Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “I don’t think my father was.”

  “A factory worker making only chair legs never gets that satisfaction. He’s the unhappy one.”

  “Finishing chairs wasn’t enough. My father was unhappy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “In the country, when people have black thoughts they go to a barn to dance the ronde or to a veillée on winter evenings where the women sew and the men repair tools. My parents went often, but it didn’t help.”

  He wasn’t going to make the mistake he did with Margot, not taking an interest in her background. “Tell me about them.”

  “Once my father picked me up, set me on his horse, and climbed on behind me. We rode to the top of a hill. He asked me if I could see the sea. I laughed and told him I only saw rows of grapevines and the house and the hills. Then I asked what he saw. ‘The sea, another coast, other hills, mountains, other cities,’ he said. I thought he was playing a game with me, but no. He was preparing me.

  “The next day when I woke up, he wasn’t in the house, wasn’t in the vineyard or the pressing house. His horse was gone. He never came home.”

  “I never imagined.” He took her hand and stroked the back of it.

  “Maman thought he left because she nagged him about bringing in mud on his shoes one too many times.”

  Auguste had done the same thing, to the infinite displeasure of Madame Bérard. He sympathized with the man.

  “You’ve never heard from him?”

  “We waited through several winters and tried to keep the vineyard going with my cousins’ help. Then Maman thought we’d find him in Bercy, where the wine comes into Paris from the east. So five years ago we moved here to look for him. I cried all day when we left. It cleft my life in two parts, before and after, like a cleaver going through a melon. Whack. I wobbled for a long time after that.”

  “You didn’t like Paris?”

  “The bigness made me feel small. I couldn’t sleep for the noise at night. Maman got a post as a seamstress and put me out to work as a laundress. After work every day she dragged me around looking for him. We rode omnibuses on the upper level so we could search better. People gave us mean looks. We didn’t know women weren’t supposed to climb up there. At the slaughtering yards in La Villette, Maman asked, ‘Have you seen a man named Pascal Charigot, middling tall if he weren’t so bent, eyes spaced wide like a Dutchman’s, a large brown mole beneath the left one?’ It was so embarrassing. I hated it.

  “But whenever I’m in a café, I sit so I can look out the window, just in case he might walk by. I have dreams of walking down a street or buying fruit in the Marché de Saint Pierre, and there he would be, coming right toward me.”

  “You never found him?”

  “A letter came to the vineyard and my aunt sent it to my mother. He was in America. In a place called North Dakota.”

  He glimpsed the vacancy her father left in her life. Until now, he had only seen her cheerfulness, just as he had with Alphonsine at first.

  “I wonder if he ever wakes up thinking he might have made a mistake. If he had died instead, it would have been easier on Maman. There’s something natural about death. There’s nothing natural about a father leaving a vineyard his great-great-grandfather planted and a family he loves.”

  Auguste couldn’t blame the man for having the wanderlust. He had the courage to make a clean break from a carping wife. Would the daughter slip into the mother’s nagging nature?

  He could never take her to Madame Charpentier’s salon, to any of the other hôtels particuliers where he had commissions, to the Salon or to Durand-Ruel’s gallery. She might blurt out some rustic impropriety fit for a barn. He would be leading a double life.

  She was too young. He too old, too unstable in money matters. He had visions of Monet unable to feed his pregnant Camille, forced to beg from Charpentier and Zola, and of Sisley’s wife packing up in the night, time after time to avoid landlords. He was far from ready to settle down.

  Maybe, by a stroke of luck, the painting would earn enough for him to travel. Nearly forty years old, and he had not seen the frescoes of Raphael. He had not expanded his oeuvre beyond Paris, the Forest of Fontaine bleau, the Seine. Now was the time, when he was unattached. He was going to chase the light. He would experiment. He would be his own man.

  Another man might snatch her up in the interim. She was ripe as a grape at picking time. It was all moot anyway if he couldn’t solve the last problems of the painting and his career shriveled because of it.

