Bridal Chair (45 page)

“
Spasibo
,” he said, thanking her in Russian and she smiled.

“
Pozhaluysta
,” she replied.

In deference to Franz, the conversation at the table was in French, but it was clear that when Marc and Vava were alone, they spoke in Russian.

Vava served tea in glasses encased in polished silver holders, careful to place a platter with sugar cubes next to Marc.

Later in the evening, Marc and Ida conferred in the living room over arrangements with dealers and offers for paintings that had been made by collectors. Jewish themes were sought after by wealthy American Jewish collectors, and Marc’s works were much in demand.

They spoke of francs and dollars, of demanding sterling from one gallery, deutsche marks from another. Vava sat quietly, diligently darning socks. When her mending basket was empty, she sat back with her eyes closed as the talk of money hummed about her.

Franz and Ida left for Switzerland the next morning, but before they departed, Vava insisted that they sit down for a few minutes.

“Yes. You must do that,” Marc agreed.

Ida smiled. “It is a Russian custom,” she explained to Franz. “You sit before a journey so that you will have a safe return. Magical thinking of a kind. My mother sometimes insisted on it.”

“Vava knows and understands the old customs,” Marc said.

Obediently they sat.

“So what do you think of Valentina Brodsky?” Ida asked Franz as they drove back to Paris.

“It is important that she brings your father contentment,” he said carefully.

“Contentment, yes,” she agreed. “And dependence. She even spooned his egg out of the shell at breakfast. It would not surprise me if she offered to urinate for him.”

Franz laughed. Words that he might consider vulgar when spoken by others had an amusing charm when Ida uttered them.

Ida was excited when she discovered an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis that she knew would be ideal for her father when he had to spend time in Paris. Reluctantly, he agreed to see it and at once decided to buy it. The large, wide-windowed rooms were flooded with light and overlooked the Seine. The master bedroom overlooked a garden where lilacs were already in bloom. Ida led him to a smaller bedroom.

“It is just the right size for David,” she said daringly.

“Why do I need a room for David? Is he in my life? Do I want him in my life? He lives with the Englishwoman and her lying and deceitful husband, does he not?” he asked bitterly.

Ida did not answer. She understood that Marc was a prisoner of his own irrational hatred. She would wait for his anger to dissipate and for his longing for his son to emerge.

“You will do wonderful work here,
Papochka
,” she said.

“Perhaps. But Vava does not think I should interrupt my work by traveling back and forth to Paris. She worries that I will lose the continuity of my vision.”

“Vava is hardly an art critic,” Ida retorted. “She is at Les Collines to manage your household, not to serve as your mentor. You will come to Paris whenever it pleases you. And Vava will have her room here. She will keep house for you in Paris as she does at Les Collines.”

He was silent. After some minutes, he went over to the window and stared down at the Seine, where green waves, laced with froth, rippled downstream. He spoke without looking at Ida, his voice so soft she had to strain to hear him.

“Vava has told me that she wants to return to England. She has her business, her millinery shop that is suffering in her absence. She will remain in France, remain with me, only if we are married,” he said. “And she wants that marriage to take place very soon. In early July.”

“Married?” Ida repeated, her voice faint with shock and disbelief. “But,
Papochka
, you’ve known each other for only a few months. Surely it would be wise to wait until you are certain that such a marriage will be successful.”

She gripped the edge of a chair to steady herself against a sudden dizziness.
Marriage? Could her father really contemplate marriage with a woman he had known for a scarce few months?
The thought sickened her, but she willed herself to be calm as Marc continued, his voice firm.

“We are not children. She is, of course, some years younger than me, but that is not a problem.” His voice gathered strength. “She is a mature woman. She knows her own mind. She understands my feelings and I understand hers. This is the way many marriages were arranged in our Russia. A Jewish man and woman of the same background, each offering the other something important, agree to share their lives. Such marriages were successful more often than not.” He did not turn from the window. He did not look at Ida.

“All right. You offer her a home. Financial security. Your famous name. What does she offer you?” Ida asked.

“Sanity. I will go mad if she leaves and I remain alone in that house, which has too many rooms, too many memories. Can I live alone in this wonderful apartment that you have found? What will I do on my own here—wander all night from bed to bed? Vava takes care of me. She sees that I can work without interruption, that there is a meal on the table when I leave the studio. Idotchka, there is peace and order in the house that she keeps for me. She is a companion. When I talk, she listens. We speak in Russian, the language of our homeland. When I want quiet, she is silent. And she is beautiful. Sometimes I look at her and I think I am seeing your mother, my Bella. She is pure, as Bella was when she came to me. She has told me that her previous marriage was a marriage in name only. She is from a Jewish family, like Bella’s, a cultured family, a wealthy family. The Brodsky name was known throughout Russia. We are well matched. She has said so and I believe her. I cannot risk losing her. So I ask you, what do you think about my marrying Vava?”

