and chattered in a language I didn’t understand. I thought it was Polish.

Klimt shook his head and backed away, but she followed him, waving the second bird by its floppy neck. Finally he relented and gave her the money. He draped them over his easel.

Then, haltingly, Klimt asked the woman in her language if he could sketch her. At first she said no quite adamantly, but the crowd around her started to clap and cheer. Men pushed her toward the empty circle around the easel. Klimt smiled and beckoned. Finally, laughing, she agreed.

Despite the warm weather, the woman wore so many wool sweaters that she resembled a ball of yarn with feet. She was like a doll with a dried apple for a head and silk floss for hair. I looked at her, and then at the paper, then back again, watching as a line appeared here, then there, trying to see as Mr. Klimt saw her. It was impossible. There was a dark triangle, then a haystack of crossed lines, a few ovals, and she was there. How had he done that?

When Klimt gave her the drawing he had done she giggled like a child and gave him a small cloth pouch filled with hazelnuts.

Slowly I worked my way through the tightly woven crowd until I was standing right behind the thin brother. Dimly I realized that I had better return to my father and my sisters, and that I would be in trouble when I appeared, but it didn’t matter. I had to get closer.

By some silent sign they had agreed and were both sketching two shop girls who were standing with their arms around each other, talking about bonnet trimmings. Yellow silk flowers or lace with delft blue ribbons, which would be nicest? Look at the rich lady with the hummingbird in her hat. How wonderful to be able to afford such things! The brother used a pencil, I noticed, while Klimt was holding a thick piece of black chalk in his fist like a fish he’d just pulled from a lake. He worked quickly and turned the page of his pad over when he’d finished. I barely had time to examine them before they were gone.

When they saw the artists looking at them the two girls blushed and ran away. I could see the last rough sketch that Klimt had made, and there was no doubt as to whom it was. In a moment he had captured their self-conscious slouching, their excited eyes, the way they leaned into one another.

Then two university students stumbled by and asked to have their portraits done for a few shillings. The brother said no. “We choose our subjects,” he said. “They don’t choose us.” The crowd laughed at the drunken boys, who looked surprised, as if it had never occurred to them that anyone might find them less than worthy subjects. As it slowly dawned on one of them that he was being rejected, his face flushed with anger.

“Look here, you,” he said, poking the brother in the chest and nearly knocking his easel over.

Then Klimt stepped in front of his brother, into the path of the student’s fists. “Speak for yourself,” he said. “Personally I would be honored to sketch these gentlemen.” For a moment the brother looked as if he might hit Klimt, but then he smiled and shrugged and went back to his easel.

The students leaned against one another and affected postures of great wisdom. Their gowns were too long and trailed in the dust. Klimt, in a few curving strokes, managed to delineate their extreme youth, their skinniness like starving dogs, their drunken eyes. He and his brother both ripped the papers from their easels and presented them to the students, who were pleased beyond all sense, the argument forgotten. They dumped their pockets for them. They showed the sketches to anyone who would look at them. Then they folded them into tiny squares and walked away. I winced when they folded the papers. The magical drawings looked like trash folded up like that. The students would probably forget about them in ten minutes and carelessly lose them. Klimt didn’t seem to notice the rough treatment of his drawings. He was counting the money.

Next to him his brother had begun to sketch a Hungarian couple in the brightly embroidered national costume. Klimt came and stood in front of him, blocking his view. People had begun to drift away, but I couldn’t move.

“We’re artists, not street beggars,” Klimt’s brother hissed angrily.

“Where did we get this charcoal?” Klimt said calmly. “And this paper?”

“From school,” said the brother sullenly.

“We took the paper out of the garbage pail and wiped it clean. We got the charcoal off the floor. With this money we can actually buy some supplies.”

The brother clearly did not like to admit that Klimt was right.

“We have enough to get a piece of cake at the café,” said Klimt, in a way that told me that this was his brother’s weak point. Then they both laughed.

“How much did we get?” asked the brother.

“Stupid kids, they gave me ten shillings for a drawing I wouldn’t wipe my ass with.”

My head spun. The artists were so poor that they pulled paper out of trash bins and used them. They had almost caused a brawl. Their language was vulgar and frightening. I was repelled, and yet fascinated. I had never met anyone like them.

Suddenly the only thing I wanted in the world was for Gustav Klimt to draw me. I had no money, but I thought if I got in his line of sight maybe I could do something interesting to attract attention. Then someone shouted that the carriages had been spotted and everyone rushed to the street. I ran to the steps of the Rathaus. Helene’s red hair stood out like a beacon, and when I saw it I slowed to a walk and slipped into place beside her.

