Mistral's Daughter (50 page)

She scanned the main body of
the text, holding her breath in fearful apprehension.
 
Until now there had been no news leaks
anywhere about Fauve's existence.
 
Maggy
herself had only learned of Fauve's birth three weeks after it had
happened...
 
Teddy waited until they had
all arrived in St. Tropez to write to her.
 
She had been too shocked, too outraged to bring herself to answer that
letter.
 
Now there was no need to, she
realized in a grief so profound that it gave her the strength of utter loss that
allowed her to search the
Match
story.

There, in the second
paragraph, was the account of the investigation of the register of births at
the town hall in Avignon.
 
Fauve Lunel,
enfante
adulterine
, was the civil status of her granddaughter.

The baby was a child of
adultery who, under French law, must remain forever unacknowledged, so
different from the status of an
enfante naturelle
, a merely illegitimate
child whose parents were free to marry each other if they wished, whose father
could give her his name even without marrying her mother.

Teddy had long ago acquired
American citizenship, at the time that Maggy herself had become a citizen, but
Maggy knew that if reporters had managed to search the right register in Paris
they would have found still another fact:
 
the record of the birth of Théodora Lunel:
enfante adulterine
.
 
But the celebrated
Match
thoroughness
had not operated at its full efficiency.
 
This much at least they hadn't discovered.

Maggy let the magazine close
without finishing the story.
 
After all,
what difference did it make?
 
Why should
anything so minor matter, now that Teddy no longer existed on this earth? Teddy
was gone, her lovely, dreamy, heedless, sweet girl and nothing she had ever
feared might happen to her had been even a shadow of the reality.

The baby in Maggy's arms woke
up.
 
Her eyes, a delicate, clear, smoke
gray, were endless in their depth.
 
She
looked straight at Maggy with shocking clarity for such a young being.
 
She blinked twice under her carrot fluff and
when nothing happened she made a small but distinctly hungry noise.
 
As Maggy searched her shoulder bag for the
bottle that must be warmed, she remembered a saying that every French child
repeats after two unplanned events of hazard of any kind:
 
two bottles of spilled ink, two tumbles in
the schoolyard, two splinters in the same finger. "
Jamais deux sans
trois
."
 
Never two without a
third.
 
Magali Lunel. Théodora
Lunel.
 
And now
—
Fauve Lunel.

The baby howled so loudly
that every passenger in the lounge turned to look at Maggy.
 
She glared back at them.
 
Had they nothing hatter to do?
 
Did they expect her to give her granddaughter
cold milk?
 
"Listen to me, you
little bastard," she whispered to Fauve, "shut up, it's coming, it's
coming."
 
The infant stopped
screaming immediately.
 
"So, you'd
rather listen than eat?
 
That, at least,
is a sign of intelligence.
 
Perhaps
you'll be the lucky third."
 
As she
sig- naled the lounge attendant to heat the bottle, she held the baby close
and, as softly as she could, sang her a lullaby with half the words
missing.
 
Where had it come from, this
song?
 
It was in French and she had no
idea how she knew it.
 
She didn't remember
ever singing it to Teddy.
 
It must come
from her own grandmother, Maggy thought.
 
Her gentle grandmother, Cecile Lunel.

21

"
How," Maggy
asked Darcy, "do you expect a child who still hasn't learned how to walk,
to play with a panda that is twice as big as she is?"

"It was irresistible
—
I was passing F.A.O. Schwarz and it was there in the window..."

"That trap
—
why,
they probably sell a half-dozen every Saturday."

"No, this is the
prototype, there isn't a bigger one in the whole store," he said
proudly.
 
"I checked it out."

"Well, I put it in her
playpen and I haven't heard a sound from her room since, so obviously she liked
it.
 
That makes almost an hour of peace
today.
 
Let's enjoy it while it
lasts."

A year had passed since Maggy
had returned from France with Fauve.
 
She
and Darcy were sitting in the great drawing room of her resplendent new
apartment on Fifth Avenue, a room purposefully decorated to give the impression
that it must surely open out onto a vast private park belonging to a noble
Georgian manor house in deepest Devon.
 
However, it occupied a space even more expensive than rolling English
acres, a full half-floor of one of the most indis- putably impeccable buildings
in all of Manhattan, an East Side apartment house that had a pedigree that
virtually guaranteed the background of everyone who was permitted to dwell in
it.

Maggy had determined that in
order to properly bring up a baby whose adulterous as well as illegitimate
origins had been so thoroughly documented by the press of the world, she must
do it in the highest of styles, in the most open and grand of manners.
 
Every impulse that had made her tuck Teddy
away on the comparatively unfashionable West Side, which had caused her to send
her daughter to the little-known Elm School, was to be reversed in the case of
Fauve.
 
