Mistral's Daughter (49 page)

Mistral rose and approached
them.
 
"This is Julien
Mistral," Teddy said, possession plain in her voice.
 
The sun-dappled shade of the Sennequier
suddenly seemed to turn into the stage of a theater as she watched Julien shake
hands with the four tanned, white-clad, startled Americans who had grown
suddenly shy, stiff
—
definitely in awe of him.
 
It reminded her of that day, so many months
before, when she had first met Mistral and, looking at him now, she was moved
again by his heroic head, his splendid height and the contained force of his
eyes.
 
She was proud and glad that
someone from her old life had seen them together at last, and, by God, she
wanted to show him off.

"Oh, Peggy, I have a
billion questions to ask you!" Teddy cried.
 
"Listen, can the four of you have dinner
with Julien and me tonight?"

"We can't, honey, we've
promised to go to a party, but listen, Chase has his sailboat or yacht or
whatever you call it when it's seventy feet long, anchored right here in the
harbor
—
why don't you both come on out and sail with us tomorrow and
have lunch on board?"

"We'd absolutely adore
it, wouldn't we, Julien?"

"We would enjoy nothing
more," Mistral said to Peggy Arnold.
 
He welcomed any distraction at this moment.
 
He was convinced that Kate would give in
eventually but he had begun to realize that it would take longer than he'd
expected and he didn't dare to share his suspicions with Teddy.
 
It was growing harder to reassure her with
every passing day.

The next day Teddy and
Mistral boarded
The Baron
, Chase Talbot's chartered yacht, at ten in
the morning.
 
A crew of four, including a
cook, had been hired to sail the yacht on a leisurely cruise from one port to
another, along the French and Italian coastlines.

As
The Baron
moved
smoothly out of the St. Tropez harbor into the Mediterranean, all six
passengers lounged on cushions in the sun, close to the bow of the ship.
 
Teddy allowed her hand to fall casually on
Mistral's arm as she chatted with Ginny and Peggy, dropping back with relish
into news of the world she had abandoned without a backward glance.

She had been lonely for women
friends of her own kind, she realized, as they talked.
 
She and Julien had lived in such a purposeful
solitude that it felt good, just for a little while, to get back into an
atmosphere where the difference between Ben Zuckerman and Norman Norell was, if
not critical, at least acknowledged, a world full of assumptions and references
that had once been so important to her, that was still important to them.

As they talked eagerly,
catching up on the news of New York, with one finger she caressed the firm
muscles on Julien's forearm.
 
Just that
light touch made her understand that nothing her old life had ever offered was
more than a shallow facsimile of existence.
 
She abandoned the conversation and half closed her eyes.
 
Reality was Julien Mistral, the man who had
made her life whole, the man who had turned her from a girl who feared she
could never love, to a woman who knew that she could love forever.
 
Reality was Fauve, the daughter she was bound
to by a feeling that was so different in texture and power from anything she
had ever thought of as love. When she took her baby, naked except for a diaper,
in her arms and tucked Fauve into her neck and felt that silky, plump, soft and
incredibly strong little body relax in complete trust against her, Teddy knew
an emotion for which she had no words.

Reality was Julien and
Fauve.
 
Reality was the end of this
vacation and the trip back to Avignon.
 
Reality was settling in for the fall and winter in that
champagne-colored city, hunting through antique shops for more furniture for
the big apartment, taking Fauve for promenades in the park, getting in a huge
supply of fire wood, going to market
—
oh, reality was so full of lovely
things to do and eat and drink and smell and touch!
 
And if reality should include another child,
Teddy grinned to herself, Kate would have to admit defeat.
 
Why hadn't she thought of that sooner?
 
It was I brilliant idea!

"Let's throw over the
lunch hook," Bill suggested.

"What's that?"
Teddy asked, roused from her reverie.

"It's a light anchor, a
Danforth.
 
We use it whenever we just
want to stop for an hour or so and swim or eat.
 
The other one
—
the Plough
—
is simply too much trouble to
bother with unless we're staying for the night
—
it's a big heavy
bastard and I keep it lashed under the bow as much as I can.
 
I'm your average lazy sailor."

"Oh."
 
Yachtsmen always told you more than you
needed to know, Teddy remembered from her summers in the Hamptons.

"Do we want to swim or
drink or both?" Chase Talbot inquired of the group.

"How's the water?"
asked Ginny.

"Great. If you want your
swim, now's the best time."

The yacht lay several miles
off the coast, in quiet water. The sun was hot on the deck and everyone voted
to swim first and drink later.
 
For half
an hour the six of them took turns diving from the pulpit, a U-shaped chrome
structure above the bow from which two lifelines were rigged.
 
The deck of
The Baron
was far enough
above the Mediterranean so that the pulpit, which rose three and a half
additional feet above the bow, made a good diving platform.

Teddy hadn't had a chance to
dive into deep water for two years but after a few attempts all her muscle
memory returned as she clambered up, using the lifelines, and curled her toes
expertly around the top railing of the pulpit until it was time to let go of
the jib stay and plunge into the ocean.

"Gin and tonic for all
hands," Peggy called to her as Teddy took her place at the bow.
 
She looked behind her.
 
All four of her American friends had
collapsed, laughing, on the cushions on deck, gathered around a tray of glasses
brought by one of the crew.
 
She looked
out to the ocean. Some twenty-five feet away Julien waved to her from the
water.

"Just one more quick
one," she called.
 
She'd swim out to
Julien and put her arms on his shoulders and float there with him and kiss him
and kiss him, and whisper her marvelous new idea to him.

