Pictures at an Exhibition (29 page)

When later in Ann Arbor, despite myself, I asked a man who had been deported on Convoy 62 in November of 1943 if he knew Bertrand Reinach, this was correctly deemed unprofessional and may have precipitated the illness for which I was hospitalized on the day prior to the election that won President Truman his second term in office.

When the crisis abated three months later, I was advised not to return to my interview work with Senek. Before my release from the hospital, I spoke often with one of my doctors about my own haphazard medical training in France. As unorthodox as it strikes me now, he suggested I sit for some exams in Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Michigan Medical School as part of my cure. I passed these, then several more, then began attending lectures regularly. Seamlessly, or so it appeared, I made the transition from patient to student to doctor.

For some time, I possessed an aversion to the idea of visiting New York City and a fear that I would encounter someone from the old world there. Most of the art dealers who had left Paris had taken refuge in Manhattan; a few were in London, a few in Los Angeles. At the height of the McCarthy era, Father reported that two or three had returned to France. This aversion remained until one day, a glimpse at a Sotheby's catalog revealed one of my father's Toulouse-Lautrecs—
La Goulue with Her Partner
, the dwarf painter's muse with the man who was called the Boneless One for his flexibility. I rushed to New York to claim it. Yet the seller disappeared and the auction house remained mute and uncooperative. Rather than return home, as I had no real belongings or friends in Michigan—and my kindly landlady agreed to ship to me what few things remained—I saved the money of the return ticket and stayed on in Manhattan.

I first caught sight of my future wife during the month of October, in my first year as a resident at New York Hospital. The young Ellie Berger remembered all the patients’ names but forgot the doctors’ (including mine). She was unshaken when the survivors of a school bus accident were brought to our emergency ward. I overheard her tell another nurse that her fiancé had died over the Pacific. When I introduced myself a second time and asked where she had been raised, she said, recognizing my accent, “Nouvelle Rochelle,” waited for me to smile, and then explained the joke. Through the glass of the nurses’ station, I watched her complete crossword puzzles with terrifying speed. We were married in four months’ time.

Now I understand that more complex forces drew us together. Ellie's own father (a Berliner by birth) hanged himself following the crash of the American markets on Black Tuesday of 1929. Her mother took in boarders and put her daughter to work. My family's life must have seemed a miracle of ease to her.

Our older daughter Sophie is to be married to a lawyer of Irish extraction in the winter. I cut the engagement announcement from
The New York Times
and sent it to my parents, who have it framed in their kitchen in Le Puy. The younger, Michelle, I am told is almost identical to me as a child. She is long and loose-limbed, with unruly brown hair and a dreamy look and disposition; perhaps it is true. I am a fortunate father, for they are doting daughters. During their childhood, I took them often to the Museum of Natural History and the New York Public Library, but never the Metropolitan or the new Modern art building on Fifty-third Street. I supposed they were both ignorant of art, though at Sophie's graduation from Barnard she received a prize for an essay on Ruskin. We may have something to discuss in our later years, after all.

Chaim remained in France two years after I did, still searching for word of his wife and son. When at last he learned of their murders, he followed me here. He seemed to bury his grief in his work, opening a store that sold winter coats to the women of Milwaukee. Chaim chose Wisconsin, which he refers to as
Veesconseen
, because he was told that its climate would remind him of Poland. He remarried, to another survivor, though they have no children. He spoils mine instead, and Michelle is his favorite.

In January of 1965 he went back to Auschwitz for the twentieth anniversary of its liberation. “I was freezing the entire trip, Max,” Chaim wrote, in a handwriting I now know only we Europeans use. “I thought only, ‘I could not survive this now. Surely I would have died.’ I could not believe I survived it then.”

Chaim, perhaps unexpectedly, took up fishing, and I followed suit. We visit him and his wife each summer. I did not tell Chaim of my stay in the sanatorium in Michigan; hence, he thinks I am a man apt to disappear for long stretches of time, as I did when we lived together on rue de Sévigné.

