Bridal Chair
Authors: Gloria Goldreich
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Copyright © 2015 by Gloria Goldreich
Cover and internal design © 2015 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Kathleen Lynch/Black Kat Design
Cover illustration by Vivienne Flesher
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldreich, Gloria.
The bridal chair : a novel / Gloria Goldreich.
pages ; cm
(softcover : acid-free paper) 1. Fathers and daughters—France—Fiction. 2. Artists—France—Fiction. 3. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 4. Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction. 5. Paris (France)—History—1870-1940—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.O3845B75 2015
813’.54—dc23
2014044578
For my most important readers (eventually):
Gila Rose, Samuel Nathan, and Lily Esther Sheldon
Ruthy Gal, Saul Eitan, and Ilan Yehuda Amkraut
Koby Matan and Alon Yoav Horowitz
The
Bridal
Chair
is a work of biofiction, based on the life of Ida Chagall, the only daughter of the artist Marc Chagall. While I have adhered faithfully to the chronology of her life and the historical events that informed it, I have taken the novelist’s license and created scenes and conversations that are entirely based on my own imaginings. I have, in all such instances, attempted to remain faithful to the personalities of the protagonists and details of the incidents, relying on insights gleaned from my extensive reading of biographies, letters, and accounts that relate to such invented situations and exchanges. I relied on many sources, but I want to make special mention of Jackie Wullschlager’s magnificent
Chagall: A Biography
(New York: Knopf, 2008) and
My
Life
with
Chagall
by Virginia Haggard (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1986).
She is gripped by a terror she cannot name, but she is certain that she is in danger, grave danger. Her breath comes in labored gasps. She is running, racing. The taps on the heels of her patent leather shoes clatter against the cobblestones, and her heart beats wildly as though struggling to match her frantic pace. Her parents grip her hands—her mother’s sharp nails dig into her right palm, and her father’s grasp on her left is painfully tight.
“Faster, Idotchka. Faster.” They speak in unison. She trembles at the fear in their voices.
Their pursuers draw closer, booted feet beating in tympanic hate, horses’ hooves pounding ominously.
She cannot go any faster. She feels her energy draining, her legs faltering. Tears streak her cheeks. How angry they will be with her if she should fall. She does not want them to be angry, her
mamochka
, her
papochka
.
And then, suddenly, their race is over, and they are lifted to the heavens. They are soaring, the three of them, hands linked, hearts lightened, flying skyward. Her parents’ arms have become wings that scissor their way through a sky no longer draped in velvet darkness but wondrously studded with rainbow-colored flowers. A vagrant wind plays with her auburn curls, and she laughs as the thick tendrils tickle her cheeks. Her pinafore billows out into a great puff of whiteness that will surely keep her afloat.
She glances at her mother, who glides so easily through the air, a blackbird of a woman, her hair a cap of polished ebony, the velvet dress that hugs her slender body the color of night. She turns her head to the left and she sees that her father’s beret has fallen and his fine silken hair frames his elfin face; stray strands briefly veil his bright blue eyes. He smiles; his daughter’s hand is so light and trusting in his own. He is at home in this flower-strewn heaven. He will paint these skies, she knows, when they are safe and out of harm’s way. But for now, their flight continues.
They float, the three of them, like zephyrs borne on soft breezes, cushioned by gentle clouds, high above the burning villages and the dark columns of soldiers tramping the country they had once called their own. Mother Russia has cast them out. They are orphaned refugees, rootless and rejected, but they are winging their way to a safe haven. They do not speak, because language is lost to them. The quiet settles over them in a soothing coverlet embroidered with hope and promise. Wordless, soundless.
Still half asleep, safe in her bed, she stretched languidly and opened her eyes to the golden light of early morning streaming through the wide window of her bedroom. A bird sang with plaintive sweetness and she hurried to the window. The solitary warbler teetered on a fragile branch of the lemon tree and then soared off into the cloudless summer sky.
“
Au
revoir
,” she called softly and looked down at the garden where her parents sat opposite each other in their wicker chairs, talking softly as they sipped their morning coffee. Their voices drifted through the open window as their spoons clinked musically against their china cups.
She watched them for a moment and then turned, stripped off her white nightgown, and stood naked before her full-length mirror. She studied the curves of her body, the fine-boned contour of her face. She lifted her mass of bright hair and allowed it to fall again to her shoulders.