A big fishing boat, unnoticed
in all their noisy rollicking, had passed behind the stern of
The Baron
moments before.
 
Just as Teddy let go of
the jib stay, gracefully poised to dive, the heavy wake of the fishing boat
smacked into the yacht.
 
The whole boat
rolled sharply.
 
Teddy lost her balance,
teetered in the air for a split second and somersaulted awkwardly.
 
There were two sharp steel flukes, nine
inches long, that protruded from the big Plough anchor lashed directly under
the bow.
 
As Teddy fell, her head smashed
sideways into one of the wickedly pointed flukes.
 
Mistral launched himself underwater as soon
as he saw that she'd been hit.
 
He found
her almost immediately, caught her easily under one arm and brought her to the
surface with a powerful stroke of his free arm.
 
Chase and Bill helped him bring Teddy up to the deck.
 
She had not drowned.
 
There had not been time for that.
 
Teddy had been dead before she entered the
water.

Three days later, in the
American Cemetery in Nice, Teddy was buried.
 
Maggy and Julien Mistral had been the only mourners.
 
Mistral had forbidden the four Americans from
the yacht to come and they had been too much in dread of his monstrous anguish
to insist.

Maggy had not yet, and would
not now bring herself to look directly at Mistral.
 
She felt such a surpassing hatred of him that
it was almost impossible to utter even a few necessary words.
 
She knew she had to stay calm enough to
convince him that he must give her granddaughter to her.
 
He had already killed her daughter.

"I want to take Fauve
with me," she said at last.

"Of course," he
muttered.

"Did you understand what
I mean?"
 
He couldn't have
realized.
 
He must not have listened.

"Naturally, you must take
her.
 
There is no one else.
 
I have no home for her, I will never go back
to Avignon, I never want to see
La Tourrello
again
—
I'm going
away, I don't know where, I don’t know for how long..."

"If I take her now, if
you agree, you won't be able to change your mind," she said fiercely.

Mistral got up with a groping
movement, hesitant, almost sightless, his monumental body shambling, his hands
shaking and fumbling.
 
His cheeks were
covered in gray stubble, for he had not shaved or slept or eaten in the three
days since the accident.
 
His eyes
weren't red for he had not been able to weep but the blue fire that they had
always held was utterly gone.
 
He was an
old man with dead eyes.

"Go back to your home,
Maggy.
 
I can't talk anymore.
 
Leave."
 
He made his unsure way out of the hotel lobby and, a minute later, Maggy
heard him drive off in his car.

She sat immobile for a
moment, not daring to move lest she hear the car return.
 
Then, galvanized, she went to the front desk
and made a reservation on the next plane to Paris, ordered a taxi and went to
her room to pack.

"Madame?" It was
the nurse, tiptoeing into the room.

"Pack one suitcase with
the baby's things.
 
Do you have a formula
for her?"

"She drinks ordinary
milk, Madame, for the last two weeks.
 
But don't forget to warm the bottle."

"Thank you,
Mademoiselle.
 
I do remember that
much."

A day later, trailed by a
junior concierge from the Ritz who had been delegated to accompany her to the
departure gate, Maggy crossed Orly Airport in Paris on her way to board the
plane for New York.
 
Fauve was in her
arms.
 
As she passed a newsstand she
stopped suddenly, clutching Fauve to her so tightly that the baby started to
cry.
 
A pile of copies of the new issue
of
Paris Match
had just been deposited on the counter.
 
The cover photo, in black and white, had been
taken on board
The Baron.
 
There,
looking into each other's eyes, stood Teddy and Julien Mistral.
 
They were laughing in the most careless
happiness, utterly absorbed in each other.
 
A lock of Teddy's wet hair lay on his muscular shoulder and he held her
possessively close to his bare chest with both his arms.

How many minutes, at that
moment, Maggy asked herself did Teddy have left to live?
 
She felt as if a crucial membrane inside of
her chest had been ripped away.

"What is it,
Madame?" the junior concierge asked in alarm as he saw her face.

"Please get me a copy of
Match,"
Maggy said tightly.
 
She would have to face the story.
 
She couldn't pretend it didn't exist, not when everybody in the world
would read one version of it or another.

Maggy sat in the first-class
waiting room, cradling Fauve in one arm, and fumbled with the magazine, her
hands shaking so badly that the slick pages were almost impossible to
turn.
 
The cover headline had announced "La
Mort de la Compagne de Mistral"
—
at least they had called Teddy
his companion, not his mistress, Maggy thought numbly.

Apparently there was no other
major story in the world that week, or at least none that so appealed to the
shrewd editors of the great French magazine, for they had devoted twelve pages
of pictures and text to it.

Beyond surprise, or so she
thought, but not beyond despair, Maggy turned the pages.
 
There were three electrifying photographs
that Bill Hatfield had taken of Teddy and Mistral in the studio, not the
pictures
Mode
had published, but pictures of them talking to each other,
ignoring the camera, already entranced, already lost.
 
There were pages of photographs taken at
La
Tourrello
of Mistral, Kate and Nadine, the artist and his devoted family,
only two years earlier. Among the great pictures of Teddy that had been taken
while she was modeling was a dignified portrait of Maggy, surrounded by her
most famous models, which had been taken for
Life
three years earlier,
and yes, there, just as she had assumed it would be, was a reproduction of that
most notorious of the
Rouquinne
series, Maggy herself, on those damn
cushions spread in full color across two pages.
 
She didn't have to read the caption to know what it would say.
 
Match rarely missed a trick.