Bridal Chair (21 page)

“But you too have something to offer,” André said. “Listen to me, Michel. You have a wonderful speaking voice. So clear, so smooth, so pleasant to listen to. Elsa has told me how you would recite poetry during your days at the encampment and how everyone was impressed with your fluency. My friend Pierre Lazareff represents the Free French. He works with the Voice of America, a U.S. State Department program that broadcasts to Europe. They want to increase transmission to France. Pierre is in search of French speakers who can read the news and create radio programs that will offer encouragement to listeners in France so that they will know that they are not alone, that they have allies in the free world. It would be an important job and one that I think would suit you well.”

“It is especially important now,” Elsa added. “The United States is not yet at war, but that day is very close. Everyone in this country expects it to happen—next week, next month, next year. Washington cannot remain much longer in the waiting room of history. The president will not abandon American allies. He is only waiting for an excuse to enter a war that he already knows he must fight. The Voice of America will be an important agency when that happens.”

“That is why Lazareff is in search of newscasters who can raise French morale and encourage the people to resist the Nazi occupation,” André said.

“And would he hire me?” Michel asked hesitantly.

“Why would he not hire you?” André replied gruffly. “I will call him this very moment and arrange for you to meet him.”

He went to the phone, spoke briefly, and then passed the receiver to Michel.

Pierre Lazareff would be delighted to meet him. Could Michel arrange to come to the Voice of America office the next day? It was in Rockefeller Center, a convenient location.

“You will know how to reach it,
n’est-ce pas
?”

“
Bien
sûr
,” Michel said. He did not know how to reach it, but he would find it, just as he had found embassies and consular offices in Paris and Nice, in Madrid and in Lisbon. Necessity had made him a skilled navigator of foreign streets.

“At noon then. There is a wonderful French restaurant nearby. I imagine you would not be opposed to eating a fresh-baked croissant.
Au
revoir. À demain
.”

“
À demain
,” Michel repeated. He set the phone down and smiled gratefully at his friends.

* * *

Pierre Lazareff was an amiable man. Portly and florid, he emanated a contagious confidence and optimism. He had fled Paris just before the German invasion and made his way to London, where Charles de Gaulle had encouraged him to go to America. The war to free France would be fought on many fronts, de Gaulle had assured him, and an important front would be that of effective propaganda. Washington was in agreement. Pierre Lazareff had a budget, a broadcasting studio, and fields of transmission, but he needed effective newscasters.

“We must fight the Nazis on the airwaves. Our people must know that they are not alone. You will give them news, encourage and engage them, urge a viable resistance movement. Can you do that, Michel Rapaport?” he asked.

“I can,” Michel replied. He bit into the croissant. Pierre Lazareff had not erred. The croissant was fresh-baked and flavored with anise.

Lazareff ordered omelets and discussed hours, expenses, and salary. Michel chewed slowly and nodded.

“One last thing. Your name. You must assume an alias for the broadcasts.”

“My name?” Michel asked, disconcerted. “Do you object because my name is Jewish?”

“No. Of course not. But your parents are in France. If the Gestapo monitors your broadcasts, and they will, they will be in danger. You understand that.”

“All too well,” Michel agreed. “And so I will not be Michel Rapaport.” He thought for a moment. “I will be Michel Gordey,” he said without hesitation.

“A quick decision,” Lazareff said approvingly. He too made swift decisions. It had taken him only minutes to recognize how valuable an addition to his staff this young man, this Michel Rapaport, would be. He had a voice that was at once sonorous and gentle, that both soothed and inspired confidence. “Why Gordey?” he asked.

“My wife and I lived in Gordes, our last home before fleeing France. I am hopeful that if my parents are alive, they will recognize my voice and make that connection. And they will find a way to contact me.”

He closed his eyes and thought of his resourceful mother, his sad-eyed father.
If
they were alive, he had said.
If. Si.
The monosyllable of uncertainty weighed heavily upon his heart.

“A wise choice,” Pierre Lazareff said. “I will see you at the office tomorrow then.”

He paid the bill and left, pausing at the cashier’s station to fill his hand with peppermint candies. His craving for sweets had begun during the early days of this bitter and terrible war.

Michel remained at the table and stared down at his coffee cup. He was overwhelmed by his good fortune. He had a job, an important job, a job that would pay a salary and release him from accepting the dollar bills that Marc counted out so grudgingly. He had a new name, a new profession. He would no longer be known only as Ida Chagall’s husband, Marc Chagall’s son-in-law. He was now Michel Gordey, newly his own person with his own mission.

