Mistral's Daughter (51 page)

He opened the door and went
inside.
 
The studio was dark except for a
few stray rays of sun that came through the cracks in the shutters.
 
Mistral pulled on the ropes that controlled
the heavy canvas that covered the glass and in a minute the studio was drenched
in the full light of high noon.
 
Nothing
had been touched since he left.
 
The
empty canvas with which he had posed with Teddy still stood on the easel.
 
On a cluttered table lay the palette he had
held, crusted with dry paint.

Slowly Mistral looked around
the walls.
 
There were those paintings,
so thickly hung that some of them all but obscured a corner of others, that had
so silenced the visitors from
Mode.
 
He looked long from one painting to another,
not moving an inch toward any of them.
 
For as far back as he could remember having had rational thoughts about
the act of painting he had considered that he was trying to put on canvas what
he saw in the most direct way he could, without letting an intellectual process
come between his eye and the canvas.
 
Now, in a growing swell of realization, he understood he had painted
what he had felt at the time that he was seeing. The paintings were a visual
equivalent of his emotions.
 
Not the
activity of the brain but the tides of the heart had been recorded here.

This comprehension gave him
the first comfort he had permitted himself since he had knelt on the deck of
The
Baron
and realized that the body that he held so tightly in his arms was
dead, that Teddy had abandoned him.
 
The
paintings were proof that Julien Mistral had lived, that he once cared, once
felt.
 
He swayed, overcome by fatigue and
the shock of allowing a feeling to touch him.
 
Mistral had fled feeling with such absolute concentration for the last
three years that any emotion, even a kind one, made him dizzy with the fear
that it might be followed by pain so annihilating that he would kill himself to
escape it.

There was an old mahogany and
leather chair in the corner of the studio.
 
Made long ago for a tobacco planter in Martinique, it unfolded
ingeniously so that a man could recline at full length in it.
 
Mistral sat down in it and gave a great sigh
of relief.
 
Within minutes he was asleep.

Hours later Kate went to the
pool for her afternoon swim and noticed that the sun was shining directly
through the glass of the studio roof.
 
Otherwise the studio was as completely shuttered and closed as it had
been for four years.
 
Either the canvas
had fallen or a vandal or a thief had broken in through the door on the side of
the house.
 
Moving soundlessly she walked
alongside the length of the pool and approached the studio.
 
One of the thick wooden shutters sagged
slightly at its hinge and she had a hairline view into the studio.
 
She saw only a part of a man's hand,
motionless, dangling.
 
Immediately Kate
turned, went quietly back to the house and entered the kitchen.

"Marte, tell the cook to
go out and kill another chicken for dinner," she commanded. "Send the
gardener for more lettuce and tomatoes and grapes.
 
You go yourself and open Monsieur's room, put
fresh sheets on the bed.
 
Make sure
there's no dust, plenty of towels in the bathroom, a new cake of soap on the
sink and tub...
 
why are you standing
there?"

"You didn't tell me you
were expecting a guest, Madame," Marte Pollison answered with
dignity.
 
She disliked hurried, last
minute preparations.

"Monsieur has
returned."

"Oh, Madame!"

"There is no reason for
surprise," Kate said.
 
She turned
quickly so that Marte wouldn't see her small, calm, triumphant smile.
 
"I've been expecting him."

On a late spring afternoon,
four years later, in 1961, Maggy was dressing for dinner when Fauve burst into
her room without knocking.
 
She turned
from her mirror but her intended remonstrances faded on her lips as she watched
her splendiferous granddaughter skip across the pale carpet.

Fauve was almost eight,
dressed as always after a trip to the park, in tatters, her knees skinned, her
shoes covered with dust, her ripped shirt pulled out of her cotton skirt, on
which one of the pockets hung by a thread.
 
At least she didn't have a black eye today, Maggy thought, or a bloody
nose.
 
Fauve, as all the boys in her
class complained, "didn't fight like a girl."
 
There wasn't one of them she hadn't punched
out at one time or another, but still they wouldn't leave her alone.
 
Irresistibly attracted to her, they
manifested their fascination with eight-year-old pestering and sneaky tricks.
 
If she'd had pigtails they would have found
inkwells in which to dip them.

She had a disquieting,
imprudent beauty, that sprang partly from an elation that soared so high that
adults feared the tears that such a mood would have produced in an ordinary
child. However, Fauve only wept, as she explained to Maggy one day, if there
was a happy ending to a book she was reading or a movie she'd seen, but she
didn't know why she cried and so she tried to hide those tears.

Her coloring bedazzled, the
carrot fluff she had been born with had deepened into a red that had no name
because it was so many reds, and it sprang out from her head in a thick tumble
that mesmerized the eye with its electric energy, its meshed colors that in
some lights made patterns that were more pink than bronze, in others more
copper than gold.
 
The light gray irises
of her eyes were rimmed in a circle of the darkest gray.
 
When she was serious, her glance was grave
and level, and if Maggy searched her eyes she felt as if she were looking into
heavy mist that parted only to reveal another curtain of mist behind which
there was yet more mist.
 
But today
Fauve's eyes were so hectically bright that Maggy thought she seemed on the
verge of something like hysteria.

"What have you been up
to?" she asked anxiously.
 
Unruly,
more active than ten children, inquisitive, rebellious and strong-willed as
Fauve was
—
all normal characteristics Maggy often reminded herself to
be expected from a gifted child
—
there was no any way to predict what
she would do next.

