I Always Loved You

by Robin Oliveira

  She walked him inside to the parlor, to his chair, grasping his elbow. She was reluctant to let go of him.

  Degas’s myopic gaze searched for hers and he said, “I never loved you, did I?”

  It was then, certainly, that the light dimmed.

  Then he pulled off his glasses and kissed her. Her lips softened and opened to his. His hand rose to her cheek and still the kiss went on. He was forgetting, she thought, that they could have spent a lifetime doing this.

  After a time, he pulled away slowly, his brown eyes cloudy with blindness. Then he sank into the armchair and closed his eyes. In his sudden sleep, age veiled any vestige of his former self: his savage vitality, his mirthful savoir faire, his ruthless devotion to principles no one else believed in and which had made his art as masterful as Velasquez’s or Titian’s.

  She covered him with a blanket and went back upstairs, into the studio that was little more than a storage room with the best art of the nineteenth century hanging on its walls. She had not seen the little dancer in decades, but she knew she had to be here, hidden, perhaps, behind boxes, as he used to hide her. Surely someone would have taken care of her in the move, set her somewhere she couldn’t be harmed. Squeezing through narrow aisles between piles of boxes, Mary headed for the back of the long studio, where a dustcloth draped an upright figure. She pulled off the cover, removing it inch by inch, careful not to pull too hard. And there she was: his little girl, his made woman. She was in pieces. Her arms had broken off and lay at her feet. Her tutu had grown ragged and moth-eaten. The ribbon tying her hair, once glossy and jaunty, drooped in a dull frown; dust grayed the black velvet ribbon around her neck. Broken, neglected, she had been rotting for years.

  Faint, Mary reached out to the statue to steady herself, then snatched her hand away, lest she harm the little dancer further. The detritus of Degas’s obsessions surrounded her. A satin ballet slipper, its long ribbons tucked inside the shoe, lay on a marble-topped table, as if he had unearthed it to paint a dancer again. A spray of brushes of all sizes and shapes wrapped in paper spilled across the same table. On the shelves beneath, palettes lay one on top of another—oval and rectangular, small and large. He had not scraped the dried globules of paint from them, as if he had set down each one intending to pick it up again in a moment.

  A life mask, rendered in gray plaster, stared up at her from the clutter. It was Degas when she had fallen in love with him: heavy lidded, long nosed, his once piercing gaze rendered blindly benevolent by the opaque clay. It must have been done when his bust was sculpted in the early eighties. She stared at his face frozen in time, all of who he had been to her preserved now in plaster. She stroked the contours of his cheeks, the lilting wave of his hair, his half-closed eyes. Edgar.

  She turned away.

  Downstairs, she woke him. “Tell me, is your niece, Marguerite’s daughter Jeanne, still in Nice?” He had mentioned her sometimes in his letters, his young niece, training as a nurse in southern France.

  “I don’t know. They say she’s working in a hospital.”

  “Do you know which one?”

  “Which one?” he echoed.

  She touched his hand. “I’m coming back, Edgar, but not for a few days. You’ll be careful, won’t you, until I’m back?”

  “You’ll come back?”

  • • •

  The next day, Mary took the train to Grasse with Mathilde and found Jeanne in a hospital on the harbor in Nice. It took no time to convince her to come to Paris to care for her uncle. She returned with Mary and Mathilde, and they went immediately to Edgar’s apartment. Mary waited outside the door while Jeanne went in to greet her uncle and to tell him she had come to live with him.

  “How did you know,” Mary heard him say, “that Zoe died?”

  “Mademoiselle Cassatt told me.”

  “She did? How did she know?”

  “She is here, Uncle. She was here with you a few days ago.”

  “Was she? Isn’t that strange?”

  From the doorway, Mary beckoned to Jeanne. “It’s best if I don’t come in.”

  “He’ll want to thank you,” Jeanne said.

  “He has nothing to thank me for.”

  “Don’t you want to say good-bye?”

