Katherine Keenum (20 page)

“You can give me an expert opinion on what sort of piece to commission.”

“Oh, that’s easy: You must have her do portraits of darling Effie and Miss Palmer.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Treasure Room

C
ornelia formally invited Sonja and Amy for the following Sunday afternoon. In honor of the occasion, Amy insisted that Sonja look respectable. “For the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
oui
,” agreed Sonja. She was too tall and brawny to borrow clothes easily; but from her own trunk, she produced the nondescript brown cashmere dress trimmed in braid and jet buttons in which she had arrived from Poland four years ago and even the yellowing corset to wear under it. A friend from La Poupée en Bas lent her a high-crowned, brown felt hat trimmed in pheasant feathers. Altogether, she looked rather haphazard but imposing.

As for Jeanette, this time she could visit the Renicks secure in the knowledge that what she wore was perfect. Not only did Effie now regularly bring home Cornelia’s discarded fashion magazines, but she also spent a lot of time window shopping or browsing in the big department stores on her way to and from McAll Mission halls and Mrs. Renick’s Poutery. Moralists inveighed against buying frenzies induced by the seductive displays of goods in the huge emporia, but a New Yorker on a tight budget and hardened by exposure to Macy’s was in no danger. Effie came closest to losing her head one day in the Bon Marché (her favorite store because many on the staff spoke English) when she spotted a ready-made navy blue jacket on a sale rack. It closely resembled an illustration she and Jeanette had admired in
La Mode Illustrée
. A rip in the jacket shoulder greatly reduced the price. Even then, rather than buy wildly, Effie persuaded a sales clerk to hold it a few hours until she could hurry Jeanette over to approve it. Jeanette did so, enthusiastically; and with repair by an in-house seamstress and a skirt and bodice run up from the yard goods department, she found herself provided with a smart new outfit for daytime.

To Jeanette’s embarrassment, Emily was not invited to the unveiling. “Why should I be?” asked Emily. “I am neither the sculptress nor the model nor a friend of the Renicks. Very few people even know I exist.” As a matter of fact, Cornelia had heard a lot about Emily from Effie; and Mr. Renick, who had many sources of information, had made inquiries. Miss Richardson was as safe as houses, and Mlle. Borealska came of good family with connections to minor nobility. More than one member of the Polish exile community predicted that sooner or later Sonja Borealska’s disregard of convention would make her notorious; but so far, as the ninth child of eleven and a woman who showed no designs on eligible men, she was too insignificant to be ostracized. The Dolsons were different. There was nothing definite against him in police reports, but Robert Dolson was known to keep shady company. Journalists often did, of course; and for that very reason, Mr. Renick was firm about which ones he let into his house. A banker could not be too careful.

Edward arranged to pick up Sonja and Amy in a carriage first, then Effie and Jeanette. Ever since they had met at the Renicks’, Jeanette had thought of him as Effie’s Dr. Murer and a friend of her parents (technically untrue but close enough); nor did Effie’s reports of him from the Poutery do anything to change her mind. Then in the previous week, after Sonja’s moving day, he had taken her and Effie to Corneille’s
Le Cid
at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, where Effie had kept a copy of the play open on her lap to help with the dialogue. Judging by his absorption whenever Jeanette glanced at him, Dr. Murer needed no such crutch. Once he caught her looking at him and half smiled inquisitively. She shook her head and turned back to the action on stage. Later, when it was Jeanette’s turn to hold the play, he missed an exchange and leaned toward her. Correctly reading his intent, she silently passed him the book. That night, as she drifted off to sleep rehearsing the evening and embroidering on it, the little moments between them came up over and over again. Over the next few days, Dr. Murer’s confrontation with Sonja’s landlord likewise grew longer, with variations and ever-more-melodramatic outcomes. Now, by the wide-awake light of day, when he handed her into the carriage, she met a pleasure in his eyes with pleasure of her own. She was very aware of gathering up her new skirt and stepping up buoyantly.

