The Swan Thieves Part 12

picture inspires little jealousy in her. Instead it gives her a sense of relief, as if she is sharing a burden. She knows that the genteel alternatives to these extremes are restaurants where men--mainly men--eat their midday dinner, or even their evening meal, and talk together. Occasionally he comes home needing no supper and reports pleasantly that he's had an excellent poulet roti or canard a l'orange. There are also cafes chantants where both men and women can sit with propriety, and other cafes where he can sit alone with Le Figaro and a late-evening cup of coffee. Or perhaps he simply does work late.

At home he is attentive: he bathes and dresses for their evening meal if they dine together; he puts on his dressing gown and smokes by the fire if she's already eaten and he has dined out, or he reads aloud to her from the newspaper; sometimes he kisses her on the back of the neck with exquisite tenderness when she sits bent over her work, crocheting lace or embroidering dresses for her sister's new baby. He takes her to the opera in the glittering new Palais Gamier and occasionally to the nicer places to hear an orchestra or drink champagne, or to a ball in the heart of the city, for which she dons a new dress in turquoise silk or rose-colored satin. He makes it clear that he is proud to have her on his arm.

Above all, he encourages her to paint, nodding with approval at even her most unusual experiments with color, light, rough brushwork in the style she has seen with him at the more radical new exhibitions. He would never call her a radical, of course; he has always told her she is simply a painter and must do as she sees fit. She explains to him that she believes painting should reflect nature and life, that the light-filled new landscapes move her. He nods, although he adds cautiously that he wouldn't want her to know too much about life--nature is a fine subject, but life is grimmer than she can understand. He thinks it good for her to have something satisfying to do at home; he loves art himself; he sees her gift and wants her to be happy. He knows the charming Morisots. He has met the Manets, and always remarks that they 170.

are a good family, despite edouard's reputation and his immoral experiments (he paints loose women), which make him perhaps too modern--a shame, given his obvious talent.

In fact, Yves takes her to many galleries. They attend the Salon every year, with nearly a million other people, and listen to the gossip about favorite canvases and those the critics disdain. Occasionally they stroll in the museums in the Louvre, where she sees art students copying paintings and sculpture, even an unchaperoned woman here and there (surely Americans). She can't quite bring herself to admire nudes in his presence, certainly not the heroic males; she knows she will never paint from a nude model herself. Her own formal training was in the private studios of an academician, copying from plaster casts with her mother present, before she married. At least she has worked hard.

She wonders sometimes if Yves would understand if she elected to submit a painting to the Salon. He has never said anything slighting about those few paintings at the Salon that are by women, and he applauds whatever she herself puts on canvas. In like fas.h.i.+on, he never complains about the household, which she runs so well, except to say politely once a year that he would like something cooked a little rarer or that he wishes she would put another arrangement on the table in the hall. In the dark now and then, they know each other in a completely different way, with a warmth, even a fierceness, that she cherishes but doesn't dare think about during the day, except to hope that one morning she will wake up realizing she hasn't recently needed to get out those neatly folded clean napkins for her underclothing, the hot-water bottles, the gla.s.s of sherry that takes the edge off her monthly cramps.

But it has not yet happened. Perhaps she thinks about it too often, or too seldom, or in the wrong way--she tries to stop thinking about it at all. She will wait instead for a letter, and that letter will be her main diversion for the morning. The post comes twice daily; it is delivered by a young man in a short blue coat. She can hear his ring through the rain, and Esme answering the 171.

door. She will not seem eager; she is not, in fact, eager. The letter will appear on a silver tray in her boudoir while she is dressing for her afternoon calls. She will open it before Esme goes out and then tuck it into her desk, to reread later. She hasn't yet taken to putting the letters inside the bodice of her dress, carrying them on her person.

In the meantime, there are other letters to write and to answer, meals to order, the dressmaker to see, the warm coverlet to finish for her father-in-law's Christmas present. And there is her father-in-law himself, the patient old man: he likes to have his drinks and books brought by her in person after he naps, and she actually looks forward to the moment when he strokes her hand with his transparently veined one and gazes at her with almost empty eyes, thanking her for her care. There are the flowering plants she waters herself instead of leaving them to the servants! and most important of all there is the room next to hers, originally a sun-porch, that contains her easel and paints.

