by John Jakes
ii
In the little hotel off Oakley Street, they made love twice that night. It was done a bit clumsily because of her size, and with extreme care. Yet it was concluded more tenderly, more satisfyingly, than he could ever remember. When he awoke in the morning, he discovered the note.
My dearest Matt:
You will know where to find me for a little while in Liverpool. But please don’t because that would merely cause problems with my family. My sister Peg had written to ask whether I would be in her wedding, and now I shall have to tell her I’ll be gone. I don’t suppose she would want me anyway—by then I shall be swelling like a melon!
I don’t care about any of that now. There is great happiness in the midst of the sadness I feel over losing you. But then, as I tried to tell you yesterday, I shan’t be losing you, really. A part of you will remain with me always. I shall try to make you proud of your son. Please make him proud of you through your work.
You have always had the ability to be a fine artist. Now you have the opportunity. To that you must bring the will.
Try not to be too disappointed when you experience failures, as you surely will. You have chosen to live with a demanding and capricious and even cruel mistress. But I know that in the end, she will reward you far more than I ever could. God keep you, my dearest.
Yours always—
Dolly
Chapter XIV
Dolly’s Gift
i
HE AWOKE TO find his feet were numb. The quality of the light was all wrong, even for a winter morning. Why was the loft so dark?
Because the sky itself was dark, he realized. Overhead, the glass was wet with wind-driven snow. He watched for a moment or so. A regular damn blizzard!
What day was it? Tuesday? Wednesday? He wasn’t sure. He’d worked sixteen hours straight to complete the new picture. When night came, he’d resorted to his trick of finishing less than critical areas by lamplight. He’d worked feverishly because he had an intuition that the picture would be good, and also because concentrated effort helped drain away some of the pain that had been his lot ever since Dolly’s departure last summer.
He crawled out of bed. Stamped on the cold floor till his toes began to tingle. Lit one of the four lamps arranged in a semicircle on the floor of his work area. Then he staggered to the old stove and tossed a few lumps of coal onto the embers.
He coughed as he shut the small grilled door. The fumes were abominable. He recalled he’d disposed of some food scraps in the stove a day or two ago. He found the long pole and used it to lift the hinged section of the skylight. Freezing wind tore into the loft. Snowflakes came in as well, whirling on an icy gust one moment, drifting slowly down the next. What the hell day was it?
He believed it might be the twentieth of January—or possibly the twenty-first. His head was a muddle—just like the loft with its heaps of discarded clothing and disorderly stacks of books. Dirty dishes stood everywhere. Recent mail was scattered all over the floor.
Wind flowed through the skylight opening and down a wall where Renoir’s cartoon hung from a nail. The cartoon rattled. Matt heard the noise but didn’t turn. He couldn’t bring himself to throw the drawing away because it was such a faithful and touching likeness of Dolly. But neither could he bear to look at it often.
He used the chamber pot in the corner, carried the pot to the kitchen alcove, opened the window and dumped the pot into a howling gray abyss that stretched down four stories. The ground was invisible.
He slammed the window and returned to the main room, passing the scrap of mirror glass he used—infrequently—for shaving. He paused, startled by the unpleasant image in the glass. He saw a man who’d lost weight because he had no appetite and only ate once a day, if then. A man who’d let his beard grow to an incredible tangle. A man with ugly dark circles under his eyes.
He turned the glass mirrored side down on the little shelf.
He sat on the edge of the cold double bed and locked his hands between his legs, pushing his nightshirt down to create a trough where he could generate a little heat for his fingers. His left hand hadn’t regained its old flexibility and perhaps never would. But his right functioned normally. That is, it did when his brain was alert enough to provide proper direction. The proof stood in the work area, immediately behind the semicircle of extinguished lamps and to the left of the huge Matamoras painting, which he’d finished in December. The new picture, considerably smaller, had been started on New Year’s Day and completed sometime after four this morning.
It was a study of a woman, painted in the new, unromanticized style of the Batignolles group. The woman was washing something in a tub. She was seen in three-quarter view, with the tub indistinct in the lower foreground. The visible sliver of water was done in blue of a dark value, so as to be subdued, like the tub itself.
The picture had several sources. The woman’s tired, bent body was Lisa’s as he remembered it from that moment at the Guerbois when he’d come upon her with her hands immersed in the dirty dishwater. The clothing was Lisa’s, too. So was the straggly hair falling over the eyes, and the faint look of grime. There the resemblance ended.
The woman dominated the right-hand two thirds of the painting. Most of the background was extremely dark, although there was clearly a secondary light source somewhere to her right: an irregularity in the siding of the building in which she was working, perhaps—a gap admitting highly diffused sunshine.
The strongest light came from above and behind the woman’s left shoulder. There he’d placed a large open doorway. Outside lay a meadow where two ungainly colts ran in the first radiance of day.
