Katherine Keenum (45 page)

Almost inadvertently it seemed, Edward’s muscles would respond to the warmth and relax; sometimes, he grew sleepy. As he came to expect a level of ease, there were days when he intentionally rested on his elbows and let the purling water lift his legs and trunk so that he floated. Eventually he began to explore motion: the effect of scissor kicking, of twisting, of lowering himself and shooting upward.

It was left to each man to encounter the spring’s genius in his own way. By February, it sometimes whispered seductively to Edward when he was too much at ease to feel ashamed. It was after one such occasion that he discussed the matter of the girl on the Boulevard Saint-Germain with Dr. Aubanel. Aubanel agreed that prostitution was a social ill but told him to consider desire a sign of health. Helped by Aubanel’s assurances that there was sound reason not to burden Jeanette with a confession, Edward finally forgave himself.

When their time was up, bathers could dry off and dress at once or rinse away all traces of sulfur in a shower of cold well water from a cistern behind the pavilion. Edward recoiled at the thought. He would rather smell like a hard-boiled egg all day than punish himself just when he felt best. The opera singer countered that the cold water was invigorating. Ah, but for that, sea bathing was preferable, said M. Pierre Turenne de Villeroy, the young nobleman who drank too much.

*   *   *

Turenne was a difficult man; no one quite liked or trusted him. Although his manners were perfect and his overt mockery always aimed only at himself or fate, he was bitter, ironic, and far too observant. What he left unsaid could amount to a sneer. One unusually warm morning in January, when Edward’s victory over opium had been most precarious, Turenne had found him chopping at weeds between rows in the vegetable garden. He watched silently until Edward looked up, ready to snarl. Turenne shrugged apologetically and pulled out a cigarette case. “You do not smoke, I believe,
monsieur
.”

“No.”

“A pity.” Turenne leaned over to light up against the wind. “You and I, we have need of a petty vice to fill a major void,” he said, directing puffs upward out of the side of his mouth. He watched as Edward went back to chopping. “Come, I have something to show you. You are making a bad job here anyway.”

“I’ll go back over it.”

“So you will, another day, and another and another. Here, catch.” Turenne tossed Edward’s coat from where he had left it folded across a fence post. “I am going to show you a way down to the sea.”

Edward had dropped his hoe to catch the coat. “I’ll need my walking stick.”

“No, no. If you return to the house, you will not come out again. We shall pick up something to use along the way.”

Turenne cut west across the hospital grounds along one of the narrow tracks made by the farm’s animals. It plunged down into a rocky ravine. From above, the path seemed to disappear; but after a scramble down the bank, they landed where it continued under a canopy of juniper, wild plum, and other brush. Turenne handed Edward a likely stick, then led on, sometimes in the open, sometimes covertly, down a mile and a half to a deserted shingle beach.

Turenne trudged out to the water’s edge and stood staring out to the horizon. “The sea,” he mused, in a strangely proprietary tone, “liberty.” He began pulling off his clothes, casting them aside carelessly.

Edward watched, unmoved. The day was warm for the time of year, and they were hot from walking, but he had no more inclination for that kind of chill than he had for a shower after a soak. Turenne waded purposefully into the water until it was almost up to his waist and then struck out. Suddenly, it came to Edward that he meant to keep swimming, swim to freedom, swim until it was too late to come back. “Turenne!” he shouted, and wrestled out of his own clothes. He knew how to swim but had not done so for years—paddling in the thermal pool or with the Renicks one day in August didn’t count. Nor had he ever pulled a man to safety. Without knowing what he hoped to accomplish, he ran splashing into the water. He hardly noticed the shock of the cold until his lungs hurt and he was gasping. Almost at once, Turenne turned around and swam back easily.

They floundered out. Edward was furious, too angry to speak. Turenne, with the grace of young manhood and custom, walked up onto the beach ahead of him in perfect self-command. He was already drying himself off with his shirt when Edward snatched up his own.

“This is what you and I need,
monsieur
: exertion and distraction. We must measure ourselves against something hard and win in order to keep fighting.”

“I thought you might drown.”

“Did you? In that case, my thanks,
monsieur
.” Turenne bowed. “How fortunate for you that the mistake took you into the water, which otherwise you would have refused.”

Edward was not appeased. Leaving his guide to sit on the sun-warmed pebbles and smoke another cigarette, he stalked back up the hill alone. Nevertheless, a week later, when Turenne invited him to slip away again, Edward went, and went again the next time he was asked. He began to understand the need to stretch and strike out for freedom. Ridiculous as it was in winter, he went in the water each time—to prove to Turenne that he could take the self-punishing challenge and because it felt good to survive. “No one who has not gone through it can ever really understand,” said Turenne, one day.

“
La mélancolie
,” muttered Edward.

“Ah, that,” said Turenne, “no, that is Valabrègue. I am just a sot.”