Her reflection reassured her. She passed her hands across the tender fullness of her breasts and felt the power of her nascent womanhood. She was no longer the frightened small girl of her nightmare. The dream was banished. The painful past was behind her. She had no need of a celestial haven. She willed herself to triumph over the sadness that too often lingered in the aftermath of her haunted sleep.
She turned her head, glanced at herself in profile, practiced a smile, practiced a frown.
Am
I
pretty?
she wondered.
Am
I
beautiful? Will Michel find me much changed?
There was an impatient knock at her bedroom door; her name was called once and then again. “Mademoiselle Ida! Mademoiselle Ida!”
The harsh voice of Katya, the Polish maid, irritable and accusatory, pierced her reverie.
“It is very late. Your parents are waiting for you.”
“Tell them I’ll be down in just a few minutes.”
A grunt and then heavy footfalls retreated in reproach.
Ida shrugged. She knew that Katya did not like her, did not like being a maid in a Jewish home. But that was of no importance. Katya, as her mother frequently pointed out, was lucky to be working for the Chagalls. They were kind employers, Katya’s wages were paid on time, she ate the same food as the family, and transport to church on Sundays and festivals was provided.
She dismissed Katya from her thoughts, splashed her face with cold water, and dressed quickly, choosing a pale blue, pearl-buttoned dress of a gossamer fabric that slipped off easily and would let her swiftly disrobe. Her father had told her that he wanted her to pose for him before she left for the alpine encampment so that he might complete the series of nude studies he had begun months earlier, alternating at whim between watercolor and gouache, charcoal and oil.
Her father had used his brush over the years to create a visual journal of her life, chronicling the days of her playful childhood, her moody adolescence, and now her emergent young womanhood. The title of each effort was scrawled in his looping script across the back of the work, a claim of ownership and provenance. There was
Ida
on
the
Swing
, a portrait in motion, painted swiftly as she thrust herself skyward, her chubby legs vigorously pumping, the wind burnishing her cheeks. He had taken more time in painting
Ida
at
the
Window
, capturing her as she stared dreamily through the shimmering glass while the sun sank over their Montchauvet home, setting the waters of the Seine on fire.
“What are you thinking about, Idotchka?” her father had asked that day as his brush flew across the canvas, his eyes narrowed in concentration.
She had thought then to share her recurring dream of frantic flight with him so that he might paint that nocturnal fantasy into a tactile reality, but she had remained silent. The dream was her own, not to be co-opted by his brush and palette. She took a perverse pleasure in keeping it secret. She had, after all, so few secrets from her parents. They had laid claim to every aspect of her life, keeping her close from the day of her birth. Sometimes she thought that they monitored the very breaths she took and seized upon her moods, saddened by her sadness, joyful in her joy. She choked on their vigilance; she resented their obsessive insistence that they possess every aspect of her being and then felt a disloyalty that shamed her. She was fortunate to be their daughter, the beloved legatee of their fame and fortune and unconditional love. And she loved them deeply in return.
She understood that their concern for her was born of the uncertainty and the suffering they had endured. Of course they were frightened. She accepted their fear, submitted to it. She allowed them to believe that they were the conservators of her life. But her dreams, her beautiful and terrifying nocturnal odysseys, those were her own, as was the secret she had held so close within her heart throughout the year. It thrilled her that she had managed to refrain from telling her parents about Michel. He belonged only to her.
Michel. Her Michel. She loved the very sound of his name. She had thought of his fine-featured face, of his soft and thoughtful voice, as the long months of their separation drifted slowly by. Her anticipation of their next meeting had intensified during these last sultry days of summer as she posed for her father, hour after hour, never stirring when he left his easel to more closely examine the dark areolae of her nipples, the tangled rise of the russet curls between her legs. The intensity of that gaze never unnerved her. He was Marc Chagall, and he looked at her neither as man nor father but as an artist in the throes of creation.
It was Michel who saw her with a lover’s eye, Michel whom she would see in only a few days’ time after the long year of separation.
She smiled at the thought, threaded a blue ribbon through her hair, and glided, barefoot, through the sunlit house to join her parents at breakfast in the walled garden. The French doors slid open and they turned to her at once, their faces bright with pleasure.
“Ah, our Ida.”
