The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 90

Chapter 99 Marlow

The Musee de Maintenon was in Passy, near the Bois de Boulogne and perhaps near Beatrice de Clerval's family home, although I had no idea how to find that and had forgotten to ask Henri. Probably it wouldn't be a museum anyway; I doubted her brief career would have warranted a plaque. I took the metro and then walked a few blocks, crossing a park full of children in bright-colored jackets swarming over swings and modernist climbing structures. The museum itself was a tall, cream-colored, nineteenth-century building with heavily decorated plaster ceilings. I wandered around the first floor and through a gallery of works by Manet, Renoir, Degas, few of which I'd seen before, then into a smaller room that housed the Robinson gift, paintings by Beatrice de Clerval.

She had been more prolific than I'd realized, and she'd begun painting young; the earliest piece in the collection dated from her eighteenth year, when she had still been living in her parents' home and studying with Georges Lamelle. It was a lively effort, although without the skill of her later paintings. She had worked hard--as hard in her way as Robert Oliver had in his obsession. I'd imagined her as a wife, the young mistress of a household, and even as a lover; but I had forgotten about the strong workaday painter she must have been in order to complete all these pictures and to grow in technique from year to year. There were portraits of her sister, sometimes with a baby in her arms, and there were glorious flowers, perhaps from Beatrice's own garden. There were small sketches in graphite and a couple of watercolors of gardens and the coast. There was a cheerful portrait of Yves Vignot as a newly married man.

I turned away with reluctance. The third floor of the Musee de Maintenon was lined with enormous Monet canvases from Giverny, mainly of water lilies, most of them from very late in his career, executed almost abstractly. I had never understood before how many water lilies he had actually managed to paint--acres of them, spread all over Paris now. I bought a handful of postcards, some of them gifts for Mary's studio walls, and left the museum to stroll in the Bois de Boulogne. There was a boat with a canopy pulling up to the shore of a little lake there, as if expressly to ferry me across; it went to an island with a grand house on it. I paid and stepped in, followed by a French family with two small children, all dressed for a special occasion. The smaller girl stole a look at me and returned my smile before hiding her face in her mother's lap.

The house turned out to be a restaurant, with shaded outdoor tables, blooming wisteria, frightening prices. I had coffee and a pastry and let the sun on the water lull me. No swans, I realized, although they would have been there in Beatrice's day. I pictured Beatrice and Olivier by the water with their easels, his quiet coaching, her attempts to catch the swan rising out of the reeds. Rising in flight or landing? And had I re-created their conversations too freely, in imagination?

In spite of my rest on the island, I was bone-weary by the time I reached the Gare de Lyon. The bistro near the hotel was open, and the waiter seemed to consider me an old friend already, exploding the myth that all Parisians mistreat foreigners. He smiled as if he understood what my day had been like and how badly I needed a glass of red wine; when I left, he smiled again and held the door for me and returned my "Au revoir, monsieur" as if I had been dining there for years.

I'd meant to find a place to call Mary with my new phone card, but on my return to the hotel I fell into bed and slept like the dead, without pretending to read first. Henri and Beatrice crowded my sleep; I woke with a start that had some connection to Aude de Clerval's face. Robert was waiting, and I was supposed to call him, not Mary. I woke and slept, and overslept.

Chapter 100 Marlow

It is an early morning in June of 1892, and the two people waiting on a provincial train platform wear the conscious, alert look of travelers who have been up since before dawn, neatly dressed and standing aloof from the stirring of the village. The taller one is a woman in her prime, the other a girl of eleven or twelve with a basket on one arm. The woman is dressed in black and wears her black bonnet tied firmly under her chin. The veil makes her see the world as sooty, and she longs to push it up, to replenish for herself the colors of the ocher station and the field across the track: gold-green grasses and the first poppies of the summer, which show cadmium even through her twilit netting. But she keeps her hands firmly on her purse, her veil over her face. Their village is strictly conventional, at least for women, and she is a lady among villagers.

She turns to her companion. "Didn't you want to bring our book?" The last few nights they have been reading from a translation of Great Expectations.

"Non, maman. But I have my embroidery to finish." The woman reaches out a hand cased in fine black lace to touch the girl's cheek where it curves down to a mouth that matches her own. "In time for Papa's birthday, after all?"

"If it turns out well enough." The girl checks in her basket, as if her project is alive and needs constant care.

"It will." For a moment the woman is flooded with a sense of rushing time, which has caused this flower, her beauty, to grow tall and articulate overnight. She can still feel her daughter's robust baby legs in her arms, pushing upright in her lap. The memory can be summoned at a moment's notice, and she summons it often: mingled pleasure and regret. But she doesn't regret for a moment standing here, a woman alone in her heart, past forty, a woman with a doting husband waiting in Paris, a woman mature and sheathed in mourning. In the last year, they have lost the kind blind man who had the place of a father in her heart. Now there is a different cause for sadness as well.

But she feels also the course of a life advancing as it should: a child's growth, a death that brings relief as well as loss, the dressmaker sewing something a little more fashionable than what she'd worn when her mother died years ago -- skirts have changed again since then. The child has all this ahead of her, with her basket of embroidery, her birthday dreams, her love of her papa before any other man. Beatrice has not dressed her daughter in unrelieved black; instead, the girl wears a white dress with gray collar and cuffs, a black sash around the pretty waist that is still thin but will soon be shapely. She takes the child's hand and kisses it through her veil, surprising them both.