  “Do you see differently than normal people?” she asked.

  He laughed solemnly at himself. “Maybe. Look at that skiff under that tree. Don’t think of objects. Think of colors and shapes. What do you see?”

  “A green boat, a green river, a green tree. Like that?”

  He shook his head. Never to a dinner where art would be discussed. But what dinners did he attend where art was not discussed?

  “Not quite.”

  “Then, what?”

  “An elongated shape pointed and curved up slightly at one end, the shape revealed as gradations of different greens. Behind it, shifting patches of deep green and blue and yellow-green and white, with a shimmering red line repeating the solid one on the long green shape. A vertical column of brown edged in ocher on one side, reaching upward and dividing, angling up to a textured fullness of greens and yellows touched in places by ocher and gold.”

  “Doesn’t all that seeing wear you out?”

  “Try again.”

  She squinted. “I see some great old maple trees that have been here longer than anyone. Honorable trees, as honorable as old grapevines.”

  Yes, differently.

  Their spot of sun had gone. Shadows of trees stretched fingerlike across the water. Gooseflesh rose on her arm. It was time to get dressed. He paced at a respectable distance from the ladies’ changing cabin. The sun was sinking. Already a few clouds bloomed in shades of rose and soft orange and cast violet shadows on the river in spots. It would be a dazzling color show.

  “Aline, hurry,” he said outside the cabin. When she came out, he grabbed her hand. “It’ll be over in a few minutes.”

  She untied Jacques and he hurried her through the little wood to the western bank of the island. The incandescent globe rested momentarily on the poplars across the channel, then winked between their branches, shooting shafts of orange light right through the translucent blue-green surface of the river.

  “The sun is rolling toward America,” she mused.

  Solemn, he would call her expression at that moment if he had to find a word. When he looked skyward again, the pale orange had become rose and he had missed a stage in the color change.

  “Don’t move.” He crawled away from her and lay on his stomach at a little distance. “Now I can see you against the changing colors.”

  She was quiet and still, for him, he thought. The sky cast a ravishing rosy light over her shoulders and turned her deep golden hair to bronze. He tried to imagine what it would be like to watch her go about her domestic tasks, and to have this display of double beauty at the end of every day.

  He crawled back and lay on his side facing her. He could press himself against her, if the yappy terrier would let him. Anticipation pulsed. He never experienced anything deeply unless he was able to touch it. He made a move. Jacques growled.

  “I won’t hurt your mistress. I promise.”

  Jacques countered with a bark. Aline scooped him up and he quieted.

  Auguste passed his fingers over the grass. “See, Jacques? What I want to do isn’t anything more than this. She’ll hardly feel it.” He would go through a long, slow dance, building a history before he touched her sexually.

  What Madame Charpentier and Camille saw in him was a need to give himself to a living, breathing being, someone real, not colors on a canvas. To give himself in a way he’d never done, in this case, by withholding himself for the sake of the woman. He was beginning to grasp the difference betw
een pleasure and happiness. It was another plane, beyond adoration and sensuousness, a country new to him. At this stage of life, he’d better just lean into love, because if he fell, he feared he might break a hip.

  “I want to paint you again. Let me name the ways. On the bank about to get into a yole with someone, let’s say Gustave. Dancing at Bal des Canotiers.”

  “With the baron?”

  “No, waltzing with Paul. In a garden, reading.” Her face turned pink at that. “As a nude in the sunlight, your hair streaming over your shoulders like the great Renaissance paintings of goddesses. Someday. When you’re ready.”

  “You mean when my mother is ready.”

  “Then begin getting her ready now.”

  “She doesn’t want me to run with a painter.”

  “We won’t run. We’ll stroll, and enjoy every step.”

  He brushed his hand across her ankle, the outer bone and the inner, fixing the shape in his mind. Jacques perforated him with his beady black eyes. His hand moved slowly upward to where her ankle became calf.

  Jacques barked and she drew her leg away. “I have to go home. Maman is expecting me before dark.”

