Men and Angels (17 page)

Jane gave her a slow, comprehending look. She pushed her hair back off her forehead with the heels of her hands and sat, keeping her back beautifully straight, although it was a bench she sat on and she leaned on air. Anne saw that Jane wanted to tell her things but did not want to seem to be giving them away too easily.

“Tell me about Paris. The first time, I mean. How did she talk her father into letting her go?”

Jane laughed. “Plain stubbornness. My God, she was a stubborn woman. She was a person who could really hold out.”

Anne fingered the milk pitcher, an old-fashioned yellow with raised pink flowers.

“She was his favorite child,” Jane went on. “Henry, the oldest brother, ought to have been the favorite. He did everything his father wanted: went to all his father’s schools—Exeter, Amherst—he went into the bank and followed his father there. But his father didn’t like him; he despised him for not having enough spirit. What he wanted was a spirit he could break.”

“Did he want to break Caroline’s?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I’m rather unfair to him because I can’t forgive him for being so awful when Stephen was born.”

Guiltily Anne felt her own excitement. This, of course, was what she wanted to know about: the scandal of the illegitimate child. It lit up Caroline’s life with garish and unnatural yet pleasing color. Who was Stephen’s father? And then what happened? Soap-opera questions.

“Poor Caroline,” said Jane. “She wasn’t young, you know, when it happened. She’d lived on her own for six years; she was thirty-six. She felt she was proving something to her father—that she could be on her own and take care of herself. Then she got pregnant, and she felt it was the end of her life. Yet her father was the first person she told.”

“How did he respond?”

“All outraged honor. She had betrayed his trust, besmirched the family name. He retired to the library and wept, I believe.”

“You don’t believe he was really distressed?”

“Yes, partly, of course he was. It was, after all, a scandal. They were an important family and Philadelphia was not Paris. But he took great pleasure in having been right all along, in having his predictions come true.”

“I gathered that from the letters. Pleasure in correct judgment kept creeping through the outrage.”

“You do see things, don’t you,” Jane said, giving Anne one of her considered looks.

Anne blushed. “It wasn’t hard to see.”

“Listen, my dear, I must give you a piece of advice. It’s a kind of ingratitude not to accept praise when it’s offered. And it does no good to undervalue yourself. People are always ready to do that for you.”

“I guess in my family thinking too well of yourself was the cardinal sin. And then I had a sister who was much less successful than I, and my mother was always afraid she’d feel bad or jealous of me.”

“Yes, well, all that’s in the past, you’re a grown woman now, not a child. And so you must simply stop things that are not in your best interest.”

Anne felt embarrassed. She had revealed too much, and in a mode Jane did not find congenial. “You must simply stop things that are not in your own best interest.” Jane was not a person she would want to be around if she was feeling weak.

“How did Caroline feel about her father, do you think?”

“For years she was furious and wouldn’t speak to him, except in the way she had to. You know, of course, the situation with the money and with Stephen.”

“No.”

“Caroline had no money of her own until her aunt Adelaide died, which was 1907, and even then it wasn’t much. Her money came from an allowance her father gave her. She couldn’t afford to be cut off from him entirely, because she needed that money if she was going to paint.”

“And Stephen?”

“Her father agreed to be responsible for Stephen’s support as long as Caroline promised she would bring the child home and not take him out of the country until he was twenty-one. He kept saying it was France that was the cause of all this heartache.”

Jane walked to the door and rubbed a spot off the glass with her index finger. “It was a wicked thing he did. It caused terrible suffering.”

She sat down at the table. “Caroline hated America. Particularly Philadelphia. She had never been well received here, and she had been unhappy as a young girl. She said the light was all wrong: the sun was too high, the clouds were useless, there was no silver in the leaves. And there was no place, she said, where one could sit and talk and have coffee, because there was no place that would let you sit, no one you wanted to talk to, and no coffee that was drinkable.” Jane laughed. “Of course, it was more than that, but she couldn’t work there. She tried. She stayed at home till Stephen was two, and she couldn’t bear it.”

“What did she do?”

“She packed up and went back to France. It was a very productive period for her.”

1902–1908. The years she changed her picture plane, her palette. Those were the years she exhibited with the Fauves; those years showed her transformation from an Impressionist to a Modern, from an American to an international painter.

“What happened to Stephen then?”

“He lived at his grandparents’ house. He had a governess. And his aunt Maggie looked after him.”

