Mistral's Daughter (35 page)

Mistral gave his toil of the
day for the promise of painting at night, the shutters of the studio tightly
closed, so as not to show the mild illumination he managed to create with the
candles that had been stockpiled before the war by Kate, who believed as firmly
as any French
châtelaine
in a bulging larder, far-sighted Kate who had
piled up bars of soap as if they were gold ingots; who, much to Mistral's
scorn, had filled armoires with blankets and dozens of heavy, hand-woven linen
sheets that had never been used.

Now these sheets, treated
with a kind of sizing made by boiling rabbit bones into a glue, served him as
canvases.
 
They were priceless, his most
precious possessions.
 
Bitterly he
regretted the bonfires of former years.
 
What would he not have given to have those paintings back so that he
could paint over them?
 
With growing
despair he saw his stock of paints dwindle, although he rationed himself as
severely as possible.
 
Still, while he
was working, sometimes
he would forget, and lost in the trance of
creation he would use paint as he always had.
 
Then, as the candles guttered, Mistral was overwhelmed with the blackest
misery as he confronted the half-empty tubes that had been almost full mere
hours before.

A few weeks after the Germans
came to Avignon a black Citroën stopped before the gates to Mistral's
mas
.
 
A German officer in his green uniform got
out, followed by two soldiers with cocked machine guns.
 
Rigid and pale, Marte Pollison made haste to
open the gates so that they could drive in.

"Is this the home of
Julien Mistral?" the officer asked in passable French.

"Yes, sir."

"Go and get him."

No Frenchman answered the
summons of a German officer without fear, even Mistral, who had no hidden radio
tuned to the BBC wavelength, who had taken no part in any Resistance effort,
who was perfectly
en règle
with the Vichy authorities.

The captain introduced
himself with a flourish.
 
"Käpitan
Schmitt."
 
He extended his hand
and Mistral shook it.
 
The German
waved
his arm at the soldiers and they lowered their guns.

"It is a great honor to
meet you, Monsieur Mistral," Schmitt
said.
 
"For years I have admired your
work.
 
In fact I am a bit of a painter
myself
—
only an amateur, of course, but nevertheless I have a great
love of all art."

"Thank you,"
Mistral replied.
 
The man sounded like one
of the dozens of daubers he had taken pains to avoid in the past.
 
His uniform seemed totally at odds with his
friendly words.

"I was stationed in
Paris until recently and I had the pleasure of visiting Picasso in his
studio.
 
I had hoped that if it wasn't
inconvenient you might allow me to see your own studio
—
I have read
much about it."
 

"Certainly,"
Mistral answered.
 
He led the way to the
st wing of the
mas
.
 
Schmitt
looked carefully at the canvases Mistral had piled against the walls.
 
His exclamations of pleasure were perceptive
and intelligent and showed a thorough knowledge of the body of Mistral's work.
Before the war, he explained, growing more talkative, he had visited Paris
every year in the autumn to see the new exhibitions and tour the museums.
 
At his home outside Frankfurt he had his own
little studio, and even now, in Avignon, whenever he had the time, he worked at
his portable easel.
 
"I can't resist
painting, it's my weakness.
 
I painted in
Paris every weekend for two years, you understand how it is."

"Perfectly."

The captain gave his soldiers
an order and one of them ran out to the black car and returned a minute later
with a bottle of cognac.

"I thought..." the
officer said with a trace of shyness, presenting the bottle to Mistral,
"please allow me
—
I would be honored." Mistral stared hard at
this polite, enthusiastic, cultivated man who was the only person to have seen
his new paintings in two and a half years.
 
Paintings that were his body, his heartbeats, his breath, his every
vital function.
 
The soldiers had
disappeared.

"Sit down," Mistral
said, "I'll get some
glasses.
 
Let's have a drink."

Käpitan Schmitt became a
regular visitor, dropping by every two or three weeks.
 
On his first visit he offered to bring
Mistral tubes of paint
and Mistral accepted them eagerly.

Later in the year, when the
Todt Organization, which was fast becoming the largest employer in France,
swept through the Lubéron, drafting thousands of farmers to build submarine
bases, blockhouses and airfields, Schmitt took Mistral's dossier and marked it
in such a way that he was exempt from the work which would
have finally
forced him to leave his studio.

If his neighbors concerned
themselves with his friendship
—
for that
was what it had become
—
with a German officer, Mistral never knew
about it, for he no longer
went to the café in Félice.
 
The
atmosphere there was closed, suspicious and dismal, there was nothing left to
drink, and only a few old men and young boys ever ventured out to play boules.

