Bridal Chair (27 page)

“You must think it strange that my husband and I sleep in separate rooms,” she said.

“Not at all,” Virginia replied. “I do not share a room with my husband.”

They stared at each other, two young women who did not sleep with their husbands, who understood the world of art, who might have been friends in another time, another place.

“Everything is understood then?” Ida asked. “My husband and I are leaving for a brief vacation. Will you manage?”

“I will,” Virginia assured her, her tone carefully submissive.

Ida and Michel left for their vacation that evening.

“One last shared holiday,” Michel murmured.

“Perhaps,” Ida said sadly. “But perhaps not.”

Their years together had been suffused with uncertainty. There was no certainty even now.

Virginia arrived early the next morning and began her life as Marc Chagall’s housekeeper. Within days, she was also his lover.

Afterward, they could not tell when it had begun.

Marc claimed he had recognized their shared destiny the very moment she entered his studio.

He had thought, he said, that Bella had sent Virginia to him. Bella, in death, was his guardian angel. She would not cease to protect him. Virginia speculated that their intimacy could be traced to her third day in the apartment when he asked her to join him when he ate because he felt lonely in the large dining room. Such intimate meals then became a pattern. Small Jean napped on the living room couch as her mother and Marc ate and sipped their wine. They spoke of their disparate childhoods, her early years in Venezuela and later in Dorset and Paris, as the lonely and unhappy daughter of a British diplomat. He reminisced about his youth in Vitebsk, his studies in St. Petersburg, his life in Paris, so cruelly aborted by the war. They pitied each other and offered each other comfort with the softest of gazes, the lightest of touches.

In a more relaxed mood, he gossiped about the artists they had both known in Paris. He was ambivalent about Picasso, dismissive of Giacometti and Miró, hostile to Max Ernst.

Virginia listened to his stories, both awed and amused. He invited her into his studio and she reveled in the time she spent in the large, wide-windowed room with its familiar scents of drying brushes dipped in turpentine, linseed oil, and the acrid odor of fixatives. Ida had furnished it with huge potted plants and suspended a swaying mobile from the high ceiling. It was, Marc explained, a gift from Alexander Calder, intended to console him after Bella’s death.

“But why should I be consoled by such a creation, the body of a man with the head of a goat?” he asked. “Calder doesn’t understand me. There is no one who understands me now that my Bella is dead.”

“I will try to understand you,” Virginia murmured daringly.

She punctured his sadness by telling him about her own Bohemian student days in Montparnasse, describing the masquerade balls at which students and artists, models and prostitutes, danced until dawn and slept in each other’s arms.

“And did you sleep in the arms of many young men?” he asked teasingly. “Or perhaps you are intrigued only by older men.”

“I am intrigued by you,” she admitted.

She did not add that she had also been intrigued by her husband, the weak and elderly John McNeil. Her family had condemned that marriage as an unhealthy obsession with the weak and infirm, similar to her childhood nursing of birds with broken wings, hares with injured legs.

But this was different. Marc Chagall was neither weak nor infirm. Age had not affected his amazing energy, his formidable talent. He was the opposite of her ill and impoverished husband.

She kissed him gently on the lips, entwined her fingers in the tangle of his gray curls, amazed at how soft they were to her touch.

It was not long before he entered the bedroom while she changed the linens. It was not long before they collapsed together onto the unmade bed. She unbuttoned his shirt and buried her head in his chest. Through the closed door, they could hear Jean babbling happily to herself as she played with the small toys she crafted out of bits of clay and stray buttons. The child’s prattle vested their midday coupling with an aura of innocence. They turned to each other, smiled, and dressed very swiftly.

Ida sensed their new and daring intimacy when she and Michel returned to New York. She realized at once that the relationship between Virginia and Marc excluded their daughters, herself and small Jean who was enrolled in a nursery school at Marc’s insistence and expense.

“Perhaps you should spend more hours at your studio classes, Ida,” Marc suggested to her. “You must not spend so much time in the apartment.”

“He wants to be rid of me,” Ida told Elsa. “It’s a pity that there is no nursery school for the adult daughters of fathers engaged in afternoon love affairs with their housekeepers.”

