Bridal Chair (29 page)

“All right,” he said at last. “We will have a son named David. Dovidl, my mother called my brother. I was in the room when he was born. I heard his first cry. My mother’s face was shining. Will your face be shining when you give birth to our son, Virginitchka?”

“I think it is shining now.” She pressed her lips to his mouth, his cheeks, his eyes.

* * *

They were reconciled and determined to forge a new beginning. Marc wanted to give up the Riverside Drive apartment. It was redolent with memories of Bella and too large for his diminished family. Michel had already left for France and Ida would also soon be working in Paris on his retrospective exhibition. He yearned for the peace of the countryside, a respite from the tumultuous streets of New York, and Virginia longed for a landscape similar to the gentle hills and green meadows of her Dorset girlhood. She found it in the Catskill region and in the village of High Falls where she discovered a small wooden house nestled beneath a beautiful catalpa tree. The front window looked out on a wild valley and the view from the kitchen was of an outcropping of rocks and a shallow ravine canopied by graceful willows.

“It’s perfect,” she exulted to Marc.

He agreed. He immediately laid claim to a rustic, much neglected cottage on the edge of the property. The walls could be knocked down and large windows installed.

“It’s like an
isba
, my Russian studio,” he enthused. “I will work there.”

He met with the estate agent and arranged to buy the house that very day. The acquisition of a new house always energized him. Overjoyed, brimming with plans, he told Ida of the purchase as soon as they returned to New York. He had not anticipated the ferocity of her rage.

“You should have consulted me before making such a decision. You entered into a contract never thinking of the consequences, as you did when you bought the Gordes house,” she said. She had not forgotten the purchase that had wiped out their savings and left them dependent on others for their visas and passage to New York.

“I do not need your approval. You do not control my life,” he retorted.

“But I still manage your affairs,” she reminded him. “Who makes deposits in the bank? Who pays the bills? Do you even know how much money you have or how much you will need to renovate this house? Of course, such mundane matters do not concern you.”

“You will like the house, Ida,” Virginia said softly.

Their confrontations frightened Virginia, but she had learned how to defuse the tension. She and Ida were uneasily balanced on the dangerous seesaw of Marc’s affections.

And Ida did like the house. She saw at once how it might be improved. Always authoritative, she contracted with carpenters, plumbers, and painters. She strode across the property, wearing slacks and a white men’s shirt, her bright hair tucked beneath a workman’s cap, holding a clipboard, twirling a pencil. She was in her element, in charge of a project, issuing directives, organizing a schedule. The local contractors laughed at her accent, spoke to each other of her beauty, agreed to the reductions in estimates she demanded, and accepted the deadlines she set.

Virginia gratefully conceded control to her. She understood that Marc and Ida were forever bound to each other even as Bella lived on in his mind and heart and in his work, materializing still on his canvases. In a new painting he called
Lovers
on
a
Bridge
, two figures stood together. One was clearly Marc himself, embraced by a dark-haired, dark-eyed Bella as he worked on a portrait of Virginia, who stood apart, the third lover, excluded from their closeness.

Virginia recognized the fierce ambition that consumed Ida and Marc. It was born, she thought forgivingly, of the deprivation and uncertainty they had endured for so many years in so many countries.

* * *

The gala Museum of Modern Art opening was attended by curators, artists, and writers, millionaire collectors and celebrities who anticipated becoming collectors. They flocked to East Fifty-Third Street to view the works of the artist whose life and work was vested with legendary drama. He was a hero who had not only eluded the Nazis, but had also triumphed over them by painting the Jewish world they had thought to destroy.

Marc made a triumphant entrance with Ida on his arm. It was thought best that Virginia not attend. The presence of his pregnant mistress would expose him to malicious gossip, and he was in search of respectability.

Expert costumiers, father and daughter had dressed for the cultural stage on which they would perform that evening. Ida was radiant in a gown of russet taffeta, the exact color of her hair, which she had sculpted into a coronet of braids, interwoven with narrow ribbons of gold. Marc wore a forest-green velvet jacket and the high-necked white shirt of a Russian troubadour. Virginia had combed his hair, taming the wild gray curls into smoother tufts that framed his elfin face. Their entrance was noted, their names whispered reverently.