“Where were you?” hissed Father. I tried not to breathe too fast or hard and give myself away.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“After all I’ve indulged you today,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed.”

“There he is!” said Helene.

I forgot that Father was angry and jumped up and down in an effort to see better. Pauline craned her neck in a distinctly unladylike way. Even Father was straining and waving.

The emperor rode on horseback, and he looked very brave and strong. The epaulets on his coat and his hands on his knees remained perfectly still as the horse trotted past. A corps of soldiers encircled him.

“What does he look like?” asked Pauline, though she’d seen his picture a hundred times.

“Like a sad walrus,” I shouted. I was elated; I had caught the emperor’s eye, and he had smiled at me.

Pauline looked shocked. Helene giggled. “That’s no way to talk about the emperor,” said Father.

“When have you even seen a walrus?” asked Pauline.

“A zoological book. At school.” I tried to explain how his upturned mustache made him look as though he were smiling, though his eyes were sad. I tried to explain how he had smiled at me.

“He is not smiling at you,” Father said. “You aren’t anyone. He is smiling at Vienna.”

The soldiers that followed the emperor on foot had horsetail tassels on their helmets and marched in a formation like a flock of geese, kicking up dust and pounding out a tune with their footfalls. Their commander shouted commands, and they raised their rifles and shot into the air. The crowd cheered.

The carriage behind the soldiers came into my view then. It was filigreed like a page of music. The grand horses pulling it had garlands around their necks and pink and yellow ribbons braided into their white manes.

“What do you see?” Pauline cried impatiently.

“She’s got her veil on inside the carriage,” I said. “She’s not even looking at the crowd.”

“She” was the empress, of course, the one we had really come to see. It looked as if we would be disappointed. We were resigned though; she hadn’t been seen in public in five or six years.

Then the window of the carriage was pushed open, just a little. A glove appeared and gripped the gilt whorls that framed the window. Not just any glove, either. A glove of the softest kid, dyed black and trimmed with what I now know was maribou. The hand reached out toward the crowd, tentatively touching the air, not quite waving. A sleeve—the most delicate lace sleeve shot with golden threads—dangled from the glove, blowing a little in the breeze, and that was all. The carriage passed and was gone.

A
t breakfast the next day Papa read us an article in the newspaper about the Klimt brothers. They’d been hired to paint the murals for the new theater that was being built not far from where we lived. Papa said it was a very prestigious commission for such young artists.

There was so much more I wanted to know: what were they going to paint? How did they paint the ceiling? What kind of paint did they have? Was it like the paint on the walls of our apartment? But Papa brushed my questions aside.

“I’m late,” he said. “And so are you.”

We went to a convent school next to St. Ann’s church. Everyone there was very nice to us in a pitying sort of way because we were Protestant, which meant in practice that when the Host came by in chapel we had to cross our hands across our chests into an X. It always felt to me that we were pronouncing ourselves excommunicated. In principle it meant that we were going to hell. Why they bothered to educate us if this were true the Sisters never said. Mother told us not to listen to them when they talked to us that way.

The stone interior of St. Ann’s, where we said Mass, was stained with age and the air inside was sweet and murky with incense. Candles hung from wrought iron cages like instruments of medieval torture. White-robed figures glided by with censers lighting and extinguishing candles. Christ was dying everywhere and with much suffering: on the stained-glass windows he performed the stations of the cross bleeding and crying and falling again and again, on the frescoed ceiling he wore the crown of thorns. On the tapestries that covered the cold walls he was wrapped in a shroud, he was lying in the tomb. Father told us not to look at it, it was barbaric and blasphemous, but it was hard neither to look nor listen. Next I thought they would tell me to hold my nose so as not to inhale the sandalwood and myrrh as it wafted through the air.

The school was housed in the nearby convent that was nearly as old as the church. The flue was clogged with centuries of soot and our eyes were often stinging red when we came home. The nuns were the only ones who would teach girls Latin and mathematics and philosophy, and that’s why we went there. Father was afraid that his business would collapse and we wouldn’t be able to support ourselves. He didn’t say why it would collapse; there were things out there, invisible malignant hands, trying to pull him down. At least that’s what it seemed like to me, listening to him talk. Mother had been pulled out of school when her own mother died and never got over it. You will be educated, she said darkly, no matter what happens. So in their different ways, united only by a sense of doom and helplessness, they encouraged our educations.