She did not blame Virginia. She knew that Virginia was desperately poor, trapped in an unhappy, loveless marriage, and estranged from her own father. Of course she would be enticed by a relationship with the world-famous and prosperous Marc Chagall. But she resented Marc.

“He might have waited until the first anniversary of my mother’s death,” she complained to Michel, who smiled bitterly.

“He is a dependent man who has no capacity for solitude,” Michel replied coldly. “Surely you know that.”

Ida nodded. She had always known that.

She did not speak to Marc about Virginia but remained complicit in their domestic charade. Virginia ate alone in the kitchen. She addressed Marc as Monsieur Chagall and was never introduced to their guests. She glided silently through the room at parties or gatherings, balancing trays of glasses, removing dirty dishes, a compliant servant who knew her place. When Ida gave a small dinner party, she invited Virginia into the dining room and offered her a glass of vodka, which Virginia drank standing up and wearing her housekeeper’s apron.

Ida was careful to set boundaries. Virginia’s weekly wages were placed discreetly on the kitchen table. When she was in the room, Ida spoke to Marc in Russian, which Virginia did not understand. Virginia ignored them as she swept the floor and dusted the furniture.

But tensions within the apartment mounted. Marc and Ida argued. They disagreed about household matters, about negotiations for the sale of his paintings, even about the food and liquor bills. Their angers, however heated, were brief. Inevitably Ida spoke soothingly to Marc, called him
Papochka
, pressed her lips to his forehead.

She loved him and feared for him, feared for their togetherness. She watched Virginia disappear into his studio. She watched him follow Virginia into the kitchen. Virginia was usurping her place, but she was also freeing Ida of her worries about Marc.

“You cannot have it both ways, Ida,” Michel said when she complained. He reflected passively that she was, after all, used to having all things her way.

She spent less time at the apartment and concentrated on working more closely with Pierre Matisse.

“This is the time to exploit your father’s fame,” the art dealer said. “He wants new venues for his work. And with the war over, there is a hunger for new and exciting experiences in art, in dance, in theater. The New York City Ballet is interested in his work.”

She immediately met with a director of the Ballet and showed him the file of reviews of her father’s sets and costumes for
Aleko
in both Mexico City and New York.

“You are staging
The
Firebird
,” she said. “He knows and understands Stravinsky’s work.”

Dates and deadlines were discussed. Honorariums were offered, rejected, and renegotiated. At last, terms were agreed upon. The commission was in place. Contracts were signed.

“It’s a great honor,
Papochka
,” Ida enthused. “Pierre Matisse says it will be of major importance to your reputation. Your work must be exemplary. We dare not disappoint.”

“Has any work of mine ever disappointed?” he asked laconically as he flipped open his sketchpad and listened to the recording of
The
Firebird
that blared from their phonograph day after day, hour after hour.

“Everything depends on your absolute concentration. You must be able to work without distraction,” she said and stared hard at Virginia, who blushed and left the room. “You know how you hate the city in the summer. It is too hot, too noisy. You will have difficulty working and so I have rented a house in Sag Harbor, a large house with a studio that overlooks Long Island Sound. You will be able to work in peace there,” Ida continued.

Marc frowned.

“I work quite contentedly here. Virginia brings calm and order to my life. I don’t want anything to change,” he replied. “I cannot manage without Virginia.”

Ida recognized defeat.

“Of course we’ll ask Virginia to join us in Sag Harbor,” she said. “She will keep house, and her little Jean will love the ocean and the beach.”

“I’ll speak to her,” Marc said without looking up from his pad. “Perhaps she will agree.”

“Oh, I’m certain she will,” Ida replied.

She did not glance at Virginia who entered the room just then, carrying a glass of tea for Marc that she set down, careful not to disturb his drawing pad and pastel chalks.

Virginia did agree. She did not want to be separated from Marc and it had been a long time since she and Jean had had the opportunity to be at the seaside. Her husband, whose depression had deepened, raised no objection. He knew that they needed the money she earned working for the Chagalls. It was their only source of income.