The train to Paris is seldom late; this morning it comes a little early, a distant rumble interrupting the kiss, and they both arrange themselves to wait. The child always imagines the train crashing into the village itself, smashing houses, piling up old stones and raising clouds of dust, overturning chicken coops and wrecking the market stalls--a world bouleverse like one of the prints in her book of nursery rhymes, old ladies holding their aprons up and running away on the wooden sabots that seem an extension of their big feet. A comic disaster, and then the dust settling and everything coming to rights in an instant as people like Maman climb quietly into the train. Maman does everything quietly, with dignity--she reads quietly to herself, she turns your head quietly a little more to the right when you sit for her to braid your hair, she touches your cheek quietly.

Maman also has sudden moments that Aude recognizes in herself but has no way of knowing yet as the moments of youth that never leave us--the surprising kiss of the hand, a laughing embrace of Papa's head and hat as he sits reading his paper on the garden bench. She looks beautiful even dressed in mourning, as they now are for Aude's grandfather and more recently for the death of Papa's uncle in faraway Algeria, where he went to live years ago. Or she will catch Maman standing at the back window watching the rain fall over the meadow, and see the rare sadness in her eyes. Their house in the village is at the edge of all the others, so that you can leave the garden directly for the fields; there is a line of darker woods beyond those fields where Aude may not go except with one of her parents.

In the train, once the conductor has stowed their luggage, Aude settles herself in imitation of her mother. Her composure is brief; after a moment she jumps up again to look out the window at a pair of horses driven by her favorite coachman, Pierre le Triste, who comes daily with packages, deliveries for the small shops in the village center, sometimes for Maman herself. They know him well after all these years; Papa bought their village house the year she was born, the perfect, rounded date called 1880. Aude cannot remember a time when they didn't come to the village, just between Louveciennes and Marly-le-Roi, the train steaming through three times a week, the brief visits and long summers here with her mother and sometimes both her parents. Pierre has gotten down from his perch and seems to be conferring with the conductor outside about a package and a letter; his face is wreathed in smiles--the overflow of jollity that has earned him his affectionately ironic nickname. Through the window she can hear his voice but misses the words.

"What is it, darling?" Her mother is taking off gloves and cloak, arranging her bag and Aude's basket, their small picnic.

"It's Pierre." The conductor sees her and waves, and Pierre waves back and comes up beside the train, motioning with his big arms for her to lower the window and take a package and letter. Her mother stands to receive them and gives the package to Aude, nodding to let her know she may open it at once. It is from Papa in Paris, a delayed but welcome gift; they will see him tonight, but he has sent Aude a little ivory shawl with daisies in the corners. She folds it contentedly and drapes it across her lap. Maman has taken a jet pin from her hair and is opening her letter, which is also from Papa, although another envelope falls out of it, one with unfamiliar stamps and a shaky handwriting Aude has never seen before. Maman snatches it up and opens it with trembling care; she seems to have forgotten the new shawl. She unfolds the single page, reads it and folds it again, unfolds it and reads it, puts it slowly back in the envelope and lays it on the black silk of her lap. She leans back, puts her veil down; but Aude sees her close her eyes, sees her mouth turn upside down and quiver the way one's mouth does when one resolves not to cry. Aude drops her eyes and strokes the shawl and its daisies; what could make Maman feel this way? Should she try to comfort her, say something?

Maman is very still, and Aude looks out the window for answers, but there is only Pierre in his boots and big jacket, unloading a case of wine, which a boy trundles away in a handcart. The conductor waves good-bye to Pierre, and the train whistle screams once, twice. Nothing is wrong in the village, which has come to life everywhere.

"Maman?" she tries in a small voice.

The dark eyes behind the veil open, glittering with tears, as Aude has feared. "Yes, my love?"

"Is something--is it bad news?"

Maman looks at her for a long time, and then she says, her voice a little unsteady, "No, not news. Just a letter from an old friend that took a long time to reach me."

"Is it from Uncle Olivier?"

Maman catches her breath, then lets it out.

"Why, it is, yes. How did you guess that, my darling?"

"Oh, because he died, I suppose, and that's very sad."

"Yes, very sad." Maman folds her hands over the envelope. "And did he write you about Algeria and the desert?"

"Yes," she says. "But it came too late?"

"Nothing is ever really too late," Maman says, but her words trip over a sob. This is alarming; Aude wishes the journey were over and Papa there with them. She has never seen Maman cry before. Maman smiles more than almost anyone she knows, except for Pierre le Triste. She smiles especially when she looks at Aude.

"Did you and Papa love him very much?"

"Yes, very much. And so did your grandfather."

"I wish I remembered him."

"I wish you did, too." Maman seems to have collected herself now; she pats the seat beside her, and Aude moves gratefully close, bringing her new shawl along.

"Would I have loved Uncle Olivier, too?"

"Oh yes," says Maman. "And he would have loved you. You are like him, I think."

Aude loves to be like people. "In what way?"

"Oh, full of life and curiosity, good with your hands." Maman is silent for a second; she looks at Aude in that way Aude welcomes and cringes under, the straight, straight gaze, bottomless dark. Then she speaks. "You have his eyes, my love."

"I do?"

"He was a painter."

"Like you. As good as you were?"

"Oh, much better," she says, stroking the letter. "He had more experience of life to put in his paintings, which is very important, although I didn't know that at the time."

"Will you save his letter?" Aude knows better than to ask to see it, although she would enjoy reading about the desert.

"Perhaps. With other letters. All the letters I have been able to keep. Some of them will be yours when you are an old lady."

"How will I get them then?"

Maman puts her veil up and smiles, pats Aude's cheek with her gloveless fingers. "I will give them to you myself. Or I will be sure to tell you where to find them."

"Do you like my shawl from Papa?" Aude spreads it over her white muslin skirts and Maman's heavy black silk.

"Very much," Maman says. She smoothes the shawl so that it covers her letter and its big strange stamps. "And the daisies are almost as pretty as the ones you stitch. But not quite, because yours always look alive."