Katherine Keenum (18 page)

After the concert, it was almost too good to be true to walk out onto the side porch in the late afternoon and see the last of the flower sellers loading buckets of unsold roses and bronze chrysanthemums into handcarts while across the street lavender shadows played against mellow stone. A few blocks away, the harsh white glare of the electric light about which Theodore was so enthusiastic would soon come on to bleach and harden everything in sight; but for now, trees on the Rue Royale led gold and russet to the Place de la Concorde. Up and down the sidewalks, women in black coats with a touch of fur at the throat and men in top hats dodged among one another in long lines like notes on a staff. What a pity it was for Cornelia to be shut away from this liveliest, loveliest of cities! More than a pity, damnable. He remembered them both with the gravel stings in their hands and muddy knees. She was always laughing, her hair slipping free out into a fuzzy nimbus from whatever braiding or ribbons her mother had used to try to control it. Good old Cornelia. As he started down the church steps, he supposed that he ought to have invited Miss Pendergrast to come along to the concert; she was the sort who enjoyed any outing. But no, truth to tell, he was glad he had obeyed his instinctive caution with spinsters.

Pulled toward the Place de la Concorde, he crossed traffic and continued on the western side of the bridge over the Seine. A cluster of young men leaned at their ease on the balustrade and discussed where best to watch the sun go down. The Seine turned to a molten sheen overarched by a blazing sky would be a sight worth seeking out, but looking at a bank of low cloud in the west, Edward thought the day would not end in fire. As he turned eastward upriver, his heart leaped; for there, with the sun still in the sky, a pale golden moon was rising. Just as he had at the rail of the
Nordland
, he blinked back tears, yet to anyone who had felt as deadened as he had for so many years, there was no inward regret at finding himself moved, only gratitude that he could feel beauty.

At the entrance to the Tuileries Garden, a woodsy-sweet roasting smell hung where a mother and two children were buying chestnuts from a street vendor. Inside the wall of the park, the central gravel path held the waning light while the surrounding grass gradually faded from wan green toward no discernible color at all. In the basin of a big fountain, a pair of silhouetted ducks glided at the apex of an ever-broadening wake. A few people dawdled along the paths or sat under the ranks of trees on either side of the park. The tree trunks were strictly aligned, very French; but wind and rain had stripped their leaves in scattered patches, and a few trees were almost bare. The naked upper branches reached toward a primordial wildness having little to do with parks or men. One lithe young tree, which must have been planted to replace a victim of the 1870 siege, had attained height but not girth. Its skeletal twigs probed an invisible chaos; it seemed inimical to man, or not so much hostile as heedless in its dark energy. The trees at Shiloh had been like that. With a blink of the eye, Edward dismissed the fancy; the tree fell into place in a formal row that led to a creamy hemispheric wall. Above the wall, the mass and irregular roof of the burned palace blocked the far end of the garden. No queen of France to watch for now. In the growing dusk, golden lights pricked out the Rue de Rivoli to his left. Edward whistled a measure from the afternoon’s concert. At the
rat-a-tat-tat
of a drum being beaten to signal the closing hour, he felt a momentary urge to flout the martial-sounding order. As a boy, he might have hidden for the fun of climbing over the fence later. The middle-aged man decided to go in search of coffee and brandy.

He came out on the Rue de Rivoli, where a young woman in a small hat perched forward over curls stood under a streetlamp. Her eyes met his; she yawned and immediately held a prettily gloved hand to her mouth. So natural a gesture, so public a slip in decorum amused him, and he raised a hand to tip his hat. She winked and tilted her head. His hand hesitated; blood rushed to his face at his mistake. She turned away, perhaps herself inexperienced enough to be embarrassed, more likely already seeking a better prospect. Completing the tip of his hat with a flick,
adieu
, Edward was glad that Carl had not been present to see his blunder. He took a seat at a sidewalk table and sipped his coffee and brandy, watching the crowd with skeptical new eyes.

When he was done, it was still too early to dine. He felt dissatisfied. Sophie and Cousin Anna constantly reminded him to take his meals regularly and he knew he should, but he rejected food as a corrective to the uneasiness that had crept into his evening. His limbs wanted action. He returned to the Meurice and asked the concierge to recommend a fencing studio.

