“He’s well over eighty,” Peter went on. “But there was nothing of age in him. Sure-footed, supple, nimble . . . must have a personal trainer twice a day. No memory problems. None.”
Kathryn knew it was better not to quiz Peter; just listen to the gravelly melody of his voice. She loved it when Peter found something or someone inspiring. His rare, hard-won praise glittered like a shower of diamonds.
“Plummer owned every line. Every line was nuanced—pitch, pace, emphasis—exactly the way he wanted. Perfectly calculated, perfectly spontaneous.”
“Without flaw or blemish?” She was teasing him.
“Perfectly rendered. I felt in the presence of Shakespeare. Not physically. But Plummer embodied the essence of genius. The spiritual and artistic essence of Shakespeare, captured completely by Plummer.”
Kathryn had never heard Peter speak so unequivocally. Not in forty years. Royal glanced back over his shoulder at her and smiled: she had opened the right topic. She waited another moment, then said softly, probably too soon, “I once heard a Rubinstein all-Chopin performance like that. It was in San Francisco in the early seventies. I was teaching in Idaho. I flew down just to hear him play. Rubinstein and Horowitz—they were the pianists my mother most admired. She was still alive then, when I had the teaching job in Idaho. I wanted to hear Rubinstein partly as a tribute to her. I couldn’t afford the dollar and fifty cents to have new heels put on my shoes that year, but I flew down there and back. James was in San Francisco then; we were divorced, but he met me and we went together. Then I flew back to Idaho.”
“Yes, well,” Peter said dismissively of her journey to San Francisco—so long ago, to be sure, before he came into her life. “This trip to Stratford was certainly an extravaganza for me.” Peter directed a stony glance at the distant treetops, as though they irritated the sky with their branches and their incessant need for more. More sunshine, more time, more rain, more money.
Now they were looking down the empty terraces of the amphitheater toward the permanent stage shell, two stories tall, woodland brown, with an ample number of door and window openings for any theatrical need. At the bottom of the slope where they stood, the stage backdrop rose flat, brown, and two-dimensional in front of the trunks of magnificent trees. An empty stage, bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang, Kathryn thought. Why didn’t the neighborhood children use the empty stage for playing? she wondered. Why didn’t they devise their own stories and act them out on these empty boards? They didn’t know how. No one had taught them.
Why didn’t children playact here on the big stage in the park all year long, not just play on the swings and slides in the southwest corner of this available paradise? She ought to instigate the activity; give some of her time to Cochran Elementary, only four blocks south, to introduce the children to the fun of pretending and acting, the way she and Nancy had done spontaneously when they were children.
(The younger of her two older brothers, John, age six to her four, had taught her how to imagine: They aren’t benches anymore—the long, ebony-colored piano bench, the shorter hard-maple vanity—they’re horses and the sofa cushions are our saddles.)
Maybe the university would let her work with children one semester instead of teaching her usual class for advanced writing students. She should ask. How could they give her permission if she didn’t ask? The dean would understand. The provost and president, too. She was a lucky academic to have such humane leadership at the top.
Looking at the open amphitheater, the stage with its stalwart backdrop of doorways and balconies, a natural, mature grove behind the set, and an immense golden ginkgo at stage right—surely a place to inspire any ambitious child or natural thespian such as Peter—Ryn said, “I wish you’d try out for Lear.” She spoke as quietly as she could, wistfully, with no imperative in her tone. Every summer there was Shakespeare in the Park.
“‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks,’” he mumbled.
Speak up! she wanted to say. She mumbled, “I know you’d be great.”
“Think so?” He suddenly looked at her and grinned happily. The dog added his knowing glance. “I played Lear in college.”
“I’m surprised some faculty member didn’t grab the part.”
“Why? They knew I was the best.” Now he was impish. Totally cocky.
