Mistral's Daughter (59 page)

"Look!"
he said excitedly.
 
"Here's a Roman
oil lamp from the first century before Christ. See the two menorahs on its
base?
 
It says here in the book that it's
one of the oldest representa-tions of the menorah ever found on French soil
—
it's a hundred years
older
than the Pont du Gard."

Fauve
found herself abruptly appalled at the sight of the humble little object.
 
"Oh, Eric, think of the earth under
which it must have been found
—
so many feet of earth
—
too much
history
—
too many years ago
—
how many generations are there in
two thousand years, how many births and deaths?
 
I can't bear to think about it
—
I'm having trouble going back
two hundred years, much less two thousand."
 
She turned away to the cases with
relief.
 
Photographs, no matter how old,
were somehow of today.

She
walked slowly up and down, almost weary, gazing with diminishing interest at
old letters and proclamations.
 
Suddenly
she stood transfixed before a photograph, taken in 1913, of a dignified,
handsome old gentleman with a trim white mustache, a double-breasted black
suit and a black hat with an upturned brim of a typically Provençal style.
 
He stood to one side of the railing that
encircled the doors of the tabernacle in the synagogue above them and, standing
on the other side, was a dark-eyed, stately woman in a long, tiny-waisted black
dress with a wisp of veiling on her gray hair.
 
"Eric," she cried, "come and look at this.
 
Look, just look!
 
It says that they were two of the last
representatives of the Jewish community in Cavaillon."

"They're
certainly very impressive," Eric said, puzzled by her emotion.

"Their
names!
 
Monsieur and Madame Achille
Astruc
—
Astruc, my great-grandfather's name!
 
Oh Eric, I haven't told you about him
—
David Astruc was Magali's
father
—
these people might, have been relatives of mine!
 
They were old when Magali was a little girl
—
 
they could have been cousins, or great-aunt
and uncle or
—
oh, I don't know...
 
something —"
 
Fauve had tears
in her eyes as she
 
pored over the
photograph of the fine, serene old people.
 
Eric stood quietly, rocking her gently with his arms clasped around her
waist, as she studied the picture, lost in speculation and wonder.

It
was minutes before the other tourists started to trickle into the museum.

"I
think we've had the best of it," Eric whispered to her and Fauve quickly
agreed, casting one last glance at the photograph before she followed him up
the stairs and outside.

"I
need a Coke...
 
don't you?" Eric
asked.

"Something
cold with a lot of sugar in it," Fauve agreed, and they returned to the
café and almost collapsed at a table, with that peculiar, drained, but
high-hearted exhaustion known only to sight-seers who have somehow been
allowed to travel in time and not been forced to merely observe.

Eric
picked up the guidebook and riffled through its pages with curiosity.
 
"I wonder how many Jews lived in
Cavaillon
—
let's see...
 
it says
here that it was always a small number, never more than three hundred people at
the most.
 
This is interesting, Fauve,
the municipal archives mention that there was a rabbi in Cavaillon as early as
the eleventh century but when the Revolution came in 1790 the Jews began to
leave Provence and spread out all over France and after 1793 there isn't even a
trace
of
community activity.
 
Look, here's a list of the names of the last members of the community
—
it's from the archives of Cavaillon and they've broken the names into groups to
show their origins."

Fauve
took the book.
 
"There are more
French names than any other," she said, "all taking their names from
the various localities they came from...
 
Carcassonne, Cavaillon, of course, and Digne, and Monteux... all
place-names...
 
and...
 
and Lunel."

"Lunel?"
he echoed.

"Lunel!
 
Then there must be a
place
called
Lunel!
 
I never knew that!
 
It never even occurred to me that it might be
a place-name.
 
Oh, Eric, we
have
to
be able to find it on the map if it still exists!

Eric,
when can we go looking for Lunel?"
 
Her fatigue forgotten, Fauve looked as if she were ready to set out on
the search at once.
 
Eric smiled at the
sight of her eager, open-hearted impatient beauty.

"It's
got to be somewhere, Fauve, and I'll dig it up for you...
 
places just don't disappear.
 
But not today."
 
He took the guidebook away from her and looked
at the page from which she'd been reading.

