Pictures at an Exhibition (21 page)

Chapter Seventeen

T
HAT SPRING, THE FIRST AFTER THE WAR, WAS A
cruel trick. Even in May, grayness flooded the city from sky to street, from the pigeons roosting forlornly on lampposts to the granite plaque on rue Bonaparte where, as it read, Manet had been born in 1832, when the street was called rue des Petits Augustins.

I walked along the damp cobblestones onto rue des Beaux-Arts, past Manet's birthplace, stopping at the granite facade of the Galerie Zola, where Rose had sent me. Inside, I saw a woman dressed in a man's black suit, with hair the shade of a sunset in a Technicolor movie.

I tried the gallery's door, but it was locked. The woman in the suit reached under her desk, the door buzzed, and I pushed it open. A man beside her stared at me from behind a pair of bottle-rimmed lenses.

“Better him than Léon Blum,” he said, turning back to the orange-haired woman.

They both laughed and then stopped abruptly. The man said something in a hushed voice and the owner said,
“‘Tsk, tsk.”

While they spoke, I stood by the door and examined the gallery. The walls were covered in a brown fabric that gave the air a muddy quality. Picasso prints, all signed in 1944, filled the front room.

“Is this open?” I asked, stepping into the unlit side gallery.

“Yes, yes,” the orange-haired woman said, in a voice indistinguishable from a man's, and turned on the dim lights.

Even before my eyes could adjust, I saw the Morisot emerge from the gloom. My father's
Woman in White.
At last.

I took it off the wall. My hands shook. Behind me, I heard the gallery owner hurrying her customer out the door. I strode over to her.

She gave me a quick, alarmed look and said, cowering, “Please, be reasonable.”

“This belongs to my father,” I said.

“Fine,” she said, backing away toward her desk. The light reflected off her witchy shoes.

“You even kept the frame,” I marveled.

“You can have it,” she said. “I bought it for a song. I always thought I would have to give it back, and here you are. But now you must never come back here, and you must not tell anyone how you acquired this painting. I don't want to ever see you again. Don't even tell me your name.” The fright was gone from her voice; this was a speech she had planned to give. She walked to the front door and held it open, waiting for me.

It can't be this easy, I thought. “How did you get this?” I asked.

“Do you want the painting? Because if you want the painting, then you shouldn't ask any questions. Let's keep this simple.”

I paused. I thought of Bertrand then, who wouldn't have listened.

“Leave,” she said, and this time I obeyed. I ran toward the Seine, clutching the painting under my gray coat. My feet felt like lead. I could not move them quickly enough.

THE SENSATION THAT THERE WAS A REAL WOMAN IN
the room with me, and that she was lovely but remote, was nearly painful. I leaned the Morisot on the glass table next to my valise, wedging its corner into a jagged crack that streaked across the table-top like a bolt of lightning.

It was Friday evening and Chaim had already set out for the synagogue,
so I could study the Morisot alone: the half smile, the averted eyes, and the hatch of paint blurring the middle of her lips. In her dressing room there were a mirror, a washbasin, some jars suggesting powders and paints. A few shelves with perfume bottles, linens. I cupped my hands on either side of my eyes, as if peering in a store window at midday, and looked at the Morisot again.

The gesture, familiar all of a sudden, conjured an afternoon with my father in May of 1940, before the city fell. The days were lengthening and the gray sidewalk in front of the gallery was scattered with geranium petals from the flower boxes on the building's upper floors. The weather was so glorious, it nearly promised victory. However, at home, in addition to news of the bank panic and fear of the German invasion, my mother had been unable to find a reliable piano tuner. Father and I were in the gallery, trying not to listen to her argue with the day's third browbeaten tuner in the parlor above. The gallery darkened and then lightened as if cued by the intervals upstairs. Father shielded his eyes to look at the Morisot on the wall before us.

“I find it helpful to study Morisot like this. You do it, too,” he instructed me, and then I saw what he saw. There was a claustrophobia to Morisot, or the sense of standing too close to someone else. I always wanted the painter to paint from one step farther away, as in Morisot's portrait of her unlovely sister Edma, mountainous in a black frock atop a floral settee.

