Mira's Diary (10 page)

He was a man now, taller, filled out, with a beard, but it was definitely him. He saw me and froze.

“Mira?” He looked astonished and anguished at once.

I swallowed my tears and wiped my eyes. “Oh, Claude, please forgive me! I didn't want to leave, but I did, and you haven't heard from me in so long!”

“Mira, it really is you!” Claude put down the sandwiches wrapped in newspaper he'd brought for lunch. He knelt next to me and handed me his handkerchief. “Do not cry! We are not angry with you, are we, Degas?”

“I was never angry with Mira, not for a second,” Degas said. “I thought you had gone to America to bring me back a turkey buzzard. Have you?”

I sniffled but couldn't help smiling. “Again with the turkey buzzards,” I murmured. I was wearing the same dress as when we were together in the park, that day of the almost-kiss. I wondered if Claude remembered.

“It is astonishing! You are precisely the same. Precisely!”

“Oh, these Americans,” Degas drawled. “They are a young country, you know. Babies, all of them. It is the same in Tahiti. Gauguin writes that the women there simply do not age the way our French country lasses do. As if the more primitive way they live smooths away wrinkles, vanquishes gray hair. But in any case youth is overrated. Anyone can be a genius at twenty-five. The trick is to be one at fifty.”

He was talking as if nothing had changed, as if I hadn't vanished for more than a decade and turned up out of nowhere. I wanted to throw my arms around his neck and kiss him in gratitude.

“So you forgive me?”

“There is nothing to forgive, is there, Claude?” Degas gave him one of his rare smiles.

“Of course not! We hope this time you can stay.”

“I hope so too,” I said. I really did. For a minute I forgot what time I belonged in. It was tempting to think I could stay here with Claude for good. But he was already too old for me. And I wasn't a nineteenth-century Parisian. I had to remind myself I was here for a reason. Mom was counting on me.

“You only hope? You do not know?” Claude looked anxious again.

“It's my aunt. She called me away suddenly and I had to go, and I meant to write but things got complicated, and I don't know what will happen next.” I offered the same lame excuse I'd given Mary.

“Leave her be, Claude. She is a free woman, and can come and go as she pleases.”

“Then how long are you here for?” Claude pressed.

“I don't know. I'm not sure yet. It depends.” I'd run out of explanations and desperately needed to change the subject. “Let's talk about something else, shall we? What do you think of the Dreyfus case?”

“A wretched man to betray his country like that, hardly an earthshaking story,” Degas said, not at all fazed by my question.

He tossed me a newspaper, a different one than Mary's. “You can read about the horrid man here. If you excuse me, I must wash the chalks from my hands and change into more presentable clothes.”

Now that I was alone with Claude, the room didn't seem sunny and warm, but tense and edgy. He sat in the chair next to me, arranging Degas's simple lunch while keeping his eyes glued to me as if he was afraid I'd disappear right in front of him. I scanned the newspaper with one eye while I tried to look like I was paying complete attention to him. It was a technique I'd perfected in school when a teacher was particularly boring and I didn't want her to know I was engrossed in a book on my lap instead of listening to her drone.

This article was just as ugly in how it described the evil Dreyfus, but this time the writer wrote about the coming punishment, how the traitor would be shackled to a cot in solitary confinement in a small prison built especially for him on Devil's Island, an old leper colony off the coast of South America that the French used for convicts. I couldn't imagine anything that Degas could possibly say, even if he wanted to, that would convince the public that Dreyfus was innocent. How could Mom have thought that would work? What was I really supposed to do here? How could I make people outraged at an injustice when they saw Dreyfus as the demon Jew who deserved the most severe punishment possible?

“I thought you were angry at me,” Claude interrupted my thoughts. “The way you left without a word. I thought maybe I had pushed you to show me something you did not want to reveal. So now you have forgiven me?”

“I was never angry at you!” I didn't for a minute regret letting Claude see my sketchbook. He had encouraged me, and in return, I'd hurt him. I wished I could tell him the truth. Instead I lied, as usual.

“It was my aunt, like I said.” What a lame excuse! I wouldn't blame him if he hated me.

I tried to meet Claude's eyes, to let him know how truly sorry I was, but his face was turned away, his jaw tight. There was a distance between us, not just because so many years had passed for him but because obviously I was still so young and he was a grown-up. No more chance of kisses. I wondered if we could even still be friends.

