Bridal Chair (30 page)

They walked slowly. At the rue des Saints-Pères, he took her hand. At the place Saint-Germain, they entered her apartment building together and, in her dimly lit flat, still in silence, she melted into his arms. They offered each other the tenderness of tone and touch, an end to the painful solitude of the soft spring evening.

Late in the night, he looked up at the painting of
The
Bridal
Chair
. “Your father’s work,” he said. “I have never before slept beneath the work of a master.”

“And have you ever before slept with the daughter of a master?” she asked teasingly.

His answer was irrelevant. She knew that their relationship would be an interlude, a prequel to her new world, her new independence.

“This Tériade is an exciting man,” she wrote to Elsa in New York. “We have much in common. He is an honest critic of my drawings and paintings, but I know that I am not the only woman in his life, nor is he the only man in mine. It is a refreshing change for me,
n’est-ce pas
? And you must not worry, I am being careful,” she assured her friend, slyly repeating the monitory advice that Elsa had offered her again and again through the years.

And she was being careful, careful to control her feelings, to avoid being swept into an emotional maelstrom. She was a latecomer to the transient world of teasing flirtations and love affairs, but she learned the rules quickly. Tériade, without resentment, understood that he occupied only a defined place in her bifurcated life.

One afternoon, as she lunched with a curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne in the dining room of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, she glanced across the room and saw a couple seated at a red velvet banquette. The diminutive man, his thinning sandy hair combed skillfully to cover his incipient baldness, wore the newly fashionable morning coat with a diamond stick pin glittering in his striped silk cravat. The woman seemed more mannequin than human, her fine-boned face powdered and rouged, her dark hair swept upward into a waxen sculpture, her pale gray dress clinging to her very slender body. A triple strand of pearls shimmered at her neck, and nacreous droplets dangled from her ears and braceleted her wrists. She smoked a cigarette through a lacquer holder. The couple did not speak to each other. They did not lift their eyes to the waiters who served them and hovered nearby. A cairn terrier crouched at their feet.

The curator followed her gaze.

“They look familiar,” Ida said apologetically, aware that she had been staring.

“Of course they look familiar. You have seen their pictures often enough in the newspapers. They are the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, once welcome guests of Herr Hitler himself.” His lip curled in contempt.

Ida remembered how she had watched them dance at the Silver Jubilee cotillion in London. How young and naive she had been to sympathize with them then.

She turned away and did not look up as they left, walking with robotic stiffness, their small dog trailing after them, its leather collar studded with jewels.

She was glad that she was to be at Le Bar Vert on the rue Jacob in Saint-Germain that evening where the sybaritic Duke and Duchess of Windsor would not be welcome. Not that they would want to be among the poets, artists, and students of postwar Paris who gathered there to drink cheap wine and munch on stale sandwiches.

The young women of Saint-Germain wore black, high-necked, body-hugging tops and short skirts; their hair was long and fringed their foreheads, and their legs were bare. Ida ignored the requisite uniform of
la
vie
bohème
. She was her mother’s daughter, a lover of color and costume. Radiant in her royal blue dress, her luxuriant bright hair capping her shoulders, she was pleasantly aware that men turned to look at her as she entered. She slid into a seat at a narrow triangular table scarred with cigarette burns and littered with the cheap overflowing ashtrays that advertised Byrrh and Dubonnet.

“I’ll have an absinthe,” she told the waiter.

“So that remains your favorite drink.”

Michel stood beside her table, holding the hand of a slender young woman.

“Oh Michel. How wonderful to see you.” She stood, flushed with pleasure, overwhelmed with affection.

He introduced her to his companion.

“Marina,” he said, and she noted the softness in his eyes when he spoke the name. Once he had spoken her name in that same loving tone. She was happy for him even as she was brushed by a wisp of regret.

They exchanged news of each other’s families. Ida had written to the Rapaports and she assured Michel that she intended to visit them as soon as she could to thank them for all that they had done. He, in turn, asked about Marc and Virginia. They were sincere in their concern, bonded as they were by the tempestuous times they had shared.

Eventually there was nothing left to say. They wished each other well and Ida watched as they crossed the room and joined a group of young people. She saw how Michel smiled with ease, spoke with confidence, how his friends deferred to him. How they had changed, she and the youth she had married. History had mischievously tricked them both. She sipped her absinthe, a drink that always soothed her.

* * *

It did not surprise her when Marc wrote that he would leave New York at the end of May when Virginia entered the last trimester of her pregnancy. “Virginia encourages me to leave,” he wrote to Ida. It was a claim she neither believed nor disputed. He was a master of self-deception. He had escaped Ida’s birth in Petrograd and he would escape the birth of his second child in France. Childbirth had always frightened him.

He arrived in early June, almost five years to the day that he and Bella had fled their Paris home. Greeting him at Le Havre, Ida saw with surprise that he seemed to have grown younger during her brief absence. He was infused with a new strength. His elfin face was radiant, his blue eyes sapphire-bright. He had survived exile and loss and was the rejuvenated lover of a very young woman, awaiting the birth of his child. His creative life had exploded, his horizons expanded. He was intent on experimenting in new and demanding genres, his sights fixed on murals, on triptychs, on stained glass windows. His return to France, to Paris, was a validation of both his suffering and his success. He had left, stripped of his French citizenship, and he returned as a celebrated artist, a favorite son of the City of Light.

