Bridal Chair (7 page)

Bella set the dinner table with great care, using the white linen cloth and the heavy silver cutlery, reminiscent of that of her childhood home, purchased with the proceeds from Marc’s gouache illustrations of La Fontaine’s
Fables
. She set a crystal vase filled with the last white roses of the season on the table and then swiftly removed the pristine flowers and replaced them with a bouquet of purple irises. This was not a night for white roses.

Marc dressed carefully, selecting a burgundy velvet jacket and cream-colored trousers, looping a white satin ascot about his neck. Bella, in her simple black dress of the softest wool, watched as he studied himself in the mirror, as he brushed his thick, silver-tinged, curling hair and pinched his cheeks sharply to add color.

In his youth, Marc had rouged his cheeks and lips. Always his preening, his fascination with his own reflection, had amused her, although it had distressed her parents. They had not understood that he saw everything—his clothing, the decor of his surroundings—with the artist’s eye, that demanded color and drama.

He followed her into the dining room, surveyed the beautifully set table, and removed a drooping iris from the vase.

“All this to impress the son of a shopkeeper?” he asked sarcastically.

She arranged her paisley shawl into graceful folds and ignored the question, setting four small glasses on a tray and filling them with vodka. Marc lifted one to his lips.

“
L’chaim.
To life,” he said, then downed the drink just as the door opened and Ida and Michel came into the room.

“Are you drinking to life then,
Papochka
?” Ida asked dryly and kissed him on both cheeks.

The irony of her question caused him to flush, and it was Bella who replied, even as she held her hands out to Michel.

“But of course we are drinking to life. It is the toast of our people. Welcome, Michel.”

He smiled nervously, and she liked him for his unease.

“I am pleased to be here. I thank you for your invitation, Madame Chagall, Monsieur Chagall,” he said politely and held out the bottle of
vin
ordinaire
his parents had insisted that he bring. Marc accepted it, stared at the label, and frowned.

Bella set it on the sideboard. “We have already decanted wine for this evening,” she said apologetically, and he understood that his gift was rejected.

Ida moved closer to Michel. She knew how he had feared meeting her parents. He had told her, as they walked toward the Bois de Boulogne, that he would offer no excuses but would accept all responsibility. She admired his courage and thought that he looked very handsome in the dark suit and white shirt his mother had pressed with great care. Her amber-skinned lover of summer days and starry nights was restored to her. She handed him a glass of vodka, held out another to her mother, and lifted her own drink. Marc refilled his glass.

“
L’chaim
,” Ida echoed her father, her voice firm. “To life.”

They nodded and drank without pleasure.

They sat at the table, their conversation stilted and awkward. Michel admired the flowers. Marc asked what newspapers Michel read. Bella refilled the bread basket. Their spoons clinked against the soup bowls. The salt was politely passed. Ida said nothing and ate nothing, moving the food about on her plate.

Katya drifted in and out of the room with serving dishes. They spoke Russian as she circled the table. They were complicit in their reticence, at one in the mutuality of their unease. They ate the excellent coq au vin without comment, speared the asparagus, and toyed with the salad. It was only after Katya placed the platter of gâteaux on the table and left the room that Bella turned to Michel and spoke to him in a soothing maternal tone. There would be no blame, no anger.

“Michel, of course you know that Ida has told us of her condition.”

He nodded.

Marc plucked a napoleon from the platter, licked a trace of cream from his finger, and frowned. “We assume that neither of you wants this pregnancy to progress,” he said before Bella could say anything else.

His voice was cold, matter-of-fact. Ida stared at him in surprise. She had anticipated his anger, even his fury. She had not imagined this distancing, nor the frigidity that turned her father’s eyes into slivers of blue ice.

“That is correct. Ida and I are in agreement about that,” Michel replied. “We care for each other, but we recognize that we are young, that having a child at this point in our lives would be a mistake.”

Bella breathed a sigh of relief. “Then we know what must be done,” she said. She reached for Ida’s hand and stroked it gently.

Ida pulled away. Her mother’s comforting touch had come too late. “Yes. We too know what must be done,
Maman
,” she said.

“Very well. We must find a competent doctor. A good clinic,” Marc said. “It must be in a convenient location. There is such a well-reputed place in Neuilly.”

Ida stared at him, startled by his dispassion. He spoke of finding a competent doctor, a convenient location, as he might speak of finding a skilled framer or a convenient art supply shop. He had not met her eyes, had not reached out to comfort her, not with a touch, not with a caress. Was this the father who had so adored her, who had chronicled her life in painting and drawing? Did she fill him with a shame so deep that he could not bear to look at her? She turned away.

