by John Jakes
With his left hand, the brewer’s boy made a contemptuous gesture. “Your mother is an old whore so ugly the moths nest between her legs!”
Paul screamed another obscenity and started to charge into the field, brandishing the bat. He’d taken two steps when the pitcher threw the ball.
It whizzed past the astonished artist. He stopped and goggled. Matt dropped his charcoal and shot his right hand over his head. The pad slid off his knee as he caught the ball in long, thin fingers.
“Out! Paul? You’re out.”
Paul spun around. “What does that mean, out?”
“I told you the last time you were up and the same thing happened. He struck you out—your turn’s over.” Matt stood up. The sleeves of his loose white silk blouse flapped in the wind. He waved at the team in the field, all of them clustering around the pitcher as if ready for a fight. “You were the last batter, so that ends the inning and begins a new one with the other team at bat.”
One of Paul’s own teammates called from his easel, “Ah, he’s too stupid to ever understand it.”
Matt’s friend looked increasingly furious. “I demand to know how my turn can be over. I didn’t hit the ball! That turd-eating, lice-ridden little nitwit was distracting me!”
The brewer’s boy took a step in toward home base. Matt held up a hand and he stopped reluctantly. “You can be put out on strikes, Paul. We go into the next inning now. They’re ahead, two aces to none.”
Paul looked at Matt as if he wanted to assault him. Sometimes Matt thought his friend was quite mad. The very names of his dark, troubled pictures suggested it. The Orgy. The Autopsy. The Strangled Woman. Even in the circle of friends and acquaintances who’d been christened the Batignolles group, Paul was only marginally accepted—and the group wasn’t exactly made up of what could be called conservative men. Still, Matt was absolutely convinced the bad-tempered Frenchman possessed a gigantic talent. He saw it particularly in Paul’s paintings of his uncle Dominique.
“You absolutely mean to say I’m finished?”
Matt nodded. He was a slender young man of twenty-six with an oval face said to resemble his late mother’s. He had large brown eyes and a scraggly mustache as sun-streaked as his hair. Wide, solid shoulders offset the slimness of the rest of his body and saved him from any hint of effeminacy.
“Yes, Paul, I’m sorry.” He started to clap a hand on his friend’s shoulder, then remembered Paul despised having anyone touch him.
At the pitcher’s mound, one of the other team shouted, “Hey, let’s play, uh?”
“A bloody wasted day,” Paul grumbled, shuffling away.
The brewer’s boy heard. “Come on, thin skin. You had nothing better to do. Certainly your work’s just as much of a waste of time.”
His teammates laughed and applauded. Paul went rigid. He shoved a hand into the pocket of his soiled trousers.
“You whoresons!” Paul cried, and jerked out a clasp knife. He opened it with his teeth and walked rapidly toward the members of the other team, the blade flashing in the sun.
iii
Panicked, Matt flung himself against Paul and held him back. “Look, it’s only a game. I’m sorry I got you involved!”
“Let me pass!” Paul pushed, strong and wild-eyed. “I’ve had enough of their insults.” Which Paul himself provoked, Matt thought sadly. It was almost as if the artist wanted people to despise him, so that he would have proof that he was rejected, isolated, special.
No one on Paul’s own team made any move to help him. They clearly wanted him to fight with the five players huddled at the pitcher’s position. Two had picked up rocks. Matt shoved at Paul with all his strength, aware of the brandished knife just a few inches from his arm. The members of the other team didn’t help matters.
“What’s that you’re brandishing, sweetheart, one of the tools you use for painting?”
“Oh no”—came another jibe—“he uses brooms and trowels, that’s what all the critics say—”
“Everyone, calm down!” Matt shouted. “This has gone too far.”
The brewer’s boy shrugged. “Tell that to your crazy friend. If he wants to end an inglorious career right here, we’ll accommodate him.”
Paul let out another enraged growl and shoved Matt’s shoulder. As the younger man staggered back, Paul bolted around him. The knife glinted and flashed. Desperate to prevent a brawl, Matt lunged and caught Paul’s free hand. He hung on with all his strength, braced his boots in the stubble and yanked.
