Mistral's Daughter (56 page)

The great gates of the
La
Tourrello
stood wide open and the lights of the salon were blazing on the
far side of the courtyard.
 
"Just
drive right in," Fauve said absently.
 
Eric parked the car in the courtyard.

"Well, you'd better come
meet my father..." Fauve mumbled and nervously led the way to the salon
where she knew he always sat,
listening for her.

As they entered the room
Mistral rose from his chair near the fireplace and walked toward them, looking
from Fauve to Eric in surprise.
 
Only
surprise, thought Fauve, immensely relieved, not irritation.

"This is my
father," she said, not daring to look at Eric.
 
She should have told him she was Mistral's
daughter, she knew she should, but there just hadn't been an appropriate time,
or rather the time at which it would have been natural had come and gone so
quickly that she hadn't had the wit to seize it, and anyway he hadn't asked and
in any case, what of it?
 
He didn't like
her because she was Mistral's daughter and he wouldn't not like her for it
either, but now when it was too late, she desperately wished it hadn't come as
s surprise.
 
Eric might think she'd
planned it to impress him.

"Papa, this is
Eric," she said faintly.

"1 can see that,"
said Mistral, shaking hands with a smile.
 
"But, what is this strange tribal custom of the young never to know
each other's last names?
 
Eric what, may
I ask?"

"Good evening, Monsieur
Mistral."
 
Why, Fauve wondered, did
he sound so strange?
 
Was he angry at her
after all?

"The
name of my family," Eric continued, "is Avigdor.
 
And the name of my father, Monsieur Mistral,
is Adrien Avigdor."

"But
you can't possibly forbid Fauve to go out with this young man," Kate said
evenly. "That's really out of the question, Julien, this day and age.
 
Think about it.
 
You have absolutely no reason that she could
understand or accept.
 
All that would
happen is that you'd encourage her to ask questions you don't particularly care
to answer, isn't that so?
 
If I were you,
I'd just let the whole mess alone
—
it'll disappear of its own accord
unless you meddle."

"You
didn't see his face, Kate.
 
You didn't
hear his voice."

"Did
he say anything unusual?"

"No,
he was perfectly correct as far as that went, but there was something
—
I know I'm not wrong about that."

"Julien,
all he could know is that his father was once your dealer.
 
Naturally Avigdor must resent having lost
you, what dealer wouldn't?
 
It's
unquestionably a famous family horror story
—
how Julien Mistral got his
start from Papa Avigdor and then was so thoroughly ungrateful that he changed
dealers
—
you know how those people talk business all the time.
 
Losing you was probably the biggest event in
Avigdor's life
—
next to getting you."

"I
don't want Fauve mixed up with him."

"She's
just a child
—
she's not old enough to 'get mixed up' with a boy at
sixteen, not seriously anyway.
 
What harm
could come of it?
 
An artist has the
right to change dealers, after all.
 
Fauve said that this boy is only twenty years old, didn't she?
 
Well, you haven't seen Avigdor since before
the war
—
it was sometime in 1938 I think that he came here the last
time...
 
or perhaps even as long ago as
1937
—
 
I don't remember.
 
That's more than thirty years ago!
 
Be reasonable!
 
I think you're taking this all much too
seriously, just because it's Fauve. You never made this kind of fuss about
anyone Nadine went out with and God knows she brought home a lot of young men
in her day."

There
was no reason, Kate had realized long ago, for Julien to realize that Marte
Pollison had told her exactly what had taken place between him and Avigdor
during the war, and that her visit to Avigdor had confirmed that, and other
facts as well.
 
There were many pieces of
information about her husband that she had stored away in her memory.
 
One never knew when they would become
useful...
 
they were a form of capital,
perhaps in their own way as valuable as any of the canvases in the storeroom.

Meanwhile
she relished the look of anxiety on Julien's face.
 
She had so few weapons and he had so
many.
 
Strange.
 
Once Fauve had seemed to be another of his
weapons, a danger to her, a threat to Nadine.
 
