Bridal Chair (46 page)

“Vava fears that it would be harmful for me to see David,” he said. “She worries that it will upset me.”

“But Vava is at Les Collines. She has a summer cold,” Ida reminded him. “Surely she would not object if you saw David purely by chance at my home.”

She understood the danger of her suggestion. She was inviting Marc into a complicity of deception. She waited. He was silent. At last he smiled; his blue eyes twinkled. He had the look of a schoolboy contemplating a mischievous prank.

“Of course. If I saw him purely by chance,” he said. “Why not?”

The next day, eight-year-old David, wearing the short pants of a child and the white shirt and tie of a man, perched nervously on a sofa beside Marc, dressed in a dark shirt and even darker tie, the uniform of a respectable and responsible father. Ida, her thick hair gathered into a bun, full-figured in a dress of forest green, sat across from them, her daughters on her lap, her own son beside her, and smiled benignly at her father and her brother. They were a family bonded in blood. Marc and David were restored to each other. It was natural, as the afternoon wore on, for Marc to open his sketchbook and show David the work that he was doing, explaining his choice of colors, the importance of perspective and texture. It was natural for him to take his son’s hand in his own and to sit beside him, with Piet resting against his knees, three generations of Chagalls enjoying a peaceful summer afternoon in Paris.

Ida wondered if he would mention David to Vava when he returned to Vence, if he would tell her that he had seen his son and that the meeting had filled him with joy rather than with pain. She did not think so, but it did not matter. She had accomplished what she had set out to do.

Weeks later, Marc wrote to tell her that he had settled an allowance on David. He understood that Virginia’s situation was difficult. Charles Leirens was ill and her resources were limited. He did not pity her, he said. She had been the architect of her own misfortune, but David was his son and he would provide for him. The boy would spend his holidays at Les Collines.

Ida wondered how Vava had reacted to such an arrangement, but Marc did not mention his wife except to report that she had recovered from her summer cold.

Ida drifted into a time of contentment. She was a devoted wife and mother, a gracious hostess, and her father’s diligent representative. There were frequent trips to Paris with Franz where they worked together on his study of Marc’s work. Marc occasionally joined them there, but Vava was rarely with him. Vague excuses were offered. She was not well. She had obligations in Vence. Her brother was visiting. Ida dutifully expressed regret, but she acknowledged her relief at Vava’s absence.

She was, however, infuriated when Vava reproved her for accepting what she considered to be an insufficient sum for the sale of a group of lithographs.

“My husband and I are disappointed. You underestimated the value of his work,” Vava wrote.

“The milliner, the sales lady of hats, is now an authority on art,” Ida fumed to Franz.

“Ignore her,” Franz advised. “You are your father’s representative.”

She did not answer Vava’s letter but instead sent her father photos of her children at play. He did not acknowledge receiving them, and she understood that Vava had not passed them on to him. She said nothing. There was, after all, nothing to say.

Ida’s family spent the month of July on the Riviera so that they might jointly celebrate Piet’s birthday and Vava and Marc’s anniversary. As always, they stayed at their Toulon villa, but the celebration meal was to be held at Les Collines. Ida had purchased an intricately tatted white lace shawl for Vava and a leather portfolio for her father’s lithographs. They arrived at the house laden with gifts and delicacies. Marc was still at work in his studio and Vava was resting. The children ran down to the orchard. They delighted in the citrus trees. Oranges and lemons did not grow in Switzerland’s colder clime.

Ida and Franz wandered into the suite at Les Collines that she still considered her own. She had left her possessions in place there even after her marriage. They granted her provenance of a kind in her father’s home.

She opened the door and gasped in disbelief. The room was bare; every trace of her presence was eradicated. The scent of tobacco smoke lingered in the air. She opened the closet where she stored the clothing she occasionally wore at Les Collines. Trousers, blazers, and a man’s white linen suit had displaced her dresses and skirts. She opened the drawers and found that her nightclothes and undergarments, her scarves and sweaters, were gone. In their stead were men’s singlets and shorts, striped pajamas, and an assortment of monogrammed linen handkerchiefs.

