Bridal Chair (35 page)

She wanted to be done with crates and trunks, with packing and unpacking, with carting the debris of her past into an all-too-temporary present. She wished away all the impermanence of her episodic life. She was a mature woman, in the fourth decade of her life. She needed gravity, grounding, a home of her own.

“Why should I not have it?” she asked herself and fell into a dreamless sleep.

She went into the village the next day and wandered through the narrow streets, avoiding the stares of the housewives who looked down at her from the narrow windows of their pale pink stone houses. She nodded to shopkeepers who looked at her as though they were seeing a ghost. She had not been forgotten in the years that had passed. She made her way to the post office.

Yvette looked at her from behind the counter and gasped.

“Madame Ida, it is you? Can it be you?” Her voice broke and tears streaked her cheeks.

“Yes, It’s really me, Yvette,” Ida said and wiped her own eyes.

They looked hard at each other, assessing the changes that the years had wrought. Fine wrinkles creased Yvette’s plump and pleasant face, and her light brown hair was streaked with silver. She had gained weight—no, she was pregnant. Her simple gray smock draped the rise of her abdomen. She smiled shyly at Ida’s surprise.

“Yes. My baby will be born in two months’ time. And I have a son, two years old. Pierre. I named him for my first husband. I remarried a year after the war ended. Eduard owns a small welding shop in Avignon. He is a good man, a gentle man. We have built a good life together. I have not forgotten my Pierre. I mourn him still, but life goes on, Madame Ida. And we ourselves must go on.”

Ida nodded. “I too have learned that,” she said.

“And is your Monsieur Michel well?”

“He is well. But he is no longer my Monsieur Michel. Does it shock you to learn that we are divorced?”

“After the war, nothing shocks me,” Yvette replied.

She closed the post office, and arm in arm, the two friends strolled down the narrow sun-spangled lane, bonded by their shared memories of the months of raging war, the weeks and days of troubled uncertainty. Their lives had changed, but they had forged new beginnings. There was joy in their reunion. They wished each other well in their very different lives.

“You must come back to Gordes, Madame Ida,” Yvette said as they parted.

“Yes. Of course,” Ida agreed, but even as she and Yvette exchanged kisses, she knew that she would not return. She was done with revisiting the scenes of her past. It was time for her to build a future.

Ida returned to Paris imbued with a new certainty, a new determination. Her reflection in the mirror told her that her very expression had altered. Her once-soft girlish features were finely chiseled. Her eyes were grave beneath the perfect arches of her russet brows. There was a new seriousness in her demeanor. She emanated the quiet maturity of a confident and prosperous woman, in control of her life, in control of her future.

She examined her impeccably maintained accounts and ledgers and calculated how much she could comfortably spend on a house. It would not be a careless purchase. She was not a careless woman. She wandered through the city day after day, crossing the Seine, strolling down the Right Bank and veering back to the Left Bank. She explored broad boulevards and narrow lanes, looked up at turreted mansions, and glanced into the gardens of graceful town houses. She rejected neighborhoods that were too isolated and neighborhoods that were too busy. She knew exactly what she wanted.

She envisioned a stately home set amid flower beds and conifers, large enough to accommodate her father during his stays in Paris. Its spacious rooms would have high ceilings and wide windows that flooded them with light. There were such homes in postwar Paris. The fifties promised to be a decade of plenty.

She imagined herself a hostess in a well-appointed salon, its wood floor gleaming gold, its vases overflowing with fresh flowers from her own garden.

She sketched her imagined home. She told Géa that she wanted to live in the heart of Paris.

“Why?” he asked, toying with a tendril of her hair.

“Because that is the most beautiful part of our beautiful city,” she replied.

“And my beautiful Ida should live in the most beautiful part of her beautiful city,” he agreed and laughed. He thought her aspirations childish. And he thought them charming. To please her—and he was always anxious to please her—he accompanied her now and again as she visited properties on offer.

On a wintry afternoon, they went together to view a house that a hopeful agent was certain would interest her. They climbed the high marble steps of the beautiful seventeenth-century town house, and Ida paused at the entry and stared down at the view below. Couples strolled along the Pont Neuf and stopped to look down at the sun-streaked Seine. Two small boys stood at a fretted iron railing and tossed stones into the bright water. Ida imagined herself crossing the bridge at the twilight hour, imagined the river breeze cooling her cheeks. The very street address of the house, the Quai de l’Horloge
—
the Wharf of the Clock—intrigued her. She thought it prescient, symbolic. The year was ending; the minutes and hours completed their cycle. Her years of wandering had ended. The clock, the
horloge
, would be rewound and there would be a new beginning.