Paul swung around to curse Matt, flailing wildly. Suddenly he stumbled. He started to fall forward, the knife inadvertently aimed at Matt’s midsection.
Only Matt’s clumsy leap backward kept the blade from ripping his belly. As it was, Paul gashed Matt’s blouse, then toppled to the ground, nearly impaling himself as the knife slipped from his fingers.
In a sudden burst of temper, Matt grabbed the knife and flung it away. Paul seemed to come to his senses and realize what he’d done. Matt glared at him, then at the other team. “I’m the umpire and I say the game’s over.”
“Splendid!” the pitcher responded. “It’s ruined anyway.”
“You won, for God’s sake,” Matt exploded. Then he too began to calm down.
“We’ll play again next Saturday, as usual,” Matt said.
“All right,” the brewer’s boy agreed. The thought of the victory seemed to mollify the rival team. “But not if you invite him.”
Cursing under his breath, Paul climbed to his feet and stormed off to collect his easel.
iv
For the next few minutes Matt moved among the players, quietly apologizing on Paul’s behalf—his friend would never do it himself—and restoring the atmosphere of friendliness that usually characterized the Saturday outings. Soon the players started back across the fields toward Paris, chattering amiably again and leaving a cloud of sunlit dust behind them. Matt’s anger with his friend was passing. He knew better than to expect any admission of bad behavior from Paul, even in private.
Ah, well. He’d invited Paul to join the Saturday expedition for a more important purpose than learning baseball or practicing salon courtesies. He needed advice—before Dolly’s train arrived.
He walked to where his friend stood motionless in front of his easel. Before the game, the artists in the group had spent an hour working. Paul had begun a study of a clump of alders in the middle distance. Just as Matt approached, he ripped the linen off the frame and flung it out of sight behind him.
“Wretched. Wretched!”
Then he kicked the easel, knocking it over. “Why in Christ’s name do I even trouble myself? Camille tries to encourage me to get out of the studio and master this painting in the open air, but I can’t get the hang of it. I make botch after botch. This is a dog’s profession!”
Matt had an uneasy feeling Dolly was beginning to feel the same way. In the past few months her remarks about the casual, raffish life they lived had grown more and more frequent—and more pointed.
“Here, that wasn’t so bad,” Matt said as he bent to retrieve the unfinished landscape. “I’ll bet your friend Pissarro would agree with me—”
“Leave it alone. “
Paul’s eyes had that dangerous glint Matt had come to recognize and respect. With a slight lift of one shoulder, he drew his fingers back from the discarded work. Paul shot out his hand.
“Let me see what you did!”
Paul studied the sketch Matt showed him without expression, then handed it back. “I look like Satan.” He sounded proud.
Matt helped his friend pack up his pots of pigment, brushes and bottles of diluent. Then he put his own sketch in a lacquered case and fell in step beside the older man. They walked southward, toward the looming butte of Montmartre dominated by the lazily revolving vanes of the oldest of its several windmills, the Moulin de la Galette. The roofs of Paris were largely hidden by the hill on which a drowsy little working-class suburb had grown up in recent years.
&
nbsp; Matt wondered what time it was. Early afternoon, to judge from the light. He owned neither calendar nor pocket watch. He was about to raise the question on which he wanted Paul’s advice when the latter blurted, “Do you like that silly game you tried to teach us?”
“Yes, a lot of Americans like it. If my country sank into the sea tomorrow, just about the only real loss would be our baseball teams.”
“Why don’t you ever take part?”
“I used to, but now I’d rather watch. The only way I can draw is to stay out of the game. Paul—did you mean what you said a few minutes ago about painting being a dog’s profession?”
“Absolutely! It’s insecure, it’s scorned by the masses, it’s degrading because you live in poverty and it destroys the soul because illiterate critics are constantly showering verbal piss on whatever they don’t understand. A dog’s profession! I’d give it up instantly, except that every other profession is so much worse.” Suddenly Paul’s voice grew more temperate, showing an unexpected concern with his friend’s state of mind. “Why do you ask? Are you feeling the same way about it?”
