Katherine Keenum (41 page)

Dearest Edward,

The flowers are beautiful. Won’t you come see them in place? Please. I thought perhaps you would let me paint your portrait now that I have a studio.

Yours as ever,

Jeanette Palmer

She mailed it at once, before Cousin Effie came home. She would have had it hand delivered if she had known where he was likely to be during the day.

Yours as ever
, he read, that evening.
Please.
His hand shook. He told himself to summon resolve and eschew his evening dose of laudanum but took it anyway. He spent most of the evening in reverie, pondering the note: the intimacy of its salutation, the ambiguity of its valediction. No watercolor this time, but her words, her hand, her invitation. In a general sort of way, he knew he should send a reply, but one of the effects that made opium so desirable was detachment from the urgency of things. If he felt he ought to do something, it was as good as done. He took a bedtime dose and drifted off to sleep.

Next morning, he awoke to a crushing sense of failure. The onset of a headache pressed. While the base of his skull pounded, his mind groped toward the bedside table where the laudanum bottle and dropper sat.
I thought perhaps you would let me paint your portrait.
He hated the brute fact of a headache and even more his body’s clamor for an opiate anodyne. Cousin Anna had given him some willow bark. He struggled to his dresser to retrieve it and rang for Gaston. Panting from nausea, he handed over the packet and gave orders for breakfast in bed with an infusion of willow bark alongside a plain roll and the best coffee Marianne could brew. By midday, he had eaten, dozed, staved off the worst, and risen. He felt rotten. A thank-you note from Miss Pendergrast had arrived in the morning post with a specific invitation to call that afternoon for tea. He pulled himself together.

He showed up at the Rue du Fleurus late in the afternoon. Although he had stopped at his barber to have his hair and beard trimmed, he felt seedy and knew he looked haggard. The crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes traced deep; the circles under them were dark. Jeanette, who had hurried to answer the door, was shocked. “You’ve been unwell!”

“Not exactly.”

“A good thing you hadn’t been, Dr. Murer,” chirped Effie, nervously, “or Jeanette would have sat you down for a study. She’s been drawing a convalescent all month.”

“Then perhaps mine is a visage to interest you,” said Edward, keeping his gaze on Jeanette. He wondered what Cornelia had been saying about him. “I could sit for a portrait.”

“That’s not why—! Come in,” said Jeanette, with her throat constricted. “You must see your flowers.”

They had placed the bouquet on a small table given temporary prominence in the middle of the room with Jeanette’s portable easel beside it, holding a watercolor picture of the flowers. Edward hardly took in anything about the place—not the yellow walls, not Effie’s peacock feathers nor her silken screen. He was aware only that Jeanette had bitten back hurt feelings. He put his hand under her elbow.

“Carolus will be back next week. The class begins on Monday,” she said, in an effort to sound unconcerned. “I shall have to put still lifes aside. He stresses portraiture.”

Edward glumly remembered Carolus-Duran’s ebullience and felt seedier than ever. He withdrew his hand.

The visit was awkward but not quite a disaster. Effie tried too hard and made a nuisance of herself, but she had the wit to let Jeanette show Edward to the door.

“Will you really sit for me?” Jeanette asked, her eyes pleading. “Come on Monday. Come around two while the light is good.”

She wanted his face; she longed for his presence in the room. He saw it, and although he did not quite trust it, he came.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Portrait of a Man

A
fter their first sitting, he came four times a week punctually at two. The punctuality mattered to him more than to her; it was a means of holding on. Effie chaperoned from the far end of the long studio, where she made a show of writing or sewing with her back to them. Her tact and the size of the room gave them a kind of privacy, enough to have allowed a lovely veiled dalliance if Edward could have roused himself. His shame over the prostitute had ebbed with time, aided by his doses of laudanum. Now he tried to break away from the drug again but knew better than to stop all at once. With ever lower doses, there was nothing to blind him to his chance of happiness slipping away, to the old darkness closing in. The black dog growled.

Jeanette struggled with the portrait. Always, a wistful part of her mind wondered what had gone wrong between her and Edward; sometimes a more compassionate part of her was abashed to see how cruelly something gnawed at him. Her artist’s mind, meanwhile, was absorbed in the search for how to portray the layers of mystery in his face. She wanted to tell truths with her brush, but how could she when she didn’t understand what she saw? And with Effie in the room, it was impossible to ask the questions that mattered: Where have you been? Do you still love me? What’s wrong?