In the mornings the three of us walked to school together. We walked home again for lunch. After school we would sometimes invite friends to our apartment. More often the three of us would entertain ourselves. On Saturdays we might walk in the park, or listen as our mother played the piano.

She had wanted to be a pianist, and her teacher thought she had talent. Instead, she did what she was supposed to and got married. My father loved to hear her play, but he had no idea that pounding out Strauss tunes for him at home did not satisfy her. Intermittently she tried to be a good bourgeois wife and mother, but most of the time she forgot. She was too abstracted, lost in compositions that could only be played for us.

That was my entire world. I had no contact with the musicians who played at the Opera, or the men who taught at the University, or anyone, really, outside my family and my schoolmates. Occasionally I went to the market with Mother and looked longingly at the girls who came in from the country with their families to sell cheese, or sturgeon, or rabbits. They stood outside in all weathers, calling to people as they passed, flirting with customers, making change, wrapping things into parcels and tying them with string. It seemed so much better than my own life. Their hands were red and chapped, but they were doing something useful. And they were free, at least freer than I was.

When I was supposed to be doing my homework I drew in one of my school notebooks. I drew little girls with curly hair and giant eyes. Their heads were always too big for their bodies. I drew dancers arabesquing but couldn’t figure out how the neck melted into the back. My dancers all had jutting shoulder blades like fish fins. I attempted to draw Helene while she slept and only succeeded in terrifying her when I threw my slate and the paper it held across the room in disgust. I had more luck drawing clothes than the people who wore them. I drew the empress’s beautiful glove, and tried to recreate her dress, even though I had only seen the sleeve. I thought the dress must be brocade of a golden peach color. It would not have a princess collar, but would plunge from little cap sleeves adorned with skeins of pearls. Fastened to the shot-gold lace at her décolleté would be the largest ruby brooch anyone had ever seen. Of course such a dress would not provide much warmth, so I designed a white fox cape and matching hat. I was quite satisfied with the results.

Once I had drawn the dress, I was inspired to play drawing room. We gathered some of Mother’s old evening dresses from a hall closet and supplemented them with various scarves, robes, tea towels, jewelry, whatever we could find. We were forbidden to touch any of it, of course, but Mother was in bed with a headache and wouldn’t appear until supper, which was hours away.

When we were dressed Helene began choreographing a dance inspired by a famous troupe of dancing sisters. Every so often one of us ran to the bed and ate from a bag of chocolates we had smuggled into the house after school.

Our dancing quickly unraveled into quarreling. Helene had teased me about my clumsy dancing, which only made me clumsier, and I stepped on the hem of my dress and tore it. I believe I then hit her with my shoe. Pauline came between us and caught a heel in the eye, which made her scream. I ran away before I could be evicted from the game. So there I was, not dancing, pouting in the windowsill.

Helene tried to entice me back. She held out her arms to me and fluttered them in what was an annoyingly passable imitation of a sylph, though her gray silk taffeta robe was much too big and hung from her arms like laundry on a clothesline. Then she began to sing. Helene knew that when she sang she was nearly irresistible. She had a high, clear voice like a choirboy. Her bright hair curled around her face like a Raphael. But I was her sister, not an admiring teacher or a proud parent or a gushing parishioner. I ignored her. She finished a stanza and then, when she got no response, stopped.

“You’re just being lazy,” said Pauline, who was really too old to be playing this game but had done it to humor us. She was squeezed into a high-waisted pink organza evening dress and looked like an overstuffed pillow.

She didn’t like our games much anyway. Pauline was practical like our father. She was the only one who could soothe Mother when she had one of her hysterical crying fits, and the only one who could make the noodle pudding with cinnamon and raisins the way that father liked it. I thought she was depressingly lacking in imagination.

I said nothing. I opened and closed the clasp on the rose-shaped brooch I was wearing on my sash. The jewels in the brooch were pasteboard, of course, but they looked remarkably like rubies and pink diamonds.

Helene shrugged at Pauline. They were used to my sulks. They returned to their dancing, which required a lot of intricate work with scarves. It was hard not to get them tangled up. In fact, the dance had to be interrupted frequently for untangling and arguments over who was to blame. I half-listened to them as I watched the people passing below.

Fortunately for me, the street on which we lived was a very busy one. There was always someone interesting passing by. I watched a woman with a velvet cloak pulled tight around her throat step into the apothecary. I recognized her as a well-known soprano. I wondered if something was wrong with her voice. When she came out a few minutes later she was reading the label on the back of a small bottle as she walked. She nearly collided with two doctors with leather satchels and worried expressions. I saw one of the drunken students that the artist Gustav Klimt had drawn. He no longer looked drunk, but his hair was very messy and he was quite pale and in a rush. He dashed past my building and out of sight.