“Then perhaps we should bring Valabrègue. He would have to hear me out.”

Turenne shot him an amused glance, but he also invited the ever-mute Valabrègue the next time they set out.

No one in the hospital had ever heard M. Valabrègue speak unless it was Dr. Aubanel. To the world, he presented his gentle smile and compliant manner; but when caught off guard, his eyes betrayed desolation. That day, if a spring to his step meant anything, he was genuinely grateful to be included in the walk to the beach; and he proved equal to a brief swim.

When they came out of the water, they horsed around. Turenne snapped his shirt at the others. Edward laughed—laughed and laughed. His sides shook; he gulped and, with the next choking gulp, realized he was crying. Covering his face with his hands, he crouched down, sobbing uncontrollably—for Mutter and Papa and Marie gone, for the men he had killed and the men he hadn’t, for too many years of his life wasted, for the recent, botched months, for loneliness. Turenne and Valabrègue let him go until the paroxysm slowed. A hand touched his shoulder. Reluctantly, he looked up into Valabrègue’s soft, sad eyes.

Edward sighed heavily. “I beg your pardon, both of you.”

Turenne sat a little way off, smoking a cigarette and staring out to sea. “Think nothing of it. As I have said, no one who has never undergone the agony can understand—but then, we have, each in his own hell.”

Edward pushed himself up. At the water’s edge, he knelt down and splashed his face. It made him shiver. He was too exhausted for tears now; he wanted sleep. Laudanum, his system begged. He clenched his teeth against the craving and stood up. “I’m all right now.”

By the time they got back to the house, lunch was on the table. Thinking there was nothing he wanted less than food or company, Edward headed for the stairs to lie down in his room. Turenne detained him. “Speaking from experience, I would say it is best to follow the rules and eat.” Turenne’s habitual dispassion, as if he didn’t really care, was more effective than Cousin Anna’s admonishments or even Sophie’s gentler efforts to persuade. Valabrègue stood by and nodded. Edward, not wishing to appear more childish than he had already, gave in.

Dr. Aubanel received the truants without comment; yet he must have seen at once that something had happened to Edward; for after the meal, he ordered him into the office for an early consultation. By then, food had stabilized Edward’s blood sugar and steadied his nerves. He himself recognized that he was in a crisis and that while his defenses were down was the time to lay some of it before the physician he was paying to cure him; but, God, he was tired.

“Tell me where you were,” said Aubanel.

He listened carefully, asking only enough short questions to keep Edward talking for a while. “I know that path,” he said, finally.

“Turenne will be sorry to hear it.”

“No need to tell him,” said Dr. Aubanel, with a faint smile. “I believe,
monsieur
, that it would do you good to go with him again soon.”

My dearest Jeanette
, wrote Edward, a few days later,
I turned a corner, whether deeper into darkness or up toward the light I could not tell at first, not until the sun shone golden.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Early Spring 1880

I
n addition to the picture of the stairway and the salon, Jeanette had painted a third view in the Renicks’ house and given it to them as a thank-you. She wrote Mrs. Renick to let her know that she would be submitting
Un Vestibule dans le Quartier Saint-Germain
to the Salon and asked where
The Treasure Room
had been so beautifully framed.
Dear, darling Jeanette, How thrilling
, Cornelia wrote back,
for you and for us. Hurrah! If your piece is accepted, it will be a coup to show off its companion in May!
In her letter, Jeanette also asked about Edward, and Cornelia decided it was time to intervene. Besides sending Jeanette the address of her framer, she wrote Effie:
Marius has business in Nice and Rome this year, and so we are staying on longer than usual. At last, I can see a Provençal spring! Why don’t you and Jeanette come down for a couple of weeks?

Jeanette’s heart leaped at the chance to see Edward, and for that matter to leave Paris at the dirty end of winter, but she was unsure whether she should miss any of the few classes left to her. Carolus told her to go: Ah! the Mediterranean! Take her paintbox and bring him back the sun. “If you do, I shall give you a private critique,” he promised.