“Sometimes,” Matt admitted. He couldn’t get used to his friend’s abrupt swings of mood. But as long as Paul had calmed down, he might as well take advantage of it. “Dolly seems pretty damn unhappy lately.”
Paul’s face softened even more. “A lovely young woman, Miss Dolly. Is she still in England visiting her parents?”
“She’ll be back tonight.”
“And she’s dissatisfied with the way you’re living?”
“I think so. She hasn’t said it straight out, but I’m beginning to suspect she’d like me to take up a steady occupation. Maybe I should. I haven’t made much progress lately. I’ve been working on one painting for almost three months but nothing’s come of it.”
“A painting of what?”
“The woods at Barbizon.”
“Why did you choose that subject?”
“Because so many good French painters have done fine landscape work down there.”
“Yes, but you’re an American, not a Frenchman. Does Barbizon have any special meaning for you? Does it generate any feeling within you?”
“No, but—”
“That’s the trouble, then! Paint what you are. Paint what you know! Paint what stirs your heart and excites your eye. Unless you do that, there’ll be no passion in your work. No juice of life—”
“Are you saying I should paint something American?”
Paul shrugged. “Perhaps, if nothing else will satisfy the requirements I just set forth.”
“Spoke like a teacher!” Matt said with a trace of pique.
Paul didn’t take offense. “How is old Fochet, by the way?”
“Just as confused as I am about what’s wrong with my work.”
“Fochet is good.” It was a pronouncement. “An intolerable man as regards his disposition—he’s crankier than I am—but he only hectors a pupil to get the best out of him. Tell me, Matthew—why do you hate America so much?”
Matt was unprepared for the sudden change of subject. But he didn’t have to ponder his answer. “Because it’s become a country of parvenus and social climbers. Because money is all that’s important over there. And because of that damn war!” There was a rising fervency in his voice that held his friend’s full attention.
“I saw too much of it, Paul. There should have been another way to end slavery, but the leaders on both sides were too stupid and arrogant and self-serving to find it—just like politicians everywhere. So five hundred thousand boys lost their lives while a few profiteers got rich. Half a million boys, Paul! One of them was my youngest brother.”
“Ah,” Paul murmured. “I never knew that. It explains a great deal.”
They walked on in silence, Matt thinking over what Paul had said. As a matter of fact, he had grown tired of French subjects—landscapes and the figure models engaged by Fochet, the teacher in whose studio he took instructions and rented space. Fochet sensed his dissatisfaction, but was at a loss to offer a remedy.
Paul’s suggestion struck a chord because Matt had been thinking of trying a picture with a subject rooted in his own experience. He’d abandoned the idea because he was contemptuous of virtually everything American, and because such a picture would be too close to lowly genre painting—works depicting everyday life.
Was Paul right? Was he making a mistake by rejecting subjects from his own past? He’d even been having trouble with a small portrait of Dolly. Perhaps there too he was striving for a final effect that was overly refined. Squeezing the juice of life out of the subject, to use his friend’s phrase.
Of course that still left the essential question to be answered. He stated it tentatively.
“I guess what worries me most is wasting my time and Dolly’s. Wasting good years in a worthless effort. Sometimes I wonder whether I have the ability to justify going on.”
“Do you feel you do?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I share your opinion. You have a genuine and formidable talent.”
Matt felt a knot loosen within him. At least he’d gotten the reassurance he sought, and could face Dolly’s occasional jibes with a little less self-doubt. He felt better—but only for a moment. Paul’s face grew dour.
“Don’t preen and congratulate yourself on having talent, my friend. If you haven’t learned it by now, talent’s a cruel mistress. She’ll bring you just a few very brief moments of supreme happiness, and all the grief you’ll need for ten lifetimes. She’ll be very demanding, too. If your young lady ever decides to test whether she or your other love is the more important to you, you’ll discover how cruel a mistress painting can be.”
