Commune of Women (16 page)

Even so, she remembers. This time, when she returned to
Quatre Vents
– that’s the name of the property,
Four Winds
– she thinks she may have gotten a small inkling of what Tante Collette perceived: how her whole life was washed in the flat white light off the Atlantic and moved by it, the way music moves to a metronome.

“You must keep the sea always in your heart,” she told Ondine on the summer of her fifteenth year, when she was struggling to birth her nascent feelings into poetry. “Once you’ve mastered the cadences of the sea, the spark of salt crystal, the coilings of the fog and the dirge of the wind, then poetry will live in you – and you in it.”

Not much has changed, really, since that long-ago summer. The house scarcely shows the passage of time. Its edges were rounded then, its stairs scooped into parabolas by generations of feet, its windows a hand-rolled waver of lustrous glass
semé
with sparks. And so they remain.

Only the garden seems to mourn Tante Collette’s passing. A ramshackle pergola of roses needs pruning; fruit trees haven’t seen a long-handled saw in several seasons; the walkways of hewn limestone are furred with long grass fanned across them by last winter’s heavy rains.

The fountain in the shape of Pan – Tante Collette called it her
fauntain
– splashes into a pool clogged with last autumn’s black, viscous leaves. Roses and
Vigne Vierge
lattice the music room windows.

The entire place – house, garden, orchard – holds a stillness that’s both serene and highly energized, as if a gong had been struck and even though its note has disintegrated past hearing, it still vibrates in the air. It’s like a sleeping princess awaiting a reviving kiss.

At ten, Ondine’s daydream was to live there, chaste and pure, to write and paint and sculpt. She imagined her sculpture stand out under the willow tree in summer and in the studio – the converted dairy – in winter. She envisioned laying out her chisels, files and mallets on the crude workbench and the stone, half roughed-out, sitting solidly in its ruff of dust and chips.

The place itself inspired such visions in Little ondine, with its framed photos, grainy and dreamlike, of Tante Collette’s friends, the
Nabis
, painting in her garden, or in smocks and berets, wielding hammer and chisel in the studio. These artists of the French Symbolist movement became Ondine’s friends, too, in the imaginary land of her childhood.

It seems impossible that Tante Collette’s life bridged theirs and Ondine’s. The artists of the
Nabi
are like the knights of some distant quest to Ondine – lost in time. It was Tante Collette’s father, really, who was of that generation and who made his reputation painting as a Symbolist, while young Collette appeared in many of the artists’ paintings as a lithe and lively model, and served as their resident
femme inspiratrice
.

She was Ondine’s great aunt, actually, which is hard for Ondine to believe because Tante Collette seemed, even in great age, so young. Ageless. Preserved in some inner
aqua vitae
of joy...

“I...I really
miss
her!” Ondine stops to dab at her eyes with a hanky dug hastily from her bag.

The women sit quietly, their attention unblinking.

“Can you really be interested in all this stuff?” She gazes around her, with tear-glossed eyes.

Heads bob. She sighs, and then continues.

Tante Collette lived in a manner that was part affectation, part fiscal necessity and in large part the manifestation of her inner aesthetic and creative force. Her sensibilities were too refined for the rough-and-tumble of public life. She belonged, Ondine always felt, within the magical confines of her high garden walls, behind her thick portal doors. Like some exotic animal, she needed them as bulwarks against extinction...

“I see you giving me that look, Heddi. I can hear you thinking,
Projection, projection,
and
projection!
Well, maybe you’re right. I do feel safe there. Safer than... well... anyway...”

The gatehouse – a majestic structure with massive double street doors on one side, the garden gate on the other, and stone benches in deep shade along each inner wall – sports a classical pediment in gray stone over each portal, netted in climbing roses. There Tante Collette kept an ancient, balloon-tired bicycle for mundane travel.

“I love this elderly conveyance, with its willow basket,” her aunt once told her with great dignity, when Little Ondine teased her about it. “The bicycle is a noble invention – it requires balance, rigorous effort all of one’s own and the willingness to brave the natural world – not unlike art. Or life.”