Mary invited me to join her and a group of artists at the Nouvelles Athènes, a nearby café. Degas was there, as was Claude. He nodded when he saw me, but the old warmth was gone. I'd ruined that friendship. Not that I'd meant to. Maybe if I was better at time travel, I could have done things differently.

Morton never did explain how I could control this “gift.” And Mom hadn't either. I wondered if I'd ever get it right. Was time travel like drawing, something you had to do over and over to do well? That was a scary thought! I've been drawing since I could hold a crayon, and I'm still nowhere near as good as I want to be.

Then I had an even scarier thought—maybe Mom was more experienced at time travel than I was, but she still wasn't good enough to control it either. Maybe she didn't know how to get home. Maybe we were both stuck in the past.

I tried not to think about that as Degas introduced me to a middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed moustache and beard who was dressed in white flannel with a beret perched jauntily on his head.

“Mira, this is Émile Zola.” So here was the notorious writer at last! He seemed so ordinary, except for the unusual choice in clothes (white flannel?), yet somehow he was really important to Mom. Important to both of us then. Because somehow if we did something right with him, we'd both go back home. I just had to figure out what that thing was and trust that Mom was a better time-traveler than I was an artist.

“Another American niece of yours, I presume,” Zola said in thickly accented English.

“No, no, Mira is a friend. My brother, René, the one in New Orleans, sent his daughter to stay with me for several months a couple of years ago. You can see how much she improved my English. A lovely girl! It is so important to have family, you know. I regret that I never married, but the thought of a wife criticizing my painting was more than I could bear. Remember how much Madame Manet harped on poor Manet?”

“Remember how he cut up your portrait of the two of them because you didn't do justice to her…ahem…beauty?”

“Given her actual face, I did the best I could!”

“Well, you could have had a wife like Madame Renoir, a sweet cream puff of a woman,” observed Zola.

“But I would have had to be a sweet cream puff of a man, like our friend Renoir. No, a bitter, old curmudgeon like me would have ended up with a shrill harpy. I cannot change who I am.”

“Nor would we want you to, though we all fear your sharp wit,” said a man with bright button eyes and a moustache so big it covered half his face. I wondered if he was hiding something in all that hair—a dueling scar or a massive pimple.

“I thought Oscar Wilde could be cutting. Then I met you!” he continued. The man was James Whistler, an American painter who had moved to Paris. Degas introduced me to him, praising his etchings, but to me he was the guy who painted that famous picture of his mother in a rocking chair, the one that's a recurring joke in cartoons.

“I don't know Renoir well, but he didn't strike me as such a cream puff,” I said.

“Compared to Degas he is!” Mary laughed. “Renoir knows how to relax. Degas knows only how to make art.”

“That is not true!” Degas objected. “I go to the theater, the opera, the ballet all the time. Almost every night!”

“And then you go straight home to bed,” teased Whistler. “Paris is known for its clubs and dance halls but you don't take advantage of them.”

“I leave that to Toulouse-Lautrec,” said Degas. “He can have them!”

“You admire his paintings then?” Zola asked.

“Actually, I do. His posters for the Moulin Rouge have the look of Japanese prints.”

“I agree with you, Degas.” Zola nodded. “In fact, I was thinking that he would make the perfect illustrator for a new book I'm thinking about.”

“A book?” I squeaked. Wasn't he supposed to write about Dreyfus? Wasn't that what Mom wanted? If she wanted Degas to support Dreyfus, that had to be what she wanted Zola to do.

“Monsieur Zola is a writer, not an artist,” Degas explained. “Perhaps he is not yet translated into English. Are you, Zola?”

“I should hope so!” he huffed. “How else would Whistler know my work?”

“That is why painting is superior to writing—no translation necessary,” Whistler said.

Mary was describing a literary magazine she and Degas were working on when a woman walking down the street caught my eye. Something about the way she moved was deeply familiar. As she came closer, I could make out her deep blue dress, her hat, her hair. It was Mom!

I slid down in my chair, turning so she wouldn't see me. I held my breath, waiting for her to come closer, ready to run after her if she walked by. Maybe I could at least slip her a note? I wanted desperately to hug her, to hold tight and never let her go, but all I could do was sneak glances at her.

“Émile! There you are!” she called out to Zola. Her familiar voice stabbed me. I couldn't help it. I burst into tears.

