The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

  From around the corner, he heard voices, a man’s and a woman’s, the woman asking a question and the man answering, and he thought that Rose must be there, too. He pictured her sitting in that formal way that she had, her hands folded in her lap and her back held very straight. She would smile a little when she saw him, as if the smile were a small self-indulgence that she allowed herself, like a chocolate. She would nod at him and then rise and get him a cup from inside in the kitchen, pour him some coffee from the pot that sat on the table between them. He hurried forward toward the voices.

  It was not Rodin, of course, and the table and chairs were gone. A boy stood in the middle of the patio where they’d been, and a girl stood next to him. He was dressed in the uniform of a British gunnery officer and he had a book open in his right hand, which Edward saw, as he approached them, was a Baedeker. He was speaking, explaining something to the girl. They looked up as Edward approached, smiled in greeting and began to drift away down that path.

  He let them wander on and then followed after, down the slope to the place where, six years ago, Rodin had erected the façade of a château at the end of his land, just because he liked it and he could. Those were the days of abundance for him. He had it packed in crates, brought from the country and put back together section by section on his lawn.

  It was under this that he and Rose were now buried, side by side. Edward went down the slope toward the white outline of the mausoleum. The couple who had gone before him were standing looking up at the cast of The Thinker that sat sentinel over the graves.

  There they were: the names inscribed on the stones, the dates of their lives, beginning and ending. He made himself stand there and read the names out loud, saying them softly so only he could hear. He knelt down and traced the inscriptions with his fingers. After so many deaths, he thought somehow he would be better able to understand this one, but instead, he was aware of something resistant inside him: a great stone or a vacuum, a refusal, so that he was left staring, dry-eyed and scraped out. Why is there nothing else, only this feeling of being at once heavy and empty? He thought reflexively of the person of whom he would want to ask this, the person whom he could ask a question so large, which was, of course, Rodin himself. In his head, he began to compose the letter he would now never write to his friend: Why can’t one get hold of it? It seems so impossible to get the mind around permanent absence. How long does it take to understand? All I can do is stay here and listen to the sound of the wind, while strangers blow around your grave like ghosts.

  Everything is lost in the end, he thought. It is inexorable, the process by which the world strips away what you think belongs to you. The only thing you can do is to give what you can, when you can, as Rodin had done for him. The only small power that you have is the power of generosity, the power to choose to whom you give away what is precious.

  He went back to his rooms in Montparnasse and began to write a letter to Marion.

  AT THE END of the court case Marion felt all the good drain from the world. The universe was crooked and broken, without the possibility of justice or clarity. Impulses to do good were confounded. Impulses to love turned to poison.

  She found a studio uptown and tried to paint again, but she felt so sick at heart that she could not begin. She would stand in front of a blank canvas for hours, sifting through preliminary sketches trying to find something that moved her sufficiently to try to paint. Nothing held her attention because nothing held her feelings. After weeks on end of this she took the canvas down from her easel and put her paints away; she did not want to look at them sitting idle.

  She would go to her studio anyway during the days and just sit, silently, and watch the people in the street below, going about their business oblivious to her. Then she began sleeping there. She secluded herself, seeing as few people as she could. She preferred to be alone. It was easier than enduring the forced conviviality of the world trying to return to what it had been before.

  The Spanish influenza that she had seen in France in May swept through New York, stronger and more rapidly contagious than before. She read about its onset in the papers; saw the first cases begin to fall ill but now here, among civilians. When the trial was over and the publicity surrounding it died down, she volunteered to nurse those in the temporary infirmaries that had sprung up all over the city to deal with the burgeoning caseload. Because she had been a nurse and had recovered from the disease already, she was sent to a hospital on the Lower East Side where crowded tenements were filled with the worst cases she had yet seen.

  There was no cure and no remedy; nothing to do but make the sick comfortable and wait. Nurses and doctors wore protective masks throughout the hospital wards, so it was a world of people without mouths, the bottom halves of their faces blank. When they spoke, their voices were muffled and echoing, as though all their conversations were recordings.

  Each day that winter and into the spring, she distributed medicine and food, took temperatures, gave injections. The patients weakened; their skin turned waxy and slick; they breathed, in the end, only with tremendous difficulty, and she saw their bodies grasping for air, their chests heaving with the effort. They did not want to let go; and sometimes, she watched them struggle up from it and come back to themselves. But more often, she watched them slip away, subsiding into death, or kicking against it, but going under in the end all the same. A kind of iron calm descended on her, different from the frantic work the war had demanded or the listlessness she’d felt following the trial. She moved steadily; she listened to all the sounds around her, the sound of her own breath. She absorbed each death not as an individual event, but as part of a great tide. She did not designate each one its own specific grief. In this way, she kept going.

