I Always Loved You (30 page)

S
he didn't lose the light until late, not until long after Degas had lost his. Not until after she broke her leg in a fall from her horse. Not until after she fell so deeply in love with Japanese prints that she would see her style irrevocably influenced, finding in the flat planes of the Oriental art something so pure and interesting that even her brushstroke altered. Not until after she had traveled Europe with Louisine and her husband, helping them to purchase a museum's worth of paintings. Not until after she earned Degas's scorn by designing murals for the great Chicago exposition, fulfilling a commission she was proud to have received. Not until after she traveled one last time to the States to visit America and to see her paintings exhibited in Philadelphia. Not until after her brother Aleck died. Not until after the pains in her leg struck and the doctors diagnosed diabetes. Not until after she began to inhale radium to cure it. Not until after Matisse and Picasso infuriated her by making a mockery of art. Not until after she traveled down the Nile with Gardner, his wife, Jenny, and their children, a trip to ease her loneliness.

She may have begun to lose the light when Gardner died after returning to Paris from the boat trip, felled by some bacterial infidel of Egypt. Or it may have begun when the Germans started marching through Alsace-Lorraine and she had to flee for a time to the South of France, leaving her chateau and all her Manets and Monets and Pissarros and Degases and Japanese prints vulnerable to the marauding Germans.

Or it may have begun when she last visited Degas, after hearing of his peripatetic wanderings through Paris, and had seen for herself the lonely, pained man he had become.

Yes, she believed, that might have been the moment. Shock could do that to a person, couldn't it? Who knows what the human body will do? It might even blind you when you cannot stand what you see.

He lived now at 6 Boulevard de Clichy, where she had once had her studio, so long ago. The tree-lined boulevard had gone from backwater unsophisticate to busy avenue, but it still carried the shabby patina of Montmartre, the unpolished edges of the little village it had once been. Even so, much had changed: Automobiles weaved among carriages; the trees had grown up to block the light; and newer, taller buildings had replaced the lowly two-story houses and open lots and chicken coops from her time. Neither was 6 Boulevard de Clichy the same building where she had once toiled; it was instead a new and anonymous sandstone building butted up against a brick monolith, all of which, she knew, Degas must hate, even though artists' studios, equipped with north-facing window walls and attached living apartments, stamped the area as uniquely, once and forever, the artists' quarter of Paris. She had heard he had four floors. At the entrance on the third floor, at No. 3, she stopped to catch her breath. She knocked and waited a long while before the shuffling sound of slow footsteps approached the door.

A wraith answered the door: an old man with unkempt white hair and a snowy, bushy beard. He wore an ill-fitting threadbare woven coat, baggy pants, and slippers on his unsocked feet. His skin had grown translucent, creped and spotted here and there under his eyes, which were glassed behind thick lenses smoked black. Through the opaque glass it was impossible to tell if he betrayed shock at her unheralded arrival or if perhaps he just needed a moment, as she needed one, to accommodate the mark of time. She had not written him to tell him she was coming to visit, not when he could not see to read her note. She stepped forward, took his hands in hers.

“Is it you?” he said.

“It is.”

He felt his way into a cluttered parlor, a pathway it seemed he had traversed a hundred times, expertly dodging dusty tables and chairs piled with dishes crusted with dried food. Here and there stale half-eaten loaves of bread hibernated in their paper wrappers. He sank into an armchair while she lifted a pile of unread mail from the cushion of another and sat down too. Behind this room was another room. A spiraling private staircase provided navigation to the upper floors. Sunlight filtered through the stairwell, attesting to better light upstairs, where, she thought, he must have his studio.

“Do you remember?” Mary said. “My studio used to be here, at this address?”

“Did you hear my sad news? Zoe left me. She abandoned me.”

“She didn't abandon you, Edgar. She died.”

“Well, she's gone, either way.” He turned his head as if to look for her, though his gaze drifted.

He was thin, his clothes hanging from his shoulders.

“Are you eating, Edgar?”

