Mistral's Daughter (43 page)

Nadine, at six, already had
all sorts of little tricks to get what she wanted.
 
Frequently Mistral caught her out in lies,
especially against the servants.
 
When he
insisted that she should be punished, Kate grew angry.
 
"She's just imaginative, oversensitive,
at her age she can't be expected to know the difference
—
don't be so
moralistic Julien."
 
Mistral thought
otherwise. Like all adults he knew how easy it was to lie and he was deeply
suspicious of a child who had learned so young to do it so well.
 
But Marte Pollison, who had children of her
own, conspired with Kate to spoil Nadine in spite of the discipline that the
nurse tried vainly to impose.
 
When
Mistral talked to Kate about it she just laughed and said that it was typically
French to expect children to be like little adults.
 
Didn't he realize that her daughter was not
an ordinary child?
 
She was special and
she had a wonderfully inquisitive little mind.

As he swam underwater after
he fell into the pool Mistral thought grimly that inquisitive mind or not, he
would teach her not creep up behind him on the diving board, but when he
surfaced Nadine had prudently vanished.
 
Sly.
 
She had been born sly and
manipulative he told himself and dismissed her from his mind.

As Julien Mistral floated in
his pool he thought about his work.
 
It
had been six months now that he had been groping toward the beginnings of a
series of paintings inspired by shapes of grapevines in winter.
 
His studio floor was covered with sketches
and studies but only he knew that when he woke up each morning he no longer
felt the gut-filling urge to leap out of bed and paint until the light
faded.
 
Only he knew that he lay under
the quilt of the bed with the taste of fear in his mouth, with a churning in
his stomach, with a weak and contemptible desire to fall asleep again so that
he wouldn't have to face the fact that his fire burned lower and lower.
Nevertheless, Mistral sketched all day, every day, wandering through his
vineyards and those of his neighbors, each stroke of his charcoal based on a
fear of death.
 
He worked to keep death
away, every motion of his fingers a useless protest against even thinking about
death.

Ever since his fiftieth
birthday he had been obsessed by this thought.
 
Which came first? he wondered.
 
The idea of death or the loss of that urge to paint that was the same as
death itself? Mistral had always cared nothing for the lives or opinions of
other artists but he found himself wondering if any of them had ever lived
through the arid stretch of sand and rock in which he found himself Wandering.
 
It was not that he could not paint...
 
technically he had such mastery that he could
continue to paint for as long as he lived, but something had disappeared from
his work, and he could not deny it to himself even if the public could be
fooled
—
who could not fool those credulous cretins?

He searched and searched for
the reason.
 
The nerves of his eyes were
as alert as ever; he
saw
with the vision that had always possessed
him... but he was not
driven
to record what he saw, except by that fear
that he would die if he stopped.
 
Where
was the failure, he wondered, where was the lack of connection, no, no... not
lack of connection but lack of
appetite
.
 
Yes, that was it, that was what it was.

Julien Mistral shuddered even
though the water he floated in was warm, for he knew that there were many
things in life that could be learned and many that could be achieved with hard
work but that appetite must spring from within a man, and well forth without
his conscious effort.
 
Just as no wise
doctor has ever been able to explain why, at the end of nine months, the womb
begins to work to expel the child, no one knows what causes the divine hunger
of the artist, no one can tell you what temptation must be put before him to
drive him to appease his appetite day after day.
 
Should that appetite falter... should that
appetite dry up... if he had believed in God, Julien Mistral would have prayed.

18

"It's the oddest
thing," said Marietta Norton to Bill Hatfield, "but I believe I'm
actually feeling a bit apprehensive.
 
I
haven't felt apprehensive since I heard about Pearl Harbor."

"Apprehensive, hell, I'm
terrified...
 
The last three guys who
tried to get Mistral's picture came home empty-handed
—
all they had on
film was the back of his head.
 
But they
didn't have our secret weapon
—
 
La Belle Théodora."

The fashion editor and the
photographer leaned back against the cushions of the suitcase-filled old
Renault taxi they were taking to
La Tourrello
from Le Prieuré
—
the hotel that had once been the pension of Madame Blé
—
in
Villeneuve-les-Avignon, where they had spent the previous night.
 
Behind them in another taxi were Berry, Sam
and Teddy.
 
They had been in France for
almost ten days and after this afternoon's work they would be ready to return
to Paris, and a day later fly back to New York with their objectives
accomplished.
 
Marietta Norton's
intention had been to photograph her resort fashions in the studios of the
three greatest living French artists
—
Picasso, Matisse and Mistral
—
and through Darcy's connections in the art world she had been granted
permission by all of them.

In one day, in Vallauris,
Bill Hatfield had shot fifteen rolls of film of Picasso and Teddy. There, on
the Chemin du Fournas, Picasso rented two large studios in a building and split
them in half, one part devoted to sculpture and the other to painting and
engraving.