"There
are some other names with a Hebrew origin like Cohen and Jehuda and a few from
the Latin
—
that's where your Astruc comes from, darling, from
astrum
meaning star.
 
The last group are
foreign, people from Cavaillon who came here from other countries...
 
Lisbonne and Lubin...
 
a Pole...
 
and..."

"And..."
Fauve asked, puzzled at his stopping.

"Damn
time!
 
It takes everything with
it," he muttered.
 
People named
Astruc and Lunel had belonged to that temple he had just visited as if it were
only a larger than ordinary curiosity from another civilization.
 
The past, tantalizing, elusive, always just
beyond reach, had rapped him smartly on his shoulder, and he shivered in
wonder.
 
If he knew enough, if there were
documents
—
which there weren't
—
why couldn't he trace Fauve's
family back before the Romans had built the Pont du Gard?
 
Why had so much knowledge been lost?
 
How had it come to be forgotten?

"Ah,
don't be upset," Fauve said, understanding his emotion.
 
"It just isn't fair, not being able to
know, it's so frustrating...
 
Eric, we're
both so miserably uninformed and ignorant, aren't we? We're a disgrace."

"We
certainly are."

"But
imagine..."
 
Fauve continued, her
eyes bigger than ever with speculation, "just imagine...
 
Lunels and Astrucs and Lubins and
Carcassonnes all going to temple together...
 
knowing each other...
 
their
families living right here for hundreds and hundreds of years...
 
maybe one of them was that rabbi in the
eleventh century
—
I can almost see them, can't you?"

Eric
was silent, looking at her lovely, thoughtful face, so animated by the visions
she saw.
 
He found himself swooping back
from the past and totally, marvelously alive in the present.

"It's
impossible to see anyone but you."

"Eric,"
Fauve said chidingly.
 
"What a lack
of imagination."

"Because
I'm in love with you."

"What?"

"I'm
in love with you.
 
Do you love me?
 
Do you, my darling?"

"I
don't know...
 
I've never been in love
before," she murmured.

"Look
at me," he commanded.
 
Slowly she
raised her lids and what he saw in her eyes was so unmistakable that he almost
cried out in joy.

"But
I didn't
intend
to fall in love!" Fauve protested.

"It's
too late now," he said triumphantly.

25

The writer who complains of
the loneliness of his work, the artist who speaks ruefully of the solitude of
his studio, the composer who announces that he is condemned to shut himself
away to write music in a secluded room all share one trait:
 
they lie.
 
Were they to admit the unfashion-able truth they would have to say that
there are few places less lonely than that privileged space in which the mind
is free to concentrate on its work, no privacy more jealously guarded from
intrusion.

The vast studio in which
Julien Mistral worked at
La Tourrello
had been his only true home for
forty years.
 
As he opened the doors he
breathed in deeply, relishing the complex aroma composed by the smell of the
poppy-seed oil-based paints, the prepared canvases, the seasoned pine used as
stretchers, the agreeably rancid paint-smeared rags that lay about, all mixed
into a pungent necromantic brew.
 
Mistral found himself greeted by a population of images that
represented everything he had ever cared about.
 
In this studio he had expended his heroic resources.
 
Brush stroke by brush stroke he had distilled
his life itself and the release of this essence of each hour's work had left an
imprint on the very air.
 
The paintings
that he had sold over the years seemed to him to be as constant in their
presence as those he had kept for himself, as if they had refused to
leave.
 
He had never experienced a
minute's loneliness in his densely peopled studio.

What then, Mistral asked
himself savagely, was the feeling that plucked so insistently at his
consciousness that he found himself
 
looking blankly at a half-finished canvas for an hour at a time?
  
What was this restlessness, this irritation,
this sense of something not accomplished, something incomplete?

It was a month before he was
willing to admit to himself that it was Fauve's absence, a month before he
reached a point at which he
 
could no
longer tell himself that tomorrow she would be back, a month before he was able
to isolate and define the realization that in the course of the past eight
years the painting lessons he gave her every morning during her summer stay
with him had become essential to him.

He needed her!

After Teddy's death Julien
Mistral had resolved never to need another human being.
 
He had given Fauve up without a moment's
hesitation, he had stayed away from her for eight years because he was afraid
that she would remind him of Teddy.
 