One day as he came back late
from his cabbages, Mistral found Madame Pollison shrieking with anger.

"They came and took
everything!
 
Everything.
 
The last chicken, the turnips, the jam, the
ration books
—
they searched the house, the young bandits, they even
searched me!
 
Oh, Monsieur Mistral, if
only you'd been here..."

"Who came?" Mistral
demanded roughly.

"I don't know, I've
never seen them before, not anyone from around here
—
young savages,
gangsters, criminals
—
they went toward Lacoste through the
woods..."

"Did they go into the
studio?"

"They went everywhere,
there wasn't a door they didn't open..."

Mistral
ran to the studio and examined it quickly.
 
He came
screaming,
 
"Where are my sheets?"
 

"They
took those too, and the ones in the house as well, and all the blankets..."

"All
the sheets?"

"What
could I do, Monsieur Mistral?
 
I ask
you?" she cried, indignation mingled with fury. "I tell you they were
gangsters."

When
Käpitan Schmitt came, the next day, on one of his regular visits, bringing as
usual a painting he had completed for Mistral to look at and criticize, he
found the painter haggard.

"What's
wrong?
 
Has anything happened?"

"I've
been robbed," Mistral answered grimly.
         

"Was
it Germans?
 
If so, I'll look into it,
rest assured."

"No,
I don't know who they were
—
young bandits, my housekeeper says.
 
A bunch of thugs."

"The
Maquis
?"

"All
I know is that they were strangers, she'd never seen them before."

"What
did they take?" Schmitt asked, concerned over the mask of despair that was
Mistral's face.

"Many
things, of no importance, damn them to bloody, eternal hell, but why did they
take my
sheets?
How can I work? I haven't a single canvas left.
 
I could kill them!
 
Bastards!
 
Scum!"

"Where
did they go?"

"I
don't know
—
Madame Pollison said toward Lacoste, on the forest
road.
 
By now they could be
anywhere."

"I'll
see what I can do to get you some canvases
—
it isn’t easy, there is
almost none anywhere, but I'll try."
 
Two days later Schmitt returned with his car filled with the wide linen
bedsheets.

"No
canvas
—
but I got you your sheets back," he said beaming.

"How...?"

 
"We found the thieves in the woods, near
where you said they had gone
—
a regular nest of them...
 
they were loaded with stuff
—
they’d
been out 'requisitioning' all over, or so it looked.
Maquis."

"They
weren't Maquis!"
  

"Oh,
yes, Julien, they were.
 
Twenty of
them.
 
Don't worry, the little swine
won't bother anyone ever again."

15

Shortness, Teddy Lunel
thought with wistful,
hopeless longing as she looked about her in the
classroom, shortness is the answer.
 
It
must be.

There had been so many times
in the past seven years at the Elm School, a small, private school just off
Central Park West, when she had finally
decided that her lack of
popularity must be due to one or another of the things about her that made her
different.

She didn't, like all the
other girls, have a father or a family.
 
Her mother, unlike any of theirs, worked all day.
 
She had skipped third grade and was a year
younger than her classmates. Eventually Teddy had worked
it out that it
had to be her height that caused her to be relegated to the ranks of the
outsiders, the few girls who were lumped together like untouchables by the
formidable band of the acceptable girls, who decided, with as much gravity as
if they were electing a pope, which of them was the most popular, which the
next most popular, right on down to that fatal line that excluded Teddy
forever.

She had never been invited to
a birthday party unless some mother democratically insisted on inviting the
entire class; during the lunch hour no group ever saved a seat for her in the
cafeteria; when clumps
of girls formed to giggle at secrets during
recess, Teddy had never been beckoned to join their priceless intimacy.

This exclusion seemed to have
reached back to the first day of first grade, there was no appeal that could be
made to change it, no person from whom she could
seek an explanation
—
it simply existed, with mysterious finality.

There was no one wise in the
ways of little girls who could
have told Teddy that her extraordinary
beauty was, at her age, a calamity that set her apart; nobody to point out that
her peers weren't able to deal with a beauty so uncompromising, so inescapable
that it made her seem to belong to a different species from their own.
 
When adults complimented her, and few of them
could resist, she
completely discounted whatever they said for they
didn't know that no matter how she looked no one liked her.

Just as Teddy couldn't see
herself in the mirror and know
that she was already a classic beauty,
neither could she draw back from the situation and understand the ways of
school.
 
How could
a
thirteen-year-old girl be philosophical about the need that exists in children,
as it does in all other social groups, to form up into layers of clubbiness and
that in order for any of the layers to seem ultimately desirable, there must
always be one group that does not belong to any of them?