He walked energetically across Central Park, breathing in the clear chill air of early winter. It seemed to him that he was filling his lungs with hope. He was exhilarated when he returned to the Riverside Drive apartment. There was a new buoyancy in his step, a new assertiveness in his voice. That evening, with barely muted pride, he told the family about his appointment. Ida hugged him, proud and relieved. His depression had weighed heavily on her. His new independence ensured her own. Marc said nothing. His silence did not surprise Michel. He had learned, over the years, that his father-in-law rarely took pleasure in the success of others.

Ida’s quiet smile of pride sufficed. He took her hand and led her from the room.

They slept together that night, her body pressed against his own, their limbs entangled. When they embraced, it was with gentleness; when they came together, it was with ease rather than with passion. Their movements were practiced, the touch of their hands tender and comforting, the sweetness of their mingled breath familiar. But even as her body arched toward his, even as they laid claim to each other, there was no surge of joy, no cry of delight.

Exhausted, they leaned back against the pillows, their eyes closed, but they were reluctant to surrender to sleep. They did not speak. It occurred to Ida that they were not unlike dear friends, reunited after a long separation, newly surprised that their affection had endured. Like fairy-tale characters, they had wandered through a dangerous forest, evading danger, struggling to survive, but without a trail of bread crumbs to guide them home. Together they had raced across borders and crossed an ocean, mutually dependent, mutually supportive. No matter what else happened, they would always be bound up in bonds of affection. They would always be linked by shared memory.

And Michel, as though reading her thoughts, lay quietly beside her and took her hand in his own. They fell asleep at last, with their fingers intertwined.

Life in New York settled into a routine. Bella worked on her autobiography day after day. She wrote and rewrote in Yiddish, her pen moving rapidly as she raced to capture the world of her childhood, as though fearful that it might be obliterated in memory even as it had been destroyed in actuality. Her chronicle of Vitebsk denied Hitler a victory, she told Joseph and Adele Opatoshu, the Chagalls’ closest friends, who listened as she read from a completed chapter in a voice trembling with emotion.

“You must not work so hard, Bella,” Joseph Opatoshu, an accomplished novelist, advised. “Writers need time to reflect, to replenish their imaginations.”

Bella shrugged and continued to work at a frenetic pace.

Re-creating the ambience of their life in France, each Sunday the Chagall apartment, high above Riverside Drive, became a salon to which friends and acquaintances flocked. Marc reveled in the roles of both the generous host and the guest of honor at his own party.

He was voluble about his new works. He was painting with a new intensity, in anticipation of his first New York exhibition. He spent every day in his studio, his brushes flashing across canvases large and small, his palette gleaming with fresh pools of paint. He was determined to make his mark in the city of his exile. Pierre Matisse and Ida, working together, shrewdly predicted that the war and his own personal history would ignite a renewed interest in his work.

Ida too worked with fierce concentration. She dashed across town each morning to help select paintings from the early period in Paris. She prepared the catalog, spending long hours proofreading, and updated the guest list. She supervised the positioning of each painting.

“You are exhausting yourself,” Michel warned her, although he himself was also working long hours, leaving for his Voice of America office at the crack of dawn and returning late in the evening. The hours of transmission were geared to Paris time, and between each broadcast, newspapers and journals were scavenged for material, musical selections had to be decided on, and interviews arranged. Michel introduced new concepts. It was his idea to open each program with a robust rendition of “La Marseillaise,” igniting patriotism, and to conclude with a gentle Piaf chanson, inspiring nostalgia. He traveled to meetings in Washington and conferences in Montreal.

He and Ida lived parallel lives, their worlds disparate, their interchanges increasingly swift and perfunctory.

The exhibition opened in November. Ida was the reigning hostess, meeting with critics and dazzling patrons with her analysis of her father’s work, pointing out the bold colors and themes of fantasy and wonderment, making quotable statements.

“My father was a pioneer. His work sowed the seeds of surrealism,” she declared with a charming toss of her head and a brilliant smile. Her pleasure in her own words and her delight in her father’s work was contagious. Her London success was replicated. Her elegance and charm were celebrated. She designed her own clothes, selecting shimmering, bold-colored fabrics, royal blue silks and jade-green satins, that offset the coppery tones of her thick hair. She mingled effortlessly with seasoned collectors and moneyed dilettantes alike, now speaking French, now speaking English, tossing off snatches of German and Russian.

Her dramatic and hazardous escape from Europe, her horrendous journey on the
Navemare
, mutated into fascinating anecdotes. Her courage was admired, the drama of her life applauded. Young women envied her adventures; young men thought her glamorous and courageous.