In the sculpture studio Berry
had hooked Teddy into a strapless, black silk organdy dress printed with
enormous white bows.
 
Balancing lightly
on her thin, high-heeled, black sandals, she stood amidst the mountain of spare
metal parts that Picasso collected for his sculpture: bicycle chains and
handlebars, wheels and pulleys of every size, any piece of odd iron that he
could find discarded on a junk heap, some of which would be transformed into
his animal heads and female forms and the great
She-Goat
, while Picasso,
an aging Pan in a boiler room, flirted delightedly as she tried to avoid
snagging her thin stockings on nails and barbed wire.
 
Teddy quickly changed into a cornflower
printed silk and the entire entourage
 
moved into his painting studio where Picasso, peeking out from behind a
potbellied stove, proudly pointed out the thick spiderwebs he encouraged to
swing everywhere in the forty-foot room.
 
Bill went mad with excitement, trying to capture the expressions on
Picasso's face as he talked to Teddy.
 
Whenever he dared, he shot picture after picture of the messy, crowded
studio itself filled with the pots of paint and tools and old cans and
equipment of all sorts from which the wizardry was distilled.

From Vallauris they had
driven to Nice to find Matisse, bedridden in his bright hotel room at the
Regina, living in a magnificent muddle of plants, singing birds, cooing doves
and the brilliant fantasia of the bright paper cutouts he made now that he
could longer paint.

Matisse had welcomed them
with the sweetness for which was famous, enchanted with Teddy in her
harem-bright dress... a shocking pink shantung splashed with an orange print,
with her lovely bare arms making an arabesque that, he told her, none of his
odalisques could equal. Teddy's clothes had been changed often enough to fill
eight pages of
Mode
with the new spring prints.
 
Now, at Mistral's domain, Marietta Norton
planned to wind up with shots of the packable clothes that would travel
everywhere next winter, four more pages of pictures in all.

In the second taxi Teddy sat
in the front seat next to the driver.
 
She was happy to leave the back seat to Berry and Sam, who seemed to be
achieving an interesting relationship based on the limp and dazed condition in
which Berry had staggered back last night into the room she shared with
Teddy.
 
Happy Berry, thought Teddy, I
envy you.
 
This is a country for lovers.

As the taxi passed l'Isle sur
la Sorgue, with its ancient waterwheels still turning in the canals that
surrounded the city, Teddy consulted the map.
 
At least another half-hour to Félice, she thought, and her stomach
clutched into a ball of nerves.
 
Did all
the others know that her mother had posed for Mistral? she wondered once
again.
 
The seven paintings that formed
the
Rouquinne
series had never been publicly exhibited since the show in
New York in 1931, but anybody with any knowledge of the history of modern art
must have seen them in countless reproductions.
 
Yet how many people in 1952 would ever connect them to Maggy?

Teddy had been in college in
a darkened auditorium in the art building when a color slide of one of the
series had been flashed on the screen in Art 101.
 
She had never really looked at the picture
before with close attention, but then, as the lecturer talked on about Mistral,
she had scrutinized the model's face and realized, with a hot black flash of
sureness, that the abandoned redheaded girl who displayed herself with such
ripe sensuality had the same features as her remote, businesslike, stiffly
coiffed, perfectly dressed mother.

On her next vacation Teddy
had screwed up her nerve and ventured to ask Maggy about the painting but she
had been granted only a few careless words. "I modeled briefly for artists
when I was very young
—
it was so long ago that I've forgotten the
details.
 
Naturally we all posed naked
—
I thought you knew that," Maggy had said in a way that clearly indicated
that she had no intention of discussing her life in Paris in any further
detail.
 
Teddy had been too intimidated
to try to find out any more.
 
Somehow her
mother's existence before she came to the United States was almost as much of a
taboo as the mystery of her own birth, the never-to-be-asked questions about
her father.

Did Maggy have any
understanding of the baffled, tongue-tied bruised frustration that Teddy had
felt for so long?
 
Or, to be fair, Teddy
told herself, was she not a coward herself? Why had she been unable to confront
Maggy with her questions, to insist on getting answers, no matter how much it
might have shamed her mother?
 
Oh, the
old dilemma, the two sides to the argument that she had held with herself all
those years while she was growing up.

In the past four years,
living on her own, financially free of Maggy, she had almost forgotten the
tormented, twisted bewilderments of her childhood.
 
They had come to seem less and less important
as her life grew more crowded and self-centered.
 
It was only because she would be in the
presence of Mistral so soon, that now they were filling her mind again.
 
Yet, had this entire trip not been a kind of
search?

Maggy had struggled to
prevent her from taking the
Mode
booking as soon as she had learned what
it was to involve, but Ted
 
had
insisted.
 
