Mistral's Daughter (38 page)

After the game everybody went
from party to party, sampling the various lethal, fruity concoctions, based on
the cheapest available gin, which were served in each suite of rooms.
Drunkenness is the normal way to end a Saturday night throughout the Ivy
League, but Wellesley was a resolutely dry campus.
 
Once there had been rumors of a single beer
party in Munger given by a group known as the Lousy Eleven, but nobody believed
them because the risk was too great:
 
immediate expulsion for anybody drinking on college property.

Teddy loved to drink.
 
Really loved it.
 
There were few better feelings than the shift
in perception that only liquor could produce, that sudden sense that the world
was finally comprehensible and that it lay within her hands.
 
Teddy studied, because it was essential, and
dated and drank her way through three years at college, each more memorable
than the last.

On a Sunday afternoon in the
early fall of her senior year five members of a Harvard singing group, the
Dunster Funsters, drove to Wellesley to visit Teddy.
 
They went frolicking about the famously
beautiful campus, and after they decided not to walk all the way around the
lake, Teddy showed them the Arboretum, the almost hidden, little-explored
collection of rare trees behind the science building.
 
Part of the Arboretum is a thicket of pine
trees, wonderfully scented, its floor covered with inches of fallen needles,
slippery and soft underfoot.
 
Instinctively
they lowered their voices and slowed their pace.
 
They seemed to have arrived at a place that
was no longer Wellesley, that wasn't connected to the Gothic towers and the
high sense of purpose that always hung over that marvelously lovely campus no
matter how lazy the day.

"Drink, Théodora?"
asked one of the boys, pulling a flask out his pocket and sitting down under a
tree.

"Harry!
 
Are you mad?"

"Nothing like a schnapps
in the fresh air
—
come on, there's nobody here but us and you know
we're harmless, alas."

"Don't you dare!"
she shouted, but
the boys were already passing the flask around.
 
The first time they offered it to Teddy she refused but soon, under the
soothing influence of the aroma of the pine needles and the out-of-season softness
of the early October air, she dared to accept one small sip.
 
And then another, and then a third.
 
Harry was absolutely right about drinking
outdoors, it heightened senses that didn't get properly exercised unless you
were a part of nature. And oh, how blissful, how truly blissful it is to be a
part of nature, she thought as she had a generous swallow of Scotch from a
second flask.

"Gin smells bad, bourbon
is too strong, rye is utterly horrid but whoever invented Scotch was a good man
and true," she announced.
 
She felt
that she'd made an important discovery.

"Robert Graves survived
the trenches in World War One drinking a whole bottle of Scotch every
day," Harry's roommate Luther, told her.
 
"I can get by on less than a half of that."

"And you can't even write,"
Harry said., "But I can sing, can't I, Harry?"

"Luther, you can sing,
we all can damn well sing, we all
should
damn well sing!"

And sing they did, softly at
first, harmonizing sweetly on old ballads, their voices so low that the birds
could still be heard.
 
Teddy lay back and
listened in a haze of pleasure.
 
How fine
it was!
 
One by one they sang all the
Funster specialties.
 
Really, she mused,
it would only be fair of Harvard to give me a diploma when these boys graduate
—
I'm as much a part of their classes as they are.
 
When they started singing football songs none
of them noticed that their voices now rang loudly through the little pine
forest. "With the Crimson in Triumph Flashing..."
 
Teddy found herself joining in but her voice
was drowned out by the boys' voices, so she rose from the pine needles and did
a little wild and antic dance.
 
The five
Punsters applauded wildly.

"More, Teddy,
more!"

"Sing the Yale song
—
then I'll dance more."

"Never."

"Traitor
—
you're
a traitor to the Crimson, Théodora."

"Sing the Notre Dame
song," Teddy insisted, capering wickedly.
 

"What the hell
—
we don't play the Irish
—
give the little lady Notre Dame
—
take
it off, Teddy, take it off!"
 
Their
voices rose in the Notre Dame fight song and Teddy cavorted like a shooting
star, a captivating demon in Bermuda shorts, hair-raisingly graceful and quite,
quite drunk.

It was during her bacchic
encore, performed to a roaring Navy finale, "Beat the Army, Beat the Army
Grey!" that Teddy's philosophy professor and his wife, out for an
afternoon's stroll, attracted by the noise, wandered into the pine grove.

Two days later Teddy left
Wellesley for good.
 
Her case had been
investigated and settled with due formality but there had never been any real
question of the outcome.
 
The sin was too
grave.

At Back Bay Station, Teddy
waved a last goodbye to all the grieving and guilty Funsters who had come to
the station to see her off.
 
But, as the
train gathered speed in the outskirts of Boston, she dropped her aching, hot
head to her hands and thought, silly bitch,
silly bitch
, STUPID BITCH!
My fault, totally and absolutely my fault, I knew better!
 
Did I think I could get away with
anything?
 
Did I think I was
invulnerable?
 
Fool, fool, bloody, bloody
fool
!
 
I've lost it all, all lost,
all gone, kicked out of paradise for good and for ever...
 
I'll never be happy again.
 
She would have groaned out loud but she was
in the club car and it was filled with passengers.
 
She had never known such paralyzing
hopelessness.
 
All the fears that had
ever plagued her, all the premonitions that life was too good to be true, that
nothing so wonderful could endure, gathered together in one lump that bulged
rawly in her chest and rose up into her throat.