She gripped Franz’s arm, tears streaking her cheeks, and together they hurried into the house where Vava, immaculate in a dress of pale green linen, her shining dark hair arranged in a smooth chignon, was arranging flowers for the table.

“I have just been to my apartment,” Ida said angrily.

“Your apartment?” Vava raised her eyebrows. “But you no longer live at Les Collines. I cannot think of why you should think you have an apartment here.”

“I have always had rooms in my father’s house. You know that. My closets and drawers are full of the clothing of a strange man.”

“Hardly a strange man. My brother Michel uses that room when he stays here. And of course he keeps his own things in the closet and drawers that are no longer your closets and drawers. You have a home of your own. Several homes, actually.” Vava smiled her catlike smile. “It amazes me that one family should need so many homes,” she added. “Nor can I understand why you, who have so many homes, would lay claim to rooms in my house.”

“My father’s house,” Ida corrected her.

“I am your father’s wife.” Vava’s tone was very calm, her intent clear. “So Les Collines is my house. As for your things, I have packed them carefully. Please take them with you when you leave.”

She turned away and left the room as Ida, hot with fury, struggled to find the words that expressed her anger. Franz placed a restraining hand on her shoulder.

“Say nothing,” he advised sadly. “What’s done is done.”

She nodded. She would not allow her confrontation with Vava to ruin her children’s day. She smiled at her son and allowed him to pull her onto the terrace.

She watched as Marc, looking like a disheveled, aging elf, romped with her children. His white hair was askew, his blue eyes glittered, and his painter’s smock flared behind him as he raced after them in the citrus orchard. He sparred with Piet in a mock duel, using olive tree branches as swords.

The day passed pleasantly. Guests arrived. The birthday cakes were brought out to applause and admiration. Everyone sang happy birthday to Piet.

“Four years old. Can you believe that he is four years old?” Ida asked Franz.

He nodded. The years of their happiness had flown by on wings of joy.

The adults lifted their glasses in a toast to Marc and Vava.

“Happy anniversary,” they shouted.

“Five years. As long as that,” Franz said softly.

“It feels even longer,” Ida rejoined and looked swiftly around, relieved that her words had gone unheard. She would have to be careful, she reminded herself. Positions were altered. The rules had been changed.

She offered her own gifts, draping the white lace shawl over Vava’s shoulders.

“I thought of you as soon as I saw it,” she said. Her tone was even.

Vava fingered it tentatively and smiled her feline smile.

“It is quite lovely,” she said. “Not quite my sort of thing, but lovely.”

She slipped free of the shawl, which fell soundlessly to the ground.

“Are you tired, Marc?” Vava asked.

The guests scrambled to their feet. They understood that her question and his slow nod of acquiescence was an invitation to leave.

Ida kissed her father good-bye. The children hugged him and they hurried to their car. The maid rushed after them.

“Madame Ida. Madame Ida, you must wait. Madame Chagall is sending your trunk to you,” she called breathlessly.

The gardener trudged down the path, laboring under the weight of Vava’s black trunk that contained the remnants of Ida’s life at Les Collines. Ida looked back. The terrace was deserted and the white lace shawl she had selected so carefully lay across the red slate floor.

At home in Basel, Ida carefully considered her position. She determined that she would continue to represent her father and that she would treat Vava with cautious courtesy. A cold peace was in place.

Vava now dealt with all correspondence that came to Les Collines. She wrote replies to requests that had once been referred to Ida, patently unapologetic about the role she had appropriated.

“I am the guardian of my husband’s privacy,” she told Ida Bourdet. “I will allow nothing to disturb him. He gets letters from vultures, carrions who will devour his talent. Letters come from the Jewish
shnorrers
in Israel and in Russia pleading for money. When mail arrives from Russia or Israel, I just toss it away unopened.”

