The Swan Thieves Part 32

longer." I sat opposite him again. "Could I ask you one more favor without trespa.s.sing on your hospitality?" I hesitated. "Could I see The Swan Thieves?"

He looked at me gravely, as if considering everything we had already said. Had he given me any inaccurate or invented information? I would never know. He put steepled fingers to his chin. "I did not show it to Robert Oliver, and I am glad now that I did not."

This took me by surprise. "Didn't he ask to see it?"

"I think he did not know I owned it. It is not well known. It is private information, in fact." Then his head snapped up. "How did you know? How did you know I have it?"

I would have to say what I should have said earlier, and I feared it might open old wounds. "Monsieur Robinson," I said, "I wanted to tell you before, but was uncertain--I went to see Pedro Caillet in Mexico. He was very kind to me, as you've been, and that was how I learned about you. He sent you warm greetings."

"Ah, Pedro and his greetings." But he smiled almost impishly. There was friendship still between these men, with their stale, long-forgiven rivalry across an ocean. "So he told you that he sold Aude The Swan Thieves, and you believed him?"

It was my turn to stare. "Yes. That's what he said."

"I think he really believes that, poor old cat. In fact, he tried to buy it from Aude himself. They both considered it extraordinaire. Aude bought it from the estate of Armand Thomas, a gallery owner in Paris. It had never been exhibited, which is strange, and it has not been exhibited since then either. Aude would never have sold it to Pedro, or anyone else, because her mother told her it was the only important thing she had ever painted. I do not know how Armand Thomas got it." He closed his hands over the letters in his lap. "The Swan Thieves was one of the only paintings that remained from the failure of the Thomas business--Armand's older brother, Gilbert, was a good painter, but not a good businessman. They appear in Beatrice's and Olivier's letters, you know. I have always felt they must have been rather mercenary 530.

types. Certainly not great friends of painters, like Durand-Ruel. They also made far less money in the end. They did not have his taste."

"Yes, I've seen two of Gilbert's paintings in the National Gallery," I said. "Including, of course, Leda, the one Robert attacked."

Henri Robinson nodded. "You may go in to see The Swan Thieves. I think I will stay here. I see it several times a day." He gestured toward a closed door at the end of the sitting room.

I went to the door. Beyond it was a small bedroom, apparently Robinson's own, judging from the prescription bottles on the bureau and bedside table. The double bed wore a green damask spread. Matching drapes hung at the single window, and again there were shelves of books. The sunlight was dim here, and I turned on the light, feeling Henri's gaze but not wanting to close a door between us. At first I thought there was a window above the head of the bed, looking into a garden, and then I thought there was a painting of a swan there. But I saw at once that it was a mirror, hung to reflect the one painting in the room, on the opposite wall.

I have to stop here, to catch my breath. The Swan Thieves is not easily put into words. I had expected the beauty in it; I had not expected the evil. It was a largish canvas, about four feet by three, rendered in the bright palette of the Impressionists. It showed two men in rough clothes, brown-haired, one with strangely red lips. They were moving stealthily toward the viewer, and toward a swan that rose in alarm out of the reeds. A reversal, I thought, of Leda's fright: now the swan was victim, not victor. Beatrice had painted the bird with hasty, living strokes that made its very wing tips seem real; it was a blur, hastening up out of its nest, a suggestion of lily pads and gray water beneath, a curve of white breast, gray around its numb dark eye, a panic of failed flight, the water churning under a yellow-and-black foot. The thieves were too near already, and the larger man's hands were about to close 531.

over the swan's straining neck; the smaller man looked ready to heave himself forward and catch the body.

The contrast between the swan's grace and the coa.r.s.eness of the two men shone clearly through the rapid brushwork. I had studied the face of the larger man before, in the National Gallery; it was the face of an art dealer counting coins, too eager now, intent on his quarry. If this was Gilbert Thomas, of course, the other man must be his brother. I had seldom seen such skill in a painting, nor such desperation. Perhaps she had given herself thirty minutes, perhaps thirty days. She had thought deeply about this image and then produced it with speed and pa.s.sion. And after that, if Henri was correct, she had set down her brush and never picked it up again.