“We know of that clinic,” she said curtly, her voice suddenly strong, invigorated by her hurt and anger. “My friend Elsa, who is a doctor herself, will make the arrangements. Neuilly is very conveniently located,” she added sarcastically. “I will not be registered as Ida Chagall so our sacred name will be protected. Elsa will obtain a false
carte
d’identité
for me. She will see to everything. My so-called condition, as you and
Maman
refer to it, will be resolved within the week, and no one will be the wiser, if that is what you fear.”

Marc nodded. Bella sighed.

“Of course, these arrangements will be expensive,” Ida added with malicious pleasure.

“It is my responsibility. It is I who should pay,” Michel interposed, his voice heavy with misery.

Ida stared at him, surprised and pleased. How good he was, how responsible.

Michel leaned back in his chair. The impact of his words dizzied him. The amount needed was overwhelming. He and his parents had discussed it. His mother had made tentative suggestions. There was a wealthy uncle, a family friend who frequented the Bourse with great success, a Jewish loan society.

“No, Michel,” Bella said. “Ida is our daughter. We will assume the responsibility.”

Marc clenched and unclenched his fists, but he did not disagree. When he spoke, his tone was calm but cold. “I see that you are a young man of integrity, Michel, but we would not want to burden your family with such an expense. Still, your offer tells us that you will be a good and responsible husband to our Ida. You can be married within a month. Ida will be fully recovered, and it will still be warm in Yvelines. It would be preferable not to have the wedding in Paris. Perhaps it will still be warm enough to have the ceremony in the garden.”

Ida stared at her father, her eyes flashing with anger, her face flushed with disbelief.

“Married? Wedding? What are you talking about? If the pregnancy is terminated, surely there is no need for us to marry. We love each other, yes, but we want to wait. At least until Michel’s studies are completed, I am older, and we both know how we want to live our lives.”

She gripped her mother’s hand. Surely Bella would protect her from such unreasonableness. Surely she would acknowledge the absurdity of the suggestion.

But Bella only nodded her assent. “Of course you must marry,” she said quietly. “You and Michel have been together. You have shared intimacy as man and wife. My brother Yaakov says that according to some rabbinic laws, you are already married. The community will demand it.”

“
Maman
, have you gone mad? Rabbinic law? What do you care about rabbinic law? This is Paris in the twentieth century. What community? We have no community. We do not even go to synagogue. Has a rabbi ever been a guest in our home? How can this nonexistent community demand anything at all of us? And if it did exist, what would give them the right to tell us how we must live?” she shouted. “Michel, can you believe what they are saying?”

Michel shook his head helplessly. His parents had also spoken of marriage. The Chagalls’ words had echoed those of his father. Michel and Ida had known each other in the biblical sense; their bodies had merged, and his seed had been poured into her womb. In the tradition of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebecca, in adherence to the conventional values of their Russian Jewish community, it was incumbent upon them to marry.

“But who will know if we do not?” Michel had asked.

“You will know,” his mother had replied in a broken voice. “And we will know. And this is a small community. People whisper. Rumors travel. Already there is talk. Those who were with you and Ida Chagall at the encampment have spoken of it.”

He had not argued with them, recognizing the sacrifices they had made for him, the nuggets of truth in their argument. He and Ida were young. They had their whole lives before them. It was only right that they assuage their refugee parents’ desperate hunger for respectability. Obedience was demanded of them. And they did, after all, love each other. They would surely marry in a few years’ time. So why not now when it would bring solace to their parents, his as well as hers? When they could be together, live together, openly and honestly?

He placed his hand on Ida’s quivering shoulders, buried his face in her bright hair, indifferent to her parents’ presence. “I love you,
ma
chérie
. I love you with all my heart.”

His words were an acknowledgment of his quiescence and, she thought angrily, of his weakness. But she would not be so easily swayed. She broke free of his embrace and glared at Marc and Bella. She was not defeated.

“And if I refuse to marry? If I tell you that I want to wait until Michel finishes his studies, until I myself have decided how I want to live my life, what then?” she asked defiantly. “Will you disown me or will I disown you?”

Michel pressed his hand to her cheek, but she ignored him and did not avert her gaze from her father, who was pale with anger. When he spoke, his tone matched her own, anger for anger, threat for threat.

“If you refuse to marry, I will not pay for the
avortement
. If you refuse to marry, you will no longer be a daughter of this house. You will have to support yourself. This will no longer be your home.”