“The cheese vendor on Rue Lepic takes care of me. He gives me a baguette and slices me some cheese and makes my change for me.” He fingered the damask cloth of the armchair. “What color is this? I can't remember.”

“It's gold.”

“Is it?”

“Have you even had coffee this morning?” Mary said.

“Pardon?”

“Have you eaten today?”

“I can't remember. I don't think so.”

No one had told her that it was this bad. They had written that he followed funeral processions, that he was dependent on walking sticks, that he could roam in circles for hours about the streets, but not that he wasn't eating. She wondered whether anyone had checked on him recently.

“You must see my new work,” he said.

“You have new work?”

Upstairs, in a high-ceilinged studio that any artist would envy, the usual disarray had mushroomed into complete disorder. Crates were heaped in a jumble, with barely any room to walk between them; boxes of wax lay open and dried out; molded figures vaguely resembling his old dancers and horses lay half-done, abandoned, or finished, the figures imperfect, barely reminiscent of his previous obsessive perfectionism; hundreds of papered-over canvases lined the walls along the floor—it was impossible to know what they were, for no identifying label marked the paper, just his address and that of an auction house; a forest of cylinders storing rolled-up drawings leaned against one another in the corners.

On his walls hung many of the paintings he had long loved: drawings and oils by Delacroix and Ingres, a number of primitives by Gaugin and one extraordinary canvas of a vase of flowers; two early Renoirs, before he prettified everyone and made Degas furious; print after print by Pissarro of his countryside villas and gardens west of Paris; studies and oils by Édouard Manet, including one of Berthe Morisot in mourning, just before she married Eugène. And framed by all the others hung a single oil of hers from the eighties that he had adored and had to have:
Girl Arranging Her Hair
, hung in the exact center, surrounded by dozens of her prints—all the prints from the journal that was never published—of her mother and father reading the newspaper, Lydia at the Opéra, her mother reading to the grandchildren, her mother knitting. Her family, her old life, their old life, resident with him.

There was no new work. He had wanted to show her this.

“I made sure that you were here. I made certain.” He turned, unsteady on his feet, shuffling, his unseeing gaze hidden behind those black glasses. “Do you remember when we were together? I'm afraid I wasn't very kind to you. But I don't know what would have been,” he said, suddenly defiant. “I cannot say.”

Even now, years and years later, he would not define what they had been to one another.

“Where is your little dancer?” Mary said.

“I don't know. I've lost all my friends,” he said. “They leave you, don't they, when you are old and infirm? I've lost everyone. Sabine. Zoe. Caillebotte, Manet, Berthe, Achille. Where do they go? And Halévy died, but we had broken with one another long before, over Dreyfus.”

“As did we, if you'll remember.”

“Your forgave me, though. It's odd, isn't it, how none of that matters now?”

“I think it still matters.”

“I must be nearer death than you.”

They went downstairs.

“I have my car and chauffeur,” she said. “We can go somewhere nice to get something to eat.”

They drove to Rumpelmeyer's, the celebrated café on the Rue de Rivoli. The doorman opened the door for them and shuttled them inside, two old people who no one recognized anymore.

During breakfast, Degas talked about old Paris, the winding streets and the dark misery of it all; he talked of his mother, who had died when he was thirteen, and how he missed her still; of his dead sisters and their daughters and sons; of his dead brother, Achille, and his living brother, René. He often lost his way; Mary reminded him what he had been speaking about and he talked on. He picked at his eggs and salad, pushing them around on his plate, sipping his coffee, misplacing the cup on the saucer from time to time. When they had finished eating, Pierre drove them across Paris, through the Place Vendôme, past the palatial Opéra house, approaching Montmartre through the twisted triangles of streets, the new white cathedral of Sacré Coeur sailing above the butte. The Germans were in Alsace-Lorraine, but as yet had not touched Paris, though Mary wondered if they might, if food would be as short as it was in the Prussian War, if Degas would be stuck here, defenseless, having to fend for himself in an upturned world. At his studio, they ascended the stairs together, his walking stick making sharp noises as he planted it before he climbed each step. Who had chosen this ghastly building for him, Mary wondered, without either gas or elevator?

