Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  41

  Lorna’s lecture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on the painter Meissonier was to be September 15. She gave herself a lot of trouble over it, found herself nervous, fussed over what to wear, and reviewed her projection images more times than usual. Her talk was in a way radical. In the late nineteenth century amid the newfound admiration for Impressionism, the painstaking realism of Meissonier’s renditions, say of the tiniest details of the bridles of Napoleonic soldiers’ horses, had been savagely taken against; realism was out, and he had been thrust from the ranks of artists whom it was acceptable to admire. His statue was dragged out of the Louvre. She couldn’t find out what happened to it. From being the painter whose canvases had commanded the highest price per square inch the world had ever heard of, he was cast away as rubbish, though if you had a Meissonier you of course held on to it. Lorna had perfected her account of him, where he might be put back in place, and updated her theories about the transition to Impressionism generally. In Lorna’s view, his moving little canvas in the Louvre, of bodies on the barricades during the 1870 Commune, showed signs of Impressionism creeping into his work.

  At the reception after her lecture, Lorna had occasion to ask the director, Marina Box, if she would like to see Pont-les-Puits’s Woods, in case the museum might be interested in acquiring it, and Mrs. Box eagerly said yes.

  Lorna had learned from simple Internet research that the village of Pont’s Woods would be worth around seven hundred thousand dollars, and she had also been told, though she discounted it, that she herself, according to the terms of Woods’s instructions, would have a small fee for her trouble finding a buyer. Real art galleries would take as much as half of a painting’s value, but Russell had frugally designated ten percent as a reasonable sweetener for his old friend’s efforts, and to Lorna even that was an amazing windfall. She was not above some commercial calculation, but she also knew that the museum would pay what it was correct to pay. Beside the older grandes dames it had a canny board of yuppie MBAs and McKinsey alumni who might not know much about art but knew about prices.

  Though the lecture had on the whole been a success, with the reservations she had felt in Bakersfield, she mistrusted her own understanding of the audience, or what interested people now. Looking out at the polite, attentive faces, she had seen, or rather, felt, their provisional commitment, their basic indifference to nineteenth-century painting, to France maybe, even to art itself—was that possible, given that they were all patrons of this art museum?

  Even more clearly than at the lecture to the Altar Forum, she saw that all was over: she was over, and so was the lecture, or at least her own powers of animating this nineteenth-century genre of performance in the twenty-first century, was over. She felt empty with shock but didn’t resist this revelation. She would have to adapt, soldier on, but how, in what direction in a country she no longer understood.

  * * *

  —

  Ran and Lorna had run into each other downtown twice, so that it got to seem almost normal to see each other, even to feel a kind of comfort in their shared concerns. Today Ran was arriving and Lorna was just leaving Hams’s after one of her visits. Ran politely stood with her a minute as she waited for her taxi.

  “During Curt’s coma I always made sure to avoid you,” Lorna said, meaning long-divorced people running into each other in family crises. “It’s nice that we can talk now.” Each thought of Curt—how he had survived his coma but was lost, apparently, to them.

  “We have a lot of hostages to fortune, don’t we?” he said. Meaning she and he together? Mankind in general? Lorna had always worried by herself, but of course Ran must worry, too, and there was collegial comfort in them worrying together. It was hard to remember them being in bed together, though.

  “Maybe you knew about my other daughter, with Amy,” Ran suddenly went on. “You must have heard about her from Peggy or Julie?”

  “Yes, of course. How old is she now? Your daughter. Fifteen, sixteen?”

  “Sixteen in March. She’s in school in France. Julie’s over there, too, of course.”

  Lorna didn’t know if she was supposed to know about Gilda’s pregnancy, so she changed the subject without learning what Ran meant to bring up: “According to Peggy, she—Julie—is very brokenhearted over someone she left behind here.”

  “I don’t know about Julie’s affairs of the heart,” Ran said. “I expect she’ll meet some nice Frenchman.”

  They recognized simultaneously that this remark could also have described Lorna, who had met some nice Frenchman all those years ago, although well after she and Ran were definitively on the rocks.

  “I wish Peggy would meet someone,” Lorna said. She had a flurry of thoughts: she would have liked to see a photo of Gilda (what a name!) but hesitated to ask. Was Gilda smarter or as pretty as their granddaughter Julie? Or as Peggy had been?

  Her thoughts flew to Peggy: Peggy might meet someone if she dressed better. Maybe she could pay Ursula to diagnose Peggy’s wardrobe, Ursula always looked magnificent. Not that meeting someone was the be-all and end-all. Women had to forget that formula; Peggy needed a more interesting life. How clear things became when one reached a certain age.

  * * *

  —

  In Woodside, Ran and Amy began preparations even before Thanksgiving for Gilda’s return at Christmas and the baby’s birth in March. The baby would be born; it by now existed, unnamed, but a person, unthinkable to dislodge. Amy especially now thought of little else. They would put the bassinet in Gilda’s room with her, but it could be rolled into the adjacent room and be with the baby nurse when Gilda needed sleep—the nurse would sleep in the nanny’s old room, which they repainted. Was there something punitive about planning to insist that Gilda take care of her baby through the night? Maybe, but examining their feelings, they didn’t think so; it was more a concern for the well-being of the baby. In China the baby slept in bed with its parents for months. When Gilda was born, she slept in a basket at the foot of Ran and Amy’s bed. Amy had not been parted from her for a second.

