Mistral's Daughter (62 page)

"Then why does he?"
Mistral growled.

"If he doesn't come out
and take a bow, Father, the rumors will start again
—
they'll say he's
dead or drugged or shut up in a mad house
—
I can't imagine how he
endures it.
 
The temptation, of course,
is to compromise, to create a length that is not revolutionary but merely
evolutionary
—
but Jean François is too great an artist not to be
faithful to himself."

"Tell me," Mistral
asked, "just how old is Jean François?"

"No one is sure, not
even I, but I think he must be close to forty."

"He sounds like a
child.
 
And if you live in a child's
world you descend to his level," Mistral said scornfully.

"Enough of Jean
François," Kate said abruptly, rushing protectively into the
conversation. She was all too familiar with Mistral's opinions about the value
of the haute couture and she knew how icy Nadine would turn if Jean François
were criticized.
 
"Nadine, you must
ask Fauve to tell you about her summer
—
it's been an absolute
revelation."

Nadine looked at her mother
and caught a purposeful spark in her eye. They had never needed words to
communicate.
 
She shrugged lightly and
turned to Fauve.

"You've been
uncharacteristically silent tonight, now that I think about it.
 
And yet it seems to me that I've heard
something about you and a rather attractive young architect.
 
So, little Fauve has finally deigned to
recognize the masculine sex?
 
And how do
you find first love, eh?" Nadine spoke with a cold curiosity so
penetrating that Fauve almost flinched.
 
Instinctively she sought a way to deflect that curiosity, for Nadine,
like a tomcat, with a small animal in its jaws, wouldn't release the object of
her attention until she was satisfied.

"I find the masculine
sex marvelously useful, thank you.
 
How
have I spent all my summers here without any other transportation than my
bicycle?
 
This fellow has his own car so
I've been able to convince him to drive me around
—
I've seen more of
the countryside in six weeks than I saw in the last eight years."

"Your interest is only
touristic?
 
Fauve, do you expect me to
believe that?"

"Believe what you want
—
I'm investigating the history of the Jews of Provence."

"Good Lord, how utterly
bizarre...
 
I thought they were all in
Paris!"

"So do most
people," Fauve said, almost laughing at the success of her gambit.
 
Nadine hadn't even asked Eric's name.
 
"There have been Jews living right here
for two thousand years."

"Two thousand
years...
 
are you sure, Fauve?"
Nadine drawled.
 
Her hard glance, the
green of malachite, was distinctly dubious.

"Absolutely!
 
And until the Crusades they were treated more
or less like everyone else.
 
Even the
Vandals and the Visigoths and the Barbarians left them alone when they invaded
the countryside
—
it wasn't until the twelfth century, when the kings of
France went chasing off to recapture the Holy Land, that they really began to
persecute the Jews."

Fauve had put down her fork,
excited by a chance to talk about the revelations she had come across every day
in Armand Mossé's book, to which both her father and Kate seemed callously
indifferent.
 
She grasped this
opportunity eagerly although she was perfectly aware that it had only come
about because Kate wanted to head off an argument.

Fauve was literally on fire
with names and dates and statistics; she felt as if Pope Alexandre VI and Jules
II, who had both employed Jews as their physicians, were her personal
friends.
 
Just as heartily she loathed
Jules III who had ordered the burning of the Talmud.

She was too involved in her
subject to notice the veiled disdain that passed from Nadine to Kate as Fauve
grew increasingly indignant over the more than five hundred years, ending only
with the Revolution, during which all the Jews of Provence had had to submit,
from childhood on, to the wearing of a distinctive yellow patch on their
clothes.
 
Mistral listened without
expression while she described the horrors of the old ghettoes, locked and
barred every night, in which countless generations dwelled in miserable,
jam-packed airless hovels while all other men were free to live at liberty in
the vast and rich valley of the Vaucluse.
 
The rules, cruel and restrictive and arbitrary, that the authorities
imposed on all aspects of Jewish life, came spilling out of her in one long,
fervent monologue.
 
Mistral stopped
eating and his lips tightened angrily yet Fauve didn't notice.
 