Her forays into the world were highly selective. Even at the end of her life, she’d sally forth for shopping in the village, peddling at a leisurely pace, her posture as upright and proud as if she straddled a Lipizzaner stallion. Off she’d go down the dirt road, always following the right hand rut, raising little puffs of dust in the summer heat.

And always in a skirt. Ondine never saw her in pants, except in her garden or studio, where she wore tailored men’s trousers, cinched by a large leather belt.

“She and Coco Chanel were contemporaries and modest friends – but sisters in elegance.”

“She
knew
Coco Chanel?” Heddi, doyenne of fashion, gasps incredulously.

“Yes. In fact, someone told me once that it was Tante Collette who first started wearing men’s wear – and Chanel stole her style and then took all the credit for it.”

“My God!”

“Who’s Coco Cha-what’s-her-name?” This, from Pearl who has been leaning against the candy machine, quietly paring her nails with her pocketknife.

“She’s a fashion designer, Pearl,” Ondine says patiently.

“Well, I been wearin men’s clothes all mah life, an ain’t no one never cared one way or t’other.”

Heddi and Ondine share a long look.

“Well, it was probably just a rumor, anyway.”

“This is interesting, Ondine,” Betty pipes in, “don’t stop now. Tell us more.”

An ancient housekeeper, Marie, whose life was apparently dedicated to cleaning and polishing as a religious calling, underpinned Tante Collette’s elemental yet aristocratic life. Marie’s gnarled old fingers wielded broom, dust cloth and polishing rag like holy relics, and she fed the carved legs of tables and chairs with good local bees-wax and lavender oil as if she were genuflecting to administer the sacrament.

Tante Collette’s banker was another of her ancient retainers, who handled all her accounts and managed the small fortune that her husband, Ruban, had left her when he died young. It wasn’t a happy match, she always implied, and she apparently loved him more for abandoning her in comfort than for any more romantic reason.

Once a month, she’d stop at the bank and her old friend, although long-retired, would meet her in a private room to discuss the state of her resources which, given her modest needs and conservative spending, was ever-normal.

But Ondine doesn’t want them to get the impression that Tante Collette was stodgy or boring. Quite the contrary.

“When I was little, I always used to confuse her telephone, in my mind’s eye, with the hand-held porcelain shower head attached to her bathtub. They seemed equally complicated and exotic, and both were all white and gold, with big horns on the end, perforated with little holes. I pointed the similarity out to her one day, when I was sitting in her huge bathtub, surrounded by a foamy mattress of bubble bath.

“ ‘The French do not invent things,’ she told me with a twinkle in her eye, ‘they
fantasize
them.’ Then she picked up the hand-held shower and, instead of rinsing my hair, she put the thing to her ear and shouted, ‘Allo? Allo?’ in her heavily accented English.

“Pretty soon, she had me giggling, as she carried on an imaginary conversation with a
desmoiselle
, one of the local fairies.”

Ondine shakes her head in amusement.

Occasionally, Tante Collette would embark on more worldly travels. Maybe there would be an invitation to an art opening in Paris. As one of the last of the
Nabi
, she was always lionized. Or maybe she simply needed to replenish her underwear and nightgowns at
Galeries Lafayette
. And there’d always be a stop at
Chanel
for something deliciously simple to augment her wardrobe.

And in the depths of winter, almost until she died, she escaped the cold Atlantic winds by embarking from Marseilles for Morocco, where she kept a tiny house with a walled courtyard, close to the
kasbah
.

“I own that now, too – and what I’ll do with it is anybody’s guess. I’m afraid to go to North Africa, with all the terrorism...

“Are you laughing at me, Heddi?

“Oh! I get it! Afraid to go to my aunt’s house in Morocco, but then, here in L.A...! Very funny...

“It
is
pretty ironic, isn’t it?

“So, are you bored to death, yet? No?

“Okay. Let’s see... What more can I tell you?”

Tante Collette always sailed in the keeping of a young seaman who clearly adored her, a Captain Fouquet. There are photos of her bundled up on a deck chair like a film star, with him hovering over her like a handsome leading man.

She never talked much to Ondine about these migrations to a warmer climate, but there would be huge amber beads against her couture blouses, or heavy silver earrings worn with cashmere sweaters that attested to her secret movements through the labyrinths of the exotic.

