Mistral's Daughter (32 page)

Lust, palpable as smoke, a
pungent, hungry, raw lust quivered on the canvases of Maggy with her legs
sprawled wide apart lying on an unmade bed, one arm dangling to the floor;
Maggy with wet hair washing between her legs with a soapy cloth; Maggy thrown
down on a pile of green cushions, laughing, her nipples tender and inflamed,
her pubic hair caught in a shaft of light so that each red filament was alive
and separate.

As Darcy stood immobile,
frozen, unable to look away from the pictures, he caught words rising from the
talk in the room.
 
There was a delighted,
high-pitched, scarcely repressed excitement in the babble that greets any
out-and-out scandal.

"Bianchi's model, my
dear, that French girl...
 
mistress...
 
Perry Kilkullen, of
course...
 
what
skin
...
 
I saw them together in Maxim's...
 
did you say Bianchi?...
 
widow, my foot...
 
incredible breasts...
 
didn't they have a child?...
 
met her at Lally's,
yes, I'm
sure...
 
a child surely...
 
how the hospital committee let this pass I'll
never...
 
the Kilkullens will...
 
shocking...
 
don't be so provincial...
 
shocking...
 
painted when, you
say?...
 
Bianchi's model...
 
poor Mary Jane...
 
Perry's
what
?"

Why the hell didn't he paint
them in sperm?
 
Darcy thought to himself,
why not just fuck the canvas?
 
He shook
with uncontrolled laughter.
 
Life had
never attacked him so unexpectedly. That lily maid,
that contained and
elusive princess
—
oh, how beautifully she had outfoxed him! What a
formidable woman she was!
 
His admiration
for Maggy swelled within him like a great chuckle as he watched the faces of
all the men in the room, their eyes greedily roving the canvases
—
he'd
bet that half of them were trying to control
stiffening cocks
—
he knew he was. Oh, Maggy, darling Maggy, so you
"had heard of
Mistral" had you
—
and how many times did he stop
painting
to fuck you?
 
How, in fact, was he able
to pay any attention to his paint and brushes?
 
The man must have had the concentration of a diamond cutter to get any
work done at all under the circumstances
—
oh, Maggy, no woman
has
ever surprised me like this
—
I feel a virgin fifteen again.
Bravo!

By noon of the next day Maggy
was without a job.
 
She didn’t
blame Bianchi; her useful-ness to him was clearly over.
 
He'd received a dozen outraged phone calls
before he'd asked to see her and if none of them had actually used the term
"scarlet woman'' it was only because they knew it was old-fashioned.
 
Obviously Maggy couldn't possibly organize
another society
fashion show and as for normal modeling for the house,
her notoriety would get in the way of the dresses. People would come to see the
cause of the scandal but they wouldn't dream of ordering the garments she
wore.
 
Just by putting a dress on, she
would invalidate it.

As he said goodbye to Maggy,
with a check for two weeks’ salary, Alberto Bianchi felt two emotions; sorrow
at losing this
valuable model and a burning impatience to run up to the
Nathen Gallery to see for himself what Maggy looked like stark naked
—
God knows, he'd wasted enough time wondering.

Darcy tried to reach Maggy at
Bianchi's as soon as he left
the
Nathen Gallery,
without success.
 
She'd gone to bed,
Nanny Butterfield had told him.
 
He
phoned her at home repeatedly but she refused to take any calls, not even from
Lally, who also had called several times.
 
She asked Nanny Butterfield to answer the phone and say that she was out
of town and wouldn't be back for a while.

When he couldn't reach Maggy
by phone Darcy went to
her
apartment but the doorman had firm
orders to allow no one
upstairs but deliveries.
 
He sent flowers twice a day with notes
begging her to call him at the office or at home, but she did neither.
 
He stood impatiently on the street outside of
her apartment house for
hours, but she never emerged.
 
He did everything but disguise himself as a
delivery boy.
 
