I Always Loved You (29 page)

T
he struggle that had seemed so essential, the yearning for transcendence, the doubt that had plagued her, fell away in the face of success. Mary had become the artist she had wanted to be by dint of hard work and perseverance. And what was left was work, the work she had chosen: the pleasure of the puzzle, the technical questions of execution, the choice of composition and color, nothing different than before except that now she understood that pain was the foundation of art—not always its subject, but always its process. To be in pain was to be in the work. But no longer did she fear it meant failure. She knew she would succeed eventually with a canvas. She knew that if she stayed with it long enough, through the blindness, she would finally see what it was meant to be. She knew that she would find its soul. Pain was the essential ingredient.

Would she call this newfound calm patience? Perhaps. But patience based on confidence born of the struggle that had now faded away. Degas, too, fell away. Like a waxing and waning moon, he came in and out of her life, full of affection and respect one moment, spouting trouble and discord the next. Even when he was in Paris, he wrote her notes of praise for her painting, of news of the Opéra, the ballet, Sarah Bernhardt, of his aghast horror at the Eiffel Tower's startling appearance on the skyline, of his travels around France and to England, of the insolence of the upstart van Gogh, of his bafflement with Pissarro's and Monet's continuing infatuation with the countryside, of this and that and more, an endless stream of letters he sent when he was not at her door asking her opinion on this, inviting her to an exhibition of that, behaving as if he were her dearest friend, which he was on some days and others suddenly wasn't, when none of her opinions on anything were valid and her company was neither needed nor wanted, and he would disappear for months at a time without notice. She never knew what to expect, and so she guarded herself, as others had learned to do.

Louisine Elder married a wealthy American named Havemeyer, who indulged her love of art, buying her canvas after canvas on Mary's advice. She asked Mary, from time to time, how it was with Edgar, and Mary made brave answers of independence and indifference, but Edgar's cutting tongue set loose on one of her paintings or proffered opinions could set her back so much that she wouldn't be able to paint for days, sometimes weeks. Mary often wondered whether, had she given in, had she allowed herself to become irretrievably entangled, had she been willing to submit to a lifetime of uncertainty, they might have found a way to be at intimate peace with one another. The question came to her at the oddest times. Well, perhaps not so odd. They came when she was with her nieces and nephews. Her brothers and their families came often to visit and so Mary had, over time, the pleasure of a revolving coterie of children who managed in their most endearing moments to make her wonder about the child she might have had. Fleeting, but unsettling, the question rebounded throughout the years to bedevil her. Why was so little in life ever truly settled? Not the happenstance of things, but the why of things?

The work came to her in an endless profusion of possibilities. There were a thousand ways to paint a mother and her child, for in each familial bond there was a unique tie that found its expression in a particular gesture. It was what he had taught her, so long ago. Gesture. Made, not spontaneous. Studied, not accidental. The signifier of a unique truth about a life, or two lives. The gift of Degas.

He was losing his eyes. There could no longer be any question about that. Over the years, his work grew both freer and more coarse, especially his pastels. Everyone liked to say how bold his work had become, how vivid the colors, how brave the stroke, but she knew it was because he no longer had the sight for refinement. She was certain that what he saw and what he put on the paper were two different things, a trick that the mind always played with artists, but this was a nastier kind of betrayal. A more sighted Degas, a younger Degas, would have recoiled at the blind turn his wavering eyes had taken. She tried not to tell him, though sometimes she broke down and suggested that he might not be seeing what he thought he was seeing, that what he put on paper might not be what he thought he was putting on paper. But she struggled because he had no patience for prevarication; over the years he had not once hesitated to devastate anyone whose work he considered inferior. It was, he always said, a point of the defense of art. She gave up, finally. For what more could she have said?
Stop working, because the thing you have most feared has arrived
? What would he do? How would he live? Would she have wanted him to warn her? Would she have even believed him? Would he believe her? And in the end, who was she to say? If the work was different due to the failure of retina and macula, was it not still art? She would not jury his or anyone else's work. Just her own. Perhaps in this lay their true difference. She would not devastate him as he had devastated her.

Time marched on, years of industry vanishing one after the other, marked only by her work and the needs of her father and mother, grown dearer to her since Lydia's death.

