Mistral's Daughter (46 page)

The apartment they occupied
formed the entire second floor of an eighteenth-century mansion that had
formerly belonged to a rich merchant in the fashionable Prefecture
quarter.
 
Its tall windows opened onto
the flower beds and lawns, dotted with strutting peacocks of the Calvet
Museum.
 
Mistral had turned the largest
room into a studio and next to it, in the bedroom, they had installed an
enormous canopied bed with royal blue velvet hangings embroidered on the inside
with scenes from a stag hunt.
 
On chilly
nights the hangings could be closed to shelter the bed on all sides.

There was no central heating
in the apartment and each of the rooms had a huge fireplace, where, from early
November on, fires of spicy eucalyptus and pine burned all day and all night.
The studio was kept warmer than any of the other rooms of the house by a
baroque Viennese stove, made of white porcelain, like a mound of whipped cream,
taller than Mistral himself, that he had bought from an antique dealer to keep
Teddy warm as she posed for him, as she did almost every day in the afternoons.

Never before in his life, he
told Teddy, had he stayed up as late as he did now, sitting with her captive in
his arms in front of their bedroom fire, talking and laughing far into the
night, cracking walnuts, roasting chestnuts and sipping from the contents of
the tall, slender-necked bottles of the colorless brandies distilled from
fruits, which she bought for their irresistible names:
prunelle de buissons
,
mûre sauvage
,
églantine
and
myrtille des bois
.
 
Nor had he ever slept so late.
 
Now, when he woke, he lay and watched Teddy
sleep until she opened her eyes. Then, often, they made love in luxurious
forgetfulness of time and even space.
 
Afterward Teddy would discover that she had so lost herself that she
didn't know where she was for an instant, as she looked up into the embroidered
forest with its running huntsmen, leaping hounds and tiny-petaled wild flowers.

"Does Madame want
another soaping?" the assistant asked.
 
Teddy nodded in assent and relaxed even more deeply as she contemplated
the details of her new life.
 
They lived
like sovereigns, secure in their whirlwind of love, content to kiss and look at
each other and know that they were right.

Every day before lunch they
went for an
aperitif
to the Café du Palais, where they never wearied of
the spectacle of the Place de l'Horloge, a vast, open square bordered by rows
of venerable plane trees with their motley, piebald bark, filled with swooping
flocks of pigeons and animated by the citizens of Avignon who promenaded there
every midday, crowding the many cafés.
 
At twilight they often walked to the top of the Rocher des Doms, where
they found a park planted in roses that flowered till Christmas.
 
Sometimes, when there was a film starring Gérard
Phillipe or Jean Gabin or Michel Morgan, they went to one of the local movie
houses, and in the intermission, when the ice cream sellers sold their wares up
and down the aisles, Teddy would eat two Esquimos and Mistral would eat four.

It seemed to Teddy that
although she sometimes noticed people glancing at them on the street or in a
restaurant, no one in Avignon concerned himself with them.
 
Mistral was a figure they had been accustomed
to seeing for many years, coming and going, and if he now appeared with a young
woman, it would be indiscreet and impolite to stare.

They had made no friends
except for the doctor and his wife who occupied the
rez-de-chaussée
just
below them.
 
Two friends were all they
needed, for Julien Mistral knew painful primitive feelings.
 
He wanted to stand guard over Teddy and never
let her out of his sight.
 
He hid his
suffering every time she left the apartment on an errand, he woke in the night
to listen to her breathing; when men looked at her he would have gnashed his
teeth at them if he could have.
 
She was
all woman to him, his bride, his child, sometimes as tender as a mother or as
playful as the sister he'd never had, always his treasure, unknowable by anyone
but him.

Under her turban of soapsuds
Teddy made a wry face as she remembered the letter she had received today from
Maggy.
 
It had been conciliatory, very
different from the first cruel and angry letters Maggy had sent after Teddy had
written about her new life with Julien.
 
Now, Maggy wrote, her only concern was Teddy's future.
 
She was terrified that in some way history
might repeat itself, as if Julien's intention to get a divorce would be no more
successful than Teddy's father's had been.

How could she compare the
cases? Teddy wondered.
 
Kate Mistral was
a Protestant, not a Catholic, and she had married Julien in a civil ceremony,
not a religious one.
 
Teddy tried to
reconcile the Kate Mistral her mother described, a woman Maggy said she had
feared from the moment she met her, a woman she described as having a willpower
greater than Mistral's own, with the woman she herself had met; colorless,
rather fragile, middle-aged and all but fawning over Marietta Norton.

No, Teddy assured herself as
her head was gently massaged, her mother was wrong, she was seeing ghosts.
 
Times had changed.
 
Surely no woman today would continue to hang
on to a man she had utterly lost?

It took the hairdresser a
long time to towel-dry and brush out the long hair that Teddy no longer
bothered to have set.
 
Nor did she wear
any makeup now, except for mascara.
 
She
looked younger than she had since she had started modeling, and her face was
rosy from all the time she spent with Julien in the open air.
 
All the eating and drinking, all the lazy
parade of her days in which the only work she did was to pose for three or four
hours, basking in the heat of the Viennese stove, had made her gain
weight.
 
The Korrigan skirts she had
bought once she had decided to stay in Provence were growing tight, the slacks
she had worn over in the plane from New York were difficult to zip.

I could never work for
Mode
today, Teddy thought, as she strolled to the Café du Palais to meet
Mistral.
 
Marietta Norton would faint if
she saw me now.
 
She stopped in a market
to buy a jar of Mont Ventoux lavender honey, a long loaf of warm bread, a
chalk-white cylinder of goat cheese and a half-kilo of pale yellow farm
butter.
 