He could hardly believe
his own behavior, yet he couldn't stay put.

Four days after the opening
of Mistral's exhibition Darcy telephoned once more in the late afternoon,
hoping that by now she might be ready to come out of her isolation.
 
Maggy was in the bathroom when the phone
rang, Nanny Butterfield was making Teddy's supper, and Teddy herself dared to
answer the phone, something she was forbidden to do.

She was three, a prime age
for little girls, one of their peak years.
 
Teddy
had already grown accustomed to the exclamations of
strangers in the park who saw her beauty for the first time, she had already
learned that there were certain laws that she could break without being
reprimanded just because of how she looked.
 
However, these laws still applied at home; Nanny and Maggy tried to be
strict
with her because they were joined in a conviction that it would
be fatally easy to spoil her.
 
A
ringing phone was already an object of greedy veneration for Teddy. She picked
it up with guilty delight and said a muffled hello.

"Who is this?"
Darcy asked, thinking he had the wrong number.

"Teddy Lunel.
 
Who are you?"

"A friend of your
mother's.
 
Hello, Teddy."

"Hello, hello,
hello."
 
She giggled and arched her
neck.
 
"I have new red shoes."

"Teddy, is your mother
there?"

"Yes, but don't you want
to talk to me?
 
What's your name?"

"Darcy."

"Hello, Darcy, hello,
Darcy.
 
How old are you?"

"Hello, Teddy
—
I'm
—
oh, never mind
—
is your mother there?"

"In the
bathroom....
 
no, here she is...
 
Mommy, telephone for you."

Hastily Teddy held out the
phone to Maggy, who looked around wildly
for Nanny Butterfield, almost
replaced the receiver, but finally
snapped her fingers in anger and
answered curtly, "Yes?"

'Maggy, thank goodness, I
thought you'd never come out of hiding."

"I'm not hiding!"
she said furiously.

"Hibernating then.
 
Your daughter sounds charming, much nicer
than you.
 
How about dinner
tonight?"

"Absolutely not.
 
I'm not going out."

"But you're the toast of
New York."

"Darcy, you were never
malicious before."

"I'm telling you the
truth.
 
The gallery is mobbed with people
who've heard how luscious you are.
 
You're considered the beauty of the decade."

"A
succès de scandale
—
do you think I want that?"

"This is New York,
Maggy, any success is a success, nobody really cares what it's based on as long
as they talk about you," he said, trying hard to make her feel better in
the only way he knew how.

"If that were so, I'd
still have a job," Maggy answered, bruised
by his
practicality.
 
Didn't he understand how
embarrassed, how humiliated she was?

"That's different,
Bianchi has to mollify his clients, but they aren't everybody in town...
 
oh, they think they are, but they really
don't count except in their own world."

"Nevertheless, Darcy, I
earned a living in that world, such at was."

"Maggy, remember what I
thought about your being a Powers girl...
 
why don't you go see him?"

"No!" Maggy
exclaimed sharply.
 
"I'll never
model again, not any reason.
 
I've been a
painters' model and a fashion model
—
I was seventeen when I started and
now I'm twenty-three and out work
—
and I've never made more than fifty
dollars a week
—
 
thank you,
that's not for me, it hasn't done much for me, has it?
 
On the other hand...
 
well...
 
I suppose it's silly of me..." She stopped, unwilling to continue.

"Tell me, Maggy, come
on."

"It's a foolish
idea.
 
No, no
—
perhaps not
absolutely, totally foolish...
 
do you
remember telling me that Powers had a hundred models working for him and that
he took ten percent of what they made?"

"Sure I do.
 
What about it?"

"I'm used to telling
models what to do and how to do it.
 
Bianchi's, all the girls came to me for advice
—
it's something I
seem to know in my nerve endings.
 
I
haven't any idea what photographers require of a girl but it can't be so
different from what painters expect, so, well...
 