She had no idea how long and how passionately
she had talked until Nadine finished her cheese, and said lightly, "Aren't
you being a bit of a bleeding heart, Fauve? Those people have all been dead for
a long time
—
it's so morbid to talk as if this still matters today
—
I find it distinctly odd of you."

"Not that odd,
Nadine.
 
Everywhere in Mossé's book I
find the names of Lunel and Astruc
—
names of my family...
 
my name in fact."

"Isn't that pushing
what's probably a very distant connection?'

"Distant!
 
No, damn it, I don't think there's anything
distant about it..."
 
Fauve
responded furiously, when Mistral finally broke his brooding silence.

"Enough!
 
When you came back from that place in
Cavaillon you described it in a way that convinced me that the local Jews must
have been well off and well treated and now you submit us to this endless
catalog of misery.
 
This is becoming a
mania with you!"

"I was being an
uninformed romantic, Father, living in an illusion."
 
Fauve spoke up boldly, unintimidated by his
disapproval.
 
"That building isn't
even two hundred years old and I was fool enough to think that it indicated an
idyllic past.
 
Now I know that it's a
deceptive remnant of one of the brief periods in which the Jews were permitted
to live in relative tranquillity
—
and even so, it used to be surrounded
by a dreadful ghetto that's been torn down.
 
There are still people, well-meaning people, who boast that Provence
was 'The Paradise of the Jews'
—
well, it was, if you compare it to the
dozens of other places in France where the Jews were all burned alive! Provence
was a paradise in the most limited and ironic sense of the word, like saying it
was the best of all possible prisons for people who had committed no
crime."

"Prison?" Kate
said, carefully watching Mistral's expression as Fauve defied him.
 
She was the only person at the table who was
aware of how deeply he resented Fauve's interest in anything Jewish, the only
person who had enjoyed his reaction to every word Fauve had said. "Why
'prison,' Fauve?
 
We weren't the people
who were responsible for what happened to those people, we never were cruel to
Jews,
we
never treated Jews as if they'd committed a crime. Really,
Fauve, I'm surprised you haven't accused us all of sending them to
concentration camps."

26

Kate Mistral had
acted a role with Julien Mistral from the moment she met him.
 
The closest he had come to awareness of her
real self was in that moment she had asked him to marry her. Now, after
forty-two years of marriage she was locked into a part that had evolved with
the years, a part in which she had never revealed all her emotions to this most
necessary of opponents.
 
When she admired
an actress on the stage or in a film it never occurred to her that in her own
domestic life she had long been a habitual and consummate performer.
 
All of her human relationships took place in
an intimate theater in which she assumed that everyone was acting much of the
time.
 
The moments in which her dramatic
mask could be partially dropped were rare.
 
Sometimes she approached the truth
—
and a genuine inner moment
of contact
—
with Nadine.
 
Never
with her husband.

Kate sat placidly
in front of her dressing table, taking off her pearls while Mistral stood
angrily in the door of her bedroom, unwilling to come in and sit down, yet
unable to go off to his own room and try to sleep.

"What on
earth are you so disturbed about, Julien?" she inquired mildly.
 
"I'll agree that it's irritating that
Fauve insists on boring us at the dinner table but why treat it like a major
problem? All girls go through difficult phases in their teens."

"You
deliberately encouraged her."

"Nonsense.
 
You can't say a single polite word to Fauve
these days without unleashing her obsession.
 
You know yourself that if you just say good morning you risk a lecture
about a thousand years at the Wailing Wall.
 
There's no stopping her
—
whenever she eats with us I'm afraid
we're in for it, unless you want to forbid it entirely."

"You can't
forbid Fauve to talk about the things that interest her, she's not that kind of
girl," he said grimly.
 
"Goddamn that Avigdor brat!
 
He's behind all this."

"You're
being very unfair.
 
Of course the boy
adds fuel to the fire, but in my opinion it goes way beyond him.
 
If you want to blame anybody, Maggy Lunel is
the guilty one."

"What the
hell does that mean?"

"The Jesuits
say that if you give them a child for the first seven years they can form him
for life.
 
You gave Fauve to her grandmother
and she lost no time in imposing her own identity on your daughter.
 
After all, Fauve does have that Jewish streak
no matter how little you like it. Don't underestimate its power, Julien.
 
