Mistral's Daughter (52 page)

She spent hours with Fauve
every day and long before the little girl could understand what it meant, Maggy
told her that she was her most beloved illegitimate granddaughter, in the way
parents of adopted children use the word "adopted" to create an
acceptance from the earliest moments of the child's comprehension.
 
As Fauve grew old enough to understand, Maggy
told her of her own family's history, from the highly embroidered scraps her
grandmother Cecile had told her of the ancient history of the Jews of Provence
right down to the tragedy of Teddy and Julien Mistral.
 
Before Fauve was four she had heard about
Maggy and Perry Kilkullen, she knew the sad tale of the dashing David Astruc,
Maggy's own father, and of Maggy's mother who had died in childbirth.

She had even been thoroughly
introduced to the admonitions of Rabbi Taradash.
 
Sometimes Maggy would wonder if she was right
to fill the child's head with so much Jewish family lore
—
a child who
had only one Jewish grandparent out of four
—
but what else did she have
to give her?
 
She knew nothing of the
Kilkullens, nothing of the Mistrals, but of the Lunel women she was, alas,
something of it specialist.

"Why doesn't my father
ever come to see me?" Fauve would ask and it was the only question Maggy
could never answer satisfactorily. "He's married ...
 
he lives far, far away, he's working very
hard, he's a man who never travels..."
 
What kind of answers were those?
 
She had even considered writing to Mistral to remind him of his
daughter's existence but she had never been quite ready to do it, reasoning
that Fauve was such a happy child this single sadness would just have to be
endured.
 
But now that Julien had finally
brought himself to see Fauve, Maggy set her teeth and gave her consent to
Fauve's visiting for the summer in Provence.
 
Only the thought of Kate Mistral made her uneasy.

"Maggy, I assure you,
Kate wants whatever I want," Julien had said impatiently.
 
"She accepts me as I am, she always
has.
 
A child of eight won't threaten her
—
think, Maggy, I'm sixty-one, she's almost sixty, we've been married
thirty-four years... you don't imagine she would be jealous of a little girl,
do you?"

"l think she'd be
jealous of a canary if you decided to make a pet of one."

"Maggy, you've never
been rational on the subject of Kate."

"Kate is not a woman
about whom it's possible for me to be rational.
 
If she had agreed to a divorce so that you could marry Teddy..."

"We might have gone out
on that boat anyway, Maggy.
 
Who can look
back and determine what combination of circumstances give fate its
chance?"

"l never believed I'd
hear you talk about fate."

"It's the only
explanation I can endure."

"You don't wake up at
night and ask yourself what you did that made things go wrong? You don't
blame
yourself?"

"I will
always
blame
myself.
 
I
live
with blame, but
does it help?
 
Any tiny change in events
could have changed what happened.
 
If the
fishing boat had passed a minute later, if I hadn't waved at Teddy, if she hadn't
let go of the line when she did, if the Americans hadn't come to St. Tropez,
if we hadn't been sitting at the Sennequier, if...
 
there is no end to the ifs.
 
All I can do is to paint, Maggy.
 
That, at least, is something, but blaming
myself is worth nothing at all.
 
Am I
wrong?"

"No." Maggy fell
silent.
 
To entrust Fauve to Julien even
for the short summer months was dangerous.
 
To entrust anyone to him was dangerous.
 
But did she really have a choice?
 
"No," Maggy repeated out loud, but it was not to Mistral that
she spoke.
 
It was even more dangerous
not to allow Fauve a father.

22

On a June day in 1969, at the
Gare de Lyon, Julien Mistral and his sixteen-year-old daughter Fauve boarded
the deluxe express train that runs from Paris to Marseilles.
 
Each June for the past eight years Mistral
had traveled up to Paris from Félice to meet Fauve at the airport, spend a
night in Paris with her and then travel down to Provence for the entire
summer.
 
During all those years it had never
failed to thrill Fauve that the train was called
Le Mistral.

She had assumed, that first
time she traveled on it, that the train was named in honor of her father and
she still wasn't quite sure when she had finally had to acknowledge that the
train was named for the dominating wind of Provence.
 
The mistral, that infernal cold dry wind,
blows only when the sky is bright, bright blue and the sun is blazing, or,
depending on whom you discuss it with, turns the sky white and hides the sun,
this wind
—
again depending on individual opinion
—
that blows
for a period of three days or six days or nine days without stopping; a wind
that forces every last tree in Provence to bend toward the south; that causes
every house to be built without windows on its northern wall, a wind like a
dragon that hides quietly until the countryside has almost forgotten about it
and then springs, screaming down from the Alps to the Mediterranean at fifty
miles an hour, entering the most tightly closed room and giving the inhabitants
of Provence an excuse for every ailment from a headache to a murder.

