Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “I’m sure he would.”

  After she left, Alphonsine said, “She’s been planning the menus weeks in advance.”

  “Then why is she asking me?”

  “She likes you. She wants to feel part of it. That’s why she comes upstairs and announces the dishes. She never does that for anyone else.”

  From his side, it was also true—he was feeling part of the family. Maybe too much for his own sense of independence.

  He darkened the blue slightly and added a tint of violet for the shadows in the folds of her skirt. “And Jules, our anglophile poet with the irrepressible habit of quoting Shakespeare?”

  “I like him doing that.”

  “He can’t stop himself. It’s the way he experiences life.”

  “I liked him from the first time I saw him gazing at the river with a far-off look on his face. Maybe he was composing a poem. It’s fascinating, I think, to line up words in a way they’ve never been before to allow you to see something differently.”

  “Paintings allow you to see something differently too.” He made a pale yellow ocher for the trim on her sleeves. While he had it on his brush, he added green and feathered in strokes for the foliage behind her bordering the river. It was coming along quickly.

  “I have to tell you about the women too. Ellen has a serious streak even though she works at the Folies, but Angèle’s frivolous. Angèle’s so funny when she speaks roughly. She’s not the type who would endure hardships for a loved one, man or woman. She’d just go where impulse takes her.”

  “She’s a pleasure-seeker, all right. After that cycle ride, Alphonse had better be wary.”

  “He is. He’s so wary I wonder if he’ll ever fall in love.”

  “Does that run in the family?”

  Her eyelids lowered. It took her a moment to answer.

  “With me, it’s not wariness. It’s something else.”

  Louise came up the stairs again with a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses on a tray. “I forgot what I was going to say. Oh, yes. For dessert—”

  “I’ll make the dessert, Maman.”

  “You didn’t tell me.” She jabbed her fingernail into his shoulder. “I’m the cook and she didn’t even tell me. So what do you think you’re making?”

  “Layered apple pastries drizzled with Chambord liqueur.”

  “And where do you think you’re getting the Chambord?”

  “Papa’s cabinet, of course.”

  Auguste motioned for Alphonsine to take a drink and he did too.

  “Have you noticed how these women drink?” Alphonsine asked. “Ellen takes careful little sips, a lot of them one right after the other, sip, sip, sip, but Angèle drinks in a great, hearty gulp followed by a loud, throaty ‘Ahh.’”

  “And Circe?”

  “Circe drinks with closed eyes, in order to see her inward pleasure. She’d probably want to watch herself making love too, careful to make every move precise. Princesse Circe, dressed by the Salon Clorinde or some other famous maison de couture on the rue de la Paix or rue St. Honoré at ten francs per stripe. Her voice is as sticky as the resin on a pine tree.”

  “Where did all that come from?” he asked.

  “She’s right,” said Louise. “Don’t be taken in, Auguste. Her fingernails are sharp as claws.”

  “That doesn’t worry me as much as getting her to pose the way I want her to. She’s amusing at times, but she’s pigheaded.”

  “That she is, truly,” Louise said, standing to go. “I tell you, if she comes into my kitchen again, I’m going to shoo her right out.” She started down the stairs. “Right out the way she came in.”

  “You told Circe you don’t want the painting to tell a story,” Alphonsine said. “But you can’t deny people’s interpretations just because you say there’s no story. When my brother gave his contribution, didn’t you see how he was looking at Charles? He was almost laughing at him wearing that top hat. And what about Antonio leaning over Angèle as though he’s going to lick her ear any second? You don’t think there’s a story there? Émile adores Ellen, but she won’t let him near her, and now he hasn’t come back. Something’s going on between them. Something’s going on everywhere in the painting too. There will be mysteries to people looking at your painting, but they’ll bring their own feelings to it, and will imagine they know something. Like Jules said, how things are connected, one thing and then another and another.”

  “Ah, the promenaders reminding you of the hat shop. Will you tell me about it?”

  “You’re brave to ask.”

  He worked on the tablecloth. He loved to paint white, which was never pure white. The pastel tints would tie all the other colors together.