ON THE OCCASION OF MY TWENTY-FIFTH WEDDING anniversary, i arranged for three weeks’ leave from the hospital and had the travel agency on our street corner book passage for two to Paris. Neither of our children would come. Sophie was at a piano workshop in Aspen and Michelle was meditating at Esalen. Ellie and I reserved rooms at the Hôtel Rousselet in the Seventh. My parents had a neighbor care for their dogs and took the train from Le Puy. My mother's seventy-fifth birthday was a few weeks hence. It was to be a celebratory visit.

Despite myself, I thought of Rose. I could find her in a crowd of a thousand, by the Greek vases with their scenes of love in the longest gallery in the Louvre. I had thoughts like this many times. And though their frequency did not lessen with the years, their yearning quality did.

During our second night in Paris, from the depths of a deep sleep, I heard my mother shouting my name. I rushed into my parents’ room. With deliberate, untrembling hands, I administered chest compressions and breathed my breath into my father. This prolonged his life by several days. The chest compressions, as sometimes happens in older men of a delicate constitution, shattered his eardrum. He was half deaf for the final days of his life. We all had to shout our love at him, which, it occurred to me, I had been trying to do my whole life.

On the morning he would die, Ellie said, “Max, you're always on the other end of the camera. Take a picture with your parents.” Her motive seemed so transparent, as if to ask, how much time do you three have together? I protested, but my father beckoned me. He pulled me to him and kissed my forehead, holding his lips there during the long time that Ellie fumbled with the F-stop and the focus and the flashbulb. The click came too soon. My father had never embraced me for so long.

When I learned that my father had died in the night, I ran to a camera shop, as if the photographer's strong-smelling solvents might bring him back to life. I ran past the post office on rue de Sèvres and wove madly through a bakery line. I crossed the avenue while the traffic was still moving and heard it screech in my wake.

The camera shop owner must have recognized my distressed state. Although he still wore his street coat, he complied with my request to develop the roll of film with my father's last photograph. I lifted the heavy camera from my neck—I had not trusted my shaking hands not to expose the film or drop it in a gutter. He took the

Nikon into his darkroom and returned a moment later. “I'm terribly sorry,” he said, his mustache working up and down above his lips. “There is no film in this camera. Perhaps you took it out already?” And so my father's picture joined the other images in the lost museum in my mind.

WE BURIED FATHER IN OUR FAMILY'S PLOT IN MONT-parnasse, beside my sister. Micheline's grave was gray, and time had darkened the letters of her name. She lay next to Abraham Berenzon, whose tombstone looked as if it had been burned. A tower of five or six stones rested atop each, laid by an unknown hand. While the rabbi conducted the service, a jet plane flew overhead and drowned out the sound of his singing. The jet's trail evaporated in the sky, though we could hear its roar after it had disappeared above the clouds.

“Please join me in Kaddish,” the rabbi said. In a voice husky with tears, my mother chanted with him, loudly, as if hoping Father would hear her from the beyond. As a child, when I first heard these words, I thought they were Polish.

Our feet sank into the cemetery's damp grass. The ground trembled when a train passed deep beneath us, steaming out from the massive station. The graveyard's whitewashed walls, with their scatterings of red moss, could not block the sight of the sleek office tower that had been erected in 1972. I thought it a black shard of glass piercing the earth.

ELLIE DIRECTED THE SHIVA RITES, COVERING UP THE mirrors in our hotel suites and somehow procuring black ribbons with a single tear, which we affixed to our clothes, a symbol as if we had rent them in mourning. On the seventh day, Mother said, “Now he's gotten out of going to the memorial service.”

“Who?” I asked. “What memorial service?”

“Your father. The anniversary of the roundups. Because of the Camondos.” She still referred to Bertrand's family by his mother's maiden name. “Every year, a battle with your father. He never liked to go. I've never missed one.”

She wiped her beautiful, fluttering hands on her apron, cupped my cheek with her damp palm, and said she was going to lie down.

