I Always Loved You Page 23

  Even the attentive Auguste Renoir had abandoned her; he’d become society’s darling, their appointed portrait painter extraordinaire, in no small part due to the Charpentiers’ generous patronage. Auguste had so many commissions now and so many invitations to stay at people’s summer homes that he was beginning to complain of exhaustion. One would think that in gratitude to the Charpentiers for the waves of money now coming Auguste’s way he would feel obliged to intervene for poor little Isabelle Lemonnier, or at least warn them all of Édouard’s chronic faithlessness. Apparently, though, Auguste felt no such obligation.

  Now only Stéphane Mallarmé came to visit Berthe, to talk of poetry and remind her of an intellectual life, a life not taken up with the diapering and feeding schedule of a baby. On occasion, Mary Cassatt extracted herself from Degas’s clutches to pay Berthe a visit, but Mary’s hands were so blackened by ink and her conversation so concerned with printing presses and plates that Berthe felt exiled from art, no matter her afternoons of work. To be fair, Berthe babbled too, but about Julie and little else, and so Berthe believed it was entirely possible that she had become insufferable.

  But Édouard was not insufferable. He was pitied in his infirmity and visited daily by hordes of women who made it their singular business to drown him in their collective silken and lace-framed décolletages. Édouard liked an admiring audience and he certainly had one now, though how he could paint when he was crowded in on all sides, forced to chatter and amuse, to flatter and flirt, was a mystery to her. She needed privacy. She always had.

  Eugène stuck his head in after tapping at the door. “Darling?”

  “Mmm?” Berthe said.

  “Mother sent a note. She’s planning a family dinner for next month, for all of us, including Gustave. She has to book him weeks in advance now just to get him to show his face. She wants us to convince Édouard to go to Meudon for the summer, for his problem with his legs.” They had taken to referring to Édouard’s affliction that way, in order not to have to say what it really was.

  “Do you think Édouard can tear himself away from that impertinent Isabelle Lemonnier?” Berthe said. “And doesn’t Suzanne ever tire of his little dalliances?”

  “Not as much as you, it would seem,” Eugène said.

  Berthe affected a preoccupied glance at her canvas, at the boats and the way they seemed to be rocking, and Eugène apologized for the interruption and shut the door.

  When his footsteps had completely receded, Berthe sighed. Her husband was far too nice to be treated so badly. After a minute, she picked up her brush and looked again at the canvas. No, it needed nothing. It was already what it was meant to be.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Late in November, a pink-bordered envelope from Meudon brought Mary the long-awaited announcement of Abigail Alcott Nieriker’s delivery of a baby girl, named after Abigail’s famous sister, Louisa, and with it the unhappy news of a postpartum illness. The hand was Abigail’s, but shaky, and it requested Mary’s presence at her bedside as soon as possible. Though the language was not dramatic, the request, for the even-tempered Abigail, was. Within half an hour, Mary was on her way to the Gare Saint Lazare to catch the train for Meudon.

  Mary had never made it out to visit Abigail in Meudon, despite her promises. After the unproductive summer, her exhausting travels with her father, and Lydia’s lingering illness, Meudon, for all its proximity, had seemed too far: A visit would consume a day, a day in which she would lose a chance to work. She had decided to wait until after the baby’s birth, when Abigail was past her confinement and ready for visitors, but now Mary regretted the delay.

  The Nierikers had taken rooms in a large house behind tall wooden gates that shut the house off from the street. The parlor overlooked a side garden that lay brown and fallow this time of year, but through a great window at the rear of the parlor the red-roofed houses of the village, the wandering Seine, and in the distance, Paris, all floated like a welcoming mirage. Mary envied Abigail painting at that window.

  “Abigail’s been sleeping all day,” Sophie Nieriker said. Louisa Alcott was still too ill to come for a promised visit, and in her absence Ernest’s sister and mother had come to help with the baby, who slept in a cradle in the nursery. After showing her to Mary, Sophie ushered Mary into Abigail’s bedroom, where Ernest stood next to his wife’s bed. Abigail was sitting up, nested in a pile of pillows, her cheeks flushed, her skin a bluish white, her eyes shut against even the dim light of a tallow candle burning softly on the linen-draped table at her bedside.