I must have stood rooted there a long time, staring, because I felt a sudden fatigue wash over me--the hopelessness of imagining other lives. This woman had painted a swan, it had meant something to her, and none of us would ever know what. Nor would it matter, beyond the vehemence of this work. She was gone and we were here, and someday we would all be gone, too, but she had left a painting.

Then I thought of Robert. He had never stood in front of this image and puzzled over its pa.s.sionate misery. Or had he? How long had Henri Robinson, old and independent, been safely out of the way? I'd seen just one bathroom so far, near the entrance to the apartment, and there was none here, off the bedroom--the apartment was old, eccentric. Would Robert have stopped at opening a closed door? No--he had surely seen The Swan Thieves; why else would he have returned to Washington in a rage that would shortly after overflow in the National Gallery? I thought of his portrait of Beatrice in Greenhill, her smile, her hand clasping a silk robe over her breast. Robert had wanted to see her happy. The Swan Thieves was full of threat and entrapment--and perhaps revenge as well. Probably Robert understood her grief in a way that I, thank G.o.d, never could. He had not needed to look at this painting to understand it.

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I remembered Robinson, then, pinioned in his chair, and went back into the salon. I knew I would never see The Swan Thieves again. I had spent five minutes with it, and it had changed the look of the world.

"Ah, you are impressed." He made an openhanded gesture: approval. "Yes."

"Do you think it is her greatest work?"

"You would know better than I."

"I am tired now," Henri said--as Caillet had said to me and Mary, I suddenly remembered. "But I would like you to come back tomorrow, after you have seen my collection at the Maintenon. Then you can tell me if I have kept the best one for myself."

I went quickly to take his hand. "I'm sorry I've stayed so long. And I would be honored to come back. What time tomorrow?"

"I take my nap at three o'clock. Come in the morning."

"I can't thank you enough."

We shook hands and he smiled--those artificially perfect teeth again. "I enjoyed our talk. Perhaps I will decide to forgive Robert Oliver after all."

533.

C HAPTER 99 Marlow The Musee de Maintenon was in Pa.s.sy, near the Bois de Boulogne and perhaps near Beatrice de Clerval's family home, although I had no idea how to find that and had forgotten to ask Henri. Probably it wouldn't be a museum anyway; I doubted her brief career would have warranted a plaque. I took the metro and then walked a few blocks, crossing a park full of children in bright-colored jackets swarming over swings and modernist climbing structures. The museum itself was a tall, cream-colored, nineteenth-century building with heavily decorated plaster ceilings. I wandered around the first floor and through a gallery of works by Manet, Renoir, Degas, few of which I'd seen before, then into a smaller room that housed the Robinson gift, paintings by Beatrice de Clerval.

She had been more prolific than I'd realized, and she'd begun painting young; the earliest piece in the collection dated from her eighteenth year, when she had still been living in her parents' home and studying with Georges Lamelle. It was a lively effort, although without the skill of her later paintings. She had worked hard--as hard in her way as Robert Oliver had in his obsession. I'd imagined her as a wife, the young mistress of a household, and even as a lover; but I had forgotten about the strong workaday painter she must have been in order to complete all these pictures and to grow in technique from year to year. There were portraits of her sister, sometimes with a baby in her arms, and there were glorious flowers, perhaps from Beatrice's own garden. There were small sketches in graphite and a couple of watercolors of gardens 534.

and the coast. There was a cheerful portrait of Yves Vignot as a newly married man.

I turned away with reluctance. The third floor of the Musee de Maintenon was lined with enormous Monet canvases from Giverny, mainly of water lilies, most of them from very late in his career, executed almost abstractly. I had never understood before how many water lilies he had actually managed to paint--acres of them, spread all over Paris now. I bought a handful of postcards, some of them gifts for Mary's studio walls, and left the museum to stroll in the Bois de Boulogne. There was a boat with a canopy pulling up to the sh.o.r.e of a little lake there, as if expressly to ferry me across; it went to an island with a grand house on it. I paid and stepped in, followed by a French family with two small children, all dressed for a special occasion. The smaller girl stole a look at me and returned my smile before hiding her face in her mother's lap.

