Mistral's Daughter (54 page)

It was this final detail that
made most of the housewives of Félice disbelieve his account for not even
Madame Mistral could be foolish enough to do such a thing.

They were quite right.
 
It had not been Kate, but Mistral himself who
had feverishly harried the workmen; he who had decided to convert the dovecote,
because he knew that a romantic tower room would delight a little girl; he who
had thought of how to employ the traditionally patterned fabric to make sure
that the occasional cold mistral of summer wouldn't come whistling through the
old stones, replastered though they were; he who had accomplished the
impossible by getting Provençal craftsmen to finish the work they had promised
to do by the time they had agreed to do it, with an efficiency unheard of
throughout the Midi.

When Fauve arrived in La
Tourrello
that first summer she had fallen in love with her room from the moment she
entered it, yet, as the summer started, she spent many a sad hour there
pondering the reasons for the hatred she felt emanating from Nadine and from
Kate.

Was it, she wondered, the
fact that her father was teaching her how to paint that made Nadine treat her
with an enmity so remote, so totally rejecting, that she couldn't seize and
wrestle with it?
 
Would her half-sister
have detested her under any circumstances?

Was it the fact that she was
a bastard that made Kate regard her with an animosity that was sensed by no one
but Fauve, for Kate was much too clever not to know that anything unpleasant
she could say or do to the little girl would cost her far more grief from her husband
than it would be worth.
 
She was careful
to seem ungrudging and generous, yet her loathing existed in the very way she
pressed Fauve to have more homemade apricot jam, in the gesture she made to
fill Fauve's glass of milk, in the smile that went with the suggestion that
Fauve might enjoy having a bicycle so that she could go to the village.

Finally Fauve's pride
asserted itself.
 
If Kate and Nadine
hated her she would ignore them and go her own way.
 
She would seek out the children of her own
age in and set about making friends of them.

She never suspected how
united the tightly knit community of eight-year-olds had been in their
suspicions of her, a tall, oddly dressed American girl with flying red hair who
bicycled up from le château, as they called
La Tourrello
, a girl whose
fancy room they had heard too much about.
 
Fauve spoke to them in citified Northern French but yet she made so many
babyish mistakes in grammar, she didn't understand that she must shake hands
all around or that she must not play the "Babyfoot" pinball machine
with the boys, this girl with a most uncivilized name who did not even have her
own saint's day to celebrate.

They envied the way Fauve's
father promenaded her around the café as if she were a baby just able to take
her first steps instead of a gawky girl as old as they were; they envied the
shiny new bicycle and her pretty clothes.
 
Who was she to descend on their little group and try to get in?

Nit none of them could resist
Fauve for long, none of them could turn away from her brimming, open and ardent
intention to love them.
 
She offered to
help them cut grass to feed the rabbits they raised for market and she
volunteered to take care of their little brothers and sisters while they played
tag.
 
Fauve taught them how to throw a
baseball, and she invited them all home for many sumptuous goûter, the
afternoon snack of bread and brioche and chocolate and three kinds of jam that
is the French child's favorite meal.
 
Afterward she took them up to her room, to lie sprawled over her astonishing
canopied bed while she told them about school in New York where, evidently,
nobody really did any work at all, in comparison to what was expected of them
in the village school.
 
Then, during the
winters, she wrote letters to each of them so that when she came back each
summer it was as if an old friend had returned.

Two of the girls in
particular, dark, pretty Sophie Borel, who Fauve nicknamed Pomme because of her
apple-red cheeks, Louise Gordin, called Épinette, or thorn, because of her hot
temper that contrasted so strangely with her angelic little face, had become
Fauve's two best friends.
 
Pomme, a
humorist and born trouble maker, was a tremendous source of information since
her father was the local postman.
 
Fiery
Épinette was one of Fauve's first champions. Almost from the beginning, she
defended Fauve to other girls who had not yet been won over to the stranger's
presence in their insulated and chauvinistic community.

She could hardly wait to see
Pomme and Épinette again, Fauve thought, as lunch proceeded, and the waiters,
as agile as acrobats, balanced the platters of spicy rabbit ragout, serving
everyone in the dining car with swiftly graceful motions, as the train,
traveling at a high speed, swayed constantly from side to side on the sinuous
roadbed.

Neither Pomme nor Épinette
was a good correspondent and while Fauve was away from Félice she always
worried that something might happen to change the village she loved so much.
What if someone had built a supermarket or a Monoprix or a movie house?

Félice was utterly beautiful
to her just as it was.
 
It was as quaint,
Fauve thought, as any town on this planet could be, but quaint was not the
right word for anything so modestly, so naturally and utterly itself, a human
dwelling place that put on no show to attract the casual visitor, a private
world in which the way of life hadn't changed in basic ways for hundreds of
years.

