The Last Nude (39 page)

When I completed my
Saint Anthony
, I sought out Rafaela, but Adrienne wouldn’t give me her address. “You’ll have to ask someone else,” she trilled, and because all those years with that curly-headed Pollyanna had Americanized her, she added, “She is a married woman now.”

“That’s no way to run a business,” I said. But she had become a bit of a loose cannon by then, even cutting ties with that Irish author she had championed. So I waited, and I began, groping, to paint again.

Some three years later, in September of ’38, Adrienne gave in. She was worried for the girl: Rafaela’s husband had gone to cover the war in Spain for his friend Janet’s magazine, Adrienne said, and had gone missing before he could file a single story. I had my hands full at the time: no sooner had Hitler annexed Austria than I began convincing Rollie to sell off his ancestral lands. My husband had never discussed his father’s Jewish family with me, but anyone opening up the
Zidovsky Kalendar
could read all about it. Staying had been a mistake in 1917, and I was not one to make the same mistake twice.

But then the land was sold and Rafaela’s husband dead for certain, by his own hand, she nonsensically claimed. When I invited her to my new studio, she padded down the halls with her arms crossed over her chest, watchful. She tallied with her eyes how few paintings I’d made since my marriage, and looked at me with the face of a doctor who’d seen cases like mine before. I looked back at her grave and lovely face and wondered, what made her so sure her husband had killed himself? She said she’d sit for me again, but not nude, and not for pay. Eleven years before, when she had meant nothing to me, she’d been irresistible. How could I do without her now? She was the years when I had hungered most. She was the city where I had become a painter. She was a Jew, and I could save her.

 

 

 

At the end of ’38, in a winter as cold and brilliant as their misplaced hope, Parisians were drinking and dancing like the Munich Peace would last forever. Rafaela and her friends were even expanding out of their Contrescarpe workshop into a tiny showroom on Place Vendôme. What were they thinking? I finally got her back into my bed, and I convinced her to come to New York with me. Only for three months, I said at first, because she seemed so attached to that dress shop. To her dead husband’s leaky houseboat by the Pont Sully. To her friend Virginia with the bastard son. I had to work to win her over. I even told her how I got out of Russia—the Swedish consul—to show her how easy she had it. See? I never looked down on you, I assured her. All the same, it was hard enough to persuade her to come with me for three months, let alone indefinitely. When I finally told her she should stay out of Europe until the storm broke and blew over, I even offered to set her up in her own shop in New York. Let me save you, I insisted. You are my chance to do one good thing. Why can’t I remember her reply?

 

 

 

This evening when Romana showed Martin some photographs of my paintings, she paused over the portrait of her mother, Marika de la Salle. “I’m glad you stopped telling everyone you were painting her
à la
Violette Morris,” she said.

“Well, of course I did,” I said, “ever since that night she made your mother look bad. Not that you helped, Mademoiselle
.
”

Romana laughed, a dark, throaty echo of her girlhood giggle. “Did I tell you, some biographer telephoned me all the way from France to ask about Vi Morris, based on one little thing you told the papers in ’25?”

“Well, how could we have known how she’d turn out?” I demanded, feeling both apologetic and hostile.

“Wait, who was Violette Morris?” Ana asked.

I explained by pointing to my portrait of the Duchesse de la Salle. “See how she’s dressed? See how she’s standing?” I asked, before telling them about the champion boxer of 1923. “At one point Miss Morris took a little shine to our Romana here.”

“We never did more than fool around once or twice at a party,” Romana said with a shrug, shocking the children, but not her husband, who simply looked amused. “I’m glad now, that Maman interfered, but at the time I was furious.
Incensed.
My mother really put her foot down about Vi.”

“It’s because they were two of a kind,” I said. I remembered the night Rollie first proposed, in ’27, the night of the de la Salles’ party. I’d been so angry at Romana for playing the tramp with Vi like that in front of her mother. Getting the athlete ejected from that party was a sure way to scotch any chance I might have had at painting her portrait. I remembered how those two women swaggered, facing off in their suits.

“Touched a sore spot, I think,” agreed Romana. “But
really
,” she said with a shudder, “it’s just as well. In her later years, Violette Morris became a Nazi collaborator,” she told the children. “She went to the ’36 Olympics in Berlin as Hitler’s personal guest. Before the invasion, she gave Germany the plans to the Maginot Line, and she taught them how to destroy French tanks. During the Occupation, she spied on the Résistance, and she turned in Jews.” I shook my head, remembering how like a romantic hero Vi Morris had seemed, showing up Romana’s mother at that party. How foolish, how impotent Marika de la Salle had appeared by contrast. And now who looked bad? “When the war was over,” Romana continued, “the Résistance shot her in the head.”

“Oof!” cried Martin. “Just like that!”

“I had no idea,” I said. “It’s awful to think we used to see her at parties all the time during the Twenties, and then think about how she turned out.”

“Well, we judge the Twenties by one set of standards, and we judge the Thirties and Forties by another,” Ana reflected. “So it’s not so strange that the same person could be a hero in one era and a villain in another. That one could make the right choice for one era, but—”

“Oh, Ana, are you an existentialist on top of everything else?” I teased. But I was not alone in staring at her, this strange, cold girl, so sure of her own pronouncements, so oblivious to her own beauty.

“Wait, what standards?” asked Martin.

“Well, look at Auntie Mame,” said Ana. “Fun. Extravagant. Daring, for a woman. Nobody asks whose side she took in the Spanish Civil War.”

“Interesting . . .” Martin murmured, still staring.

“Well, whose side
did
she take?” Hector butted in, clearly unable to stand another moment of Martin’s inattention.

“Who knows?” Romana said testily. “She was imaginary.”