Fauve held one hand teasingly
behind her back.

"I have a surprise, the
most marvelous surprise, the best surprise in the world, Magali,
Magali!"
 
Fauve's voice cracked with
the effort of not telling it right away.
 
Maggy had refused to be called any variation on grandmother, yet Maggy
seemed too informal, Fauve called her by the real first name that no one had
used since her own grandmother died.
 
Maggy reached for her hidden hand but Fauve stepped back.

"No animals?" Maggy
asked.
 
It was an old battle.
 
"I promised, didn't I?"

"Vegetables or
minerals?"

"Not that either,"
she sang out, bursting with information.

"Then I give up."

"My
father
!"
Fauve exploded and whipped out a sheet of sketch paper and thrust it into
Maggy's hand.
 
On it was an unmistakable
sketch of Fauve sitting on a park bench, her chin leaning on her hand.

As Maggy stared at it in mute
shock, Fauve's words spilled out so fast that she could scarcely follow
them.
 
"We were all playing in the
park and an old man with a beard came up and introduced himself to Mrs. Bailey
and Mrs. Summer
—
they got all surprised and

excited
—
and then he
came over to me and said I must be Fauve Lunel and I said yes and he asked...
he asked did I know who my father was?
 
I
said that I was Mistral's daughter of course, everybody knows that, and then,
Magali, he said he was my father, he was Julien Mistral!
 
For a second I didn't believe him
—
because in the picture I have he's so much younger and doesn't have a beard,
but then I knew, I felt it and I gave him a big hug, Magali, just the biggest
hug, as hard as I can hug, and he said I looked exactly the way he thought I
would look and he held my hands and kissed them and he didn't seem to know what
else to say...
 
that's when Mrs. Bailey
and Mrs. Summer came over to talk to him, but he didn't want to talk to them,
so he asked me to sit still for a minute while he drew my picture.
 
He did it so quickly, even more quickly than
I do, Magali, and you know how quickly I draw, and then he wrote you a letter
and made me promise to give it to you.
 
My father!
 
Oh, Magali, I'm so
happy!
 
I wanted him to come back home
with me but he said he couldn't, not yet...
 
oh, here's the letter."
 
She
took a folded piece of sketch paper out of the one remaining pocket of her
shirt.

"Fauve, go to your room
now and wash your hands and face and put on something clean," Maggy said
softly.

"But I want to watch you
read the letter."

"Go on, darling, and
come back in ten minutes.
 
Remember,
tonight's the Sabbath and I'm going to light the candles soon
—
you
can't look a mess for that."

So it had happened, Maggy
thought, not unfolding the paper.
 
Had
there been a single day during the past eight years when she had been free of
the expectation of this minute?
 
At first
she had told herself it was only a question of time before he came, no matter
what he had promised. Then as Fauve grew older, she almost persuaded herself
that perhaps she had been wrong; perhaps this man who obeyed no laws but his
own had decided to ignore an inconvenient child. But now she felt no surprise.
 
She unfolded the paper.

    
Dear Maggy,

I thought I could
see her just once and go away.
 
I had to
come to New York and once here I couldn't resist.
 
Now I must see you and talk to you.
 
I'll telephone you at your office tomorrow
—
or at home if the office is closed.
 
Forgive me but I know you will understand.
 
Julien

Forgive him? It would be as
impossible to forgive him, Maggy told herself, as it would be not to
understand.
 
As he well knew.

Julien Mistral never
comprehended that it wasn't any of his reasonable arguments that persuaded
Maggy to let Fauve spend the summer at La
Tourrello,
he never knew that
he could have spared himself the interview with her.

During the years after
Teddy's death she had been attacked over and over again by a wretched,
fruitless monologue that replayed history in her brain.
 
Wouldn't Teddy's life have followed a
different course if she'd had a father?
 
Mistral was so much older than Teddy
—
 
wasn't it merely a search for a father that
had attracted her to him?
 
What if Maggy
had been able to talk about Perry Kilkullen
—
 
wouldn't that have made Teddy
feel
that
she had had a father who was more real than those few childhood memories, like
wisps of happy dreams?
 
Worst of all, if
Teddy had known all about Maggy's relationship with Mistral, known how
heartlessly he had taken everything she had to give; her virginity, her whole
heart; even her money, and then just dropped her without a thought or a scruple
for a rich American
—
wouldn't that have caused Teddy to hate him from
the cradle?
 
How many chances had she
missed to change the course of events? How
guilty
was she?

Eventually Maggy would make
herself turn away from this tormenting litany of mistakes and busy herself with
practical ways in which to guarantee that, whatever else happened, on a practical
level Fauve's life would be different from Teddy's.
 
Fauve must have traditions she determined as
she bought a menorah to replace the battered brass one that she had left behind
long ago in Paris.
 
From the time Fauve
could remember anything, she carried an image of
 
Maggy lighting the Sabbath candles
—
it was the first fire the baby saw and she clamored for it, fascinated by its
magic.
 
Every one of the eight days of
Chanukah was commemorated by its gift, and the lighting of first one and then
an additional candle for each night of the holiday.
 
From the time she was old enough to memorize
them, if not to read, Fauve always asked the four questions at the festive
Passover seder Maggy now gave each year, making sure that there were never any
younger children present to claim that privilege.