“So much green,” I said.
Green is a secondary color made by mixing yellow and blue. Blue for sky, yellow for sun; chloros, or green, in nature. And that’s the problem: only the true greens of nature look believable. All other greens look what they are: imitation. Green is unreliable. There are so many wrong greens, greens where the yellow is too dominant, making a sickly tint like a fading bruise, or greens where the blue is too dark, making the green look like a storm cloud over an angry ocean. To me, only when green is accented with black does it look authentic in a painting, black pigment made from burnt bones. Fire. So much of life is about fire and destruction.
“Travel is very difficult these days,” Gerald said. “All those Austrian refugees clamoring at the embassies.”
The sad clock ticked. Footsteps rushed down the hall, one of the girls late for her class. I studied the pattern in the worn carpet, torn between obeying Gerald and my duty to the school, and a growing desire to see Charlie. It had been a long time.
Gerald looked up, and I could see in his face that awful puzzlement: Why is she alive, when my brother is dead? It was my fault, and it was unforgivable. I agreed.
I ate boiled beef and greens with the students and other faculty in the dining hall that night, and then went to my studio. I hadn’t painted since the accident, since Allen’s death. Colors defied me, wouldn’t come true. I would try a study in blue, but when it dried it would be gray, only gray, and I didn’t know if it was my vision that had changed or the paints themselves. It was like a singer losing her voice, knowing what the notes are but not being able to replicate them. Death can do that, make reality as hard to hold on to as water dripping through your fingers.
That night I tried to size a canvas, just to see if I could still do it. It felt important not to lose the craft of painting, even if the art of it eluded me. The schoolgirls were at a dance in the great hall, drinking pineapple punch and pretending, as Allen and I had, that they were somewhere else, somewhere festive and gay. I could hear the gramophone, a Freddy Martin song, “April in Paris.”
One of Allen’s favorite songs. I was so distracted I applied the glue too thickly and ruined the linen. I decided not to try a second one. Why waste school supplies? I turned off the lights, locked up the room, and crossed the graveled courtyard to my little bedroom over the school garages. It smelled of gasoline, but I had my own entrance, a modicum of privacy. An owl hooted. Somewhere in the fields beyond the manicured lawns a fox barked, a rabbit screamed. Life and death in the peaceful English countryside.
I listened to creeping darkness, a light patter of rain on the roof. What if I did go to Paris and see Charlie? I dared a brief moment of happiness. And there it was, a pale blue rising in me out of the gray, not quite joy, but something close to it. Anticipation.
I hadn’t seen my brother since my husband’s funeral. Charlie had wanted to visit, but I always said no. I did not want consolation or reminiscing about earlier times. I wanted to be alone with the heartbreak.
My father had been a physician famous for his treatments of skin grafting during World War I. After he and my mother died of the Spanish flu, Charlie and I were taken in by my father’s sister. I was five, Charlie only three. He barely remembered them, so during our childhood I would make little sketches of Momma and Poppa from my own memories to share with Charlie, so that he would know them, at least through my own memories. Art can do that, save the best of the past for us.
Aunt Irene had married a man who owned the northeast franchise of the Fuller Brush Company, but they were childless. Their parenting style required that we be fed, housed, and educated but never coddled, so Charlie and I grew completely dependent on each other, two primary colors not needing a third to be complete.
After I finished high school my aunt and uncle supported me through a year of studies at the Art Students League. I exhibited one small oil, a portrait, in a minor exhibition in a small downtown gallery, and thought I was on my way to a career—but when I was nineteen Aunt Irene said, “Enough! You can’t be a student forever!” She offered to “finish” me with a trip to Paris for a month. I wouldn’t go unless Charlie came with me.
That was in August of 1933, when, after the crash, a Hooverville appeared behind the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue, tin and cardboard shanties in straggling rows of the newly homeless. In Paris money stretched further—whenever my aunt said that, I imagined bills and coins of rubber, stretching like broken hairbands. We shopped, dined, walked in the parks. When my aunt was resting in the hot afternoons, Charlie and I went to the Louvre.