Their eyes locked. They were pitted against each other in a battle they both would lose. Ida choked back the words she could not say. She wanted to tell him that she did not need his help, his money, that she would support herself. That she would find herself another home. But even in her anger, she recognized the absurdity of such words. What would she do? Could she become a waitress, a sales clerk, an artist’s model? She remembered Yvette’s dismissive words about the slovenly woman who posed in the nude for their class. “What choices did she have?” Yvette had asked. And what choices did she, Ida Chagall, have? She was no different from the model. She had no education, no skills. Nothing had prepared her for an independent life.

“You must decide, Ida,” Marc said. He rose suddenly, his face very pale, and left the room, slamming the door behind him.

Bella turned to Michel. “Speak to
your
Ida. Reason with her,” she pleaded, her own claim to her daughter relinquished.

She retreated into the kitchen. Minutes later, they heard her speaking harshly to Katya. A dish had been broken, a pot burned. These small domestic disturbances mitigated the focus of her grief. She had no power over Marc, no power over Ida, but in her kitchen, she had absolute domain.

Ida and Michel sat in silence at the table. Ida lifted a flower from the vase and ripped the blossom apart, scattering the purple petals across the white cloth.

“What can we do? What can we do, Michel?” she asked plaintively.

“We have very little choice. No choice. We will marry. It is the right thing to do. We love each other. We love our parents. We don’t want to hurt them,” he replied gravely.

“Yes,” she parroted back. “We love each other. We love our parents.”

The anger, the disappointment in her voice, terrified him. He trembled and wondered how he might comfort her. Gently, tentatively, he drew her close.

“Ida, my Ida,” he said softly.

Defeated, she rested her head on his shoulder. Drained of anger, drained of certitude, the passion of her protest spent, she allowed him to gently, rhythmically stroke her hair, then bury his face on the soft pillow of her too tender breasts.

The days passed slowly, the weeks too swiftly. Ida returned from the Neuilly clinic to convalesce in her parents’ home. She drifted sadly and reluctantly back into health, a lethargic bride-to-be barely participating in the frenetic prewedding activities of the household. There were arrangements to be made, a wedding dress to be fitted, caterers to be contacted. There was the journey to Montchauvet laden with suitcases and parcels, the readying of the house and garden for the hastily arranged marriage that would nevertheless be tastefully celebrated. The bride, after all, was the only daughter of Marc and Bella Chagall.

Ida woke on the morning of her wedding day and was perversely pleased that although there had been a glorious autumn, a storm threatened. Gray clouds drifted through the darkening sky. Sudden winds rattled the branches of the trees, and brittle leaves danced across the sere earth of the garden. She turned away from the window and tried, without success, to will herself back to sleep.

Despite the weather, an ambience of subdued excitement prevailed in the salon where the reception would be held. Bella rushed in and out of the room. She adjusted the white cloth that covered the buffet table on which rows of crystal champagne flutes sparkled and then aligned the platters of artfully arranged artisan cheeses, fresh fruit, and elegant pastries.

“Katya, we need more spoons, more cake plates,” she called and glanced nervously at her watch. The flowers had not yet been delivered, and the musicians were late.

She sighed with relief as the florist and his assistant arrived, their arms laden with roses. They filled every vase and bowl with the full-petaled blossoms whose fragrance permeated the house. She herself arranged ferns and pale yellow buds in the copper bowl at the entry and stepped back to study the effect. It was perfect, she decided. Marc would be pleased.

“We have the bride’s bouquet, madame. Where shall we put it?” the young assistant asked.

She took the spray of white roses from him. Marc himself had designed the bouquet, sketching it for the florist who had faithfully adhered to it. Buds and full-blown blooms alternated with greenery and baby’s breath, all held together with a narrow white satin ribbon. Bella held the bouquet to her face, felt the moist brush of the soft petals, inhaled its fragrance, and set it down.

There was a timid knock at the door. Katya rushed to open it, and the klezmer musicians, a pale violinist and an elderly flautist, entered shyly. They doffed their caps, gratefully drank the coffee Katya offered them, set up their music stands, and immediately launched into a rehearsal of their repertoire. They played the poignant wedding tunes of eastern Europe, the melodies now mournful, now joyous, pausing to correct false notes, to substitute one piece for another, speaking softly in Yiddish.