Now with my hands around my eyes, I looked at Morisot's
Woman in White
, and the model's averted gaze suggested she knew I was there and looking. The circular mirror in the painting reflected nothing back, and the mottled impasto on the model's chest was a lighter shade than on the figure's face. Her left hand was engaged in pulling off the right sleeve. Soon, one hoped, the whole nightdress would follow.

“When Manet died in 1883, five of his portraits of Morisot were part of the estate,” my father had said. “Manet kept the pictures he had painted of his sister-in-law for all those years, out of a sense of love or propriety, that no one else should possess such an intimate sight. What makes one man keep a painting when he could have a
thousand others? It pleases me to think we've reunited Morisot and Manet here, even for a few days. They can whisper to each other in the gallery after dark.”

Father leaned closer to the painting. “The Impressionists respect me,” he said. “I like the unfinished quality of their work. It may be what I like best. And Morisot leaves her paintings unfinished as well as any of them. She says to you, ‘Let your eye finish the picture. Let it notice what isn't here and add it in, let it resolve the features on this woman, see what I saw in this moment, what stood out to me, what remained and what did not.’ There's a modesty to that vision that I admire. One that respects what the viewer will see.

“I'm not a modest man,” my father said.

We heard Mother pound an angry arpeggio and scold the piano tuner.

“Your mother isn't modest either,” he said. “But Max.” He said my name almost plaintively. “Somehow, you are a modest fellow. It is a great virtue, and I admire it in you.” I flushed and tried to look into my father's face, but his eyes were still fixed on the painting. A flock of swallows glided past the skylight in formation, and their shadows flew across the illuminated patch of green carpet. The sounds of the piano tuner were comical and sporadic.

I ticked the time off on my fingers: by that evening in Chaim's apartment, it had been five years since I had last seen the Morisot. The church bells outside tolled eight-thirty. Somehow I had missed the intervening hour and a half, lost in my thoughts and the study of the painting. Chaim had left me two unripe apples, the day's newspaper folded in two, half of a baguette, and a hard triangle of cheese. I was touched by his silent generosity even while he worried about how much money we had left and the dwindling number of cans in the cupboard.

I polished off the apples, followed by the bread and cheese, hid the Morisot in the valise, tucked the newspaper under my arm, and went in search of something else to eat. I crossed over rue de Rivoli and out of the Jewish quarter. I found a grocer selling sardines for a good price near where rue de Rivoli becomes rue Saint-Antoine, bought a tin and a stale roll, walked to the church of Saint-Paul, and
sat down on its steps. I unfolded the newspaper and read an account of the American battle for the Chinen Peninsula. Okinawa was nearly theirs. In Paris, the wife of Robert Wagner, former district leader of Baden, committed suicide upon her arrest. The newspapers were always especially curious when women were involved.

I ate my sardines on the roll, soaking the stale bread in the oil at the bottom of the tin. The oil dripped and spattered onto the newspaper, and two pigeons with iridescent heads and lidless beady eyes waddled over to inspect.

On Friday nights, before the war, Bertrand and I might have tried to sneak into a movie or have loitered in the place de la Sorbonne to see if any girls wanted to talk to us. Tonight, I licked the sardine tin clean and walked back to Chaim's apartment and to my painting, which I propped next to my bed. Before succumbing to sleep, I considered that my father would be proud of this recovery. It was nearly enough to take me back to him.

THE NEXT MORNING, A SATURDAY, I AWOKE TO THE
sight of the Morisot.

I rolled over in bed and turned away from the window, the light streaming in from the open shades. I watched the dust motes and fell into a languid half sleep.

In a dream, Rose appeared at the foot of my mattress, carrying a child in her arms. The bundle cried out twice, sounding much like Chaim's neighbor's cat, and then vanished. Rose was the girl as I remembered her before the war, in the same gauzy
déshabillé
as the Morisot woman. I could smell her laundered nightdress and her damp skin and its talcum powder and perfume. The collar of the
déshabillé
brushed against me. But this fantasy was broken by a second one. In the painting was a mirror. I dreamed then of a second mirror, covered with a black sheet. Where was
this
memory from? When the Count de Camondo died when I was thirteen? Yes, and another house as well, with lotus flower wallpaper. But I could remember nothing more.