Harmony. Why did he insist that in some way their sensibilities were at odds? For all their spurts of congeniality, he must forever and a day be in some contention or competition with her (Giles had felt none of that). Why? She knew the outrageous answer he stubbornly maintained: it was because she grew up in the city, while Peter had grown up on a wheat farm in South Dakota. She was the city; he was the country. (But Giles had been an Alabama farm boy, with red clay caked on his heels.)
Just behind center stage rose Kathryn’s favorite tree, towering over the open-air stage: a fantastical hemlock, a natural steeple. Its sheer size implied its importance, though it was never self-important. Its shaggy mate, stage left, a somewhat smaller hemlock, was also lovely.
“In her memoir, Souvenirs,” she told Peter, “Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun quotes her little daughter, Julie, about the cypress trees of Italy. She was only seven. When she saw the cypress trees, Julie exclaimed, ‘Those trees demand silence.’ Élisabeth mentions in her memoir that she never forgot her daughter’s words because she had been so surprised that such a young child could think in that way.”
“Did you include that in Portrait?”
“No. I don’t think so. You always have to leave out so much in a historical novel. But I always felt for Julie. One of the things that drew me to Vigée-Le Brun was how much she loved and appreciated her only child.”
“Like you.”
“Of course.”
“Well, what do you think those hemlocks are saying?”
Kathryn looked at the feathery pair; she glanced at Peter, tall and straight. “I don’t know.”
PORTRAIT
WHILE I HAVE scarcely even begun to mature, for the sake of propriety, I am always escorted in my journey to the bric-a-brac shop kept by Mlle Boquet’s father, and from there she and I have excursions for drawing lessons supervised by M. Briard, who has rooms in the Louvre.
So much better to regard the unique features of faces other than my own! I know now that I want to work with portraits in earnest, not just types, but individuals. As for myself, I am happy almost to forget that I even have a face; when I am absorbed in drawing or painting it is easy to forget myself.
With heads bent, Mlle Boquet (who is beautiful) and I, at her home or mine, spend hours drawing with charcoal, side by side. On cloudy days by lamplight, we draw natural objects we collect or plaster casts replicated from the sculptures of great artists. How to render the illusion of depth on a flat surface is the question.
Mlle Boquet and I visit not only the collections of paintings within the Louvre but also in the Palais-Royal (especially the Italian masters of the Renaissance) and at the Luxembourg, which contains some of Rubens’s great paintings. Nurse carries a picnic basket for us—the food, especially the hard sausage, is so very delicious—so that our pursuit of art, both regarding it and our own drawing and painting, is seldom interrupted. We eat when we are tired and hungry and then we talk and talk about what we have observed.
I consider my friend wonderfully talented; of myself I must say that my progress is so rapid that now I am being discussed among the artists of Paris, and the famous painter Joseph Vernet has made it his business to become acquainted with me and to encourage and advise me. Many of the artists, as well as intellectuals, knew my father.
I am especially grateful to know the Abbé Arnault, a member of the French Academy, for from him I am learning how to speak of all the sister arts, as well as of painting. He insists that I read great literature (not novels, of course). From this learned mentor I garner a vocabulary I would not otherwise possess, and more important, a way of seeing and understanding that is imaginative and aesthetic in relat
ion to the other arts. I learn how to recognize moments of greatness in poetry and in drama almost as surely as I learned from my father the hallmarks of excellence in painting.
But it is in conversation with Mlle Boquet, over our picnic basket, that I feel most free, and I can integrate what I learn from my elders with my own nature. I am passionately devoted to Mlle Boquet because we share the same passion. We are connected at the core of our beings. She is fifteen and I am only fourteen, but we are perfect friends, and we share every idea. To talk with a congenial soul is surely one of the great pleasures in life: to have a dear friend! I do not long for any more. She is complete and perfect.
We also practice our art at home, individually. She has her father to encourage her, and my mother is unfailingly enthusiastic about my progress and the new acquaintances I am making in the salon world of Paris, sheerly because of my work.
