I Always Loved You

by Robin Oliveira

  At home, in her own bed, Lydia rallied, reviving their unreasonable hopes, but the next day she succumbed. She just left them—no lovely last moments, no farewells, no lingering laughter to treasure. The air in the bedroom, heavy with heat, pressed down on them, and for a good while they all sat weeping at her bedside, not believing that she had gone. Mathilde and Anna, who had been vigilant with tea and sandwiches that no one would eat, opened the bedroom window to the rainy Paris afternoon to let Lydia’s soul fly away. Katherine bathed her body. Robert stood and sat and stood again. In the past month, he had prayed that he might die instead of Lydia, but his plea had failed, and from that moment he lost faith in the rescuing power of grace. Katherine thought of the boy they had buried in Germany and could not finish the bathing. Mary took up the cloth and washed her sister’s lifeless legs and arms. They changed the sheets under Lydia and combed her hair and put on her prettiest day dress. They tied a ribbon in her plaited hair. Mathilde went to the store to buy black-bordered stationary and black bunting that she draped on the door. Mary wrote a note to the funeral home to come the next day. Robert went to the telegraph office and sent a note to Gardner and Aleck. They were both in the States, but Aleck was about to board a boat for Paris. Then there was nothing else to do. They sat into the night with the candles burning, contemplating a lifetime without Lydia, the girl they all adored, and they thought, Where will we find love now?

  • • •

  At the small cemetery at Louveciennes, next to Marly-le-Roi, in the shadow of Versailles, the January wind bristled through the denuded trees shading the clay grounds, whipping small pebbles and dust into the air. They had waited to bury Lydia until Aleck and his family arrived and the holidays had passed. Katherine, her face veiled in black, wept on Robert’s shoulder, who stood shakily against the dual onslaught of grief and winter. Mary stood beside them, with Aleck and his wife, Lois. Louisine Elder stood with Edgar. Handkerchiefs clutched in their gloved hands, they each threw a flower onto the mahogany casket before it was interred in the little raised vault, far from Paris, far from home. The scrape of the casket sliding onto its shelf in the tomb was lost to the wind. The flowers blew onto the clay. Mary picked them up and laid them again on the casket. The grave workers shut the door, sealing Lydia in. Mary stood back as Katherine and Robert and Aleck and Lois walked back to the family carriage.

  “Are you coming?” Robert called.

  “I’ll travel with Louisine and Edgar.”

  The open hearse followed her parents’ carriage out the drive. Mary watched it go, relieved now to be apart from her family, whose heavy sadness she could no longer bear. She pulled off a glove and placed her right palm on the cool, new stone and leaned into the vault.

  Lydia was to have lived, to have kept her company after their parents died, to have eased her old age, to have charmed her until they both died at the same moment in the same blessed place, together, two unmarried sisters of two married brothers, comforting one another in the passing years, astonished at the affronts of age, shocked at the mordant relentlessness of time. Now the great gulf of the future, vast and empty, would have to be faced alone. Language yielded no word to describe what it was to lose her beloved sister. Mary laid her cheek on the cold stone and closed her eyes against the chill.