It chastened Jeanette to have so little power over Edward. She quit risking rejection and stuck doggedly to the task, but the picture threatened never to be finished, never to be good. Yet he kept coming back, one week, two weeks, three weeks, four. As she worked and failed, worked and failed, she came to understand his persistence as an abiding loyalty, perhaps even a bid for some kind of solace. She left off trying to explain him to the world and aimed only to capture forever some image of him for herself. On the last Monday in October, near the end of an afternoon’s work, she looked down to pick up a dab of raw umber on her smallest brush. When her eyes returned to the canvas, she caught her breath.

“It’s finished.” Even so tiny a dab would be one too many. Her tone was so hushed that Effie did not hear her.

Edward did. He sat up straighter. “May I see?” He came around and, from behind her, studied the intelligent, pensive face on the canvas, the lowered shoulders, which hinted at weariness but not defeat. Far from stripping him bare, she had guarded his privacy; the man in the portrait harbored a banked force.

“I am honored,” he murmured. Unaware that he did so, he laid his hand on her shoulder. “You have painted me finer than I am.”

“I paint what I see—and what I sense.” Jeanette shifted her weight so that the back of her head rested against him. “It took long enough, I’m afraid.” Nervous modesty could not hide an equally nervous, but growing, conviction that the results were good.

Roused by the stir at the other end of the room, Effie watched them for a moment. “Is it done?” she asked.

Edward dropped his hand.

“Come look,” said Jeanette.

“Why, you’ve made it a sad picture. It’s sadder than your studies of Signora Antonielli! Well, I shouldn’t say that, of course. It’s very handsome, but you should smile more next time, Dr. Murer.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” said Edward, with just a trace of his old humor.

Jeanette squeezed her eyes shut in embarrassment. “Here, give me a minute to clean up, and let’s take a walk,” she said.

When she and Edward were on the street (Effie had the good sense not to join them), Jeanette said, “It wasn’t meant to be sad.”

“No.”

Nevertheless, Effie had spoken truth: It was a sad picture, a sad face, profoundly sad. Jeanette knew it, and still an inward part of her rejoiced at the painting’s completion. Wishing that bugs were not crawling under his skin, Edward offered her his arm. She took it and walked at first with the lazy contented woolliness that comes after great exertion. Once or twice, she spoke on the few blocks leading up to the Luxembourg Garden. He made no reply.

When they were safely inside the gates of the park, she let her hand slip down to his and pulled him over to the side of the wide main path. The leather of their gloves blunted touch. She squeezed hard and looked at him intently, not to observe but to try to reach him. “Edward, what’s wrong?”

He held on to her hand; but after meeting her gaze, he looked away and stared over her head, through an avenue of yellowing trees to a patch of green lawn. She felt his arm jerk. “I’m soul-sick,” he said. “Sick in body, sick in mind.”

“What does that
mean
?” she asked, with an unaccountable vehemence.

That I need brown powder, he thought, irritably, and let go of her hand. He felt it touch his arm and looked back at her face. He steered them into motion again, trying to pull his thoughts together.

He was disappearing into himself. “Cousin Effie thinks you disapprove of my studying nudes,” she said. There, she had laid out the conflict she feared most.

He looked blank. “That has nothing to do with—” Or maybe it had, indirectly, a long time ago. “Jeanette, forgive me if I’m old-fashioned about such things. Your art is your art, and, of course, you must train for it.”

Her heart swelled as it always did when he said such things, until she realized he was dismissing the matter as trivial. “Then what?” she demanded.

He did not answer. On a side path, he took them to a secluded bench, where he sat, bent forward, head down, rolling his thumbs in front of him. He watched an ant drag a fragment of leaf, skittering through an obstacle course of gravel. “Jeanette, what I ought to tell you is that I’m an opium-eater.”