“Brilliant Marc Chagall.” “Beautiful Ida Chagall.”

Ida radiated happiness. She smiled and answered questions. She spoke now in French, now in Russian, now in German, granting the editor of
Art
News
a brief interview in her charmingly accented English. Marc circled the room, staring at his own paintings as though seeing them for the first time. Many of them were works painted in Russia and during his early years in Paris when he was very young. He paused in front of a portrait titled
Pregnant
Woman
. Fela Cendrars, he remembered, the wife of a friend, had posed for it.

He wondered sadly why he had never painted Bella when she was pregnant with Ida. He would not paint Virginia either, he decided. It would be bad luck.

Virginia went to the retrospective alone some days later. She too studied the portrait of Fela Cendrars as she stroked the gentle rise of her pregnancy.

“Your father is a genius, David,” she whispered to her unborn child.

The exhibition received extravagant reviews, and then, as Ida had arranged, it moved on to the Art Institute of Chicago, where crowds lined South Michigan Avenue, waiting to be admitted to the gallery. Ida engaged in intricate negotiations with the Institute for the sale of
The
White
Crucifixion
and emerged triumphant. She had arranged for a price that far exceeded her own expectations.

Flushed with success, she returned to New York. She showed the contract to Marc and playfully fanned his face with the check.

“We are rich,” she exclaimed. “No more worries about money. Finally, finally.”

She was liberated from the role of the supplicant. Never again would she have to write letters pleading for help; never again would she or her father be in need.

“Yes. We are rich. Finally,” he echoed in delight.

He kissed her on both cheeks and danced her around the room in a rollicking musicless polka, their humming voices punctuated with laughter, step matching step. Virginia watched them in wonderment. Marc never danced with her as he danced with Ida. Their music was alien to her. Sighing, she rose from her seat and filled their glasses with the vodka she detested but that they downed with ease and pleasure.

They clinked the glasses.

“
L’chaim
,” Marc said. “To life.”

“To our good fortune,” Ida added.

Within the week, Ida prepared to leave for France. Marc’s success in New York and Chicago guaranteed a retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. She would lobby for it. She would arrange it.

On her last day in New York, she wandered through the Riverside Drive apartment and recalled all that had occurred during their time there. She felt her mother’s presence, Michel’s tenderness. She lingered in her father’s studio, inhaled the scent of linseed oil and turpentine, and studied the finished canvases and the works still in progress, some turned to the wall, some facing her. As always, Marc was involved in many projects, his working days divided between High Falls and New York. She glanced at his sketches of Virginia, his skillful charcoal drawings of her long, melancholy face, her high aristocratic cheekbones.

She realized that although she still missed her mother desperately, she was grateful for Virginia’s presence in her father’s life. It absolved her of responsibility and worry. She was grateful too that she would not be in America when Virginia’s child was born. She did not want to witness the beginning of her father’s second family.

She stood in the doorway of the bedroom that she and Michel had intermittently shared, sleeping beneath the painting of
The
Bridal
Chair
. She remembered how the light from the window had fallen across his avian face and how she had watched him as he slept. There had been other times when she had awakened to find his eyes upon her. They had been compassionate bedfellows,
amis
in the end, rather than the
amoureux
they had been in the beginning.

But then, of course, she told herself, to all things there are beginnings and endings, seasons for all of life. She sighed and removed the painting from the wall. It would have to be carefully crated for its return journey to Paris. Her smile was bittersweet. Her marriage was over, but her father’s wedding gift endured.

“
Adieu
,” she whispered to the silent rooms. “
Adieu
,” she repeated silently to herself.

Her life in New York had ended. She would carry her memories home, home to Paris, to a new beginning. She slammed the door behind her, hugged the heavy painting, and hurried away.

That transatlantic crossing was the first vacation of Ida’s life. Alone in her stateroom, she gazed for hours through the porthole at the endless ocean.

