by Tessa Lunney
“He could have you arrested.”
“Bastard.”
“His bastardry is so pronounced it’s positively Shakespearean—Edmund from Lear, perhaps, or Iago.”
“Iago is good; the cunning whisperer.”
“But we have whispers about a possible Cassius, a possible son…”
“Julius?”
“Or Caligula. I’ll ask Bertie, see if he can find out anything.”
“Bertie’s part of this?”
“Intimately… if you know what I mean.”
“Like last time?” Tom grinned. “How is Bertie? Good bloke that. I like your taste in friends.”
“So do I. Why do you think I returned?”
16
“oo-oo ernest are you earnest with me?”
After an afternoon spent walking and talking, we headed to the Closerie des Lilas. Hemingway was sitting at a terrasse table, a purple liqueur in front of him. He was bundled up against the wind in a navy peacoat with the collar turned up, a thick woolen scarf of a homemade brown, and a black beret. He saw Tom and waved, indicated two seats at his table, and called the waiter over in preparation for our joining him. At his table was a soft-looking woman with short brown hair and a warm smile.
“My wife, Hadley.” Hem introduced her with obvious pride.
“Are you writers too?” she asked.
“Tom’s a reporter, we met in Smyrna,” said Hem. “Kiki here…”
“I’m a gossip columnist,” I said. “So writer: yes. Artist: no.”
“Hadley plays piano,” said Hem, his hand on her knee. “Sit down, sit down, we’ve got a few minutes.”
“Until what?” Tom asked.
“Until we meet Gertrude and Alice.”
“Gertrude Stein?” I asked. “I’ve never been invited.”
“I was nervous at first,” said Hadley, “but Alice is the loveliest wife I’ve ever met.”
“Gertrude’s a gun,” said Hem, “and Tom, this’ll be the real Paris for you.”
“It’s a salon,” I said to Tom.
“And surely the perfect antidote to your recent travels, wouldn’t you say?” said Hadley. “I took Hem, my Tatie, out to a Bal Musette last night for ‘sweet song and supper,’ as Tatie calls it, for just that reason. Paris will cure all our ills.”
“And we certainly saw some, in Greece, or Turkey, or whatever it is now.” Hem growled through his cigarette smoke.
“Turkey, I reckon,” said Tom. “But I dunno if I can talk about all that, not on such a romantically wind-blown night as this…”
“We’re travelers in an antique land…” Shelley, again; I stopped myself. I reached over and took Tom’s cigarette.
“If you want antique,” said Hem, “you need to get to Italy. Eating gelato under the Roman aqueducts, strolling past the Colosseum on your way to drinks—bellissimo!”
“We were there in June, on our delayed honeymoon,” said Hadley, with a smile at her husband. “Tatie worked, of course. I’m finding out that you can’t stop a writer from writing, whatever food for the body and soul is on offer. Sometimes that even makes it worse!”
“On a story?” I asked.
“No, an interview,” said Hem. “With Benito Mussolini.”
“Another newspaperman,” Tom nodded, but gave me a look. “Always slippery buggers, other reporters, never answering a question directly. Or else they go over-the-top and spill their guts over several drinks.”
“Slippery as a whore’s promise, this one.” Hem licked the purple liqueur from his lips. “I want to like him—no, really, I do—we both fought on the Italian front, both wounded for Italy, both want to see the world a better place than before the war so the war was all worthwhile. But he used to be a socialist and now he’s a fascist. He’s gone from being an internationalist to a nationalist, an intellectual to a populist…”
“And how can anyone trust a man like that?”
“Exactly, Kiki.”
“Was he wearing one of his black shirts?” Tom gave a sardonic grin and Hem laughed.
“You know, he really was! That’s another thing I don’t trust—his showmanship. Show off with words, show off at a rally, but with another veteran, just the two of you? It’s too much. It makes the performance not persuasive but pathological.”
“So…” I smiled in a way I hoped was persuasive. “What did he say that you didn’t publish? What’s the gossip?”
“Ah, of course, you’re a gossip writer.”
