Mistral's Daughter (23 page)

"Well then, I'll do
it," Perry said with resignation.

"I know
—
let
Paula.
 
It's the sort of thing she does
best.
 
She can read character, that one
—
you can't fool her.
 
At least I never
could.
 
And don't forget the last
shiddach
she made."

"Shiddach?"

"An introduction
—
as in you and me
—
well, only used loosely.
 
Actually it's an arranged marriage, like the
one my Aunt Esther wanted me to make.
 
It
comes from a Hebrew word
'shidukh,'"
Maggy said learnedly.

"And that bit of lore
came, I assume, from Rabbi Taradash?"
 
Perry was charmed by Maggy's rare use of Jewish expressions.
 
They seemed as piquant and chipper to him as the
red carnation in her buttonhole.

"Don't remind me of my
poor sweet rabbi.
 
A kept woman living
in sin with a Catholic?
 
Oh, I can't even
think what he'd say."

"Would he explode?"

"Explode with anger,
split with aggravation, burst with suffering
—
you can take your pick.
But he would not understand, any more than your priest if you had one,
would.
 
However, I refuse to feel
guilty!
 
The Talmud says
 
'When a man faces his Maker, he will have to
account for those pleasures of life he failed to experience.'
 
That's one part of the Talmud I know and the
one part I agree with entirely.
 
It's
probably contradicted in another part
—
I'm basically ignorant about
religion and where we're concerned, I don't see that it has any
relevance."

"Is that the only reason
you don't feel guilty about me?" he asked, with sudden gravity.

"Oh, my darling, no. I
don't feel guilty because I love you so much."
 
There was no way to truly tell him, she
thought, how she felt about him.

It was a love without
mystifications, free of surprises or harshness, a love that could never wound
her.
 
Perry's arms were a bulwark
against ever being hurt again.
 
With him
she was utterly safe, and now she knew the value of safety.

There were moments, she
admitted to herself, when she was flooded by memories of Julien Mistral, when
she would feel again just how the stern line of his mouth became so
surprisingly tender under her lips.
 
But
then she would turn away resolutely from the unwelcome memory and count her
blessings.
 
What if she had lived with
Mistral for years?
 
What if she had been
saturated with him, her heart stained through and through by the paint-obsessed
man who cared for no one.
 
How
astonishingly lucky she'd been.
 
Her
brief months with Mistral had left her badly bruised, but she believed that
she possessed a core that he had never touched.
 
She bent her head to the back of Perry's hand and rubbed her cheek over
it so gently that she could feel the tiny blond hairs tickle her skin.
 
"About that butler..." she
murmured.

"I'll attend to
it."

"I knew you would."

"Close your eyes tight
and promise not to peek.
 
I'll lead you
into the salon
—
I want you to see that first," Perry said to
Maggy.
 
It was April of 1927 and they
stood outside the front door of the Parc Monceau flat.

"But that's so silly.
 
Still, after all, why not?
 
This whole thing is ridiculous." Maggy
squeezed her eyes shut and took Perry's arm.
 
It seemed to her that they walked a long time before he said, in a voice
tight with emotion, "You can look
now."

She opened her eyes on one of
the first of the truly modern rooms of the twentieth century. She felt as if a
fresh breeze had blown her into a new world, a gold and beige and ivory and
white world in which the utmost luxury was expressed in the purest of
forms.
 
Nothing looked like anything she
had ever seen before.
 
The gloomy walls,
that she had remembered as paneled in dark wood, had been stripped from floor
to ceiling and covered with hundreds of squares of parchment, each one slightly
different from all of the others.
 
Uninterrupted by a single picture, they formed, in their assembly, a
deliberate and masterful work of art that glowed, pale gold, in the light of
the boldly shaped white plaster lamps.

The room, which had seemed
impossibly big when she first saw it, now embraced her in its unexpected festivity.
 
As she walked around on the white rugs she
realized that she was moving in a new sort of space, a space in which she had
never imagined people living, a space suffused with freshness and openness,
that immediately made all other interiors seem crowded and fussy and
old-fashioned.
 
Maggy trailed her fingers
along the backs of the simple armchairs, covered in the plainest, heaviest
ivory silk imaginable, she caressed the tops of the low, gold lacquered tables
and then dizzily, she dropped down to one of the large sofas.
 
She lay full length on the soft, natural
beige leather and, eyes half-closed, contemplated the essential shapes of
everything in the room.

"What do you think?
 
Isn't it terrific?" Perry asked
anxiously, his words rushing.
 
"The
lamps are designed by Giacometti, there are forty coats of gold lacquer on the
tables, the rugs are hand knotted in Grasse..."

