Mistral's Daughter (65 page)

"Where are you going?" Eric asked.

"New York."

"Do you have your plane ticket?" She nodded.
"Your train ticket?"

"I'll buy it on the train."

"I'm going to get it for you now."

"No."

"Fauve, you must let me do something for you or
I'll go mad!"
 
She shrugged her
acceptance and he went off to buy the ticket and a supply of sandwiches and
mineral water for the trip, and in an impulse of helpless grief, every magazine
he could find, although he knew already that she would sit without moving all
the way to Paris.
 
Something frightful
had been done to her and his passionate intuition told him that nothing on
earth would ever give him back the same girl he had left at the gates of
La
Tourrello
only a few hours ago.

"Thank you," Fauve said in a white voice
when he came back with his purchases. "I'm sorry, Eric."

"Will you answer my letters?"

"Yes."

"Fauve, will you stop once in a while and
remember that I love you, that I'll love you forever and I'll never stop?
 
If you were only a few years older I'd never
let you go, no matter what, you know that, don't you?"

"Yes, Eric," she answered but his heart
shriveled as he heard the passive, faraway tone of her voice.
 
She was just saying yes to everything to get
rid of him, or make him let her get on the train that he could hear hooting in
the distance.
 
All around them people
were standing and picking up their luggage and moving purposefully toward the
platform.

The train came to a stop and Eric went ahead of Fauve,
putting her suitcases on the rack over her head in a first-class carriage,
finding her a seat and stowing away her provisions.

She slumped in her seat as limp as a dead animal and
he stood over her irresolutely for a few seconds until he heard the guard's
whistle blowing to announce the departure of the train.
 
He took her by her elbows and made her stand
up and face him.

"We never did get to Lunel," he said.

"No."

The train began to move slowly as he kissed her.
 
It picked up speed and Eric released her.
"I promised we'd go and we will.
 
You're my one and only love, Fauve.
 
Never forget me.
 
He ran down the
corridor and jumped off at the very edge of the platform, and stood there with
tears running down his cheeks as he watched the train disappear to the north,
taking his heart away.

On another late summer day, a year later, Kate Mistral
sat alone after breakfast, waiting until Mistral left the house.
 
For months he had been gone from morning to
evening.
 
He didn't tell her where his
roaming took him, but she knew enough to guess that he was searching the
countryside for a fresh idea.
 
He had
been in a long non-productive period and for months he had spent no time in his
studio.
 
Kate was too realistic not to
know that it was no coincidence that this dry spell had started when Fauve left
La Tourrello
.
 
Since then, Mistral
had written to Fauve six times.
 
Marte
Pollison, who collected the mail from the postman at the gate, reported to Kate
when each of the letters was returned unopened.
 
What lies, what attempts at explanations could Julien have concocted?
Kate wondered.
 
When Fauve had decamped
he had told her only that it had been over a teenaged misunderstanding, a
stupid fight about her spending so much time with that Avigdor boy and getting
too involved with the Avigdor family.

Several weeks ago he had finally brought himself to
write to Maggy and since then, Kate had waited with dread for a response that
would reveal her part in Fauve's departure.
 
Yesterday Maggy's answer had finally come, just before Kate left for an
appointment in Apt, and Mistral had thrust it unopened into his pocket.

Last night, all through dinner, which was silent and
gloomy as it had been for the past year, Mistral's expression had been angry
and weary and bitter.
 
It seemed to
encompass everything; the fine meal he had been offered, the perfectly laid
table, the deft service, even the deliciously scented night air.
 
What could Maggy have written?
 
She had to know.

As soon as Kate heard Mistral drive off she went
upstairs to his bedroom and locked herself in.
 
The room was, as always, tidy, impersonal, for his real life was not
lived here.
 
There was no letter on the
night table where he kept that book on the Jews of Avignon which Fauve had left
behind.
 
Kate had seen it there before
when, as she occasionally did, she checked his room in his absence and she
could still not understand why he kept it around.
 
It wasn't like Julien to torture
himself.
 
The top of his desk was bare as
well.
 
Deftly she went through its
drawers and finally, tucked under a pile of unanswered mail from admirers from
all over the world, she found the envelope she had seen him put in his pocket
yesterday.
 
It had been torn open.
 
Quickly she read the short note it contained.

Julien,

No, I don't
have any idea of why Fauve won't answer your letters, or even read them.
 
I've tried to talk to her about last summer
but she absolutely refuses to tell me anything except that she doesn't want to
talk about it.
 