This same phenomenon operates
in leper colonies, among whores, in jails and on the sidewalks of
Calcutta.
 
None of this knowledge would
have comforted Teddy Lunel, who, at thirteen, had reached her full growth of
five feet ten and a half inches, standing three inches above Mr. Simon, her
eighth-grade teacher.
  

Maggy had no understanding of
Teddy's position as one of the pariahs of the class.
 
Teddy had never been able to admit it to her
mother, who loved her with such a proud love, a love that made an implicit
demand that Teddy be happy, be exceptional, be all that Maggy had ever dreamed
of in a child.
 
Teddy was terrorized by
the possibility of jeopardizing her position as the joy of her mother’s life if
she diluted that love with the reality of her sad, lonely chagrin and
bewilderment.
 
She hid her wounds from
Maggy as if she had indeed done something so awful that she deserved
them.''
  
Very early in her life she
learned to deceive, quickly she discovered that she could create a fantasy of
an untroubled day that Maggy would believe and find reassuring.

Maggy often thought that
Teddy lacked normal vanity.
 
But perhaps
it was just as well, considering how young her daughter was, she concluded,
feeling wise and careful, for to Maggy, whose business was based on women's
beauty, it seemed that Teddy had been designed by witchcraft.
 
She was a creature of the most romantic
contrasts, her hair, a dark red, its curling strands held a bewilderment of
colors from almost brown to almost gold, her skin was so pale that when she
flushed she seemed to flash into a moment of passionate fever, her delicate
mouth was so mobile, so firmly outlined, such a riotous natural pink that it
looked as if she were we
aring
lipstick.
 
Under wonderfully astonished eyebrows, she had her father's eyes, blue
and green and gray by turn, but they were set as far apart as Maggy's own.
 
Her nose was splendid, a real nose,
Maggythought proudly, a fine, shapely firm nose that gave Teddy a faintly
haughty air.
 
It was, admittedly, perhaps
too important a nose for a face without makeup, a child's face, to carry, but
time would take care of that.
 
Maggy
never really saw Teddy as another child among children, because her practiced
eye, alert to detect beauty, saw the woman she would become, not the too tall,
too proud, too
different-looking girl she was.

Although Maggy had no idea
that Teddy would have joyfully tra
ded
her beauty to be little and cute,
she had always been concerned
about the fact that Teddy had not one
relative in the world, no family
but herself.

In the earliest days of the
Lunel Agency, when Maggy was still working
from home, she had watched with
gratitude as her first models
treated Teddy as if she were their baby
sister.
 
Soon, when Maggy moved to a
suite of offices in the Carnegie Hall building, adding
more phone lines
and more assistants and more office space every year, she had asked Nanny
Butterfield, and later Mademoiselle Gallirand, who replaced her, to bring Teddy
to the office after schoo1 to play for a few hours several times a week.

Later, when Teddy had
homework, there was a special desk set up for her in a quiet corner and the Lunel
girls, who now numbered a hundred and twenty, would pop into Teddy's
"office" to give her a quick
hug, show her a new picture of
themselves, complain about their aching feet or ask for an apple from the pile
that Maggy kept heaped in a basket on Teddy's desk.
 
They were a wonderful band of honorary
relatives,
Maggy thought defiantly, as she shopped at Saks and De Pinna on Saturday, when
the office was closed, for yet more pastel cashmere sweaters, yet another
expensive imported tweed or flannel skirt for Teddy to wear to school.

The Elm School was only a
short walk away from the big high apartment Maggy rented in the handsome San
Remo, at Seventy-fourth and Central Park West, overlooking the park.
 
The towers of Fifth Avenue rose facing them
across the entire width of the park and it was precisely this
separation that had made Maggy decide upon the apartment, although she could
easily have afforded to live
in the most elegant part of the East
Sixties or Seventies and sent her daughter to one
of the better known,
more fashionable schools
on the East Side,
 
Teddy would have been in constant danger of
bumping into a Kilkullen or a McDonnell or a Murray, or a Buckley: the East
Side was the
quartier
of the Establishment Catholic and after
Maggy had lost her job at Bianchi's, after the scandal of the Mistral
exhibition, she had tried to keep her child at a distance. It is ridiculously
easy in any city to just drop out of the small circle of fashionable
neighbor-hoods and schools.
 
Particularly; Maggy thought, when you have never been a part of it.

Teddy roamed the Sam Remo as
if it were her fief.
 