  Ernest leaned over and whispered into Abigail’s ear, “Darling, Mademoiselle Cassatt is here.”

  Abigail’s eyes fluttered open, her gaze vague and distracted.

  “Your baby is beautiful, Abigail,” Mary said. “She looks like you. She has such a pretty mouth.”

  Abigail nodded, a film of disinterest glazing her eyes before they fluttered shut.

  Ernest said, “But you feel better today, don’t you, darling?” In his grief, he looked older than Abigail, who had once confided to Mary that her husband was fifteen years younger than she was. Mary felt his youth acutely. He was speaking out of hope.

  “Oh, yes. Better,” Abigail said, but her voice was thin and reedy.

  “Abigail,” Mary said. “You must get well so you can paint again. We all need your beautiful paintings. And you’ve made such a pleasant home. I must come back when you are well again, and we’ll have tea in your exquisite parlor.”

  Abigail did not respond. Her breathing became fast and shallow. Mary waited to see whether or not she would reawaken, but she did not.

  Outside the bedroom, Ernest took Mary by the elbow and said, “The doctor says she will get well. At least, he says, she cannot get worse.”

  “What does he do for her?”

  “He does nothing. He hopes, with us.” Ernest pulled his handkerchief from his pocket. “Abigail was very frightened about the delivery. She boxed up all her things, some for her sisters, some for her friends. She asked me to bury her in the cemetery at Montrouge if something happened. Abigail wants, should she not survive, for me to send the baby to her sister Louisa in America.”

  “She’ll get better,” Mary said, but even as she said it, she mourned what insipid things were said in the face of grief.

  Ernest’s gaze met hers, hope shining in his glassy eyes. “You’ll come back?”

  “I’m so sorry I didn’t come before.”

  “You didn’t know.” His eyes drifted to the nursery. A wet nurse was bending over the crying child, undoing the buttons of her dress. “Do you know that Abigail refuses to see the baby, so as not to make the child love her?”

  Her mother, leaning over Lydia; Abigail, making the kind of dreadful sacrifice only a mother could make.

  Mary reached for Ernest’s hand, but he turned away before she could grasp it and hurried back into Abigail’s bedroom.

  Mary walked back to the station in a rising wind; the cold air, smelling of snow, funneled off the Seine and whipped up the sloping hill. All she could think about was Abigail, so happy at the Salon, so thrilled to be getting all she had hoped for. This was the danger of being a woman. Childbirth could take everything from you, even your chance at happiness. Mary waited in the small railway salon on a slatted wooden bench, its curved back biting into her spine. Other passengers began to gather in the station, and as the train steamed toward the platform, Mary waited until they had all pushed forward before finding a seat as the doors closed.

  • • •

  Mary, occasionally accompanied by Lydia, took the train weekly to Meudon until a telegram arrived at noon on December 29, saying that Abigail had died at nine that morning and that the funeral was to be on December 31. On the bitterly cold New Year’s Eve, an American minister said prayers in the Nieriker parlor and read scripture over Abigail’s coffin as the baby cried in her mother-in-law’s arms. The attendees, only a few—a Miss Plummer, the Nieriker family, and Lydia and Mary—climbed into the
carriages and followed the hearse to the Montrouge Cemetery. Along the way, onlookers raised their hats in mournful respect. At the graveside, the coffin was lowered in a relentless wind. They tossed in their hothouse flowers, their petals stripped by the wind, and went away.

  1880

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  My God,” Edgar said, “you’ve been in the acid. We might choke to death in here one day. They’ll find us, you and I, dying for our art.”

  Mary’s copper drypoint plate fell into her lap, and she shuddered to think of the ruin a soft-ground plate would have incurred in the fall. “Couldn’t you knock or say hello instead of bellowing the second you step inside? And I haven’t been in the acid. The cover must be off the basin.”