Her father rose and kissed her on both cheeks. She knelt before her mother, felt Bella’s soft hands gentle upon her head. This was, as always, their morning greeting, a coming together after a single night as though they had been long parted. It was as though they saw each day of their togetherness as a gift, her presence in their lives, and perhaps their lives themselves, as a miracle. She wondered if they ever dreamed of desperately fleeing danger and despair and flying into freedom. Perhaps their dreams, like her own, were embroidered with dark-threaded memories of the lost land of their birth, the village of their youth. Did the faces of family and friends, long vanished from their lives, drift above them in the darkness of the night, like the celestial flowers of her own dream?
But of course, they would not share such thoughts with her. She was their pampered virginal daughter, to be vigilantly protected against the harshness of life. They had never even sent her to school because they so feared any threat and danger. Other children were cruel. Crowded classrooms bred disease. Broad avenues and narrow streets were haunted by unknown strangers, speeding vehicles. They could not risk exposing their Ida to danger. She was the repository of their past, their hope for the future, the source of their joyous present, her mother’s student, her father’s model, an enchanting and exuberant daughter. And she in turn worked hard to please them, to amuse them, to evoke the admiration of their friends.
“Such a bright child.”
“Such a creative girl.”
“So charming.”
Always they had beamed and collected her accolades as though they themselves had earned them. Her effervescence delighted them; her laughter trilled through their home. Their wonderful Ida, so happy, so beautiful, and yes, perhaps even talented. The drawings of her adolescence were clever, and her paintings showed promise.
They allowed her to begin classes at a small neighborhood art school, although Bella stood at the window, awaiting her return home.
Always she saw the lines of tension on their faces ease when she entered, her voice lilting as she invited their amusement, telling them of the absurd tramp she had seen, wearing one red shoe, one blue shoe; the ridiculous boy in her class whose beret fell over his eyes; or the maître who patrolled the studio singing “Sur le Pont d’Avignon.” She had an ear, she had an eye, their Ida, they agreed.
She played her role even as she slowly and determinedly forged her way free of the cocoon of their anxiety and laid claim to her life as she wished to live it. She had campaigned for their permission to join in a program geared to the young adult children of Russian Jewish émigrés, held in a French alpine encampment. It would be their gift to her on her seventeenth birthday.
“It will make me so happy,
Mamochka
,
Papochka
. Don’t you want your Ida to be happy?”
She had danced toward them, her arms outstretched, and they had smiled, charmed by her charm. Of course they wanted her to be happy. They were pledged to her happiness. They made inquiries. The encampment was well chaperoned, and the young participants were immersed in Russian language and culture and imbued with love for the life and literature of Mother Russia. Such exposure would bring their Ida even closer to them. She would have a new understanding of their past. And most important of all, she would be happy. They agreed and paid her tuition, purchased her train ticket.
Excitedly, during that first journey on her own, she had peered through the windows of her first-class carriage as it sped through the mountains. Shyly, she formed her first tentative friendships with other young Russian Jews. Joyously, she had locked eyes with tall and slender Michel Rapaport who spoke all the languages of her heart. She soared on the wings of her new freedom, wandered barefoot with Michel through the waving alpine grass, sat beside him at the blazing bonfires as they sang Russian folk songs and lilting chansons.
He was a reluctant law student, a devoted son who helped his parents in their small Paris shop, determined to ease their lives by becoming a successful
avocat
. He and Ida were mutually constrained by familial obligations. They acknowledged that it would be impossible to meet during the ensuing months. But they were not discouraged. They would see each other at the next retreat. They were young. Oceans of time stretched out before them. In the intervening months, he sent her books of poetry and she sent him her drawings. Their intimate, innocent exchanges, packets of hope and love wrapped in brown paper, arrived by post and were easily explained away.
“A gift from a friend,” Ida told her mother.
The months had passed, and Ida counted the days. Soon, she would count the hours and then she would board the train and travel southeast to the alpine hamlet where Michel would await her, his face bright with love.
Seated with her parents in the garden on this sunlit morning when the branches of the fruit trees were heavy with golden pears and carmine cherries and the air was thick with the scent of rosemary that clung to the stone walls, she was suffused with contentment.
She smiled at her parents, smiled even at sulky Katya who poured her coffee. Her father plucked up a piece of toast, crunched it noisily, and wandered into the garden, stretching out beneath the shade of an ancient olive tree.
“Did you sleep well?” her mother asked as she spread Ida’s croissant with the raspberry jam she made herself, following the instructions of the cook who had reigned over her parents’ kitchen in faraway Vitebsk, the village that had been home to both Marc and Bella.