There wasn’t one of
the black elevator operators whose life history she didn’t know; she was a
favorite with the doormen who were always ready to lend her a piece of chalk
for sidewalk hopscotch, at which, with her long legs, she was a natural
champion.
 
When she wasn't in school she
was a volatile, talkative girl, always in motion, on roller skates, on her
bike, or belly-flopping down the hills of the park on her sled in winter.
 
Like the Pied Piper, she often led a romping
file of children much younger than she, and when they were tired of playing,
Teddy told them complicated stories about tropical jungles and raft trips down
the Amazon.

There were other days,
usually in the spring when a soft rain fell and the first forsythia splashed
its yellow promise over the gray park, on which Teddy would take solitary
refuge in
Anne Hathaway's Garden, at the foot of an old stone tower.
There, her imagination flaming, her hopes dancing, her heart high, she would
dream her vague, glorious silvery dreams of love, and wonder when, oh when,
would it happen to her?

When Teddy, at thirteen,
graduated from eighth grade, she led the class into the auditorium, a decision
reached in a half-hour of wrangling among the teachers about whether her height
would
be less noticeable if she were first in line or last, since
putting her in the middle was obviously unthinkable.
      
 

As she walked across the
stage in her white dress to get her diploma there was an outburst of applause
from the audience.

Maggy had invited Darcy, the
Longworths, Gay and Oliver Barnes, and a dozen of her favorite models to come
and see her daughter finish elementary school.
 
The twelve top cover girls of 1941, decked in their best hats, whooped
and hollered and whistled as they watched Teddy, her eyes downcast so that she
wouldn't trip, walk with a grace that some of them would never be able to
learn.
 
"My God, Doe," said one
of them who had just had her twenty-fourth birthday, "wouldn't it be
wonderful to be young again?" "I still am, darling," Doe replied
but a sudden finger of doubt touched her heart.
 
She, too, was twenty-four.

In high school Teddy
resolutely forged an alliance with a few of the
unpopular girls.
 
Sally was a bookworm who wore thick glasses
and sweated too much;
 
Harriet stuttered
and wore orthopedic shoes, and Mary-Anne was the teacher's pet, always sitting
in the front row of every class, ready to wave her hand triumphantly when
others failed to know the answers, but the three of them became her best
friends.

Teddy stopped going to the
park or to the Lunel Agency after school in favor of doing her homework with
her new allies.
 
The four of them would
gather at one another's houses and finish their assignments as quickly as
possible so that they could get down to the real business of these afternoons,
the discussion, in unfailingly fascinating detail, of their romantic
dreams.
 
They had no actual boy in mind,
just a vague notion of someone male, somewhere in the distant future. The most
burning question they dealt with was that of the wedding night.
 
How could you wear a nightgown like those
that their mothers possessed?
 
After all,
it was possible to
see through
those nightgowns
—
they had all
sneaked into their mothers' drawers held the pretty, fancy things up and made
sure of this incomhensible, frighteningly strange fact.
 
How could you get from the bathroom to the
bed wearing a gown that was almost transparent?
 
How could you, assuming that you wore a bathrobe over the nightgown,
ever
take the bathrobe off?
 
Would you
actually get
into
the bed?
 
Or
would you just lie on top of it?
 
And
then
what?
 
At that point they all stopped
talking in a flurry of giggles and went into the kitchen for brownies and Cokes.

One day Teddy had tried to
tell them what happened next. '
'
The father takes
his penis and puts it in the mother's vagina and seeds come out that
swim..."
 
She was interrupted by a
chorus of disgusted shrieks and squeals.
 
Her friends didn't want to hear such revolting details and they could
not believe that Teddy's mother
—
even if she did work
—
had ever
really sat down with
her and told her these horrible things.
 
At barely fourteen they hadn't really
recovered from the shock of their first periods and what Maggy called "the
facts of life" were far too unromantic and entirely too
clinical
for them to bear.

What then, Teddy wondered,
would they think if they knew the whole truth about her?
 
If they couldn't even listen to how a baby
was made, what would they say if they knew she was a bastard?
 
Oh, Mom had used a different term, of course,
but it didn't change the truth.

She couldn't remember how old
she had been when Maggy, finding it easier to express herself in the French
they spoke together than in the English they spoke with everyone else, had told
her that she was "
une enfante naturelle
"
—
but it was so
long ago that she had had to
grow up
to the knowledge, gradually
working out what exactly it meant long after she had first heard the
words.
 
How had
Maggy let her know
that her background was something she must not investigate?
 
How had she been taught to know how to say,
in a way that stopped all further questions, that her father was dead?
 
She couldn't explain it even to herself, but
it was long ago and she accepted it absolutely.