Now, as Fauve grew older and more precious to Mistral every year, more
dear to him than anything
—
for Kate was too clear-eyed to ignore that
—
Fauve became a weapon she herself might find a way to use.

Some
day, at some time in the future, repayment had to be made for the suffering
Julien had caused her.
 
Kate believed in
the inevitability of revenge.
 
Life could
not, must not be allowed to treat her unfairly...
 
not in the long run, not if she were
patient.
 
How deeply interesting it was
that Fauve had met this young Avigdor.
 
"What did he look like?" she asked lightly.
 
"Was there much of his father in
him?"

"Something...
 
perhaps...
 
but I didn't pay much attention.
 
He's far better looking, taller, I would never have guessed they were
related."

"You
mean he didn't look Jewish?"

"That
wasn't what I meant!
 
Neither did
Avigdor, as you know very well."

"Good
heavens, Julien, there's no reason to lash out at me
—
do try to be less
touchy.
 
In two weeks Fauve'll be tired
of visiting old buildings with this student and there will be ten other boys
for you to worry about.
 
So he was better
looking, was he?
 
How much better?
 
Avigdor wasn't a beauty, after all."

"Very,
very much better.
 
Too much better."

"Try
to get some sleep, Julien," Kate said sweetly.
 
"You're seeing ghosts."

24

"What were you thinking
of, Eric, to begin this cultural project by going to the Popes' Palace?"
Beth Avigdor said with mild, amused indignation.
 
"Such a great barracks of a place,
without even any furniture to make it look less inhospitable
—
and full
of tourists as well?
 
No wonder you're
exhausted, Mademoiselle Lunel.
 
I've
avoided setting a foot in there for years."

"I enjoyed it...
 
for almost the first hour...
 
and by that time we'd passed the point of no
return," Fauve answered, wriggling her sore toes, grateful for the
umbrella that cast a cool shadow over the lunch table in the garden of Le
Prieuré.

Eric' s mother was a woman to
reckon with, she realized, forthright and statuesque, with fine dark eyes and
hair only beginning to show a thread of gray here and there.
 
She looked as if she must be at least twenty
years younger than Eric's father who sat, looking as much at ease as any man
has ever looked, judiciously considering the fourteen-page wine list, which was
wittily decorated by seven, full-page, ink drawings by Ronald Searle.
 
Adrien Avigdor had never seemed particularly
young even as a young man, and now he was pleasantly bald, pleasantly stocky
and pleasantly wrinkled, mellow, sturdy and as unremarkable as ever.
 
His mien had always been so simple, so independent
of any outstanding feature, so dominated by his expression of rustic goodness,
that age had only enhanced it.

In 1945 he had married
beautiful Beth Levi, who had fought beside him for three years in the
Resistance.
 
Their only son, Eric, who
had inherited his mother's looks, and his father's mien, had been born in
1949.
 
The Avigdors had a fine and
harmonious marriage, and his gallery on the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré was one
of the most successful and respected in France.

Many years ago, when he had
bought a vacation house in Provence, he had chosen to live in the urbane,
elegant little city of Villeneuve-les-Avignon, which was so different in
topography and atmosphere from those savage hill villages of the Lubéron that
still held memories he didn't care to resurrect.
 
And now, by God, here was Eric turning up
with Mistral's daughter, Avigdor mused, as he weighed the possibility of a
potentially interesting Nuits-St.Georges, Clos de la Maréchale against a
highly promising Romanée-St.-Vivant.

It had been impossible to
prevent Beth, her maternal curiosity immediately aroused by Eric's enthusiasm,
from arranging this lunch.
 
His wife had
never known anything more about Mistral than the simple fact that her husband
had once been the artist's dealer.
 
"We didn't get along but it's too unimportant to discuss," he
had told her years ago.
 
Eric had grown
curious, in the last year, to know the reason for his quarrel with the painter,
but he'd resisted being drawn into an explanation with his son.
 
"Just call it a mutual disagreement,"
he'd said, with such an uncharacteristic frown that it had only served to
convince Eric that there had been a serious rupture between them.