She waited to see if Maggy
would finally come right out and say why she didn't want Teddy to go to
Provence, but Maggy had given a dozen reasons that had nothing to do with Mis
tral, and in revenge, Teddy had resisted all her arguments. What could Maggy be
afraid of? Teddy wondered, her heart beating faster as the taxi turned off the
road to Apt.
 
What secret could she have
that would still shock anyone after all these years?
 
Could she possibly be so naïve as to imagine
that because she had once posed naked for a painter who must be an old man by
now, that it would horrify her worldly daughter?

"Berry," she said
softly, "we're almost there.
 
Better
put on some lipstick before Marietta gets a look at you."

"I'm sorry to keep you
waiting," Kate Mistral explained to Marietta Norton, "but Julien is
still working and I don't dare to tell him you're here."

"I hope the light
doesn't go," Bill Hatfield said anxiously.

"Don't worry.
 
I made him promise to stop at five tonight
and reminded him again at breakfast
—
he rarely agrees to do this sort
thing, you know, but when I can get him to say yes he's usually very good about
it."

"We're awfully indebted
to you," Marietta said, praying that one more expression of gratitude
might hasten the emergence of Julien Mistral.
 
Picasso had given them a whole day but Mistral had only agreed to the
hours of the late afternoon.

"Not a bit
—
I've
been a
Mode
reader all my life
—
I get it here by mail,"
Kate said, smiling, charming, very much the wife of the great painter.
 
She had led them all through the
mas
,
with its profusion of high, white-plastered, dark-beamed rooms, fashionably
spare and shining with hexagonal terra-cotta tile floors.
 
Baskets of dried lavender stood here and
there amid the fine country antiques.
 
At
the rear of the house, two large wings, built of old stones, and connected by a
high stone wall that protected them from the winds, faced each other across a
central swimming pool surrounded by grass.
 
One of the wings was Mistral's studio, its doors closed, and the other
was the new pool pavilion where a room had been set aside in which Teddy could
change.
 
For almost an hour they all
waited, drinking tall glasses of cassis-flavored lemonade in the shade of a
vine-heaped trellis.

Kate Mistral took no interest
in any of them but Marietta Norton.
 
She
had an unerring capacity to pick out the most important person in any group and
as far as she was concerned the only one of this band worth talking to was the
fashion editor.
 
Not only could she catch
up on news of some of her carefully tended friendships with people who shaped
opinion in New York, but she could lay the foundations for a connection to
Marietta that would someday, somehow be valuable.

Kate had watched with disgust
as the attention of the art world turned toward the new painters, particularly
those of the New York School, and although she had no fears that Mistral was
not secure in the fame that had grown since 1926, she was too clear-eyed not to
notice how Picasso, as firmly enthroned as Mistral, was no longer considered to
have any relevance to what the new painters were doing, how he was attacked on
every side by the younger generation of art critics.

It was not enough for Kate
that the major museums of the world competed to give Mistral shows, that art
historians took the most serious interest in him, that he sold every painting
he allowed to be shown.
 
She wanted
continuing publicity, particularly in the most fashionable publications, that
would prevent any public slackening of interest in Mistral.

She knew that Mistral had
never given a damn whether his art was fashionable
—
she would never
have dared to use the word in front of him when speaking of anything but a
dress
—
but she, Madame Julien Mistral, did not intend ever to find
herself the wife of a painter in whom the fashionable world had lost
interest.
 
The Impressionists had ignored
the great Delacroix and the public had followed their lead.
 
The new Abstractionists must never presume to
discount Mistral. These pages in
Mode
would be helpful
—
all topflight
publicity was helpful, although "publicity" was a word she would have
feared to use even more than "fashionable" in talking to Mistral.

While Kate chatted effusively
on a wicker sofa with Marietta the rest of the
Mode
group sat at a
little distance.
 
Only Teddy stood
up
the entire time in her sleeveless, white jersey Anne Fogarty dress.
 
The top of the dress was tightly molded and
finely pleated, crisscrossing over her breasts into a deeply wrapped décolleté,
and spreading into a vast ballerina skirt that stopped less than ten inches
from the floor.

To emphasize the illusion
that Teddy belonged to some unseen
corps-de-ballet
, Marietta had added a
belt like a tight gold ring, gold ballet slippers from Capezio and a gold band
that held her mass of red hair back off her brow.
 
Teddy looked as insubstantial as an
iridescent soap bubble in the dress that, in theory, was uncrushable.
 
However, Berry hadn't dared risk letting her
sit down in it for there were eight stiffly starched crinolines underneath
holding out the light fabric. Teddy leaned over carefully and sipped a mouthful
of
 
liquid from a glass that Berry held
for her. All she needed was to spill the pink lemonade over the dress, she
thought.
 
Ridiculously her hands were
shaking.
 
Why the hell didn't he come
out?