Charles Leirens, a Belgian photographer visiting New York, came to the apartment and Marc and Bella posed for him. He saw Ida standing in the doorway and trained his camera on her, intrigued by her full-featured generous face, the graceful arcs of her eyebrows. She smiled, frowned, stared at him gravely, and laughed, a willing and quiescent subject.

“Are you also an artist, Mademoiselle Ida?” he asked.

“Madame,” she corrected him. Though she and Michel barely saw each other, he would not have her marriage ignored. “Yes, of course. I too am an artist.”

She had not abandoned her own work. Somehow she found time to attend studio classes. She filled the pages of her sketch pads with portraits and landscapes, still lifes and free-floating designs, now working in charcoal, now in pastel chalks. She never showed her efforts to her father, nor did he ask to see them. Bella glanced at her drawings, but it was Ida’s marriage, not her art, that concerned her.

“You and Michel must spend more time together,” she said worriedly. “Your father and I were never apart so often.”

Bella’s fear for their marriage was palpable. She would forever adhere to the values of Jewish Vitebsk where divorce, like an unmarried daughter who had lost her virginity, meant a loss of respectability.

Ida sighed. She would not remind her mother of Marc’s wanderings alone through the French countryside in search of new landscapes or of the long hours he spent in his studio.

“My marriage is different from yours,
Maman
,” she replied impatiently. “This is a different time. Women live their own lives. Our husbands and fathers do not define us.”

Even as she spoke, she acknowledged inwardly that her very name defined her. The world knew her as Ida Chagall, daughter of the artist.

“
Plus
ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The more it changes, the more it remains the same. Marriages are vulnerable. You must be careful,” Bella warned.

“Don’t worry. When the exhibition is over, Michel and I will have a holiday,” Ida promised.

The exhibition ended on the first Friday in December. Pierre Matisse declared it a significant success. He was increasing the regular income he sent to Marc each month, and substantial amounts would be forthcoming as the paintings sold. He wrote a generous check to Ida in recognition of her assistance. In celebration, the Chagalls invited their friends to brunch on that Sunday. It would be, Bella decided, more elaborate than their usual Sunday salons.

She began to bake at dawn, and by midmorning, the air was heavy with the sweet scents of cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg. Her face flushed, a large white apron covering her green silk dress, she darted from oven to counter, arranging her babkas and slices of apple and banana cake on serving dishes. Flakes of confectioner’s sugar jeweled her cheek, and Marc, in his peacock-blue velvet jacket, playfully licked them off. Bella laughed and swatted his hand. Ida stood in the doorway and watched them, at once amused and envious. For that brief instant, she saw them as the carefree and charming lovers of her childhood. She smiled and went into the dining room where Michel stood at the window, staring down at the bleak street.

“You’re not working today?” she asked in surprise.

“There is a popular theory among journalists that no news of any importance occurs on a Sunday. Generals and politicians also need their day of rest,” he replied drily. “So I have leave to relish your mother’s apple tart.”

Ida laughed. “Then you must help me prepare for this very important brunch,” she said, pleased by the unexpected lightness of his tone.

They stood at opposite ends of the table and draped it with a heavy white linen cloth. Michel carried in the samovar he had discovered in a shabby secondhand shop. It was silver plate, darkened by neglect, but Bella had polished it so that it gleamed in the soft light of the winter morning. He placed it next to the platter of artfully arranged cut fruit, russet pears leaning against blushing apples, interspersed with golden segments of orange. Bella, always the aesthete, was particular about appearances. Her home, the table that she set, clearly stated that the Chagalls had survived, their dignity intact, their prosperity assured. They would live as graciously as they had always lived, impervious to adversity, Hitler be damned.

Ida and Michel set out the china and cutlery. She found it oddly comforting that they shared this small domestic effort. It had been weeks since they had done anything together, caught up as they were in the separate currents of their new lives.

Gratefully, she took his hand in hers and pressed it to her lips. He looked at her in surprise and thought to tell her how beautiful she looked at that moment. He marveled at how the copper-colored wool dress that hugged her slender body almost exactly matched her bright hair. But he remained silent even as the color rose to her cheeks. He knew their emotional balance to be tenuous, easily upset by even the most casual words.