ONE DAY WHEN I AM WORKING AT HOME, I try to render my mother’s nose, but I cannot quite make it right. I am looking in our glass to inspect my own nose, hoping that comparing and contrasting will enlighten me. My nose has been my best feature, but I realize that my nose has become more attractive than it used to be. I look again. To my surprise, each of my features has improved! They seem actually to have moved about, as though my head had been modeled in soft clay and the sculptor had had a second, better idea. So surprised and pleased am I that I do not look at my reflection again, lest my improvement has been an illusion.
I realize that transformation must be gradual, if it is occurring at all, and I think change can best be tracked by examining my reflection at somewhat wide-spaced intervals, but regularly. I want to be scientific! I hit upon the idea of the Sabbath as being a time to check my physiognomy. Perhaps I may be able to join the tribe of the beautiful!
The Sabbath is the day my mother and I take special pleasure in being together. Mlle Boquet says she does not experience music as my mother and I do. Kneeling with my mother, we are invariably transported by the sacred music. And I pray ardently and privately for transformation, directly to God the Father, the Creator of All Beauty.
Perhaps it is the low notes of the organ that rearrange my face! I feel their powerful effect inside my body, a feeling of ecstasy, which I now think of as corporeal joy. I almost feel that I could leap up from the kneeler and continue to be propelled upward, to the top of the vaulted ceiling of Saint Eustache.
After my mother and I return from Mass, I allow myself to glance into the glass above her dressing table. Only then! (I abstain from practicing my art by looking at myself; at home, I use my mother or brother, whom I so much enjoy looking at anyway, as my models.) In my own features, each week I think I see something of my mother’s beauty. Or is it only a miraculous residue within the glass itself of her image? I think I see something new and almost pretty in my own countenance trying to shine out. Nearly every Sunday some aspect of my face has improved, or the whole configuration has become slightly but visibly more harmonious.
I notice that as my appearance improves, so do my confidence and my ability to charm in conversation. My ability to access wit and quickness increase till one day I think I am speaking with the aptness, alacrity, and ease of my father. “You remind me of your father,” my mother remarks immediately. “You have almost the same modest curl at the end of your sentences that was so delightful in his speech. Something self-effacing and modest, for all its perfect aptness.”
The flesh of my body as well as my face begins also to feel different: more rounded. Within my clothes, softness develops. When I put the palm of my hand and my fingers against my forehead, its bone seems gracefully curved. Against the inside of my eyelids, when I lower them, comes a slight pressure like luminosity (I fancy), and I am glad because my father often said a beautiful eye is made more beautiful when it projects a sheen of intelligence. Not every man of his day would have voiced that notion.
One day when I arrive a little late, and therefore flushed, at the door of my friend in the Rue Saint Denis, Mlle Boquet grabs my hand before I can take off my coat and leads me to the pier glass.
“Look at us,” she says. “Now people will say you rival me in beauty.”
And I see that it is true. In her objective mirror, because I am trying to be an impartial judge, I cannot say whose glowing face is to be preferred.
“I am completely changed,” I say, but with as much wonder as vanity.
HUBERT ROBERT, WHO HAS BEEN in the presence of the king, has also taken an interest in my painting. My skill as a painter is bringing me many commissions despite my young age, which is most fortunate, for my dear father has left us nothing in the way of money. I have now painted the portrait of Count Orlov, a giant who was one of the assassins of Peter III, and also Count Shuvalov, who is about sixty, a charming, amiable man who enjoys the company of the best society, some of whom also engage me to paint their portraits. For Russians, they speak French remarkably well, but I have learned that French is spoken not only at court in Russia but in most of the capitals of Europe.
Because of my skill at painting, the foreign and some French notables include me at gatherings, a person otherwise of no consequence, and they do not condescend to me in the least, but always treat me with respect, despite my youth, as though I were their equal in every way. My mother is always with me, whatever the location of my work, so my purity is never impugned.