Ida hesitated before answering. She knew he could not live alone. He might die of grief. His doctor had said as much. That was why she had brought Vava into his life after Virginia’s desertion, just as she had brought Virginia into his life after Bella’s death. How odd it was for a daughter to be her father’s procurer, she thought bitterly.

But Vava, unlike Virginia, had taken control. She was at once housekeeper and companion, nurse and hostess. As Ida had surmised, she had arrived at Les Collines with her own agenda and her own ambition. Ida recalled the questions she had asked and the swiftness with which she had asserted her dominance over the household and indeed over Marc himself. She had been attentive to their discussions of money because she craved financial security. She wanted recognition and respectability. She was no longer a young woman whose charms were her passport to survival. She was middle-aged, her past suspect, her future uncertain. Marriage to Marc Chagall afforded her all that she was desperate to achieve. She did not want to spend her life selling hats to imperious English women, carrying huge boxes out to their cars and pricking her fingers as she sewed flowers and veils onto her clever creations. Her small millinery shop could not give her the income necessary for the life she wanted to live. An alternative had presented itself and, like the opportunist she was and had been forced to be, she had seized it.

Ida acknowledged that this Valentina Brodsky had played her cards well. She had recognized Marc’s vulnerability, cultivated his dependence, and then issued her ultimatum. She was blackmailing him into marriage. That much was clear.

Ida paced the room, not looking at her father as she struggled to organize her thoughts. Wearily and with great reluctance, she recognized that such a marriage might actually be for the best. It would be good for Marc and good for Ida herself. She would be liberated from her constant concern for him. Vava had proven herself an accomplished caregiver, a talented companion. Her motives might be devious, but her performance was exemplary.

“So, Idotchka, what do you think of such a marriage?” he asked again.

She smiled. “What I think is of no importance. It is your life, your decision. If Vava makes you happy, then I too will be happy. If and when she becomes your wife, Franz and I will welcome her into our family.”

His shoulders quivered. He turned to face her and she held her arms out. Wordlessly he moved into her embrace.

“Shhh,
Papochka
. Everything will be all right. All will be well,” she murmured in Yiddish.

They stood in the empty room, locked in each other’s arms, as the dying sun bled into the Seine. They left, walking arm in arm, father and daughter supporting each other as the pealing bells of Notre Dame tolled the twilight hour.

* * *

It was decided that Marc and Vava would marry at the home of Ida and Claude Bourdet in Rambouillet. The Bourdets, delighted with the success of their match, insisted on arranging every aspect of the nuptials.

“I myself have seen that the banns were published,” Claude announced proudly.

“Banns? Why should banns be published when two Jews marry?” Ida asked.

“Vava asked me to see to publishing them and I obliged. Perhaps she thinks it is a French custom,” he replied.

“Perhaps,” Ida agreed, although the strangeness of the request troubled her. She wondered, yet again, if Vava, during the course of her wanderings, had shed her very inconvenient Jewishness. It was not a suspicion she would share with her father, who had written to his Yiddishist friends about his marriage.

“I am marrying a Jewish woman,” he had assured them. “A Russian Jewish woman like my Bella from a good Jewish family who will make me happy.”

Marc and Vava were married on the sun-drenched terrace of the Bourdets’ home. Regal in a loose chemise of golden linen, Bella’s pearls warm against her neck, Ida stood at her father’s side during the quiet ceremony. It pleased her that he wore the blue velvet jacket that had been her gift to him, chosen because it matched his eyes. She glanced at Vava, solemn and confident in a black silk dress that hugged her slender form. She held a single white orchid, a gift from her brother Michel. He was a slender man, his angular face as pale as the flower he had chosen, his dark eyes watchful. Vava’s jet-colored hair was brushed into a sleek and shining helmet and her lips were bared in a half smile. Her voice was barely audible as she uttered her vows. The officiant nodded, smiled, and pronounced Marc Chagall and Valentina Brodsky man and wife in accordance with the laws of France. Someone clapped very softly as a small girl tossed white rose petals into the air. Ida turned to her father.

“
Mazel
tov
,” she said, and he smiled.

“But my
mazel
is already
tov
,” he replied. “My luck is very good indeed.”

Ida kissed Vava on both cheeks. “Please make my father happy,” she murmured.

