I Always Loved You

by Robin Oliveira

  At the end of each day, she dropped her brushes into a tin can and ferried them to the portier’s closet in the hallway, where she washed them with turpentine in a spattered sink. It was now that she had to shutter her ears to the suddenly voluble critic, who awakened as she emerged from her reverie. The persuasive voice harped alternately that she was posing, or that her work was hackneyed and flat, or that she lacked the soul of an artist and was therefore incapable of imparting truth, or that she would never hear again from the art dealer in Philadelphia, who had probably stolen all her canvases anyway, or that she ought to give up, or the worst, that Degas would think nothing of her work. The voice blathered on and on, taking advantage of her fatigue as she rinsed and re-rinsed her brushes and rubbed from her chapped hands the ocher and rose splatters of paint that decorated her wrists and knuckles. She had no idea where she would ever show her work now that she had broken with Degas.

  Back in the studio, she fell on the sandwiches and fruit that Anna had packed for her, looking out the window to the busy boulevard, where the late afternoon bustle washed away the perverse workings of her doubting mind. The effort of spurning the ugly voice exhausted her, and only when she was certain it had quieted did she turn to study the canvas before she locked the door and started for home.

  In this way, the summer of the Exposition Universelle passed: the cold, rainy July and the disconsolate oven of the brutal August, when wealthy Parisians traveled to Dieppe or Provence while her family spent the summer seeking relief in the shade of the Bois de Boulogne, hiring fiacres to transport them from the city to the cooler environs of the park.

  • • •

  One afternoon at the end of August, Degas came toward her on the sidewalk of the Rue Frochot. His linen suit was wrinkled, his top hat was moist at its wide satin band, but his gait was as certain and sure-footed as always. In the bright afternoon he wore his lavender glasses. The reflection on the glasses made it impossible to read his eyes. She thought for a moment that he might pass her by.

  “Mademoiselle Cassatt,” Degas said, stopping at the last moment.

  “How are you?” she said.

  “Quite well, thank you.”

  He was never well. He always had a complaint. “You have not gone away for the summer,” she said.

  “I will vacation in October.”

  “So there is no possibility of an exhibition this autumn?”

  “None.”

  “I see.”

  “How is your family?” Degas said.

  “We have suffered here.”

  “Give them my regards, Lydia especially,” he said, tipping his hat.

  He walked past, his shoulders set, his stride resolute.

  “You are never this polite unless you do not care for the person you are conversing with,” she said, turning.

  He stopped. “You do not seem to care for the truth, or for my apologies.”

  “You must admit you were wrong. We could have dropped sugar cubes and people would have followed them to our exhibition.”

  Degas shrugged.

  “You are indifferent?”

  “You are the one who did not answer my letters. I am not so in need of friends that I force myself on someone who doesn’t care for me.”

  “I was hurt.”

  “I believe I said I was an imbecile.”

  “You were an imbecile.”

  The cobbles had absorbed the sun’s heat during the day, but now the sun dropped behind the gables of the buildings, and the wretched glare diminished. In the reprieve of shade, Degas removed his glasses, and Mary studied his eyes, hoping to find the spark of interest he had always carried for her. They were cool, but not angry. Assessing.

  “You’re a bulwark when you’re angry,” he said.

  “And you are glib and unkind.”

  He would have to walk away to end it. Her pride would sustain her in this; she would stand here through dinner, through the night, all the way to the morning, if necessary, though there was little satisfaction in it.

  “I will not tell you that I am sorry,” she said.

  “You owe me no apology. Just an acceptance of mine.”

  A sliver of light penetrated a break in the buildings’ facade. Degas winced, but did not put on his glasses, concentrating his piercing gaze on her and what she would say next.

  “We are adept at wounding one other,” she said. “But can we not? I would rather have you in my life.”

  A small smile lifted the corners of his mouth. He said nothing, but took her parasol from her, shut it, and hung it over his forearm, then folded his glasses into his coat pocket. He reached for her hands and wrapped them in his. Like hers, his were reddened and roughened by the scourge of turpentine, shaped by the dexterous manipulation of brush and palette knife, tinted by pastels and oils fast nestled into crevices. Mirrors, their hands.

  “I don’t want to have to spend my life defending my aspirations nor my right to speak. Not to you. Not to my father. Not to anyone,” she said.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” he said.

  “Would you come see what I’ve done? It’s new, and I’m not sure.” Though now, in his presence, she was sure. It was solid work: new, bright, and veracious. “If you come, it won’t take more than a moment,” she said, but it would. And he wouldn’t mind. He would abandon whatever friends he was on his way to meet now and would come back with her and look at all her paintings and exclaim over them.

  “I looked for you,” she said. “Every day. On the street. I never saw you.”

  “Except today.”