Ida Bourdet was shocked. She wondered if she had ever known the real Vava. The woman who so haughtily called herself Madame Chagall bore no resemblance to the self-effacing London milliner, the victimized refugee, who had sold her an unbecoming plum-colored cloche.

She and Claude curtailed their visits to Les Collines. Their absence was scarcely noted. Vava’s acquaintances, her brother Michel and his friends, were frequent visitors. They wandered through the orchards, reclined on the terrace, ate at Marc’s table, and profusely praised his new works. Their flattery pleased him. He offered them his choicest wines and beamed proudly as they toasted his talent and his generosity, Vava’s very white hand resting on his shoulder.

He was painting with new vigor and verve. Entranced by the Mediterranean landscape, he captured the elusive translucence of its light, the brilliant fecundity of its soil ablaze with flowers on verges and hillsides. He feverishly refreshed his palette, and in a riot of colors, he painted gay bouquets in graceful vases, soaring waves, lovers walking beneath floral canopies.

Ida, in Switzerland, replied to queries from his friends in Israel and Russia who asked why their letters went unanswered. They worried that their friend Moshe was not well. She reassured them as to his health, but she did not tell them that he no longer answered to the name Moshe, because his wife intensely disliked it. Vava wondered what the name Moshe ben Yechezkel had to do with her husband, Marc Chagall, the internationally famous French artist.

“We live in Paris, not in a shtetl. Would you have collectors call your father Moshe Siegel?” she asked Ida. “You know that the name Chagall, written in Hebrew script,
sin, gimel, lamed,
could also be read as Siegel. Moshe Siegel. A fine name for an artist.”

“An artist is judged by his work, not his name. Chaim is not a French name, but it does not seem to have prevented collectors like Mr. Barnes of Philadelphia and the Museum of Modern Art in New York from buying up the work of poor Chaim Soutine,” Ida replied drily.

Vava did not answer her. She did not care about Chaim Soutine, who had died during the war. She did not care about any of the artists of the École de Paris, a much diminished group. The only artist who concerned her was her husband, Marc Chagall. She was the conservator of his time, the protector of his sensibilities. She intercepted Yiddish journals and communications from Israel.

“He grows too upset when there is bad news from Israel. He cares too much. I do not know why he worries so much about events happening so far away. He lives in Vence, not in Jerusalem,” she told Ida.

She rejected a proposal that Marc illustrate a Haggadah for a prestigious publishing house. “My husband does not wish to be known as a Jewish painter,” she wrote. “He prefers universal, ecumenical themes such as his mural in the baptistery of the church in Plateau d’Assy.”

There was no need for her to disclose that she often visited that church, sometimes with her brother, sometimes alone, her face veiled, a white mantilla covering her smooth black hair.

Ida was angered when she learned that the commission for a Haggadah had been rejected.

“A Haggadah would be an excellent vehicle for my father and it would sell well. You should have consulted me,” she told Vava.

“Why? I understand my husband’s inclinations. I alone am responsible for his welfare, and I make certain that nothing interferes with the work that is most important to him, work that fully engages him,” she said dismissively.

“There is nothing you can tell me about his work. My life has been dedicated to his work,” Ida replied coldly.

She knew that Marc’s pace was formidable, every hour of his day crammed with discrete projects. He created stained glass panels and crafted fanciful ceramics. He painted tapestries that magically trapped light and color in the folds of fabric. But always he prioritized his paintings. He completed
Red
Roofs
, a painting that spoke to his Russian past and his French present, with Vitebsk and Notre Dame oddly neighbored in a single composition.

Ida in turn raced from one European city to another to exhibit, curate, and promote his work. A major exhibition in Paris forced her to leave her family for a protracted period.