*   *   *

It was an odd preoccupation to have lodged in his brain, fencing, and he knew it. As a boy, he had learned the basics from Theodore, who in his university days in Kiel had excelled at the sport. He remembered the salute, the
en garde
position, a few parries and ripostes—enough to have led him to accompany Carl one night in Freiburg to watch Young Paul fence at a club for soldiers and students, where dueling scars still conferred glamour. He hated everything having to do with real officers’ real sabers; but when he saw the young men in their warm-up exercises and ritualized practice with foils, he began to wonder whether the discipline might help his stiffness and pain. If only to slake his curiosity, he thought he would experiment here in Paris, where he could make the trial away from the eyes of anyone he knew.

*   *   *

The
salle d’armes
to which he was directed proved to be a ground-floor establishment at the back of a courtyard near Les Halles. As he approached the door, out came two men, laughing and talking. They had the easy gait and glowing faces of healthy men who had just exercised hard. They nodded with a slightly distracted friendliness and held the door for him.

By gaslight inside, brown-speckled mirrors and stained wallpaper gave the impression of a place long in use. Thumps, stamps, whining clinks, and shouts rang out from beyond a partition behind a reception desk. Chalk dust and sweat permeated the air, interpenetrated by a heavily perfumed Turkish cigarette being smoked by the desk attendant. It’s going to be my lung, not my leg does me in, thought Edward. The attendant assured him he could be supplied with instruction, he had come at a good hour, the master could work him in at once. All the necessary equipment could be hired on site; there was a charge for each broken foil, of which there were likely to be a few each lesson. If
monsieur
would step this way.

In the dressing room, Edward was given a wadded buckskin jacket, sweat-stained and greasy from use, but the flannel shirt to go under it and a pair of linen trousers were freshly laundered. So was a hand towel to take with him to wipe his face. Bath towels were ready for later, when Ahmed would be available to give him a rub-down (
monsieur
should take advantage). The old man who ruled the dressing room knew his business: The trousers were just the right length and fullness to give ease of motion; the shirt was comfortable at the neck. In trading the confinement of collar, cuff, necktie, and suit for such freedom, Edward felt he was putting on a disguise.

Back out at the desk, the clerk introduced him to the
maître d’armes
, M. Pierre Artaud, who assured him that nothing could better reinvigorate him than the noble art of fencing. To commence, they would warm up
monsieur
’s muscles and then see what he remembered.

After a few stretches, knee bends, and arm rotations, M. Artaud took down a mesh-visored mask from a line; inside were tucked wide-cuffed gloves.
Monsieur
should always use these sets bound in red; the others belonged to regular clients. Below hung foil after foil. The one M. Artaud handed to Edward was light and springy, far lighter than the sabers that officers carried into battle in 1861. It could break as the attendant had warned, but its springiness demanded panache.

Edward stepped back and came to rigid attention as he had in the Ninth. With his mask held up to his chest, he flourished his weapon through a salute and begged the honor of a lesson in arms. M. Artaud returned the salute with solemnity and proceeded to bark out a series of commands: pronate, supinate, advance, retreat, lunge. Edward maneuvered the blade through basic positions and took up stances, learning in only a few minutes how tiring it could be to maintain the balance of a long foil against gravity. Although he knew he ought to take as detached an attitude as his examiner in a diagnostic session, he was annoyed when the blade wobbled. When he made mistakes, he leaped to try again before Artaud could correct him.

“
Bon, monsieur.
Now we cross swords—only briefly, only to touch steel, no follow-through.”

It was not a match, but every cut or thrust made by Edward was quickly deflected. When it was his turn to demonstrate ripostes, he could not remember them. The approach of the foil point to his mask frightened him. Yet against all reason and growing breathlessness, he threw himself into trying harder. No good. He felt weak; everything flew out of control.

“Arrêtez!”
M. Artaud called a halt and stepped back calmly, breathing normally.

Edward gasped for air. He coughed; his right arm and both knees trembled. It brought back the rout and confusion of defeat in war and how sick even the work of victory had made him, scavenging and stripping bodies after a battle with the reek of metal, gunpowder, and death in the air. (When he had taken his first sword out of the dead hand of a Confederate officer and tossed it on a heap of gathered weapons, the clank seemed to be all that chivalry amounted to.) He could hardly register what M. Artaud was saying.

“Here is what I can do for you,
monsieur
. Your hands are good. With them, I see, you habitually make precise and controlled movements. You must learn to rely on them, not your arm, to control the blade, though the arm needs strengthening, too, a matter for barbells. Your eye is good, but you must learn not to flinch when the point comes near, also to be aware of a wider field of vision. Your lame leg will be no obstacle to attaining flexibility, precision, and speed.
Bon
, I shall turn you over now to an assistant to teach you a routine warm-up.”