Teddy sat quite still for
three hours, lanced by misery, drowning in self-reproach as the train traveled
along the route that she had taken so triumphantly to Brown and Yale and
Princeton.
 
All the way to Hartford she
stared unseeingly out of the grimy windows.
 
Finally she roused herself enough to order a sandwich and coffee.
 
As she ate she looked around the club car for
the first time since she had entered it.

At first her gaze was
indifferent, unthinking, her mind didn’t process what her eyes took in, but
after a few minutes she focused, narrowed her concentration.
 
The club car was filled with businessmen and
wherever she looked there was approval.
 
More than just approval, there was intense interest, there was frank
invitation, there was fascination.
 
Teddy
felt the first faint relief from pain that she had known since that moment in
the pine grove when Professor Tompkins stopped dead and said, incredulously,
"Miss Lunel!"
 
Some instinct
made Teddy get up and walk the length of the club car to the little
toilet.
 
She pushed open the door
impatiently and confronted her eyes in the cracked mirror over the
washstand.
 
No matter how she felt
inside, she looked no different than she had only two days ago.
 
She braced herself against the walls, swaying
with the train, as each mile brought her nearer to New York and the
confrontation with Maggy that she dreaded with a fear so great that she
couldn't even begin to face it.

You have to do
something
,
she told herself grimly, looking in the mirror.
 
You can't just show up and say that three years have gone down the
drain.
 
You have to have some project for
the future, some idea of how you plan to lead your life.
 
Three years toward a degree in history is
useless on the job market
—
but I can't come home without a scheme.
 
I've got nothing left but my face, it's as simple
that.
 
But am I right?

In her mind Teddy checked
over every comment she had ever heard Maggy make as she pored over models'
photographs at home in the evening.
 
It
had been seven years since Teddy had spent much time at her mother's agency,
seven years of being absorbed in herself, seven years in which an entire
generation of models had retired, their places taken by new faces, seven years
during which she had only given rare glances to fashion magazines except for
the yearly back-to-school issues.
 
Yet
she had never forgotten the indispensable requisites for a model's face.
 
How often had she heard Maggy repeat them as
she discarded photograph after photograph?

Peering desperately into the
grimy mirror, she went down the list, her heart beating faster and faster.
 
Definite cheekbones; eyes set far apart; a
nose with a distinct shape to it; but not too big or too small; hair that
anything could be done with; clear skin; perfect teeth, a long, long neck; a
small chin, clearly cut; wide jawbones; a high forehead; a well-shaped
hairline; an
uncrowded
face...
 
yes, oh,
yes
, she had them all.
 
She knew she was more than tall enough, she d always been skinny
enough...
 
but was she photogenic?

Teddy knew that only the
camera could decide this.
 
The crucial
question of whether the sum of all the parts, no matter how good, will add up
to a face that
matters
in only two dimensions, without the third
dimension of depth, and minus the help of color, can never be settled by the
eye alone.
 
Maggy never let herself get
too optimistic about a new model's potential until she had seen the test shots
because so many girls didn't photograph as well as they looked in person, just
as some of the best models were oddly unexciting in the flesh.

No, I just can't be sure,
Teddy thought, as she went back to her seat, but at least it's something to try
for, something Mother might approve of...
 
oh, you bloody, silly bitch, who are you kidding?
 
If she wanted me to become a model, why would
she have never mentioned it? Why would she have sent me to Wellesley?
 
But better a straw than nothing.

After her disappointment,
after her anger, Maggy asked herself a sudden question.
 
Why was her daughter so punished, in such disgrace
for drinking on campus when, at Teddy's age, she had been living in sin with a
married man and bearing an illegitimate child?
 
A little historical perspective, please, she said to herself
grimly.
 
It won't kill her not to
graduate.
 
From this, as Rabbi Taradash
used to say, little children don't die.
 
And it would be good discipline for Teddy to try her hand at modeling.

The Lunel girls were a
regiment of foot soldiers, hardworking, motivated and unspoiled.
 
No one, looking at the fashion pictures and
advertisements they posed for would have guessed at the vast amounts of grit
and energy and willingness to endure discomfort that the frivolous images
represented.

With a few flighty
exceptions, every successful model went to bed early to get eight hours' sleep
to prepare herself for the difficult day ahead. Without nonsense, businesslike,
and as cheerfully as possible, she got up early so as to be ready on the dot of
her first appointment; punctuality was vitally important to editors and clients
and photographers who expected to see every model arrive made-up and ready to
work, on the stroke of the hour.
 
Dependability was the sister virtue to punctuality; a model wouldn't
cancel a booking for anything less than hospitalization, and even if she shook
with fatigue between shots, she never let herself show it when the camera was
on her.
 
Tiredness was something she
accepted as part of the money she earned, now as much as forty dollars hour for
top models.

Forty dollars an hour.
 
The sum still astonished Maggy even she
fought to push it still higher.
 
In
Montparnasse, when she’d arrived there, the average artist's model worked for
the equivalent of sixty cents for three hours of posing.
 
Of course, once Paula had taken her in hand,
she'd made double that, forty cents an hour standing naked in an unheated
studio in the middle of a Paris winter.
 
She'd managed to live on it, even to pay her rent, buy her clothes, wear
a fresh carnation every day
—
even to support Julien Mistral for one
unforgettable perfect spring. Maggy paused and tried hard to imagine herself
back in the skin of that girl.
 
What had
she thought about, how had she felt?
 
Flashes of memory were vivid, the rest was lost.