“Mira, what's wrong?” Claude took my hand. I kept my head turned away, but Mom must have heard my name. She froze where she stood, so close I could almost reach out and grab her.

“I'm so sorry, Émile! We'll talk later. We have much to discuss.” Mom's voice cracked with fear. She was terrified. Of me? I hated to think that. It had to be the stupid rule. Whatever it was, she turned and dashed away, disappearing between the ragpickers, vegetable peddlers, and washerwomen with baskets of clothes.

I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to help Mom, but I'd made things worse. I'd gotten in the way of her convincing Zola of anything, which meant now I'd have to do it instead. I had to figure out how he could support Dreyfus. What could he do that would make a difference? I tried to focus on the problem, but first I needed to calm down. I wiped away the tears and drank the water Claude offered me.

“Mira, your hands are shaking. You aren't well. Should I walk you home?”

He was so sweet to me that I wanted to lean into his chest and let him comfort me. But he couldn't really be my friend. And I had to help Mom.

“I'm fine,” I told him. “I just swallowed something wrong, got some dust in my eye.” I was the master of the lame excuse. Next I'd tell him the dog had eaten my homework.

“So strange for Serena to act that way,” Zola was saying. “She was supposed to bring me some useful information, but it's just as well. I don't want to think about writing anything for a while.”

So that's what Zola needed to do—write something about Dreyfus. Surely not a book. Those took too long to be printed to make much of a difference. Unless publishing was a lot quicker in the nineteenth century than in the twenty-first. I was trying to think of a clever way to bring up the Dreyfus case when Whistler did it for me.

“You know, the English press thinks a charge as serious as treason should be tried openly. None of this secret evidence you French are so fond of. What's fascinating to me is the way your newspapers report the whole thing, as if there's no question but the man must be guilty.”

“Because there is no doubt of it!” Degas snapped, his face suddenly rigid. He'd transformed into a cold aristocrat in a second. Maybe this was why he had a reputation as such a grump.

“There's precious little proof, seems to me,” Whistler insisted. “There's the handwriting that some experts say is Dreyfus's while others say it isn't. There's no motive, since the man had independent financial means.”

“Being Jewish with ties to Alsace-Lorraine is motive enough!”

“Then accuse all the Jews in the military!” Whistler laughed. “It's ridiculous!”

“How many Jews do you think there are in the service?” scoffed Degas. “Theirs is a vile race of cowards.”

I'd never seen this side of Degas. It was like learning that somebody you liked and admired advocated slavery or thought women shouldn't be allowed to vote. Could I like someone who said such hateful things? I looked at Claude, wondering if he felt the same way. His jaw was tense, his eyes angry, his hands tight fists. I couldn't help myself. I leaned forward and whispered in his ear.

“We don't have to listen to this. We can go.”

He pulled away. He wasn't going to leave, and I was proud of him for that. “Dreyfus,” he declared, “is a scapegoat.” Everyone was staring at Claude now. Degas looked furious. But Claude didn't back down. “And when the real traitor is found, he will be vindicated. It is only a matter of time.” His voice was strong and firm. And just being next to him, I felt filled with a new sense of purpose. Mom was right—we had to help Dreyfus.

Degas could forgive my sudden departure, my return out of nowhere, but I wasn't sure he'd forgive Claude this. Had he just lost his place in the artist's household? I was worried for him. But if he was willing to talk, so was I.

“Monsieur Whistler,” I said, “you've clearly read a lot about this case, and I'm curious if you can explain it better to me. I really don't know what it's about.”

“The worst is the secret file, the evidence that Dreyfus wasn't allowed to refute because he was not allowed to see it. You as an American can appreciate the basic tenet of law that an accused has the right to answer his accuser and examine the evidence used to convict him. Some sources even say that the file is completely invented, not a word of truth in it, just suppositions and circumstantial evidence of the thinnest kind.”

“If he's not allowed to see it, that makes it even easier to invent, doesn't it?” I asked.

“The military does not make up evidence!” Degas snapped. “The very idea is ridiculous!”

“But if it was invented?” I pressed.

“It was not!” Degas looked furious now. I was afraid to say anything else, but Whistler wasn't.

“I think it's precisely the kind of thing the military would do. Without clear evidence, they would feel compelled to create some. They wanted an open-and-shut case, so they made one.”

“Who could have written such a file? Who was in charge?” I turned toward Whistler, my back to Degas.