“We are home, Idotchka,” he said excitedly. “You and I will be together again in our beautiful Paris.”

“You will find the city much changed,
Papochka
,” she warned him.

“Nothing can change my feelings for Paris or my love for her,” he protested.

Still, he was shocked by the devastation he found, shocked by the Nazi desecration of the city’s beauty, the buildings destroyed, the gardens uprooted, the fallen trees and the shattered windows. Graffiti had been scraped away, the streets somewhat cleared of the detritus of war, but a necrotic aridity remained. He mourned for all that had been lost, but within days, Paris seduced him yet again.

He and Ida walked together through the Bois de Boulogne, both of them thinking of Bella, who had so often hurried across the green, her arms laden with flowers, her face lifted to the sun that stole its way in ribbons of light through the flowering chestnut trees. She would forever be their ghostly companion although they dared not speak of her. They stood before the Trocadéro building, their last address in Paris, and stared up at the windows of the flat that had once been their home. They imagined Bella’s gamine face pressed to the pane, her graceful hands beckoning them to climb the long stairway and join her in the flower-filled salon.

“We were happy once, weren’t we, Idotchka?” Marc asked.

She did not reply. The past, with all its sadness, with its brief moments of joy, was done with. It was the present that claimed her. She willed herself to a sustaining optimism. She turned away from the window and took her father’s arm. They walked on in a complicit silence.

They visited the once-elegant Hôtel Lutetia, commandeered by the Germans during the Occupation and now a center for returning refugees in search of vanished friends and relatives. The grimy walls were papered with notes written in faltering hands. Tattered lists of names, addresses, and phone numbers fluttered in the weak breeze of the ceiling fan. They studied the notes and names in silence.

Greta Weissman seeks her sons Chaim and Moshe, now eight and ten. They both wear glasses. Last seen in Block 44 Auschwitz.

Yakov Altman searches for his wife Chana, last seen in the Lodz ghetto 1943.

Ida imagined two small bespectacled boys reading that note and hugging each other joyfully. They would find their mother. They would have a home. The image broke her heart. She knew that their glasses had been shattered years ago and that Greta Weissman would seek her small myopic sons in vain all the days of her life, just as Yakov Altman would forever search for his Chana. She turned to her father and saw that he was crying.

“Did you find the name of someone you knew?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No. But, Ida, our own names might have been on one of these lists. Marc Chagall searches for his daughter Ida. Ida Chagall seeks her father, Marc. Bella Chagall…” His voice broke as he finally recognized the reality of how close they had been to death.

“But that did not happen. We were spared.” Her voice grew louder. “We are safe.”

She put her arm through his, and like invalids supporting each other, they left the Lutetia, weaving their way through the sad-eyed men and women who continued to stare so wistfully, so hopefully, at the names and notes. Together they crossed the boulevard Raspail. The light was fading; it was the hour Parisians called
l’heure bleue
. They entered a small bistro and ordered anisette.

“L’chaim
,” Marc said and touched her glass with his.

“To life,” she repeated.

The toast was a celebration of their survival. They were alive and in Paris, the taste of licorice tingling pleasantly upon their tongues.

Their nostalgic wanderings ended. Marc settled into the apartment Ida had rented for him on the avenue d’Iéna and they addressed the business at hand.

Arrangements with Tériade for the publication of the engravings were successfully concluded. It did not surprise Ida that when the final contract was signed, he abruptly left for Athens, sending her an apologetic note, citing the urgency of business, family problems.

Like all the intimacies of her life—her marriage to Michel, her affair with Itzik Feffer—their brief relationship was episodic.
Perhaps
, she thought cynically,
Marc
was
right
. It was only art that endured. Lives and loves were sadly impermanent. Immediately, she rejected the thought. An enduring love would come to her. She was young; her heart was open. She had only to wait, and she was accustomed to waiting.

Marc was caught up in a whirlwind of invitations. He had dinner with Henri Matisse, lunch with Picasso, and began a project with his old friend, the poet Paul Éluard. They were partners in sorrow. Marc had lost his Bella and Éluard his own longtime lover, the beautiful Nusch. Marc committed to illustrating Paul’s poems.

“We will call it
Le
dur
désir de durer
,
The
Lasting
Wish
to
Last
,” Marc told Ida.

“A wonderful title,” she agreed. She too had a lasting wish to last. But that thought fluttered away, replaced by speculation as to how such a volume could be marketed. She discussed her ideas with Marc. He smiled.

“Ah, my Idotchka,” he said. “You have an artist’s heart and a businesswoman’s head.”

At the end of June, a cable arrived informing them that Virginia had delivered a healthy baby boy on the Jewish Sabbath.

Marc was jubilant. His hair tousled, his face aglow, he gripped Ida’s wrists and spun her around the room.

“I have a son!” he shouted in Yiddish, in Russian, and in French. “A son named David.”