  Edgar and Louisine each took her by an arm and steadied her as they walked to the carriage and helped her to climb in. All the way into Paris, Edgar held her hand and would not relinquish it.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Bougival was not far enough, after all. As it turned out, Berthe and Eugène saw Édouard all the time. The rail line, as Édouard had warned, turned out to be no obstacle. So Eugène and Berthe moved south to Nice, where she painted and tried not to think of Édouard, not when she was using the pastel easel he gave her for New Year’s, not when she agonized over composition or color or models, not when she rose and not when she retired, not when she breakfasted and not when she dined, not when she attempted the waters of the Mediterranean nor when she painted the wildflowers on the hillsides, not when she painted the beach and not when she drew the charming houses climbing the steep streets. She tried but she did not succeed, could not exercise the emotional fidelity that Eugène deserved, though she never once mentioned Édouard unless he wrote. Then she affected, in the most offhand way, a slightly bored voice of informality as she slit open his prettily decorated envelopes and related to Eugène the little trifles Édouard always wrote to her, all the while searching the letter for some opaque indication of his devotion. She tried not to reveal the catch in the back of her throat as she mourned any mention of his dwindling health. Sometimes she had to keep herself from booking passage back to Paris to comfort him; she especially had to resist the day he wrote to tell them of winning the Legion of Honor from the state, the coveted prize from the Salon he had desired for so long. They traveled to Italy, where Julie fell ill, and when she recovered they returned to Bougival for the summer and again spent the warm months chastely visiting the Cassatts and Édouard and Suzanne and Madame Manet in Rueil, just four kilometers away. She virtuously doted on her brother-in-law and cared for him and admired his landscapes and still lifes, all that he had energy for now. They painted Julie side by side while everyone ignored their affinity, watching from tea tables set up in the garden. Then suddenly it was the fall and Édouard and Suzanne and Madame Manet left and Berthe stayed behind in Bougival, because to be near Édouard was to love him and she could not stand the pain of him, she could not, even as he began to fail in earnest. When Berthe received the news of Lydia’s death, she rued her decision to save herself from the abyss that was Édouard, but she stayed on in Bougival, until the spring of 1883, when the terrible happened and she rushed back to Paris.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  As Édouard traveled the middle distance, somewhere between mortal depletion and immortal plenty, he felt the light trickling away. It seemed that he would not be able to survive the ambush of the last prescription, written for him by a quack he had visited in hopes of a last-minute cure. The quack had given him rye ergot, promising it would shut down his pained nerves, but instead insects began creeping up his skin, and his limbs burned and swelled and he suffered from unrelenting cold. And soon after, the skin on his feet and legs began to pucker and desiccate and blacken. And then the doctor took off his leg. Gangrene, he said, though Édouard heard the condemning diagnosis through the gauzy haze of suffering and could not protest. His fight was over and he knew it and he could not speak.

  This mortal lucidity did not surprise him. Life, he now knew, was a fleet sprint from birth to death, revealed at twilight to be astonishingly brief. This truth arrived as a terrible certitude, his lost days sparkling like gems of squandered clarity. Enlightened as he was by the affront of the finite, he could not imagine why humanity suppressed this verity. What had once seemed so necessary evanesced too: the struggle and the striving and the wild gabbling of intellects arguing about brushstroke, subject matter, color, all now revealed to be mere taste, preference, choice. He hoped, though, that his paintings might endure, but this no longer troubled him as it had troubled him in life. All of it was vanity. The question of what life is, of how one should live one’s days, and to what one should pay attention no longer puzzled him, either; it was as clear as light. He saw, on this unexpected brink, the certainty of what life should have been: a life with Berthe. Though he once thought this selfish indulgence, he knew it now to be honest. Love was not the obligation to Suzanne and Eugène that he and Berthe fulfilled out of chivalrous fastidiousness. While loyalty was no shabby stepsister, a form of love some claimed superior to all others, it was not love. Love was not, either, the sum of all his casual distracting dalliances, which was the reason he was dying, all the willing women who had made him feel alive and joyous spurring this ironic death. Nor was love the more justifiable of his infidelities, rooted in the sincerest, if briefest of affections. Love was instead an affinity so pure he wept as he thought of it. That cl
eaving to Berthe would have been further infidelity, disloyalty, and betrayal, he found oddly incongruous, but he could not help the ways of the universe.

  Now he grieved for his beloved, who must witness the agony of the gnawing, voracious pain that clawed at his flesh. She wept at his bedside and claimed his mortifying hands, her unabated grief coursing through them, the fragments of his life ebbing as she mourned with abandon, forgetting decorum, forgetting that she was betraying herself. Her grief sanctioned their ardor. I love you, she said. I love you.

