Katherine Keenum (10 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Bienvenue

A
full six months? Oh, good show; you won’t regret it,” said Miss Richardson, when Jeanette and Effie arrived first thing Wednesday morning. She unlocked a small tin box to receive Jeanette’s payment. “Here’s a receipt; thank you very much. Do me a favor today or tomorrow and drop by the office. Show this to them and sign the registry for the Atelier Bouguereau et Robert-Fleury.”

“William-Adolphe Bouguereau?” exclaimed Effie.

“Himself.”

“But one of his pictures just sold in New York for ten thousand dollars! Oh, my, that should impress your parents, Jeanette. Studying with William-Adolphe Bouguereau.”

“When you think about it, it’s jolly good of him and the others to come around,” said Miss Richardson. “I don’t know what Julian pays them, but they can’t do it for the money.” She paused and looked at a knitting bag that Effie had brought with her. “Would you care to observe today, Miss Pendergrast?” Her politeness left no doubt that an exception was being made.

“Oh, I . . . would I be in the way?” asked Effie.

“Not at all. If you will just wait by the door, please, I’ll set up Miss Palmer and get the model started. Then I can see about a chair for you.”

Miss Richardson led Jeanette around the edge of the room, keeping her eye on the floor. “We’ll have to find a place where there aren’t any chalk marks—those are the spaces already taken. Here, this should do. I know it’s a bit far back and at an angle, as you’ll see, but you’ll have a full view. Grab that easel against the wall, Miss Palmer.

“
Attention, mesdemoiselles. Je voudrais vous presenter une élève nouvelle
,” she went on, in French, addressing the rest of the class. “Ladies, I would like to introduce a new student, Mlle. Jeanette Palmer from the United States, and her cousin, Mlle. Pendergrast, who will be sitting in this morning.”

“
Et le bienvenue?
” someone called out, to a round of titters and expectant looks.

“
Cet après-midi
,” Miss Richardson called back, with a lift of her eyebrow and a meaning glance back in Effie’s direction.

“I didn’t catch that. What is this afternoon?” asked Jeanette, in a low tone.

“A customary little party at the newcomer’s expense. You are going to commission Pauline, our concierge and maid-of-all-work, to provide the entire class with punch and cake at the end of the session. Don’t worry, there’s none of the horrid hazing the new boys endure at the Beaux-Arts—no duels with loaded brush, no stripping and painting you blue—but do be prepared for a certain level of juvenile jocularity.”

Stools and easels scraped on the bare wooden floor as students shifted within the tight confines of space allotted to them. The model emerged from behind a screen. With her drapery thrown around her like a toga, she threaded her way to the front of the class, glancing neither to left nor right. She stepped up onto a wooden platform about two feet off the floor, sat down on a stool, and dropped a bundle beside her. When she let the drapery fall from her shoulder, an audible squeak sounded from near the door. Blood rushed to Jeanette’s cheeks. Unsure which was more embarrassing—Cousin Effie, the public disrobing, or her own blushes—she forced herself to look directly at the model. Guided by a penciled sketch that lay on the floor, Miss Richardson was crouching to arrange the drapery to fold exactly as it had on Monday. When it was done, the model rolled her head a couple of times, shifted her shoulders up and down, and leaned forward gracefully into position with her back arched to show each disk of her spine. From the expression on her face, she seemed to be speaking to someone; she might be a sibyl or a beggar. Her black hair was caught up in filets, Grecian-style, but a few tendrils escaped over the nape of her neck. Even from Jeanette’s angle off to the side, both breasts were visible.

Jeanette had to look away, unnerved by twinges in her own body. The page of her new sketchbook, propped up on its easel, provided a safe place for her eyes.

“It’s awful, isn’t it, that empty blankness?” whispered an English voice beside her. “Try to find the sternum and plumb a line down to the seat as the point of reference for everything else.”

I know that much, thought Jeanette, irritably.

The speaker was a latecomer who had taken up position while Miss Richardson posed the model. She leaned sideways from her stool to be heard but immediately pulled back, as if afraid she had intruded; she turned a quick, shy smile toward Jeanette. Her smooth, brown hair was parted primly in the middle over a wide forehead. Her mouth was small, her chin pointed. She seemed gentle rather than condescending. Jeanette nodded. Even if it was not the blank page that disturbed her, a quick sketch to block in the main masses was just the thing to steady her nerves. An hour later the model was allowed her first break. She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly while her shoulders dropped. Straightening up, she rubbed her right arm, bent and turned from the waist, stretched her limbs, wiggled her toes—all without shifting the carefully folded drapes. Without a word, she bent over to the sewing basket beside her and pulled out a small garment, which she began mending. Pauline, the maid, brought her a cup of coffee and a cigarette, which she accepted curtly as her due. Nobody else smoked.

“My name is Emily Dolson,” said Jeanette’s neighbor, as talk became general throughout the room. In an undertone, she added, “Would you like me to show you the ladies’ toilet?”