Every child needs a feeling of identity... or
so they say."

"She's my
daughter
—
she's a painter.
 
Isn't
that enough identity for her, by Christ?
 
What more does a sixteen-year-old expect, for the love of God!
 
But no
—
instead of taking advantage
of this summer she's wasting her time chasing around imagining she's found a
so-called tradition that has nothing to do with her.
 
She's mad to imagine that the Lunels and the
Astrucs in that cursed book are her family.
 
She can't possibly find out anything
—
even if there were some
sort of vague relationship, it's too unimportant to matter!"

"Perhaps
just knowing that she's your illegitimate daughter isn't enough for
Fauve."
 
Kate put her bracelets
away, closed her jewelry box and began to brush the fine hair that fell so
neatly around her face.
 
"Do go to
sleep, Julien.
 
You make me nervous
standing there."

A minute later
Mistral was on the way to his studio in a darkness that was illuminated by
that light night sky of Provence in which the stars have moved in from space
until they seemed as if they must sing to man as they do in the other great
open lands of the earth, in the desert or in the great polar reaches.
 
He didn't flick on the work lights but walked
directly to the easel on which the half-finished picture of Fauve stood.
 
He looked at the rectangle of canvas, an almost
solid gray under the skylight, lost in thought.
 
Kate's words repeated themselves in his mind. "Every child needs a
feeling of identity."
 
How could he
deny that she was right?
 
From the day
Fauve was born he had been powerless to give her his own name.
 
Under French law he could not recognize her
as his daughter, she could not call herself Fauve Mistral so naturally she
thought of herself as a Lunel
—
as one of them.
 
All summer long she had been slipping away
from him, eluding him more each day, and although he had captured her image on
the canvas he knew that he had not, as in other years, come close to catching
her spirit, for even as he painted her she was somewhere else.

Scornfully,
Mistral turned his back on the painting
—
why even bother to finish that
daub?
—
and prowled around the shadowy studio.
 
How do you catch a sixteen-year-old girl and
pin her down and make her see reason?
 
It
would be easier to talk sense to a hummingbird.
 
If only she were French, brought up right here in Félice, under his
eye.
 
If only she didn’t escape him every
year, if only she could be frozen in time!

Restlessly he
sought the only comfort he had ever found effective
—
the presence of
his own work.
 
He unlocked the door of
the storage room, switched on the overhead lights and roamed the brightly
illuminated aisles, pulling out a rack here and there, and contemplating the
painting on it as if it were a strange object, as if he had never spent many
weeks, often many months, of the most intense effort of which he was capable on
each one of them.
 
After a long while he
began to reach out and run his hand over an occasional painted surface,
feeling the rough textures of the canvas as if it were a sentient being.
 
Little by little he allowed himself to be
eased, slowly he accepted solace.
 
These
lived
.
 
He was as sure of that as he
was of the fact that he was Julien Mistral.
 
They lived now and they would live as long as they existed.
 
This room was not full of finished paintings
but of speaking, breathing creatures.
 
Here was his identity, here in this windowless room was all that would
ever need to be said about Julien Mistral.

There was a
section of the room that he never visited.
 
The paintings he had made of Teddy when she was pregnant and of Teddy
and Fauve during the first two months of Fauve's life, during which he had
worked more rapidly than he ever had before or since, were all kept on several
dozen racks in the back of the large room.
 
He had abandoned them in his apartment in Avignon after Teddy's death
where they had been carefully guarded by the married couple who had worked for
them.
 
After his return to
La
Tourrello,
Mistral had arranged for the paintings to be picked up and
brought to the storage room, but he had never looked at them again.

Now he walked slowly
to one of the racks and pulled it into the wide aisle.
 
The rack held only one large unfinished
canvas, the last picture he had painted of Teddy in St. Tropez.
 
She sat in a garden on a
blue-and-white-striped swing, holding Fauve close to her breast, her head bent
as she studied the baby.

Even in his most
tormented, longing dreams she had never been as beautiful.
 
He had painted his love so clearly that the
canvas seemed to cry out on one high, clear, wordless note of joy.
 
Quickly, he shoved the rack away, out of
sight, and rushed out of the storage room, locking it behind him.
 