The house turned out to be a restaurant, with shaded outdoor tables, blooming wisteria, frightening prices. I had coffee and a pastry and let the sun on the water lull me. No swans, I realized, although they would have been there in Beatrice's day. I pictured Beatrice and Olivier by the water with their easels, his quiet coaching, her attempts to catch the swan rising out of the reeds. Rising in flight or landing? And had I re-created their conversations too freely, in imagination?

In spite of my rest on the island, I was bone-weary by the time I reached the Gare de Lyon. The bistro near the hotel was open, and the waiter seemed to consider me an old friend already, exploding the myth that all Parisians mistreat foreigners. He smiled as if he understood what my day had been like and how badly I needed a gla.s.s of red wine; when I left, he smiled again and held the door for me and returned my "Au revoir, monsieur" as if I had been dining there for years.

I'd meant to find a place to call Mary with my new phone card, 535.

but on my return to the hotel I fell into bed and slept like the dead, without pretending to read first. Henri and Beatrice crowded my sleep; I woke with a start that had some connection to Aude de Clerval's face. Robert was waiting, and I was supposed to call him, not Mary. I woke and slept, and overslept.

536.

C HAPTER 100.

It is an early morning in June of 1892, and the two people waiting on a provincial train platform wear the conscious, alert look of travelers who have been up since before dawn, neatly dressed and standing aloof from the stirring of the village. The taller one is a woman in her prime, the other a girl of eleven or twelve with a basket on one arm. The woman is dressed in black and wears her black bonnet tied firmly under her chin. The veil makes her see the world as sooty, and she longs to push it up, to replenish for herself the colors of the ocher station and the field across the track: gold-green gra.s.ses and the first poppies of the summer, which show cadmium even through her twilit netting. But she keeps her hands firmly on her purse, her veil over her face. Their village is strictly conventional, at least for women, and she is a lady among villagers.

She turns to her companion. "Didn't you want to bring our book?" The last few nights they have been reading from a translation of Great Expectations.

"Non, maman. But I have my embroidery to finish." The woman reaches out a hand cased in fine black lace to touch the girl's cheek where it curves down to a mouth that matches her own. "In time for Papa's birthday, after all?"

"If it turns out well enough." The girl checks in her basket, as if her project is alive and needs constant care.

"It will." For a moment the woman is flooded with a sense of rushing time, which has caused this flower, her beauty, to grow tall and articulate overnight. She can still feel her daughter's robust baby legs in her arms, pushing upright in her lap. The memory can 537.

be summoned at a moment's notice, and she summons it often: mingled pleasure and regret. But she doesn't regret for a moment standing here, a woman alone in her heart, past forty, a woman with a doting husband waiting in Paris, a woman mature and sheathed in mourning. In the last year, they have lost the kind blind man who had the place of a father in her heart. Now there is a different cause for sadness as well.

But she feels also the course of a life advancing as it should: a child's growth, a death that brings relief as well as loss, the dressmaker sewing something a little more fashionable than what she'd worn when her mother died years ago -- skirts have changed again since then. The child has all this ahead of her, with her basket of embroidery, her birthday dreams, her love of her papa before any other man. Beatrice has not dressed her daughter in unrelieved black; instead, the girl wears a white dress with gray collar and cuffs, a black sash around the pretty waist that is still thin but will soon be shapely. She takes the child's hand and kisses it through her veil, surprising them both.

The train to Paris is seldom late; this morning it comes a little early, a distant rumble interrupting the kiss, and they both arrange themselves to wait. The child always imagines the train crashing into the village itself, smashing houses, piling up old stones and raising clouds of dust, overturning chicken coops and wrecking the market stalls--a world bouleverse like one of the prints in her book of nursery rhymes, old ladies holding their ap.r.o.ns up and running away on the wooden sabots that seem an extension of their big feet. A comic disaster, and then the dust settling and everything coming to rights in an instant as people like Maman climb quietly into the train. Maman does everything quietly, with dignity--she reads quietly to herself, she turns your head quietly a little more to the right when you sit for her to braid your hair, she touches your cheek quietly.