“Oh, Dolly would never push me to that kind of choice,” Matt said, though without great conviction. It seemed to him that over the past few months, she had been tending just that way.
Hoisting his easel to rest it more comfortably on his shoulder, Paul trudged on with his melancholy gaze lost in the golden stubble ahead. Matt followed in silence, grateful that his friend had been willing to offer encouragement. It was just what he needed with Dolly returning this evening. He did love her, and only hoped that after a good holiday with her parents, she’d be her old tolerant self again.
But he found Paul’s ideas about what was wrong with his work difficult if not impossible to accept. America meant nothing to him any longer. It was just the accidental place of his birth and the benighted address to which he sent mail for his brother and his father. He would never have any desire to paint American subjects, nor any compelling reason to go home again.
Ever.
Chapter II
The Prussian
i
PAUL AND MATT climbed the butte and parted company near the summit, Matt turning off toward his quarters while Paul kept on toward the church of Saint-Pierre and the nearby Place du Tertre, where he was to meet his mistress at a café. How the young and pretty model Hortense Piquet could stand Paul’s abrasive disposition, Matt didn’t know. But he was glad his friend had found at least one person to share his life.
Matt washed, took off the ripped shirt and donned a fresh one, wholly oblivious to the littered state of the two rooms he shared with Dolly. He napped for a bit, then asked his landlady Madame Rochambeau what time it was. Four thirty, she said. He set off down the south slope of the butte, intending to walk all the way to the Gare du Nord. Dolly’s train, which had met a channel steamer at Calais, was due at quarter to six.
A lovely panorama of Paris spread before him as he descended the hill. The late afternoon sun bathed the right bank in a mellow light, while in the west, dark clouds sped toward the city, white streaks flickering in their centers. Matt was unaware of all of it. He was thinking about his work again.
Matt had been sketching for as long as he could remember. Where he had come by the ability, he couldn’t say. Certainly he hadn’t gotten it from his father or mother.
Looking back, he recalled that his earliest
experiments with drawing had been a means of retreating from the turmoil in the Kent household in Lexington, Virginia. That was before the war, when his mother Fan and his father Jephtha, a Methodist minister, had differed strongly on slavery and secession. Their differences finally sundered the family. After a period of involvement with the Underground Railroad, Jephtha fled for the North.
Matt remained with his mother and his brothers, Gideon and Jeremiah, in the valley of the Shenandoah. And gradually the sketching became more than a method of escape from painful reality. It became an end in itself—something that challenged his mind and hand and prodded him to search for the essential nature of a subject, then discover the few lines which would re-create the subject and comment on it at the same time.
In 1859, at age fifteen, he left home. He had his mother’s permission and that of his new stepfather, an actor named Edward Lamont whom he didn’t like very much. He was poor in school so Fan had agreed to let him go to sea on a cotton packet operating out of Charleston. He’d taken to the life at once, and to the vessel’s captain, Barton McGill, a man who seemed to know a good deal about Matt’s family but never explained how.
Of course he’d taken his drawing materials along. When war broke out, McGill shifted to blockade running. Matt stayed with him. After a dangerous run, Matt was always grateful for the release he found in doing sketches of West Indian blacks or stevedores and soldiers in wartime Wilmington. McGill was generous with his praise of the work.
Captain McGill had drowned in a storm in the Gulf in the last days of the war. The incident shook Matt profoundly and affected his life on two counts.
When the schooner broke apart and went down, Matt spent several minutes floundering in the black water. He’d never been a strong swimmer, and for that brief time he could find no timbers to which he could cling. The storm growled and screamed and the raging sea was as black as the sky. He realized he was going to die.
Finally he caught a floating spar and clung to it until he was washed ashore. But that time in the water had given him a harrowing sense of his own mortality and made him realize that the only way to beat the game was to create something death couldn’t destroy. Most men sought immortality in their children, but he wanted more than that. He decided he could find it in his art.