“Did Caroline ever see him?”

“She came home in the summers. She bought a house on the Hudson—you know it from the landscapes. It was the only place in America she liked. She said the Rhine couldn’t touch the Hudson; it was second only to the Loire. But she didn’t like having a small child around her. They were not good times for Stephen.”

“Did she ever like having him around her?”

Jane looked uneasy. “Stephen wasn’t always easy to be around. He wasn’t a happy person, he became morose quite often. And he was worst around his mother. He never believed she loved him.”

“Did she?”

Jane set the cups down in the sink impatiently. “Mother love. I haven’t the vaguest idea what it means. All these children claiming their mothers didn’t love them, and all these mothers saying they’d die for their children. Even women who beat their children say they love them, they can’t live without them, they can’t live without them, they wouldn’t dream of giving them up. What does it mean ‘I love my child’?” She turned quickly. “Come in, my dear, don’t lurk in the doorway like that.”

Anne turned around and saw Laura, hanging back at the entrance to the kitchen. She was smiling at Jane, but Jane wouldn’t look at her.

“Have some coffee, my dear,” Jane said, handing her a cup.

“I don’t drink coffee, thank you,” Laura said.

“Well, then, tea,” said Jane, pouring the coffee down the sink as if it had been spoiled by Laura’s refusal of it.

Anne wanted to protect Laura from Jane: her quick, angry movements, her refusing looks. Jane had decided she didn’t like Laura, and she wasn’t the kind of person to try to be nice to someone she didn’t at first take to. But Laura was no match for her, and Anne didn’t want to see Laura hurt.

“Laura likes cocoa in the morning. I’ll make it for her. We usually have a cup together.”

“Well, I can’t see the point of it,” said Jane. “It’s no stimulation whatever, and it’s terribly fattening. You should learn to drink coffee or tea, my dear. It will make life much easier for you in civilized society.”

Anne and Laura drank their cocoa silently while Jane moved around the kitchen peeling potatoes, chopping vegetables. Anne looked at Laura; Laura smiled from over the edge of her cup. Anne could see that there would be no more talk about Caroline with Laura there. But she didn’t resent Laura’s presence; she saw her as a small, colorless bird about to be swooped on by a hawk who made beautiful downward cuts through the morning sunlight. She was delighted when the children came down dressed and ready, they said, for a walk on the beach. Ben had said he would take them for a walk on the beach before breakfast.

“But Ben’s not up yet,” Anne said. “Let him have his rest.”

“Of course I’m up,” boomed Ben, coming into the kitchen. “Just give me a cup of tea and we’re off. Good morning, my darlings,” he said to Jane and Anne. “Good morning, Miss Post,” he said to Laura.

“Why don’t you all go,” said Jane, not looking at anyone as she gave Ben his tea.

“I’ll stay and help you,” Anne said.

“Of course you won’t. I prefer to do things by myself anyway at this stage of the meal.”

“All right,” said Anne. “I’ll go and change.”

Anne knew by the set of Jane’s back that she was angry. Her back was impatient, like the back of the woman in the painting. Some high door had closed; the gate had, as Anne knew it would, come down. Anne didn’t know how it had happened, but she was glad to be walking out the door. The air was salty; they were only two miles from the sea.

The children knew the ocean in summer, but in all other seasons it ceased to exist for them. To find it still intact when they had been to school was a sign of richness and benevolence, a treasure hoarded, opened up for them now. Anne worried about Laura, about Jane, worried that she didn’t have it in her to do justice to the paintings, worried that the dinner would not be a success, that they would go to bed disappointed, the betrayal of a holiday gone wrong coating their tongues like too much sugar. But she didn’t worry about her children. They walked far ahead of her. She saw them as she saw the sea: high, brimming, whole. She held the shells they gave her to collect, the stones she knew would grow uninteresting as they dried; she saw the colors rise on their faces. She ran after them, embraced them, felt, through their thick clothes, the quick, light beating of their hearts.