His smile was patronizing but I didn’t care. I needed to know what this black-shirted man was up to.
“Well… he sat there stroking the ears of a wolfhound the entire interview. Even as he told me about his half million followers, about how he was going to reignite the Roman empire, he ran the dog’s large ears through his fingers again and again. I could see he was getting happy on it; the soft pliability of the ears was doing something to him. When he mentioned, sotto voce, that a ‘big event’ that was imminent, I almost laughed. He looked offended, but the double entendre was too much.”
“What big event?”
“Oh, he was very secretive about it, but he’ll gather his followers—all half a million of them, if you take him at his word—for some enormous show of force, popularity, whatever.”
“You’re not interested?”
“As a newspaper reporter, sure. As a man, no. He’s all bluff and nonsense.”
“His secretary does make a delicious cup of coffee though,” said Hadley. “From a little stove-top pot, which she serves with a sweet, airy biscuit. She did this all while chattering away in Italian, which I don’t speak, and did no other work, not even answering the telephone when it rang. I think making coffee was the main part of her job.”
“Typical,” Tom and Hem spoke together, then laughed, and the conversation moved away from the black-shirted people’s prince. But it was enough to go on. I could now figure out where to look next.
* * *
“Hemingway!” Gertrude signaled with a teacup from her chair. “Matisse is arguing with me about socialism, but I’ve lost track of who’s for it and who’s against it. You’ve just been to Smyrna. Tell us about the clash of civilizations there.”
I glimpsed a solid woman with a sharp gaze and hair braided around her head. She was seated next to a middle-aged man with pince-nez, looking like a lawyer from the suburbs in his pale gray three-piece suit. Was that Matisse? The walls were covered with contemporary artworks, starting at eye-height and moving to the ceiling, with sculptures placed on tables against the wall.
“Gertrude.” Hem gripped his hat with both hands and his nod looked very much like a bow. “Tom here was in Smyrna with me.”
“Pleased to meet you, Miss Stein.”
“What accent is that? Australian? I met some of them during the war. You’d know about the clash of civilizations, then. Alice?” She nodded at a small woman with a serious nose, bobbed black hair, and alert eyes. Alice, who must be Alice B. Toklas and Stein’s muse, lover, and champion, smiled and ushered me and Hadley away to another part of the room.
“Tea is this way,” she said and placed her hand on my arm. It was clear; I was not invited to talk politics and art with Stein and the men. I bristled but Hadley winked at me.
“More gossip in this part of the house,” she whispered when Alice moved away to get us cups. “And you may get back to the ‘big talk,’ as I often think of it, when they find out you’re not a wife.”
“A wife? Is this the married women’s quarantine?”
“Gertrude finds the men censor their opinions when their wives are present,” said Alice as she handed me a slice of green cake. “It’s pandan and pineapple slice, a recipe I picked up from a sailor from Java. Try it.”
“I think quarantine is probably too harsh a word…” said Hadley.
“Gertrude, and the rest of them, don’t properly value the quotidian,” said Alice. “Take this slice, for instance. The recipe is a Polish-Jewish-American version of a Dutch
cake cooked in France with traditional Javanese ingredients. I bought the pandan at a dockside market where all the peoples of the world meet and trade. The recipe is from the sailor’s mother, who worked as a kitchen maid in a colonial house from the age of five. He joined the navy of the Dutch East Indies, ended up with the British navy during the war, then decided to jump ship in Paris after going to a meeting of the French Communist Party with his ‘Tonkinese brothers,’ as he calls them. In there,” she gestured to Stein and the men, “they are discussing the ‘clash of civilizations,’ of how important, and somewhat self-important, men decide national politics. But their whole argument can be found in the story of this green cake—empire, religion, communism and capitalism, monetary policy, immigration, and war. They talk about it, but here, we live it.”
Hadley applauded, as did a couple of other women whom I didn’t recognize. Alice smiled.
“But I don’t think you’ve ever cooked a cake, have you?” Alice raised her eyebrow.
“Not beyond the compulsory lessons at school.”