When
he saw no resemblance to her mother in her face, he had been relieved; no man
could love twice as he had loved Teddy, and survive.
 
He could not afford to give another such
hostage to fortune.
 
The nine months of
the year that Fauve spent in New York passed without too much pain, although
much too slowly, in the certain knowledge that every June she would come home
to him, and they would be together all summer long.

Never would he have believed
that she could desert him.
 
There had
been no sign, on the last trip down from Paris, only five weeks before, of any
basic change in her.
 
A new maturity, yes
certainly, and a hint of dissatisfaction with her own work, now that he thought
about it, but what true artist was ever satisfied?
 
No, it had nothing to do with his disapproval
of her ventures into Abstraction...
 
surely Fauve must know that if she had really insisted on it she was
free to paint with a broom instead of a brush, free to paint archery targets or
jigsaw puzzles, free to make mudpies and plaster casts.
 
All that was just a convenient excuse.
 
The reason she'd left him was Eric
Avigdor.
 
Fauve had been his daughter
until the night she met that boy.

It was so simple an
explanation, and so obvious that Mistral didn't understand how he had failed to
see it sooner.
 
Kate had been right,
entirely right
—
perhaps if she had said nothing he would have
understood immediately, but whenever Fauve was concerned, he discounted any
opinion Kate had.

Where, after all, had Fauve
been all these past days?
 
Arles, she
said, and Cavaillon and Nîmes and Orange, Carpentras and Tarascon and St. Rémy
and Aix-en-Provence.
 
Oh, how banally
touristic!
 
What was her conversation
about on those few evenings that she favored them with her company at
dinner?
 
An infuriating mixture of
architectural wonders
—
not one of which Mistral thought was worth
looking at as much as the sight of a single cherry tree in bloom
—
and
the discoveries she was making, little by little, of that most confusing of all
subjects, the history of the Jews of Provence.

Did she think that he gave a
damn for one word of it?
 
He had nothing
against Jews, they simply didn't interest him, any more than Mohammedans or
Hindus.
 
Why was she fascinated by a past
that had nothing to do with her, so little relevance to the modern world?
 
Did she have any idea how farfetched the
topic was?

Maggy, who had, after all,
been Jewish, had never given it a thought as far as he could remember, and
Teddy cared only for the present they had lived in together, and yet here was
his own daughter, poking about in synagogues, in Avignon, in Aix, in
Carpentras.
 
Synagogues!

Only last night, irritated
beyond endurance, he had asked her why, since she was going through a religious
phase, and since three out of four of her grandparents had been Catholics, why
didn't she visit cathedrals?
 
"Cathedrals are just too accessible," she'd said, maddeningly
pleased with herself.
 
"They're
everywhere, there isn't a town without one or two
—
they're old, but
without mystery."

Mistral put down his palette
and gave up any attempt to continue work.
 
He paced the floor of his studio in a rising panic.
 
It was almost mid-July.
 
In six more weeks, Fauve's summer visit would
be over and she was on the verge of drifting away from him.
 
When she came back next year she'd be seventeen
—
no longer a child
—
and he would be seventy.
 
Seventy
—
bah!
 
It was just a number.
 
He had more energy, more curiosity than he'd
had when he was fifty.

It was the behavior of his
teenaged daughter that bothered him, not the weight of his years. Exposed to
the attention of the first young man who'd noticed her, she had turned flighty,
giddy and filled with overblown, momentary enthusiasms.
 
She needed to be brought down to earth, that
was all.

During each of the past
summers Fauve had posed for a portrait, but this year she'd been out gadding so
much that he hadn't had a chance to claim her time.
 
Everything they had been accustomed to do
together
—
the painting lessons and the posing, the visits to
the café in Félice, had been changed by the entrance of that abominable boy
into Fauve's life.

Mistral
took down the canvas on his easel and propped it carelessly against the wall.
Moving as eagerly as a young man going to a rendezvous with a woman he loved,
he went to the corner where his blank canvases were stacked and picked out the
largest one he, could find.
 
Yes!
 
A full-length picture, an ode, a hymn to
Fauve Lunel and her miniskirt
—
she'd like that.

"I’ve
found out why Avigdor means ‘the judge,’" Eric said to Fauve.
 