Just as Helene was saying that Pauline looked like a goat and Pauline was about to cry because she did a little, with her close-set brown eyes and long face, I saw something I couldn’t believe. Someone was at the door. It was a small man carrying a valise in one hand and a cane with a glittering handle in the other. He set the case down and rang our bell. Then he took off his hat to let the wind ruffle his hair, and he looked up, directly at me.

It was Gustav Klimt.

He smiled and bowed to me with a flourish of his hat. I nearly fell off the window seat in my haste to hide. Pauline and Helene stopped dancing.

“What?” Helene said.

“He’s here,” I said.

“Who?” said Pauline. She gasped when I told her.

I didn’t tell them about the bow. I don’t know why. It was something special that set me apart. “But what’s he doing here?” said Helene.

No one ever came to our house except the doctor. It was puzzling why this artist we’d never heard of until a few weeks ago was now standing at our door. We waited, peering around the curtains. When the door opened and Gustav Klimt disappeared into the building, we crept into the hall and leaned over the banister, straining to hear.

Mother took him into the parlor, leaving the valise and the cane in the hall, a sure sign that he was staying awhile.

Then we ran up the stairs and into our room as fast as we could, because Mother had come out of the parlor and was coming up the stairs. We stripped off the evening dresses and hid them in the armoire. By the time she arrived we were in our regular clothes and arranged in a slightly breathless tableau: Helene and I looking out the window, Pauline reading at the desk.

She frowned at us and said, “It’s no good trying to look innocent. Your faces are too pink.” We weren’t sure whether she meant that she knew about the dresses, or knew that we knew about Klimt, so we all tried to look chastened but not say anything to give ourselves away.

“What is it Mother?” asked Pauline, not very convincingly. “We heard the bell.”

“Mr. Klimt is here.” Our mother was fond of dramatic pauses. Helene couldn’t wait.

“Why? Why is he here?”

“Your father has asked him to draw your portraits.”

We stared at one another. Pauline looked horrified, but Helene looked as excited as I felt.

“Don’t keep the poor man waiting down there,” said Mother. “Straighten yourselves up, put on your school blouses, and come downstairs.”

“Our school blouses?” said Helene.

“That’s what your father wants.”

I nearly cried. Our school blouses were thin white cotton, with a plain neck and a bib-like appendage hanging over the chest. The bib-like appendage was embroidered with cheap floss because we’d been forced to do it ourselves. Pauline’s had turned out all right, but Helene’s, and especially mine, were poorly done. It was like performing at a dancing recital in my nightgown. I might’ve tried to slip past my mother in something else, but then I heard Father come home early from the factory. He was going to chaperone the sittings.

When we were dressed we brushed our hair and sighed over our complexions.

“If I had known I would’ve done the honey milk bath,” said Helene, who already glowed like a Madonna. I pinched her.

“Or the cucumber walnut scrub,” said Pauline. “That’s what the empress does when she’s about to be photographed.”

Pauline went first. While we waited Helene and I tried to imagine what was going on behind the closed parlor door. The wood was so heavy we couldn’t hear anything, even when we stood right up against it. Helene, who was shy around people she didn’t know, was afraid she’d have to talk to him. I thought it would be more awkward to sit there and not say anything.

We listened for the clock in the hall chiming on the quarter hours. Six passed before Pauline emerged. We scanned her face for a clue. She looked sleepy and dazed.

“Helene,” Papa called. With a terrified look she disappeared behind the door.

I quizzed Pauline about her time in the parlor but all she would say was that it wasn’t worth getting excited about. When I asked what Klimt was like, she shrugged. When I asked what they talked about, she said she didn’t know. The clock chimed, then chimed again. At last it was my turn.

When I went in Father was sitting in the corner of the room reading the paper. The air around him was dim with smoke and smelled of leather and cinnamon. He smiled at me but then went back to his paper, leaving me standing nervously in the doorway. The painter was standing in the middle of the room in front of a spindly-looking easel.

“Was that in your valise?” I asked in surprise. I was so curious about all of his things that I forgot it was rude for a girl to be too curious or to ask too many questions.

Klimt laughed. “Handy, isn’t it?” he said. “Let me show you.” He laid his paper on the sofa and deftly folded the easel until it resembled a bundle of kindling. I remembered I had seen it before.

“Oh yes, you had one like that the day of the procession.”

He smiled. “You remember.” He held the bundle out for me to take. I saw when I got closer that he had patches of red in his beard.