I woke with a cry and leaped from bed. It was essential to hide the
painting, which I did, behind the giant armoire in Chaim's hallway. Then I set out in the direction of the rue des Beaux-Arts.

I ARRIVED ONCE AGAIN AT GALERIE ZOLA AND PEERED
in its window. The owner's elbow was propped against the desk and she was engrossed in an auction catalog. A long ash dangled off her cigarette and piled on the page opened before her. I rang the buzzer and she started, then walked to the door but did not open it. She touched the glass, leaving the cloudy imprint of five fingers. Judging by how she had sent me away, I was prepared for a fight. But to my surprise, she pressed an unseen button and let me in.

The gallery was stuffy after the brisk air outside, and I could smell the wilted flowers rotting in the wastebasket. I noticed an ashtray that bore the name of a Swiss hotel.

“Please sit down,” she offered. I sat.

“So you're Daniel Berenzon's son.” She could not hide that she was impressed. So my father's reputation had meant more than my own efforts.

She eyed me down the length of her Camel. I looked at her hands. They were ringless, with nails bitten to the quick.

“Don't bother asking how I know that. I had heard a whisper that you were back in town. And you look just like him. I realized it last night, after you left. Before the war, I attended the openings at your house. Beautiful gallery. Paris is just
un petit village.
“ She laughed.

I took a calling card from its tray on her desk.
Claudine de La Porte des Vaux
, it read, and gave her address and telephone exchange.

“I apologize about the difficulty yesterday,” Madame de La Porte des Vaux said, as if she meant it. “I'd heard that the Jews coming back to France are all practically deranged. So listen: The cheese man sold his cheese during the war. The baker sold bread. I kept the gallery open and sold the paintings that fell into my hands. And I was better than most, Monsieur Berenzon.”

“Better than most Frenchmen?” I asked.

“True, though my point is finer than that: better than most of your father's and my colleagues. You want to know how I got the
painting? The Germans asked me a question, I gave them an answer, and one day a man—in civilian clothes, mind you—knocks at my door and gives me the Morisot. He says, ‘Thank you for providing Herr Rosenberg with the necessary information,’ and disappears. I didn't even know who he was talking about. I didn't want to get mixed up with the Germans at all. But if you find out who Herr Rosenberg was, and you probably will, you could let me know.”

“What did you tell them?” I asked.

She sighed. “You think I was a collaborator, but I was not. The month was January, in 1942, and I was alone in the gallery as I always am. Two German soldiers came to the door. They were very polite and apologetic that their French was limited. I, however, know a little German, so we were able to converse. I was courteous—I value my life, after all—but not friendly in the least.

“The soldiers showed me a piece of paper with the name
Rose Clement
on it. In their uncouth way, they were asking me what I knew about her and whether or not she was a respectable young woman. I praised her honestly: her intelligence, beauty, the enormous responsibilities that your father entrusted to her, and so on. I hope you will not mind my saying this, but I heard that she had rejected your suit. So I told the Germans this, too—that she had refused a Jewish man.

“The soldiers nodded to each other and one wrote down little phrases in a notebook. We stood talking by the gallery door the entire time. No Nazi ever set foot in this establishment.

“Then three months later, a bald man appeared. He wore lovely shoes, I remember, and handed the Morisot to me. At the time, I had no idea why—I thought he wanted me to sell it for him, which surprised me because he was so evidently well-off in those lean times. But then he made it clear that it was a gift for my cooperation. What cooperation? I thought. After he left, I remembered telling those two polite young men about Mademoiselle Clément, and I figured the events must have been connected. I was so relieved the soldiers didn't deliver the painting to me. Then the neighbors would really have been suspicious! So you see, I wasn't a collaborator at all. And I may have saved your friend's life.” She looked out the gallery's window in a dreamy way, as if she were sitting for her portrait. “Now I
have helped the house of Berenzon twice,” she said, and patted my hand. I withdrew it. “Just remember. In this business we say, any bad arrangement is preferable to a good lawsuit.”