Bridal Chair (43 page)

Marc roamed the room, barely glancing at either woman. Ida would do battle for him. He relied on her. She was his protector, his advocate.

Ida fixed her gaze on Virginia.

“We trusted you, my father and I. And we trusted Charles Leirens. He came to my house to show us the wedding photos. His behavior was cruel, duplicitous. For how long has this affair between you been going on while you accepted my father’s largesse and he accepted my father’s hospitality?” Her tone was frigid, prosecutorial.

Marc broke in before Virginia could reply. He shook his fist at her and spat out his words, trembling with anger.

“Perhaps you and he were lovers back in America when he stayed with us at High Falls? Perhaps you were lovers even while he took those photographs of both of us together, those portraits of David? David, our son. Did you even think of our David, our Dovidl, when you lay in your lover’s arms?” he shouted.

“Our feelings for each other, Charles and mine, became clear only weeks ago. We were together for only two nights. And yes, of course, I thought of David. David is never far from my thoughts. He is always in my heart,” Virginia replied.

She willed herself to be calm, although she trembled in the face of Marc’s fury. He moved threateningly toward her, but Ida lifted a monitory hand.

“Shhh,
Papochka
,” she said softly, and he, like an obedient child, fell silent. She turned to Virginia.

“What happened over a few weeks can perhaps vanish over a few more weeks,” she suggested, her tone more conciliatory. “My father loves you in spite of what you have done. He can be reconciled to your error. He loves you and he needs you. And you know that I have always had great affection for you.”

“And you also need me,” Virginia said drily.

“And there is my brother, David, to be considered,” she continued.

“Your half brother. My son,” Virginia corrected her.

The phone rang. Ida left the room to answer it. Virginia went to the window and stared out at the Seine. She did not turn when Ida rejoined them.

“I am sorry, but I must leave,” Ida said. “I am needed at the gallery to cope with an urgent problem. Nothing that I can’t correct,” she assured Marc, who looked at her worriedly.

“Of course. My Ida can correct anything, cope with anything,” he said.

Virginia smiled grimly. She knew that he had expected Ida to solve their dilemma as efficiently as she solved curatorial problems. Perhaps he assumed that a solution was in place.

Ida held her hand out to Virginia. Virginia took it, surprised that Ida’s fingers were so warm when her own were as cold as ice.

“We will talk more, Virginia,” Ida said. “I will see you at the vernissage.”

“I don’t think there is much more to talk about,” Virginia said. “And considering all that has happened, I do not think that I can go to the vernissage.”

“But of course you will go,” Ida insisted. “How would we explain your absence?”

“You might tell the truth,” Virginia said.

* * *

In the end, she did go to the vernissage. She owed that much to Marc. The gallery was crowded. Marc’s sculptures and ceramics and the etchings for La Fontaine’s
Fables
were much admired. He himself exuded charm, delighting the viewers with anecdotes, delivering explanations of the more complicated pieces. He had created fanciful and complex creatures, cows that symbolized fecundity, goats wearing garlands of flowers, airborne lovers flying across platters or clinging to the handle of a cup.

An earnest young woman, her notebook open, asked breathlessly how his ideas came to him.

“I do not know,” he replied. “Marc Chagall is a wanderer in the wilderness of his own imagination.”

Ida was never far from his side. Radiant in a new gown of shimmering blue silk, her color high, her hair swept up and held in place by sparkling sapphire butterflies, she smiled happily, waved to new arrivals, urged him to join one group and then another. She occasionally motioned Virginia over and introduced her.

“My father’s very dear friend and companion,” she said, her voice warm and affectionate.

Virginia stared at her in wonderment. The Ida who had spoken to her so coldly and judged her so harshly now masqueraded as an affectionate friend. She was a chameleon, Virginia decided, a charismatic chameleon capable of magical transformations. Father and daughter alike were accomplished thespians on the stage of public opinion. They betrayed no hint of the personal upheaval that confronted them.

Virginia was relieved that Charles had not come to the vernissage. It had been agreed that she would retrieve her suitcase after the exhibition and then meet him.