  Amy had flown to and from Paris three times since the girls had been there, and thus had been monitoring Gilda’s increasing size, keeping her in smart loose-fitting fashions when not at school; Saint Ann’s cooperated to the extent of permitting her to wear her uniform blouses untucked. Gilda had insisted on playing field hockey until early November when she became conscious she was getting slow and becoming a liability to her side. Now when the baby moved inside her, she felt scared and invaded, and hated it.

  About Gilda’s pregnancy, Ran had researched the incidence of birth defects in babies of diabetic mothers: even in those like Gilda with good glycemic control and folic acid supplementation, malformations were three to twelve times more frequent than in normal pregnancies. There was also an increased frequency in very young mothers. With these statistics, it was almost a certainty that something would go wrong. He kept tight watch on any changes in Gilda’s physiology in case it did. Her numbers were faithfully reported to him by Dr. Karas and by Gilda herself. And they began to worry him. He and Amy decided to go to Paris during Gilda’s end-of-term break, maybe take the girls for a few days somewhere nice in the South of France.

  42

  Lorna was to take the Woods canvas to the museum for study by the board members, their experts, conservators, and financial people. This she did, wrapping it up in a scarf, putting it in a paper shopping bag, and taking a taxi, which seemed kind of unceremonious, but what was the alternative? She was glad to get it out of the house, and she knew a museum had lots of insurance. The director reproached her for not using one of the bonded and expert art-delivery specialists in San Francisco, who would have crated it for the short distance to Third Street from Russian Hill at great expense. “My God, don’t tell anyone you transported it like that.” Lorna began to understand the new concerns of high-end art conservation: condit
ion, provenance, intrinsic interest, and the fame of the artist.

  She unwrapped it in the director’s office, with people standing around to admire. They planned, if Lorna consented, to put it or a facsimile in a vitrine in the lobby, to solicit comment by the public about the projected purchase. “That’s the church in his village?” people asked of the subject. “Charming.”

  Seeing it in this new setting, Lorna could newly understand the picture’s intense charm, the inspired management of the light, and the genius of the brushwork, the something distinctive about Russ’s way of seeing, his particular shade of blue; it was like a new painting for her. Probably she hadn’t been supportive enough of poor Russ’s obsessive paintings of version after version of the church in Pont seen at various times of day.

  “The church was his sole subject,” she explained to the committee, seeing in Russell’s obsession the lineaments of a new lecture. “He found it inexhaustibly interesting, above all the play of shadow on the façade, but also the details of the carving…” So apparently did the viewers, and it was plain that the museum would be enriched by owning the painting.

  After leaving the painting, she had a conversation with Marina Box and a young woman lawyer as they walked her out through the cavernous entrance hall; Lorna, who considered herself rather slow at grasping business matters, thinking over their conversation on the way home, came to see they were suggesting a discount for the museum on whatever the appraised valuation turned out to be, with a small rebate for Lorna herself, on top of her commission, if the discount was meaningful. Something about institutional versus market prices, things like that. There would of course be legalities, authentications, title searches, verifications of the provenance…

  * * *

  —

  Lorna tormented herself for a few days with ambivalence about whether to go see, and then went to see, Tory Hatcher’s photographs of Pont-les-Puits. No one had yet asked her what she as a person who had lived in the village thought of them, but they might. She couldn’t account for her dread of seeing the exhibition; was it that it might be too grisly, or was it that it might awake a longing for the little place where she had lived for eighteen years?

  Neither of these responses turned out to be hers—the scene of unearthed bones and tipped tombstones was grisly, but the emotional distance afforded by the black-and-white medium privileged the art with which the rows of skulls, the architecture of the market hall, the symmetry of its arches, the picturesque castles of mud created by the digging machine repairing the terrain, blanched away emotion. It was very interesting, she found, and there was the pleasure of recognition, an almost proprietary feeling about the village and its impromptu ossuary, so she felt no pangs. Or maybe a pang, was it of nostalgia? Or was it something else?

  Seeing it made her think of a conversation she’d had with Donna a week or so ago. “Could you move back to France if you wanted to?” Donna had asked. “Legally, all that.”

  “I guess so, I’m a French citizen by marriage. I don’t think they take it away. I have a French passport. An American one, too, of course.”

  “Would you, though? Why did you come back here anyway?”

  Lorna wasn’t sure anymore. “I’m an American, this is my native land. I’d always be a stranger over there.” It was a pat answer, but she didn’t know the real one. Why do people who leave usually come home? Why did others find that so peculiar?

  “Stranger, so what?” Donna said. “I’ll always be a stranger in California. Isn’t it nicer in France?”

  “It is, I guess. Cleaner, safer. Prettier.” She felt irritated at Donna for forcing her to confront these comparisons, and at her native land for not dealing with, even neglecting, such quality-of-life issues in favor, supposedly, of its superior “energy” or for fear of offending someone whose culture might include throwing gum wrappers on the street, or some other offense you dared not reprimand.