In the second week in March, Jeanette and Effie took a train straight through to Marseilles, second class, sitting up all night to save money. When they arrived at the Renicks’ house midmorning, frowzy and short of sleep, Cornelia sent them upstairs, each to her own bedroom, a luxury Jeanette had enjoyed only at Aunt Maude’s since she left Circleville. Her room in the northeast corner of the house had windows on two sides; it was full of light. To eyes accustomed to Parisian gray, it floated. Outside were trees, slashes of lawn seen through foliage in a next-door neighbor’s garden, and beyond them cliffs of rock. It seemed wrong to pull the shutters against such beauty; but she wanted to change out of her thick woolen travel costume, wash up, and, perhaps, as Mrs. Renick suggested, lie down before lunch, when Edward was expected. She was sure she was too excited to sleep, but the bed had springs and a good mattress. When she awoke, for a moment she had no idea where she was. Sluggishly, she tried to orient herself in the dim room—and then sat bolt upright. A china clock on a side table read three o’clock. She had missed Edward’s arrival. She had missed lunch, too, but that didn’t matter. She fumbled at her back to retie her corset. Her hair! She must let it out, brush it, and pin it back up. When she hurried downstairs, Hastings showed her out into a garden. The bay in a great oval of gold-flecked turquoise tilted up toward the far horizon; the overarching sky was darkest blue at the zenith; a wedge of chartreuse lawn receded to the brink of a cliff. Only two figures were visible—Effie sitting happily in the sun and Mrs. Renick shaded by a big muslin umbrella near a palm tree. No Edward. Anxiously searching for him, Jeanette slowed her pace.

“So there you are! Come sit down beside me,” said Mrs. Renick. “Did you get some sleep? You look rested, a very good thing.”

Jeanette conveyed Carolus’s best wishes and resigned herself to conversing with her hostess, all the while wondering where Edward could be. Surely, he had not come and gone. Had he not come at all?

Effie couldn’t bear to tease. “Dr. Murer set out on a walk a while ago, Jeanette; he’ll be back. Isn’t this just the most magnificent view! Revivifying, I call it.”

Jeanette’s heart gave a hard thump against her breast bone. She could not help herself. “Please, how is he, Mrs. Renick? Is he better?”

“Yes, he is, my dear, and he’ll be better yet when he sees you. Run along and fetch him. He went down that path over there. It leads to only one place, our own small
calanque
. You can’t miss running into each other.”

Jeanette fled across the lawn to a break in a low retaining wall, where steps led to a path that zigzagged down steeply between rocks, junipers, cypress, and blooming laurustinas, which shielded it from sight but framed views of the dazzling, blue-green sea. Near the bottom, a huge boulder forced a bend. As she came around it, she saw Edward, standing on another boulder below her, with his back to her, naked. Covering her mouth to stifle a shriek, she jumped back so as not to be seen and then peeked around again more carefully. Sinewy, with small shapely buttocks, he was raising his arms and in the next moment lifted off into the air in a dive. Involuntarily, her hand traced the curve described by his body. She had learned to look at the nude and seminude male body posed in unnatural contortions and statuary stillness but never in the beautiful fluidity of motion. She felt a brief anguish as he disappeared until she heard the clean splash of a knifelike entry. She stayed where she was until he rose out of the water, hoisted himself onto the rock by the strength of his arms, and stood up, water streaming down off the hair of his head, the hair of his beard, and the hair surrounding his all-too-visible penis and scrotum. She pulled back in acute embarrassment and delight, smiling to herself. Holding her breath, she leaned her back against her boulder, eyes closed to recall the image. When she opened them, she started up the path, wondering what she should do, praying that he hadn’t seen her. “
Un moment, s’il vous plaît!
” came his alarmed voice. She tiptoed away.

Edward had seen a slight movement, a bird, he hoped. He called out just in case, struck by the comedy of the unseemly situation as well as by distress. He dropped low and scuttled to his clothes. Quickly, he dried himself off with his shirt as he always did at L’Estaque and pulled on his trousers, still crouching as much as he could. Whatever could have possessed him to succumb to his whim and swim here when he saw the deep, inviting water of the hidden inlet? Showing off secretly to himself, he supposed, silly, puerile; and yet he was not sorry. The beauty and the privacy of the place were irresistible, his mastery of cold water a source of pride. “
Bonjour?
” he called out when he was dressed. No answer. Just as well. He whistled in assumed insouciance as he started back up the path.

At a wide turn, well below the garden, a bench had been set. Jeanette heard him from where she sat on it, looking at the ground, listening for his footsteps. As he came into sight, her head lifted and she rose slowly. He stopped. She held out both her hands to him, a welcome without reserve. When he started forward again, she walked slowly until he opened his arms, then ran. He caught her close and squeezed, harder and harder. Feeling her yield to the joy of their embrace, Edward abandoned himself to it, too. He could hardly believe his good fortune and, after many caresses, murmured as much into her ear. She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. Gently with his hands, he pushed her back so that his eyes could meet hers.

“Jeanette,” he said. A quietness in his voice made her suddenly afraid. “That day in the café, I said I had been going to ask you to marry me.”

Not again, she thought.

He saw her fears and took confidence from them. “Now I can. I had meant to wait.” He kissed her forehead lightly, each of her eyelids, her nose. Before he reached her mouth again, he said, “I had meant to say, Miss Palmer, will you do me the very great honor of becoming my wife?”

Edward had rehearsed this proposal for other circumstances, had expected the usual resistance, had planned to be gentlemanly and bid her to think it over before she gave him an answer. Instead he begged, “Oh, Jeanette, my darling, will you? Please say yes. Please.”