To Edward, she looked no older than when he first had first seen her in May, yet less touchingly gauche, more polished. Paris was working its reputed magic. Ever since the theatrical outing he, too, had had a sense that they were inside a new pale of acknowledged acquaintanceship—not courtship, but even as he tried to deny it, he had to admit that he had wished all along to court her company. Since the night he had found Marie’s photograph dead to him, returning health had enabled him to resuscitate a sentimental flicker of affection for his dead fiancée’s memory and the happiness they might have shared, but he no longer deceived himself. His early attachment was fixed in ghostly lines, unchanging except to fade molecule by molecule as surely as the silver iodide of the tintype. Miss Palmer was vital. Her limbs had volume; they occupied space; and when she moved, the air took on her scent. She was not the primary reason he had been on his guard to avoid anything more than courteous relations with Miss Pendergrast, but she undeniably made him more aware of just how tactfully he must tread.

Inside the carriage, Effie sat beside Edward and sensed the currents. The effect of pretty young women on men of all ages was not news to her, nor the nullity of being middle-aged, homely, and poor. All the same, she had come out to the carriage cheerfully thinking of Dr. Murer, a man her own age, as her friend from the Poutery, while the three students were set off in her mind as “the girls.” She might not often have let herself stray into speculating on what it would be like to go home, not to New York City, but to Cincinnati, as a married woman with a house of her own; she might have every reason to be well content with the platonic friendship of an old maid and old bachelor unlikely to last more than the few weeks of Dr. Murer’s visit to Paris; nevertheless, it was cause for chagrin to be forced to revise her assessment of his inclinations.

At the Renicks’ house, a junior footman wanted to take the battered, striped-silk hatbox in which Sonja carried the portrait bust, but she would not relinquish it. Up the grand staircase she marched with an alarmed Amy on her heels. Right past Hastings, who waited at the drawing room door. Straight in to where Mrs. Renick was seated on her sofa halfway across the room. Sonja deposited her hatbox on the floor, curtsied deeply, and proclaimed, “Mme. Renick, I am Sonja Borealska.” Without waiting for an answer, she dropped to her knees and sat back on her heels. From beside the sofa, Mr. Renick silently signaled Hastings to send the others in unannounced. From the musty, faded plush depths of the hatbox, Sonja lifted out the bust swathed in a clean silk scarf.

“Now you take the box,” said Sonja, grandly, indicating it with her head to the flustered junior footman, who had followed the guests into the room, unsure whether he was wanted. “Burn it; it has served its last purpose.”

“Come closer, everybody,” said Cornelia, as she began carefully to unwrap the clay bust. “
Mademoiselle
, you must sit here beside me.” Cradling the back of the portrait head in her hands, she tilted it to examine the face. “Oh, Edward! it is as alive as you described it—and almost as beautiful as the model.” She looked up at Amy, who stood with Jeanette at one arm of the sofa. “Forgive me, Miss Richardson; I spoke too freely; that was personal. But, oh, how I am carried away! Mlle. Borealska, the skill of your fingers catches the brilliance of your insight. Thank you,
thank you
, for parting with this. I couldn’t have done it in your place. Jacques—” The head footman, who had been waiting inconspicuously, brought over a side table on which sat a revolving sculptor’s chassis. With gloved hands that were practiced in dealing with precious objects, he set the bust on the turntable. Mrs. Renick winked her thanks at him in a glance. “Dr. Murer tells me you are primarily a painter,
mademoiselle
,” she said to Sonja, without taking her eyes off the piece, “but it is obvious that you also love this medium.”

“It is only a maquette,
madame
. Hollowed out, but not fired—air-dried.”

“Yes, I can see that.” Cornelia turned the piece, lightly fingering it. “I adore enameled earthenware, but the play of light over bisque is more revealing. And
this
—!”

“If you wish, I make you a more permanent cast and fire it. This clay is too impure for the kiln.”

“No, no! I love its soft spontaneity.”

Cornelia revolved the turntable inch by inch to examine the piece from different angles. From behind the sofa, Mr. Renick leaned forward intently. “I think we must show them the treasure room,” he said, quietly.