The maid sitting for her these days--not Esme but the younger Marguerite, whose gentle face and yellow hair she likes--is hardly more than a girl. Beatrice has begun a painting of her sitting by the window with a pile of sewing; since the maid likes to busy her hands while she poses, Beatrice is happy to let her mend collars and petticoats, as long as the girl keeps her drooping golden head sufficiently still.

It is very light in there; even when rain streams down the many panes, they can get a little work done together, Marguerite's hands moving on the delicate white goods, the cotton and lace, and Beatrice's measuring shape or color, reproducing the roundness of the young shoulders bent over the needle, the folds of dress and ap.r.o.n. Neither speaks, but they are united by the peace of women at their tasks. In those moments, Beatrice feels that her work is a part of the household, an extension of the lunch simmering in the kitchen and the flowers she arranges for the dining table. She daydreams about painting the daughter she does not have, instead 172.

of this silent girl she likes but hardly knows; she imagines that her daughter reads poetry aloud to her as she paints, or chatters about her friends.

In fact, when Beatrice is actually working, she ceases to worry about the significance of her paintings, whether they are good, whether she could ever raise with Yves the notion of submitting one to the Salon--they are not good enough yet for that anyway, and probably never will be. Nor does she worry about whether her life has a wider meaning. She finds it enough for now to contemplate the blue of the girl's dress, perfectly matched at last by a smear on the palette, the curling stroke that gives color to the young cheek, the white that she will add the next morning (it needs more white, and a little gray, to convey that rainy autumn light, but she has run out of time before lunch).

If painting fills her mornings, then the afternoons when she does not feel like painting more, and doesn't make calls or receive them, can be a little empty. The characters in the novel she is reading seem with a certainty dead, so she writes instead a letter she's been gathering in her mind, an answer to the one now sitting in a pigeonhole of her painted desk. She crosses her feet at the ankles and tucks them under her chair. Yes, her desk sits in the window; she moved it there last spring, to take advantage of the view of the garden.

As she writes, she sees that this is one of those strange days that sometimes come to Paris in autumn, the driving rain turning to sleet, then snow. Effet de neige, effet d'hiver --she saw that phrase at an exhibition last year, where some of the new painters were showing not only sunlight and green fields but snow as well, accomplis.h.i.+ng revolutionary things out in the cold. She stood, humbled, in front of those canvases the newspapers reviled. Snow, when it sits on the ground, contains flecks of gray. It contains blue, depending on the light, the time of day, the sky; it contains ocher and even brown or lavender. She has already stopped seeing snow 173.

as white herself a year ago; she almost remembers the moment when she recognized that, examining her garden.

Now, the first snow of a new winter materializes in an instant before her eyes; the rain has transformed itself without warning. She stops writing and cleans her pen on the flannel pen-wipe at her elbow, keeping the ink away from her sleeve. The wilted garden is already covered with subtle color--indeed, it isn't white. Beige, today? Silver? Colorless, if there is such a thing? She adjusts her paper, dips her pen, and begins to write again. She tells her correspondent about the way the new snow settles on each branch, the way the bushes, some of them green all year, huddle together under their weightless veil of nonwhite, about the bench, bare in the rain one moment and collecting a fine soft cus.h.i.+on the next. She feels him listening, unfolding the letter in his graceful, aging hands. She sees his eyes, with their restrained warmth, absorbing her words.

When the post comes later, there is another letter from him, one that is lost to posterity but that tells her something of himself, or of his own garden not yet covered by snow--he would have written it earlier in the day or the evening before; he lives in the heart of the city. Perhaps he deplores--with humorous charm--the emptiness of his own life: he has been a widower for years, and he is childless. Childless, she remembers sometimes, like her. She herself is young enough to be his daughter, even his granddaughter. She refolds his note with a smile, then unfolds it and reads it again.

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CHAPTER 28 Kate.