Virginia and Marc returned to the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire together. Exhilarated by the success of the vernissage, Marc tossed his cloak onto the sofa in the salon, opened a bottle of brandy, and poured a tumbler for each of them, even as Virginia methodically packed her bag.

“To our future,” he said.

“What future?” she asked wearily.

“Our future together. Ah, Virginitchka, we have been through a difficult time, you and I. I made mistakes. You made mistakes, but that is in the past. I speak of all the years to come. Surely you will not turn away from the life I offer you and the children. I am among the most famous artists in France, equal to Picasso, equal to Matisse. Think of what that means to us, Virginia. The world is ours.”

“It means nothing to me,” she replied. “All that was important to me was your love. But that vanished. For a long time, I thought of myself as a widow, but how could I be your widow if I never became your wife? And always it was Ida who ruled our home and managed our household.”

“But now Ida has a new life with Franz. She will live in Switzerland and you and I and the children will be together at Les Collines. Won’t it please you to be in charge of our home?” He trained his beneficent engaging smile on her.

“It will make no difference to me,” she said, her voice firm, impervious to argument. “Les Collines is no longer my home. I am taking the children and leaving you. Our life together is over. I belong to Charles. I belong with Charles.”

He stared at her, his face a mask of disbelief.

“You do not know what you are saying.”

“I know exactly what I am saying.”

“But what of my son?” he cried. “I cannot live without my David.”

“You will see David as often as you like,” she replied calmly.

“You cannot take him. You will not take him.”

Tears streamed down his cheeks. The glass of brandy slipped from his trembling hand and fell to the floor.

“I can and I will.”

She turned then, valise in hand, and left the room that stank of liquor and misery.

Ida arranged to meet Virginia at the hotel the next day. They sat together in the drab lobby. Ida had changed from judge to supplicant.

“Please, please, stay with my father. He will break down if you leave. You know how dependent he is,” she said.

“Dependent on you. Never on me,” Virginia insisted. “I was simply a presence, a caretaker.”

“You were more than that. Think of what you will give up, Virginia. You were not his wife. He is not required to offer you any financial support. He has no legal obligation to support David. The law of France does not consider David his son. Do you want to return to a life of poverty? Have you forgotten how you lived before you met us? Think of your children if not of yourself.” She gripped Virginia’s wrists, stared hard at her, and then turned away.

Virginia was unmoved.

“Money is not important to me. I will take care of David. Charles will provide for us. Marc will see David as often as he wishes,” she said and wrested herself free from Ida’s grasp.

“We will see,” Ida said.

She too consulted a lawyer. She listened to his advice, made copious notes, and she and Virginia met again.

They sat side by side on a bench in the Tuileries gardens on a cold and gray afternoon. Ida’s cheeks were rouged by the thrust of the wind. Virginia was pale, her head bare, her hands ungloved. She lifted her eyes to the crescent of a pale sun that offered no warmth.

“Perhaps you will agree to a trial separation from my father,” Ida suggested. “I would be prepared to rent an apartment for you.”

Virginia shook her head.

“I will never live with Marc again. I must begin a new life, a life with Charles Leirens.”

“I see,” Ida said wearily.

She was resigned to defeat. She understood that Virginia’s decision was firm. She would have to create a new scenario for this new chapter in her father’s life and her own.

She spoke to Marc that night, her heart heavy, her voice solemn.

“It is over,
Papochka
. She is resolved and nothing we can do will dissuade her,” she said.

“But David, what will happen to David?” he asked, his voice quivering, his blue eyes awash with tears.

“The lawyer told me that you have no legal right to David. He is David McNeil, not David Chagall.”

Marc sank into a chair. “But he is my son. My Dovidl. Named for my brother,” he said plaintively.

Ida knelt before him, wrapped her arms about his trembling body, patted his head. She was, once more, the comforting mother to her newly bereft father.

“It will be all right,
Papochka
,” she said softly. “David will remain in your life. Virginia will allow you to be with him whenever it pleases you.”

He shook his head, beat his breast with clenched fists.

“Tell her to return to me,” he pleaded. “I cannot live alone.”

