Lawless (21 page)

By the time Fochet wrote his third letter and got it into a pouch on one of the last balloons to leave Paris and sail away over the enemy lines, the earlier pugnaciously cheerful tone was gone:

—General Trochu is a lily-liver who stages sorties which fail to break the Prussian grip. The mob grows progressively more ugly as food grows progressively more scarce. The bourgeois is hated because he can afford to buy whatever he needs on the illegal market. The petit bourgeois grows rich because he sells the bourgeois what little is available in his shop. Meantime the populo, those from the dark underbelly, growl at both and listen more attentively to agitators from the “Red” clubs who have begun to condemn everything—the provisional government, the Republic—everything except their own dubious panaceas. You wonder whether I exaggerate? Three brief examples will show you how bad things have become. Yesterday I saw a new shop with a sign reading “Feline and Canine Butcher.” The famous Jockey Club has begun serving delicacies such as salmi de rats. And last week a pundit said, “Civil war is a few days away, famine, a few hours.” Be thankful you are not here.

But he wasn’t. He wished he were back in Paris, waltzing with Dolly at the Moulin under the lanterns of summer. Holding her in his arms on a night that somehow would never pale into morning.

Just as she’d promised, he was completely free.

And unhappy most of the time.

For a few weeks after she’d gone and he’d located the loft in Chelsea, the return of that freedom had pleased him. He’d been filled with the excitement of wanting to work again. Excitement had carried the Matamoras painting to completion. Then the passion had cooled, and old emotions had come back.

On occasion he still fell into the frenzy of complete concentration. It had happened yesterday—all last night—when he was finishing the portrait. But that kind of excitement was by no means constant any longer. Oh, he took satisfaction from work well done. But the loft was frigid and lonesome, the bed hard and cheerless, and he had to haunt Whistler’s house or sit in the taverns to find a little companionship. A man couldn’t paint twenty-four hours a day.

Shivering, he studied the portrait of Dolly. Were a few daubs on canvas worth what he was going through? Worth the chill misery of—

Loud thumping startled him.

“Matty? You in there? Are you dead drunk? Fornicating? Answer me, for God’s sake.”

“Jim?”

He turned just as the door from the landing burst open. There stood Whistler, snow melting in his handlebar mustache and condensation fogging the monocle in his left eye. Every time Matt saw that monocle, images of Lepp dying flickered in his head.

The painter fairly bounded across the loft. He always moved as if he were in a state of agitation, and he usually was. His friends had to accept the fact that his temper was a bomb with a burning fuse of unknown length. Matt well remembered one of the first times he’d met Whistler in Paris. Whistler had thrashed a street workman who’d spilled plaster on him. A day later Whistler had chanced to meet his brother-in-law, whom he disliked, and had pitched the fellow through a plate glass window.

Whistler was strong, a diligent student of boxing. Other men seldom got the better of him physically. He was quickwitted, too. Judges and prosecutors who tried to punish him for his peccadilloes seldom got the better of him, either. During that violent visit to Paris, he’d talked fast and gotten off with nothing more than a small fine.

Now Whistler shook snow from his fashionable fur-collared paletot. The heavy three-quarter-length coat was sprinkled with white from top to bottom. He took off his hat and knocked more snow from its broad brim as he said, “Rotten day to be out, Matt. Wouldn’t have come, but this looked impor—”

He stopped, spying the portrait. He drew his hand from within his overcoat, where he’d been searching for something. He whistled through his teeth.

“By God that’s good, Matty. Insufferably good.”

The compliment lifted Matt’s spirits a little. He murmured an acknowledgment as the older man marched to the easel.

“Turn up that damn lamp, won’t you?”

Matt did so. Whistler dried his monocle on a dry place on his sleeve, fitted it back under his brow and bent close to the picture, examining the brushwork.

“I need to do a little touch-up here and there—” Matt began.

“Hell you do.” Whistler pointed with his monocle and issued his decree.
“That
is going to the next Royal Academy Show jury. Bet they’ll accept it, too. Now don’t argue. You know I punch out anybody who argues with me. Hah-hah!”