  She thought of Edward when her mind was not busy, saw him in the faces and movements of other people. When she returned uptown to her studio, exhausted at the end of the day, he was so strongly etched in her mind that she was almost convinced she would open the door and find him, though she knew that she would not. Sometimes she would try to imagine it: What if she said yes? If she went to live with him? But she could never quite picture it. She could not see how they would emerge from under the weight of the past, not together.

  Then unexpectedly she received a letter from him. It came by the second post, in the middle of the day, so she did not get it until she returned from the hospital that evening. It surprised her. She did not know what it would say; it would not, she thought as she tore across the top of the envelope, be another request that she live with him as his mistress. She knew him and something about his limits; he had his pride; he would not ask her again. When she felt the weight of the envelope, she realized there was something inside it besides paper. She found it and withdrew it. It was a set of keys. She unfolded the letter. It was short, one side of a single sheet.

  Dear M—

  A few weeks ago, I was discharged from the Air Service, and now I am going back to Voulangis. I will rebuild my studio and darkroom there, and that is where I intend to live and work from now on.

  The keys I’ve enclosed are for the apartment on Montparnasse, my old Paris studio, which I will not be using anymore. They are the only set.

  The place is quiet, and spacious enough for one person to paint in. Sometimes the sink leaks and in winter, you should keep the fire in the stove going all day because it gets drafty. But the light there is good, especially in the mornings. It is yours if you want it. Accepting it entails no obligation to me. You said you wanted to go back to painting so I offer you this.

  That was all. She looked at the keys, then closed her fingers around them; they were solid, the metal cold on her skin. There were two on the ring. One must be for the front door to the building and the other for the apartment. She had not been there in years, but she remembered the place quite clearly. The front apartment on the third floor, with a big window, which looked out onto the boulevard, where people would be coming and going all day, beginning to rebuild their live
s after the conflagration, to look however they could for hope. She should go there and be among those who had seen what she had seen, who knew those terrible things, too. Perhaps there she could begin the process of making sense of this sore, skinned world. Perhaps she could find something she loved or hated enough to want to paint it.

  He had given her this chance, this possibility. She did not know if she would take what he had offered, but she felt inside her the smallest stirring of something alive, something capable of growth and perhaps renewal. She understood that she was loved and that she was free.

  She slipped the keys into the pocket of her skirt along with the letter so she could feel that it was there as she walked through the rest of the day.

  Wheelbarrow and Flowerpots. Voulangis, 1920. Palladium and ferroprussiate print.

  FRANҪOIS SAYS, YES, he will help. He thinks that Monsieur Steichen is crazy. He indicates this with a shrug and a sucking sound drawn through his remaining teeth. Crazy. But not so crazy that François won’t do what he asks.

  They have a little kerosene to spare. That will help. François retrieves it from the shed near Edward’s studio while Edward goes upstairs to the attic to begin bringing the canvases down to the garden. There are nearly a hundred stacked against the sloping walls. He lifts two by their frames and carries them down the stairs.

  With François’s help he soon has a waist-high pile of frames and pictures built into a ramshackle pyramid on the lawn. Isolated away from the trees and the flower beds, it looks lonely.

  “Go ahead and light it,” he says to François. “We don’t want to make it any bigger than that.”

  “Some of us don’t want to make it at all,” François mutters. “If I’d known you didn’t want these, I would have burned the frames for firewood three years ago when we had the coal shortage.” He douses the pile in solvent. “You light it,” he says. “I don’t want to be responsible.”

  Edward fishes in his pocket for a match. He strikes it and watches the fire swarm over its head. He throws the match in among his paintings. Flames begin to lick across their exposed faces.

  François curses quietly in Breton and slouches into the house.

  Edward had considered facing all the paintings inward, so that he wouldn’t see them as they burned. He started to make the pile with all the blank reverses showing, just pale canvas and wooden frames. But he changed his mind and turned the paintings to face him as he made their funeral pyre.

  So now he sees them vanish one by one. First, fire consumes the portrait of a small boy who stands chewing his thumb and staring as the flames stroke upward toward his white collar. The son of one of the farmers from Voulangis. He would have been twenty-two this year if he had not died at Soissons. Beside that, a vase of sunflowers starts to blacken and crumple. A view of the river from the hill behind this house. Bowls of fruit, women leaning on the railings of a bridge, people in a rowboat on a sunny day. All of them disintegrate before his eyes and their rags move in the fire’s currents as though they were alive.

  François emerges from the back door carrying three more paintings. He lays them carefully on top of the rest. Edward nods with satisfaction and then goes to retrieve more. He feels a sudden surge of elation: He’s done it. He hasn’t lost his nerve at the last moment. By nightfall all his paintings will be ashes on the lawn.

  THE THOUGHT THAT the paintings must go had tugged at him ever since he’d returned to Voulangis. It was spring and he was living alone, undisturbed except by François, who came in to work in the garden. He went to work repairing the damage to the house: the damp in the walls and the floor, the broken kitchen window. He sanded and painted the woodwork outside. He replaced one of the walls of his studio and put new shingles on part of the roof where they had fallen away. When the studio was ready for use, he started to bring the paintings downstairs from the attic; but he found he didn’t like them anymore. They felt stilted, romantic in a way that rang false. He left the paintings where they were, locked the attic up again and retreated downstairs.