*   *   *

An hour and a half later, Edward left in a haze of exhausted well-being, all memories of the war forgotten. He had worked out, taken a lesson, bathed, and been worked over with oil by the Algerian masseur who manned a table in the dressing room. Emerging into the semidarkness of the courtyard, he headed for the gaslight marking the street. He was tempted to hail a cab back to the hotel and fall into bed, but a tightness across his temples and the clap of his belly warned him instead to eat or he would wake with a pounding headache at the very least. Luckily, Les Halles was full of unpretentious restaurants and cafés catering to those who worked in the nearby wholesale food markets. He had not gone half a block before he came to a brasserie called Les Vosges and saw two peasant farmers enter, one with downy goose feathers clinging to his trousers. Edward followed them. He was feeling unequal to the elegance of the Meurice, but by the look of these two men, they might have worked on Gran’marie’s farm in Alsace.

Inside, similar customers stood at a bar with tall glasses of beer or sat with food in front of them, four or six to a table, talking politics or leaning back to laugh at a jest. Four men in a corner were playing cards. The atmosphere was something like that in Edward’s Cincinnati eating house, but he could expect better food. Soon, he was provided with soup, beer, a wedge of pâté, and crusty rye bread. The soup was only cabbage soup with pork and vegetables—only soup? One taste and he realized it was the
potée
of his childhood, transformed by godlike hands into ambrosia. In a flood of contentment, he decided to invite Miss Pendergrast and Miss Palmer to a play.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Moving Day

Q
uick, Cousin Effie, put your coat on,” said Jeanette, banging the door violently one evening, a few days after Edward’s arrival in Paris. Boots, who had been pouncing at yarn dangled for him by Effie, swerved under the sofa. “We’re going to La Poupée en Bas for supper for a council of war: Sonja’s landlord has given her two weeks’ notice to vacate her studio.”

“Two weeks’ notice! Oh, dear. Is that legal?”

“You know Sonja,” said Jeanette, shaking change out of the ginger jar. “She doesn’t have a lease, and she hasn’t paid the rent since she got back from Italy.”

“She ought to take him court.”

“Why? She wouldn’t win.”

“Because the law drags things out, that’s why. It would buy her time to look for a new place. Shoo, Boots, out you go.” The cat, who was slinking back toward Effie’s abandoned ball of yarn, made a sideways dive, hopped languidly onto the windowsill, and stepped out as though he had meant to leave all along.

“The owner is planning to pull the building down. We’ve got to find somewhere for her to go right away. Amy is unhappy with her place, too, and said she might go in with Sonja if they find something good.”

*   *   *

La Poupée en Bas was Sonja’s discovery, a supper club organized by women artists whose studio windows overlooked a back courtyard where the kitchen of an Italian
ristorante
, Les Deux Hélènes, received deliveries.
They engaged the owner of the restaurant to supply them with simple boxed lunches and daily dinners for a flat fee
, Jeanette had written her parents the first time she and Effie were taken there.
They all knew her because she used to be a model—a really good one, too, who commanded top fees. What she said, though, was that beauty fades, while people always need to eat and drink, so she lived with her mother and saved up until they could open a tavern. Mama Elena used to do all the cooking, but then the daughter, La Belle Hélène, married a cook from their home town in Tuscany. Nobody could believe it because he’s so ugly and she’s so pretty.
She thought it better to leave out that everyone also said that Agostino sweated in the kitchen and flavored the food with yearning.
The artists call their club La Poupée en Bas—the Doll, or the Mannequin, or the Model Downstairs—because it’s in a kind of half-basement out back below the restaurant. They put a lay figure in a chair by the door, and somebody really good painted La Belle Hélène’s face on it. The walls are splintery, and the soft bricks in the floor are worn down into powdery hollows. You feel like you have to duck where the ceiling is low, and you can look right up to the beams and the underflooring of the main story. But the subscribers whitewashed the walls and put blue-and-white checked table cloths on secondhand tables to make it cheerful, and the best thing about it (besides the food!) is that they hang a rotation of their own paintings, drawings, and prints every month
.

When Jeanette and Effie arrived, Amy was seated at a table near the back across from Sonja, who was sprawled half-turned in a tilted chair, her elbow propped on the top rung.

“Ah, Miss Pendergrast, you come, too. Good,” she said. “One moment, please.” She turned back to finish recounting to a woman at the next table the particulars of her case, freshly indignant over every intransigence on the part of her landlord and relishing every insult she had hurled at him.

“Emily’s not here,” observed Jeanette, a little disappointed. Emily had said she must consult Robbie first.