  Edgar opened a window to ventilate the fumes, secured the cover, then wiped his glasses with a cloth. He’d been gone since midmorning, painting a portrait, leaving Mary to work alone. Her comings and goings from his studio had become so frequent that he had given her a key. At her studio, dust covered everything: her easels, her tables, her brushes and jars; all her tools had begun to sour from neglect. That room seemed lifeless now compared with Edgar’s, where his muttered asides and dramatic entrances and exits over the winter months had enlivened the lonely hours of work in the frosty gloom. Depending on her mood on any given day, her studio could seem either refuge or jail, but never before had it been as at Edgar’s: a theater, at once dramatic and collaborative, a bazaar of imagination and instruction, an escape.

  “I’m so tired of this woman, I’m not sure I can continue,” Edgar said. “She is such a bore.”

  “Will you finish?” Mary said. Sometimes he didn’t, especially when he didn’t like his subject.

  “Yes, but I’ll only have to start another portrait, while you get to experiment all day.”

  She let his complaint pass without argument. Lately, Edgar’s comparison of their relative economic freedoms had become a dirge. She had given up reminding him of her need to maintain the expenses of her studio or the fact that he kept a box at the Opéra.

  “Are we printing tonight?” he asked.

  She indicated the five finished plates lined up on the table, the product of days of work. As it turned out, they were not the merry four of Degas’s imagination, but rather an intent two. Camille Pissarro, who had planned to work beside them, contented himself with sending his work in from Pontoise, taking critique by letter, while Félix Bracquemond, after spending only several hours instructing them over the course of a week, had abandoned them to their fate.

  Mary said, “We can print tomorrow if you are too tired.”

  “We can’t lose another day.”

  And so began their daily adagio, working toward their self-imposed deadline for the publication of Le Jour et la Nuit, set to be published in conjunction with the next exhibition on April 1. This was their intimacy—not a bodily intimacy, but a communication of minds. He had not pressed her for more than caresses and kisses, beyond which she was not certain she would go, anyway. What mattered was this moment, and moments like it.

  They had rearranged Edgar’s second room to accommodate the new project, pulling the intaglio press from the wall so that they could each work a side. Now they covered a table and the floor with layers of butcher paper to protect it from the huge pots of sticky ink and profusion of rags needed for the laborious process. Bracquemond had warned them that the consumption of supplies would be enormous before they produced a print of any quality, and indeed the expense had been prodigous. Mary had poured her earnings from Alexis Rouart’s purchase of Woman in a Loge into boxes of copperplate and ink, also piled under the table. Vessels of acid were stored up against the wall.

  “How many states do you want to pull?” Edgar asked, dropping a sheet of watercolor paper into a tub of water.

  “The usual. Four or five,” Mary said. She pulled on her waterproof gloves, opened a jar of tacky ink, and smeared the plate with the thick paste, adding drops of thinner to achieve the consistency she wanted. Then she worked the ink into the bitten grooves with her gloved hands until it penetrated them. She wiped the plate several times, examining it to ensure that the flat areas were clean. She laid it on the press as Degas placed the wet paper on top of the plate. Mary slipped a second sheet into the water to bathe.

  Degas piled several sheets of felt on top of the paper and turned the crank, and the bed rolled under the drum roller. Mary pulled the print free of the felt and smiled at the result. The impression was exquisite, the light tender, the dark fierce: It was Lydia, smiling, seated at the Opéra in a loge, the print an echo of the original oil, which was an echo of all the studies Mary had made of her beforehand. It pleased her that she could make print after print from this one plate, iteration of iteration of iteration, keeping Lydia well forever, trumping medicine, trumping time. She wished now that she had thought to draw a picture of Abigail; Monet had painted his beloved Camille swathed in her shroud just after she died, a ghostly, haunting image he had brought one night to the Manets’.

  Love and art: too much, it seemed, for a stingy universe to bestow.