“And a daughter named Ida,” she murmured, but he did not hear her.

“A namesake for my brother.” He swayed as though in prayer.

And
I
have
a
brother
, Ida thought.
How
absurd. I am thirty years old and sister to a newborn baby.
She struggled against a wild laughter, and subdued an invasive thought.
If
Virginia
is
not
my
father’s wife, is this baby actually my brother?
But it was a legal conundrum of no importance, she decided. The infant David was her father’s son, blood of her blood, bone of her bone. That was sufficient.

Letters arrived, fat envelopes crammed with Virginia’s exuberant descriptions of the baby, declarations of her love for Marc and the family they would build together, snapshots of the child, her own drawings. Marc tossed them carelessly onto his desk and Ida plucked them up and read them although they were not intended for her eyes. She was merely being vigilant, she assured herself. She wanted to protect her father. She wanted to understand Virginia better. Ida admired her strength, her ability to resist Marc when he demanded that she terminate her pregnancy. She had the cleverness of a survivor. Did she realize, Ida wondered, that David’s birth gave her new and significant power? As the mother of Marc’s son, she could demand marriage; she could demand money, their hard-earned wealth.

She shivered, chilled by her own cynical speculations, and stared down at the photograph of Virginia holding the infant. A fuzz of dark hair fringed David’s head, which seemed too large for his very thin body; his narrow eyes were barely open. Virginia, seated on the shaded porch of the High Falls house, studying his upturned face tenderly, resembled a contented Madonna. But how contented could she be, Ida wondered. Virginia was a new mother, but her child’s father had been absent at his birth. Was she still chained to an unhappy marriage? No legal provision had been made for her or for her baby. And yet her expression was radiant, and in her letter, she pledged her affection for Marc and for their son.

Virginia was an emotional chameleon, Ida decided, and chameleons were notoriously unpredictable. She wondered if they were dangerous as well. Did they bite? Were they perhaps poisonous? She smiled bitterly and arranged for the snapshot of Virginia and David to be placed in a frame of red Moroccan leather that she put on Marc’s bedside table as an apology of a sort for the unkindness of her thought.

The glass that covered the photograph was soon oily with Marc’s fingerprints as he lifted it and set it down then lifted it once more, brushing it with his lips.

“Does my David look Jewish?” he asked Ida one evening as he studied the photo.

“He is a baby,” Ida replied drily. “He looks like a baby.”

“But his hair is dark. Like Bella’s hair.” He passed his paint-encrusted finger across the photograph.

“He has nothing to do with Bella. Virginia is his mother.” Irritation rimmed her voice.

“This child has everything to do with my Bella,” he insisted, his voice rising in protest. “Bella sent Virginia to me.”

“No,” she retorted angrily. “It was I who brought Virginia to you, to darn your socks, to be our housekeeper.”

Joseph Opatoshu sent the news that David had been circumcised eight days after his birth, in accordance with Jewish tradition.

“Your son has been entered into the covenant,” the Yiddish writer wrote his friend, and Marc smiled proudly as he showed the letter to Ida.

“My son is now Jewish,” he said proudly.

Ida told her uncle Isaac that the infant David had been circumcised and her father now claimed that he was Jewish. Bella’s orthodox brother murmured his protest.

“The child is not Jewish,” he said. “The absence of a foreskin does not make a child Jewish. He was born to a non-Jewish woman, and unless he is taken to the
mikveh
, the ritual bath, he has not been entered into the covenant.”

He sighed and turned the brittle pages of a Talmudic text, his gnarled finger tracing its way down the column, searching out a text for corroboration.

“It is as I thought,” he said at last. “This child cannot be considered to be Jewish. Marc Chagall can create worlds in his paintings. He can make fiddlers dance on rooftops and cows fly, but he cannot rewrite Jewish law. Tell him that his son is not yet a Jewish child.”

“I will,” she promised, but she knew she would say nothing. Her father lived by his own law. He had willed the son born to Virginia Haggard McNeil to be Jewish and that was how he would think of him, the rabbis be damned.

Virginia urged Marc to return to New York. “You missed David’s first smile. You are losing precious moments,” she wrote.

Marc apologized. He responded that he longed to see Virginia, longed to meet their son, but he had to remain in Paris until he completed a series of pastel sketches that reflected the postwar mood of the city. And of course there were still preparations for the retrospective. But his thoughts were never far from her. He described his new painting of a mother and an infant guarded by an artist holding his palette.

“It is my pledge of protection. I will always take care of you and our son,” he promised.

Ida occasionally added an affectionate note to his letters, and finally, in August, it was she, their various projects completed, who booked the ticket for his return to America.

“Virginia needs you,” she said as she packed his bags.

She felt a guilty relief at his departure. His presence overwhelmed. His demands were endless.

“It was draining to be with him constantly,” she wrote ruefully to Elsa. “He left me no time to think of myself, of what I want.”

She was aware of the disloyalty of her own words, but Elsa would understand. Her friend was, as always, a safe confidante.

And
what, in fact, do I want?
Ida wondered as she posted the letter.

The time had come, she knew, to confront that question.