Robert consented, stonily, to see the campus doctor, but he would not let me go with him. The health center was in walking distance of our house, like everything else, and in spite of myself I stood on the porch, watching him go. He walked with his shoulders bowed, putting one foot in front of the other as if every movement pained him. I prayed to whatever I could think of that he would be communicative enough or desperate enough to tell the doctor all his symptoms. They might have to do tests. He might be exhausted from some blood disease: mononucleosis or--G.o.d forbid--leukemia. But that wouldn't explain the dark woman. If Robert didn't report much from this visit, I would have to meet with the doctor myself and explain things, and I might have to do it in secret, so as not to anger Robert.

He had apparently gone on to his cla.s.ses after the appointment, or to paint at the campus studio, because I didn't see him until dinnertime. He didn't tell me anything until after I'd put Ingrid down to sleep, and even then I had to ask him what the doctor had said. He was sitting in the living room--not sitting, actually, but sprawled on the sofa with an unopened book. He raised his head when I spoke to him. "What?" He seemed to be looking at me across a great distance, and one side of his face drooped a little, as I'd noticed before. "Oh. I didn't go."

Rage and grief rose in me, but I took a deep breath. "Why not?"

"Lay off me, will you?" he said in a thin voice. "I didn't feel like it. I had work to do, and I haven't had time to paint in three days."

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"Did you go paint instead?" That, at least, would be a sign of life.

"Are you checking up on me?" His eyes narrowed. He put the book in front of him like a breastplate. I wondered if he might even decide to throw it at me. It was a photographic essay on wolves he'd bought on impulse earlier in the year. That was a change, too, his frequently buying new books he later didn't read. He'd always been too thrifty to buy anything that wasn't secondhand, or much of anything at all, apart from the big well-made shoes he loved.

"I'm not checking up on you," I said carefully. "I'm just concerned about your health, and I'd like you to go to the doctor and look into it. I think just doing that will help you feel better."

"Do you?" he said almost nastily. "You think it will help me feel better. Do you have any idea how I feel? Do you know what it's like not to be able to paint, for example?"

"Certainly," I said, trying not to fire up. "There are very few days when I get to do that myself. Almost none, in fact. I know that feeling."

"And do you know what it's like to think about something over and over until you wonder... never mind," he finished.

"Until you wonder what?" I tried to speak very calmly, to show only that I was a good listener.

"Until you can't think about or see anything else?" His voice was low and his eyes flickered to the doorway. "So many terrible things have happened in history, including to artists, even artists like me, who tried to have normal lives. Can you imagine what it would be like to think about that all the time?"

"I think about terrible things sometimes, too," I said staunchly, although this sounded to me like a rather strange digression. "We all have those thoughts. History is full of awful things. People's lives are full of awful things. Every thinking person reflects on them--especially when you have children. But that doesn't mean you have to make yourself ill over them."

"Or what if you started thinking about one person? All the time?"

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My skin began to crawl, whether from fear or from antic.i.p.ated jealousy or both, I couldn't have said. Here was the moment when he would wreck our lives. "What do you mean?" I got the words out with some difficulty.

"Someone you could have cared about," he said, and his eyes traveled the room again. "But she didn't exist."

"What?" I felt a long blankness in my own mind--I couldn't find the end of it.

"I'll go to the doctor tomorrow," he said angrily, like a little boy resigned to punishment. I knew he'd agreed so that I wouldn't ask him anything more.

The next day he went out and came back, slept, and then got up to eat some lunch. I stood silently beside the table. I didn't have to ask. "He can't find anything wrong physically--well, he took a blood test for anemia and some other things, but he wants me to get a psychiatric evaluation." He put the words deliberately out into the room, so that something in them rang just short of contempt, but I knew that his telling me at all meant he was afraid, and willing to go. I went to him and put my arms around him and caressed his head, the heavy curls, the ma.s.sive forehead, feeling that surprising mind inside, the vast gifts I had always admired and wondered about. I touched his face. I loved that head, his crisp uncontrollable hair.

"I'm sure everything will be all right," I said.

"I'll go for you." His voice was so quiet I could hardly hear it, and then he put his arms tightly around my waist and leaned over to bury his face against me.

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CHAPTER 29 1878.