Often Fauve reflected on the
difference between attitudes in New York and Félice toward her illegitimate
birth.
 
In Manhattan, as she grew older
and more noticeable, she often was aware of an undercurrent of unwelcome and
malicious attention whenever she went out in public with Maggy and Darcy or
with Melvin Allenberg, who had become her guide to the art world.
 
There was a certain type of alert, overly
curious glance that moved too quickly away from her face; an unmistakable
nuance in voices discreetly lowered at a nearby restaurant table, an
unnaturally blank kind of impersonal look that managed to scrape over her
entire surface and take in every detail of her appearance; all signs of
recognition that told her unmistakably that someone had just whispered to
someone else, "Look, there's that girl, Mistral's illegitimate
daughter."

At such moments, without
knowing that she did it, Fauve straightened up to her full five feet ten
inches, threw her slim shoulders back and opened her eyes wide, without
blinking, and faced the people who had noticed her with a look of such stern
and frank pride that it would not have been inappropriate on her father's face,
a look that could startle people into silence.

Illegitimate," Fauve had
once said to Maggy. "Why don't people bother to be original?
 
I looked it up in Webster's Thesaurus and I
could be called so many other things
—
by-blow, catch colt, nullius
filius, whoreson and woods colt
—
I'd prefer woods colt, wouldn't
you?"

"
Yes
indeed...
 
pity more people don't have
better vocabularies," Maggy had responded dryly.

But in Félice, when there
were consequences of premarital sex, popular opinion held that the only fault
lay in the parents not having been careful enough.
 
No finger was pointed at a child who grew up
illegitimate.
 
In Félice, Fauve felt that
she was fully Mistral's daughter, in a perfectly down-to-earth and natural way,
accepted as the guiltless result of guilty passion, but accepted.

She looked impatiently out of
the train window.
 
They still hadn't
reached Lyon and lunch was almost over.
 
"Is there any news from the village?" she asked her father. "Nothing
new since your letter?"

"New?
 
Not unless you count that accursed, tasteless
rabble, that unspeakably foul pack of decorators from Paris who are buying up
old houses all over the valley
—
painting them green and lemon yellow
and even mauve, by Christ, against all tradition, doing them over inside and
selling them to foreigners for filthy, decadent , Parisians for ten times what
they cost
—
it's a plague!" Mistral growled.

"In Félice?" Fauve
asked, alarmed.

"Not more than before,
only a few outsiders have discovered us but in Gordes and in Roussillon it gets
worse and worse.
 
The villages have lost
all their atmosphere, they look the way your Disneyland must look, sickeningly
picturesque, with old houses tarted up like whores at a wedding, and swarms of
hundreds of foreigners, God knows what kind of barbarians, arriving in tour
buses, drinking Coca-Cola in the cafés, buying postcards by the dozen, ignoring
the village itself, getting back on the bus and going on to the next place
—
one day to see the whole Lubéron!"

He looks more like a gallant,
heroic conquistador than ever, Fauve thought, as Mistral fulminated.
 
As she grew older he seemed to grow younger
to her, perhaps because she had learned to really look at him, perhaps because
he had shaved off the beard that had kept her from first recognizing him.
 
His big nose was more prominent than ever,
and his mouth more tightly set, unless he was looking at her, but the bold,
arrogant adventurous set of his handsome head hadn't changed; he seemed, as
always, stronger, more upright, so much bigger than any man she'd ever
seen.
 
He's prodigious, she thought,
using her newest favorite word.
 
I have a
prodigious father.

23

Pervert
!" shrieked
Pomme, "depraved...
 
debauched...
 
corrupted
—
you're
sick
, Fauve Lunel, that's what you are!"

"Backwoods...
 
medieval..." Fauve gasped through tears
of laughter as Pomme shook her as hard as she could.
 
"You're living in another century, poor
girl."
 
When she'd put on her record
of Three Dog Night singing "Easy To Be Hard" she'd known that her
friends were far from ready for it.
 
In
the past she'd won them over to Johnny Cash and Engelbert Humperdinck although
their hearts were really still with the Bee Gees.
 
But she hadn't been able to resist bedeviling
them.
 
They enjoyed it as much as she did.

The teenagers of Provence
were dance mad in spite of the fact that their taste in music lagged behind
that of New York.
 
Each village held two
public dances every year so that in the Lubéron there was almost never a Saturday
night on which it wasn't possible to go to a dance within an area that could be
reached by car or by bus.