There could not be anyone
Avigdor was less anxious to see his son interested in than Mistral's daughter,
but he resolved that he would be as pleasant to her as he would be to any other
girl.
 
Indeed, what man could not be,
once he'd laid eyes on her?

The years had taught Adrien
Avigdor certain things, and one of them was how lucky he had been to survive
when so many had perished.
 
It was
important to him to be grateful for life, important not to dwell on old
wounds.
 
He asked only to live with
dignity, and with decency toward others, but the hard-earned lessons of self-preservation
he had learned during the Occupation made him turn his back whenever he heard
people speak of religion or politics.
 
If
only, he thought often, those two forces that so violently and persistently
divided humanity had been left out of the scheme of things, how sweet life
could be for everyone.
 
He wanted nothing
to do with certain memories that, in spite of his philosophy, had never faded,
and Fauve Mistral brought them back to life.

"So, Mademoiselle,"
he said, turning deliberately to Fauve with, his benign air, "you go to
school in the United States, do you?"

"Oh, please call me
Fauve
—
yes, I live in New York but I come to visit my father every
summer."

"Of course, of course,
how pleasant.
 
Ah, Jacques," Adrien
Avigdor turned to Jacques Mille, director of the hotel, son of the proprietor
of Le Prieuré, who had bought it from Madame Blé, "What do you think of
the Nuits-St. Georges as compared to the Romanée-St.-Vivant?
 
Your personal opinion mind you, among
friends."

"If it were my palate,
Monsieur Avigdor, I'd pick the Beaune Vignes Franches, 1955." Young
Jacques Mille, dressed in a casual, distinctly English manner, possessing an
open, upright charm, and brought up to preside over a masterpiece of a hotel
and restaurant, was a man whose advice could be relied on in all things.

"Then that's
decided," Avigdor said comfortably.
 
The rest of the meal could now revolve around the wine rather than have
the wine chosen to accommodate the food
—
he preferred it that way.

The garden of Le Prieuré was
filled, as always, with festive groups:
 
celebrating families and tables of serious gourmets, seated at round
tables on bright blue cushions under red sun umbrellas.
 
Waiters and busboys bustled about under the
vigilant eye of vivacious Marie-France Mille, Jacques's soft-voiced wife who
embodied that idealized brunette Provençal beauty that the Italian poet,
Petrarch, had immortalized in his Laura.

What would the ghost of pious
Cardinal Arnaud de Via, nephew of Pope John XXII, who had given his palace to
twelve canons in 1333 to turn into a priory, have made of the merry lunchtime
scene?
 
What would the ghost of Madame
Blé, who had run such a quiet
pension,
have thought of the Olympic-sized
swimming pool and the two tennis courts that lay on the other side of the old
rose garden, out of sight of the diners?
 
What exclamations would she have made if she could have seen the
splendid addition that had recently been built and perfectly integrated into
the old buildings, with its air-conditioned suites and luxurious baths?
 
And what would the ghost of Teddy Lunel have
thought if she could have looked down from the room in which she had decided
her fate and seen her tall, lovely young daughter sitting there about to have
lunch with Adrien Avigdor, a man Julien Mistral never mentioned to her during
their short life together?

"I'm so happy to meet
you, Monsieur Avigdor," Fauve said. "My grandmother has told me of
you."

"So Maggy hasn't
forgotten me?" asked Avigdor, pleased.

"Of course not.
 
Magali has always told me absolutely
everything about her past.
 
She believes
that it's important for children to know as much as possible about their
parents and grandparents
—
particularly when they're
illegitimate."

Fauve chose her words
deliberately.
 
She wanted Eric's parents
to know from the beginning that no matter what was in their minds about her
birth they didn't have to treat her with cautious tact.

"I wish you'd tell me
about my father, when he was a young man," she went on. "I've only
really known him for the last eight years.
 
Perfect as my father is, he refuses to reminisce.
 
But you gave him his first show so you must
have known him for
—
oh, more than forty years!
 
What was he like then?"
 
The most lively curiosity was fervent on her
face.

Mistral as a young man?
 