“You know that I must help your
grandpère
,” she told her children when they protested. She sent them extravagant gifts, beautiful dolls for Bella and Meret, an electric train set for Piet, but she was heavyhearted because she knew that her gifts were no compensation for her absence. She called her children each evening.

“Are you coming home soon,
Maman
?”

The little girls’ voices were plaintive, Piet’s angry. Arguments about her duty to his
grandpère
did not sway him.

“Do you love him more than you love us?” he asked and hung up before she could reply.

It was just as well. She had no adequate answer to offer him.

The Paris exhibition closed, and she returned to Switzerland, knowing that her stay at home would be brief. An English retrospective loomed and she had given her word that she would be in London when it opened. She had no choice. Her presence was specifically mentioned in the contract.

“But after this trip, I will concentrate on the children,” she told Franz.

“Be careful not to make promises that you cannot keep,” he said.

She understood that he was becoming increasingly frustrated by her devotion to her father’s work.

The afternoon she was to leave for London, at an hour when she was already packed and dressed for the journey, Piet was sent home from his nursery school. He was very ill, the school nurse said severely. His face was flushed and his small body shook uncontrollably. Ida took his temperature and her heart sank. The thermometer reading was dangerously high. She called the doctor, who advised her to apply cold compresses, administer half an aspirin, and see that he rested.

She put him to bed in her dressing room, and he stared with glazed eyes up at the painting of
The
Bridal
Chair
that hung there.

“Why is there no one sitting on that chair,
Maman
?” he asked fretfully. “If it is a chair for a bride, why doesn’t she sit in it? Did she die before her wedding? Are the flowers for her funeral?”

His words pierced Ida to the core. He had seen that picture many times, had been told its title, but never before had he asked such a question. He was a fanciful child, prone to dark imaginings. The Angel of Death often flew through his dreams and he awakened in the night shouting that evil spirits lurked beneath his bed. Ida, so familiar with night terrors, had always known how to comfort him, but this feverish fantasy, fueled as it was by delirium, was different. She understood how the empty chair, shrouded in white, might frighten him. She had always loved the painting although it had frightened her often enough. She had no answer to offer him. Piet sat upright, his sweat-streaked body writhing, then sank back, closed his eyes, and fell into a frighteningly heavy sleep.

“Piet,” she said, but he did not stir. “Piet!” she shouted, but he remained immobile.

She rushed to the phone and called the doctor again. “My son is unconscious,” she shouted. “He will not wake up.”

The doctor arrived swiftly. He examined Piet without even removing his overcoat and sighed.

“It is influenza. It has been going around, Madame Meyer,” he said. “Many children have been infected.”

“But it’s not dangerous, is it?” Ida asked, glancing at her watch, her hand resting on her son’s brow, so hot to her touch that she thought her fingers might burn.

“Such an illness in a young child is always dangerous,” he replied gravely. “But I would not consider it life-threatening. He must be closely watched, of course. He must have plenty to drink, the medicine I prescribe administered regularly, sponge baths to lower the fever.”

“Of course,” she agreed. “Our au pair is extremely diligent, extremely capable.”

“You will not be here?” he asked, his voice laced with disapproval.

“I am expected in London,” she explained. “I have business obligations that cannot be canceled. His father will be at home this evening and our housekeeper will also be here. He will be well cared for.”

She did not tell him that there was a reception that very evening at the Leicester Gallery to which royalty had been invited, that she was scheduled to give an interview on the BBC the next morning, and a journalist for the
Times
in London had asked her to sit for a photograph for an article titled “The Artist’s Daughter and the Artist’s Work.” Such longstanding arrangements, involving so many people, could not be canceled. Her father’s reputation and her own were at stake. But none of that, she knew, would make any difference to this stern, very caring physician. It was a matter of indifference to him that the mother of his young, dangerously ill patient was the daughter of Marc Chagall.

“I would suggest you engage a nurse,” he said icily. “I will arrange it.”

“I should appreciate that.”