“I’d be eternally grateful, and so would my cousin who is with me. Just a minute though, I’ve got to catch Miss Richardson. Miss Richardson, please! About the
bienvenue
—?”

“Shall I arrange it for you?” Miss Richardson looked Jeanette up and down with an appraising eye. “Right. We’ll go for good-natured, not out to dazzle; on a budget yet not stingy; making do with last year’s hat but never skimping on shoes. How’s that?”

“About perfect!”

*   *   *

In the afternoon, while Miss Richardson set the model in a new pose, Jeanette looked around at the works in progress nearest her. Emily Dolson, she was interested to see, drew in delicate pencil with a very hard lead; already the shading was exquisite, though faint.

At four thirty, Pauline appeared, carrying a tray with a pitcher surrounded by an array of cups and mugs. The model unbent, rose, and, staring straight ahead, made her way to the screen through the cheerful crowd that was moving in the other direction. A few minutes later, Pauline returned with a second tray of brioches,
baba au rhum
, and pastry. When Jeanette settled up, she was glad Cousin Effie wasn’t there (and glad she had cashed a rather large check at the same time she had withdrawn her tuition); but remembering what the Thomas Cook agent had advised about tipping the railway porter, she gave Pauline fifteen centimes, which, from the way Pauline bounced it in her fist, she deduced was satisfactory.

As Pauline began serving out the punch, a voice shouted, “
Le catéchisme!
” Jeanette was hustled up onto the model’s dais and made to stand on the stool looking out over everybody else. If she had any illusions that a studio full of artists with the same ambitions as hers would be an uncomplicated sorority of reciprocal encouragement, she was now disabused. One woman in particular was clearly the center of a clique, which she held to one side.

“What is the first principle?” someone in the middle of the room demanded in French.

“Drawing keeps art honest,” replied Jeanette, in English, and then read a motto posted over the door—
Le dessin est la probité d’art
—to a patter of laughter and applause. She had cleared the first hurdle.

The next questions were easy: They asked her name, her home town, her age. They asked her the name of her lover. “Nemo!” She had played this sort of game at Vassar. How many brothers did her lover have? “Legions.” How much was he worth? “A sigh,
un soupir
.” The game was harder to play in French. She missed a question as the model stepped out from behind the screen, now dressed in street clothes, though her hair was still piled in classical ringlets and tied with a ribbon. Jeanette was chilled by an unreadable look that crossed her face. She felt a fool bobbing and swaying on the seat where the other woman had just employed professional skill to endure rigid bondage for hours.

“
Madame!
” called Jeanette.
“Merci . . . un gâteau . . . ?”

Won’t you join us? she wanted to ask, but a hush had fallen on the room. The model’s face froze into anger. Looking away, she lifted a faded shawl over her head and, with a twitch of her skirt, cut her way through the crowd to the door and closed it behind her with a rap just short of a slam.

A voice from the clique drawled out, “And what was your latest
faux pas
?”

“She is proud, La Grecque,” someone else explained to Jeanette.

“Second principle,” called up a friendly American voice, “only the
massière
speaks to the model.”

Awkwardness put an end to the game, and interest returned to the refreshments, as most of the class broke up into little conversational groups, largely by language.

“If you hadn’t put your foot in your mouth, you might have had a triumph,” said Miss Richardson, joining Jeanette and Emily. “But just as well not. This lot can be cruel to goats and turn viciously on lions. Better a safe mediocrity.”

“I know I goofed, but what was so wrong? Are the models never included in celebrations?”

“Not by rights; they’re not one of us, you see,” said Miss Richardson. “Hired by the week. Of course, it depends on the personality. Some of them set out to ingratiate themselves with one and all, and I have to admit that the best are better at what they do than many of us are at depicting them. La Grecque keeps her distance. But even if she shoots daggers at you tomorrow, stare right back and draw for all you’re worth. You’ll be critiqued in the morning, and first impressions matter.”

“By M. Julian?”

“Good lord, no. By M. Bouguereau.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Murers Abroad

T
he Murers traveled from Cincinnati to Philadelphia on settees and cushioned armchairs in one of the comfortable new railroad parlor cars. Years before, through the wooden slats of rattling, splintery cattle cars, Edward had watched blasted landscapes jolt by: trees hacked to stumps, houses burned, torn rags caught on fence posts, corpses tumbled down the railroad embankments—everything broken and trampled, ruined and dead. Now out of glass windows, he saw tilled valleys and wooded hillsides, prosperous small towns, or the high wilds of Pennsylvania. For years, Theodore had urged him to travel; he began to think he should have listened.

From Philadelphia, they embarked on the
Nordland
for Antwerp. Although Theodore refused to return to Germany, he never gave thought to booking passage on anything but a German ship.

To no one’s surprise, Edward was a bad sailor and, in the grip of seasickness, too miserable to be ashamed. “Just get me to France,” he said, with his eyes closed when Sophie hovered over the deck chair where he lay wrapped in blankets. “You can fatten me up there. If I live.”