“Please, Mother, don't smoke in bed,” I asked. She had singed a hole in the hotel blanket the night before, and I had woken to the smell of burning wool.

She shushed me. “It is one of life's great pleasures.”

Ellie went out and returned with one of my mother's early recordings, and the concierge brought up a gramophone. We listened to Brahms all afternoon. My wife and I bid each other a happy anniversary at midnight.

BECAUSE THE SEVENTH DAY OF SHIVA HAD PASSED, I proposed to Ellie that we attend an auction. It was time to get out of the hotel. I kissed her and thought how we were both growing old. I would turn fifty-five the next month, as would she.

Father was on my mind in the taxicab, as we crossed the Seine. I told Ellie how men at Drouot's elbowed one another when he appeared at the back of the auction hall, framed by the double doors, the pomade in his hair shiny, everyone and everything seeming instantly to dull by comparison. The taxi passed through the courtyard of the Louvre and its long queue of tourists with visor hats and sensible shoes. I thought of Rose then, for the second or hundredth time that day: in her red coat with her cheeks flushed in the cold at 5 a.m., Bertrand beside me, his cap at an angle as we watched
Winged Victory
roll from her pedestal in a wooden crate. The phalanx of white trucks, the exhaust from their running engines brown in the wintry air.

That morning, at the reading of my father's will, Rose was bestowed a not insignificant sum, as a “pension for a former employee.” I felt my mother's eyes on me but did not meet them. There was no need to upset Ellie. The will told me that Rose was most likely in Paris, and I felt a vague unpleasant anger toward the dead. How often had my father been in contact with her during my decades of faithful silence? With what knowledge had he died?

We sped under an archway and swerved to miss a dog. The Comédie Française passed in a blur of columns. I had proposed the auction visit on a whim or, rather, out of an old familiar feeling that I desired to shake off and that I could not resist. It was 2 p.m., and that seemed a reasonable time for an auction. I paid the taxi driver and, forgetting that I was in France, gave him a tip. I grabbed Ellie's hand and pulled her out of the cab. “Come on, old girl,” I said.
“Vite, vite.”

“Vite, vite
, yourself, old man,” she said, as we hurried across the marble entryway I sensed that the few people milling about were listening to our English. “There's no rush. You haven't been here for thirty years. And you can't buy anything anyway. You have two daughters to marry off.”

THE ROUNDED WINDOWS OF THE CASHIER'S BOX caught my eye. CAISSE, the tarnished brass letters read. Inside, hunched over the cash register, raising with each keystroke a torrent of ringing mechanical bells, was the gnome from my youth, from the day I purchased Manet's
Ham.
He raised his head and I looked quickly away.

“All the big auctions happen upstairs,” I said, tugging Ellie by the strap of her handbag.

“No bidding,” she said, and slapped my hand.

“Ça va,”
I said.

Room Six was choked full of bodies in suits. Even in the hallway, we could feel the heat from inside.

“Good God,” Ellie said. “We can't go in there.”

“Come on,” I said. “It's always like this.” She made a face and disappeared between the broad shoulders of two men. Her hand reappeared and grabbed my sleeve.

“Mon mari,”
she said, in her broad American accent, and smiled at the unhappy men, who parted to let me through. Ellie looked around the room, searching for a seat. “Everyone has a catalog,” she said. “Why didn't you get one?”

“If I'm not allowed to buy, what's the use?” I whispered.

“I wish I had a catalog. Or at least a seat.” She smiled, announced,
“Je vais défaillir,”
and accepted a young man's chair, surrendered with a sigh. Now nearly everyone seated was female. We were separated by sex, as if Drouot's were an old-world synagogue.

The men stood pressed against each other, arms bent close and awkward, pale auction paddles flattened to their lapels. The heat settled around me like a bath. A Vlaminck sketch sold for 100,000 francs. Then an ugly Picasso vase went for half a million.

To the gentleman on my right, I said,
“‘Très bon marché”
—the prices were startlingly reasonable, even cheap. He smiled and touched his brow.