He shrugged. He did not need the appreciation of this fashionably dressed, beautifully coiffed woman who placed professional considerations above the comfort of her child. He slammed his black bag shut and left.

The nurse arrived within the hour. “I am Sister Marie Grace,” she announced.

She was stern-faced, a fringed white cap crowning her cropped gray hair, her uniform startlingly white. Ida took her up to Piet’s room. The small boy, newly awake, sat up in bed and stared at his mother and Sister Marie Grace. His eyes widened in fear, and his small hands were clenched into fists. Perspiration darkened his pale blue night shirt, and fever rouged his cheeks.

“A ghost. She is a ghost. She fell out of the painting.
Maman
, tell the horrible ghost to go away,” he shrieked.

“No, no, Piet. Don’t be foolish. This is a lovely nurse who has come to take care of you. Sister Marie Grace is here to help you get better,” Ida said soothingly. She knelt beside him, stroked his hair, the golden ringlets damp between her fingers. “You must calm yourself. You must get better. I want to see a healthy boy when I return from London.”

He clung to her, pressed his face against her bosom, his tears soaking her white silk blouse. “Don’t go,
Maman
. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave your Piet. I will be good. I will be excellent. Don’t go,
Maman
,” he wailed.

Her heart turned. Sister Marie Grace examined the medicine the pharmacy had delivered, set a pitcher of water on the bedside table, and lowered the window shades. She moved silently on her rubber-soled white shoes, a competent spectral presence.

“The child will be all right, madame,” she said softly to Ida. “I believe a car has arrived for you.”

Again Ida looked at her watch. Of course she had to leave. She could not miss her plane. “Be a brave boy,” she said to Piet, but he tightened his grasp, his hands tight about her neck.

“
Maman
.
Maman
.
Maman
.” The wail drifted into a moan, a mournful plea.

Gently, gently, she pried his fingers loose. Gently, gently, she kissed his burning cheeks, and too swiftly she left, closing the door softly behind her. There were instructions to be given to the housekeeper and to the au pair, a call to be placed to Franz at the Kunsthalle. He was not in the gallery, but she left a message with his secretary. Their son was ill, but a nurse had been engaged. Everything was organized. She would call Professor Meyer from London.

All swiftly accomplished, she handed her bag to the waiting driver, checked her briefcase, tossed a cape over her shoulders, and hurried into the car, her heart pounding. She looked up at the window as the car pulled away. Sister Marie Grace lifted her hand in a gentle wave meant to reassure. Ida was not reassured. Her abdomen contorted in the grip of a sudden cramp that did not subside until she reached her London hotel room.

Even before removing her cape, she called Franz. Piet was much better, he told her. His fever was down and Sister Marie Grace was remarkably competent. She was careful to keep Meret and Bella away from their brother.

“I should not have left them,” Ida said.

He hesitated. “Perhaps not,” he agreed.

His words fell like stones upon her heart. There was nothing more to be said. She hung up and shrugged out of her cape. Almost immediately, the phone rang. It was Marc, calling from Vence to remind her to buy the sable brushes that were sold only at an art supply shop in Soho. And Vava needed the herbal supplements from a health food store in Hampstead.

“She gets too many colds,” he said worriedly.

“I will take care of everything,” she assured him wearily and added, “I am concerned about Piet. He was running a high fever when I left.”

“Children recover very quickly,” Marc said. Piet’s illness did not interest him. “You won’t forget Vava’s vitamins,” he said again.

“I will remember,” she promised reluctantly. She hung up, seething at his indifference to Piet, his absurd concern for Vava.

She dressed carefully in a blue velvet gown for the reception at the Leicester Gallery where she would greet the royals who had come to pay homage to the daughter of Marc Chagall. Hanging her traveling clothes in the closet, she saw that Piet’s tears were imprinted on the burgundy silk of her blouse. She pressed it to her lips as if to taste her small son’s sorrow.