She walked him inside to the parlor, to his chair, grasping his elbow. She was reluctant to let go of him.

Degas's myopic gaze searched for hers and he said, “I never loved you, did I?”

It was then, certainly, that the light dimmed.

Then he pulled off his glasses and kissed her. Her lips softened and opened to his. His hand rose to her cheek and still the kiss went on. He was forgetting, she thought, that they could have spent a lifetime doing this.

After a time, he pulled away slowly, his brown eyes cloudy with blindness. Then he sank into the armchair and closed his eyes. In his sudden sleep, age veiled any vestige of his former self: his savage vitality, his mirthful savoir faire, his ruthless devotion to principles no one else believed in and which had made his art as masterful as Velasquez's or Titian's.

She covered him with a blanket and went back upstairs, into the studio that was little more than a storage room with the best art of the nineteenth century hanging on its walls. She had not seen the little dancer in decades, but she knew she had to be here, hidden, perhaps, behind boxes, as he used to hide her. Surely someone would have taken care of her in the move, set her somewhere she couldn't be harmed. Squeezing through narrow aisles between piles of boxes, Mary headed for the back of the long studio, where a dustcloth draped an upright figure. She pulled off the cover, removing it inch by inch, careful not to pull too hard. And there she was: his little girl, his made woman. She was in pieces. Her arms had broken off and lay at her feet. Her tutu had grown ragged and moth-eaten. The ribbon tying her hair, once glossy and jaunty, drooped in a dull frown; dust grayed the black velvet ribbon around her neck. Broken, neglected, she had been rotting for years.

Faint, Mary reached out to the statue to steady herself, then snatched her hand away, lest she harm the little dancer further. The detritus of Degas's obsessions surrounded her. A satin ballet slipper, its long ribbons tucked inside the shoe, lay on a marble-topped table, as if he had unearthed it to paint a dancer again. A spray of brushes of all sizes and shapes wrapped in paper spilled across the same table. On the shelves beneath, palettes lay one on top of another—oval and rectangular, small and large. He had not scraped the dried globules of paint from them, as if he had set down each one intending to pick it up again in a moment.

A life mask, rendered in gray plaster, stared up at her from the clutter. It was Degas when she had fallen in love with him: heavy lidded, long nosed, his once piercing gaze rendered blindly benevolent by the opaque clay. It must have been done when his bust was sculpted in the early eighties. She stared at his face frozen in time, all of who he had been to her preserved now in plaster. She stroked the contours of his cheeks, the lilting wave of his hair, his half-closed eyes.
Edgar.

She turned away.

Downstairs, she woke him. “Tell me, is your niece, Marguerite's daughter Jeanne, still in Nice?” He had mentioned her sometimes in his letters, his young niece, training as a nurse in southern France.

“I don't know. They say she's working in a hospital.”

“Do you know which one?”

“Which one?” he echoed.

She touched his hand. “I'm coming back, Edgar, but not for a few days. You'll be careful, won't you, until I'm back?”

“You'll come back?”

•   •   •

The next day, Mary took the train to Grasse with Mathilde and found Jeanne in a hospital on the harbor in Nice. It took no time to convince her to come to Paris to care for her uncle. She returned with Mary and Mathilde, and they went immediately to Edgar's apartment. Mary waited outside the door while Jeanne went in to greet her uncle and to tell him she had come to live with him.

“How did you know,” Mary heard him say, “that Zoe died?”

“Mademoiselle Cassatt told me.”

“She did? How did she know?”

“She is here, Uncle. She was here with you a few days ago.”

“Was she? Isn't that strange?”

From the doorway, Mary beckoned to Jeanne. “It's best if I don't come in.”

“He'll want to thank you,” Jeanne said.

“He has nothing to thank me for.”

“Don't you want to say good-bye?”

“I already did.”

“Are you all right?”

“Not at all,” Mary said, and kissed the girl on the cheek, then picked her way to the bottom of the stairs, where Mathilde and the chauffeur were waiting to take her back to Mesnil, alone.