“She will not come back,
Papochka
, but you will not be alone,” Ida promised.

He would not be comforted. Despair weighted his limbs. He moved with difficulty.

Days later he returned to Les Collines unaccompanied. He wandered through the large house, sitting for long hours on David’s empty bed, barefoot and unshaven, a mourner draped in a dangerous and melancholy silence.

Ida understood that her father was incapable of living alone. Solitude oppressed him.

“He needs a woman,” she told Franz. “A companion, a housekeeper, someone who will care for him, see to his needs.”

“A consort,” Franz said drily. “I have never seen such a position advertised. How do you intend to find such a person?”

“I found Virginia, didn’t I?” she retorted.

He laughed. His Ida could do anything.

With studied casualness, she mentioned that her father might be interested in meeting an appropriate woman. Meanwhile, she found an apartment in Paris where he could live for part of the year. That, she decided, would lessen his sense of isolation. And it was important too, she thought, that both he and she have an ongoing relationship with David. To that end, she called Virginia and invited her to lunch.

They met in a small restaurant in the Place Dauphine, known for its very excellent and very expensive food. A vase of forsythia stood on the table. A solicitous waiter hovered. Ida found a stain on her spoon and sent it back. He bowed obsequiously and handed them the menus. He was accustomed to demanding women who ordered expensive lunches and even more expensive wines.

Ida and Virginia were oddly relaxed. Their war was over and all that remained was to establish the terms of their peace treaty.

Ida lifted her wineglass and proposed a toast. “To David,” she said.

“To David,” Virginia echoed.

It was clear that it was because of David that they were sharing a meal.

They sipped the wine slowly.

“I have bought my father an apartment near my own home where he can live for part of the year. It will make it easier for him to see David fairly often, that is, if you do not object.”

Ida chose her words carefully. She wanted Virginia to understand that she was making a request rather than issuing a demand.

“David is Marc’s son. He can see him as often as he wishes,” Virginia said.

She was relieved that Ida had finally accepted her departure from Marc’s life and was moving ahead. Established in his own apartment, Marc would no longer need his rooms at the Quai de l’Horloge. Ida and Franz would have complete privacy when they visited Paris. How swiftly and with what efficiency Ida had adjusted to this change in their lives. How clever Ida was. She would have her husband, her home, her generous commissions as Marc’s agent, and an even greater dominance over his life. Eventually, Virginia supposed, just as Ida had brought her into Marc’s New York home, she would bring another woman into his Paris apartment. Clever, resourceful Ida.

“Shall we share a parfait?” Ida asked.

“Of course,” Virginia agreed.

The waiter watched as the two very different women dipped their long spoons into the creamy desserts and ate with great concentration. They did not speak. He supposed that whatever had brought them together had been accomplished.

It did not surprise him that it was the auburn-haired woman in the tasteful black Chanel suit who paid the check. He watched as they shook hands at the door and went their separate ways down the windswept Place Dauphine. It amused him that they both walked briskly, their heads held high, and that neither of them turned back.

It was only a week later that Ida met her good friend Ida Bourdet at the very same restaurant. As the two Idas sipped their wine, Ida Bourdet smiled slyly.

“I have a surprise for you, but you will have to pay me a commission or, at the very least, offer me one of your father’s sketches,” she said.

“First reveal your surprise,” Ida replied. “It will have to be worthwhile. My father’s sketches do not come cheap.”

“Oh, it is very worthwhile,” her friend assured her. “I am certain that I have found exactly the right companion for your father. She is a very accomplished and sophisticated woman, quite beautiful, a Russian Jew. She lives in London, but I think she would not be averse to coming to France.”

Ida leaned forward, her interest piqued. She knew that the Bourdets’ connections stretched across continents and included an eclectic community of artists and intellectuals, businessmen, and government officials.

“And who is she?” Ida asked as she carefully buttered her croissant.

“Her name is Valentina Brodsky, but she prefers to be called Vava. She runs a millinery shop in Hampstead, a rather chic shop,” Ida Bourdet replied. “I met her when I went in to buy a hat. She is a divorcée, but her marriage was very brief and she has no contact with her former husband. Thus no complications,” Ida Bourdet said.