And one day, when I went to revisit the Mona Lisa, a young Englishman, tweedy and polite, was sitting there, on what I thought of by then as my bench. He looked straight ahead at the Mona Lisa in front of him, and the ginger color of his hair and mustache, the sharp line of his nose, reminded me of one of Renoir’s early self-portraits. Say what you will of the cloying sweetness of some of his subject matter, Renoir knew how to use color.
The Englishman rose gallantly and offered to share the bench. “Allen Sutter,” he said, taking my hand. That single touch, a warm grasp, and I felt I had been jolted awake from a deep sleep.
“Lily Cooper, and my brother, Charlie.”
The three of us sat down and pretended to study the Mona Lisa, but all the while I was giving Allen sideways glances and he was returning them. He was thin and tall, and his eyes were very dark brown, not the pale gray that often goes with red hair. Unusual coloring that made me want to try a portrait of him. And then I wondered what it would be like to kiss him, to hold him.
Why him? It was the time, the place, and there was a sparkle in his dark eyes that made me want to make him laugh. Coup de foudre, the French call it, the lightning strike. Love is partly what we feel about the other person and partly how that other person makes us feel about ourselves. With Allen, from our first meeting, I felt confident and as pretty as a girl in one of Watteau’s paintings of country courtships.
After that initial encounter, for the next two weeks, we met at the Louvre every afternoon, when my aunt was napping.
When Aunt Irene did finally return to New York in September, I didn’t go with her, insisting that I was going to stay in Paris and study art there.
She peered hard at me when I told her. “If I hear so much as a whisper of misbehaving, your allowance will be cut off and you will return immediately to New York,” she said. “Do you understand?” Charlie studied the ceiling and gave me a little poke in the ribs.
When Charlie hugged me good-bye at the pier, just before he boarded, I had my first and only moment of doubt. We had never been separated before. “Don’t behave,” he whispered. “Have fun.”
Three months later, Allen and I were married in a civil ceremony at the Mairie de Paris. Well, I suppose you are “finished” now, my aunt wrote, when I sent her a telegram announcing my marriage. Try and be happy. You’ll find it’s not as easy as it seems. Good luck, and love. Fingers crossed.
Allen and I spent our honeymoon in a Left Bank one-room studio, eating bread and cheese and rarely rising from the mattress we had put on the floor. We were young and so delighted with each other we couldn’t imagine needing anything else. In that first year I didn’t even miss my brother, who had begun medical studies in Boston. Allen was lighthearted and full of practical jokes, a perfect antidote to my somber childhood, his sunny yellow next to my gray-blue. He once taught children in our apartment building how to fill water balloons and drop them from the roof, a morning’s work that did not endear us to others in the neighborhood. He was playful, and passionate in our lovemaking, teaching me the delights the flesh could provide, the way colors burst upon closed eyelids in ecstasy.
Allen was a math tutor who helped students prepare for the difficult baccalauréat exam, and I received my allowance—it was to continue until my twenty-first birthday—so we made do for an entire year in Paris, with the
mattress on the floor and a single cooking ring smuggled into the room. But one morning the silly jokes were gone and he was serious. When I asked what was wrong, he said that it was time to plan for the future. “I have to provide for you,” he said. “And there may be children, you know.”
Children. Believe it or not, I hadn’t even thought of that, hadn’t realized that there could be even more love in the world than I already had. “Children,” I repeated. “Lovely. Let’s practice.”
His brother, Gerald, got him a job as math teacher at the girls’ boarding school outside London, where Gerald was resident physician. Newly serious, somewhat reluctantly, we left Paris and went to damp, cold England. As much as I had grown to love Paris, I didn’t mind, because I was with Allen. We were a universe of two. A quiet universe of two, still waiting for my first pregnancy to happen, when two years later I, still waiting for motherhood and bored of so much countryside, begged Allen to go to a dance in town with me.