In addition to the well-connected Count Shuvalov, at the same time I also paint Mme Geoffrin, who is even more famous for her brilliant social life, which includes men of talent and discernment in the arts and in literature, as well as notable foreigners and the grandest members of the court.
I learn two truths from her. The first is that through dressing poorly it is entirely possible to look much older and less attractive than one really is. I guessed her to be a hundred, for she is bent and wears an iron-gray gown and a large unfashionable cap with great wings tied to her head with a black shawl knotted under her chin. But my mother tells me she is very far from one hundred.
The second lesson is that Mme Geoffrin has earned for herself a position of importance in society that no other woman occupies, though she has neither a good family, nor wealth, nor unusual talent. If such an achievement is possible without possessing particular intellectual or artistic gifts, it seems to me that if one did have talents one might surely win for oneself such a circle of friends.
Mme Geoffrin, because she had heard others speaking of my gifts, actually came to see me. It is very easy to like anyone who has a genuine enthusiasm for one’s work, so long as he or she does not become too demanding of one’s time, which belongs, after all, to the passion of work. But friendship is another worthy passion, and I can tell who is genuinely friendly and who is merely being pleasant. I like Mme Geoffrin, and I do my best in rendering her in pastels as interesting and somewhat more attractive than she actually is. She loves my portrait, and me. I can tell she would like to pinch my cheek.
My best portrait is that of my brother. One morning, as he is about to leave for his classes, his books bound by a leather strap that he swings up over his shoulder, he puts on his hat, opens the door, and looks back at me. “Stop!” I screech. “Stay exactly still!” and I pull out my book and sketch him rapidly. He loses nothing of his spontaneous brightness as I sketch him. It shifts only slightly to something a bit more mellow, perhaps less exuberant, but his intelligence, and freshness, and affection for his big sister who sketches him are all captured. Then I let him go, and I set about immediately to transform the sketch into a small oil portrait. I do not want to lose the joy, neither his nor my own. And I do not. It is there. Captured in oils: his bright glance from beneath his tricorne hat, the spontaneous turn of his body to say au revoir to me as he leaves for school.
These days, since my change, my mother is proud of my face and of the fresh, blooming appearance of my body, and she has begun to take me on walks on Sundays, after Mass, at the Tuileries. She is beautiful herself, and the two of us are often followed b
y admiring men. I learn how to discharge such admiration without giving insult, a skill, my mother says, that will keep me in favor throughout my career.
Though a young artist, I am paying our household expenses with my earnings as well as for my brother’s schooling, his clothing, his books, and all the items necessary for a young man of ability.
Nonetheless, it seems that my mother believes it would be greatly to our advantage to acquire new and more expensive lodgings and for her to remarry.
FOUNTAIN
THE FRONT DOOR was standing open when Kathryn returned home from the park. Through the glass storm door, she saw Royce, her housekeeper’s handsome son, who was vacuuming a rectangle of sunlight on the carpet. The rounded toes of Royce’s shoes stood on the petals of large flowers woven into the rug. When Marie and Royce were in her home, she felt happy, at home with herself in a special, cozy way.
She had forgotten that it was the day for Marie and Royce to come, but Marie had her own key for use when Ryn was away or forgot what day it was. Marie was leaning over to dust the Marie Antoinette replica furniture in the entry hall, but she didn’t look happy.
As Ryn and Marie hugged, Ryn asked, “What’s wrong, Marie?”
“I was in this room by myself and that man used to hang out with Humphrey came by, asking me where y’all at?”
Ryn felt her body turn cold. “What did you say?”
“I said y’all moved away and we working for the new owners.”
“What did he say?”
“He said how come the same furniture in this entry hall. And then I hollered Royce, and he come right down from mopping the bathroom upstairs, and I say, ‘I don’t think you met my son Royce. He all time working with me now.’ Soon as he saw a strong young man coming down the stairs, Jerry say, ‘Thanks, Marie,’ and he turn himself right around and go down the steps to the car.”
The Fountain of St. James Court; Or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman Page 14