“Inconvenient to His Nibs, no doubt,” said Amy, dryly. She nodded toward a sideboard, where a vat of soup and platters of meat sat next to a round of cheese in muslin and a bowl of fruit. “Better hurry before it’s all gone.”

While Effie ladled up creamy soup for them, Jeanette leaned across the sideboard to study a small canvas.

“Who did that wonderful still life of eggs in a copper bowl?” she asked, when they sat down.

“Louise Steadman,” said Amy. “Good, isn’t she?”

“Exquisite contours, as Emily would say. You know what we should do? Set up studies from a dairy shop: eggs, those big mounds of butter, and round cheeses—think of all the fat shapes.”

“I can tell who’s hungry,” said Amy.

“No, really, think of the curves and closely related tones,” insisted Jeanette. “What is in this marvelous soup?”

“Your eggs and cream in wine and beef broth,” said Amy.

“We can never go back to America, Cousin Effie,” sighed Jeanette.

“It may be required if ever you want a studio,” said Sonja, gloomily. “None is to be had in Paris.”

Sonja had assumed that she would hear of something that night, for the members of La Poupée en Bas always notified each other of any openings in their buildings; but by October everyone who was going to move that fall had already done so. On their way to the sideboard, a few women did stop by with an address to try or the name of someone else to ask. After one such visitor, Effie asked Amy in a low voice, “How is that name spelled?”

“Are you keeping a list, Miss P? Good show.”

“Well, it’s going to take some legwork, you know.”

“Cousin Effie, what about Miss Reade and Miss Isobel? Could you ask them?”

“There’s a thought,” said Amy. “No telling what that pair might come up with. Sonja, you remember that I told you about Mabel Reade—Irish woman, older? The one who began studies with Carolus-Duran? She recently moved across the river to be in his vicinity: Nôtre-Dame-des-Champs.”

“Too expensive for you and me, even on the sixth floor.”

“Nonsense. There are all sorts of things around there from palaces to ant heaps.”

“You never know what you’ll find till you look,” said Effie.

“No cold feet, you swine.”

“I told you, Sonja, no promises.”

*   *   *

Effie visited a few places with Sonja to get a sense of what she wanted. She sent a note to Miss Reade; she checked at agencies; she put the problem to Mme. LeConte, the
portière
of their
pension
.

“Sonja isn’t looking for a
pension
,” said Jeanette.

“Of course not, but the porters all know each other; and one thing leads to another.”

Effie walked block after block, climbed dusty staircases to look at dirty rooms, and nosed out obscure back alleys. She investigated a Right Bank neighborhood near the Place de Clichy to check out comparative values. “It’s closer to where Miss Richardson is now, which she might prefer.” Under false pretenses, she talked her way into one apartment and studio near the Reade sisters’ building on the Rue d’Assas just for the pleasure of sighing over its view of treetops in the Luxembourg Garden. With her bad French, no one knew how she managed it all, but she did. She found time, moreover, to stop in for morning coffee and report to Cornelia on her progress. “Darling Effie, you must write all this down,” said Cornelia, more than once. “You could sell it to the newspapers.” Sometimes Edward was there. When he was not, Cornelia regaled him later with heightened versions of Effie’s accounts. “You must not dream of returning to Germany,” she said, “until we know how it turns out.”

On Wednesday of the second, fateful week, Effie arrived midday at Julian’s, greatly excited. It seemed that Miss Reade had a friend whose upstairs neighbor might move downstairs if the two ladies could find someone congenial to sublet the cheaper studio and apartment while they tried out their shared living arrangement. The upstairs tenant would be home late that afternoon and was willing to show her place.

“It’s on an impasse off the Rue Madame. If Mlle. Borealska will just come take a look at it on her way home before she does anything foolish . . .”

“I doubt that Sonja is here today,” said Amy, shortly.

“You don’t mean she’s off signing a lease!”

“I have no idea what Sonja Borealska is doing. Why I ever so much as hinted I might go in with her is beyond me. But I can promise you one thing: She never signs leases.”

“What about this, Cousin Effie,” said Jeanette, as worried by Amy’s irritation as by Effie on one of her flights, “I’ll meet you at Galignani’s reading room after the first break this afternoon. We can scout out the apartment. If it’s any good, we’ll track down Sonja somehow.”

*   *   *

The Rue Madame began near the mismatched towers of Saint-Sulpice and ended at the Rue d’Assas. Throughout the area, buildings were fast filling in what remained of the semirural garden plots, work yards, and vacant land that had characterized the district not many years before. Having mastered its intricacies during the last ten days, Effie could go straight to the address on a dead-end half-block. The
portière
sent them through an archway into a narrow passage between the building and a high wall.