Maman also has sudden moments that Aude recognizes in herself but has no way of knowing yet as the moments of youth 538.

that never leave us--the surprising kiss of the hand, a laughing embrace of Papa's head and hat as he sits reading his paper on the garden bench. She looks beautiful even dressed in mourning, as they now are for Aude's grandfather and more recently for the death of Papa's uncle in faraway Algeria, where he went to live years ago. Or she will catch Maman standing at the back window watching the rain fall over the meadow, and see the rare sadness in her eyes. Their house in the village is at the edge of all the others, so that you can leave the garden directly for the fields; there is a line of darker woods beyond those fields where Aude may not go except with one of her parents.

In the train, once the conductor has stowed their luggage, Aude settles herself in imitation of her mother. Her composure is brief; after a moment she jumps up again to look out the window at a pair of horses driven by her favorite coachman, Pierre le Triste, who comes daily with packages, deliveries for the small shops in the village center, sometimes for Maman herself. They know him well after all these years; Papa bought their village house the year she was born, the perfect, rounded date called 1880. Aude cannot remember a time when they didn't come to the village, just between Louveciennes and Marly-le-Roi, the train steaming through three times a week, the brief visits and long summers here with her mother and sometimes both her parents. Pierre has gotten down from his perch and seems to be conferring with the conductor outside about a package and a letter; his face is wreathed in smiles--the overflow of jollity that has earned him his affectionately ironic nickname. Through the window she can hear his voice but misses the words.

"What is it, darling?" Her mother is taking off gloves and cloak, arranging her bag and Aude's basket, their small picnic.

"It's Pierre." The conductor sees her and waves, and Pierre waves back and comes up beside the train, motioning with his big arms for her to lower the window and take a package and letter. Her mother stands to receive them and gives the package to Aude, 539.

nodding to let her know she may open it at once. It is from Papa in Paris, a delayed but welcome gift; they will see him tonight, but he has sent Aude a little ivory shawl with daisies in the corners. She folds it contentedly and drapes it across her lap. Maman has taken a jet pin from her hair and is opening her letter, which is also from Papa, although another envelope falls out of it, one with unfamiliar stamps and a shaky handwriting Aude has never seen before. Maman s.n.a.t.c.hes it up and opens it with trembling care; she seems to have forgotten the new shawl. She unfolds the single page, reads it and folds it again, unfolds it and reads it, puts it slowly back in the envelope and lays it on the black silk of her lap. She leans back, puts her veil down; but Aude sees her close her eyes, sees her mouth turn upside down and quiver the way one's mouth does when one resolves not to cry. Aude drops her eyes and strokes the shawl and its daisies; what could make Maman feel this way? Should she try to comfort her, say something?

Maman is very still, and Aude looks out the window for answers, but there is only Pierre in his boots and big jacket, unloading a case of wine, which a boy trundles away in a handcart. The conductor waves good-bye to Pierre, and the train whistle screams once, twice. Nothing is wrong in the village, which has come to life everywhere.

"Maman?" she tries in a small voice.

The dark eyes behind the veil open, glittering with tears, as Aude has feared. "Yes, my love?"

"Is something--is it bad news?"

Maman looks at her for a long time, and then she says, her voice a little unsteady, "No, not news. Just a letter from an old friend that took a long time to reach me."

"Is it from Uncle Olivier?"

Maman catches her breath, then lets it out.

"Why, it is, yes. How did you guess that, my darling?"

"Oh, because he died, I suppose, and that's very sad."

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"Yes, very sad." Maman folds her hands over the envelope. "And did he write you about Algeria and the desert?"

"Yes," she says. "But it came too late?"

"Nothing is ever really too late," Maman says, but her words trip over a sob. This is alarming; Aude wishes the journey were over and Papa there with them. She has never seen Maman cry before. Maman smiles more than almost anyone she knows, except for Pierre le Triste. She smiles especially when she looks at Aude.

"Did you and Papa love him very much?"

"Yes, very much. And so did your grandfather."

"I wish I remembered him."

"I wish you did, too." Maman seems to have collected herself now; she pats the seat beside her, and Aude moves gratefully close, bringing her new shawl along.

"Would I have loved Uncle Olivier, too?"

"Oh yes," says Maman. "And he would have loved you. You are like him, I think."

Aude loves to be like people. "In what way?"