He was tired and wanted to stay in. He already had his slippers on, his pipe lighted, a pile of algebra tests on the table, waiting for grading. “Come with me,” I pleaded. And he did.
If I had known then how easily, how quickly, total destruction could arrive around the next bend in the road, I would have locked him in his room, like a treasure, and me there, locked in with him.
Instead, I killed him. I was driving, and I hit ice on the road and barreled into a tree. A brief memory of screams, and when I woke up, in the hospital, Charlie was there, trying to comfort me, to calm me, to rouse me back to life, but not even Charlie could do that. My universe had collapsed, because Allen had died in the crash.
After the funeral, I sent Charlie back to Boston, to his medical studies. Gerald, my brother-in-law, told me to stay at the school as long as I needed; he would move me to a smaller room, a room for one person, a widow’s room. My punishment, and I accepted it, wanted it. Gerald never looked me in the eyes again.
* * *
• • •
But now Paris, the city where I had fallen in love with Allen, was calling me again. Paris, and Charlie—I wanted to see them. Both of them. I wanted to take a deep breath, to walk on city streets, to have even a small vacation from misery, from the constant ache for Allen.
I found a scrap of paper and began making a list of what I would need to pack.
* * *
• • •
Two days after receiving Charlie’s telegram, Gerald drove me to the train station. I had given the girls a final evaluation, turned in my paperwork, and ended the semester early. Gerald was furious, and I could see in his face that he wished I would lose my passport in Paris, that I would never return, never stand before him again, reminding him. I was alive. His brother wasn’t.
When I arrived at the Gare du Nord the next day, it was a sunny June afternoon, and the cavernous station was busy with girls in summer frocks, les hommes d’affaires with their briefcases and rolled-up shirtsleeves, younger men sitting at the buffet tables drinking coffee and watching the crowd, looking for a specific face or perhaps any pretty face. I found a cab on rue de Dunkerque and went to meet Charlie, my little brother.
He wasn’t at Café les Deux Magots when I arrived, still a little sick from the Channel crossing and train ride. I checked the telegram—correct time, correct place. Charlie was late. This was unlike him, good, responsible Charlie, but it was spring and Paris and I decided not to worry, to take in my surroundings, to observe how the Parisian women sat in their chairs, how they tilted their heads to the side, lifted their coffee cups with their hands wrapped possessively around them, women with the colorful frocks and dark eyes that Matisse painted.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés was busy and the café crowded. All the tables huddled under the faded awning or sprawled into the street were occupied and the air was thick with the hum of conversation, the chink of coffee spoons against china, and occasional bursts of laughter. When the café door swung wide I could see the two brightly painted Chinese figurines posed atop pillars that gave the café its name. The mandarins looked very contented, those two, subdued and self-possessed, as if nothing could startle them.
Sunlight gilded the pavement and the gray façades of the buildings across the street. A ginger cat strutted past, his back arched high, sniffing his way toward the fishmonger’s shop. Schoolchildren in blues and plaids, a fruit seller with trays of oranges and apples and grapes—a rainbow, all in one place.
The sky was the shade of blue that Rossetti had used for the sky in Dantis Amor. I wasn’t a fan of the ethereal pre-Raphaelites, but when their colors appear in a real sky the effect is fabulous.
“Another coffee?” The waiter hovered over me, formal in black trousers, with a white towel tied around his waist. I tapped the paperback spread-eagled on my table, pretending I was preoccupied, though I hadn’t read a single word since I had sat down a half hour earlier.
“Yes, please.”
He squinted and leaned a little toward me. “Perhaps an aperitif as well? A Pernod?”
I shook my head. “Just coffee, please.”
A group of boys wearing new khaki-green French army uniforms took the table next to me. Two and a half million young Frenchmen had been put into uniform that year, according to the BBC. Yet we all hoped, still believed, there would be no war. Roosevelt said so, over and over in his fireside chats.