She walked the promenade deck each morning, her bright hair tied back with a gossamer, rainbow-colored scarf, the salt-tinged wind ruddying her face. Afterward, she sat on a deck chair, a plaid woolen blanket draped over her knees, and reviewed the correspondence from the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne and Pierre Matisse’s memo listing his own preferences.

“Perhaps
Homage
to
Apollinaire
, perhaps
Praying
Jew
. But, of course, the decision rests with you,” Pierre had written. His words, Ida realized, were a testimony to her knowledge and her ability to gauge the mood of the complex and competitive art world. Even Marc had grudgingly granted her a new respect for her acumen. He acknowledged, however reluctantly, that she was as insightful a critic of his work as Bella had been and a much shrewder manager. Virginia McNeil was carrying his child, but Ida knew that her role in her father’s life was secure.

Seated at the captain’s table, wearing one or another of her stylish new gem-colored gowns, she was known only as Mademoiselle Ida, a gay and intriguing young woman who told amusing stories about the art worlds of New York and Paris. All conversations with other passengers were casual. There was talk of the new Broadway musicals, amiable arguments about whether
Brigadoon
was superior to
Annie
Get
Your
Gun
. The postwar world was intent on replacing the sad songs and dark tragedies of the war years with the lighthearted music and gentle stories of the new peace. An enduring peace. They assured themselves that the new United Nations would solve all future international conflicts. They had entered an age of reason.

She slept easily, dreamlessly, throughout the voyage, cradled in the gently rocking womb of the huge ship, her porthole open so that the ocean breeze brushed her face. But on the last night at sea, she was lost in a dream in which she walked slowly down a lavender-scented path, ribboned with vividly colored flowers that bent their heads toward her in friendly greeting. She paused beside a rose bush heavy with full-petaled white blossoms that matched those of the bouquet that rested on the bridal chair in her father’s painting. A single flower fluttered to the ground, and she plucked it up and held it to her face, inhaling its rich fragrance. Smiling, she felt herself soar, not in flight, but in rapture. She was still smiling when the ship’s strident horn invaded her reverie and thrust her into sudden wakefulness.

Disoriented, she looked around her stateroom, glancing in puzzlement at the steamer trunk and mystified by the crate that contained
The
Bridal
Chair
in place against the wall of her oak-paneled stateroom. She lifted her eyes to the porthole and saw a low-flying gull winging its way daringly across the upper deck.

Her confusion lifted. She realized at once where she was and how very close she was to her beloved France.

She sprang up and, still barefoot, she stared out at the brightness of the new dawn, her heart pounding with excitement. The ship was approaching the shore, sailing smoothly through French waters. They would reach Le Havre before noon. Soon, very soon, she would be in Paris, walking down the boulevards of her girlhood and through the gardens of her dreams.

* * *

It was late evening when she reached her small
pensione
in the Montmartre section of Paris. Overcome with exhaustion, she went to bed at once, leaving her window open to the scent of the early lilacs in the small garden. It was the aroma of her childhood, of the bouquets her mother carried home so tenderly throughout the early days of spring.

“I am in Paris,” she thought sleepily. “I am home.”

She did not draw the curtains and awakened the next morning to a room bathed in brilliant sunlight. She dressed quickly, eager to walk down the streets she knew so well. Her mother had once said that those who loved the City of Light had its scenes and scents engraved upon their memories. Bella had been right. Ida instinctively made the correct turns and walked down the boulevards she had once known so well, veering now and again into the charming side streets in search of a shop where she had bought fabric, a florist she had favored, the art supply store where she had purchased her own pastel chalks and her father’s sable brushes. Some were still there; others had been destroyed in the war.

The carcasses of rusting tanks marred the beauty of the flowering chestnut trees that lined the curbs and the wisteria studded with shy blue blossoms. The facades of elegant buildings were pockmarked by bullets. Graceful balconies had been shattered and splintered. The war had left her beloved city wounded and hollow, its beauty strangely lifeless.