  “We lived above it. Papillon et fils, Chapelier, our sign said. It was in the shape of a top hat. We had all kinds of hats, chapeaux hauts de forme like Monsieur Ephrussi’s, feutres, chapeaux de paille, chapeaux mous, English bowlers, French melons a little shallower in shape, like Raoul’s, bérets, mariners’ caps, canotiers, flat-topped boaters for members of the yacht clubs, like Gustave’s. I had a counter for ladies’ hats. We bought the forms wholesale and I decorated them with ribbon, net veils, and silk flowers that I bought in the stalls of Les Halles. It felt like I was a bird building a nest with feathers and tulle. Sometimes I put a little feather bird in the folds.”

  He let her tell whatever it was she wanted to at her own pace while he painted her hand on the railing, the high curving arch under her fingers and palm, her thumb relaxed.

  “Do you know, it’s ten years almost exactly since the war began?” she said.

  Her eyes glistened. He wanted to catch them just that way in his painting, like polished river stones of lapis. The peachy hues of her face made her seem much younger than she was, but behind her eyes, right this minute, lay a realm he had not seen.

  Madame Charpentier had told him to find a wife. It would be easy to move right in with the family—he liked them all, and he felt tenderness for her. He hadn’t realized it until she’d picked the grit out of his face. He could see now that Louise was right—Alphonsine was beginning to care for him. It would be satisfying, but that would end sowing his wild oats in Montmartre. Madame Charpentier’s point precisely. No. Put it out of mind.

  “Louis was called up.”

  The abruptness brought him back to the moment at hand. “So was I.”

  “Where were you sent?”

  “To the South. I never saw any combat, but I treated myself to a vile case of dysentery. One day my comrade and I were at a wine merchant’s, and the next day, he stopped speaking. The day after, he was delirious and couldn’t stop laughing. A horrible, deranged cackle. Then he was gone. I would have died too if my uncle hadn’t come to rescue me.”

  “I’m glad he did.”

  A pink blush washed her cheeks. She looked away.

  “Did Gustave fight?” she asked.

  “He was in the Garde Mobile de la Seine. I didn’t know him then, but I knew Paul. Pierre and I were crazy with worry because he’s such a risk-taker. After the war he told us he’d been taken prisoner east of Metz and interned in a Prussian barracks. He tried to escape and failed the first time, but Christmas night the cell guard was sleeping and he took his clothes and walked right out of the barracks and into a town in the midst of a holiday celebration. Of course, he couldn’t resist having some German beer in a brasserie. He was discovered there in the morning, asleep, and was taken back to the barracks under tight watch. Somehow, he escaped again, and hightailed it back to France.”

  That peace in her face dissolved as her lips closed.

  “Another Jean Valjean, escaping more than once, Victor Hugo fashion,” she murmured. “Louis died of cholera in a Prussian prison camp outside Trier.”

  He stopped painting. It seemed insensitive to go on.

  “I lived through the Siege without knowing,” she went on. “Lived on birds and broth and rationed horsemeat.”

  To say he was sorry was to say words
not normally used when a person learns of a death, but he did feel them. He set down his brush. That was all he could do.

  He wished he hadn’t described his comrade’s death in the South.

  He imagined her desperate for a letter from her husband while the Siege held Paris in an iron grip. Nothing in, and nothing out. Not a single piece of mail. Not a scrap of food. Alphonsine trapping a thrush on a window ledge, weeping as she broke its neck, plucked it, gutted it, boiled it, drank the broth. If she got word that Louis was dying of disease, he imagined her rushing into the street begging camion drivers to take her across the lines to his field hospital.

  He imagined her dazed and silent when she realized Louis would be buried in a mass grave across the Rhine. He imagined her watching Paris burn during the Commune and not knowing whether to cry for the living or the dead. He wanted to hold her and whisper something that would make the memories go away. Words never came easily to him at such times. Touch did, but he remembered her raising the oars in the boat. No touch could erase her loss anyway.