“No, I could tell. You’re one of these young ones who have fled the so-called ‘domestic trappings’ of marriage and home.”
I could only smile. “What’s the giveaway, my lipstick or my high heels?”
“It’s the way you hold your cake, like it’s poisonous.”
“Ignore the green color, it’s delicious,” said Hadley.
“But not if you live on cocktails and cigarettes, isn’t that right, Miss…?”
“Button. Kiki Button.” She shook my hand softly. “Yes… but no, I love cake. I just… I don’t even own a gas ring to cook on.”
“Nor a spoon, I bet.” Alice sighed. “You’re the Australian’s wife?”
“Just his friend.”
“Anyone’s wife?”
“It’s not my style.”
“No…” Alice looked me over, assessing me with something that felt like pity. “Well, you can join the men soon. Stay with us a moment longer.” She let Hadley introduce me to Mrs. Matisse, Amelie, who was Matisse’s main model and knew as much about mixing pigment for paint and stretching canvas as a tradesman. Hadley was a concert-grade pianist, but had no ambition to exhibit. They were formidable mathematicians of household accounts and swapped information on how best to balance credit to live above a meager income. I could see Alice looking at me with her big eyes from across the room, as though daring me to find value in this knowledge. I didn’t know what to do except to finish my slice and take another. It was far too sweet for me.
“You remind me of that English woman,” Amelie said, interrupting her own advice on how to haggle for a camel in Morocco. “Alice! That English model, I’ve forgotten her name for a moment, but Henri knows her well, we all know her, she sat for him that time when I was in bed after I lost the baby. You know… friends with Rodin. What is her name?”
“Cordelia,” said Alice. “I’ve been thinking that as well. There’s a look they share, a sort of… yearning. And Cordelia has no interest in cooking either.”
Amelie laughed. “That’s right! The one time she had to cook for Henri, she managed to burn boiled eggs! She is so sweet though—and she always has plenty of money for cheese, sausage, sweets for Jean and Marguerite—but like a flower, easily bruised. Too easily for Henri. As for me, I’m in my element when the house burns down.”
Hadley laughed. “And me, I come alive when the kitty is empty.”
“What was her surname?” I could feel my pulse beat in my throat.
“Oh, family names, I never remember those,” said Amelie.
“I don’t know it,” Alice said. “I’ve only met her a couple of times and, like you, she doesn’t value the quotidian. She speaks mostly to Gertrude and Matisse. She never comes here.” She scrutinized my face. “Yes, you have a definite look about you of Cordelia. Let’s ask Gertrude.”
She ushered me away from the tea table toward the men. Gertrude looked up from her conversation and spread out her hands.
“Ah, the scarlet woman! I wondered who you were in that vivid red dress. Are you Pimpernel or Jezebel?”
“Depends on the day. Depends on the hour.”
“Is it silk? I never wear the stuff myself, too delicate, but that embroidery is exquisite. You must have bought it here in Paris. Nowhere else in the world would embroider such luminous blooms.”
“She reminds me of that model, Cordelia,” said Alice.
“Of course! She wore red the first time we met her too, though I doubt she would have shown her ankles then, unless it was on the modeling dais.”
“Miss Button here wanted to know Cordelia’s surname.”
“It’s Button, of course.” Gertrude smiled. “Are you related?”
The cubist nudes stared down at me from the walls. “My mother.”
“Well! Your mother; no wonder you make such an impression. Alice, are you leaving Miss Button with us?”
“I think she belongs here.” Alice nodded and went back to the wives and their politics-in-action. I had nothing to add to their conversation but I was strangely sorry to be left. I felt as though I had failed some test of womanhood, cast out from those who might protect me. Above me, a faceless torso cavorted on a sea of sickly green.
“Miss Button.” Gertrude waved me over, appraising me as Alice had. She didn’t smile at me either, but seemed less concerned that I had no interest in the domestic arts.