  He could not speak, but he wished he could tell her the comforting truth that seemed to be reserved only for the dying. Though his soul trembled at her sorrow, her endless tears soothed his pain and hastened his mortality, and he wished, upon crossing over, that he could voice his utter astonishment at the grandeur awaiting befuddled humanity, wished he could return and suffer all the folly again to whisper, It is love, my frightened ones. Love.

  • • •

  Sitting at Édouard’s bedside, watching the light leave him, Berthe could not stand the injustice of losing the man she loved. She could not purge the horrors of the agony of his dying. She could not imagine a world that did not succumb to grief in his absence. Afterward, when five hundred people came to his funeral and his illustrious friends carried his coffin to the mournful dirge of bagpipes to Passy, where they laid him in the earth outside the village of Berthe’s birth, there was still not enough grief in the world to mark his passing. The cemetery inhabited a hill behind high walls, and the sun shone on the grave where she vowed that she would one day be buried too, not knowing that Eugène and Suzanne would be buried with them and they would all be entangled throughout eternity. Eugène’s unknowing revenge would be that he would haunt her, for he was Édouard’s pale ghost, a muted wash of the ebullient and clever man she loved.

  A year after his death the École des Beaux Arts, the Academy, the Salon, put on a display of all of Édouard’s work. All his genius was acknowledged, from his first radical canvases to his last masterpiece, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, painted before the final onslaught of pain. They all helped: Renoir and Monet and Degas and Mary Cassatt, whose attentions and kindness forged an even greater friendship. But friendship was not love. Nothing consoled Berthe. Life, she knew, would drag on with childhood illnesses and exhibitions to attend and paintings to paint. She would adore her child and tend her husband, but love, that elusive prize, had left her now. What a horror it was to be mortal, she thought, subject to such appalling weaknesses and needs. What a horror it was to be alive.

  The Rest of Time

  Chapter Fifty

  The struggle that had seemed so essential, the yearning for transcendence, the doubt that had plagued her, fell away in the face of success. Mary had become the artist she had wanted to be by dint of hard work and perseverance. And what was left was work, the work she had chosen: the pleasure of the puzzle, the technical questions of execution, the choice of composition and color, nothing different than before except that now she understood that pain was the foundation of art—not always its subject, but always its process. To be in pain was to be in the work. But no longer did she fear it meant failure. She knew she would succeed eventually with a canvas. She knew that if she stayed with it long enough, through the blindness, she would finally see what it was meant to be. She knew that she would find its soul. Pain was the essential ingredient.

  Would she call this newfound calm patience? Perhaps. But patience based on confidence born of the struggle that had now faded away. Degas, too, fell away. Like a waxing and waning moon, he came in and out of her life, full of affection and respect one moment, spouting trouble and discord the next. Even when he was in Paris, he wrote her notes of praise for her painting, of news of the Opéra, the ballet, Sarah Bernhardt, of his aghast horror at the Eiffel Tower’s startling appearance on the skyline, of his travels around France and to England, of the insolence of the upstart van Gogh, of his bafflement with Pissarro’s and Monet’s continuing infatuation with the countryside, of this and that and more, an endless stream of letters he sent when he was not at her door asking her opinion on this, inviting her to an exhibition of that, behaving as if he were her dearest friend, which he was on some days and others suddenly wasn’t, when none of her opinions on anything were valid and her company was neither needed nor wanted, and he would disappear for months at a time without notice. She never knew what to expect, and so she guarded herself, as others had learned to do.

  Louisine Elder married a wealthy American named Havemeyer, who indulged her love of art, buying her canvas after canvas on Mary’s advice. She asked Mary, from time to time, how it was with Edgar, and Mary made brave answers of independence and indifference, but Edgar’s cutting tongue set loose on one of her paintings or proffered opinions could set her back so much that she wouldn’t be able to paint for days, sometimes weeks. Mary often wondered whether, had she given in, had she allowed herself to become irretrievably entangled, had she been willing to submit to a lifetime of uncertainty, they might have found a way to be at intimate peace with one another. The question came to her at the oddest times. Well, perhaps not so odd. They came when she was with her nieces and nephews. Her brothers and their families came often to visit and so Mary had, over time, the pleasure of a revolving coterie of children who managed in their most endearing moments to make her wonder about the child she might have had. Fleeting, but unsettling, the question rebounded throughout the years to bedevil her. Why was so little in life ever truly settled? Not the happenstance of things, but the why of things?