He took the back door out of the studio and
hurried down the path that led around the walls of
La Tourrello,
stopping
only when he found himself deep in the forest of live oaks. He sat down on the
ground, his back to a tree, breathing deeply, as if he'd been running for his
life.
 
Why had he done that?
 
Why had he risked such certain pain?

As instinctively
as if he were jumping away from a stream of boiling water he preserved himself
from feeling the wound by shutting out the image of Teddy and bringing into
the focus of his mind the patch of canvas on which he had painted that scrap of
a being, the baby Fauve. Even then she had possessed a burning vitality.
 
He remembered her at the moment of her birth,
wrapped in the pink blanket, only just out of the womb, but already so distinct
that he had known her rightful name at once.
 
The anger toward her, that had been building up in him all summer as she
wandered out of his grip, evaporated as he thought of her as she had been at
dinner tonight. Fauve's face had reflected every emotion she felt; she could no
more restrain her idealistic, volatile nature than she was able to be
hypocritical or diplomatic.

Julien Mistral
was not a man capable of abstract compassion.
 
Not only did he not empathize with people, alone or in groups, he lacked
the slightest desire to do so.
 
His art
was totally personal; it embraced only those things that came within the
dominion he claimed for himself, certain aspects of nature, certain elements of
the human life of Provence, and the few
—
very few
—
people he
loved.
 
Without the motivation of love he
was a stone
—
a stone who painted.

As he sat against
the tree, his love for Fauve allowed him to enter into her mind, permitted him
access to her spirit, and he became slowly aware of the questions she must be
asking herself. Who am I?
 
What is life
all about?
 
Where am I going?
 
Who went before me?
 
Is there a connection?

Of course she was
searching for something that would answer those questions, for was she not a
romantic, as romantic as Teddy had been?
 
No wonder Fauve was confused, no wonder she was thrashing about with
silly concern.
 
For the space of a few
seconds Julien Mistral allowed himself to imagine the glory of a life in which
Fauve could have grown up, watched over and cared for under Teddy's eyes, a
child who had both a mother and a father, safe, secure, beloved. He grunted
under the blow of a useless despair and pushed the picture away, but, for the
first time in his life he fully realized that he was not the only person in the
world who had been bitterly deprived of the love of Teddy Lunel.
 
And he had never even shown that painting of
Fauve and Teddy to anyone.
 
Not even
to Fauve
.

He sat perfectly still,
so stunned with the idea that now came to him that he kept turning it over and
over in his mind, searching for flaws, unable to believe that it had never
occurred to him before.

His stern
chieftain's face expanded into an irresistible grimace of fierce joy before it
hardened into a look of resolution so intense that he seemed to be enduring,
even embracing, some deep hurt.
 
He knew
how to give Fauve the sense of identity that would bind her to him forever,
that would imprint him on her life in a way that would make it impossible for
her ever to seek out a heritage that had nothing to do with him.
 
She was so desperate that she was reduced to
skimming some sense of belonging from the shell of a Louis XV synagogue.
 
Yet he alone on the face of the great wide
earth had the power to give her an identity, a heritage, a feeling of belonging
that would make her realize that her most basic, most important tie in the
world was, and always would be, to him.

Julien Mistral
had never made a will, but, when his parents had died, he had been involved
with the details of inheritance.
 
His
mother had astonished and displeased him by leaving one-third of her tiny
estate to a friend with whom she often worked on her needlework, a woman to
whom she wasn't related in any way.
 
When
Mistral had questioned the lawyer about the legality of this, he had been told
that everyone is permitted to leave one-third of his estate to a stranger.
 
The remaining two-thirds must be distributed
among his legitimate descendants whether he wishes it or not.

Fauve was legally
a stranger to him.
 
Nothing in French law
allowed them any official connection.
 
She had no legal status.
 
As an
enfante
adulterine
she could inherit nothing
—
but as a stranger, one
third!
 
Oh, how carefully, how intimately,
how intensely they would go over all the paintings in the storage room, how
many hours they would spend in the joyously complicated, thoughtful process of
putting aside the one-third that would become Fauve's very own property,
separating them from those that must, of necessity, belong to Nadine, and to
Kate, of course, if she outlived him.