It suddenly occurred to Ondine, during this last trip, that all this is hers now. But in a house so saturated with Tante Collette’s essence, could anything ever really belong to Ondine? If she chooses, she can go to the jewelry chest and, with a little rummaging, find those Berber earrings and wear them.

Imagining that gives her a guilty sense of pleasure. At a time when her own identity is at its nadir – when she feels formless and chaotic – she can don Tante Collette like a mask and hide behind her panache.

“Always create with compassion,” she wrote Ondine in her last letter. “With compassion, courage and originality.” Always, she insisted on addressing the artist in her, despite Ondine’s protestations that she hasn’t created anything in the way of real art in almost two decades.

Would her aunt think her cowardly, if she crawled into her skin just for an afternoon and drew the last warmth from it? Put on her
aubergine
cashmere sweater, her amber beads as big as quail eggs and pretended, if she cannot feel it, that her soul vibrates to the same pure note that Tante Collette’s did?

Would she say Ondine is creating herself compassionately? Or simply that she lacks originality?

Eventually, Ondine had to try it. She dressed in her aunt’s clothes; a pale aqua silk sweater, an ankle-length wool skirt of deep sea green, Tibetan turquoise beads with a repoussé silver locket, topped by a full-length down coat of teal silk. For what, she had no idea. There was nowhere to go. No one to see. She simply needed her aunt around her, like protective coloration.

Thus attired, she went out. The wind was silvery and cold like the handle of a coin silver spoon, thin and sharp.

Silver seems, in fact, to have enchanted the land as if everything lay enmeshed in it. The sky, snared in a scrim of black branches, is that fragile blue that comes in winter with the cold. It is late afternoon and clouds are heavy in the west, deep blue-violet streaked with raspberry.

The sun pulses above the western horizon, fiery apricot, hurling lances of lemon yellow. The far hills are deep, soft lavender blue, misted over with pale silver. Leaves that have survived the wind gleam like green-black glass in last light and the pale vanilla hemisphere of the moon is already mid-journey in the sky.

Such beauty! It’s as if Ondine were seeing it through her aunt’s eyes, and for the first time.

The front wall of her heart aches and burns as if the flesh were seared. And behind the pain, there’s a tremulous beating, so weak it seems to be announcing its ambivalence about living.

She’s as insubstantial as her own shadow, wafting through bushes, stretching over the frosted grass, so vulnerable and unsure. The absolute integrity of what grows from winter soil rebukes her, as if speaking for Tante Collette.

She feels like the Unluckiest Woman in the World, resisting even thinking about the things she cherishes, for fear the hellish curse of her lucklessness will waft towards them like a blighting frost.

Yet, here she stands in the ruined garden with its shining black leaves, its red berries rimmed in a foil of frost, the thick grasses like a tangled pelt. Her passing leaves them undiminished, apparently.

Maybe – just maybe – here at Tante Collette’s stronghold, where her magic still reigns, Ondine’s luck will change at last.

And then, suddenly, the beauty invades her and she is resistless. She seems to fall back into the child she was, wild and free and so sensitive to the natural world.

What has happened to that fairy child of the past, with her wild fantasies and sprightly ways, the hubris and the innocence...?

“You are Ondine,” Tante Collette told her that summer she was ten, gazing at her thoughtfully – worriedly, even. “The water sprite.”

Ondine felt special and preened a bit. No other child she knew came with a myth attached.

“When she married a man and bore his children, she lost her soul.” Tante Collette paused, watching this dire news spread across her niece’s complacent face. “I begged your mother not to name you after her.”

“What does it mean?” Ondine asked, alarmed. “What can I do?”

Tante Collette shook her head slowly, as if already grieving Ondine’s future misfortunes. “Nothing. Unless you choose not to marry. Not to bear children.”

She broke a pink rose that proffered itself from the long hand of a vine reaching through the music room window, and clipped it under Ondine’s barrette over her right temple.

“How lovely roses look in that auburn hair!” Tante Collette stepped back to admire her.

“Or...” she continued with a sigh, “once your soul is lost, you shall have to set about finding it again.”