She stepped aside as a group of schoolchildren, their book bags strapped to their backs, hurried past her. They were pale and thin, their uniforms faded. She noticed a boy limping by, wearing unmatched shoes, one brown, one black. Two small sisters held hands and carefully crossed the broad street with their shaven heads lowered. Dispirited, she wandered aimlessly, her early exhilaration now a darkening melancholy.

On the rue des Grands Augustins, she entered a small café and realized that she had, serendipitously, stepped into her own past. She recognized the small smoke-filled Le Catalan, which she had often visited with her father, perhaps because it was the favored haunt of Picasso, the painter Marc both envied and admired.

She stared at the tattered posters tacked to the dingy walls, the same posters that had intrigued her as a child. Toulouse-Lautrec’s dancers of the Folies Bergère, Daumier’s bonneted women, Gauguin’s naked South Sea beauties looked down at her, artifacts of a vanished world, another Paris.

She sat down at a small rectangular table at the rear of the café, ordered a coffee and a croissant, and looked across the room, stunned to see Picasso seated at his usual table with a very young woman whom Ida did not recognize.

The Spanish artist had not changed. His oversized bald head sat on a neck whose tendons were stretched to a dangerous tautness; his body was squat but muscular, the features of his weathered, bronzed face boldly sculpted. His lips were full and sensual, the nose bulbous and prominent.

Ida thought to cross the room and greet him but hesitated. He might not recognize her. She had been a young girl when he last saw her, a shy adolescent who moved obediently in her father’s shadow. And unlike Henri Matisse who had treated her to éclairs and sketched her, Picasso had ignored her. It was rumored that while women intrigued him, children bored him.

She was startled when he strode over to her table.

“It is Mademoiselle Chagall, is it not?” he said, taking both her hands in his own. “Welcome to Paris. Are you in the vanguard of our returning expatriate colleagues?” His gimlet-bright eyes studied her face, her figure. He kissed both her cheeks. “You are what I always knew you would become,” he said. “A beautiful woman.”

“
Merci,
Maître
,” she said and smiled, relieved to have her anonymity shattered, to be remembered and even admired on her first day in Paris.

He invited her to his table and introduced her to his companion.

“
Ma
amie, ma belle amie
,” he said proudly. “Françoise Gilot.”

Ida smiled at the beautiful, large-eyed young woman who nodded indifferently. It occurred to her that she and Françoise Gilot were of an age and she wondered why that should surprise her. Virginia McNeil, her father’s mistress, was also her contemporary, and she herself had had an affair with Itzik Feffer, a man as old as her father. Perhaps, like King David and the Shulamite woman, aging artists needed young women to warm their chilled and weakened bodies. She smiled at the absurdity of her own thought. There was nothing chilled or weakened about either Pablo Picasso or Marc Chagall or, for that matter, Itzik Feffer.

They sat in the dimly lit café drinking bitter coffee and shredding dry croissants into crumbs. Picasso spoke softly and sadly of the years of war and darkness. He had remained in occupied Paris, cursing Pétain and the Nazis and painting works so dark that he himself was frightened by their ominous imagery.

“But that is how an artist protests,” he said. “Our brushes, our palettes, and our canvases are our weapons. I painted my sadness, my despair. Your father would understand.”

Ida nodded in agreement. Pablo Picasso had his
Guernica
and Marc Chagall had his suffering Jews, his tortured Christ wrapped in a tattered prayer shawl.

“Yes,” she agreed. “He would understand.”

There were others, he told her, who had submitted to the Nazi regime, artists and intellectuals who had collaborated with the Vichy government. His face was dark with fury. He spoke of the museums and galleries that the Nazis had looted, of the works of art that were publicly destroyed outside the Jeu de Paume.

“My paintings and those of Miró and Max Ernst and yes, one or more Chagalls,” he said. “Your father was fortunate to have escaped to America,” he added. “I hope he and your mother are well.”

“My mother is dead.” Ida’s voice was barely audible.

Picasso sighed. “She was a beautiful woman, Bella Chagall,” he said. “Your father must be devastated.”