She's been very sad and
disturbed, more than I can say, and each time you write her it only makes her
feel worse.
 
When she saw that you had
written to me, she said that I should answer your letter in any way I pleased
but that in the future, if you wrote to her again, she didn't want to even know
about it.
 
From now on she has asked me
to return any letters that you send without telling her that they have come.

I know
nothing about this situation between the two of you and I do not intend to
enter into it in any way.
 
Whatever you
did to make Fauve turn against you, is done and too late to be undone.
 
My own experience with you is such that I
have no inclination to grant you the benefit of any doubt.

Maggy

Twice Kate read the letter, replaced it and slipped
out of the room, hurrying down to sit in the sun beside the pool.

She was safe now, quite safe, she thought.
 
There would be no more letters to worry
about, no possibility of Fauve writing to her father to tell him who had told
her all that she had learned on that afternoon a year ago.
 
Safe
—
all of his paintings, the land,
the investments, the bank accounts, all safe from division, saved intact for
Nadine to inherit.
 
Her daughter's future
would not be compromised, and she herself had nothing left to fear from Fauve.

Kate had never been without a sense of irony and it
was that, and that alone, that now kept her sitting so quietly in the sun.

She had been on time for her appointment in Apt with
Dr. Elbert yesterday.
 
Elbert was the
doctor who delivered Nadine and she preferred him to other specialists in
Avignon.
 
When she had begun bleeding
again last week, fifteen years after she had gone through menopause, she had
reluctantly visited the doctor whom she hadn't bothered to see for years.
 
Cancer of the uterus, he had told her, and so
far advanced that it had spread to her liver.
 
How long did she have?
 
A year,
perhaps, a little more or a little less, but, Madame Mistral, there is nothing
that can be done at this stage of the disease.
 
If anything could have been done I would have had to see you long before
this...
 
and even then, who knows?

Who knew indeed?
 
Who ever knew?
 
Kate asked
herself.
 
She looked around her.
 
All was in order, a rich empire, magnificent,
secure and absolutely intact.
 
For the
first time since Teddy Lunel had walked through the doors of
La Tourrello
,
Kate finally could feel certain that she was in full possession again...
 
for a year
—
or a little more or a
little less.

27

It
was Fauve Lunel's twenty-first birthday, in the middle of June 1974, and the
second floor of the Russian Tea Room was crowded with two hundred people, each
of them glowing with the unspoken satisfaction of knowing that their importance
was validated by their having been bidden to this particular coming-of-age, a
pleasure that is such a basic component of human nature that it must have been
experienced by cave dwellers gathered around a particularly prestigious fire.

From
behind his big glasses, Falk, whose closest friends still called him Melvin,
scanned the horde that palpitated with noise at the decibel level only achieved
in New York; his eyes dilated with the intensity of an observation that was as
profound as it was swift.
 
Here, right
here, he thought, were gathered together all the people who had the power to
decide how the American woman would hope to look each morning when she woke up.

He
kissed Diana Vreeland and Cheryl Tiegs, reaching up to do so with no more
self-consciousness than that with which a short woman kisses a tall man, and,
as he hugged Lauren Hutton, pleased by her particular conformation of features,
he reflected that women believed that they made their own choices about their
physical aspirations, yet it was photographers like himself who were
responsible for the wind of change that sent women to hairdressers and cosmetic
counters and department stores.
 
Yet he
realized that even he was not as influential as Maggy Lunel, who, by picking
out new models and sending them to see the right people, could determine the
way everybody in the world would eventually come to think about ideal female
beauty.

But
did the
ultimate
power really rest in the hands of the fashion or beauty
editor who made the decision to use one girl rather than another, or, he
wondered as he gave Christina Ferrare a kiss on each glowing cheek, did the
power ultimately rest in the hands of these splendorous girls who offered
themselves to the camera?
 
Where would
the entire establishment of fashion magazines, advertising agencies, cosmetic
companies, photographers and model agencies find itself without a never-ending
supply of beauties willing to devote their young lives to becoming icons for
all other women?
 
In any case, Falk
didn't have to come to any hard and fast philosophical conclusions tonight
since everyone involved in creating the standards to which women all over the
country would find themselves responding was right there in this room.
Everyone, that is, but Fauve.
 
Where was
Fauve?

In
the last five years Falk had seen less of her than he would have liked.
 
While she was growing up they had spent most
Saturday afternoons making the rounds of the galleries, but in the early fall
of 1969 she had, and there was no other way he could find to describe the
change in her, quite simply turned her back on art.
 