  “I already did.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Not at all,” Mary said, and kissed the girl on the cheek, then picked her way to the bottom of the stairs, where Mathilde and the chauffeur were waiting to take her back to Mesnil, alone.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Yes, it was then that the light dimmed. The moment Edgar wondered whether he had ever loved her. Later, at his funeral, the light barely penetrated at all. They buried him in the cemetery in the shadow of Montmartre, so that he would always be at home.

  Mary put down her magnifying glass. The night had completely fallen now. The lights in the studio were on; she didn’t know how. No doubt Mathilde had come in and seen her reading the letters and retreated. She wished she hadn’t because she could have used her help; she wasn’t quite certain what she had read. Some of the lines had faded, and even his latest letters, written in Jeanne’s hand, recalled a past unfamiliar to her. Sometimes she had to remember what she had wanted. It was the meaning of a life, wasn’t it, all that desire? But desire for what? Lately, she was waking up at night gasping for air, and in those strained few moments when it seemed that she might not be able to catch her breath, the past opened up to her in one shining image of color and light that by morning had receded and left her only with a sense of wonder. It was the heart that saw what your mind hid from you. Perhaps, as Edgar so reverently believed, it wasn’t the mind that saw, after all.

  Mathilde must have stoked the fire, too, for it flickered and flared with a savage, comforting warmth. Well, it was over now, all of it, or it soon would be. How odd it was to survive nearly everyone, to be the last, to be the one who might tell everyone the tale, though no one would ever care now, she thought. For what was lost love? It was the story of everyone’s life. Hers, Edgar’s, Berthe’s, Édouard’s. A multiplicity of confusion, a multiplicity of pain.

  The letters had scattered: in her lap and on the divan and on the floor. Her memories. His. How slowly she moved now, what effort it took to gather them up. It seemed it was the work of her lifetime.

  Was it a crime to burn memory? She didn’t know. Memory is all we have, Degas had once said. Memory is what life is, in the end.

  She would be ash herself, soon, like all the others. She thrust the letters one by one into the fire. The flames took their time consuming the inked pages, turning indigo and vermillion and ocher, a dazzling radiance that penetrated the opaque wall of blindness that in the end had stolen from both of them their beloved avocation. How odd it was that in burning their lives—burning memory—color and light returned to her.

  The pages burned on and on. And in those flames the years evaporated, the things unsaid and foregone, the misunderstandings and misconceptions and subverted hopes, the things that would now never be said.

  Paint love, he had once said to her. You must always paint love.

  In this, she supposed he had given her all he could give.

  And what had she given him?

  She didn’t know. She didn’t know.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following individuals: Marly Rusoff, agent extraordinaire, and Michael Radulescu, her wonderful partner in literary excellence; Kathryn Court, the editor from heaven; Tara Singh, the assistant editor from heaven; John Pipkin, who read an early draft and is somehow still my friend; Rich Farrell, who read a later draft and gave me confidence; Kelly O’Conner McNees, who buoys me when I am down; Rena Pitasky, who introduced me to the concept of the golden ratio; the Thomas J. Watson Library, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Emily Walhout, at the Houghton Reading Room of Harvard University, who sent me copies of Miss Plummer’s articulate letters on the death of Abigail May Alcott; Richard Kendall and Patricia Fail
ing for answering questions about Degas; Michael Erickson, OD, my ophthalmologist, who explained macular degeneration and its symptoms to me; Annabelle Mathias, of the Musée d’Orsay, who signed her life away to get me past the receptionists at the museum after I left my identification back at my rented Paris apartment; Portia LaMotte, who wrote several letters in French on my behalf so that I could make the appointment at the Musée d’Orsay to see the contents of Degas’s studio; Scott Cohen, Kathryn Court’s able assistant, who went beyond the bounds of duty and found Portia for me; Dennis and Kathy Hogan, old friends who always drive me around D.C. when I go there for research; Julie Hill Barton, who arranged for me to stay at her in-laws’ home in the San Juan Islands during one of the final pushes, and my son, Miles, who kept me company there; Sue and Doug Barton, who lent me said home (a thousand thank-yous); Kathleen Doron, who recommended the great apartment in Paris; Jennifer Otte Vanim, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who opened the storage rooms for me so that I could see Cassatt’s first Mary Ellison portrait; the faculty and staff of Vermont College of Fine Arts, in particular Douglas Glover, who taught me that “repetition is the heart of art”; and my husband and children, who let me disappear from time to time without complaint when deadlines loomed.