I thought I might...
 
try...
 
to open an agency myself!" she finished on a burst of bravado.

"
Compete
with
John Robert Powers?" he asked doubtfully.

"And why not?
 
Just what does some man do that I could not
do?
 
And perhaps better? He's only
another kind of dealer and I’ve known dozens
—
believe me, there's no
magic to them."
 
She rushed on,
spurred on by his reaction of doubt.
 
"As it happens, Darcy,
I have a little capital to
risk."

"Maggy, you're bloody
marvelous!
 
Do you want some business
from
Mode
and
Women's Journal
and
City and Country Life
?"

"Of course I do!
 
Oh, Darcy, it
could
happen, it could
really
happen, couldn't it?"

"It's already
happened!"
 
How
he'd
missed that laugh of hers!
 
It made the
world dance. "Maggy, come out with me tonight and celebrate
—
champagne to baptize the new agency?"

"On one condition
—
you must allow me to pay.

"Why, for God's
sake?"

"The Lunel Agency wishes
to offer champagne to its first customer."

Oh, shit, he thought,
shit!
 
He realized too late, far, far too
late, that
he
adored
this impossible woman whom he'd as good as
started her own business.
 
"You're
right, Maggy," Darcy said glumly, "you don't have much to learn after
all."

14

Maggy's Girls, as everyone
called the Lunel Agency models, at first were only a choice handful, but soon
their ranks grew to many dozens; exquisite girls, butterfly girls who were so
much more glamorous, so clearly more sophisticated than their only rivals,
Powers's often corn-fed "Long-Stemmed American Beauties."

Maggy's Girls pranced through
the thirties as if there were no Great Depression.
 
Wearing corsages of big lavender orchids
pinned to their wide-skirted strapless ball gowns, they banished reality as
they danced at the Stork Club and at El Morocco, escorted by at least two men
on each arm.
 
They embodied escape for
millions of Americans who crowded the movie theaters to see films about rich
people in whose lives all telephones were white.
 
Like
Vogue's
earnest report that the
silly new hats have "killed discussion of the Stock Exchange and the rise
of Mr. Hitler," Maggy's Girls filled the public's avid need to have fun,
even if it was only vicariously.
 
A
New York Daily News
poll
asked women if they would rather be movie
star, a debutante or one of the Lunel models and 42 percent decided they would
prefer to work for Maggy.

While Maggy prospered in New
York, Julien Mistral painted in
a fever of energy in Félice. He had
entered into his "Middle Period" which was to last for the next
twenty years.
 
No longer, as he had in
the twenties, did he paint at random the scenes or objects that caught his
eye.
 
Now he devoted himself, for two or
three years at a time, to one subject, and out of this concentration, out of
the thousands of studies and work sketches he made and eventually destroyed,
would emerge a series of paintings, as few as a dozen, as many as thirty-five.

Defense d'Afficher
, his series of
paintings of walls covered with layer
upon layer of peeling
posters, was the first of these historic series.
 
Next came
Vendredi Matin,
images of
the bounty of the weekly outdoor market that took place in Apt.
 
Stella Artois,
the series
that
was named after Mistral's favorite brand of beer, illuminated as it had never
been before, the intense inner life of the men of the village as they passed
their evenings in the café of Félice, drinking, gambling, talking.
 
Jours de Fête,
the most important of the
Middle Period series, was inspired by the celebrations that took place
in
each village of the Lubéron on the day of its patron saint, a day of mountains
of cotton candy and dizzy children riding wooden horses, of processions and
fireworks, of wild overexcitement and budding country passions.

Mistral spent every day in
his studio from breakfast till dinner.
 
Cold meat, bread and a bottle of wine were brought to him on a tray, and
he devoured everything standing up in front of a canvas, unaware of what he was
tasting.
 
Kate took the opportunity given
her by her husband's abdication of interest in anything but his work, to take
more and more control of his business life.
 