"Don't bother me with
details, my darling," Maggy said. "Just come lie with me here, it's
like floating."

They moved in three days
later.
 
Jean Michel Frank, delighted with
his American client, since a rich, open-pocketed single man
—
particularly
if he is in love
—
is always the most desirable client any artist can
have, had bent his great talent to making the Parc Monceau apartment a total
expression of his revolutionary vision, a vision that would still be fresh and
meaningful a half-century later.

On the first night in the new
apartment Maggy found herself unable to sleep.
 
Quietly, she got out of bed and wrapped herself in her maribou
negligee.
 
As she wandered around the
apartment she had the nagging feeling that something was missing, something was
not quite right.
 
Yet Monsieur Frank had
neglected no detail.

Never, Maggy thought as she
passed by the linen and silver closets, had she dreamed that anyone could own
so many objects.
 
It would be weeks
before she felt familiar with their contents.
 
Nothing that could make life supremely comfortable was missing and
everywhere immense cleanness reigned, a cleanness that made the satin-draped
luxury of her suite at the Lotti seem shabby and even grimy by contrast.

Maggy drifted into the salon
and stood by the French doors that looked out into the park. From the vantage
point of the second floor she could see much of that most frolicsome of
Parisian parks, the classic colonnade and the oval pond and the pyramid that
the Duke of Orléans had caused to be brought there in 1778.
 
Empty now, the park, surrounded by elaborate
wrought-iron railings tipped with gilded arrows, was like a stage set, she
thought, ready for some masque or entertainment of an archaic kind.
 
It looked as if it were waiting for a
procession of goddesses in Grecian robes or a band of fantastical fairies from
a poet's imagination.
 
But she knew that
nothing would go on in the locked park until the children, those
well-behaved
children of this elegant quarter, arrived in the morning with their
nurses.
 
Restlessly she walked from room
to room
but in spite of her growing sense of something lacking that
should
be there, she could find no human need unaccounted for.
 
Finally Maggy went back to bed and drifted
into a troubled sleep
filled
with fragments of dreams.

The following day, toward
twilight, Maggy let herself into the apartment, using her new key for the first
time.
 
Rosy with the coolness of the
April evening, she didn't even bother to take off her coat as she crossed the
entrance hall and almost ran through the long
corridor to the dining
room.
 
Under her arm was a large, lumpy
package wrapped in newspaper.

She had spent the afternoon
poking through certain shops on the rue des Rosiers and the package contained
the object she had gone searching for, the one thing, she had realized as she
had awakened late that morning, that was missing from the apartment.
 
Maggy stood in front of the vellum-covered
sideboard.
 
On it stood two heavy silver
and lapis lazuli candelabras that had been designed by the famous silversmith,
Jean Puiforcat, especially for the room.
 
They matched the great covered silver and lapis bowl that stood on the
dining table.
 
Maggy took each of the
candelabras from the sideboard and placed them on the table, on either side of
the bowl.
 
Then, very carefully she
unwrapped the newspaper and uncovered a large, rather battered brass
candlestick with seven branches.

"There! That's more like
it," she said out loud as she put the menorah in the place of honor in her
home.

11

Perry Mackay Kilkullen did
not give
one good goddamn.
 
Not a
damn for the shocked letters
from his mother and his sisters and
brothers.
 
Not a damn
for what the
church had already said, would continue to say, was presently saying.
 
Not a damn for the unspoken disapproval of
his partners and
the thrilled gossip of their wives.
 
Not a damn for the rising tide of
whispers
at the Turf and Field, the Piping Rock or the New York
Yacht Club.
 
Not a damn for the opinion of anyone he had
ever known or liked or even loved before he met Maggy.
 
He was utterly indifferent to these shadowy
figures, who had once seemed important, and to what they thought about a matter
that as so fundamentally his own.
 
He was
forty-two, he had lived more than half of the years any man could expect on
earth, and only now did he understand what it meant to be alive.
 
Maggy
. Without her he would have been
an approximation of a man, and never known it.

He still performed his
banking functions with precision; no one could accuse him of neglecting the
firm, but otherwise he cut himself off from his past life deliberately and
effectively.
 
He no longer accepted
invitations to dinner from his circle of friends within the Parisian banking
community; when his Yale classmates visited Paris with their wives he avoided
them.
 
Carefully he arranged his business
matters so that he didn't have to spend time in New York, where his wife, clad
in her dignity and her religious convictions, waited with seeming serenity for
him to outgrow a stage in life through which, as her mother assured her, many
other fine men had passed.
 