It was a warm day, so the newly conscripted young soldiers had taken off their berets and neatly folded them into their front pockets, making sure the golden anchor, the army symbol, glinted visibly and brightly.
I could tell from the loudness of their comments about the menu and their field training that they were trying to impress me. One of them, the tallest, most handsome one, winked at me. I frowned and looked away.
Opposite me, a table with four young German soldiers, dashing in their tall black boots and fitted uniforms, made sideways glances at the passing girls and whispered together the way boys do, ignoring the curious, sometimes hostile glances of the older people at the café, some of whom would remember Verdun, the Somme, the other bloody battles of World War I.
In March, Germany had annexed Austria, but many people thought they had been within their rights to take back territory that had once been theirs. And if Hitler was running amok in Germany, that was their problem, not ours. So we thought. That was the time, the brief time, when French and German soldiers could still sit peacefully opposite each other in a café.
At the table on my other side a young couple sat, staring into each other’s eyes, oblivious to everything and everyone around them. Birds sang. An occasional breeze stirred the scalloped awning, making it snap like a sail. Happiness lapped at me like waves at the shore, but I was separate from it, the way water and sand are separate, even when they touch.
A half hour later I was ordering my third coffee. Where was Charlie? Had he forgotten? That wasn’t like him, but then maybe he had changed. I certainly had.
Just when I was beginning to worry, a blue Isotta roadster with a convertible top pulled up to the curb in front of the café. The car was the color of a package of Gauloises cigarettes, the blue that Gaugin used to paint Tahitian lagoons. The driver, his face obscured by a silk scarf and sunglasses, maneuvered closely to the wooden cart in front of him, and the vegetable seller, startled, skipped up to the curb.
“Hey! Good-looking!” the driver called.
I stared down at my unread book and pretended not to hear.
“Lily,” the voice said more softly.
“Charlie? Charlie!” All the colors of the street glowed a little brighter when I recognized his voice.
“Wherever did you get that car?” I shouted back. It was the kind of car that movie stars like Gary Cooper or Fred Astaire drove, not exactly what medical students from Harvard could afford.
“Borrowed from a friend,” Charlie said.
He took off h
is sunglasses and studied me. There was so much in his eyes . . . love and worry, and something else I couldn’t name. Anticipation, an announcement. He looked like someone hiding a gift behind his back.
“Get in!” he said. His hand was resting on the car door and I took it and grasped it, hard, and it was like being pulled back from a dangerous place.
“It’s been too long,” he said.
We stayed like that for a long while, just enjoying being together again. He laughed when that moment passed. “What are you wearing?”
I looked down and brushed some lint from my dress. The waist began just under my bosom and the skirt fell almost to my ankles. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing except that it is hideous.”
“Clothes don’t matter.”
“Sure they do. Believe me.”
“So this friend of yours who owns the car. A woman?”
“As a matter of fact, yes, a woman.”
“If you have so little to say about her, I’d guess she’s a married woman.”
Charlie stopped smiling.
“Oh, Charlie, does her husband know you’ve borrowed both his wife and his automobile?” My brother had a reputation, and one for which he wasn’t completely to blame. Women found him irresistible, and when he left New York for Harvard Medical, he’d left behind several brokenhearted debutantes, according to Aunt Irene.
“No, he doesn’t know, and we won’t tell him, will we?”
“Does that mean we’ll be meeting him?”
“I hope not, but it is always a possibility. How long are you here for? Did you book at the Hotel Regina?”
The Regina, a respectable hotel just steps away from the Louvre, was the hotel our aunt had chosen years before. “Bye Bye Blackbird,” she sang, when she first saw it.
“No. I decided to stay at L’Hotel Paris. It’s cheaper.”
“And it’s on the Left Bank, with the artists,” he said. “You can’t fool me. Did you get Oscar Wilde’s room? I wonder if it has the same wallpaper. ‘Either the wallpaper goes . . .’” Charlie gave me a gentle poke in the ribs.
The Last Collection Page 2