She had blamed this abrupt, and to Falk,
shocking loss of interest on the experience of going to the landmark exhibition
called "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970," which Henry Geldzahler
had mounted at the Metropolitan Museum.

God
knows, it
had
been enough to give anyone visual indigestion, that
overrich slumgullion in which thirty-five different galleries had been used to
give thirty-five retrospective exhibitions to thirty-five of the greatest
contemporary artists, but Falk would have thought a sixteen-year-old appetite
equal to such esthetic burn-out.
 
Even
he, veteran of the art spectacular, had found himself battered by the
unheard-of gaudiness of the evening, bewildered by its excesses, deafened by
the barbaric rock band and footworn from the sheer size of the show, but Fauve
had responded with something close to hysteria, saying that she never wanted to
look at another piece of art or sculpture again.
 
He'd been sure that she meant only until the
next interesting show.
 
How could anyone
with Fauve's passion for art become indifferent to the complex set of
experiences that looking at new work must give her?

Yet
as time went on, he found that her disgust not only endured but deepened into a
kind of sadness, as if she were mourning the death of art.
 
She had insisted that all the great men had
already painted, all the innovations had been made, all the great themes used
up, all graphic possibilities discovered, so that new artists were only using
the sweepings of the studio floors of past masters.

Falk
had laughed at Fauve's notions until he realized that she had stopped working
on her own painting.
 
When he questioned
her about it she was direct.
 
She didn't
intend ever to paint again.
 
How could
she keep on going when she had nothing new to add?
 
Although Falk had always recognized the
unmistakable influence of Mistral on her work he had also seen a true and
original talent struggling to emerge.
 
He
knew that it was merely a question of time before she came into her own, before
all that was personal and fresh in her work grew strong enough to make her
break away from her father and strike out on her own.
 
But instead of making progress, she had quit,
quit flat and by now, he was sure, quit for good and all.

Falk
bit into a
pirojok,
savoring the hot, flaky puff pastry made from
sour-cream dough, and, munching, reflected that what was, to his certain
knowledge a real loss for the world of art had been a gain for the model agency
business.

Who
would have imagined that Fauve, graduating from high school at seventeen, would
have decided to go to work for Maggy rather than go to college?
 
And who would have expected her to be so
astonishingly good at it?
 
In the last
four years she had not just learned the business through and through, but she
had made innovations that had kept the Lunel Agency ahead of its competition,
so that she had become Maggy's second-in-command.
 
She had worked so hard, with so much ambition
and energy and determination that her youth and inexperience had been overcome
by the time she was nineteen and since then "Lunel" had come more and
more to refer equally to Fauve as it did to Maggy.

Falk
found himself standing with Dick Avedon and Irving Penn, the only other
photographers who had remained at the very top for as long as he had, the only
others to whom every new talent was inevitably compared.
 
As he talked to them he reflected on the rareness
of longevity, staying power and endless excellence in this world where change
was the rule.
 
Yet Maggy Lunel still moved
in an aura of supremacy.

Now
she was at that age that could best be described as "ageless,"
enigmatically, flamboyantly, triumphantly ageless.
 
And ageless she would remain, he decided,
saluting her in his mind, for at least another two decades, until she moved on,
gracefully, into a period in which she would be known, no doubt to her vast annoyance,
as a "living legend."

When
he had greeted her tonight there had been an exchange of sad recognition
beneath their smiles.
 
Each had known the
other's thoughts and shared an unspoken word of never-fading grief.
 
If only Teddy were here
.

Falk
pushed away the thought, as he had done so many thousands of times, through
three marriages to fashion models, through the birth of four children, all
inheriting the genes of their mothers and now all taller than he was
—
thank heaven for great big girls
—
and looked around for the one person
he sought in this crowded room.
 
He was
fond, very fond indeed of his own children, but Fauve had come into his heart
before he had married for the first time, and by some process of wishful
thinking that he never chose to examine, she had always seemed like the
daughter he should have had with Teddy Lunel.
 
But where was Fauve?

Maggy
Lunel took a final look of self-appraisal in her floor-to-ceiling three-way
mirror before she left her apartment to go to Fauve's birthday party.
 
So she was a woman with a twenty-one-year-old
granddaughter, was she?
 
Well, so much
the better!
 
She pivoted, checking the
back of her jacket, made of several layers of thin, drifting, black silk crepe
de chine printed with oversized flowers in melting Oriental shades of plum,
lavender and deeper violet shading into purple.
 