Her father, so proud of her work that he spoke of little else, died next.
Everything is failing.
Or so her father prophesied.
A body coming to its end
, he wrote Aleck, just a month before he died.

And so the decade of the nineties went, with more deaths.

Gustave Caillebotte, who had returned to painting after abandoning art and its exhausting politics in favor of sailing and designing boats, succumbed to death before he even reached the age of fifty, in his will leaving to the Louvre all his collected paintings, ensuring that the new French painting would be preserved for the public, a last, prescient act of passion, for Manet's prices had soared after his death, and Monet couldn't keep up with the demand for his work. Now living without financial care in a house in Giverny, the first house he owned, Monet was besotted with his garden.

Berthe, who had outlived Eugène by only three years, died of pneumonia, moving from health to death in three swift days of astonishing suffering that left her sixteen-year-old Julie in the bereft hands of Berthe's dear friends Mallarmé and Renoir and her sister's children, one of whose friends later married her and made a life from painting. And only three months after Berthe, Katherine died, having outlived her invalid daughter and husband, having struggled for years for air, having fought a failing heart far longer than anyone believed she could.

Mary buried her parents near the new country home she had purchased north of Paris in Le Mesnil-Théribus, the Château de Beaufresne, moving her father and sister from Marly-le-Roi, so that they could all be together once again. And then the Dreyfus affair happened and Degas was beyond terrible, and she could tolerate him no more. Or so she thought. Months after their break, friends invited them both to dinner and he said something gracious and she forgave him, and so on and on it went. She lived between Paris in a new apartment on the Rue de Marignan and at Beaufresne, and he lived in Montmartre. They shared a friendship of intervals, of deep contention and torturous reconciliations, of unspoken need and concealed regard, but a life lived, essentially, apart, though it seemed wrong that two people who had survived so much together could not find some way to comfort one another.

•   •   •

Edgar Degas could find his way around Paris in the dark. He had to, because the black sun floated in his vision now all the time, plaguing his days. Lately Mary Cassatt had begun to query him about color, whether or not he had given up on subtlety, whether he had decided that saturated colors were best after all, whether he really wanted such a strong orange, such a hard turquoise, but he did not know what she was talking about and told her so, somehow forgetting that this had been his deepest fear. The colors he applied were muted, as they had always been, as he had always preferred, but she insisted that he couldn't quite see what he was doing, that he was choosing more vibrant tones, implying that he was losing his grasp, implying that he was unaware of his choices. She let it go, but the implications bothered him, and he ignored her for months, only to woo her back with a kind word about her work. He was always saying nice things about her work, except when she indulged her worst bourgeois tendencies and painted something so commercial it was as if she were begging for money.

It was difficult to see lines, though. This he did not doubt. They doubled and tripled under his hand so that he had to retrace them again and again. Sometimes they were not clear at all for some reason, and he had to outline his figures in black to ground them, which he had done sometimes in the past, but now found a necessity. Or the forms he was after, the precise curve of a shoulder, the long line of a neck or an extended leg, would not materialize from the canvas. No matter the medium—oil or pastel—he indulged that need, one he could not remember being such an imperative before. He could not remember lines being such trouble. The technique of his youth began to leave him. But people rarely listened when he complained of his eyes. They believed him a hypochondriac, still. And he wouldn't tell Mary, because she would only go on about color again.

The exhibitions ceased. After the contretemps of 1882, when Caillebotte seized the reins, there was only one other, in 1886, and he and Mary had exhibited then. They held it at the same time as the Salon, a last statement of their belief in their own significance. But the fire of it all was gone. The State had given control of the Salon to the artists, and so there was little left to rebel against. The dealers Durand-Ruel and Portier bought and sold their work now. The art world had changed, and whether or not their exhibitions had had a hand in altering it was a question he could not answer.

He filled his evenings and Sundays with visiting the Rouarts and the Halévys and their children. He asked one of the young women to marry him, and she pretended his question was a joke. Sabine died and a woman named Zoe Cloisters came to care for him. The city of Paris argued about Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain who had been accused of being a traitor. Everyone in Paris took sides for or against the man. Degas was against him. Everyone said the opposition was de facto anti-Semitism and not about the man's betrayal, that what the opposition disliked was the man's Jewishness. Degas stayed opposed to every writer and artist in Paris, and lost many friendships, even his dear friend Halévy, who was a Jew himself. Even Zola supported the captain, writing an article in the newspaper against the government's prosecution, so he lost him, too. And Mary Cassatt was beside herself with fury at him. For years, she had wavered in and out of his vision, his life. Now she forgave him nothing. Friends frequently reunited them, but Mary was sharp now. That yielding young woman had become an old woman who yielded nothing.