“Devastated,” she agreed. “He plans to return to Paris very soon,” she added and fell silent. She would not tell Picasso about the retrospective planned for the Musée d’Art Moderne. Artists were fiercely competitive, and Picasso might campaign for an exhibition of his own. She was once again navigating the tempestuous waters of the Paris art world, wary of betrayal and sabotage.

She rose to leave. Picasso again kissed her on both her cheeks. Françoise Gilot smiled coldly. Ida hurried down the rue des Grand Augustins, propelled by new urgency, an acute awareness of all that she had to do, of all the people she had to see. Her meeting with Picasso had intimated all that had transpired in her absence and all that she would have to learn. Her work in Paris was at a beginning.

* * *

She was in a frenzy of activity. She found a pleasant apartment on the north side of place Saint-Germain and hung
The
Bridal
Chair
above her bed. The painting was her anchor, the constant sentinel of her slumber. She smiled at the whimsical thought that her dream persona might one night float upward and, seated in that white-shrouded chair, lay claim to the bridal bouquet that rested there.

She placed her easel in front of the large front window, situating it at an angle as her father had taught her so that it caught the earliest light of the morning and the last rays of a lingering sunset, the hours she might scavenge for her own painting.

She began an earnest search for Marc’s engravings, illustrating Gogol’s
Dead
Souls
and La Fontaine’s
Fables
, which had vanished, as had so many works of art during the years of the war. Marc had resigned himself to their loss, but Ida remained tenacious, following clue after clue until she discovered them in the hands of the heirs to the estate of Ambroise Vollard, Marc’s representative. She reclaimed them and was stunned by the enormity of their valuation. Offers were made for their purchase, but she decided against making a sale until she consulted with Marc. She wrote him tantalizing letters, naming the sums at stake, urging him to come to Paris. His presence at the retrospective was important. Collectors would flock to the Musée, eager to meet the artist, and the fees for his work would skyrocket.

“Your friends are eager to see you. You will be the prince of Paris,” she added, aware that such an inducement would weigh heavily. It would confirm his image of himself as the reigning royal in the kingdom of art. “And of course, your presence will impact the prices we can ask for your work.” Marc might claim an indifference to material things, but she knew that money was always a magnet for him. “Virginia, who is so capable, will manage without you,” she added.

Still, his responses remained cautious. Excuses mounted. It would be too sad to be in Paris without Bella. He was working well, his time divided between New York and High Falls. Virginia took wonderful care of him. But of course, he missed Ida, missed his old friends.

“Have you told them about Virginia and that I am to become a father again?” he asked.

He was, Ida knew, still a son of Vitebsk, overly concerned with the approval of others.

It did not surprise her that he asked nothing about her own life, nor did he ask about Isaac Rosenfeld, Bella’s brother, and his family, who had survived the war. With Bella’s death, her extended family no longer existed for Marc Chagall. It was ironic, Ida thought, that her father mourned the Jewish people as an abstract entity, but individual Jews did not engage his sympathies. That recognition pained her, but then so many things about her father pained her.

“His genius does not excuse everything,” Michel had once said. His bitter words lingered in memory.

“I will not be like him,” she promised herself.

She met with Tériade, the distinguished Greek publisher, and was immediately enchanted by him. Over smoky glasses of Pernod at Les Deux Magots, they discussed the Gogol and La Fontaine engravings and the substantial sum his publishing house was prepared to offer for exclusive rights to their publication in a limited edition volume. Their conversation drifted to revelations about their own lives, his troubled marriage, her sad divorce, their shared loneliness. They left the café at an hour when the boulevard Saint-Michel was bathed in the gentle pastel hues of sunset. Young men holding wilting bouquets of flowers walked by them. Girls glanced at themselves in plate glass windows and smiled at their reflections. Couples, young and old, arms entwined, fingers interlaced, bottles of wine and baguettes tucked into dangling cloth bags, hurried through the gentle twilight toward lamp-lit rooms soon to be curtained in welcome darkness. The dark war years were over; the season of light and hope had arrived.