Fauve loved the mistral, to
her it was an intensely personal wind , and she was its intimate. She called it
by its Provençal names Le Mistrau or
Le Vent Terrau,
and she grew madly
exhilarated and elated when she heard the rushing, softly roaring noise it made
in branches of the trees around
La Tourrello
.
 
To Fauve it was the spirit of the land.

Le Mistral's
first-class
carriages are divided into compartments holding two rows of three seats that
face each other.
 
Fauve quickly claimed
two window seats, covered in a particularly nasty shade of moss green, while
her father busied himself with the headwaiter of the
 
dining car, buying the pink tickets that
would reserve their seats at lunch.
 
"Lyon, Dijon, Valence,
Avignon
," she murmured softly,
wondering as she always wondered, how she would find the patience to wait the
six hours it would take until they arrived.
 
The period of time between Valence and Avignon was the most frustrating
because she could see the countryside change dramatically as they drew
near.
 
Oh, the leap of her heart with the
first welcoming stand of dark, jagged- branched cypress, the intoxication of
the sight of the first groves of olive trees, the first long, low lines of
grape vines.

"Fauve, don't you want
an
aperitif
before lunch?" Mistral broke into her thoughts,
standing before her as the train glided out of the station.
 
She jumped up and followed him through the
heavy doors that opened by an electric eye, into the dining car where waiters
in their white coats were already pulling the corks of bottles of wine and
serving whiskey and Perrier to the first-class passengers.
 
This lunch drink was another tradition that
had started with her first trip down to Félice.
 
She always had two bottles of sweet pineapple juice and then, after a
little urging, a third, for they were very small bottles indeed.

"A sherry, please,"
Fauve said.

"Oh, so you drink now,
do you?" Mistral put his hand over hers.

"Only on special
occasions."
 
She laughed at him,
delighting in the passion of love she felt transmitted from his hand to
hers.
 
He was, she estimated, the most
undomesticated man who had ever painted, yet she knew that anything that
concerned her mattered to him more than anything else in his life.

"A sherry for my daughter,"
he said, "and bring me a
pastis."
 
Mistral searched her face, seeking as always
with a painful mixture of hope and fear, traces of Teddy's classic,
catastrophic beauty.
 
But as Fauve grew
older, it seemed to him that she possessed a loveliness that owed nothing to
her mother but her height and the color of her hair.
 
It was, he reflected, searching for the right
word to adequately describe this child he so adored, an
intelligent
beauty.
 
There was always something fascinatingly
thoughtful in Fauve's expression, something that made him long to know exactly
what was going through her mind at every minute, something that prevented him
from ever being quite satisfied with a single one of the many portraits he had
made of her. There was a brave and absorbing mystery about her almost
unpaintable gray eyes
—
what would Leonardo have made of her?
—
there was a seriousness that lurked at the corners of her bewitching mouth up
until the instant that it curved into a sorceress's smile.

Mistral had never found it
possible to concentrate his gaze long on Fauve's eyes or her mouth;
 
he had to look at her face as whole because
to him it was like a landscape on a changeable day in the springtime.
 
No one mood lasted for long, each moment
brought a new enchantment, a new perception.
 
No, he had never quite captured her on canvas.

As Fauve sipped her sherry
she was aware of Mistral watching her carefully.
 
It was always the same during the first week
of each visit as he pored over the changes that a year had made in her.
 
She submitted to his inspection with the
cheerful resignation that came of growing up under Maggy's all-seeing eye.
 
Did any other teenage girl have to be
scrutinized daily by the most knowledgeable woman in the world on the subject
of the female face and then, on her summer vacation, be the object of the
minute attention of a Father who saw everything?

"Mascara," Mistral
observed in a neutral tone.
 

"I thought you'd never
notice."

"I suppose it goes with
your drinking sherry?"

"Precisely.
 
Magali says that it's perfectly proper at
sixteen if I put it on right.
 
She taught
me how herself.
 
Do you like it?"

"Not excessively, but,
on the other hand, since you are otherwise fairly agreeable looking, why should
I complain, particularly when I know it would avail me nothing?
 
I've survived four years of miniskirts, which
seem to be getting shorter each year, I lived through the era of the tiny white
plastic boots, I scarcely blinked when you gave yourself a geometric haircut
—
Sassoon, was it not?
—
half of one anyway, so why should I worry about a
bit of black on your lashes that will undoubtedly come off before the day is
over?"

"What a philosophical,
patient, dear little papa I have."

"You always made fun of
me, even when you were a little girl.
 