Even before she entered the house, she knew instinctively that it was her safe haven. Its rooms would be spacious, its windows wide, its walls impenetrable. Exhilarated, she followed the estate agent into the imposing mansion, and although she listened carefully to the recitation of advantages, no inducements were necessary. She stood in front of the magnificent fireplace and decided that she would hang
The
Bridal
Chair
just above it. She loved the sound of her stiletto heels as they tapped across the polished parquet floors. Mentally, she furnished each room, imagined the swathes of silken draperies on the wide windows. Quiet colors. Periwinkle blue and silver gray. She would rescue her mother’s heavy furniture from storage where it had miraculously survived the war. The love seat would be set beneath the bow window, the credenza against the far wall. This was the house that she would buy, the house that would be her home.

Still, Ida, as always a shrewd businesswoman, argued about the price and gained concessions. Renovations were required. The electrical system would have to be updated. Adjustments were offered, thousands of francs deducted. At last, agreement was reached. Holding the precious deed in her hand, Ida and Géa walked to the rear of the property that abutted the tranquil Place Dauphine.

“My father will love this view, this location,” she exulted.

“He does not have to love it. This will be your home, not Marc’s,” Géa reminded her.

“But this will be his home in Paris. He will have his very own apartment here. Perhaps on the second floor,” she replied. She looked up at the darkened windows as though envisioning Marc standing there, brush in hand, easel in place, studying the quiet street.

Géa said nothing. He understood wherever Ida lived, Marc would be a presence, just as she had a room in the Orgeval house and would surely have a room in any residence he might purchase on the Riviera. Always their separate homes would accommodate each other. They were too emotionally entwined to live totally apart.

“But you do like the house, don’t you, Géa?” she asked.

“It is a beautiful house,” he agreed. “But it is a bit too elegant for me.”

She looked up at him and knew then that they would never live together on the Quai de l’Horloge. They had reached a crossroads in their lives. Impulsively, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him. He held her close and loosened the scarf of royal blue silk that bound her bright hair so that it cascaded in silken sheaves about her shoulders. It was, he realized, the scarf that he had bought for her in Venice all those months ago. He draped it around her neck and touched her cheek. He noted, for the first time, the new sharpness of her features; her high cheekbones, burnished to a rose-gold hue by the wintry sun, were more defined, and her full lips formed a cupid’s bow. He held her hand as they walked to the Pont Neuf and looked down at their reflections in the clear water of the Seine, both of them sadly aware that they were parting ways forever.

* * *

Even before she decorated her own bedroom, Ida created an apartment for Marc in her new home, but his visits to the Quai de l’Horloge were infrequent. He disliked Orgeval, but he complained that Paris in the winter was grim and gray, and Paris in the spring was too crowded with tourists. He yearned for the Côte d’Azur, the warmth of its sun-bright days and the wondrous blue of the sea and sky that eased his eyes and animated his brush. He would visit Ida in Paris, but he wanted his own home in the south. He had been a wanderer for too many years.

“I am tired of being a gypsy,” he told Virginia. “This wandering Jew is ready to settle down.”

She nodded. It did not surprise her that Marc and Ida shared the same yearning. Ida had purchased a home. Marc would do the same.

* * *

Marc and Virginia left the Orgeval house without regret and rented a furnished house in Vence. Little David was happiest when he was at the seashore. Ida arrived for a visit and watched the small boy laugh as he darted excitedly into the sea and rushed back to Marc, pulling him into the surf.

Marc briefly submitted to his son’s demands. But after some minutes, he trudged wearily back to the beach, exhausted by his race along the surf. Seawater pearled the white tufts of the ear locks that framed his narrow face, and his glinting eyes matched the hue of the surging waves. He collapsed onto the striped canvas beach chair.

“I am too old to be a father to such an active child,” he told Ida ruefully.

“Was I such an active child?” she asked.

“I don’t remember,” he replied abruptly. “What a foolish question, Idotchka. You were a girl, a quiet girl. It is natural for a boy to be strong and boisterous.”

His gaze was riveted to David, who was tossing a gaily striped beach ball into the waves and rushing in after it, laughing exuberantly as it bobbed up and down.

Ida turned away. No, she had not been an active child. She had not chased rainbow-colored balls in the surf. She had been patient and quiescent, obediently posing for her father, frozen into stillness as his brush flew across his canvas. She shook her head. Foolish to think back. She was a grown woman, and her brother was a small boy whom she loved. They were siblings of different generations, she and David. They had been born to different mothers, but they were her father’s children both, vulnerable to his moods and expectations.

David dived beneath foam-fringed wavelets to retrieve his ball, held it triumphantly above his head, and beckoned to her. She laughed, sprang to her feet, and ran toward him.

“Throw the ball to me, David,” she cried and they raced through the sea, the small golden-haired boy and the graceful auburn-haired woman, their laughter mounting as their game grew wilder.