He barked the two syllables. Matt was accustomed to Whistler’s enjoyment of his own remarks. But some never got used to it, and found it one more evidence of the man’s conceit.

Whistler wiggled his monocle at the background area. “What’s that stuff? Doesn’t strike me it’s France?’

“No, it’s a bit of the Shenandoah Valley.”

“Virginia?”

Matt nodded.

“Thought you were dead set against homegrown things in your pictures. Matamoras is on the south side of the Rio Grande, after all.”

“You’re right. I was opposed to American subjects—for a while. I’ve changed my mind. No, I guess it’s better to say that portrait changed it for me. I’ve decided I can paint what I know without being a part of it.”

“Hell, you can. Not and do it well.”

“We’ll see.”

Whistler shook his head, the final word on the subject. He rooted inside his coat again. As he produced a crumpled envelope, he cocked his head at the portrait. “Got a title?”

“Just
Woman of Virginia.”

“Pretty damn prosaic.”

“Well, I don’t think I should exhibit it as ‘former mistress of the artist.’”

Whistler barked, “Hah-hah! Caught you, Matty. You said exhibit! You
know
it’s good!”

Matt’s face reddened. “When I finished, I did feel it was pretty fair—”

“Fair? It’s more than fair. It’s goddamn fine work! Quit acting like a reluctant virgin! Nobody’ll boost your paintings if you don’t do it first. Speaking of former mistresses”—he thrust the envelope at Matt—“the hand that wrote this has a decided feminine slant.”

Matt snatched the letter. Whistler warmed his hands at the stove and grumped about the snow falling from the open skylight. Matt all but forgot his visitor. On the soiled envelope,
Matthew Kent, Esq.
had been inscribed above Whistler’s address. When Matt deciphered the address of the sender, his mouth dropped open.

“India?
Is that where she went?”

“Don’t ask me, sport. I didn’t steam it open. Listen, can’t you afford more heat than this? Ask your father for a bigger allowance next time you write him.”

The voice sounded miles away. Matt tore the envelope open. He was almost afraid to unfold the thin sheet inside, for fear there’d be terrible news.

“Don’t suppose you’ve heard Paris is close to capitulation,” Whistler was saying as he bent from the waist and scrutinized various sections of the Matamoras canvas through his monocle. “Don’t suppose you care, but the
Telegraph
says there’ll be hell to pay. There’s talk of Bismarck’s jackbooted Dutchmen staging a surrender ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors, maybe. Or parading past the Arc de Triomphe—why, the Reds who claim the resistance was botched will have a field day. And every excuse to take over—Matty? You fall asleep on your feet?”

Matt whispered, “Where’s Lahore in the Punjab?”

“Northwest, I think. In the mountains. My grasp of geography’s about as complete as my understanding of silicon. Sending you greetings from there, is she?”

Matt nodded. His face glowed with a strange kind of smile. Whistler didn’t know what to make of it. His young friend was either in a state of exaltation or about to bawl.

Matt’s eyes were indeed a little damp. At last he knew the location of the military post where she was teaching.

But he knew something far more important.

—Thomas Matthew Kent came into the world with no difficulty on Christmas Day. He was early by almost a month but shows no ill effects and, oh dear Matt, I do think he already resembles you. You will think so too, one day when the time is right, and you see him—

But when would that be? Months? Years

“What’s that silly grin mean, Matty? It’s from Dolly, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“What’s it about?”

Wanting to dance for joy, he grinned and handed the letter to his friend. Almost as if he were making a joke, he said, “Immortality.”

For once the dapper artist was caught short. He scanned a line or two. “Oh, I see. Guess congratulations are in order. You’ve got a bastard running around—”

This time it wasn’t embarrassment that made Matt redden. “He’s my legal son, Jim. Dolly and I are still married.”

“Oh, sorry. No offense. Just don’t get carried away.” He pointed at the portrait. “That’s the only sort of immortality that matters, you know.”

Less angrily but with complete conviction, Matt answered, “You’re wrong. She taught me that much.”

But when will I see her again? And when will I see my son?
He vowed he would somehow do both.