  Author’s Note

  In doing research, I never have any idea what I will find that will prove relevant to a story. I spent ten days in Paris retracing the impressionists’ steps, searching out their studios, haunts, and homes. I walked every inch of Montmartre and the boulevards below, getting a sense of atmosphere and distance and viewing the actual buildings in which they lived, occasionally sneaking into those same buildings and trespassing up and down private alleyways. (I did draw the line at going to the city planning department to see whether I could verify which buildings were original, but I feared my meager language skills would be no match for the French bureaucracy.) The most remarkable moment, however, occurred in the basement of the Musée d’Orsay while I was viewing artifacts from Edgar Degas’s studio. The museum had received some things, though unfortunately not everything, from his studio after his death. I requested to see all I thought they had: his eyeglasses, palettes, brushes, and pastel and paint boxes, all of which were marvelous and inspiring to see and gave me some of the small details I was after. But then the assistant curator said, “There is a mask. Do you want to see it?” We were struggling along—my bad French, her better English—and I wasn’t quite certain what she had said in her heavy accent. “Yes, of course,” I said, not knowing what it was she was going to show me. Then she pulled the mask out of the cabinet and laid it on the table. This was the gift, the one surprise I always hope I’ll stumble on. Upstairs, waiting in line earlier to eat in the dining room, I had viewed a stone sculpture of Degas that had been executed in the early 1880s. This mask, in beautifully preserved gray clay, was the impression of his face made for that sculpture. In contrast to the stone carving, there was something much more real and startling about the mask. Perhaps it was the absolute repose of his face, relaxed for the impression, or perhaps it was the material itself, but in that study, I saw Edgar Degas as I had never imagined him, even after viewing numerous self-portraits and photographs. The moment was breathtaking. The mask ultimately gave me an important moment at the end of the story I would not have had but for this serendipitous gift.

  I am indebted to myriad books on art history, biographies, exhibition catalogs, guidebooks, etc. Of particular note are Nancy Mowll Mathews’s Mary Cassatt: A Life; Degas Through His Own Eyes, by Michael F. Marmor; Edgar Degas Sculpture, National Gallery of Art; Degas, by Roy McMullen; Degas: Letters, edited by Marcel Guerin; My Friend Degas, by Daniel Halévy; Manet, by Henri Perruchot, translated by Humphrey Hare; The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas, by R. H. Ives Gammell; and Berthe Morisot: The First Lady of Impressionism, by Margaret Shennan.

  The reviews quoted in chapter twenty-eight are contemporary reviews published in various journals and newspapers. I translated them from French with the help of a grammar text, Google Translate, a French dictionary, and my two years of college French. Any mistakes of translation and interpretation are mine.

  The letters in the book are fiction, though I read many Cassatt and Morisot family letters to determine sentiment and whereabouts. One phrase of Robert Cassatt’s—“a body coming to its end”—is paraphrased from a letter he sent to his son Aleck and which was quoted in the Mathews book.

  The three lines in italics in chapter thirty-six are taken from the book The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas, and are purported to be actual quotes of Degas.

  Abigail May Alcott was called May Alcott during her lifetime; however, in the book I refer to her as Abigail because the juxtaposition of Mary and May in the text was too confusing.

  I used the contemporary titles of paintings, but over time, paintings’ titles can change. The following is a list of those painting titles referred to in this book that have changed: Manet’s Portrait of M. Faure, in the Role of Hamlet is now known as Portrait of Faure as Hamlet; Degas’s Portraits in an Office (New Orleans) is now known as The Cotton Office of New Orleans; Cassatt’s Portrait of a Young Girl is now known as Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.