  The work came to her in an endless profusion of possibilities. There were a thousand ways to paint a mother and her child, for in each familial bond there was a unique tie that found its expression in a particular gesture. It was what he had taught her, so long ago. Gesture. Made, not spontaneous. Studied, not accidental. The signifier of a unique truth about a life, or two lives. The gift of Degas.

  He was losing his eyes. There could no longer be any question about that. Over the years, his work grew both freer and more coarse, especially his pastels. Everyone liked to say how bold his work had become, how vivid the colors, how brave the stroke, but she knew it was because he no longer had the sight for refinement. She was certain that what he saw and what he put on the paper were two different things, a trick that the mind always played with artists, but this was a nastier kind of betrayal. A more sighted Degas, a younger Degas, would have recoiled at the blind turn his wavering eyes had taken. She tried not to tell him, though sometimes she broke down and suggested that he might not be seeing what he thought he was seeing, that what he put on paper might not be what he thought he was putting on paper. But she struggled because he had no patience for prevarication; over the years he had not once hesitated to devastate anyone whose work he considered inferior. It was, he always said, a point of the defense of art. She gave up, finally. For what more could she have said? Stop working, because the thing you have most feared has arrived? What would he do? How would he live? Would she have wanted him to warn her? Would she have even believed him? Would he believe her? And in the end, who was she to say? If the work was different due to the failure of retina and macula, was it not still art? She would not jury his or anyone else’s work. Just her own. Perhaps in this lay their true difference. She would not devastate him as he had devastated her.

  Time marched on, years of industry vanishing one after the other, marked only by her work and the needs of her father and mother, grown dearer to her since Lydia’s death.

  Her father, so proud of her work that he spoke of little else, died next. Everything is failing. Or so her father prophesied. A body coming to its end, he wrote Aleck, just a month before he died.

  And so the decade of the nineties went, with more deaths.

  Gustave Caillebotte, who had returned to painting after abandoning art and its exhausting politics in favor of sailing and designing boats, succumbed to death before he even reached the age of fifty, in his will leavin
g to the Louvre all his collected paintings, ensuring that the new French painting would be preserved for the public, a last, prescient act of passion, for Manet’s prices had soared after his death, and Monet couldn’t keep up with the demand for his work. Now living without financial care in a house in Giverny, the first house he owned, Monet was besotted with his garden.

  Berthe, who had outlived Eugène by only three years, died of pneumonia, moving from health to death in three swift days of astonishing suffering that left her sixteen-year-old Julie in the bereft hands of Berthe’s dear friends Mallarmé and Renoir and her sister’s children, one of whose friends later married her and made a life from painting. And only three months after Berthe, Katherine died, having outlived her invalid daughter and husband, having struggled for years for air, having fought a failing heart far longer than anyone believed she could.

  Mary buried her parents near the new country home she had purchased north of Paris in Le Mesnil-Théribus, the Château de Beaufresne, moving her father and sister from Marly-le-Roi, so that they could all be together once again. And then the Dreyfus affair happened and Degas was beyond terrible, and she could tolerate him no more. Or so she thought. Months after their break, friends invited them both to dinner and he said something gracious and she forgave him, and so on and on it went. She lived between Paris in a new apartment on the Rue de Marignan and at Beaufresne, and he lived in Montmartre. They shared a friendship of intervals, of deep contention and torturous reconciliations, of unspoken need and concealed regard, but a life lived, essentially, apart, though it seemed wrong that two people who had survived so much together could not find some way to comfort one another.