At fourteen and fifteen Fauve
had been allowed to go to the dances with a group of girls chaperoned by one of
their fathers, but now, at sixteen, they had all reached the age at which they
were permitted
—
 
in fact,
expected
—
to go to a dance with a date.

After Pomme and Épinette left
reluctantly to go home for dinner Fauve thoughtfully put away her records.
 
It hadn't escaped her that there had been a
basic change in her friends since last summer.

Today they had talked of
little else but the dance that was planned in Uzès for next Saturday to which
they had each been invited by a boy from the district.
 
They assured Fauve that she was invited to go
to the dance with the four of them in a car belonging to the father of one of
the boys, but once there, Fauve asked herself, what then?

Last year it had been
perfectly honorable to stand in the "girl corner" with a bunch of
giggling friends and, if no boy presented himself, to dance with one of
them.
 
Indeed, because of her unusual
height she was much in demand as a partner.
 
But this year she was aware it would be something of a disgrace to dance
with another girl.
 
Most of the young
females of Félice were going with dates, according to Pomme's information which
was as official as any engraved announcement.

Morosely, Fauve considered
Provençal dances.
 
At the
Salle des
Fêtes
girls and boys migrated to their separate corners as soon they
entered, eying each other as slyly and secretly as possible but otherwise not
communicating, even if they had arrived together.
 
The first dancers were always couples who
didn't care what anyone thought:
 
the
cheerful grocer with his five-year-old daughter; a nine-year-old girl who had
trapped her six-year-old brother in a grip he couldn't wriggle out of; two
cousins who had formed a jocular alliance; perhaps a newly married couple or
two, showing off for the neighbors.

Eventually each boy claimed
his date, if he had one, but without any air of grace or pleasure. Why were
they all so crazy about dancing, she groaned to herself, when they seemed so
miserable when they were doing it?
 
In
Provence people danced like marionettes whose legs moved in independence from
their stiff upper bodies. The proper expression during a dance was of frozen
despair.
 
Conversation, or even a smile
between partners, was out of the question. When the dance was over the couple
darted apart, as brusquely as if they had been locked together in a prizefight
and returned to their respective corners, where, at last, they could communicate
happily with members of their own sex.
 
And they called that a dance!

Why did she have to subject
herself to it?
 
She could stay home
Saturday night without any comment from anyone.
 
Some English friends of Kate's were expected for the weekend, and no one
at
La Tourello
would know about the dance at Uzès and wonder why she
wasn't there.
 
Yet, she reminded herself,
she had chosen to make herself a part of the village of Félice and if she
missed a dance it would be interpreted, and rightly so, as a turning away from
her friends.
 
Lack of a date was not the
slightest excuse.
 
Every girl from every
village from kilometers around who could get transportation to the dance would
be there, because this network of dances provided the only means through which
they would eventually find mates.

Oh, if it were only
last
summer
Fauve thought with a rush of nostalgia, if only the whole business of pairing
off hadn't already started!
 
Pomme and
Épinette, who once had thought of nothing but eluding their mothers and getting
into mischief with her, were so excited about their dates for Saturday night.

Within two years they'd
probably be engaged or married and then, before she knew it, they'd be young
mothers; proudly displaying their babies to her, their freedom utterly
surrendered, freedom that would be almost forgotten and probably not even
regretted except for a moment or two of memory.

In the most basic way Pomme
and Épinette were already gone forever, she thought, with a premonitory
shudder.
 
Her summer friendships, which
had seemed eternal last year, now revealed themselves as ephemeral
—
they had been replaced, in the passage of a single winter, by the shadow, as
unmistakable as it was unwelcome, of the end of adolescence.
 
Why did it have to end?

Fauve flung herself on her
bed with an impulse of passionate purity.
 
Who needed boys? Why did Pomme and Épinette have to give a damn about
them?
 
Couldn't they have waited just one
more year?
 
But she knew it was too late.
 
They had both set sail on the sea of
romance judging by the certain note of inhabitual tenderness that Pomme,
normally a fountain of mockery, had used when she mentioned Raymond Binard,
the young electrician from Apt.
 
And
where was Épinette's predictable, delightful crustiness when she proudly
announced that Paul Alouette, her "friend," who was on leave from his
military service, had borrowed his father's new Citroën for the occasion?
 
What sort of accomplishment was borrowing a
car?

In New York Fauve was part of
a group of classmates at the Dalton School, boys and girls, who had gone to the
same dancing school and now got together for rock concerts and parties. They
were, she knew, considered the late bloomers in a class where others smoked pot
and experimented with sex, but none of her friends were in any rush to launch
themselves into the complicated game of man-woman that they saw beginning to be
played out all around them.

If only the time could stand
still!
 
If only nothing ever had to
change!