"It seems that in the Book of Chronicles
the name is used twice and later interpretation says that it's one of the names
of Moses.
 
I told my father and he said
not to get too excited about it
—
there weren't any lawgivers in the
family, he informed me, but only antique dealers until he came along, and now a
budding architect."

"It's
marvelous!" Fauve said proudly.
 
The
two of them were in a secondhand bookshop in Avignon, looking for volumes that
might lead them somewhere in their quest for historical knowledge.
 
So far they had had little real luck, finding
only some minor references in books, but Eric was undiscouraged. "How did
you find out?"

"I
made a phone call.
 
It was a wild guess
but I knew that there had to be a rabbi in a big city like Marseilles so I just
looked him up in the phone book, called him and asked.
 
He said to call back in two days
—
give him time to look it up
—
and when I did, he told me.
 
He didn't even sound surprised at the
request. Maybe he gets a lot of phone calls like that."

"Hmmm...
 
probably," she said, losing interest.

"Fauve,
what's wrong?"

"It's
my father."

"What
about him?
 
Look, I know he doesn’t like
me.
 
Nobody could accuse Julien Mistral
of being much of an actor.
 
He hovers
just at the very outer limits of tolerance when I come to pick you up, but I
feel that as long as he allows me in the door, that's enough."

"No,
it's not about you."
 
Fauve sat down
on the staircase that led to the upper floor of the bookshop, and folded her
arms around her long legs.
 
She was
wearing a sleeveless, frilled, batiste camisole with a tiny peplum.
 
It laced up in front like the underwear of an
actress in an old Western movie and it was the latest rage in all the boutiques
in Midi.
 
Her sheaves of hair, bronze now
in the watery light of the staircase, fell in heavy waves over her
breasts.
 
If she'd worn a petticoat
instead of blue jeans she would have seemed like a Victorian maiden getting
ready for bed.
 
There was a richness of
suggestion in her beauty, Eric thought as he looked at her, that would bring
out the poet in the most mundane of men.

"He's
always painted a picture of me every summer," Fauve went on.
 
"He wants me to pose for him, starting
tomorrow.
 
I can't refuse, Eric, it's
impossible, he'd be too hurt.
 
It's a
tradition with us.
 
I feel guilty enough
about not letting him give me painting lessons.
 
He hasn't said another word about them, but when I see him at breakfast
I know it's on his mind and he's just controlling himself.
 
Oh, Lord..."

"I
think it's remarkable that you've had the strength of mind to keep on
resisting," Eric said.

"I
have to," Fauve said simply.
 
"It's a question of self-preservation.
 
Father doesn't consciously understand that he
does
want me to imitate him.
 
It's
implicit in everything he shows me, everything he tells me, although he'd deny
it and believe he was speaking the truth.
 
You see, my father thinks that his way is the
only
way...
 
he hasn't a good word to say for another
living painter...
 
the only ones he
admires are dead.
 
But his work comes
from him, it comes out of whatever is inside of him, and that's not
teachable
."

"Then
all these years of lessons..." Eric asked.

"Oh,
they haven't been wasted
—
I do have technical ability
—
I'm not
going to be modest about that
—
but so do a lot of other painters.
 
If I have anything more I'll only know it
when I start to work in my own style and I'll never find that style if I keep
learning from him."

"Why
did you wait so long to decide?"

"Until
last year I was happy to paint 'little' Mistrals.
 
I go to an art school in New York and the
teachers are afraid to really criticize me because of who I am and because I've
been doing work in his manner
—
they're so knocked out by who
he
is
that I can't get an honest word out of them.
 
It took me a long time to figure it out
—
I was dumb, I guess."

"Not
dumb, darling, just young," Eric said.

"Father's
always praised me too much," Fauve added thoughtfully.
 
"I don't know if I'm ever going to be
really good but I know damn well I can't be as good as he says I am.
 
He's probably only doing it to encourage me,
but it works in the opposite way
—
 
since I know my work isn’t worth such
extravagant praise, I wonder
—
 
is
it worth any praise at all?
 
If I truly
couldn't paint he'd say so, but I’m in an in-between position.
 
I
can
paint, like a very much lesser
Mistral, and I don’t want that!
 
If I'm
ever to do anything of my own it would be fatal to study with him any
more."