The white-shingled house on Sea Cove Lane was run-down, its furnishings shabby and sparse, but it was large. The second floor had a sprawling wraparound balcony, and each bedroom had a door that opened to a view of the sea. Free of the heat and noise of the city, they reveled in the brilliant sunlit days and the cool evenings. Salt-tinged breezes brushed their faces as they looked up at the brilliant stars.

The fierce sunlight bronzed Marc’s skin and his blue eyes glittered with agate brilliance. Ida, wearing broad-brimmed hats and pastel-colored sleeveless dresses of gossamer fabrics, haunted produce markets and invited friends to extravagant picnics on the beach. She wore daringly cut bathing suits that revealed the sun-gilded beauty of her shapely body and smiled teasingly at the men who stared at her as she sprinted gracefully into the sea.

She taught Jean to swim and helped the child to gather shells, but when she spoke to Virginia, it was only to plan the menu of the evening meal or to remind her that fresh linens were needed in the bedroom when Michel was expected on one of his rare visits. Each conversation, superficially pleasant, reminded Virginia that although she slept in Marc’s bed every night, she remained a servant.

Stravinsky’s music swirled through the house as Marc immersed himself in the score, committing the powerful rhythms to memory and then working feverishly to capture the elusive images in pencil or watercolor. By nightfall, he was exhausted and rested in Virginia’s arms, leaving the balcony door in their bedroom open because he found the sound of the crashing waves soothing.

Ida fell asleep swiftly on those summer nights, but too often she was thrust into wakefulness, ensnared once again in the silken web of a half-remembered dream. Her eyes still closed, she recalled only that she was running down that all-too-familiar road, but now she was alone and unprotected. Marc and Virginia raced behind her, Jean between them, their hands grasping the hands of the child when, without warning, the three of them soared skyward through the welcoming sky, studded with pastel-colored flowers. Ida was left behind, bewildered and terrified. It was that bewilderment, that terror, that caused her to sit up in bed and struggle to re-create the dreamscape, to reach for the sketchbook on her bedside and clutch a charcoal stick that she never applied to the pristine white paper.

She was startled then, as she awakened one night, to hear Jean’s terrified scream.

“I’m scared, Mama. I’m so scared.” The child’s shrill voice pierced the nocturnal silence.

Ida sprang from her bed and raced out to her balcony, only to meet Virginia running from Marc’s room. They stared at each other, their white nightdresses silvered by moonlight.

“It’s Jean,” Virginia murmured. “She must have had a nightmare.” She hurried to the child’s room.

Ida stared out at the sea, overwhelmed by a sudden inexplicable loneliness. She thought, quixotically, that her own dream, in an odd contagion, might have invaded the child’s sleep.

That awkward nocturnal encounter eased the tensions between Ida and Virginia. All pretenses were abandoned. Their casual exchanges were newly pleasant, the household chores shared. When Virginia and Jean took the train into New York to visit John McNeil, Ida did the cooking and the cleaning without comment or complaint.

“Today I am once again your only daughter,” she teased Marc as they sat together during one of Virginia’s absences. Stravinsky’s celestial wedding music soared through the room.

He looked up from his pad. “I have only one daughter, my Idotchka,” he said reprovingly. “I will always have only one daughter.”

Late one evening, Virginia and Jean returned from New York visibly upset. Virginia’s hair was in disarray and both her skin and Jean’s were coated with a noxious dark purple powder. Jean wept uncontrollably as Virginia ran a bath and immersed her in the sudsy water.

“Someone threw a can full of this horrid stuff through the train window. Probably a schoolboy playing a stupid prank. But it was really frightening,” she told Ida.

When Jean was bathed, dressed in clean pajamas, and comforted with a cup of cocoa and a bedtime story, Virginia went into the bathroom, surprised to find Ida running a fresh bath for her.

She undressed swiftly and sank gratefully into the steaming water to which Ida had added her own lavender-scented bath salts.

“My mother’s recipe,” Ida said. “She loved lavender.”

She knelt beside the tub, shampooed Virginia’s hair, and then sponged her slender, milk-white body with a new loofah.

“You are so beautiful,” Ida said admiringly. “
Très belle
.” Gently, caressingly, she passed the sponge across Virginia’s firm small breasts. “How does that feel?” she asked.