  “Yes. Except today.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  So, you have what you want at last,” Édouard said. He stood in the drawing room of Berthe and Eugène’s apartment on the Avenue d’Eylau, holding his hat in his hands. It was a warm September, and his suit was wet with perspiration. Berthe had not yet offered him a seat.

  “You blame me for wanting a child,” Berthe said. “How like you.”

  She was lying on the rose-colored divan in her rose-colored salon. She wore a white dressing gown, its grosgrain ribbon secured with a bright bow under her breasts, hiding the swell of Eugène’s child beneath. Berthe’s face had grown more angular since she’d been with child, but to Édouard, that severity only made her more beautiful. She had been ordered to rest in her apartment for the duration of her confinement. The doctors were adamant; at thirty-seven she was old to have a child, and there were dangers.

  Édouard shifted on his feet. “You know as well as I do that your child could have been my child, if I had wanted, if I had pressed.”

  “Did you come to make me unhappy? Was that your plan this morning when you left your house?”

  “Eugène tells me he believes he will have a son.” Eugène was away in the South of France in search of a job, which was why Édouard had chosen today to visit Berthe.

  “You misdirect your jealousy.”

  “Léon is not mine,” Édouard said.

  “Why do you persist in telling such an ugly lie?”

  “Why do you press me now, Berthe, on such an old story? Léon is grown, he is happy, I was a father to him—what do the details matter?”

  “Because I am to have a child, and I want to know who his true cousins are.”

  Édouard clutched the back of the armchair next to the divan. A sheen of perspiration sprang to his forehead. The pain came in waves now. Lately, just being alive had been exhausting enough; add to it the trauma of being forced to move out of his beloved studio, and well, some days he wasn’t certain he had the energy for anything. He limped around the armchair and sat down. “I didn’t come to argue with you, Berthe. I came because I have something to tell you. And I needed to tell you alone.”

  Berthe blanched against her pretty couch.

  “The doctors tell me I have ataxia,” Édouard said. “Neapolitan disease. It is possible that Rio is to blame, when I was in the navy.”

  She drew her hand to her throat. “Such dre
adful things you tell me.”

  “You will be all right. I asked the doctor. Suzanne has been fine for a very long time. I believe I am the only victim. The doctor has prescribed mercury baths. Calomel. Potassium iodide.” His voice broke. “The same treatments Monsieur Maisonneuve ordered for my father.”

  “What about my child?”

  “I repeat, the doctors have no fear for you.”

  Outside, the sky grew suddenly gray; the wind turned cool. The sheer curtains ballooned. Édouard rose and shut the window. As he hobbled back to his seat, the dull light made pale marble of his hands. “Suzanne claims she is not to blame, but it is difficult to know.”

  “Your father? And Suzanne?” Berthe said. She sat very still. “No wonder your mother despises her.”

  “My mother devised it all. She diverted funds to Suzanne when she could no longer give piano lessons; she concocted the lie that Suzanne was not the boy’s mother. She protected everyone. Herself the most, I think.”

  “Now you tell the truth.”

  “After such a long time, a lie feels like the truth.”

  “So, Léon could be your brother, not hers; your father’s son, not yours?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

  “Will Suzanne never tell who is the true father?”

  “I don’t think she knows. Though I try to believe she was faithful to me, after she and I began.” What must his father have thought, as he lay dying of the pox? Did he blame Suzanne, as Édouard tried not to do now? They had each used her, but Édouard didn’t think that Suzanne had minded. He had decided long ago that she loved him best, decided that was why she had agreed to marry him as soon as his father had died, decided that was why she didn’t mind the manufactured confusion about the paternity. It made it easier to glide over the messiness of her past. “Perhaps my father got it from someone else and gave it to her, and she to me. Perhaps I picked it up along the way. Or perhaps it was Rio, after all.”

  Berthe said, “You don’t know?”

  Édouard shrugged. “I don’t remember when the signs appeared.” Worse terrors circled now than the pain. The mercury the doctors had prescribed was said to deprive its takers of memory and sense. Already, in conversation, his wit could be struck dumb; nightly, froth bubbled from his mouth and he had to shed his nightclothes after sweating through them. The potassium iodide promised help for the pain, but he still experienced debilitating attacks, often when he was out and about on the streets. Sometimes, he had to stagger to a building and lean up against it until the pain abated. More than once, he had fallen. And always, his father’s fate loomed. Paralyzed, an invalid. Congestion cérébrale, the doctor had called it, in an attempt to eradicate the shame of the diagnosis by diction, but no euphemism had saved his father from death. His illness had occurred too late to alert Édouard to the dangers. And Suzanne never really had said. Why would she, given the awkwardness of being mistress to both father and son? If she truly had been?

  “Not quite incest,” Berthe said.

  “It was love.”

  “Love is always the excuse for shameful behavior. Claiming it is such a shabby ploy.”

  “Did Eugène not mention any of this? I asked him to go with me to the doctor, so he knows. I thought he might have told you, to make you love me less.”