She handled all the contracts with Avigdor, she carried on the
correspondence
with the galleries in many foreign countries who wanted
to show
Mistral's work, and it was she who made the decisions about the
management of the farm.

Once a year, at the time of
the harvest, Mistral abandoned his studio and worked in his fields with his
men, but otherwise he lived in a world entirely his own.
 
He had no time for newspapers. The changing
political tides in Europe were no more his concern than the train of cock
feathers on the latest Paris evening gown.
 
As for the boules tournament in Félice, yes, that still meant something
to him, but the burning of the Reichstag was an event utterly without
interest.
 
If he found that he was down
to his tenth tube of raw umber he raged, but the catastrophe of the Dust Bowl,
when Mistral heard about it from the farmers in the café, didn't touch him
enough to cause him to mutter a word of commiseration.
 
He had as little interest in the Italian
aggression in Ethiopia as he did in "Amos n' Andy."
,

Julien Mistral was at the
height of his powers, at peace with himself at last, and his natural
selfishness was only reinforced by the knowledge that never had he painted as
well.
 
How could
anything that was
happening in the world have the slightest importance, when he woke up each
morning with an absolute need to
stand in front of his easel burning
strong inside every cell of his body?
 
No
human fate, no current of history had the power to affect
him so long as
he knew that nothing could stop him from spending
the day in his studio.

Kate Mistral, on the other
hand, never lost touch with life
beyond Félice.
 
She went to Paris several times a year to
keep in touch with the art world and buy clothes, for live in the country as
she might, she continued to be well dressed at all times.
 
She worked
closely with Avigdor on
Mistral's shows, as she had on his first one and she represented her husband at
the
vernissages
he always refused to attend.
 
Occasionally she left him alone for a month
at a time and returned to New York to visit her family.
 
He scarcely noticed these absences.

In the aftermath of the
Crash, Kate was no longer rich.
 
In
hindsight, she had been lucky to use so much of her own capital
 
buying the domain of
La Tourrello.
 
Although she had fulfilled the pledge she had
made to win Mistral and given him the title to the land as her dowry, it had
been an excellent investment.
 
Her
husband had absolutely no idea of how rich they were growing.
 
The many fertile hectares that surrounded the
mas
were crowded and orderly and sweet with fruits and vegetables
destined for the wholesalers of Apt.
 
They had fine pigs, flocks of chickens and ducks, a few
horses,
the latest in farm machinery and many hands to cultivate the crops. Whenever
new, adjoining land came on the market, Kate
snapped it up.
 
The farm itself could support them in
comfort, she thought with satisfaction, even as she counted and recounted the
ever-growing sums from the sale of paintings that she deposited in the bank in
Avignon.

Although the bank account
was, of course, in Mistral's name, Kate's financial expertise compensated in
many ways for the lack of close
communion that she was dimly aware of at
the heart of her life
with Mistral.
 
He rarely spoke to her of his work, he never asked to paint her because
of what he explained was a "matte" finish to her skin that prevented
the light from entering into it, and he almost never invited her to visit the
studio.
 
However, Kate had become a famous
hostess. The
mas
was superbly comfortable and everyone she or Mistral
had ever known in Paris was eventually invited to spend long weekends.
 
She was house-proud and gloried in showing
off
La Tourrello.

During those periods of the
year when the boules players were gathered outside behind the café, Mistral
almost always joined them after he finished painting, coming home for dinner
only when the last game was over.
 
In the
winter, when it was too cold for boules, he worked all day and went to bed
early, like an exhausted farmer.
 
Yet she
possessed his body, that ever-hungry massively passionate body and the rough
direct greed with which he frequently turned to her and satisfied himself was
always enough to bring her to a climax, for Kate existed in a state of ready
arousal caused by living within the field of sensuality that enveloped her
whenever she thought of her husband.
 
All
he had to do was murmur "Patience, Kate, patience," and she was ready
for him.