The snow has deepened overnight. In the morning she gives orders for dinner, sends a note to her dressmaker, and leaves the house for the garden. She would like to know how the hedge looks, the bench. When she shuts the back door of the house behind her and steps into the first drift, she forgets everything else, even the letter tucked inside her dress. The tree planted ten years ago by the house's original occupants is festooned with snow; a tiny bird sits on a wall, ruffled up to twice its size. Her laced boots let in a rim of snow at the tops as she makes her way among the dormant flower beds, the shriveled arbor. Everything is transformed. She remembers her brothers as children, lying in the drifts while she watched from an upstairs window, waving their arms, flailing their legs, pummeling one another, floundering, their woolen coats and long knitted stockings engulfed in white. Or was it white?

She scoops a generous helping--a dessert, Mont Blanc --with her gloved hand and puts it into her mouth, swallows a little of the tasteless cold. The flower beds will be yellow in the spring, this one pink and cream, and under the tree will bloom the small blue flowers she has loved all her life, brought here most recently from her mother's grave. If she had a daughter, she would take her out in the garden on the day they bloomed and tell her where they came from. No--she would take her daughter out every single day, twice a day, into the suns.h.i.+ne and the bower, or the snow, sit with her on the bench, have a swing built for her. Or for him, her little son. She holds back the sting of tears and turns angrily to the sweep of snow along the back wall, tracing a long shape in it with 178.

her hand. Beyond the wall are trees, then the brownish haze of the Bois de Boulogne. If she finishes the maid's dress in her painting with more white, in the quick flecking she favors these days, it will lighten the whole picture.

The letter inside her clothes touches her, a sharply folded edge. She brushes the snow off her gloves and opens her cloak, her collar, draws it out, conscious of the back of the house behind her, the eyes of the servants. But they will be especially busy at this hour, in the kitchen or airing her father-in-law's parlor and bedroom while he sits at his dressing-room window, too blind to see even her dark figure in the white garden.

The letter does not use her name but an endearment. The writer tells her about his day, his new painting, the books by his fireplace, but beneath these lines she hears him saying something quite different. She keeps her wet, gloved fingers away from the ink. She has memorized every word of it already, but she wants to see the curving black proof again, his handwriting with its consistent carelessness, his economy of line. It is the same casual directness she has seen in his sketches, a confidence different from her own intensity--riveting, even puzzling. His words are also confident, except that their meaning is more than it seems to be. The accent aigu, a mere brush with the pen's tip, a caress, the accent grave strong, leaning away, a warning. He writes of himself, a.s.sured yet apologetic: Je, the "j" in capital form at the beginning of his precious sentences a muscular deep breath, the "e" quick and restrained. He writes of her and the renewal of life she has given to him--accidentally? he asks--and as in his last few letters, with her permission, he calls her tu, the "t" respectful at the beginnings of sentences, the "u" tender, a hand cupped around a tiny flame.

Holding the edges of the page, she ignores the sound of each line for a moment, for the pleasure of understanding it afresh a moment later. He intends no disruption of her life; he knows that at his age he can offer her few attractions; he wants only to be allowed to breathe in her presence and encourage her n.o.blest 179.

thoughts. He dares to hope that, although they may never even speak of it, she sees him at the very least as her devoted friend. He apologizes for disturbing her with unworthy feelings. It frightens her that underneath the long flourish of his pardonne-moi and its delicate hyphen, he guesses that she is already his.

Her feet grow cold; the snow is beginning to soak through her boots. She folds the letter, tucks it away in a secret place, and puts her face against the bark of the tree. She can't afford to stand there long, in case anyone with sufficient sight should come to the windows behind her, but she needs a sustaining pause. The trembling at her core comes not from his words, with their graceful half retreat, but from his certainty. She has decided already not to reply to this one. But she has not decided never to reread it.

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CHAPTER 30 Kate.

Robert insisted on visiting the psychiatrist alone, and when he returned he told me matter-of-factly that he had some medication to try and the name and number of a therapist. He didn't say whether or not he would call the therapist, or whether he would take the medication. I couldn't figure out where he'd even put it, and I decided not to pry for a week or two. I would just wait to see what he did and encourage him in any way I could. Eventually, the bottle appeared in our medicine cabinet in the bathroom-- lithium. I heard it rattle morning and night when he took a dose.