She thought of Caroline with sadness. She had never felt this for her son, and it was luck, bad luck. Or was it some deficiency of spirit, some inexcusable coldness at the center that cast doubt on all the rest of her life? How could she not have loved her two-year-old child? Jane said he wasn’t easy to love. But a child didn’t have to earn its mother’s love by being attractive or enjoyable or easy to be with. You loved them simply because they were. And because they were yours. Caroline was not an unloving woman. But the child was a bad accident born of the body, fathered in secret, by a stranger whose name no one knew. How primitive it was, this love of children: flesh and flesh, bone, blood connection. The spirits of children flickered, darted: one caught glimpses of them only, streaks of light in the thick forest of their animal lives. She was able to love her children’s bodies because her own body had not trapped her; she could treasure the glimpses of spirit since she loved their flesh. And since she loved the body of the man who’d fathered them. Could Caroline have loved her son more if she’d loved his father? She’d died keeping his identity a secret: it was impossible to know.

“I’m afraid I did something to offend Jane this morning,” Anne said to Ben.

“Oh, that’s always happening. It doesn’t mean a lot.”

“Only, I wish I knew what it was.”

“You’ll find out in time. She’ll approach you in a sackcloth, covered with contrition for her bad temper. That is, if she likes you. If she doesn’t, she’ll just go on being icy. One puts up with a great deal from Jane.”

“Yes,” said Anne, thinking of her gesture, her brushing the hair off her forehead with the heel of her hand. She entered the house fearfully; Jane in a long white apron greeted them with a smile of such radiance that Anne dared to embrace her. She was embraced back, Jane kissed her forehead. “I missed you,” she wanted to say, placing her cool cheek against Jane’s, which was warm and dryish. But that was absurd; she knew Jane only slightly, she had left her only an hour before.

It was a strange thing for Anne, being served by a woman she admired, sometimes feared. Jane made food appear and disappear, she put out plates and washed them; in the kitchen what she did sent up good smells: rich roasting meat, apples bursting in their pastry. It had never happened to her before: Anne was sent away to think, to look, to use her mind, and down below her someone else took on the part of life that fed the body. But that someone else was Jane, beautiful, learned, masterful. No one could have been less like Anne’s mother. Even when she was a child Anne could never have left a dinner wholly to her mother. Even her sister and her mother together seemed unsafe to Anne, as if their slow unhappiness might catch fire in the kitchen and bring the house down on their heads.

Jane gave the call for dinner and Anne came down to the table. It was the table she had dreamed of setting but didn’t have the money for. It was a table her mother couldn’t have set in thousands of years. The silver candlesticks, the china with its pattern of peacocks, the great variety of spoons and forks and knives, the silver bowl with its chrysanthemums, its brown oak and green holly leaves—it was all that Anne felt she had not been born to.

Everyone sat shyly; the formal beauty made them quiet. Then Jane brought out the turkey, human, comic on its platter. Talk began. The bird was praised; it was coveted; choices were made of dark meat or white. Dishes were passed, and people made arrangements on their plate that pleased them. Jane stood, said a blessing, and Anne felt them all grow ornamented with good fortune, like a spray of diamonds on the dark hair of a woman, as they all acknowledged gratitude in the name of Puritans who must have feared, three hundred years before, the brief appearance of their own good luck.

The two days passed quickly, and yet, since winter was filling in the autumn sky, replacing, dully, the blue flame with bleached silver, there was a solidity to every action, as if people were hoarding something, anything, against a future scarcity they couldn’t name. Anne spent her mornings with the paintings, looking closely, making notes, taking photographs so she would have slides of them for her collection. In the afternoons, she walked on the beach with the children and afterwards played cards with them by the fireplace while Jane fixed supper. It was so clearly important to Jane that Anne be freed of domestic responsibility that Anne stopped offering her help. She suggested that Laura do the dishes, an offer which Jane accepted as if Anne were lending her her French maid to iron her collars. Anne didn’t think Laura was having a good time. It was hard to tell, for Laura’s face maintained the blank matte she habitually presented. And she smiled, as always, when she caught anybody’s eye. But there was no place for her. The children had deserted her in favor of Ben and Jane, and Anne had to keep reminding herself to include Laura in the conversation. But there were conversations Anne wanted her excluded from; she didn’t like Laura’s listening in on their conversations about Caroline. What could Laura make of a life like Caroline’s, that high-colored uneven surface full of passionate triumphs and errors? So the glimpses she got of Laura, staring, smiling when she was looked at, made her feel unnerved. She had to remind herself to feel pity, but always irritation had to be smoothed down, pushed back. Pity was an emotion she had formerly despised; not wishing it for herself, she felt reluctant to offer it to others. But now it was the only thing that kept back the careless impatient gesture, and she felt its value.