  “Ah, yes, la mère whose affection I must win. I could begin tonight.”

  “No.” She stood and picked up her dog.

  “Might I accompany you to the station?”

  She nodded, already walking.

  He would do more than that. He would ride the train with her to Paris, and hope that she wouldn’t lose her willingness when they left the mystique of the river world and entered the gaslit streets fanning out from Gare Saint-Lazare before arriving at his atelier. Instead of walking back through the Maison Fournaise, they took the steam ferry from La Grenouillère to Rueil. On the water he looked south beyond Bougival to Louveciennes. Twilight softened the edges of everything. “From the bridge at Bougival, you can see the aqueduct on the hill. Whenever I see its row of arches, I think of Italy. I need to go there someday, to see the art of the Renaissance, and to paint.”

  “You won’t know how to talk to them.” Her words were clipped and final.

  “Sometimes I feel so restless I can’t stand myself. I want to go to Algeria too, to find that southern light that Delacroix painted.”

  “So you’re going to become a wanderer too?” An edge to her voice cut through him.

  The approaching evening folded the river, the ferry, and the two of them into a shadow. He slipped his arm around her waist. “Not yet. I’m not a wanderer yet. Right now I’m going with you.” In the gloaming, he couldn’t tell whether her eyes said yes or no. The alternating stiffness and relaxation of her body told him that she wasn’t teasing him. She was genuinely conflicted. At Rueil-Malmaison he waited with her for the train and stepped into it behind her.

  “No. Don’t. Stay here.” She pushed him back down the steps and the conductor closed the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Les Fêtes Nautiques

  Alphonsine sang softly. Today is Sunday…. Hurry, rowers, get the oars ready! the song urged. She was hurrying, putting on her best blue dress, a Parisian dress on the verge of being too chic for the country, but this was the day of the Fêtes, the most important day of the year at Chatou. She fastened a dark blue velvet ribbon around her neck for Alphonse’s team.

  In the dining room, she watched Auguste grab Maman around the waist and swing her in a dance step, and then he did the same with her.

  “It’s a busy day, young man. I don’t need your foolery.” Maman’s eyes sparkled even as she said it.

  “It’s exactly what you need. Today especially.” He tipped his straw boater at a rakish angle and sashayed outside singing, “Ohé! Ohé! Ohé!”

  “It’ll be sad to see him go now that the painting’s finished,” Maman said.

  “No, it isn’t. Not yet.”

  “Of course, you might lure him to stay longer.”

  “Maman, sh. Don’t talk that way.”

  “He’s been just like another son.”

  “Stop it.”

  She had made mistakes. If she had spoken to Circe privately, if she hadn’t sent him off to Paris to find another model…

  She went outside where Uncle Titi was setting up the grenouille game, a wooden box with openings in the top around a ceramic frog with a gaping mouth. It was a tossing game. People won chits to spend in the restaurant according to what hole their copper disc fell into.

  “Let me try it,” Auguste said. He tossed, and by God if the disc didn’t land right in the frog’s mouth with a clink. “Ha! Do you think that’s enough to erase one-hundredth of my bill here?”

  “Do you think Papa’s actually going to make you pay all of it?”

  Alphonse asked Auguste to help him carry out more tables and chairs.

  In a few minutes she felt someone behind her squeeze her waist with both hands. She whirled around and Raoul gave her a kiss on both cheeks.

  “First to arrive gets to kiss the ladies,” he said.

  “Aren’t you the proper canotier.” For once he wasn’t in his suit jacket with his brown felt bowler, but white canvas pants, the traditional blue-and-white-striped jersey of a canotier, and a flat-topped boater.

  Auguste came up from the cellar carrying two chairs and greeted Raoul as though he hadn’t seen him in years. “Are you the first to arrive?”

  “Aline isn’t here yet, if that’s what you’re asking,” Raoul said.

  Auguste scowled and turned to get more chairs. Raoul called after him, “Today’s the day your quatorzième will be named.” He lifted his shoulders and made a face as if to say, What’s the matter with him?

