Bridal Chair (25 page)

At Cranberry Lake, Bella and Marc listened to the hourly newscasts obsessively. As the Allied victories continued, the anxiety that had haunted them for so long abated. Marc returned to his sketching and painting, Bella to her writing. In the late afternoon, they abandoned themselves gratefully to the beauty of the landscape and took quiet walks along the shores of the shimmering lake. They walked slowly, in the gait peculiar to invalids recuperating after a long illness. They would be completely healed only when Paris was liberated and the Allies’ victory in Europe was a reality.

That reality burst joyously upon them on a balmy August day. They turned the radio on and heard exultant broadcasters announce that Allied troops had entered Paris. The strains of “La Marseillaise” emanated from every station, followed by breathless updates. French and American troops had smashed through to the heart of the city, receiving a tumultuous welcome. The German commander had surrendered. De Gaulle was en route to France.

Michel called to give them the latest news. Although he and Ida were separated, his connection to the Chagalls, in all its complexity, remained intact.

“Troyes is free. The Fighting French patriots are on the Île de la Cité. I am waiting for news from the Riviera, from Nice.” They heard the tension in his voice.

“I pray for your parents,” Bella said, and it occurred to Michel that this was the first time since his arrival in America that either Marc or Bella had mentioned his mother and father.

“As do I,” he said softly. This was no time for recriminations.

Glued to the radio, they listened to the news in Yiddish, in French, and in English. Ida called, breathless with excitement. She was hurrying to a party at the French consulate.

“Isn’t the news wonderful? Are you happy,
Maman
? Is it beautiful in the mountains on this beautiful day?” she asked.

“It is very beautiful. Your father and I are going for a walk. We want to tell the trees and the mountains the good news,” Bella assured her.

Ida smiled, relieved to hear the lilt in her mother’s voice, the whimsy of her words.

Marc and Bella walked through the forest; lifting their faces to the warmth and brilliance of the late autumn sun. Bella paused beneath the tallest of the birch trees and Marc held her close.

“You are so beautiful, more beautiful than the day I met you,” he said and he touched her face lightly, startled to find that her cheeks were wet with tears. “Ah, you are weeping with happiness,” he said and she did not contradict him.

“You know that your beauty is engraved on my heart,” he continued. “Before we left the city, I finally finished the painting of you that I began so many years ago. I called it
À Ma Femme –To My Wife
.’”

“I know.” Bella smiled. “I stole into your studio the night before we left and I saw it. The colors stopped my heart. Even the dull brown you used to paint the houses of our poor upside-down Vitebsk that you hid in a corner of the canvas. And the red divan. I tried to remember if I had ever posed for you on a red divan or if you had only imagined it.”

“But you know, Bella mine, my imagination is my reality,” he protested. “You realize, don’t you, that you will live forever in my heart and in my paintings?”

“Do you think I want to live forever?” she asked.

She lifted her hand to a low-hanging branch and plucked a leaf, which she twirled through her fingers. Its green matched that of her loose batiste blouse, a gift from Ida who knew how Bella loved the lightest of fabrics against her skin.

“It’s strange,” she said sadly, “that we Jews call our burial ground
Bet
Chaim
, the House of Life. What do you think that means, Marc?”

“I don’t know,” he replied harshly. Her sudden melancholy on this joyous day frightened him. He took the leaf from her and threaded it through her hair. Green became her. She had been wearing a green cape on the day they first met. He closed his eyes and saw her as she had appeared to him all those years ago, her delicate face flushed to a rosiness that matched that of the wildflowers she carried. Her girlish laughter had been musical, her step light as she skittered across the bridge and mischievously urged him to chase her.

But now his Bella, the beautiful woman who now walked beside him through the Adirondack woodland, was pale, slow of step, her gaze distant. Why, when Paris was free, was she descending yet again into a frightening melancholy? He feared for her; he feared for himself.

“It is getting cool,” he said, although it was a warm wind that brushed their faces. “Let’s go back to our room.”

“Yes. Of course. I want to do some work before dinner,” she agreed.