  He felt an urgency to dispel the tense silence. “You’ve heard me mention my good friend, Frédéric Bazille, who shared his studio with Claude and me when we didn’t have a sou?”

  She was still and quiet, waiting.

  “He volunteered for a Zouave regiment from Algiers, the fool, just like Paul. Zouaves were put in the most danger. He felt no political compulsion to enlist. He did it just to demonstrate his manhood that was suspect. I wrote him a note. ‘Triple shit. You’ve no right to do this, you stark-raving bastard.’ The last word he had from me and I called him a bastard. He was killed at Beaune-la-Rolande. A puny little skirmish absolutely without consequence to the outcome of the war.” The words came out pitched high with the effort.

  “France lost more than the war. It lost his unpainted pictures,” she said.

  “He was a strong talent. I wish you could have known him. We all looked to him. Gustave thinks he could have held the Impressionists together. I can still see his gray carpet slippers with the red straps. Sometimes when I’m alone in my studio, I think I hear him humming Offenbach.”

  She sat there blinking away moisture. “Sometimes I think I hear Louis humming Schumann. A piano piece called ‘Papillons.’ Butterflies. So droll. Louis’s last name was Papillon.”

  He was stricken. He had just tramped roughshod over her memory, discredited her loss by speaking of his own. This was supposed to be a joyous occasion, painting her, and they’d stumbled together into sadness. Yet he had wanted to lay his grief on her lap like a wrapped stone. To lay his head on her lap too. It might comfort both of them. When words stopped, something deeper took hold. He felt the eggshell fragility of a new intimacy, as though he had already made slow, careful love to her.

  Every woman in the painting made his pulse race, his heat rise. Every woman, that is, except Alphonsine. Until now. He wouldn’t say it would never happen, but until now, she had seemed too much like a sister. She had never played the coquette with him. What were they to each other? Something swirling, changing direction, lovely and unpredictable, like an eddy in the river. He ought to be careful. He ought to be very careful.

  “When we’re finished today, will you let me take you out in a yole?” she asked.

  “If you row.”

  “Your hands ache sometimes, don’t they?”

  “How do you know?”

  “The way you rub your fingers. And sometimes you squeeze your right hand in your left.”

  “Nothing slips by you, does it?”

  “I wish mine ached instead of yours. I wish I could take it from you.”

  “Why?”

  “The world doesn’t need my hands. It needs yours.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Confession en Canot

  Alphonsine stayed close to the bank where the current was slow but would still take her words downstream and pour them into the sea. She rested the oars across the gunwales and let the boat drift.

  “I want to tell you about the hat shop. I couldn’t tell you with Maman coming upstairs all the time. She doesn’t know this. No one does.”

  “Are you sure you want to tell me?”

  “I have to.”

  She had to know whether he was a man who could see beneath her actions to her reasons. She started with the easy things.

  “The shop was near the barricade and the Arc de Triomphe. A musician lived in the flat opposite ours on the landing. He often played Schumann’s ‘Papillons’ for Louis, but during the Siege he only played French composers like Berlioz and Bizet. When the Krupp guns thundered so close, he countered with ‘La Marseillaise.’ That dear old man pounding the keys as hard as he could, sending l’esprit de corps to our men on the barricades. Everyone doing what he could. Everyone a soldier. Aux armes, citoyens!”

  Auguste’s patient look made her trust him. But if he condemned her, she would never have the courage to tell anyone else, which meant she would never be known for what she was.

  “Everyone a loyal soldier. Except me,” she said, holding on to the oars lying across her knees. His face hardened and made her worry.

  “One morning I heard a scraping noise outside. It sounded like a cat, and a cat meant food. I crouched and flung open the door. A man fell onto my feet. He held his shoulder with one hand, his thigh with the other. Blood oozed between his fingers and soaked his uniform. A French uniform. His eyes pleaded. ‘S’il vous plaît, mademoiselle.’ Hardly louder than a breath, please. I told him I’d go get help and he burst out, ‘Nein! Non, s’il vous plaît. Non.’” This time I heard the German accent.