  Then, when looking at Tory Hatcher’s photographs of skulls and mud and tombstones, she had felt proprietary, of knowing that just down that road in the photo lay her home for eighteen years. Maybe you could have two homes in your heart. Heart’s homes. If just one, which one was really hers?

  * * *

  —

  In her mailbox was an actual paper-and-envelope letter from Armand-Loup with a handwritten list of twelve Woodses still in the possession of the mairie of Pont-les-Puits, and suggesting she ought to come back to Pont to look at these valuable oeuvres with a view to selling them for her usual fee, incidentally evading customs coming back to the U.S. by checking them through in her luggage, one or two at a time if necessary. His letter explained that shipping valuable artworks was out of the question because of the massive duty, but it was legal to bring in personal property—more or less legal. “Je t’aime,” the letter added.

  For once, this suggestion of going back to Pont-les-Puits didn’t horrify her, though at first she had no plans to do it. The idea of the village was rosier now in hindsight, and in photographs wonderful—wonderful Pont-les-Puits. After a couple of days, softened by Tory’s photographs, she began to find his suggestion of going back to Pont-les-Puits tenable. Dear Pont-les-Puits. Soon after this, Armand-Loup telephoned to follow up his suggestion, and she said she’d see.

  * * *

  —

  Among her accumulating responsibilities, Lorna had taken on the task of telling Peggy the good news that she’d been designated to make a journey to Singapore or Thailand or both, to perform the vaguely defined task of finding her lost brother. Ran and Lorna had pursued this idea during one of their infrequent phone conversations.

  “Mother, how would I even start finding someone in Thailand?” Peggy had protested. “Private detective?” This was sarcastic, but it was in fact how they proceeded. Ran made Internet forays; a Bangkok detective agency was hired. It was odd they hadn’t done this before. Peggy had about ten days to get her affairs in order and pack. Ran would deal with her mortgage and getting someone to water her lawn. In Bangkok, the detective found Curt immediately, and Curt had consented to be found but encouraged the visit from Peggy all the same. Ran decided not to tell Peggy Curt’s whereabouts were known, because with her slightly masochistic tendencies, she would cancel her trip, saying, Now that I’m not needed.

  * * *

  —

  Lorna had her own travel apprehensions. She came to agree with Armand-Loup that if she was to have an official role in Russell’s estate, she would need to return to Pont-les-Puits to look at his pictures and whatever other stuff he’d left behind; she’d have to know what was there. On the other hand, she dreaded going back to the memories both bad and good—mostly good, admit it—and dreaded the unkind way memory had of forcing you to compare your present state with the past, back when she’d been the happy citizen of a charming and enviable foodie destination in France, even if it had gone downhill a bit since the days of James Beard and M. F. K. Fisher.

  Despite her annual visits to America during her marriage to Armand-Loup, when she left France for good, she hadn’t had a realistic picture of her native land in her mind; she hadn’t yet tried to find magrets de canard or attempted to deal with an American bank or parking meters you operated with your cell phone, or tried to go somewhere on a train; hadn’t read about all the shootings, home invasions, homeless people, crashing economy, or heard the stupefying cost of turning your ankle or, for Donna, of sending the twins to nursery school. All the bad things had been unwelcome surprises.

  Just as in France she had always kept a mental list of things that were better in America, the whole time she’d been back in San Francisco, she’d unavoidably been keeping a mental list of things that were better back in France, as her recent brush with an American hospital confirmed. In some perverse way, France’s strong points now seemed all the more reason not to go back to Pont-les-Puits and risk sinking again into French safety and ease; the list of thing
s that were better and easier in France was long. Now she saw that the secret message of all American folklore—Frankie and Johnny and Bonnie and Clyde and all Western films and songs about logger lovers like Paul Bunyan who stirred coffee with their thumbs—was: you have to be tough to live in America.

  “Come for a week,” Armand-Loup said on the phone. “Not long enough to get jet lag. I’ll pick you up in Lyon or Grenoble—whatever is the best connection from San Francisco.”

  She continued to feel a little dread of seeing the places she’d lived in for so long and loved, for fear her resolve would break down. Yet it would be nice to see some of the people she’d loved in Pont—Mademoiselle Sylva at La Périchole, Vincent at the Friandise, Daisy Magnum who ran the one bookshop, Veuve Duval—always called that—Monsieur Vlad the gardener, on and on, so many. How many people did she know in San Francisco?

  Only her children and one or two old friends from college days—Pam Linden, Phil Train. The Chins. The museum women. Mostly things were changed. The doctor who had delivered her children was long retired; she had to find a new dentist. You don’t make new friends so easily after a certain age. You don’t actually want to. An image of a quilt came to her, like the AIDS quilt from the eighties, with the names of people who had died sewn in. Despite her apprehensions, she booked a ticket to France for just before Christmas in defiance of the increased fares; it was the professionally responsible thing to do now that she was Russell’s agent. She’d fly to Grenoble and take a train to Valence, and then Armand would fetch her from there—“No problem, chérie,”—or she could rent a car.