  These days he was lonely as he had never allowed himself to be before, when he had filled his days up with war work. He initiated proceedings for a divorce from Clara early in the spring; she was contesting some of his claims and it seemed likely that the negotiations would go on for some months yet. He received regular letters from Mary. She would come to France when the school year ended in summer to stay with him—he counted the days until her arrival anxiously. Through Clara’s sister Charlotte, he was also trying to arrange for Kate to accompany her, but he knew that this was a delicate process that could not be rushed. He must be patient and persistent if he wanted to see her.

  Other friends were slowly returning to Europe now that it was at peace, or at least too exhausted to fight anymore. He would go up to Paris to visit occasionally; he was pleased to see people, and pleased to get away when he left at the end of the evening. He heard from François that Amélie had returned to Mildred’s old house in Huiry: it belonged to her now. It had been left to her in Mildred’s will.

  “She still has some things belonging to you,” François said. “She said she wished to return them.”

  “Well,” Edward replied, “I’ll go and get them from her when I have a chance.” But somehow the courage to face the woman’s loss, and his part in causing it, eluded him. He put off going to Huiry, then put it off again. Weeks passed and it faded from the front of his mind.

  So mostly he was alone. He had begun taking photographs again, but he was dissatisfied with what he produced. As with his paintings, he felt that the old subjects, the old ways of depicting them, were no longer right, or real; they were too delicate to survive on the barren side of the war. He looked at the way he’d obscured his subjects with soft focuses, with retouching, and he couldn’t imagine why he’d ever thought it was necessary. But he did not know what else he could do.

  One afternoon he was taking a walk along the edge of his back field. The path followed the boundary line between his land and the neighboring farm and then dropped into a small wood on the far side. He thought that if his daughters had been there they would have liked this walk on this afternoon. He thought that they would have gone into the wood and strayed immediately from the marked path, their boots stirring up last year’s dry leaves. He followed where he imagined them leading, up a slight rise and clambering over the barrier of a fallen tree trunk. On the other side, he could see something gray and bulbous lying on the ground. He went toward it until he could make it out clearly. It was a soldier’s helmet, French, its edges rusted so that it was eaten away at the brim. It was half-covered by leaves—it must have been lying there through at least one change of the seasons. He stood up from it and formed a quadrangle with his fingers framing where it emerged from the forest floor. Then he went back to the house to get his camera and returned to the same spot.

  When he looked at the helmet through his viewfinder, he was again confronted by how uncanny it was. A hat, half-buried in leaves; the mind did not immediately have a place for such a thing; it was simultaneously familiar and strange, and this was why it had captured his interest. It caught the viewer up short; you had to look at it twice to figure out what it was, and what it meant.

  This is what I want, he thought. The techniques he used to use to mystify and obscure the world, the platinum paper that made it look like a dream, none of that seemed necessary now. He did not need to look far afield for appropriate subjects, or wait for a scene of beauty to align itself for his lens. He could just cut the world up into its component shapes, as he had done from the air; what would make them interesting was not painting over what was there, but showing it simply in all its inherent peculiarity. He took the picture, and after that, he began to use his camera again, everyday.

  His work now was very different from what it had been. He wanted to show each thing as part of its context. He wanted to show only the hinges, and let people imagine the door, and the room it led to. Because, he reasoned, when you photogr
aph a woman sitting in a chair reading, in a house during a summer of peace, you are only showing a small sliver of the story. If the woman is smiling or crying, that is only one of her multitude of feelings. The rest you must always guess at. He wanted to take pictures that emphasized this partiality of vision.

  He no longer wandered for miles looking for the perfect scenery, or the ideal light. Instead, he focused in closely on the ordinary things around him, the face of an insect, the stamens of flowers and the mottle around them. A pair of eyeglasses and their shadow. Terra-cotta flowerpots that François had piled inside a wheelbarrow and left there. Edward cut the print so that it showed only the round mouths of the pots, and the long cylinders they formed stacked one inside another.

  “They look like artillery,” François said when he showed the picture to him. “Like the barrels of the .75s that the Territorials set up on the hill.”

  People saw things differently now, Edward realized. They didn’t just see flowerpots, they saw guns. But when he looked at his paintings, he felt pulled back into a time he could no longer understand. He thought that it would be better to get rid of them, start again in this new, bare world.

  He told François he was thinking about destroying his paintings.

  “Why?” the old man asked.

  “Because I don’t like them much anymore.”

  “All that work for nothing. What a waste!” He shook his head.

  “Well, I think next Thursday, I’m going to get rid of the paintings. In the afternoon. Will you come and help me?”

  François hesitated, then finally said: “Yes. If you are determined, I will help.”