Quickly Avigdor searched for a pleasant
memory.
 
He could hardly tell this
devoted daughter that her father had always been an accursed, bad-tempered,
arrogant, selfish man.
 
A man who had
sent more than one Jew to his death.
 
But
he must find something to say.

"Well, now let me
see...
 
it's hard to describe him exactly.
 
He was always impressive, always the most
noticeable person in any room."
 
He
paused, searched a second and then found inspiration.
 
"What I'll never forget, no never, is
that very first time I met him.
 
Kate
Browning, that is to say your stepmother of course, brought me to your father's
little studio in Montparnasse where he was living with your grandmother
—
why, I can still see Maggy walking out of the kitchen in her bare feet with the
wine and the glasses
—
it's amazing how vividly I remember her, but, of
course, she was so magnificently beautiful, such a superb girl and not much
older than you are now, Fauve...
 
just
eighteen I think, and so much in love, so loyal..."

"Loyal," Fauve
echoed in a small voice.

"But, of course loyal,
that above all.
 
I admired her a great
deal, you know, supporting your father by her modeling before he began to sell
—
but, naturally when a woman is truly, in love she will make any sacrifice, is
that not so?
 
Ah, they were a striking
couple, both so tall, both with red hair, his so dark, hers so bright, they
were the legend of the
quartier...
 
ah, yes, Julien Mistral and Maggy,
La
Rouquinne
—
they must have been together for quite a while before he
met Kate.
 
By the way, how is Kate
now?
 
I've totally lost track of her."

"She's...
 
fine," Fauve said out of a confusion so
deep that she spoke vaguely."

"Her health is
good?" Avigdor asked.
 
"Perfect, as far as I know," Fauve said, forcing herself to
smile politely.
 
Adrien Avigdor spoke a
moment longer before the arrival of the Dover sole turned the conversation to
food but Fauve heard nothing more.

Her father and her
grandmother?
 
They had loved?
 
They had lived together?
 
But it had been her mother and her father who
had loved, who had lived together!
 
A
wave of troubled confusion so strong and complicated that it prevented her from
moving swept over her, and only the anxious pressure of Eric's hand on hers
under the tablecloth brought her back and enabled her to pick up her fork.

With a few nostalgic,
well-meant words Adrien Avigdor had taken the design she had made to explain
her own life and changed it forever, as irrevocably as someone giving a twist
to a pattern in a kaleidoscope.
 
The
familiar shapes were lost, destroyed.
 
Why did you never tell me this, Magali?
 
I knew only that you posed for my father, nothing more.
 
What kind of man is he? What really happened
between you?
 
What can I trust now of
anything you've ever told me?

"Is your sole not good,
Fauve?" Beth Avigdor asked gently.
 
She would have kicked her husband soundly if she had had any warning
that he was going to ramble on in that fatuous way, but to be fair, Fauve had
brought it on herself, when she proclaimed that her grandmother had told her
"absolutely everything"
—
did any parent or grandparent ever tell
the young "everything"?
 
This
would have had to be the first instance in recorded history.
 
For whatever
 
reason, the girl was clearly lost in her own thoughts.
 
"Fauve," she' repeated, "is
the fish not good?"

"Oh! No, it's excellent,
thank you, Madame Avigdor."

"Fauve, I promise, no
more architecture for twenty-four hours," Eric said contritely. "Two
days?...
 
a week?
 
Whatever you say.
 
We'll do whatever you like this
afternoon."

"Let's go to the Pont du
Gard," said Fauve, giving him a resolute smile.

"You're crazy
—
you look knocked out."

"I'm perfectly fine, and
I'm panting to truly understand the Romans."

"Eric has this notion
that you can't comprehend a civilization until you understand how they feel
about water," Adrien Avigdor grumbled.
 
"Why about water and not about wine?
 
I ask you that.
 
Ah ha!
 
No one can give me an answer.
 
They never can."

"You could probably get
one from a Talmudic scholar," Fauve suggested, "if you really want to
know."

"That's not the sort of
thing they discuss in the Bible," Eric protested.