The only meal she made was
breakfast, the others they took in restaurants or bought from the
charcuterie
and ate as a picnic in their dining room where the only furniture was two
wide, deep
bergère
armchairs covered in faded yellow brocade and an old,
elaborately inlaid card table on which stood four unmatched, heavy silver
candlesticks.
 
After Kate's immaculate,
well-appointed house Mistral delighted in this approximation of Bohemia.

Teddy looked at her watch and
began to walk quickly toward Place de l'Horloge. As she swung the shopping net
that held her few purchases she saw Mistral hurrying down the street to meet
her, the top of his curly red head, tilted as cavalierly as ever, clearly
visible from a distance above the crowd.
 
Scattering the pigeons on the street by the force of her eagerness,
Teddy began to run.

Kate Mistral stood
thoughtfully in the big, windowless, fire-proof room off Mistral's studio where
sliding metal racks had been installed for storage of his paintings.
 
There, in row after row, protected from the
daylight and from dust, stretched, dated and varnished, but not signed or
framed, stood the best of over a quarter-century of his work.
 
Mistral had never sold the pictures he
thought were the most successful of each year's work.
 
Some years he had kept a half-dozen canvases,
some years only one or two, some years as many as twenty.
 
Kate knew each canvas by heart, knew on which
rack it was held, knew almost to the penny how much each would bring if Étienne
Delage were ever allowed to offer it for sale.
 
She turned on all the lights and walked through the aisles that had been
created to give easy access to the paintings and slid out a rack from the very
back of the storage room.
 
On it stood
the painting of Maggy, naked on the pile of green cushions, most famous of the
Rouquinne
series.
 
Kate had not looked at that
painting since 1931 when it had come back from exhibition in New York but she
had never forgotten that it was there, along with the six others, like a
growing lethal radioactive substance inside a metal container, unseen but
alive.

Oh, yes, she thought, it's
easy to understand.
 
What man wouldn't,
after all, what man could resist?
 
Young
flesh, they all want it at his age, and if they could all afford it they would
line up at the market to buy it by the pound.
 
Julien is no different
—
if anything he's more susceptible than
others, I've always known that nothing matters to him more than the way things
look, than what his eyes can see, surfaces, nothing but surfaces.
 
But what a fool he is, what a vast,
childlike, typically middle-aged fool.
 
You
don't
marry
this, you don't throw away your life for
flesh
!

How long did it take him to
realize that about the mother?
 
Only
months.
 
How I loathed her, that sulky
Jewish girl with nothing but a pouting mouth and a ripe body, that girl who had
never understood what a genius like Julien needed from a woman.
 
Kate’s mouth turned sour in disgust as she
thought of Maggy.
 
That greedy
loose-living girl must have had many lovers after Julien, for obviously this
American was a bastard, why else did she bear her mother's name?

Could it be the mother that
Julien saw in the daughter?
 
Did the man
think he could travel back in time and become young again just by pressing
himself into firm young flesh once more? Her hands were clenched with the
effort not to rend the canvas, not to attack it with one of the sharp tools
that lay about in the studio only a few feet away.

Abruptly, she pushed the rack
back into place.
 
In the seven years
since the war, the seven
Rouquinne
canvases had tripled in price as the
finest examples of Mistral's early work.
 
It was the best investment she'd ever made, she thought grimly, and
she'd sell them tomorrow if she wasn't certain that they'd triple or even
quadruple in value again in the next ten years.
 
She had nothing to gain by parting with them now at any price.
 
But if she did sell, if she finally decided
she couldn't endure their presence on her property any longer, even hidden in
the storage room, she wished she could do it through Adrien Avigdor.
 
If she had to do business with Jews
—
and in the art world it was impossible not to
—
better to deal with the
smartest of them.

Kate remembered her trip to
Paris after the war and her last interview with Avigdor.
 
It had been necessary to see him because he
still had a number of Mistral's paintings that he had sequestered before the
Occupation.
 
She had been afraid that he
would insist that they were still his to sell although his contract with
Mistral had expired, but the man had been more than willing to hand them over
to Delage.

She hadn't understood until
he had told her why he would never do business with Mistral again.
 
Turned away from
La Tourello
, had he
been?
 
Well, what of it?
 
Any Frenchman sheltering Jews did it at the
risk of his life, didn't Avigdor appreciate that?
 
And what did she care that he had discovered
that the same thing had happened to other Jews who had come to Julien for
help?
 
She didn't give a damn if there
had been a dozen or a hundred or only one Jew.

What right had they had to
jeopardize Julien, she demanded of Avigdor as he sat sternly behind his desk in
his sumptuous Right Bank Gallery, wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in
his buttonhole, won, he didn't fail to tell her, for his activities in the
Resistance.
 
She had asked him angrily if
he thought that a genius like her husband had to live by the rules Avigdor had
made himself?
 
Did he know so little of
artists, after all these years, as to think that they concerned themselves with
politics unless it suited their need for subject matter?
 
Avigdor was a fool, too, she told herself,
and she would forget him.
 
He had served
his purpose.

Kate wandered down the aisle
at random, stopping to pull out a large canvas of an apple tree in flower, the
hidden voice of the painting speaking of an atmosphere so dense with spring
that she could have heard the sap rising in the branches if she had looked at
it with any attention.
 
But Kate saw it
without seeing it, as she remembered a conversation she had had with a notary
she had gone to see in Nice only a week ago.
 
One of her few friends in Félice was the notary's wife and since she
suspected that her friend might hear things from her husband, she had made the
long trip out of Haute Provence to the large city where she could be certain to
find a notary who had no idea of who she was.