"Oh, full of life and curiosity, good with your hands." Maman is silent for a second; she looks at Aude in that way Aude welcomes and cringes under, the straight, straight gaze, bottomless dark. Then she speaks. "You have his eyes, my love."

"I do?"

"He was a painter."

"Like you. As good as you were?"

"Oh, much better," she says, stroking the letter. "He had more experience of life to put in his paintings, which is very important, although I didn't know that at the time."

"Will you save his letter?" Aude knows better than to ask to see it, although she would enjoy reading about the desert.

"Perhaps. With other letters. All the letters I have been able to keep. Some of them will be yours when you are an old lady."

"How will I get them then?"

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Maman puts her veil up and smiles, pats Aude's cheek with her gloveless fingers. "I will give them to you myself. Or I will be sure to tell you where to find them."

"Do you like my shawl from Papa?" Aude spreads it over her white muslin skirts and Maman's heavy black silk.

"Very much," Maman says. She smoothes the shawl so that it covers her letter and its big strange stamps. "And the daisies are almost as pretty as the ones you st.i.tch. But not quite, because yours always look alive."

542.

C HAPTER 101 Marlow Robinson greeted me cordially on my return to his sitting room. He did not try to stand up, but he was neatly turned out in gray flannel slacks, a black turtleneck, and a navy jacket, as if we were going out to lunch rather than planning to sit immobilized in his salon. I could hear the rattle of pans in the kitchen, to which Yvonne had retreated, and I smelled onions, b.u.t.ter frying. To my delight, he asked me at once to promise I would stay for lunch. I reported on the Musee de Maintenon. He made me try to recite the name of each canvas he'd given the museum. "Not bad company for our Beatrice," he said, smiling. "No--Monet, Renoir, Vuillard, p.i.s.sarro..."

"She will be appreciated more in the new century." It was hard to believe in a new century at all, here in this apartment where the same books and paintings had sat for perhaps fifty years and even the plants seemed to have been alive as long as Mary. "Paris celebrated pretty well, didn't she? The millennium?"

He smiled. "Aude remembered New Year's Eve of nineteen hundred, you know. She was almost twenty." And he himself had not yet been born. He had missed the century of Aude's childhood.

"Could I ask you one more thing, if that wouldn't be inappropriate? It might help me in my treatment of Robert, a.s.suming you can find it in you to be so generous."

He shrugged without objecting--a gentleman's reluctant pardon.

"I wonder what you believe yourself about the reasons Beatrice de Clerval stopped painting. Robert Oliver is very intelligent, and 543.

he must have thought deeply about this. But do you have your own theories?"

"I do not deal in theories, Doctor. I lived with Aude de Clerval. She confided everything to me." He straightened a little. "She was a great woman, like her mother, and this question troubled her. As a psychiatrist, you can see that she must have felt to blame for the end of her mother's career. Not every woman gives up everything for her child, but Aude knew her mother had, and it weighed on her all her life. As I told you, she tried to paint and draw herself, but she had no gift for it. And she never wrote anything personal about her mother or about her own life -- she was a strict journalist, very professional, very brave. During the war, she covered Paris for la Resistance -- another story. But she sometimes talked to me about her mother."

I waited in a silence as deep as any I'd known with Robert. At last the old man spoke again.

"It is a mystery, your coming here, and Robert before you. I am not accustomed to talking with strangers. But I will tell you something I have told no one else, certainly not Robert Oliver. When Aude was dying, she gave me this package of letters you have so kindly returned to me. With them was a note from her mother to Aude. She asked me to read the note and then to burn it, which I did. And she gave the rest of the letters into my keeping. Aude had never shown me these things before. I felt hurt, you understand, that she had not, because I had thought that we shared everything. The note to Aude from her mother said two things. One was that she loved her, Aude, more than anything in the world because she had been the child of her greatest love. And, second, that she was leaving evidence of that love with her servant, Esme."

"Yes--I remember the name from her letters."

"You read the letters?"

I was startled. Then I realized he had been serious when he said he sometimes forgot things. "Yes--as I said, I felt I should read them for the sake of my patient."

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"Ah. Well, it doesn't matter now." He patted sharp fingers on the arm of his chair; I thought I could see a worn spot under them.