Ida turned away and went into the spacious living room, so carefully furnished with heavy dark cabinets, deep leather chairs, and patterned carpets. The tasseled sofa was upholstered in a green and gold brocade not unlike that of the very uncomfortable divan that had dominated their Paris living room. Some of the furniture was borrowed from friends; other pieces had been purchased at consignment shops. The sofa was on loan from an artist in the throes of a divorce; the bookshelves had once stood in Pierre Matisse’s gallery. Marc and Bella were skilled and resourceful scavengers, experienced at creating effective stage sets on which to play the roles thrust upon them by history.

Ida lit the lamps against the gloom of the wintry morning. She studied her father’s paintings, moved anew by his landscapes and circus fantasies, his gouache of the floating village of Vitebsk, and the pen and ink drawing of a synagogue that would illustrate her mother’s still-unfinished memoir. A portrait of herself as a sad and pensive child in a French garden stared down at her. She wondered what she had been thinking as she posed on that distant day. Had her thoughts been happy or had she been reflecting on the evasive dreams that even then had so often stayed with her during her waking hours?

“Where is my laughing Ida?” Michel had asked the first time he saw that portrait. It was not a question that he would ask. He was all too familiar with the source of her sadness.

The doorbell rang, and she shed her melancholy reverie and hurried to answer it. The regular guests entered in convivial clusters, their faces bruised by the cold wind, their ill-fitting heavy coats tightly buttoned. They were eager to escape the grim solitude of a wintry Sunday in a city not their own. Meyer Schapiro, the tall, fine-featured art critic, presented Bella with a bouquet of lilacs purchased from an overpriced florist. It was an extravagant gesture, but he knew the flowers to be her favorite. She kissed him on both cheeks in gratitude and placed the blossoms in a vase of clear blue glass that she set at the center of the table. The fragrance of the delicate blossoms filled the room, and each new arrival inhaled it deeply, perhaps remembering their own gardens abandoned in distant lands, where lilacs grew in abundance.

They filled their teacups, nibbled bits of cake and fruit, and settled themselves in the living room, choosing seats in circlets of lamplight. They spoke softly, in a gentle hum of languages—Yiddish and French, German and English, Russian and Polish.

On the hour, Marc turned on the radio and all conversation ceased. The hourly news broadcast was integral to their Sunday ritual. They sat in silence as they sipped their tea and nibbled their pastries, waiting for the newscaster to tell them what was happening on the continent of their birth. There was unusual static and then, with sudden clarity, the voice of the newscaster, hoarse and trembling, assaulted them with an onslaught of horrific news. They struggled to comprehend his words, their faces pale with fear, their eyes wide in disbelief, as the distant war invaded their quiet afternoon.

Anguished, confused, they plucked single words from the abrasive narrative and tried to arrange them into a cohesive whole.

“Attack,” they heard.

“This very morning.”

“Pearl Harbor.”

They stared at each other in wonderment. Who had been attacked? Where was Pearl Harbor?

“Japanese planes,” they heard. “The American fleet bombed. Horrendous loss of American lives.”

Each word was a jagged piece of a verbal puzzle whose meaning eluded them.

“Why are Japanese bombs killing Americans?” Bella whispered to Marc, who squeezed his eyes shut.

He could not answer because he did not know. Their war was in Europe, across the Atlantic Ocean. The Pacific, Hawaii, the continent of Asia, were beyond their imagination.

“With this unprovoked attack, the United States of America has been plunged into war,” the announcer continued, his voice heavy with grief. “This Japanese aggression is an act of war.”

They turned to each other. These were words that they understood. They were familiar with acts of war. They were the victims of acts of war. They sat in silence as he repeated the ominous words, pronouncing each syllable with great care. Marc turned the volume up. Teaspoons clattered against china plates, the delicate sound offsetting the heavy words. They learned that Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii. The battleship
Oklahoma
had been bombed in Honolulu. The Philippines were under attack. There were unconfirmed rumors of German involvement.

“The Germans, the goddamn Germans,” Marc muttered.

Bella dropped her teacup. She did not look down as it shattered into delicate shards on the hardwood floor. “Another war,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“No. The same war,” Michel corrected her, and they nodded in unison.

This was the war they had awaited, the war they had hoped for and dreaded. They had never factored Japan into their equation, but that did not matter. The United States, the land of their refuge, was at war with a German ally and so would soon be at war with the Nazis. Marc switched the radio off, and they sat in the awkward silence of visitors in a house of mourning.

Michel sprang to his feet and rushed to the hall closet for his winter coat.

“I must get to the studio,” he said to Ida, who followed him. “It seems that I was wrong. News of importance does occur on a Sunday.” His voice was laced with bitterness.

“But you will come home as soon as you can?” she asked, and he recognized that her question was a plea.

“I will.”