The flanks of the horses glowed with light. He’d used short, overlapping brushstrokes there—a technique with which Renoir and some of the others were experimenting. The effect only worked when you stood a good distance from the finished canvas.
Behind the horses rose blue foothills, quite distant and barely suggested. The splashes of light and the feeling of exuberance in the meadow were meant to contrast with the gloom and tedium inside the imaginary barn, where the woman was trapped by drudge work.
The woman was looking straight out of the picture. Matt fancied that she’d risen early, before anyone else was up, because she had so many chores every day. She was already tired but there was still strength in her arms, and in her back, whose breadth he’d exaggerated slightly. She had a defiant tilt to her chin but a resigned sadness in her large, cornflower-colored eyes.
Dolly’s eyes. It was her face.
The meadow, the horses, the hills barely sketched outside—those, too, came from memory rather than imagination. Many times he’d gazed on similar scenes in his home valley in Virginia. After his first reluctant experimentation with the familiar elements, he’d been astonished at how superbly they fitted into the overall composition.
Finishing the picture hadn’t purged all of his bad feelings, though. Standing up suddenly, his untidy flannel nightshirt falling down to midcalf, he was at the apex of a triangle whose base points were the portrait easel and Renoir’s cartoon. No matter which way he looked, he saw her. It was true even when he was outdoors, or sleeping, or—
Angrily, he shook his head and turned away.
Over the past months he’d located and visited virtually every employment bureau in London. But if any of them had sent a Mrs. Matthew Kent, or a Miss Dolly Stubbs for that matter, out to some godforsaken part of the British Empire, to teach officers’ brats to parse sentences and appreciate Wordsworth, no bureau would admit to it. She might have dropped into the pit of hell, for all he could learn.
He thought of the image he’d seen in the fragment of mirrored glass. Might be well to scrape his cheeks clean above the mat of his beard. He rummaged in the litter of books and correspondence, hunting for his razor case. In the search he knocked over a small stack of letters that included one from Gideon. It had crossed the Atlantic on a fast United States mail packet. The letter contained the usual family news
and a greeting that had made him feel good:
—your old friend Strelnik sends you his regards. He is proving to be a splendid part-time helper albeit several shades too “Red” for my taste.
His bare foot slid past three long letters from Fochet. He stared at them with pensive eyes, wondering whether the Onion was all right—or even still alive. Conditions were frightful in Paris these days. Matt had realized belatedly that he and Dolly were lucky to have gotten out when they did.
Fochet’s first letter had been written immediately after the scandalous September 2 surrender of the Imperial forces—and the Emperor himself—at Sedan. The war so frivolously declared by France had led to that nation’s undoing in slightly more than sixty days.
After Sedan, Louis-Napoléon had been hustled off to internment in some German fortress. The Prussian troops had celebrated their momentous coup by looting all available wine from homes and cafés. Even General Phil Sheridan, accompanying General Moltke as an observer, had raised an eyebrow at the “sotted” condition of the soldiers, Fochet said.
Well, they must have been sotted indeed if Little Phil had been shocked. The former Union cavalry officer, now an important man in the U.S. military structure, was in Matt’s opinion a ruthless and foulmouthed son of a bitch. Of course Matt had never met him. The impression was left over from the war.
Sometimes he was surprised at the potency of his lingering hatred of damn Yankees. The war had been a stupid and immoral one, and yet he loathed the enemy generals. It was embarrassing, unsophisticated—and forever a submerged part of him, like the memories of Virginia that had come filtering through his head and hands to the portrait.
According to Fochet, the Prussians hadn’t been too drunk to scream, “Nach Paris!” And General Moltke had been only too happy to lead them. Soon the French capital was completely encircled and besieged. There was no means of escape save a dangerous flight above enemy lines in a hot-air balloon.
Fochet’s other two letters, sent about a month apart by balloon post, showed the degeneration of the mood of the Parisian populace. At the start of the siege, Fochet sounded pugnaciously cheerful. He said there was a spirit of ebullient patriotism in the air, and a resulting widespread optimism despite the city’s predicament. The Paris mob had already proclaimed the repressive Empire dead, and the Republic reestablished. The political leader Gambetta had successfully escaped in a balloon basket to set up a government in exile. The “Red” clubs—the Socialist and anarchist groups with which Strelnik had consorted—were pouring out a steady stream of courageous, if whimsical, ideas for breaking the Prussian stranglehold. One Red suggested dumping poison into the Seine where it left Paris. Another wanted to unleash all the animals in the city zoo. A third submitted a design for a weapon similar to a Gatling gun, but with an added musical capability. The gun would lure the enemy into the open by playing Beethoven and Schubert, and then the gunners would blast the Prussians to pieces. The inventor didn’t bother to specify how the gun would cause the Prussians to suspend their judgment and leave their fortifications in order to hear the music more clearly.
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.”
ii
“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.”