“Yes, you have a definite look of Cordelia about you. Almost an air. Well, well. So, you’re Tom’s friend—from Australia? Come to think of it, Cordelia did mention she lives somewhere out of the way… that would explain why she seems to be everywhere one moment and vanishes the next. Presumably she goes home to you and your father. Don’t worry, we like her. She’s always so lively, witty in that very soft, feminine way that men like. But she has a way of looking at you that makes it seem as though she understands you completely. You know what I mean.”
“I—”
“Of course you do, you’re her daughter. But her last trip—when was that, a couple of years ago?—she seemed burdened. Why? Oh—Matisse! Matisse, look here, it’s Cordelia Button’s daughter.”
The man in the gray three-piece suit turned and stared at me for a long time, his whole body still, his eyes burning a hole through his glasses. I could do nothing but stare back.
“How old are you?” he asked abruptly.
“Twenty-six.”
He stared and then sighed. “Thank you. And my apologies. You have such a look of your mother.”
“Doesn’t she, though?” Gertrude said. By this time Tom had noticed me and was eavesdropping.
“How is she?” asked Matisse.
I shook my head. I couldn’t force my words past the weight on my chest.
“Not dead!” Matisse looked shocked. “No! No, it couldn’t be.”
They waited for my reply. I cleared my throat, swallowed, took a deep breath against the weight.
“Last year, very suddenly.”
“No… no…” He continued to stare at me.
“I’m so sorry,” said Gertrude.
“You knew her well?” I asked Matisse.
“Yes—no…” He continued to stare. “She modeled for me. She… excuse me.” He turned abruptly, grabbed his hat and his wife, and left.
“Well! How rude. I knew there was a reason we don’t invite him here anymore.”
“Matisse knew my mother well?”
“Well, we always met her in his company, but she was only an occasional model, you know, on account of her living elsewhere. Australia, I mean. I always think like that, there’s Paris, there’s America, then there’s elsewhere. I didn’t think news of her would have had such an effect, but then, Matisse has always been wound tight as a clock spring, and just as likely to come apart if you prod him. She was part of that group with Monet and Russell and even Rodin, I think—I don’t know them, their work isn’t my style, but Rodin was a nice man. Hemingway, did you ever… no, you’re too young
to have met Rodin.”
“Please—can you tell me more about my mother?”
“You don’t… of course, you miss her.” Gertrude nodded. She moved some books off an armchair which she then pulled close to her own. A sculpture of a headless female body loomed behind her.
“Sit down.” She patted the chair like giving an order. “Hemingway, would you be a gun and bring Miss Button a cup of tea? Lots of sugar and a good splash of brandy. Now, Cordelia Button… I’ll have to check the details with Alice, but we met her at a gallery opening, or rather, at the supper afterwards with Matisse, who else was there, that strange Norwegian Edvard Munch, was Russell there?… She was dressed in red, like you, all flowing fabric and a tiny waist, a real Gibson Girl type. She talked deeply and intimately with Matisse at the supper and he barely spoke to anyone else. Every time she spoke to someone else, he was lost in thought. She listened very politely but had little to add to Alice’s anecdotes of the problems of laundry while traveling. But when I spoke to her about laundresses in art, she had a lot to say about color and line and form. She was an unusual woman, looking decorative but without any decorative small talk. After that night we met her quite a few times—in Montmartre, in Montparnasse, at the Opera—and then she vanished.”
Stein shrugged as Hemingway handed me a cup of tea that smelt strongly of brandy.
“You said she seemed burdened…”
“Yes, I was hoping Matisse could have said something about that. I suspect he will once he gets over the shock of your sad news. But Cordelia, that winter… she took too long to answer a question, she was always distracted. It was just a couple of months after the Armistice, everyone was dying of the flu, no one had much energy and we were all a bit lost in thought of those we’d lost. I remember I was often concerned about the state of my car. Cordelia had been nursing someone, I think—was it Munch, or was it someone else?—or had she been the sick one? I got the sense that she hadn’t understood that France was tired and Paris full of absence. It was her first trip here since 1913, she told me, but she didn’t say more than that. She didn’t need to; her shock and disappointment were apparent. I don’t know how long she stayed. I think she might have spent a bit of time with her family in England. Alice was with me then, she’d remember more—Alice!”