She would
establish
her
granddaughter from the beginning.
 
Everyone knew everything there was to know about her.
 
Good!
 
Since Mistral was her father, let that become an asset.
 
Daughter of one
 
of the world's greatest artists,
granddaughter and only heiress of Maggy Lunel of the Lunel Agency
—
Fauve would become a
personage
even in the cradle!

She could have saved herself
the trouble, she often reflected.
 
Unless
she was more of a doting grandmother than she believed, Fauve was a child who
could have brought herself up. When she waved her arms and laughed her
surprisingly deep gurgle, things happened, people came running, even strangers
did her bidding.
 
She didn't like to be
cuddled for long, her firm body would squirm out of Maggy's arms as she
continued her never-ending exploration of her universe; she liked nothing so
much as a new face bending over her or a foreign object, any foreign
object.
 
Had she been in the vicinity of
a thick snake or a large and dangerous dog she would have launched herself
straight at it, shrieking with pleasure.

She was utterly without any
sense of fear and she detested boundaries.
 
At fourteen months Fauve was often furious because she fell down
whenever she tried to walk and impeded locomotion was the worst boundary of
all.
 
In her playpen she rattled the bars
like an angry little gorilla, shouting every word she knew, for she had an
extensive vocabulary.
 
When she was put
down on the floor she would crawl about with amazing speed and a striking lack
of judgment, bringing tables, lamps, vases and ashtrays crashing down about her
and laughing heartily at the lovely noises she'd made.
 
And when she was hit by a falling object she
only cried for a second. Life was too interesting for tears, unless they were
tears of rage and even those only lasted until she found some new and
fascinating thing to look at.

Fauve had a nurse.
 
Fauve had had a number of nurses, who, one by
one, had left, unable to keep up with her energy.
 
They loved the baby, they explained to Maggy,
in fact they adored her, but they were just so tired.
 
Maggy sympathized and hired another nurse.

Again she was trying not to
make one of the many mistakes she was convinced that she must have made with
Teddy.
 
She spent a great deal of time
with Fauve, reorganizing the Lunel Agency in order to do so.
 
She had hired three highly efficient people
to do much of the work she had once been certain that she must oversee in
person and the agency was prospering and growing as never before.
 
Saturday, today, was one of the nurse's
regular days off and Maggy and Darcy had formed the habit of taking Fauve for a
walk in the park in her stroller.
 
Since
"21" frowned on babies, even one connected to Darcy, their valued
customer since Prohibition, they headed to the Russian Tea Room on
Fifty-seventh Street.
 
There they could
have a drink in one of the little red leather booths opposite the long bar
while Fauve gulped freshly squeezed orange juice.
 
Every waiter in his red cossack tunic, every
motherly old Russian waitress, competed to bring the glass of juice to that resplendent
child who could call a half-dozen of them by names
 
"Katya!," "Rose!,"
"Gregor!," she would cry imperiously.
 
She demanded no one as often as Sidney Kaye, the owner of the Tea Room,
who told her funny stories with Yiddish punch lines to which she listened
intently, gazing up at him from her stroller, with her gray eyes opened wide in
wonder and her red eyebrows lifted, chortling when he came to the end of the
tale as if, in some mysterious way, she had understood him.

"Do I look like a
grandmother?" Maggy asked Darcy suddenly, as they sat enjoying the rare
quiet of the moment.

Maggy was forty-six now, and
during some otherwise noticed week or month between the years of forty and
forty-one, she had lost the look of being younger than she really was, that she
had kept throughout her thirties.
 
One
day, she woke up and discovered a woman in her mirror who had arrived at that
age from which it is never possible to retreat, that
"certaine âge
"
as every Frenchman gallantly but depressingly puts it.

She was an astonishingly
well-preserved woman, Maggy told herself.
 
But once anything is described as "well-preserved" its original
essence has obviously been lost.
 
It was
the difference, she thought, between a ball gown on the night that it is first
worn by a waltzing Victorian maiden, and that same gown, in mint condition,
displayed in a case in a costume museum.

In the following six years
the changes had been gradual but unmistakable for anyone with Maggy's
judgmental, unforgiving eye.
 
Maggy could
never be one of those women who only looks at her best features when she
confronts the mirror, avoiding, unconsciously and so cleverly, the areas that
show age.
 
Maggy knew exactly how often
she had to have her red hair touched up so that a sprinkling of gray didn't
show at her hairline.
 
She looked at her
mouth, that still lush and forward-thrusting flower, and saw clearly that there
were a few faint vertical lines above her upper lip.
 
Her jaw line had relaxed and blurred ever so
slightly.
 
Oh, she was middle-aged and no
good night's sleep, no vacation, no plastic surgeon could ever give her back
again that unconditional freshness, that film of newness that announces
youth.
 