“So you bought a hat and acquired a friend. How like you. Was it a nice hat?” Ida asked mischievously.

“Actually I never wore it. It was a plum-colored cloche that suited me not at all. Claude hated it, but yes, Vava and I did become friends. Buying a hat takes time and invites conversation. After I had tried on ten different creations, I knew her life story and I must admit she knew mine. We liked each other. An instant friendship, if you will. I admired her courage and found her story moving.”

“Why do you admire her courage? And what is her story?”

“She was born in Kiev into the very wealthy and supposedly well-known Brodsky family. They were, she claims, considered to be Jewish aristocracy in imperial Russia. She was only thirteen when the Revolution decimated her family and their fortune. She and her brother Michel fled Russia. Somehow they reached Berlin. They were two penniless adolescents, entirely on their own, forced to scavenge for survival. And somehow she went to school in Germany and even completed her matriculation exam. It appears she and her brother became a cult of two, supporting each other both emotionally and financially. They had a talent for improvising and managed to live on very little. Vava might find a remaindered bolt of very good fabric, buy it for a song, and create an elegant and fashionable gown that she then sold at an impressive price. They haunted vintage shops where they bartered their tailoring skills for decent clothing. They were attractive and well-dressed, fluent in several languages, and so amusing that they were invited to fashionable parties and receptions and probably attended others uninvited.”

“Where I suppose the hors d’oeuvres became dinner and enough tarts and tea sandwiches could be thrust into their pockets for breakfast and lunch the next day,” Ida said knowingly.

She had seen such scavengers at gallery openings and cocktail parties, their once-expensive clothing frayed but mended, their worn shoes too highly polished. They edged stealthily toward the buffet, snatched drinks from the trays of passing waiters, and sipped them in the corner of the room. She often wished that she could fill a basket and simply offer it to them.

“Probably,” Ida Bourdet agreed. She herself had scrounged for food during the years of the German occupation, and she appreciated and applauded the survival skills of others.

“In any case,” she continued, “they finally left Berlin and came to Paris. Vava told me that her brother, who is homosexual, very sensibly took a lover who was a successful fashion designer. That gave them access to more expensive clothing, more invitations, more entrées into society, more steps up the ladder to a kind of respectability.”

“And she married for that respectability,” Ida surmised. She was intrigued. There was a pattern to the life of this unknown woman that curiously paralleled her own familial history. The flight from Russia, the exile to Berlin, the life in Paris—her story was not unlike that of the Chagalls. They too had lived on the fringes of established society, as strangers in strange new lands. Her father and this mysterious Vava might find much in common.

“Yes, she married,” Ida Bourdet continued. “But it was a marriage in name only. Her husband refused to consummate it and she remained a virgin. I believe they call that a
mariage
blanc
. Of course they divorced and Vava went to London, which is where I met her. She told me that she is interested in returning to France if she could find a suitable position.”

“And you think she might be an appropriate companion for my father?”

“I have an intuition that it would work out. And as Claude can tell you, my intuitions are usually correct.”

Ida was silent. She refilled her glass and considered all that her friend had said. Valentina Brodsky was indeed interesting. Like Marc, she spoke Russian, German, and French. She wondered if she spoke Yiddish. Probably not, she decided, but that would not matter. She would, of course, be familiar with the customs and cuisine of Russia, the mores of France, which was more important. And having lived in London, her English might be good enough to translate the correspondence from England, a task that Ida had begun to find onerous.

She nodded and smiled at Ida Bourdet.

“Yes. It may well work out. My father is partial to women from prestigious families. He may even recognize the Brodsky name. All right. Let us offer her that suitable position. Write to her and suggest that she come to Les Collines as the manager of the estate.”

She knew that such phrasing would be acceptable to a Russian émigré with pretensions to respectability. The word
housekeeper
would, of course, be anathema.

Vava Brodsky’s response was swift. She would assume the position for a trial period, perhaps of two or three months. It was a sacrifice for her to leave her thriving millinery shop, but she had always admired the work of Monsieur Chagall, especially his crucifixion paintings. She was making a personal sacrifice so that she might assist the great artist.