The studio block was ten or twelve years old. Its burnish of newness had worn off without acquiring charm, unless a few scars and gouges where it had been hit by Prussian shells counted as marks of history. Pigeon droppings stained the walls and had been allowed to pile up in ragged pyramids along the base of the building—an authentic Sonja touch, thought Jeanette, stepping carefully to avoid dirtying her shoes. When they came out into a little courtyard, they could see better over the wall beside them: Splay-fingered, brown leaves of two tall chestnuts were visible along with the half-bare limbs of a few apple and pear trees. An entryway door opened into a stairwell that reeked of turpentine, linseed oil, and possibly urine. At each floor landing, the jambs and entablature of the door frames dwindled in width and decoration. The fifth-floor fixtures were strictly utilitarian and the hallway was painted an olive that must have been nondescript even when it was fresh. Yet any doubts about the place were banished as soon as Mlle. Tourneau, the tenant, admitted them to the apartment.

Even on a dark day, cool light emanated from the studio on their right, abundant reflected light that could come only from a very large space with many windows. Behind Mlle. Tourneau, a corridor ran past a couple of rooms, back to a daylit kitchen. Mlle. Tourneau explained that she used one as her bedroom and the other as a dining room, but they could both be made into bedrooms if one ate in the studio. There was running water. Outside a studio window, the treetops next door became part of a wider view. There was far more greenery here, and more variety in the building types and rooftops than on the Rue Jacob.

Ah, oui
, the orchard was very beautiful, agreed Mlle. Tourneau, and showed them a downward-angled landscape she had painted from that very window. She came to the point: Did they think Mlle. Borealska and Mlle. Richardson would want the apartment? Someone else was coming to look this afternoon, too. With a start, Jeanette realized what Mlle. Tourneau had just said.

“If our friends don’t want it, we do,” she said firmly, in French. “Miss Reade will vouch for us.”

*   *   *

“How could you commit us to a higher rent like that?” expostulated Effie, when they were back outside.

“At worst, it’s only six months, Cousin Effie. We’d find a way. We’ve saved thirty francs a month over what we had planned just by living in the
pension
.”

“And spent most of it, too! Oh, dear. Well, something would turn up, I suppose, or . . . What am I saying! You make me sound like Mr. Micawber, Jeanette.”

“Don’t worry. Sonja and Amy will take it.”

They found Sonja; she saw the apartment; she took it. In the past, she had repeatedly refused the commission for a portrait of two children, offered as what she knew to be charity by an exiled friend of her father’s. On the spot, she decided to accept it in order to get the advance. “Better to sacrifice my pride than sleep in the rain this winter,” she admitted. “And such light!” When Amy saw it, her earlier dissatisfactions with her own place became unbearable. She agreed to share the rent as soon as she could give notice.

By the time Effie sat with Cornelia and Edward in the Poutery on Friday to report on the dénouement, she was pink with the triumph. “We’re going to have Mlle. Borealska out in time to beat her deadline tomorrow. She has borrowed three handcarts for haulage and the girls are festooning them like carnival floats. Why don’t you come, Dr. Murer? It’s going to be like a carnival.”

“Edward Murer,” said Cornelia, “if you don’t go and come back with a report, I shall never let you into my house again!”

*   *   *

The next day at noon, Edward had a cab drop him at the corner nearest the rather dubious address Effie had given him. From there, he went on foot, relying on what he could remember of her instructions. He put a question or two to strangers, and the sixth sense acquired by walking as much as he did got him the rest of the way. His top hat, frock coat, and elegant cane were out of place in such a knockabout neighborhood, but his quiet self-possession deflected attention. He was ignored as someone who might be coming to inquire about a piece of work.

As he came to a roofed passage under a building, he almost asked a man sitting with a newspaper in a recessed doorway whether he was going the right way, but there was no need. Through the arch on the other side stood Miss Pendergrast’s carnival carts, their long shafts up in the air and crêpe paper rosettes tacked around their rims. A few boxes were stacked near the open door of a dilapidated outbuilding. Over the sound of voices, a hammer banged in nails to close up a crate. Inside, half a dozen women and several young men were packing up the last of Sonja’s belongings. Jeanette, who was helping Amy wrap up some small sculptures, saw Edward before Effie did. She smiled. Among her friends in all this activity, she was far more animated than he had seen her before. It made her pretty. “Cousin Effie,” she called, and guided Sonja over to meet him with Amy and Emily in tow. “You must meet Cousin Effie’s friend, Dr. Murer.”