Through her laughing tears, she choked out, “How could I possibly say anything else?”

The kiss that followed revealed to her hitherto unsuspected pleasures; it told him that a trusting woman’s warmth could feel like deliverance. It left them both in the glowing, self-absorbed bliss that makes lovers such social bores. (By the time they got back up the hill, they thought their emotions were well concealed until Effie asked, “My goodness, are you engaged?”)

“How long have you been waiting?” he asked her.

“All my life.”

Another kiss. “Waiting here, I mean. Were you waiting for me?”

Jeanette murmured a wordless assent, then added, “Mrs. Renick said you had gone down this path. I—it’s very steep.”

“You are hiding something.”

She reddened; and then with her reckless bent to blurt things out, she pulled loose and looked up at him. “I saw you swimming, Edward. I saw you come out of the water. I . . .”

Her voice trailed off as her courage failed, but he hardly noticed in his glee. “You saw this wreck of dry bones exposed and still greeted me the way you did?”

“Yes!” she said, almost defiantly. “And I will, again and again.”

No fool like an old fool, Edward thought, but a newfound, cocky pride strutted out to boot aside his skepticism. He believed her when she said she would marry him. He clasped his arms more tightly around her. “It’s not every decent gal who can say that and know what she’s talking about!”

“A great advantage to marrying a well-trained artist.”

He smiled indulgently as he continued to hold her. She did not really know, not really; but if she could take him as she had seen him just now, he had no fears about their future.

“Are we going to tell everyone right away?” she asked, as he set her ahead of him to start the rest of the way up the hill on the narrow path.

“Do you want to?”

“Part of me wants to shout it out, and part of me wants to get used to being this happy. If I touch the bubble, it might pop.”

He kissed the nape of her neck. “I think your family should be told first.” He turned her around, sobered by a thought. “Jeanette, do they know about me at all?”

“Of course! You’ve been in my letters ever since I met you, many,
many
times. They know I painted your portrait this fall.”

“About the laudanum as well, that I’m here and why?”

“No, I kept that to myself, Edward.”

“Will you always be ashamed?”

“I’m not ashamed! Never, never think I was ashamed. I was afraid for you, my dearest.” She stroked his face, down along his beard, and touched her fingers to his lips to stop his speaking. “I missed you so, that’s all. I had to tell Cousin Effie, but it didn’t seem anybody else’s business.”

He pulled her toward him. “I wish my failings didn’t have to be a secret, but what man would give his daughter to me if he knew, and how could I live without you now?”

“I’m old enough to marry you with or without Papa’s consent—but it doesn’t matter because they are all going to adore you.”
You’d better marry that man
, mocked Adeline’s voice in the back of her mind.

“How old are you, Jeanette?”

“Twenty-one.”

So young, he thought, almost abashed as he held her tight. She felt qualms beginning to alloy their happiness.

“Kiss me,” she begged. And with that kiss, they sealed their present hazard and their life together, whatever it might be.

*   *   *

Edward returned to the hospital on Monday morning. Dr. Aubanel had scheduled a meeting for the afternoon, knowing that, over the Friday to Monday, his patient would be with the woman he loved for the first time in months, a situation fraught with danger. He saw at once that he need not have been concerned. “It went well?” He could not help smiling benevolently.

“Better than I had any right to hope.”

“One may not always have reason to hope,
monsieur
, but one always has the right.”

A few days later, the ladies drove around to L’Estaque. After they were shown the new herb beds and the vegetable garden as well as the thermal spring, Effie and Cornelia sat in the garden while Jeanette and Edward took a walk among the olive groves. They found a place to sit on the rocks above the grapevines where they could look out over the Mediterranean.

“No wonder Carolus loves it,” said Jeanette, gazing at the bay. “I’ve begun some landscapes in watercolor at the Renicks’ house. I don’t know whether it is being happy or being in the presence of something so wondrous, but I feel like I’m discovering what color is for. Will we come here often, do you think?”

“To the bughouse?”

“No, silly! To the South of France.”

“Italy,” said Edward, with longing, as he turned his eyes southeastward. “I’ve seen it in winter. I want to see it in spring—Rome and the Tuscan hills.”

Jeanette leaned her head against his shoulder. “Sonja always teased us about going to Brittany instead—gray beach by a gray sea under a gray sky. Maybe she was right.”

“Not if you loved Pont Aven the way you said you did.” He put his arm around her waist and pulled her closer.

“Places matter.”

“They do.”

They talked for a while about what they could see from where they sat, about Paris, about needing to spend time in a place to know it well, about starting new. After a while, Edward pulled his arm back and bent over his knees with his hands pressed together. He looked at the ground. “Jeanette, what would you think of going back to Ohio?”

“Well, there is the wedding!” she exclaimed, starting to laugh until she registered his tone.