“Who
cares
?” Ana corrected her. “That’s my point.”

Sick of politics, I turned away from Ana. “It sounds like you didn’t have any news for that biographer who telephoned, Romana. Did he have any news for you? Anything about people we know?”

“Not especially,” she said. “He did tell me what happened to Vi Morris after Mother and Bibi and I left Paris. Before she started working for the Germans, she ran a garage and built racecars.”

I yawned. “I think I heard about that from somebody.”

“And she lived on a houseboat in the Seine.”

“Oh,” I said sharply. The blood suddenly pounded in my ears. “Did he say where?”

“I think near the Île Saint-Louis,” she said. “Do you remember that quai full of houseboats near Pont Sully?”

I felt a black sick wave push through my throat. “No, not so well,” I choked out.

 

 

 

I knocked and knocked at your houseboat door that morning, but you were gone. I prayed you had taken a taxi to the station—I
had
arrived five minutes late—and I took the train to Le Havre with my husband, barely able to breathe. I looked for you in the Cunard waiting room and you weren’t there. I didn’t want my husband to know just how upset I was, so I left your passport with the purser for you, and I waited in my room. I took a sleeping pill and lay down for a nap to make the time go faster. When I woke, the ship was moving. I went to your door, as we had planned, and I began to knock. You did not answer. You said you would come with me, and you didn’t come. I knocked and knocked, Rafaela. I pounded on that door until I sobbed.

 

 

 

All month I have been painting you, and I cannot remember a word you said. And now, tonight, with Romana’s words—and Kizette’s—fresh in my mind, I almost hear your voice. No one has called me by my father’s last name in decades. This is all I can remember of him, before he left my mother: he held me in his lap when I was small. He called me Tomchek
.
He fed me tidbits off his plate. I remember bites of hot new bread and sweet butter, his patient hands. Your memories of your own father were just as scant: he carried you up the stairs. And you remembered his funeral, a phrase from the rabbi’s eulogy:
vayifkach Elohim et eineiha
. That one thing I remember in your voice, those Jewish words. I felt exposed to ask, but I asked it: “What does it mean?”

You told me what the words meant, Rafaela, but I have forgotten what you said. It was something like
God opened my eyes.
Why is this all I can remember of your voice?
God opened my eyes?
Or was it
our eyes? God opened the man’s eyes?

I can’t sleep. I feel for my slippers, test my feet against the floor. I’ve rested; now can I stand? Good. I wheel the oxygen down the hall. I made Kizette leave one of her Bibles and a concordance in my studio the other week: I consulted them when I painted my new
Saint Anthony
. They’re still there, the English ones she gave me; they’re right by the couch when I settle in, finding the light with my fingertips.

Eyes, eyes.
I search, passing my finger down the column of words and phrases, and the whisper of the paper stirs something—what? I can feel my heart beating in my wrists again, and I wonder, was Kizette right? Is my hand shaking? I watch it, feeling the beat of my pulse: no. My whole body is shaking.

I look up. Hector has placed my new
Belle Rafaela
and its easel so that she faces me, not the wall. I can see today’s
Belle
the way Kizette does now: she is a thousand separate kisses of paint. But I can see you too, Rafaela. Why didn’t you open
your
eyes? Why didn’t you come with me when you could? Were you deported, in the end? Are you alive or dead?

There, I found it.
Eyes.
When I try a first, wrong, entry, I slap the Bible shut, alarmed. Because the line ran,
I will smite every horse with astonishment, and his rider with madness: I will open mine eyes upon the house of Judah, and I will smite every horse of the people with blindness.

No. No. I can taste it now, the tar and pennies. I thought those two men who came for my husband were coming for me, but now I see it: they don’t need to come for me. The rotting horse will come instead. Is coming. The stench of it is a black flood that pours in. It rises higher every time, and it will drown me. I am so afraid.
Ma belle,
you are the last thing I will ever paint.

I can’t hunt down a Hebrew phrase in an English Bible. I will have to make my own translation, my own heaven, the way I always have. And yet I hear the words so clearly in your voice. Surely there is a sensible explanation. Did I actually hear you say them? Or did I once—suddenly my memory spares me one more glimpse of my father—hear them read aloud to me and translated, my eyes following a small silver pointer that made the paper whisper, a wafer of silver pressed under his finger, a talisman shaped like a pointing hand?

 

 

 

I was never careful to remember what you said, Rafaela. You were my chance to do good, and—I see it, finally—I had already hurt you so much that you refused to let me.

I never told you I was afraid for myself, only that I was afraid for you. I told you what I thought you wanted to hear, anything to make you come with me. Anything except the one truth that might have made a difference. I never saved Thade, and I never saved you.

 

 

 

You have given me no hope that you are living, but I have paid good money to search the records of the Paris dead for your name, and yours is not there. Adrienne or her American might have known, but I was too proud to ask, and then they died. Maybe you survived in hiding. Maybe you joined the Résistance. Maybe you lived outside Paris after the war. Maybe you opened another shop. Maybe you married again and had children late, or maybe you found a new muse for your dresses, someone whose igneous devotion matched your own. You know where you are, Rafaela, and I don’t.

I stand carefully, and turn to the brushes I cleaned this afternoon, to the palette still wet with today’s colors. I work steadily for an hour and I set the brushes down, this last one tipped in Cremnitz white. I am finished. I did not need red.

These are good brushes. I will clean them again. The palette they can throw away. I will wheel the oxygen to bed, so as not to alarm Kizette. Her husband died so recently; she should get as much rest as she can. I will get into bed, I will take out my tube, and I will sleep.

I do not think Vi Morris turned you in. I do not think you were killed, Rafaela, but I do not know. You know. Come to my show next year, if you can, and see: this time, I have painted your eyes open.