She was as addicted to Julien
Mistral as she had ever been, Kate realized, as she sat downstairs alone by the
great fireplace after he had gone to bed.
 
She regretted nothing she had given up of the worldly life she had led
before she met him.
 
What little there
was of
Julien Mistral that did not belong to his work was, she felt
certain, entirely hers.
 
She smiled into
the embers, safe within the thick walls of
La Tourrello
as the leaves of
autumn flew outside and a low, red moon rose above the frosty, bare fields, the
stripped vines.

Kate made as little as she
could of the Spanish Civil War in 1936
—
"Spaniards against
Spaniards," she said, guarding her peace of
mind, for she, unlike
Julien, read the newspapers.
 
On
September 29, 1938, the Munich agreement was signed and millions of French,
English, and Germans as well, told themselves, in relief, that there would be
no war.

In the summer of 1939, Kate,
who hadn't seen her family in two years, went to New
York for a
visit.
 
The city of her birth,
particularly
gay because of the World's Fair with its theme of the "World of
Tomorrow."

Hitler had occupied Czechoslovakia
two months earlier but every day twenty-eight thousand people, to whom this
distant event had no particular significance, waited on line to visit the
"Futurama" where they were treated to General Motors’s wonderfully
convincing version of the year 1960.
 
It
was to be an era in which diesel automobiles costing two hundred dollars
each
and shaped like raindrops, would race on accident-free highways; there would be
a cure for cancer; Federal laws would protect every forest, lake and valley;
everybody would have two-month vacations each year and women would possess
perfect skin at the age of seventy-five.

"Kate, you absolutely
must come back home," said Maxwell Woodson Browning, Kate's favorite
uncle, who had been a career diplomat before his retirement.
 
"It's dangerous to stay in Europe"

"Uncle Max, why are you
so pessimistic?
 
What about
the
Munich Pact? Surely Hitler has what he wants?
 
And he couldn't be so foolish as to try anything against France
—
we have the Maginot Line, and Hitler's soldiers are nothing but a poor,
ill-equipped rabble
—
everyone knows that.
 
The Germans haven't got arms, even their
uniforms aren't made out of real wool."

"Propaganda!
 
Don't believe what you hear."

"How silly!
 
Why would French newspapers and radio be full
of propaganda?
 
Aren't they free to print
whatever they believe?"

"Kate, the situation is
dreadfully serious.
 
I'm in contact with
a
number of men who believe as I do that it is only a question of time
before Hitler will try to invade the rest of Europe.
 
You could easily be trapped over there during
a war."

"But, Uncle Max, nobody
wants a war,
nobody
wants to fight again, aren't you being an
alarmist?"

"Kate, you've turned
into a fool!"
 
At such words from a
man whom she had always admired and respected, Kate Mistral began to
pay
attention to what he was trying to tell her.
 
By the end of the evening she was so convinced that she immediately
wrote Julien to come to the United States.

When Mistral received this
first letter he put it aside without rereading it.
 
Such aberration was not worth the postage she
had put on the letter.
 
He was busy
developing a concept for a new series of paintings of olive groves.
 
At such a time he became ferociously
protective of his mental processes.
 
Nothing must intrude on that slow, steady fermentation.
 
Her second and third letters, increasingly
shrill, finally forced him to reply and he wrote angrily and briefly that no
one in the village believed that there would be a war.
 
Hitler didn't have the stomach to face the
French Army.
 
Weren't Kate's relatives
aware that the English had fixed things up with surprisingly good sense for
once in their history?

Now Kate took matters into
her own hands and started to search
north of Danbury for the kind of
farm on which Mistral could be happy.
 
She was sure that as events grew more ominous, he would see that she was
right, as she had been throughout their life together.
 
Knowing Julien, she understood that it was
crucial to find a comfortable studio before she could expect him to move.
 
But then he would follow her, as he always
had, reluctant to the last.
 
She would
return to Félice to drag him back with her as soon as a studio was
organized.