“But I do,” Vava rejoined and brushed a vagrant petal from Marc’s shoulder.

At the reception, Ida lifted her glass and smiled as Franz offered a toast that welcomed Vava into
la
famille
Chagall
.

The wedding cake was carried in, and Vava cut it and placed the first slice on a plate. Smiling, she fed it to Marc. The elderly bridegroom opened his mouth like an obedient child. He ate it with great appreciation, and when he was done, his bride deftly wiped away the small mustache of cream that had formed on his upper lip.

Ida leaned against Franz’s shoulder as they drove home.

“Don’t you think that Vava looked like a cat?” she asked sleepily. “A sleek black cat.”

“A very contented cat,” Franz agreed.

“Perhaps my father will paint her as one. He is partial to cats, you know.”

“Is he?” Franz asked. “Are you partial to cats? Perhaps we will keep one as a pet in our Basel house.”

“No. I don’t trust them. I think they are treacherous creatures. I have been told that they are jealous of infants,” Ida replied.

She thought of the large empty room in their Basel home that she had envisioned as a nursery. She had hung gossamer curtains on its windows and had imagined placing a crib of pale wood against the whitewashed wall where an infant, as yet unconceived and unborn, would surely sleep. She smiled at the thought that came unbidden.

“Ida, you must not worry. I believe that Vava will make your father happy,” Franz said. “As you make me happy.”

“Then I must believe as you believe.”

She closed her eyes and drifted into a light sleep, startled into wakefulness when they reached the Quai de l’Horloge.

Franz appeared to be right. It appeared that Marc and Vava were happy. Assurances of that happiness were scrawled across the postcards that arrived regularly at the Meyer home in Basel.

Marc wrote that they were enjoying a long and leisurely honeymoon. He loved Rome, loved guiding Vava through the museums and gardens, delighted in her delight as he explained the paintings and sculptures, as they rested in the Borghese Gardens and visited the Colosseum at sunset. He sent Ida a photograph of Vava standing before the Trevi Fountain, a loose fringed shawl draped over her shoulders, her black hair swept back and held in place with gleaming amber combs.

“My mother had such combs,” Ida recalled. “And she loved shawls. Oh they were beautiful, brightly colored, some of silk, some of wool.” She stared hard at the photo. “I wonder if Vava is channeling herself into my mother’s persona.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Franz replied, looking up from his newspaper. “I imagine she is simply dressing to please your father. Perhaps your mother did the same.”

“No. My mother pleased my father simply by being Bella,” Ida said. “Vava has to work at it.”

She had noted Vava’s tireless efforts to please Marc and had more than once seen her studying photographs of Bella. She tried to believe that her father’s new wife was concerned only with his contentment, but she could not overcome her feeling that there was a patent contrived falsity in Vava’s actions. It seemed to Ida that it was not enough for Vava that she had taken Bella’s place as Madame Chagall—she wanted to
be
Bella. Ida wondered bitterly if she would model for him dressed in white, or perhaps he would paint her dancing toward him in a gown of green velvet. The bitterness of the thought shamed her. She would have to learn to like Vava and, perhaps, even to trust her.

Marc sent Ida a page ripped from his drawing tablet on which he had sketched the Colosseum. She and Franz studied it carefully.

“It has a classic element that is very different from his previous work,” Franz, the scholarly art historian, observed.

She wondered if the shift in his technique would affect the sale of his work but immediately reassured herself. Her father’s art had always been protean, often surprising. His audience was faithful. He would, of course, continue to sell and sell well. Her own commissions from the sales of his paintings and drawings were mounting. Ever the shrewd businesswoman, she kept careful accounts and invested wisely, buying a small villa in Toulon.

“I would prefer to stay in Toulon when I visit my father. It will be more comfortable for us in our own place, don’t you think?” she asked Franz.

He agreed hesitantly, understanding that Ida did not want to be a guest in a home that would now be controlled by Vava. The parameters of her power were altered.

“It is an expensive undertaking,” he said mildly. “There is the Paris house and our home in Basel. Can you really afford the Toulon house?”

“Property is an investment,” she replied.

She did not add that because Franz’s life had always been safely anchored, he did not understand that owning property gave her a sense of security. Many homes meant many places of refuge, many seats of comfort. She had not forgotten her uneasy years of wandering, seeking refuge in the houses of other people. That long-ago life continued to shadow her bright present that grew even brighter when she became pregnant. She and Franz were delighted, and she immediately traveled to Les Collines to share the happy news with her father.

“I am going to be a mother,
Papochka
,” she said jubilantly. “You will have a grandchild.”