Later, as the ship passed England and crossed the North Sea, the weather grew uncharacteristically calm. The shallow waters off the coast of northern Belgium were yellow with suspended sand, endlessly sloshing forward and back; the waves were so gentle that Edward was able to stand at the rail for pleasure, not necessity. As they entered the wide estuary of the river Schelde, a lump rose in his throat. Land and river welcomed him home. He had not experienced such melting happiness in years. A memory of turning into a tree-lined driveway floated into his mind. Plane trees with curling plates of mottled bark. It was the driveway leading to his grandmother’s house in Alsace, near Mulhouse. He had not thought of it in years; but yes, each time they made the turn, it was the same. Each time, overlapping discs of sunshine and light shade, a moment of expectation—he felt the same expectancy now, the same happiness. Always the moment when the carriage turned in at Gran’marie’s lane . . . Tears came to his eyes and he laughed—partly to prevent weeping; partly at himself; partly, thank God, from mirth. He wiped his face as though it had been splashed with spray and leaned forward, resting his forearms on the rail.

“We sailed out this very river on an evening tide,” he said.

“I thought maybe you were too young to remember,” said Theodore, relaxed and genial, with an unlit cigar between his teeth.

“No. I remember. Lanterns were beginning to shine out low on the banks, but everything else was gray and gloomy. I remember the water hissing like this around the bow.”

“Sandy water. Look at it.”

“It was somber that night. Mutter was so sad.”

“Was she? No—relieved.” Theodore pointed his cigar at Edward and chuckled. “Up until the last minute, even after we were safely on board, she was sure that secret police would burst out from somewhere to arrest Papa and me. When the anchor was weighed in Antwerp, I think she let out a breath she had held since we left Kiel.”

“But to leave home and country, everything she knew and everyone? Surely, Edward is right,” said Sophie, comfortably, slipping her arm through Theodore’s. “Poor mothers! Mine never stopped mourning a particular cherry tree that grew in an angle of her garden wall. Almost I think I would recognize the taste of those very cherries baked in a kuchen, she described them so often. Poor mothers, but lucky offspring, eh, Theodore?” She looked up into her husband’s face and patted his arm. “Oh, this is exciting! You two may remember your passage over, but I was only a baby.”

*   *   *

From Antwerp to Brussels, from Brussels to Paris. It was Theodore’s string-pulling and money that had won them hard-to-come-by reservations at the Hôtel Meurice on the Rue de Rivoli; but from Brussels onward, Edward’s superior French came to the fore. He was the one who dealt with officials and tradesmen if their hired guide happened not to be at hand. Having spent three idyllic summers at that tree-shaded house of their grandmother’s in Alsace, he spoke with a near-native accent. The first time he had to step in to take over an exchange from Theodore, he enjoyed showing up his brother.

When they got to Paris, it gave him still more pleasure to lose himself in the busy, crowded city yet not feel lost. By then, he had forgotten that he was reading window signs and newspapers in French; he simply took in their meaning. And although he could not follow all the local dialects or slang in the streets, the more accustomed he became to listening, the more he caught of conversations around him. He resumed his morning walks. At first, he did what his Baedeker recommended, strolling down the Rue de Rivoli and along the Champs-Élysées. He walked through the Tuileries Garden and on the quays by the Seine. He watched the crowds gather at the Champs de Mars to enter the World’s Fair; he bought a posy for Sophie on the steps of the Church of the Madeleine. Once, he crossed the river to walk in the Luxembourg Garden. Gradually, as he gained a sense of where things lay in relation to each other, he left the Grand Boulevards and let his feet go where they would.

One morning, on a side street near the Parc Monceau, he paused to watch workers fitting in the last stones on a block still being repaved in the run-up to festivities planned by the Third Republic for the end of June. A stoop-shouldered man with a bristling gray beard and a wooden peg leg was watching, too.

“The past is no good,
monsieur
,” remarked the man. “Paris is an old tart, but she holds up her stockings with a gay garter, eh?” He gestured toward the pavers and around at a bench set under a tree newly encircled with a painted rail over an iron grille. “No vestige of the siege.”

“You fought,
mon ami
,” said Edward.

“Oui, monsieur.”

“
Moi aussi
. A different war.”

“For a soldier,
monsieur
, they are all the same.”

They watched a minute or two more in companionable silence. The veteran made some remark about the street as it had been thirty years ago. A waiter stood impassively in the door of a café.

“Will you join me for a coffee,
monsieur
?” asked Edward.

The veteran accepted with pleasure. Edward ordered him a brandy to go with the coffee. They talked a little of wars, of cities, of the changes the veteran had seen in the neighborhood. When Edward walked on, he felt lightened in some way. He enjoyed recounting the little incident to Sophie in his mind; but somehow, when he rejoined the family, it was too elusive, too hard to put into words what was special about it. He kept it to himself.