He put his arm around his friend. “Let me get dressed and then we’ll go have something to drink. My treat.”

“My Lord, it’s only ten in the morning! On the other hand, it’s damn fine weather for finding a snug fire and drinking a snootful.”

“Sure is.”

Matt’s voice broke when he thought of all she’d given him. The freedom to think—to create—without responsibility. She’d given him her love. And one other priceless gift every man wanted, deep in some timeless center of himself, when he began to think of the generations that would live after h? went to the dark.

All at once he beamed. He sounded almost giddy with happiness.

“I can paint a damn picture any day of the week. But it isn’t every day I have a son.”

O
N THE FIRST
warm weekend in June of the same year, the Reverend Jephtha Kent relinquished his pulpit to his assistant and traveled down to Long Branch to open the summer house. It was usually referred to as a cottage. The term was applied to all the homes along that increasingly fashionable section of the New Jersey shore, even the most opulent mansion.

The Kent house was no mansion; it had a mere seven rooms. It stood about a hundred yards back from the high-tide line, facing the ocean. It occupied the south end of a row of cottages, and was by far the smallest of them.

Jephtha had bought the place three years earlier, in 1868, feeling that his second wife, Molly, needed a refuge from the stench and clamor of New York summers. Although his duties as a Methodist pastor kept him in town during most of the warm weather, there was no need for Molly to suffer or to risk her health and perhaps her life. All the medical experts agreed disease was carried by the miasmas—the odors of garbage and waste that reached their ripest point in July and August.

On this particular weekend, Molly had decided at the last moment to stay behind. She was suffering from a bad spring cold. She’d asked her husband to be sure to hire someone to help him with the work. One of the local boys he’d engaged a couple of times before. He murmured vague replies as he left, not lying but not exactly saying he would, either.

Molly worried because Jephtha had been having some pains in his chest for the past couple of years. She’d finally pushed him into visiting a doctor. The physician had delivered a tedious lecture warning him to avoid undue exertion and the cigars which he admitted he puffed on the sly.

Thus her concern over his doing manual work at the summer house was understandable. But when he reached Long Branch, his basically thrifty nature asserted itself and he decided not to hire a helper. It was foolish to squander money that way; money was too hard to come by. At certain times Jephtha Kent was wholly unable to comprehend and accept his status as a millionaire many times over. The weekend was one such time.

He moved most of the summer furniture to the front veranda all by himself. Then, after nipping inside to smoke half of a good Havana, he began taking down the shutters. First the ones at ground level, then those on the upper story. The longer he worked, feeling only minimally winded, the more convinced he became that Molly’s fears were groundless, and the doctor’s warnings merely the cluckings of a professional hen. Except for the occasional pains he experienced—severe enough, all right, but not very frequent—he felt fit.

He looked it, too. At fifty-one, despite the streaks of white in his long, straight black hair, he fooled many people into believing he was five or ten years younger. His parishioners joked about him resembling an Indian, and for good reason. His mother had been a fine Shoshoni woman named Grass Singing.

As he was removing a second-floor shutter, the pain swept over him suddenly, constricted his chest, crushed it, as though a heavy weight had been dropped on him.

His ears rang. He heard the hissing surf with unusual clarity, smelled the salt spray with unusual intensity. He swayed on the ladder, eight feet above the ground.

He dropped the shutter but barely heard it thump in the weedy sand. He bent forward, clutching a rung to keep from tumbling off. Although he was frightened, prosaic thoughts flashed through his mind.

You can’t do this. Murch is only expecting to take over for one week, and you know he hates preaching.
The Reverend Murch was his assistant pastor.

Finally the pain and then his fright passed. He managed to make his way down to the ground. He stood leaning against the ladder, breathing without the tight feeling under his breastbone or the spotty numbness in his left arm.

Three small girls, ten or less, went scampering past the front of the house and on down the beach. They were carrying wooden buckets for crabbing. Their laughter faded. Then out of the sunny haze to the south came drumming hoofbeats. Jephtha saw a light, two-wheeled trap approaching. The mane of a splendid bay horse stood straight out in the wind.