She danced toward him, giddy with joy, her hands held out, inviting him to dance the polka remembered from her childhood, when good news signaled an exuberant whirl about the room.

He ignored her outstretched hands.

“A grandfather,” Marc said.

He looked in the mirror, studied his face newly ruddied by the southern sun, thrust his fingers through his gray hair, still so thick and curly, as though to reassure himself that he looked too young to be a grandfather. She had always understood his ingrained vanity, his desire to appear younger than he was, intensified now because he was the husband of a much younger woman. But she had wanted him to set that vanity aside and to rejoice in the news she had brought him, for her sake as well as his own.

“That is good news,” he said at last. “You must take good care of yourself.”

“I will,” she assured him, hiding her disappointment although he could not notice it. He had already turned away. Vava had called to him from the garden, and he rarely kept Vava waiting.

Ida did take good care of herself. She blossomed in pregnancy. Her hair, now the color of burnished bronze, grew thicker. Her skin was aglow and her eyes glittered. She moved with an easy grace, sailing through the streets of Basel and Paris, proud of the gentle rise of her abdomen beneath the loose, rainbow-colored garments she favored, proud of the fullness of her breasts, enchanted with the realization that a life dwelled within her body. Each movement from the baby enthralled her.

“Feel,” she called to Franz, placing his hand on her body.

He touched her tenderly, smiled, and rested his head on the swell beneath which the unborn child stirred.

“Feel,” she commanded her father, but Marc turned away.

Pregnancy and birth had always filled him with discomfort.

Vava frowned. She thought Ida’s enthusiasm vulgar, her pregnancy repellent. She herself had never wanted children. They did not interest her. There was no room in her life or in her home for a child. She had no intention of ever welcoming David, Marc’s son, born to a woman who had not been his wife, into their home. She was relieved that Marc rarely mentioned him.

“The boy is
un
bâtard
,” she told her brother Michel. “He is nothing to me. I do not want him here.”

“You are right,” Michel agreed. “For many reasons.”

He and Vava smiled at each other, acknowledging the complicity that had protected them for so many years.

Piet Meyer was born in Zurich early in July, his Swiss citizenship guaranteed. He would never face the dangers that had confronted his mother and his maternal grandparents. The lusty, golden-haired baby boy met his famous grandfather when Ida took him to Vence to celebrate Vava and Marc’s first wedding anniversary. Only two weeks old, he did not open his eyes as Marc stroked his cheek and twisted a strand of the infant’s fine hair about his paint-stained finger.

“
Azoi
shein
, so beautiful,” he said in Yiddish, and a tear fell from his eye onto the sleeping child’s petal-soft pink cheek. “If only your mother could see her grandchild,” he said mournfully. “
Ach
, my Bella, my poor Bella.”

Vava moved swiftly across the room, her face tight and unsmiling, Bella’s silver teapot in her hand, Bella’s paisley scarf draped about her narrow shoulders.

“You must have some tea, Marc,” she said sternly. “You grow too tired.”

She did not look at Piet.

“Your father is working very hard,” she told Ida. “He is busy with his biblical etchings and the sketches of Paris.”

“No longer sketches,” Marc said, his attention diverted from the baby. “But paintings. Major paintings. Do you think we should sell them as a collection or each scene separately, Ida?”

“I will consult with the galleries and then we will decide what is best,” she replied.

She lifted Piet from his cot and pressed him to her breast, now engorged with her milk. She left swiftly, offering Marc a quick embrace. She and Vava nodded politely, but they did not kiss.

* * *

Months later, happily pregnant again, Ida returned to Paris, delighted with the knowledge that she carried twins. Piet was less than a year old and she thought it wonderful that her three children would grow up together, caring companions to each other, spared the loneliness of her own childhood.

She and Franz had planned their Paris stay as a vacation gift to themselves. He had research to complete and she wanted to see the gardens ablaze with spring flowers; she wanted to stare out of the window of the Quai de l’Horloge home at the shimmering white birch trees, their tender young leaves slowly unfurling. Marc had agreed to come to the city alone because Vava was overseeing renovations at Les Collines. She imagined strolling with her father across the sun-spangled bridges, free of what she perceived to be Vava’s subtly intrusive presence.

She especially looked forward to seeing the new works by emergent surrealist artists. Braque had invited Franz and herself to an informal reception at his own studio.

Undeterred by the hugeness of her pregnancy, ignoring the slight discomfort of all-too-familiar cramps, with Piet in the care of a sweet mademoiselle from a reputable agency, Ida and Franz took a cab to Braque’s address. The cluttered, smoke-filled studio was already crowded and abuzz with excited conversation. Beautiful Meret Oppenheim, a surrealist painter, approached Ida languidly and brushed her lips across her cheek. Picasso leapt forward to greet her, to study the enormous rise of her pregnancy and, with mischievous impudence, to press his paint-stained hand against her abdomen.