  The rail line had doubled its service and people were staking out viewing places on the Rueil bank and the island. They promenaded. They browsed the booths strung out on both banks. They rented yoles. They laid out picnics. They filled the restaurant. All the things Alphonsine loved would be happening today.

  She gave out blue and red ribbons for people to show what teams they were supporting in the jousts. An organ grinder cranked out a tune, and his monkey dressed as a canotier collected sous and put them in his tiny straw hat. Several pedal boats decorated with garlands of paper flowers came up from La Grenouillère along with the usual green rental rowboats. Accordion music came across the water from Auberge Lefranc.

  Auguste sat with the models—all except Aline and Charles and Gustave—under a maple tree at water’s edge, crossing and recrossing his legs, watching the bridge and smoking. She brought him a tin ashtray.

  “Are you concerned about who will win the spot in the painting?” she asked. “Who the quatorzième will be?”

  “Among other things.”

  A racing scull crossed the river from Auberge Lefranc with four people rowing in rhythm to their song:

  The jolly canotier is rowing hard

  Digging his own path with his strength and his oars.

  On the throne at the rudder, just like in a palace,

  Sits one of his women.

  Everyone on both terraces joined in as the boat floated close.

  “Start another,” Alphonsine prompted.

  Angèle started the Marseillaise des canotiers, and the team of rowers took that song downriver to the next guinguette.

  Alphonsine turned and saw Gustave, sporty and chic in blue trousers, expertly tailored cream-colored jacket, the blue silk cravat and flat-topped boater of the Cercle de la Voile à Paris, and a blue breast banner identifying him as the vice president of that prestigious sailing organization. He stepped onto the platform to register the racers, and was mobbed by contestants. Auguste and the models gathered to size them up.

  Angèle said to Auguste, “You don’t look like the jolly canotier in the song. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t feel anything for these fellows.”

  “Don’t get all herky-jerky about it. It’s just a face.”

  “Yes, yes, just a painting,” Auguste said. “Just a chance to turn my career one way or another.
”

  Alphonsine began to feel Auguste’s nervousness herself, especially when she saw a man from Bougival with a huge hook of a nose and pink, scabby skin sign up for four races. Auguste gave her a sinking look.

  “You’d better hope this Monsieur Le Hook capsizes or rams someone and gets disqualified,” she said.

  Raoul registered for the one-man périssoire, Pierre and Paul registered for the two-man sculls, and Guy de Maupassant registered his team for the two-man sculls, the triplettes, the four-man sculls, and registered himself for the slalom course of the narrow open-hulled as, the most difficult craft to maneuver.

  “Are you crazy? Your arms will fall off,” Pierre said.

  “You put a boat in front of him, he can’t stay out of it,” Alphonsine said.

  “If I let one of my boats go unused today, she’ll say I have too many,” Guy said.

  A trumpet announced the parade arriving from Bougival. Alphonsine hurried inside to get Maman. Papa in his nautical suit and mariner’s hat led off, mounted on Uncle Titi’s horse draped with a banner with the words Le Grand Admiral de Chatou. She loved seeing him ride in for a festival he had started from nothing. He scanned the crowd for Maman, whose face was alive with pride, her eyes moist, beside herself with adoration.

  The mayors and councilmen of all the river towns that had jousting teams followed on horseback, wearing tricolor chest bands. The gendarmes and firemen came next, then the acrobats turning cartwheels, a vaudeville troupe, and the former jousting champions in their white shirts and pants with red or blue cummerbunds. The band brought up the rear playing a march.

  The mayor of Chatou mounted the platform to welcome everyone. The band played Offenbach’s Barcarole, and the vaudeville troupe did a skit using a flat cutout of a gondola. Papa pantomimed cracking a wine bottle against the prow and bellowed into a megaphone, “Que les courses commencent! Let the races begin!”

  “Let the choosing of a quatorzième begin!” Pierre echoed.