  “A spy,” Auguste said. “Amazing that he came through the barrier. Maybe some Prussian comrade shot him by mistake trying to go back out.”

  “I didn’t think about that. I only saw a human soul in pain. I only thought about whether Louis knew how to say s’il vous plaît in German. Was he at some woman’s doorstep in Trier or Sarrebruck?”

  “Your way of looking at it, I suppose.”

  “The man’s hand trembled and reached for mine. I said slowly, ‘You will not kill me, because you need me.’ He shoved a knife across the floor toward me and dragged himself into the shop, leaving a trail of blood on the entry. I was powerless to resist.”

  “You didn’t call a gendarme?”

  His voice carried a tone of judgment, already, and she’d hardly begun.

  “I locked the door. He was bleeding onto the floor. I tied strips of a sheet above and below each wound and poured water into his mouth. I made a pallet for him in the stockroom and dragged him behind the door.”

  Auguste scowled.

  “Well? What if Louis lay injured beyond the Rhine? Wouldn’t I want some man’s wife to do the same for him? I was taught by the nuns at school to love my neighbor as myself. Breaking Christ’s command seemed a greater sin than helping the enemy.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “I couldn’t have you kiss me if you didn’t know me. When you told me about losing your friend, I thought you might understand. Maybe I was wrong.”

  There. A huge disclosure. They were both waiting.

  “Please. Go on.”

  “Gendarmes could come around the corner any minute. I scrubbed the stoop and rubbed ashes from the fireplace into the stain. The man slipped into unconsciousness. If he died, what would I do with him? I had to keep him alive. I poured brandy down his throat and cut away his clothes.”

  “All of them?” He gave her a steely-eyed glare.

  She gave it right back. “Without any army’s uniform, he was just a man in pain. His shoulder was only grazed, but his thigh…Whatever it was went right through. The opening at the back of his thigh…” She shook her head, remembering, and made a circle of her hands to show the size. “I cleaned the wounds as well as I could.”

  “No wonder you knew how.”

  How did he mean that? She had to go on.

  “I sewed them with silk hatter’s thread.”

  He w
inced. Good. She wanted him to imagine what doing that was like before she asked the big question.

  “Do you condemn me?”

  Every second of silence in the boat alarmed her more.

  “How can I? I wish there had been an Alphonsine for Bazille.”

  She couldn’t say that when she was preparing to burn the man’s uniform, she’d noticed a round hole ringed by dried blood in the left chest piece of the jacket. The Prussian had no chest wound. She couldn’t tell Auguste how, on her knees in front of the fireplace, she had wept over the French soldier killed for a suit of clothes. He would think she was a hypocrite.

  “Did he talk to you?” Auguste asked.

  “He only said, ‘Merci. Merci.’”

  As the boat drifted in the current, she saw Auguste glance at La Grenouillère. She didn’t want him to think of the time he painted there with Claude. She needed his full attention. There was so much more. She waited until they had floated past it, then dug an oar into the bank to stop the boat.

  “When he was able, I helped him up the stairs. It would be safer there.”

  “Did you feed him?”

  “Of course I fed him. Was I just going to watch him die? I shared equally my sixty grams of horsemeat per day. There were rat hunts. The shooting of cab horses. The zoo in the Jardin des Plantes was depleted of everything that breathed. On the ninety-ninth day of the Siege, an advertisement for Christmas dinner at Café Tortoni listed consommé of elephant, stuffed donkey head, terrine of giraffe, roast haunch of wolf au vin rouge, bear cutlets in pepper sauce, and flanked tiger garnished with baby peas. I wondered where they got the peas.”

  “And you?” he asked. “How were you doing?”

  “I avoided looking in the mirror.”

  “You were beginning to care for him?”

  She didn’t tell him that when the explosions rattled the windows, her arm shot out for his hand, and his ready grasp on her wrist stopped her trembling. Nor did she say that all the tender caring she would have given to Louis, if he had come home wounded, she lavished on this man. In some moments, she had pretended he was Louis.