Bella wandered onto the veranda, leaned against the lemon tree, bereft of its golden fruit, and listened, transported back to the distant day of her own marriage in her parents’ garden. She remembered the brightness of the summer sky, the gaiety of the guests, the joyous dancing to the music played by a full band of klezmer musicians. How festive that day had been, how full of excitement and optimism. She had thought herself a fairy princess in her long white gown, her gossamer veil trailing after her as she moved, escorted by a coterie of her laughing friends, to her seat of honor on the bridal throne, which had been carried from the synagogue to a place of pride in her parents’ garden. A red velvet cushion covered its seat, and its dark wooden arms had been worn thin by the touch of so many Vitebsk brides, all of whom had surely felt like fairy princesses on their wedding days. Ida’s own bridal throne was makeshift, a chair plucked from their dining room suite and covered with a white sheet. It was bereft of history and tradition.

Bella sighed and fingered the intricately tatted white lace cuff of her green velvet dress. It saddened her that on this, her wedding day, her Ida would not feel like a fairy princess. She stared up at her daughter’s room, oddly grateful that Ida, in all probability, was still asleep. Katya had carried up her breakfast tray and left it outside the door when her knock was ignored.

“I would not wake her,” the maid had said primly. “A bride needs her sleep.”

“Of course,” Bella agreed. “A bride surely needs her sleep.”

But Ida had slept very little. Lying abed, she waited for Katya to leave and then opened the door and carried the tray into her room. She stood at the open window in her dressing gown, sipped the coffee, and stared down at the garden. She watched her mother bend to pluck up a single wizened lemon. Bella sniffed at the fruit and then, with girlish grace, lifted her arm high and tossed it into the distant foliage.

Ida smiled. The graceful gesture was familiar, reminiscent of the games of her childhood, when she and Bella had sent brightly colored balls soaring through the air. They had been playmates then, mother and daughter, friends who giggled mischievously at secret jokes and played house in their own kitchen even as they cooked real meals. Content within their insularity, their lives had revolved around each other and around Marc, the father and husband, who ruled their enchanted world. They were an isolated, symbiotic trio then, a small family who delighted in their exclusive closeness and reveled in the admiration of all who knew them.

Until.

The single word hung heavily, the fragmented beginning of a sentence to be hesitantly and painfully completed.
Until
she had revealed her pregnancy to them.
Until
they had made their arbitrary demand that she marry.
Until
they had declined to accompany her to the clinic at Neuilly, her mother pleading illness, her father insisting that he had to complete a commissioned canvas.

Until
she had returned home, weary and weakened, accompanied by Michel and Elsa, who had remained with her throughout the ordeal.

Their silence afterward had been mutual. Bella and Marc had asked no questions, and she had not told them of her feelings of abandonment as she lay in the sterile white operating room, nor had she spoken of the pain that had overwhelmed her during the procedure.

“
Mamochka, Maman, Mamele
,” she had screamed in all the languages of her despair, but there had been no comforting, caring maternal reply. She lay very still in the recovery room and felt that her vitality, the buoyant exuberance that had always energized her, had been suctioned away even as those unwanted embryonic cells had been aspirated from her womb. Her only comfort had been Elsa’s reassuring words in the aftermath of her pain.

“You will never have to endure this again, Ida,” her friend had said. “You will take control over your body. You will become pregnant only when you have decided to have a child.”

“But how will I do that?” Ida had asked, her voice quivering.

“There is something called a Dutch cap, a small rubber cap. You slide it in before intercourse and it prevents the sperm from reaching the ovum. We are living in the twentieth century. We are fortunate¸ Ida. Women now have control over their bodies, over their futures.”

That Dutch cap was hidden among her negligees. She had not told her mother about it. Bella had rescinded her right to her trust and shattered the wondrous security of her childhood.

Still, watching her mother move through the garden, she was overcome with sadness and regret. She pressed her face against the cold windowpane and acknowledged that she wanted to reclaim her parents’ affection, to offer them her own. Michel, a faithful son himself, had urged forgiveness and reconciliation.

“They are still your parents. You are still their daughter,” he had insisted.

He was right, she knew. She would have to accept them with a renewed understanding of their strengths and weaknesses and of her own. Their fractured togetherness could be repaired. Within hours, they would escort her to the marriage canopy, her girlhood ended, her new life launched. Ida Chagall would become Ida Rapaport, but always and forever, she would be her parents’ daughter.

“I am Ida Chagall,” she said aloud, reclaiming her place in their life. “
Mamochka
.
Papochka
.
Ma
mère. Mon père. Je suis votre fille.
” The very words comforted her, cauterizing a gaping emotional wound.

She remained at the window as her father emerged from his studio, carrying a painting. Holding it tenderly, he showed it to her mother who bent her head to study it. How beautiful and vulnerable they appeared to her, both of them so slender, so fragile of form and feature, their faces brushed by the pale autumnal sunlight. Marc stepped back and lifted the painting so that Bella might view it from another perspective.