Slowly they made their way back. They walked with their heads down, avoiding the radiance of the declining sun as though they feared what its brilliant light might reveal. Bella paused and looked up at the gold-streaked sky across which violet-tinged clouds scudded.

“Such colors,” she murmured. “Such beauty.”

She took the leaf from her hair and tossed it away. They watched as it was wafted aloft by a vagrant wind and then continued on their way.

They decided, that night, that they would spend another week at Cranberry Lake, organizing their possessions. They would return to New York and stay there only for as long as it might take them to arrange for their return to Paris. Marc looked around their hotel room, cluttered with their clothing, their books, his painting paraphernalia and sketchbooks. Bella’s pale stockings hung over the back of a chair and her dressing table was littered with containers of powder, pads of rouge, lipsticks, and jars of her many face creams, some still sealed, others uncovered. He counted two combs, three hairbrushes. He reflected, with wry amusement, that Bella’s moods might vary but her vanity never waned.

He removed a suitcase from the closet and began to sort through his own drawers.

She remained seated at her desk and made no move to help him.

“What are you doing?” he asked irritably.

“I am organizing my manuscript,” she replied, shifting the piles of pages. “Here are drafts. Here are copies. I have put my final rewrite in this folder. Remember that.”

“You are wasting time,” he replied. “Leave it for when we return home. You should be working with me, helping me. Why this sudden concern with your papers?” he asked.

“I want you and Ida to know where everything is,” she answered calmly. “I am marking each folder. In case.”

“Foolishness,” he said angrily, but he did not tell her that her ominous words seared his heart, that his anger was fueled by his fear.
In
case
of
what?
It was a question he would not ask. He told himself that in the morning, her mood would improve and she would help him.

But the next morning, she felt too weak to leave her bed. She complained that her throat hurt, that her head ached. He brought her a cup of hot tea and assured her that she would soon feel better. The landlady offered her own tonic of honey and brandy, which Bella swallowed with difficulty.

She remained weak and listless throughout the day. She was no better by nightfall and moaned in her sleep. She awakened with a frightening suddenness, disturbed by dreams she could not remember. Marc bathed her burning forehead with cold cloths. He removed her sweat-soaked nightgown, dressed her in her sheer white robe, and spooned more of the tonic into her mouth. But her fever did not subside. Her eyes were glazed and she babbled incoherently.

“I see the smoke. The smoke from the trains. The smoke from chimneys.
Mamele
,
Tatele
, where are you? The future is written in the smoke. Marc, we must save our little Idotchka. Run, Marc, run, Idotchka, run!”

He knew that she was delirious, but he decided against calling Ida. She would be better soon, very soon. He remained at her bedside as she slept briefly and then sat upright. She raised and lowered her arms so that her wide white sleeves fluttered like wings and shouted, “We must leave this place. They hate us here because we are Jews. We must go back to Vitebsk. When does the boat leave for Vitebsk?”

Frightened, he summoned a taxi that sped to Tupper Lake where there was a Catholic hospital. Marc helped Bella to the admitting desk, and she looked up at the wooden crucifix that hung above it. A group of nuns huddled in a corner, fingering their rosary beads as they reviewed charts. Bella stared at their black garb, their snow-white wimples, the heavy gold crosses that dangled from their necks. Her eyes grew wild and she clung to Marc.

“They are crows, vultures, eaters of carrion. They will kill me because I am Jewish,” she moaned.

“No. No. They are nursing sisters. They will help you,” he said and took the form that one of them handed him. “See, they want only to know your name, your age, your religion.”

“Don’t tell them, don’t tell them,” she begged. “They must not know that I’m Jewish. I cannot stay here. I will not stay here. Take me back to the hotel. I must finish my book.”

She staggered to the door and he followed her. Reluctantly, he ordered the driver to return to Cranberry Lake.

He called Ida.

“She is sick, our Bella, very sick. Her fever is high, her words confused. I took her to Mercy General Hospital at Tupper Lake,” he said in a quivering voice, “but she would not stay. The nuns, the crucifixes on the walls, everything frightened her. What should I do, Idotchka?”

“Take her back to the hospital at once,” Ida said decisively. “She must be treated. I am leaving New York. I will meet you there. Everything will be all right,
Papochka
.”