Marc and Virginia continued to search for a permanent home. Marc compared every property on offer with the homes that belonged to Picasso and Matisse. He would not settle for less. It was Ida who solved their problem.

“I’ve had a letter from my friend Claude Bourdet,” she said one afternoon. “He is selling Les Collines, the house he inherited from his mother. I am told that it is an elegant home and the grounds are majestic.”

She had chosen her words well.
Elegant. Majestic.
They triggered Marc’s interest.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“It’s on the Baou des Blancs, just off the road that goes from Vence into Saint-Jeannet.”

“But I don’t like Saint-Jeannet,” Virginia protested. “It’s so isolated, so rocky, and its poor fountain gives forth only a trickle, as though it can only manage to emit a few tears.”

Ida ignored her and turned to Marc. “I think we should see it. I am certain that we can get it for a very good price,” she said.

“Let’s have a look at it,” Marc agreed. “You don’t object to driving out there, do you, Virginia?”

“Would it matter if I did?” Her tone was light, but she did not smile. “As always, any suggestion from Ida is law.”

Ida shrugged. She and Virginia no longer pretended to friendship. They had become wary rivals, competing for Marc’s attention and approval. Ida inevitably held sway.

They did visit Les Collines the next day, driving up a cypress-lined driveway and circling past a clutch of eucalyptus trees toward the house. It was, as Ida had said, an elegant villa, dating back to the optimistic Belle Époque, but, Virginia noted with perverse satisfaction, it was in serious disrepair. It reeked of abandonment, its iron railing rusted and its yellow walls discolored by the moisture that leaked through the cracked roof of the terrace. Gleaming shards littered the shattered glass porch. The interior of the house disappointed. Every room required painting, and every window would have to be replaced. Water stains scarred and buckled the floors.

“This is a haunted house,” David shouted, darting from room to room. “I don’t want to live in a haunted house.” But his voice throbbed with excitement rather than fear.

The state of the house did not trouble Ida. It meant, she told them, that the price would be greatly reduced. Despite their new prosperity, she was always in search of a bargain and she delighted in organizing renovations. It had occurred to her that in another era, she might have studied architecture.

“The house has a history,” she told them.

Claude’s mother, Catherine Pozzi, had lived there with her lover Paul Valéry before the war. Claude, who had been active in the French resistance, had hidden in an outbuilding.

“That is where I shall stay,” Ida said as they examined his small self-contained unit.

Virginia stared at her. “Do you plan to live here with us should your father decide to buy Les Collines?” she asked.

Ida laughed. “Of course not. Don’t I have my house on the Quai de l’Horloge? But just as my father has an apartment there, I will have rooms here. I will visit, perhaps on weekends, perhaps on holidays. Do you object to that, Virginia?”

“Of course she doesn’t.” It was Marc who replied.

Virginia turned and went into the garden.

Marc roamed the house and lingered for more than an hour in the large room that Ida suggested could be converted into an ideal studio. Its huge window overlooked the swaying fronds of stately date palms. The fragrance of orange blossoms from the grove below permeated the air. Through the branches of the trees, the Mediterranean and the ancient walls of Vence were visible.

“I could paint wonderful landscapes, never moving from this window,” he murmured.

Ida smiled triumphantly.

They went outside and walked around, pausing at the rear of the property where the two majestic crags, Baou des Blancs and Baou des Noirs, stood vigil. Marc paced the property.

“I think that it is as large as Matisse’s home in Cimiez and perhaps even larger than the Spaniard’s house in Vallauris,” he said and smiled complacently at the thought that he would live on a grander scale than his fellow artists.

“And is that important?” Virginia asked irritably.

“Of course it is important that Chagall live as well Matisse and Picasso,” he replied. “It is decided. Chagall will buy this house.”

“Do you like this haunted house, Mama?” David asked Virginia as they left.

“What I like is of no importance,” she replied. “It has been ordained that we live here.”

* * *

Ida returned to Paris and arranged for the sale, bargaining good-naturedly with Claude Bourdet until her price was agreed upon. Within months, the decrepit house was beautifully renovated. Its facade was painted a gleaming white, and bright green shutters framed the windows. She divided Bella’s tables and sofas, her desks and tables rescued from storage, between her house on Quai de l’Horloge and Les Collines.

“You see,
Mamochka
lives on in both our homes,” she told Marc as she arranged Bella’s bibelots on a small end table, sweeping aside the framed photograph of David that Virginia had placed there.

Virginia smiled grimly. She waited until Ida left and then replaced the photograph.

Ida occasionally drove to Cimiez to visit Matisse. Matisse had sketched her when she was a small girl; he sketched her again during those lazy afternoons in Cimiez.

“I want to capture you as the woman you have become. I knew when you were a child that you would be beautiful,” he told her, “but I never realized how beautiful.”