She froze. As surely as the real man dispelled her wispy daydreams with his solidity whenever she was in his company, this revelation—unlooked-for, wholly new—banished all her conjectures. She sat motionless until, daringly, she reached over to trace a gloved forefinger in the hollow of the cheek she had studied for weeks; his jaw was clenched. He tuned his face three-quarters to look up at her. The finger paused, just above his beard. He squeezed his eyes shut against tears and drew the hand around to his lips, kissing her fingertips fervently; the pressure made her tremulous inside. The scrape of a boot on the path reminded her belatedly that they were in public. Hastily she pulled her hand away. The chuckle with which he relinquished it was bitter. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“No. I’ve wanted you to kiss me,” she said, forthrightly. “Edward—oh, why, Edward, why opium? Is this what you wouldn’t tell me about the war?”

“There are a thousand things I will never tell you about the war or about myself, Miss Palmer. Can’t you see I only soil you? You should leave. I don’t do you or myself or anyone else alive any good.”

“Stop it!” she cried. “I won’t leave until I know what’s been happening.”

“All right, then, yes. Union doctors gave me laudanum; they gave it to everyone. It’s a wonderful drug. It stops pain and coughs and—” He waved a hand and left unsaid,
the runs
. “It kills memory; it makes you feel grand, up in the clouds.” His yearning was frighteningly evident until he added, “But its wonders come with a price. It ruins digestion, it makes you itch. Your body itches, your mind itches; you need more and more of it just to feel normal. I’ve gone off it before. If I could again . . .”

She waited.

“Jeanette, I’ve killed men, and I’ve withheld death when they begged me for its kindness. I don’t deserve to live; I don’t even deserve to die.”

Dear lord, she thought, what on earth am I supposed to do now? On this very day, with the portrait done, the more she learned, the less she understood, and the less anything else in the world mattered.

Shaking, he scrabbled in a pocket, found a handkerchief, and raised it to his face. Eyes shut tight, he panted, face to face with the worst of his revenants—the Reb whose entrails had coiled out into the mud, a bloody, trampled mess no longer human but able still to whimper in a thin wail,
Kill me, some’ody; kill me, some’ody
. Over and over again,
kill me, some’ody
.
Mercy.
His cloudy eye had looked into Edward’s with a stare of puzzlement at his plight and the pain he was in too much shock to feel; but Edward had saved his last bullet in case he needed it for something other than mercy. He had run and kept on running. Fifteen years later, on a park bench in Paris, he managed one more time, just barely, to push his pursuer back down. Eyes open again, gaping, he pulled the handkerchief down over his mouth.

“Edward.”

He became aware of Jeanette beside him, badly frightened.

“Are you all right?”

“I told you, leave.”

“No!” She knew little else; but her heart told her that if she left now, she would never see him again.

He wiped his mouth, stuffed his handkerchief away, and closed his eyes. He slumped back while his hand covered hers on the bench between them. He was hardly aware he held it, though she was, acutely. Speech was too hard; all his effort must go into enduring from one moment to the next.

Her mind raced. If she needed help, whose? She was fairly certain he would not consent to go back to the studio, not with Cousin Effie there. The Renicks? Winkie! For a wild moment, the thought of Mr. Winkham flashed as a godsend, but, of course, she had no way to reach him.

“I’ve broken down before.” Edward spoke more calmly and looked over at her. His rattled nerves cried out for laudanum, but he could still master himself enough to delay a dose and try to think. Jeanette lacked Sophie’s calm motherly authority, Sophie’s assurance; but her young skin, the roundness of her limbs, her vitality, all proclaimed life to be good. False claims in Edward’s opinion, yet still, in some attenuated way, he was glad of the illusion, grateful to have her beside him. “If I make less of a spectacle of myself, will you sit with me here a while?”

“Till the end of time if need be.”

A sweetness altered his face ever so slightly. As his agitation subsided, Jeanette’s immediate fears were allayed, though she remained unable to do more than simply let what happened happen. Only when he realized with a start that he held her hand and tried to withdraw it did she act. She held on.

“You are not yourself,” she said, lacing her fingers through his.

“God, how I wish that were true.”

By the time he walked her back to the studio, he would to the casual eye have looked no worse than many a morose, dyspeptic
homme d’affaires
. To Jeanette, he seemed to have lost a layer of protection, to have worsened into the next stage of an illness.

“Will you take a cab and go straight home?” she pleaded. (Oh, he would, he certainly would, straight to the brown glass bottle on his bedside table.) “And come back tomorrow. Promise.”

“I will go home,” he promised, and nothing more.