Startled to find herself
close to tears, she sighed deeply with a sigh that she didn't understand was
her first sigh of adulthood, a sigh of recognition of the passage of time and
the bitter, useless
 
knowledge that there
is nothing that can be done about it.

Slowly, Fauve began to feel
comforted by her room.
 
It, at least, was
something she could always count on not to change.
 
The tower room waited for her to come home to
it each year, it possessed an interior life of its own that she knew yielded
only to her.
 
Before it had been used as
a dovecote it had been a windmill, and she could all but see the great sails
that had made their slow circles outside the windows a century ago; she could
practically hear the whirring of the wings of generations of doves that had
nested where her bed now stood.

In the last eight years Fauve
had added to her room until it was a museum of her growing-up.
 
Generations of dolls sat primly against the
walls, photographs of Fauve and Mistral together, which had been taken each summer,
hung on the walls along with old-fashioned postcards she had found in local
antique shops, and flowers she had pressed and framed, as well as posters
announcing past village fêtes, the volunteer firemen's balls and other
occasions dear to her heart.
 
She never
subtracted anything from these collections of memories, nor did she ever bring
anything home to New York from Félice.
 
Instinctively she kept her two worlds apart from each other, just as
they were in reality.

As Fauve lay, half dreaming,
she suddenly heard Kate's voice in the courtyard.
 
How much like Nadine she sounded, Nadine who,
thank God, only visited
La Tourrello
once or twice every summer now that
she was married to Phillipe Dalmas and living in Paris.

Had Nadine ever experienced
regret, even a second of it, when she slipped from being a cool, composed,
superior fifteen to a poised and worldly sixteen?
 
Fauve doubted it.
 
If Nadine and any of her crowd had ever dropped
in at a village dance it would have been to stand on the sidelines and stare
with open amusement as if it were a particularly droll folklorique spectacle.
Had they condescended to join in the dancing it would only have been to turn
it into a clever story that showed how quaint the locals were.

At the thought of her
half-sister Fauve clenched her fists and bounded up from her bed, her gloom
vanished in a rush of combat, which translated itself into the one eternal
question which can make any female creature forget even such profound questions
as the brevity of youth, the fleetingness of time.

What was she going to wear?

Five days later Fauve stood
in the girls' corner of the
Salle des Fêtes
in Uzès, a bustling market
town of many medieval towers which is the seat of the Duke d'Uzès, the Premier
Duke of France.

The year 1969 was a
particularly confusing year for personal adornment, but even in the Lubéron the
miniskirt had made its presence felt, Fauve had spent hours all week trying on
and discarding one dress after another.
 
They all looked, to her suddenly self-conscious eyes, either too dressed
up, as if she were expecting some occasion more grand than a village dance, or
too casual, as if she hadn't bothered to put on her best, as she knew the other
girls would.
 
She had still been standing
indecisively, clad only in a pair of bright tangerine tights, when Marte
Pollison tapped on her door to say that her friends were waiting outside in the
car.

In a sudden rush of defiance
Fauve jumped into a shocking pink Minidress trimmed with a long, wide,
geometric slash of purple ribbon.
 
She
gave one more lick of the brush to her red hair.
 
Each long and lively strand flirted with the
air.
 
She thrust her feet into a pair of
bright green Capezio ballet slippers and ran down the staircase of her private
tower without going into the salon to say goodbye.
 
If Kate disapproved of her sense of color she
really didn't care to know about it.
 
Not
ever
—
and particularly not right now.

The girls' corner of the room
was buzzing, but Fauve was not listening to the conversation. She could see two
young men approaching her from the boys' corner; each seemed to have clear-cut
intentions of asking her to dance.
 
One
of them was Lucien Gromet, whose bad breath she still remembered from last year
and the other, Henri Savati, was the kind of dancer who could only trudge to
the music.
 
Wildly she wondered if she
should ask one of the younger girls
 
to
dance and avoid them both?

The two boys were approaching
at the same rate of speed, neither one of them willing to seem to be in a
contest with the other.
 
They were no
more than a few feet away when suddenly they were pushed brusquely aside by a
third male figure who skidded to a stop before Fauve.
 
He turned to the two others with a flourish.
 
"A thousand apologies, my dear friends,
but Mademoiselle has promised me all the dances on her card this
evening."
 
Lucien's Henri's jaws
dropped at these words.
 
The accepted way
in which to invite a girl to dance was to mumble to her, hook a thumb in the
direction of the dance floor and amble off without even looking to see if she
was following.
 
Dance card!
 
Fauve blinked twice.
 
"Ah, Roland, I was beginning to wonder
what had happened to you," she said, and put her arm through his.
 
"I thought perhaps you had had to stop
to feed the nightingales."