Ida frowned as she read the letter. Valentina Brodsky had transformed the acceptance of an offer of employment into an act of personal generosity. She was surely a shrewd woman, an agile manipulator and probably not without ambition. The lessons of her admittedly difficult life had been well learned. She showed the letter to Franz and asked if he did not think it odd that she mentioned only the crucifixion paintings out of all Marc’s work.

“But the crucifixions are wonderfully realized works,” Franz replied. “I myself study them again and again. Each of his Christs tells a different story, offers a different perspective. I think she sounds very suitable.”

He admitted to himself that he wanted Valentina Brodsky to take up residence at Les Collines so that Ida would curtail her journeys to France, cease obsessing about her father, and spend more time in Switzerland. He yearned to start a family. He also wanted to begin work on what he hoped would be his magnum opus—a comprehensive study of Marc’s work. Given his obligations as director of the Bern Kunsthalle, he needed Ida to assist him with the research. If this Russian woman could assume the management of Les Collines and, hopefully, of Marc’s life, Ida could concentrate on her life in Switzerland, her life with him.

Ida hesitated. She read the letter yet again. Valentina Brodsky’s stationery was embossed with her raised monogram. Her penmanship was graceful, strangely reminiscent of Bella’s. Ida supposed that she, like Bella, had been instructed by the tutors employed by their wealthy Jewish parents to master such elegant script. It was an essential mark of their status.

“All right,” Ida said at last. “I will ask her to come very soon. It is important that he have company. His doctor says that his heart is being affected by his depression. Let us hope that this Vava, as she prefers to be called, will be helpful to him.”

“A wise decision,
ma
chérie
,” Franz said and drew her close. How beautiful she was, his Ida. How wonderful it was that the long winter was over and springtime had come. Soon Ida would be free to concentrate on their life together, on his work, and on her own future.

Ida wrote a detailed letter to Valentina Brodsky, assuring her of a warm welcome and generous compensation, choosing her words carefully. But that night, for the first time in months, the familiar dream recurred. Once again, she raced down a country road, but now it was her father who outpaced her, and as she struggled to keep up with him, a veiled woman appeared and took his hand. Together they soared skyward while Ida stared after them, alone and abandoned.

“
Papochka
,” she shouted, her throat tight with terror.

She awakened to find Franz’s arms about her trembling body.

“It was only a dream,” he said softly.

“Of course. Only a dream,” she agreed and shivered although the room was very warm.

* * *

Valentina Brodsky arrived on the specified date and Ida met her at the Bourdet home. She was a petite woman. Her features were delicate and her dark hair, pulled sleekly back from her high pale forehead, gave her face an oriental cast. She wore an austerely cut navy blue dress, offset by a soft wool patterned scarf that Ida immediately identified as Liberty of London. She was, Ida knew instinctively, a woman whose understated classic clothing would always be fashioned from the finest fabrics. There were probably blouses of iridescent silk in the hues of an early spring garden in her worn black leather trunk, a relic of another era, probably scavenged from a secondhand shop and painstakingly refurbished. Elegant Vava would, of course, scorn the pathetic luggage of the refugee.

She extended a gloved hand to Ida, smiled thinly, and spoke very softly in French.

“I am pleased to accommodate you and your father, Madame Meyer,” she said.

“My father is looking forward to meeting you,” Ida replied.

She noted the pearl button on Vava’s white leather glove and wondered maliciously if the gloves concealed a roughness of skin caused by caustic cleaning soaps and the pricks of a milliner’s needle. She herself had been raised by a mother who had stressed the importance of soft and well-manicured hands.

“It is important to have the hands of a rabbi’s daughter who has never had to put a finger in cold water,” Bella had often cautioned, rubbing fragrant creams across Ida’s palms and her own. Ida was willing to wager that Valentina Brodsky did not have the hands of a rabbi’s daughter.

As she drove southward, Ida described the charms of Les Collines, and Vava occasionally interrupted her with casually phrased but penetrating questions.