  “Mary?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The waltz required perfect timing to keep the rhythm; any hesitation in the process and the plate might dry out, making the next impression too light. She floated the finished print onto butcher paper while Edgar increased the pressure of the rolling drum to compensate for less ink. He laid down a new sheet of blotted paper, bundled the paper and plate in felt, and rolled the bed through again, producing another Lydia. After five pulls on the first plate, Mary declared it spent and inked the second. Twenty-five times Edgar turned the press bed: five impressions for each of the five plates. When they finished, Mary peeled off her gloves and recapped the ink pot; Edgar laid the last print on the papered floor next to the others. Each one was a version of Lydia, the first pulls vibrant and alive, the last pulls ghostly and pale.

  “Which do you like?” Edgar said.

  She couldn’t choose. To choose might maledict the future: vibrant Lydia, faded Lydia; Abigail, taken from her child.

  Edgar touched her hand. “You shouldn’t grieve so. Lydia has been well for months now.”

  “Hardly plural. Two, only.” Lydia had taken a turn for the worse in November, just as Abigail was failing; she had forced herself out of bed so that she could visit her.

  “The last time I saw Lydia,” Edgar said, “she looked herself again.”

  In the window, inky with the winter evening, their outlines were etched into the plate glass, light against dark.

  “If you like, I’ll draw the two of you together,” Edgar said. “We will make a plate and then put her in the journal. She will be eternal. Do you think Lydia would like it?”

  “Lydia loves everything about you.”

  “And you, mademoiselle?”

  “Yes,” Mary said, smiling. “Lydia loves everything about me, too.”

  Edgar laughed. “I want to show you something.”

  “Not the mystery behind the fortress of boxes?” Edgar had built a wall of wooden crates, partitioning off a part of the room he had then forbidden her to enter.

  Unlike Edgar, who was forever working on other things, Mary hadn’t painted in months, hadn’t been back to her own studio to work except to retrieve, on occasion, something or other. She had become smitten with the journal, with printing, but Edgar was a polymath, able to paint, print, sculpt, draw, and etch, moving between each medium without hesitation.

  “You must promise to say nothing. I can’t bear a word of criticism.” He shoved aside the stack of crates and pulled a tarp from an odd structure of pipe and wire and stuffing.

  Mary looked at him.

  “She’s a dancer,” he said, “but I have no idea if she’ll turn out. I’m going to build her from clay and cover her with wax. I’ll show her at the next exhibition. You must tell no one. I don’t want half of Paris clamoring to see her.”

  Mary couldn’t see how he would make a
dancer from the jumble of materials he had nailed to a wooden platform. She wanted to ask a thousand questions.

  “Promise you’ll tell no one,” he said, covering the structure with the tarp and shoving the boxes back into place. He turned and looked at her, vulnerable. He was proud, like a parent. Obsessed, something he had declared she was with the prints, albeit with great admiration. And perhaps she was. The process of printing was addictive, the challenges absorbing. The difficulties of drawing on the copper had refined her work. An eloquence of line had emerged, an arabesque so fluid it evoked the best of the Japanese prints she admired. And there was something else. Working next to Edgar had changed her eye. He would look at her work, pointing out places where the line was weak, and say, You may draw a straight line crooked, but it must give the impression of being straight. Or, Art is an artifice; it is made up of sacrifices. Or, Nothing in art must appear accidental, even the action of it. And she had understood him.

  But he had never shown her anything of his own work in progress before. Though he had warned her he wanted her to say nothing, she searched anyway for the thing to say that would encourage him, as he had encouraged her, to help him, as he had helped her. But what could she say that would match You’ve painted love? She could think of nothing. He would never accept a pronouncement. He was a genius, but to tell him that would only earn his derision. He was a visionary, but he would likely expel her from his studio, plates and all, for declaring him so. He was unique, but he would only say that everyone was unique. And the thing was such a jumble now. Only he was able to see whatever it was to become.

  “You must have dreamed her,” Mary said.

  Edgar lifted his gaze, his face becoming rapt. “She’s modeled on a petit rat, but I don’t know where this idea came from. It just appeared. One day, I saw her. Every bit of her.”