His wife nodded wordlessly, her eyes still on the sculpture. Then she looked up. “But first, we must see what else they have brought. You did all bring samples of your work, didn’t you?”

Jeanette had brought a few figure studies from class, which demonstrated her progress since May. To avoid showing even draped nudes to Dr. Murer and Mr. Renick, she let portraits from the afternoon sessions demonstrate her progress in class. She had also included a drawing of Amy at work perched on their hill in Pont Aven and another of her at her easel in the Gernagans’ upstairs room.

“I can see that you loved that room. How perfectly you handled the last reach of the sunbeam into the farther corner!” said Cornelia, pausing to smile over the picture. “And is this Mlle. Borealska’s famous willow? My, my, it does have character!—or have you given it a personality?”

“No, no, she does not impose. It is potent, that tree,” said Sonja. “It has a wild heart.”

“If you beat a child with a willow stick, it will stunt his growth,” said Cousin Effie.

There was a brief moment of paralysis while everyone looked at her, not knowing how to respond. Jeanette felt an all-too-familiar inward constriction and then, from practice, turned back to her drawings and simply continued in a slightly forced voice. “I thought you might like to see some more of what Sonja abandoned.”

A cartoon of Mortimer treading a catwalk. A quick sketch of Amy carving her bust of Sonja. A more elaborate study of a cluttered corner of the studio.

“You have a gift for rooms, Jeanette,” said Cornelia, “especially studios.”

“I keep thinking that when I go back home, I won’t be able to make people understand what it’s like here unless I can make them feel the inside of the rooms!” Jeanette eagerly pulled out two sheets from deeper in the portfolio. “Here’s one of my things set up in our front dormer, and here’s what we see out the window. And here’s a watercolor of Cousin Effie on the sofa with Boots. You see? She found this mustard-yellow folding screen with the Japanese bamboo pattern at a flea market; it’s broken, but we hide the smashed part, and it has made all the difference in the room.”

When Cornelia had seen every picture, she looked up at Mr. Renick. “Why don’t you show them upstairs while it is still light enough, before tea is served. Darling Effie can keep me company—unless, my dear, you want to see things again?” If Effie would usually have preferred to be part of any party and look at precious objects rather than stay behind to converse with someone she saw several times a week, nothing in her habits or experience would have allowed her to say so. Today, in fact, she was grateful.

The way to the Renicks’ treasure room led through a long picture gallery hung with landscapes by the Dutch Masters and the latest depictions of Parisian life. Edward paused in front of a picture of sand dunes with the roofs of a brick town in the distance; it might have been painted on the very coast of Belgium that had welcomed him back to Europe. Above it hung an even earlier Flemish Nativity set in what appeared to be the ruins of a stone hall. An ox and ass stuck their heads through broken windows. Outside, just visible, stretched a tiny landscape of green hills with patches of woods and a road winding to a half-timbered village. Struck by a look on Dr. Murer’s face, Jeanette stopped beside him. What could account for such longing? “Do you know what I love?” asked Edward. “It’s that glimpse of what’s outside the window. There’s a whole world in that tiny landscape. If you could get into the picture and walk up that road, you’d be bathed in clear sunshine and a world new made. It would smell of grass and flowers.”

Meanwhile, a different painting had brought Amy to a halt. “I say, sir, can that be a Rembrandt?”

“
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
,” said Mr. Renick, “his only nocturnal landscape. This, of course, is a copy, but from his own studio, I believe.”

The others joined them. To Edward, the effect of the night scene was the opposite of his Flemish Nativity. Here, one would not venture out into the dark shadows but take refuge beside a campfire in the lower left of the picture. Its blazing heart of flame held his eye. Jeanette, too, saw tenderness around the fire and mystery in the shadowy trees beyond it, but her eye was pulled upward to the cool, silvery light of an unseen moon emanating from behind a bank of dark cloud, transcendent.

“Someday,” began Jeanette, without thinking, then paused.