Mary Jane
McDonnell Kilkullen was too proud to give her friends any indication of how she
felt about the open scandal of Perry’s keeping a French mistress.
 
She continued on her rounds of good works,
a slim, jeweled, gracious woman who refused, by her brisk yet bland
bearing, to let anyone feel sorry for her.
 
Nothing would ever make her descend to the vulgarity of acting like an
outraged
and deceived wife.

By the fall of 1927 Maggy
turned twenty.
 
She looked more worldly
than her age, as she always had, with the urbane eyelids and bold mouth that
made her, in any crowd of women, the most fascinating to watch, even if she
was unlike the ideal beauty of the time. She was not, had never been, a
"young thing," prettily engaging, nor did she fit into the
fashionably childish and brittle flapper mode.
 
In the past few months during which she had been able to indulge
her
taste,
 
she had achieved a timeless,
enigmatic, never-to-be-dated
elegance.

To celebrate her birthday
Perry took her to Marius and Janette, where they had dined together for the
first time, and then they went on
to their favorite Montmartre
nightclub, Chez Josephine, where the absurdity of the nanny goat and the pig,
Josephine Baker's
bizarre pets, who ran about being spoiled by royalty
from a dozen European countries, never failed to amuse Maggy.

Tonight however she felt
oddly thoughtful. Twenty was very different from nineteen.
 
It was a woman's age, not a girl's age.
 
Her girlhood
was over, Maggy
reflected, and didn't know whether to be cast down or delighted.
 
She sighed and twisted the double rope of
pearls
that Perry had given her for her birthday.

"Is something wrong, my
baby?" he asked.

"I'll never be young
—
really
young
—
again.
 
And
don't you dare tell me I'm being silly."

"Was being 'really
young' so very wonderful?"

She shook her head at his
misunderstanding of her meaning.

"It meant that
everything lay ahead of me.
 
It meant
that I didn't have
to think about the future because it was so far
off.
 
Somehow the choices I made didn't
really
count
.
 
Nothing was final
because everything was going to change anyway. But now, now I feel so...
 
so," she gestured ineffectively and
shook her head because the words disappeared even as she tried to find them.

"As if you have to make
decisions?" he asked tenderly.

"Something almost like
that. As if I'm
in
my future
—
as if my life should be going
somewhere."
 
She smiled wistfully
and shrugged her shoulders with an uncharacteristically helpless air.

"You are going
somewhere. You're going to marry me."

Maggy's hands flew up
incredulously.
 
"Don't say
that!
 
You know it's impossible!
 
How can you say that, even as a joke?
 
I've never thought of it!"

"I know
you
haven't but I have.
 
It's all I've been
thinking about, almost from the day I met you
—
the theoretically
unthinkable plan of getting a divorce and marrying you and living with you for
the rest of my life.
 
Nothing else is
natural or right or true.
 
We belong
together."

"You're a Catholic and
you're married!" Maggy objected in wild consternation.
 
She had acquiesced in all his arrangements
for her even as she understood that nothing more was ever going to be
possible.
 
Every barrier stood between
them; he was as little likely to marry her as if he had been the Prince of
Wales, and she had loved him enough to accept the situation.

"My wife and I have been
as good as separated for years
—
you know that.
 
We don't have children to keep us
together..."

"Oh, why did you have to
bring this up?" Maggy cried.
 
"You know you can't get a divorce."

"That's what they said
to Henry the Eighth."
 
Perry grinned
at her.
 
True, Catholics should not get
divorced.
 
But that was not to say that
they
did
not divorce on rare occasions, through the use of infinite
willpower and patience and a great deal of money and influence.
 
Of course such Catholics were not what his
family or anyone he knew would consider
good
Catholics.
 
He himself would not consider a divorced
Catholic a good Catholic.

But to marry Maggy, Perry
Kilkullen was willing to become a bad Catholic.
 
He had discovered that his faith was not nearly as strong as his
love.
 
Once the wheels of his imagination
had begun to turn, once he had seen his life as barren, his marriage as merely
the arid continuation of something that was long dead, no more than a social
and theological convenience, he had become impatient with the laws of the church.
 
Could rules that demanded that he be false to
his deepest needs be right?
 
Did he have
to surrender all the good years that were left of his life as a man to a web of
"musts" and "must nots" that had been decreed by Rome?
 
Every time he made love to Maggy it was, by
all the dogma he had learned, an occasion of sin.
 
Yet when he lay within her he felt
consecrated.
 
Her breasts, her belly, her
thighs
—
all were a benediction.
 
Nothing as beautiful could be unblessed.

"Oh, how can you smile
like that?
 