Within a week, Robert seemed calmer and began to paint again, although he slept at least twelve hours out of every twenty-four and ate in a daze. I was thankful that he was holding his studio cla.s.ses without further interruptions and that I hadn't perceived any unease on the part of the college, although how such unease would have reached me I wasn't sure. One day Robert told me that the psychiatrist wanted to see me and that he, Robert, thought it was a good idea. He had an appointment that afternoon--I wondered why he hadn't mentioned it sooner--and when the time came, I packed Ingrid into her car seat because it was short notice to find a babysitter. The mountains flowed by, and I realized as I watched them pa.s.s that I hadn't even been to town in a while. My life revolved around the house, the sandbox and swings when it was warm enough outside, the supermarket up the road. I watched Robert's grave profile as he drove and finally asked him why he thought the psychiatrist wanted to see me. "He likes to get a family member's perspective," he said, and added, 181.

"He thinks I'm doing well so far. On lithium." It was the first time he'd mentioned the drug by name.

"Do you think so, too?" I put my hand on his thigh, feeling the muscles s.h.i.+ft when he braked.

"I feel pretty good," he said. "I doubt I'll need it for long. I wish I weren't so tired, though--I need the energy to paint."

To paint, I thought, hut to be with us, too? He fell asleep after dinner without playing with Ingrid, and was often still asleep when I left on my walks with her in the morning. I said nothing more.

The clinic was a long, low building made of expensive-looking wood and planted around with raw little trees in paper tubes. Robert went in matter-of-factly, holding the door for me as I pa.s.sed through with Ingrid in my arms. The waiting room inside, which seemed to serve a number of doctors, was s.p.a.cious, with a large patch of sunlight at one end. Eventually a man came out, smiled and nodded at Robert, and called me by name. He didn't wear a white coat or carry a chart--he was dressed in a jacket and tie, ironed khaki trousers.

I glanced at Robert, who shook his head. "This is for you," he said. "He wants to talk with you. He'll call me in, too, if he needs me."

So I left Ingrid with Robert and followed Dr. --well, what does his name matter? He was kind and middle-aged and doing his job. His office was lined with framed diplomas and certificates, his desk very neat, a large bronze paperweight sitting on the only loose piece of paper. I sat down facing the desk, my arms empty without Ingrid. I wished now I'd brought her in, and it worried me that Robert might put his face back in his hands instead of watching her cruise past electrical outlets and floral arrangements. But when I studied Dr. Q a little, I found I liked him. His face was gentle and reminded me of my Michigan grandfather's. When he spoke, his voice was deep, a little guttural, as if he had come from somewhere else as a teenager and whatever his accent was had become untraceable, just a slight rasping on the consonants.

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"Thank you for coming to see me today, Mrs. Oliver," he said. "It's helpful to me to talk with a close family member, especially with any new patient."

"I'm glad to," I answered honestly. "I've been really worried about Robert."

"Of course you have." He rearranged the paperweight, leaned back in his seat, looked at me. "I know this must have been hard for you. Please be sure that I am paying very close attention to Robert and I'm satisfied that our first trial of medication is having a good effect."

"He certainly seems calmer," I admitted.

"Can you tell me a little about what you first noticed in his behavior that seemed different or that concerned you? Robert has told me that you were the one who got him to see a doctor originally."

I folded my hands and recited our problems, Robert's problems, the dizzying ups and downs of the last year.

Dr. Q listened silently, without changing expression, and his expression was kind. "And he seems to you more stable on the lithium?"

"Yes," I said. "He sleeps a lot still, and he complains about that, but he does seem able to get up and go to teach almost all the time. He complains about not being able to paint."

"It takes time to adjust to new medication, and it takes time to find out what medication works and what dosage works." Dr. Q arranged the paperweight thoughtfully again, this time in the top left corner of the one paper. "I do think in your husband's case it's important for him to take lithium for a while, and he will probably need it permanently, or some other medication if this one doesn't turn out to be just what we want. The process will require quite a bit of patience on his part--and on yours."

I began to feel new alarm. "Do you mean you think he will always have these problems? Won't he be able to stop the medicine when he's better?"