She did not believe the words even as she spoke them. Hurriedly, she seized her coat, remembered to put all the cash in the apartment into her purse, and jumped into a cab, where she urged the driver to speed to Grand Central Station.

“Don’t worry about a ticket. I will pay it if we are stopped.”

They were not stopped. She thrust a handful of bills at him, not pausing to count them, glanced at her watch, and sped through the terminal. There was just enough time to catch a train for the Adirondacks. She tried to remember if the journey took ten hours or twelve, and she prayed that she would not be too late.

But she was. Exhausted, her heart pounding, wet to the bone from a torrential rain, she burst into the hospital. Marc stood in the entryway, peering out into the darkness, his pale face unshaven, his blue eyes dulled by misery. He fell into her arms.

“She is gone,” he sobbed. “My Bella, your
mamochka
, she is gone.” He drifted into Yiddish. “
Meine
kleine
Belloshka, nisht mit uns.
My little Bella, she is gone.”

Ida rocked him gently back and forth, his head pressed to her breast, her own grief delayed so that she could offer him the fullness of her solace.

It was a nun who told her, in the gentlest of voices, that it was a streptococcus infection that had killed her mother.

“We could have saved her if we had penicillin, but all the available penicillin is sent to military hospitals. I am so sorry. Would you like to see her?”

Ida nodded. She followed the nursing sister to the small, whitewashed room where Bella lay on a narrow bed. Her delicate face was blanched of all color and yet her expression was strangely serene. Ida wondered who had so carefully brushed her mother’s dark hair into a lustrous, jet-colored cap. She placed her hand on Bella’s and felt the rigidity that was slowly seeping into the long, slender fingers. She removed her mother’s plain gold wedding band and kissed the rosebud of a mouth, the cheek so pallid, so cold and clammy.

She looked up and saw the mark of a crucifix on the wall above the bed although the space itself was empty.

“The crucifix upset your mother so I removed it,” the nun explained gently.

“That was very kind of you. I want to thank you for all you did for her,” Ida said.

She fingered the death certificate that the nun handed her.

“If it was not for the war, we would have had the penicillin that could have saved her life,” the nursing sister repeated and crossed herself.

“Of course,” Ida said. “The war.”

The war that had pursued Bella from Paris to Gordes, from Marseilles to Portugal, and then across the Atlantic Ocean, had triumphed at last in the peaceful mountains of upstate New York.

* * *

Bella’s funeral in New York was held on a bright September day when the seasons of summer and autumn commingled and a gentle wind whistled through sunlit warmth. It was, Ida thought sadly, the kind of day her mother would have loved. Her heart was heavy with the knowledge that circumstances and history had made it impossible to fulfill their promise to Bella that she would be buried in France. The émigré community who came to the chapel watched a weeping Marc, supported by Ida and Michel, take his seat. His heartrending sobs punctuated the service, occasionally rising to a wail of despair.

“My Bella, my beautiful Bella has left me, has left this world,” he moaned.

Ida held him close, her arm about his shoulders, his head resting against her, as though he were a small boy in danger of falling. Like a solicitous mother, she wiped his tears with her own handkerchief. She and Michel stood beside him at the conclusion of the service as friends offered their condolences. She accepted kisses and embraces, nodded at their comforting words, while Marc stood immobile and silent, paralyzed by his grief.

Sheets draped the mirrors of the family apartment during the shiva, the seven days of mourning, and Marc also insisted that Ida turn all his paintings to the wall.

“We are only required to cover the mirrors,” she protested wearily.

“But my paintings are mirrors, reflections of the life we lived, my Bella and I.”

At the end of the week of mourning, the mirrors were uncovered, but the paintings were not turned back. He was not yet ready to surrender his grief. Ida’s own heart was heavy, laden with tears unshed. She could not weep. Her father had a monopoly on sorrow.

For weeks, he refused to answer the phone. It was Ida who acknowledged the mountain of condolence notes written in Russian and Yiddish, French and German, English and Hebrew. He ate very little and wandered through the apartment, his lips moving soundlessly. He was a prayerful mourner in the solitary synagogue of his grief.