“But I must paint you just as you are,” he said. “Where will I find a model as beautiful as the daughter of Chagall, her body swollen with life?”

She laughed. “I believe you have lost that opportunity,
cher
maître
,” she said teasingly, because even as he spoke, she felt the onset of what she recognized to be serious and painful contractions. She clutched Franz’s hand, and within minutes, they were speeding to a maternity hospital.

“So much for their Swiss passports,” she told Franz jokingly as she was wheeled into the delivery room.

He smiled. Ida’s resilience never failed to amaze him.

Her labor was startlingly swift and she was overcome with joy when her dark-haired daughters, their features as delicate as those of their grandmother Bella, entered the world. She rested one on each breast, stroked the shining tendrils of their surprisingly thick hair, and murmured their names.

“You will be Bella,” she told the child on her left breast. “You have my mother’s name. Your grandmother. Your beautiful grandmother.”

It was, she realized, almost exactly ten years since Bella’s death, ten years crowded with loves and losses, season tumbling after season, deaths and births swirling in wild confluence. But now, at last, her mother had a namesake. Her soul could come to rest.

“And you,” she said to the infant on her right breast, “you will be Meret.”

She had always admired Meret Oppenheim, whose lips had been so soft upon her cheek only hours before her daughters were born. She had once asked her about her name, so singular and so mysterious.

“My parents named me for Meretlein, a free-spirited heroine in a German novel my mother had always loved. Somehow it became Meret,” the painter had explained.

“Such a beautiful name,” Ida had said, deciding at that moment that she would not allow her antipathy to Germany to mar her appreciation of a name so lyrical and lovely.

Meret. Bella. The names danced through her mind, a quartet of graceful syllables. These children, these newborn daughters, Ida decided, surely would be free spirits. Fanciful. Whimsical. Creative. Yes, all that. They and their brother would have the freedom that Ida, forever burdened with worry about her parents, had rarely known. Yes, she pledged silently, her children would have all that she herself had been denied.

“Do you like the names?” she asked Franz, who moved across the room to stand beside her.

“I love the names,” he said. “I love my daughters and I love their mother.”

A nursing sister entered and took the infants from her, and Franz sat beside her bed and held her hand as she drifted into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

Ida was suffused with the contentment she had sought for so many years. Her children, toddler Piet and his infant sisters, constantly delighted her. The fresh air of Switzerland invigorated them, and the Alpine winds rouged their plump cheeks. She brought them to Paris on a visit and Marc came to see them. Vava sent her regrets. She was ill. A summer cold.

Smiling, Marc dandled them on his knee. That smile infused her with courage.

“David will be visiting us tomorrow,” she told him.

“David?” he asked as though uttering the name of a vaguely remembered acquaintance.

“David,” she repeated. “Your son. My brother. I want him to meet my children, his nieces, his nephew.” She laughed. “How strange that our little David should be an uncle.”

“They are babies,” Marc said angrily. “They will not know him. And if they do not know him, they will never miss him.”

“But I miss him,” Ida said firmly. “He is part of me. I have kept him in my heart. As I believe you have.”

“Your heart is too big, Idotchka,” he replied.

Meret whimpered and she took the baby from him.

“As is yours,” she said, cradling her daughter, stroking Piet’s golden hair. “I know that David’s mother hurt you and I do not defend her. But David is blood of our blood, bone of our bone. Have we so much family left that we dare to lose this precious boy who you named for your brother?”

He went to the window and stared down at the Seine. A lone barge moved slowly through the silken green waters, disappearing from view as it sailed beneath the next bridge.
How
swiftly
things
disappeared, how swiftly people vanished
, Marc thought. His Bella was dead, but the small girl Ida had named for her chortled happily. Friends and relatives were no longer in his world, some killed by Hitler, some by Stalin. His brother David, the Dovidl of his Vitebsk childhood, lay in an untended grave. But Dovidl’s namesake, his son David, was alive. Ida was not wrong. David had been only six when Virginia left, and Marc had not seen him for two years, during which so much had happened. Virginia had married, he himself had married, Ida had become a mother, and friends had drifted in and out of their lives. But David had been a constant in his memory. He acknowledged that he had kept his son in his heart, never forgetting the sound of his laughter, the sharpness of his imagination, the sweetness of his shy smile, his wondrous response to music. He hesitated, turned from the window, spoke very slowly.