Did all women, she wondered, as she passed her hand over the back of her
hair where it curved inward gracefully in a smooth pageboy at the nape of her
neck, feel the same way she did?
 
As if
she had stopped growing older at some undefined age that never changed except
on certain bad days?
 
An age that hovered
at some agreeably mellow yet fresh moment of time between twenty-six and
thirty-two?

She
picked up the edge of the jacket and inspected its leafprinted lining.
 
Now there was a refinement indeed, since the
lining would never be noticed, but one that Karl Lagerfeld of Chloé, who had
designed the vaguely kimono-shaped garment, and the smallscaled printed tunic
dress that went underneath it, must have loved working out, for was he not the
man who had quite seriously asked his mother to give him his own valet as a
present for his fourth birthday?
 
Yes,
the costume was successful because the long, firm lines of the body under it
had withstood the test of time, but when Maggy clasped the Van Cleef and Arpels
diamond necklace around her throat she had to concede that her interior age level
did not quite match the evidence presented by her neck.
 
Why was it that most women who owned the kind
of necklace that a jeweler, with an air that categorized the words as having an
exact technical significance, could refer to as "important," were not
likely to have unlined necks?
 
Damn
necks!
 
If only all heads rested directly
on shoulders how much more delightful the world would be.
 
Her shoulders still could compete in any
company.

As
Maggy caught the fleeting, boastful thought she asked herself in a combination
of amusement and irritation if she were growing vain?
 
She could have sworn that any vanity she must
once have had, had been absolutely knocked out of her by daily dealing with the
youngest and loveliest of all the millions of girls in the world.
 
Her neck must only be a stand-in for the
milestone that was marked by Fauve's birthday.

Yet,
in Fauve's case, twenty-one certainly didn't mean the beginning of maturity or
adulthood.
 
No, that change had taken
place five years before and Maggy knew no more of what had caused it today than
she did then, when Fauve had come home unexpectedly early from her summer in
France.
 
At first Maggy had bombarded her
with questions, but Fauve had refused to discuss what had happened with a
stubbornness, a leaden and inflexible tenacity that Maggy had been sure she
couldn't maintain.
 
But, as the weeks
passed and she saw the differences in Fauve, the loss of her young girl's
illusions, the disappearance of her innocent playfulness, she began to
understand that once again she had sent a beloved child to Europe and once
again that child had been changed, terribly changed, by Julien Mistral.
 
But at least this child had returned.

After
a year had passed, Maggy simply accepted the fact that she would probably never
know what had taken place.
 
Fauve, so
spontaneous, so open, so alive that every enthusiasm that crossed her heart
showed in her face, had somehow learned to keep a secret.
 
It had been a deeply distressing year, that
year between sixteen and seventeen, Fauve's last year in high school, Maggy
reflected, secure now in the knowledge that it was long past.
 
The mysterious hurt had never been
resolved.
 
Fauve never returned to France.
 
After Maggy had answered the letter Mistral
sent her, all communication between him and his daughter had ceased as
completely as if those eight summers in Félice had never happened.

Fauve,
so flexible, so loving and quick to forgive, had been utterly implacable on
the subject of her father.
 
She had cast
him out of her life.
 
At first Maggy had
had to admit to an intense curiosity to know what had caused the rupture but,
where Julien Mistral was concerned, it was unwise to think too long or too
deeply.

For
the first few years Fauve had received and answered frequent letters from that
boy she'd met over there, old Avigdor's son of all people, but now the letters
had almost stopped coming
–
Maggy couldn't even be sure if they still
wrote each other now or not.
 
But
eventually, Fauve had pulled herself out of the depression in which she had
been enveloped.

Time...
 
it was partly the passage of time, Maggy
decided, partly the blessed elasticity of youth and most of all it had been the
remedy of work.
 
When Fauve first
announced that she didn't intend to apply to college but wanted to work, Maggy
had thought for one despairing moment that Fauve intended to become a
model.
 
She wouldn't have been able to
prevent it. Fauve had had the unassailable, mesmerizing quality that would
have made her into the face that personified her era as clearly as Suzy Parker
and Teddy had personified the fifties and as Jean Shrimpton had dominated the
mid-sixties.
 
But, thank God, Fauve had
wanted to follow her into the business.
 
She had turned her back on using the privileges of beauty as a source of
identity just as resolutely as she had turned her back on her talent for
painting.
 
Fauve had no interest in becoming
the vigilant caretaker of her façade, no wish to be obliged to deal in
merchandising her own surface, and she had taken to the agency business as if
she had absorbed it all of her life.