You're the only person who ever makes fun of me, do you know that.

"And lived to tell the
tale?"

"Who even tried."

"What about my
mother?
 
Surely she saw how droll you
are?"

"No, no...
 
or perhaps yes, but she never mocked me
—
she wasn't like you, Fauve.
 
No one has
your nerve."

"
Chutzpa
, Papa,
that's what Magali says it is.
 
And it's
not supposed to be a compliment.
 
It
means audacity in Hebrew."

"What's wrong with
audacity?
 
You'll get nowhere in the
world without it."

"Well, it also means
brazen effrontery and outrageous gall
—
I think Magali'd like my
audacity to be a little more ladylike.
 
Still, I'm getting better.
 
This
year I didn't have a single fistfight and I went to lots of awful dances in pretty
dresses and made dumb conversation with terrible, dreadful boring boys..."

"Nobody who interested
you, not even one?"

"I would have said in my
letters, you know that.
 
No, Papa, you
have a daughter who finds the male sex much less interesting than she has been
led to hope they would be."

"But you're only sixteen!
 
Why should you find them interesting your
age?
 
There's plenty of time for that
when you're grown up."

"Sixteen is supposed to
be grown up," Fauve said earnestly but Mistral only shook his head at
her.
 
Sixteen was a child.
 
Sixteen was baby.
 
He was sixty-nine and sixteen was so young
that he couldn't remember anything of what it felt like, and certainly he
didn't choose to remember that Fauve's grandmother had only been a year older
than Fauve when he'd first set eyes on her naked body.

He thought as rarely as
possible of Maggy.
 
He wanted Fauve to
belong to him alone, to be just his, Mistral's daughter, and nothing else, yet
there was Maggy, so beloved of Fauve, to whom he now found himself linked
forever, linked by blood.
 
His
grandchildren would
 
be Maggy's
great-grandchildren and who among them would make any distinction between
generations in that unimaginable future?
  
He resented Fauve's use of an occasional Hebrew or Yiddish word, he
resented her observation of Jewish holidays about which she wrote him, he
resented the way Maggy had indoctrinated her with Jewish family history
—
what had Fauve to do with all that?
 
She
wasn't Jewish!

Yet he dared not criticize
Maggy, for it was the one way in which to make Fauve turn on him in anger.
 
Last year she had discovered a poem in
Provençal by the poet Frédéric Mistral
—
 
a song really
—
meant to be sung to a Neapolitan melody and he
never told her how maddening it was when she sang it:

Mai, o Magali,

Douco Magali.

Gaio Magali,

Es to que m'as fa trefouli.

"Wait till she hears it
—
'But oh, Magali, sweet Magali, lively Magali, it's you who made me shudder with
joy'
—
how about that for sexy, Papa?"

"It should please
her," he'd said carefully. "Don't overwhelm me with compliments
—
oh, okay, so I can't
 
carry a tune but at
least I'm learning Provençal."

"And how useful is
that?"

"In Provence at least,
it's a lot more useful than any other language I could learn.
 
I'm planning to use it to keep on working on
old Monsieur Hugonne and Monsieur Piano to let me organize a girls' boules
team..."

"What!"

"That's what they all
say, as if I'd asked to belly-up to the bat and take a swig out of the bottle
of Pernod!
 
Félice is not exactly the
beachhead for female team sports but I'm not giving up.
 
The biggest problem is the girls
—
they still look so shocked when I even mention it.
 
What's so sacred about a ball of metal
anyway?"

"Fauve, don't try to
change customs that are hundreds of years old.
 
Do girls play football in the United States?"

"Pops, girls do
everything in the United States."

"Don't call me
Pops," was the only response he'd been able to make to her shocking
suggestion, he reflected, bending toward the
prix fixe
menu the waiter
had just placed in front of them.

The first-class dining car of
Le Mistral
has a kitchen at one end in which two white-capped chefs turn
out surprisingly good food on the superior-bistro level.
 
Fauve and Mistral both ordered the
lotte
that fish that can only be found in France, and the rabbit stew with new potatoes
and salad, followed by the assorted cheeses and
bombe glacée
, an ice
cream dessert Fauve looked forward to from one year to the next.

"What are you painting
now?" Fauve asked.
 
As the years
went by Mistral painted more and more slowly, becoming more self-critical,
finishing fewer canvases and destroying a larger percentage of those he
completed.

"Never mind me
—
what are you working on?
 
Still taking
that life class?"

    
"Of course.
 
Oh,
Papa, there's so much to learn.
 
Doesn't
the day ever come when you feel that you absolutely learned something, just one
single thing for good and all?"