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The doctor recentered the bronze lump on the doc.u.ment. It reminded me suddenly of that childhood game--rock, paper, scissors--where one element could win out over the other, but something else could always win out over the winner, a fascinating cycle. "It takes some time to develop any accurate diagnosis. But I believe Robert is probably experiencing--"

And then he told me the name of an illness, one I knew only vaguely and a.s.sociated with nameless things, things that had nothing to do with me, things that people were given electric shock therapy for, or that caused them to kill themselves. I sat there for a few seconds, trying to fit these words to Robert, my husband. My whole body was bathed in cold. "Are you telling me that my husband is mentally ill?"

"We don't really know what part of any condition is mental illness and what is environmental or a function of personality," Dr. Q demurred, and I hated him for the first time--he was hedging. "Robert may stabilize on this medication, or we may have to try some other things. I think given his intelligence and his dedication to his art and his family, you can be hopeful that he'll achieve quite a bit."

But it was too late. Robert was no longer only Robert for me. He was someone with a diagnosis. I knew already that nothing would be the same, ever, no matter how much I tried to feel about Robert as I had before. My heart ached for him, but it ached even more for myself. Dr. Q had taken away the dearest thing I had, and he clearly didn't know what that felt like. He had nothing to give me in return, just the view of his hand arranging his empty desk. I wished he'd had the grace to apologize.

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CHAPTER 31 Kate.

Robert was sleepy on lithium. One day he ran into another car on his way to the museum in town--at low speed, fortunately. After that, Dr. Q put him on a different drug, combining it with something for anxiety. Robert explained these things to me when I asked for details, which I did as often as I could without irritating him.

By mid-December the new drug seemed to work well enough to allow him to paint and to get to his cla.s.ses on time, and he seemed more like the old energetic Robert. He worked in the campus studio during that period, staying there late at night several times a week. When I visited once with Ingrid, I found him deep in a portrait--the lady of my nightmares. She sat in an armchair, her hands crossed in her lap. It was one of the brilliant paintings that later got him his big show in Chicago -- a reasonably cheerful image this time--she was dressed in yellow, smiling as if to herself, as if remembering something pleasant and private, her eyes soft, a spray of flowers on the table beside her. I was so relieved to see him working, and in happy colors, that I almost stopped wondering who she was.

That made the shock greater when I went by a couple of days later to bring Robert some cookies that Ingrid and I had managed to make together, and found him working on the same picture but from a live model. She looked like a student, and she sat in a folding chair, not in the midst of overstuffed damask. For a moment my heart froze. She was young and pretty, and Robert was chatting with her, as if to keep her still while he repainted the angle 185.

of the head and shoulder. But she was nothing like the lady of his attic. She had short blond hair and light eyes and wore a college soccer jersey. Only her beautiful body and the square cut of her jaw provided her any sisterhood with the curly-headed woman I'd first seen in a sketch from his pocket. Furthermore, Robert seemed unabashed by my appearance, greeting Ingrid and me with kisses and introducing the girl as one of the regular studio models, a student job. The girl herself seemed a good deal more entranced with Ingrid and the fact that exams were almost over than with Robert. He was clearly just using her for the pose, and I knew as little as before.

I remember only a couple of moments from Robert's departure for New York State in early January. He held Ingrid for a long time, and I realized that she was so tall now that she could wrap her legs partway around his waist--the child with Robert's own long body, his crisp dark hair. The other moment I remember is going back in the house after his car disappeared down the drive into the woods--it must have been after, unless I refused to stand on the porch in the cold air for even a second longer to watch him go. I remember going inside to finish cleaning up our breakfast and asking myself in crisp, clear words, although silently, Is this a separation? But there was no answer in my own head or in the warm kitchen, with its smells of applesauce and toast. Everything seemed normal, if bleak. There was even a breath of relief in the house. I had managed before, and I would keep managing.

Robert's notes were usually scrawled on a postcard and addressed to Ingrid as much as to me, and his phone calls, too, came in an uneven rhythm, although frequently enough. The winter in upstate New York was fierce, but the snow was wonderful, Impressionist. He painted outside once and almost got frostbite. The college president had welcomed him. His room was in faculty guest quarters and had a good view of woods and the quad.