It was, she decided, as
inevitable, and as little worth railing against, as the sunrise, or the fact
that every apricot that isn't eaten will one day lose its bloom.

She didn't see the other
changes that had taken place in her in the year since Teddy's death. Maggy's
beauty was still bone deep, her surface was brilliantly maintained yet she had,
from time to time, acquired an air of vulnerability.
 
She never knew that the grief she lived with
could be seen in an expression of bitter regret that veiled her eyes when,
fleetingly abstracted, she seemed to be peering into a far and fearsome
distance.

Her business manner, which
had never been easygoing, was more terse, more quick to impatience than it had
ever been.
 
Her new assistants knew that
while The Boss would not be unfair or unreasonable they had better have a sound
and defensible reason for every decision they made.
 
Most of the Lunel models were frankly
petrified by her.
 
Maggy knew this and
sometimes it annoyed her, sometimes it amused her and, more often than not, she
considered it a healthy state for them to be in.
 
Better that than slackness.

"Do I look like a
grandmother?" she repeated.

"You can never look like
a grandmother," Darcy replied.
 
He
cared nothing about any of the changes in her
—
he didn't see them.
 
Maggy's golden-green eyes that had first
captured him had never let him go.
 
She
was still the magnificent woman whom he'd never been able to make completely
his own from the very first night he'd seen her at Lally Longbridge's scavenger
hunt. In a way that he had gradually grown to value, rather than to fight
against, she had retained an inner enigmatic core.
 
There were things about Maggy that were
unaccountable:
 
riddles, puzzlements,
areas of her life about which she had never confided in him, no matter how
close they became, and every year they grew closer.
 
Finally Darcy was content not to even try to
guess at them.
 
Although she would never
be his wife, she was his lover and his best friend and that had come to be
enough.

He knew that their long
affair irked many people.
 
If Maggy and
Darcy are going to be together
—
and so damned faithful, so devoted
—
they grumbled to each other, why don't they just get married like everybody
else?
 
Because we're not like everybody
else, Darcy would have told them if they had dared to ask him directly.
 
He wasn't sure what he meant by that but he
knew that he possessed as much of Maggy as any man could ever have had.
 
Unless he'd known her before Julien
Mistral.
 
She had left something
essential in that long past relationship, something that remained only on
canvas
—
or perhaps in her memory
—
although he tried never to
contemplate that possibility
—
and almost succeeded.

Maggy shot him a quick
glance.
 
No, he meant what he said.
 
He had answered her question with that hard
gray flash, that bladelike look that had first attracted her notice.
 
His thin face was even more distinguished
than it had been so long ago, his hair was beginning to go distinctly gray, but
his questioning philosopher's look had only sharpened, not grown more mellow
with maturity and the unmistakable authority of his expression had settled more
firmly on his lips. She put out her hand to him, lovingly.
 
How right she had been never to marry this
man.

A cascade of books slid to
the floor behind them with a loud, long series of thumps.
 
They jumped and looked around.
 
Fauve came tottering toward them on her little
fat feet, as unsteadily as if she were dancing on bubbles, her arms open wide
for balance, a look of ecstatic achievement on her face.
 
"Panda," the new pedestrian yelled
in self-congratulation, heading for Darcy, who had provided the means for her
jailbreak.
 
"Climb panda!"

Venice, London, Alexandria,
Oslo, Budapest
—
cities were no damn good.
 
The country was no better: the Swiss Alps,
Tuscany, Guatemala.
 
Nor were islands
possible:
 
Ischia, the Cyclades of
Greece, Fiji
—
all of them were empty of whatever it was he sought and
finally Julien Mistral understood that he might as well go home.

He had painted nothing in the
last three years but he had drunk an enormous amount of whatever was the
strongest alcohol available in each place he had settled in for a week or a
month or a day.
 
Sometimes he had checked
into a hotel and left an hour later, without any reason.
 
Sometimes, he'd stayed on in a city long past
the time when it had any novelty for him, out of an immobility that went as
deep as his restlessness.
 
Now he was too
tired to go anywhere but
back
.
 
Félice was a better place than any he had found.

The gates of
La Tourrello
were
closed as Mistral drove up.
 
He pulled to
one side of the meadow and parked without honking or ringing the bell that sounded
in the kitchen.
 
It was lunchtime:
 
all the household would be gathered inside
and he wanted to avoid the inevitable moment of greeting.
 
He took the path, now almost overgrown, that
led beside the tall, protecting walls of the
mas
, around to the side
until it reached as far as the small back door of his studio. One key existed
for that door and it was still in his pocket.
 
It was the only thing he had taken with him, besides the clothes on his
back and the car he drove in, when he had gone to meet Teddy Lunel for dinner
at Hiely in Avignon on a September night four years before.