A
fter Berthe Morisot died, Julie Manet, who had begged Degas to teach her how to paint, asked him one afternoon about Mademoiselle Cassatt.

“Oh, once we were great friends.”

“Once?” Julie asked. “Is this what happens when you grow old? Don't you wish to see everyone you ever knew, to say everything that should be said?”

“No,” Degas said. “What happens is that you no longer have the energy for talk.”

“How sad,” Julie said.

He had to turn his head to see the whole of her, but he could make out her beautiful cheekbones and long hair, a silhouette that reminded him so much of her mother he had to look away to hide his dismay. Where was the Manet in her that had once caused him so much trouble?

“Tell me, Monsieur Degas, did you love Mademoiselle Cassatt?” Julie asked. “Everyone wonders.”

“Do they?”

“Of course. People say lots of things about Maman and Uncle Édouard, too.”

“Ignore people, Julie. I always do.”

“Why didn't you marry her?”

“She didn't want to marry me. And it would have been a marriage only of the mind. That was all I had then. A mind for art.” Which wasn't completely true.

“Maman was married. She had time for love.”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “She did.”

“Did Mademoiselle Cassatt love you?”

“It's possible,” he said.

“But don't you know? You would know, wouldn't you, if she did?”

How did he not know the answer to that question? It seemed to him suddenly that this was the essential question, the question of their lives. Why didn't he know? Shouldn't he know? And if he did know, would it change anything about now, about the end, when the hours were beginning to pass like bitter pills, one after the other, God playing a joke, making him suffer, draining him of light? Would his life be better if he and Mary Cassatt had ever once said I love you? Or even said it a thousand times?
I didn't say I didn't love you.
How those words had come to haunt him. Why hadn't he said it outright? Would she have then said that she loved him? And what would have happened then? Would she have married him? Would they have enjoyed dulcet days, surprised by devotion? Back then time had seemed elastic, eternal; the choices, endless. This was the shock as the end loomed: that one paid too little attention to the moments when life was asking questions. One had to pay attention. One had to think,
Why not be brave? Why not take a chance?
Regret was the stepchild of unheeded desire, and now he might never know. But if he asked her, if he visited her at her apartment or begged Julie or someone to take him to see her, far away in Mesnil-wherever-it-was that she lived now, what would he learn?

That perhaps he had been a fool.

And what man wanted to learn that?

“She has her life,” he said.

“I don't think she is happy.”

“Isn't she?” he asked, trying to suppress the surge of joy that ran through him.

“Monsieur.”

“You reproach me, but you have everything ahead. You don't know.”

Daily he limped to the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, but no one was there to argue with him anymore and so he limped home. He wandered the streets, hardly able to see anything, remembering his way, remembering light. The restless flaneur, walking because he could no longer paint.

Then the worst cruelty: They forced him to move his studio. They were going to tear down his building. Haussmann's reach was long, even though he no longer held office, but the man had influenced everything, and nothing of old Paris would remain. It was an affront, having to move. Someone said the
Little Dancer
was falling apart, but he couldn't find her, because she was buried deep in his packaged things, left disorganized in his new studio because he could not see to organize them. He wanted to work. He played with wax in an effort to feel his way to something, anything, to at least feel himself at work, but he had to abandon the lumps of uncooperative wax in disgust, as he once had abandoned many things.

He attended art auctions. He could see none of the canvases for sale, but he wanted them all. He had to have them. He bought and bought, borrowing money to pay for them from Durand-Ruel, who in turn bought more of Degas's work, work that had sat for years in his studio. Degas took his treasures home from the auctions and did not even unwrap them.

Zoe died. Alone, he spent his days walking. He walked and walked and walked. He did not know what he wished to find except the hours filled. He no longer even tried to work. He was old and he felt old and everything was too much. He forgot to wash and eat. Sometimes he did not even rise from his bed.