Ida was seized with an urgent desire to see it for herself. It was, she knew, his wedding gift to her. He had worked on it night after night, often missing dinner. Bella had carried his meals out to his studio. “Your father wants this painting finished for your wedding day,” she had said.

Ida, still weak and enervated, still wrapped in resentment, had not replied, nor had she entered the studio to view the work in progress. But that resentment, that anger, had dissipated. Watching her parents enter the house, the painting balanced between them, she felt a surge of love, commingled with compassion. She would forgive them. She had to forgive them. Her life, and now Michel’s, was inextricably bound up in theirs. She banished the litany of
untils
. They would once again be reunited, a family scarred but intact.

There was a light knock at the door.

“Ida, may I come in? May I help you dress?”

“Of course,
Maman
. But first I want to see Papa’s painting,” she said.

She opened the door and kissed Bella’s cheek, and together they went into the salon. Marc had placed the painting on a wooden stand beside the bridal chair. It was a faithful rendition of that very chair on which Ida would be seated as she greeted her guests and welcomed her groom.

“It’s a beautiful painting, isn’t it, Idotchka?” Bella asked.

Ida nodded and knelt so that she might study it more carefully.

Marc had painted the intimate interior of their own salon, dominated by the empty chair shrouded in a stark white covering, a spray of white roses tossed carelessly across the cushioned seat. She saw that the bouquet of fresh flowers placed on the actual chair exactly matched the flowers in the painting. She marveled at her father’s attention to detail. He was a fantasist who did not deny reality.

His brush had captured every detail of the room, decorated for the wedding. White roses filled the vases and urns flanking the bridal throne, and candelabra stood on a small table covered with an ivory-colored cloth. He had painted a flickering white memorial candle, an imagined object that gave deference to the dead, the ghostly, vanished grandparents Ida would never know. There was a fringed pink carpet in front of the chair, a small relief from the theme of white upon white upon white. The absent bride, the vacant chair, the monochromatic flowers might have been melancholic had Marc not added a painting that hung on the wall above the table. The painting within the painting was a miniature re-creation of his own work
The
Birthday
, his gift to Bella in celebration of their own marriage. Bursting with zest and movement, humor and grace, it depicted an airborne acrobatic lover, his face fused with that of his beloved standing on tiptoe and grasping a bouquet of flowers.

Ida knew that painting well. It had always made her smile, and she smiled now. It was a graphic promise of a kind, her father’s wishful assurance that the exuberance of the birthday lovers would be replicated in her life with Michel.
As
it
might
well
be
, she told herself. Their marriage was reluctant, but it was not loveless.

“Do you like it, my Ida?”

Marc had entered the room so quietly that she had not been aware of his presence. She turned, smiled, and lifted her hand reassuringly to his anxious face. The tensions between them receded. They had been mutually disappointed and they were mutually reconciled. Wounds remained, but they would be healed. Standing beside him, the lassitude of the preceding weeks faded, and she felt herself restored and reinvigorated.

“I love it,
Papochka
,” she said. “And now I must get dressed. Come,
Maman
.”

Together, Ida and Bella left the room. Marc remained. He stared hard at the painting as though viewing it for the very first time. It was his best work, he knew, and yet he was overcome with sadness as he looked at it. His daughter, his Ida, was absent from it as she would now and forever after be absent from their home. But he had not lost her. He would not lose her. That was a loss that he could not bear.

* * *

Ida was a radiant bride. Her upswept hair was a coppery coronet to which Bella had affixed a gossamer veil. Her rose-gold skin was aglow, and the white satin wedding gown hugged her full figure. Enthroned on the bridal chair, the bouquet resting on her lap, she smiled at the guests who approached to greet her and wish her well as the klezmer musicians played softly in the background.

Her parents stood beside her, Bella, her black hair a sleek cap, elegant in her signature green velvet gown, and Marc in his high-collared, brown linen jacket and flared trousers, not unlike the uniform of the Soviet Commissar that had been his uniform during the heady days of the revolution, that vanished time before hope turned into despair. A high, brightly colored skullcap was perched on his thick graying curls. He was a swift and lively satyr, his movements both frenetic and graceful, his blue eyes glittering gimlets in his narrow face.

Michel’s diminutive sad-eyed parents, his father’s black suit frayed at the lapels, his mother’s well-pressed silk dress as gray as her hair, smiled shyly. The prominence of the Chagalls, the beauty of their home, intimidated them. Their son had been catapulted into a new and unfamiliar world. They approached the bridal chair tentatively, extended their hands to Ida and her parents, and retreated into a corner with two elderly cousins.