Don't you know what you're
saying?" Maggy cried, deeply shocked.
 
"You've gone crazy."
 

"Wouldn't you want to
marry me if it were possible?"
 
Finally, Perry was struck by her reaction.
 
He had expected wonderment, confusion, but
not this refusal to be happy about his plans.

"I don't want to be the
cause of all sorts of trouble for you," Maggy said stubbornly.

"I was
parched
before
I met you!" Perry said violently.
 
"I was dying of thirst and you saved me.
 
I could have gone on for years and ended up
withered, dry, bleached, as empty of sap as a piece of driftwood."

"But won't it cause
trouble?
 
Bad trouble?" Maggy
insisted.

"Big, bad, terrible
trouble."
 
He grinned in
relief.
 
That was all that had upset her.
"Almost the worst trouble you can imagine.
 
But worth every minute of it, if you'll be there to marry me, if you'll
say you'll love me always no matter how long it takes."

"You know I will,"
she said slowly.
 
His utter need
dissolved her fears.

"Even though you're not
really young anymore?
 
Are you sure
you're not too long in the tooth to make such a decision?
 
After all, it may well take a few years and
you don't want to risk being an old maid."

"I may be reaching
maturity," Maggy said, "but I'm not yet too old to take a
chance."

"Then it's
settled?" he said eagerly.

"Between us, yes,
yes
,
my darling. As for the rest..."

"I'll leave for New York
on the next crossing..." Perry promised.

"But now
—
while
I'm still young enough, let's dance."

Less than ten days after
Maggy's twentieth birthday Perry Kilkullen and his wife confronted each other
in the library of their Park Avenue apartment.
 
For two hours Mary Jane had not once raised her voice in anger or let an
unguarded word escape her lips.
 
She had
listened quietly and without interruption to everything he had to say, her trim
legs crossed neatly at the ankle, her pretty face almost expressionless, her
hands lying quietly in her lap.
 
She
didn't even fiddle with any of her many rings.
 
She wasn't making it tough for him, Perry thought, as he poured out all
his arguments, all his reasons, all his pain at what he had to do to them.
 
She seemed to be listening, really listening,
to what he was telling her.
 
Perhaps she,
too, was anxious to make a true life for herself.
 
Perhaps, in all time he'd been gone, she had
found someone who could love her
as every woman should be loved.
 
Finally he stopped, hoarse from talking.
 
There was nothing now that she didn't know,
nothing he hadn't confessed, and tried to explain.

A silence fell and lasted for
so long that he almost began to speak again, to repeat himself, when she said,
gently and so softly that he could barely hear her.
 
"A divorce?
 
I couldn't do that to you
,
Perry."

"But you'd be doing
nothing
.
 
I'm totally to blame."
           

"I couldn't possibly
abandon you, Perry.
 
How could you expect
me to be so cruel?" she said with a look of compassion.

"Mary Jane, stop
twisting things.
 
You wouldn't be
abandoning me, I've abandoned you."

"You haven't done
anything that can't be put right, Perry," she said, as kindly as if she
were reassuring a frightened child.
 
"You
—
oh, I suppose people would say that you've 'strayed'
—
 
people love to say things like
that, I find
—
but as I see it, you've just made a mistake.
 
It's serious but far from irreparable.
 
Fortunately the church understands, the
church will take you back when this is over."
     

"I thought you were
listening
,
damn it!"

"I was.
 
I heard every word.
 
But Perry, poor Perry, you seem forget that
you have an immortal soul."

"Mary Jane, I'm a
grown-up man.
 
I'm forty-two
—
let
me worry about my own soul."

"You're asking the
impossible, Perry.
 
Is it for
me
to
decide that you are to be denied the life to come?
 
If I
were
to agree, if you were
able to get a divorce, if you married this girl during my lifetime, you'd be excommunicated.
 
And it would be through my fault as much as
your own."

"I'm willing to take
that chance, Mary Jane."

"But I'm not willing to
condemn you.
 
And you know that you
have
no right to ask me to do so."

He looked at her
narrowly.
 
Was there the merest hint that
she
was playing a game with him, hiding behind piety?
 
But on Mary Jane's face he saw only
conviction and resolution and tranquillity, a fatal calmness that told him that
there was no hope.
 
She
existed in
a parallel
world from his and there was no bridge of words that could
spun between them.
 
Her belief negated
the existence of his passion.
 
Maggy and
his love for her were not real to Mary Jane.
 
They were merely an abstraction, a "state of sin" from which
he could be redeemed by confession and penance and a return to her. He knew he
had lost even as he continued to reason, to argue, to plead.