  “Do not disparage Eugène. He is the innocent, either way; he is the goodness neither of us deserves.” A wave of nausea washed over her. She had been faithful to Eugène since her marriage, but barely.

  “The specter of mortality, evoking shame,” he said.

  “You will destroy my happiness yet.”

  “You won’t miss me too much, will you, darling?”

  “Don’t invite death,” Berthe said.

  “Death will come.”

  The tainted future, too, would come, and bring with it this memory of sadness. Berthe shook her head, trying to erase the indelible, blighted past.

  “I will need you, dear Berthe, in the end.”

  Relieved of his burden, he took his time, stroking her cheek as he kissed her, caring nothing for her tears as he left, for he had seen them often enough.

  1879

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The soft taps of hammers, murmurs of consultation, and occasional trills of laughter wafted through the apartment on the Avenue de l’Opéra, where Mary Cassatt stood in a bedroom, the door closed so that she could have a moment to herself. Soon, people would begin arriving for the private party on the eve of the opening, and she wanted to savor the miracle. Of the seven new artists that Degas had invited to exhibit with the group, only Mary had been allotted a room of her own. While not the Salon, the private room seemed to Mary to surpass it in every way. Eleven of her canvases decorated the walls, hung as she wished—not skied out of sight by a querulous Salon hanging committee, but arranged by her, to her taste, to show her work at its best. She peered at the exuberant paintings that had sprung from her hands these past two years and marveled at the perseverance it had taken her to get to this moment—hour after hour, day after day, year after year of faith and hard work and sheer strength of will, all of which had often failed her.

  The door opened behind her, sending a great whoosh of air into the room. The gaslight flickered behind the sconces, causing yellow shadows to dance on the windowpanes blackened with rain. It had been raining for days. She’d had to pay the carter extra to place her crated pictures under a tarp for the trip from her studio to the apartment. Now Edgar removed his hat, glistening with raindrops, and surveyed her work, which he had already seen a dozen times. In the past week, he had even helped her to choose some of the frames, though he had chafed when she had chosen red for one and green for another. He preferred white frames, because he believed they were neutral and did not detract from the work, but she had insisted because she liked the complementary effect of the colors on the artwork, and because green and red were her favorite colors. Edgar thought it a travesty for an artist to fall in love with specific colors. Color was a utility, he said, that one ought to deploy discriminately, but Mary had ignored him.

  “Not a bad canvas among them,” Edgar said. “You did well, my dear. Even if you were impatient.”

  “A year late,” she said, smiling, taking the opportunity to tease him about last year’s debacle.

  “But here you are,” he said, “with more canvases to show than you otherwise would have had.” He did not hide his self-congratulation. The profusion of exquisite canvases that Mary had been able to produce was more proof that he had been right about the cancellation. “And it is such magnificent work.”

  “Do you think so? I’m suddenly nervous. I spent half the day in bed with the covers pulled up to my neck. I could hardly get dressed. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to come.”

  She had dressed, though, and early, because Abigail Alcott, newly married and now named Nieriker, had come for dinner to introduce the entire Cassatt family to her husband, Ernest, a Swiss businessman, whom she had met in England. While Robert and Ernest discussed Ernest’s new appointment as inspector general of a mercantile house, Abigail explained privately to Mary and Lydia that he had been of immense comfort when her mother had died, having the effect of endearing himself to her more quickly than she otherwise would have allowed. When Ernest had to relocate, they decided to marry rather than endure a separation. She’d had to explain this to friends when she’d returned to Paris, as hasty marriages usually indicated a pregnancy, but this was not the case, though Abigail was hoping, she confessed, despite her age, to have a child yet. At dinner, Ernest revealed himself to be a kind man who adored Abigail, and their mutual affection and admiration of Mary and her accomplishments had distracted Mary from thinking too much about the evening to come. After dinner, the Nierikers had escorted her to the exhibition early so that she could make one last check before the party. They were outside now, having a look before the place got too crowded, though so many people had come ahead of time that the apartment was already a hive of laughte
r and flurry.

  Gustave Caillebotte stuck his head in the doorway, his gloved hand rimming the jamb. He still wore his hat and coat, though he had arrived several hours ago. Since then he had not once stopped moving. “Degas! They said you were here. Where are the rest of your things? I’ve counted only three of your canvases. Three. We open tomorrow. Have you gone insane? Of course you have; why am I asking?”

  Edgar had listed twenty-five works in the catalog, but the walls allotted him in the parlor and dining room were still mostly blank, adorned by only one portrait of a laundress and two pictures from his series on the École de Danse.

  “Gustave, you will develop a headache if you continue badgering everyone. Why don’t you let Portier manage all this?” Edgar said. Alphonse Portier was Edgar’s neighbor on the Rue Lepic, a colorist who wanted to begin dealing in pictures. He had been hired as manager, but Caillebotte, who had rented the apartment and whose money was at stake, could not let go.