Lawless (6 page)

“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.

P
AUL 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.

The second effect of the storm was a radical deepening of his dislike of his native land. The cause was McGill’s death.

Despite a pose of cynicism, Barton McGill had impressed Matt as a wise and honorable man. Even though he had believed that the Southern cause was hopeless, and the war itself a grand lunacy, to the very end he’d persisted in making runs under sail from Havana to Matamoras. The more prudent Confederate captains had put their feet up on tables in Cuban cafés and waited for an armistice. As a result, they were alive today—and rich—and McGill was dead. That was the way it went in America, Matt came to believe. The selfish prospered while the virtuous perished, forgotten. The politicians stayed safe and grew fat behind the lines while the young men they sent off to carry out their deranged policies died—just as Matt’s younger brother had perished. By the time Grant and Lee met at Appomattox Court House, he was convinced Europe was the only worthwhile place on the globe. And since that was the center of the art world, that was where he would go to learn the techniques of the profession he meant to follow.

Besides, Dolly was in Europe.

It took a while for him to achieve his goal. He spent months on the Texas coast in ’65, recuperating from the injuries he’d suffered in the sea. Several bones had been broken.

From Texas he traveled overland to New York, and a surprisingly warm reunion with his father, who had abandoned a temporary career as a journalist and returned to the ministry. Matt’s mother was dead. Jephtha had remarried. And while Molly Kent would never generate the special affection he felt for Fan, Matt genuinely liked her.

He found he no longer had any serious differences with Jephtha on the subject of the war. Dolly, whom he’d met in Liverpool while McGill was having a ship built there, had persuaded him the South was wrong on the matter of black slavery. His mounting contempt for the raw, amoral country of his birth had made him an easy convert. Unfortunately Jephtha still believed America had a solid if difficult future. Matt tactfully refrained from identifying that belief for what it was—an illusion.

Jephtha had readily agreed to let his second son have a portion of the California inheritance that would one day be his in full. Matt meant to use the funds to pay for his study. He set out for Liverpool, and Dolly, in a fever of enthusiasm.

Together they laid plans for going to the Continent. For a short time they considered Rome or Munich. Each had a flourishing art colony. Both cities finally lost out to the preeminence of Paris.

They’d convinced Dolly’s nervous and proper parents that they would be married before they left England. But they said they couldn’t linger long enough to arrange a full-scale ceremony in Liverpool because Matt was expected to report practically overnight to the
École des Beaux-Arts.
The truth was, Matt hadn’t even tried to meet the entrance requirements of the renowned state-sponsored school of the French Academy of Fine Arts. He’d made inquiries and found out that the institution’s techniques were formal and old-fashioned. Students spent months just copying from paper silhouettes or plaster casts representing parts of the human body. The true adventurer in the field of art studied independently in the atelier of a good private tutor.

Matt and Dolly had arrived in Paris in ’66, deeply in love with each other, wickedly in love with the notion of living without benefit of wedlock, and instantly in love with the city of light. Matt found a fine teacher, Étienne Fochet. Dolly soon located a good job which she enjoyed and which gave her the satisfaction of helping with their expenses. Down in the city at a private academy called the École Anglais, she taught English to the children of businessmen and diplomats planning to spend a year or so in England or America.

It had been a wonderful, ideal life for three years. There were quarrels, yes. But they were quickly settled, usually by Matt’s ability to bring Dolly to an almost frenzied state of physical arousal. His work progressed reasonably well under Fochet’s abusive guidance.
“Do it over, do it over! My God, you won’t even be a tenth-rate colorist unless you develop a better palette! Go study Delacroix! And if you can’t improve, go home to America!”

Fochet used it as a threat because he knew Matt was temperamentally unable to go home. Matt’s dislike of America had been strengthened by his acquaintance with another American artist, some years older, who visited Paris occasionally.

Jim Whistler was a pugnacious little dandy, just five feet four, and the grandest raconteur Matt had ever met. A failed West Point cadet, Whistler was fond of telling how his military career had come to a sudden end. He’d been asked to step to the blackboard and discuss the properties of silicon. “I began by saying, ‘Silicon is a gas.’ If it were, I’d probably be a major general.”

Whistler claimed he couldn’t function in the stultifying, tasteless environment of his homeland. He was a brilliant artist, Matt thought, even if he did bestow curious titles on his paintings—almost as if he wanted to deny that they had subjects. Studies of fireworks exploding in a night sky were “nocturnes.” A portrait of his mother Mathilda who lived with him and his mistress in London—a picture he’d been struggling with since ’66, he complained—was an “arrangement in grey and black.”

Matt now shared Whistler’s contempt for the United States. For that reason he rejected appealing subjects from his past whenever they came to mind. Now Paul had suggested that might be a mistake. But he didn’t see how he could find good art in bad memories.

He had to do something about his work, though. Even a simple portrait of Dolly was foundering. Was it because there were problems with Dolly?

The change in their relationship had been gradual. He couldn’t recall a specific time when it had started. Perhaps, after three years, the novelty of a Bohemian existence had worn off, and Dolly had started to think about the future. He never did that. He seldom even thought seriously about the present. In fact, when he was working, the real world was little more than a peripheral haze. Dolly had begun to let him know that although she understood that, she didn’t like it.

Today he was no better prepared to meet her objections than he had been when she left on the holiday. Well, maybe a visit with her parents had relaxed her a little, he thought anxiously as he made his way through the neighborhood near the Gare du Nord.

The storm clouds had moved in, bringing a sudden shower. He wove his way through crowds near the station entrance, first avoiding a couple of street musicians playing a flute and a curious new instrument called a saxophone, then an open-air dentist who was striking his portable chair and umbrella. He jumped off the curb and across the gurgling water in the gutter so as not to interfere with a couple of the Sûreté specials who were becoming more and more visible as street crime increased. The specials were trussing up a howling, kicking man in rags. A purse grabber, probably.

A flower girl who would have been pretty except for the sores around her lips interrupted her chant of “May your love life flourish!” long enough to sell Matt a bedraggled bunch of violets. She glanced into his eyes, then down at his trousers in case he was interested in an additional transaction. He smiled and shook his head but felt an embarrassing physical reaction to the girl’s invitation. Problems or not, three weeks was a devil of a long time to be without the woman he loved.

He darted out of the rain into the tumult of the station. In an atmosphere of smoke and noise, people rushed to and fro, knocking against one another like balls striking tenpins. Parisians were constitutional hurriers, he’d discovered. Even a pair of sweet-faced nuns almost bowled him over.

A local train arrived with a scream of iron wheels and an eruption of steam. There were several trains standing on the tracks which ran right up to barricades within the central area of the station. He didn’t know which track would receive the Calais express, so he sought the schedule board hanging from iron rafters at one end of the hall.

He found the Calais train and its designated track. As he gazed upward, he became aware of a man standing just to his left, rattling off the numbers of all the listed trains, as well as their arrival or departure times. The man was speaking accented French and had his back to Matt. But there was something familiar about his sleek yellow-brown hair.

A second, gnomelike fellow was copying down the information the first man rattled off. Paris was tolerant of the eccentric, so no one paid any attention except Matt, who thought the man might be carrying a watch.

“I beg your pardon—” Matt began. The man pivoted smartly. Matt recognized him at once, even though this afternoon he was turned out in expensive civilian clothes, including a tan sack coat with dark brown edging, fawn spats on his dark brown pumps and, tucked under his arm, a tan felt hat with a round-blocked crown and wide brown ribbon.