“Wonderful,” Virginia said. “The water is exactly the right temperature. Share it with me.”

Ida nodded, slipped off her own robe, and climbed into the tub. They sat facing each other, tall Virginia, her newly shampooed brown hair falling in silken swathes to her shimmering shoulders, and full-figured Ida, her damp titian curls piled high, her skin rosy with warmth and spattered with beads of moisture.

Marc, in search of one or the other, opened the door and stared at them.

“My beautiful girls,” he murmured.
“Mes belles demoiselles.”

It occurred to him that they would make an ideal subject for Henri Matisse. He closed the door gently behind him, and as they held towels out to each other and dried themselves, they heard the strains of
The
Firebird
, the volume turned even higher than usual.

The idyllic summer days drifted into melancholy autumn. They returned to New York.

Once again they were ensnared in secrecy. Marc worried that his friends might disapprove and see his relationship with Virginia as an insult to Bella, who had so recently died. They might be scandalized because Virginia was not Jewish. Ida worried that the relationship might damage her father’s reputation and tarnish her mother’s memory.

Virginia understood their reticence. Reluctantly, she and Jean returned to their dingy apartment, to the husband whom she both pitied and resented. She feared John McNeil’s volatile and violent moods, but she feared Ida’s displeasure even more. She knew that it was Ida who controlled her future.

She was relieved when
The
Firebird
went into rehearsal and Ida asked her to help fashion the costumes. Seated side by side, their silver shears flying as the tissue-paper patterns fluttered, they sculpted Marc’s intricate designs onto shimmering fabric. Marc worked feverishly on the sets, flourishing his long-handled brushes to create the fairy-tale landscape, the magical woodland, the enchanted dragon. He was transported into Stravinsky’s imagined world, his own Russia, the land where he and Bella had lived and loved. Virginia was a stranger to that world yet she worked beside him, her needle flashing. He thought of Bella, felt her presence in the room, imagined her spirit guiding Virginia’s hand.

“Your mother is looking down at us. She is happy that Virginia is helping us,” he told Ida. “She does not want me to be alone.”

His loneliness had come to an end. He felt himself reborn. Virginia had vested him with new life. He studied her sad pale face and marked her grace as she stood and held a piece of brilliant crimson fabric to the light.

Ida was silent. He was, she knew, painting a mental picture, a fantasy that would justify his new life, his new love.

The costumes were fitted directly on the dancers, and Marc painted his designs onto the fabric as they stood submissive and immobile. Balanchine, the choreographer, watched and nodded his approval, but it was Virginia to whom he turned as he worked, as once he had turned to Bella. He sought her admiration, her approval of his work. Virginia was, Ida knew, the secret sharer of all their lives.

“Are the colors strong enough?” Marc asked Virginia as the dancers Maria Tallchief and Francisco Moncion stood on point before them. Virginia offered no criticism, no judgment.

It was Ida who urged him to render the prince’s cloak more Mephistophelean, to use more gold to gild the trees of the enchanted forest.

Her criticisms, always accurate, incurred his annoyance.

“You presume,” he told her harshly. “Do you think you have your mother’s eye? Do you think you can take your mother’s place?”

“No, her place is already taken,” Ida retorted angrily.

Her cheeks burning, she gathered up the sketches for the costumes that she would offer for sale. Virginia tried to help her smooth out the long sheets.

“I can manage,” Ida said coldly, and Virginia shrugged and returned to her needlework.

The
Firebird
opened at the Metropolitan Opera House, and Ida, radiant in a magenta gown, her hair fashioned into a coppery chignon, entered on her father’s arm.

“Chagall’s wife is beautiful but so much younger than he is,” she heard a gawking bystander say, and she smiled and thought to shout out that she was his daughter, a daughter who ran his household and managed his affairs, a daughter with a wifely role in her father’s life.

Marc, wearing a green velvet jacket, his gray curls rakishly combed, his elfin face wreathed in a brilliant smile, nodded regally at the applauding and appreciative crowd. It had not occurred to either of them to ask Virginia to join them.

At home in her dreary apartment, Virginia listened to Stravinsky’s music as it was broadcast on WQXR. John McNeil watched her.

“I suppose you’ll go to live with the great Marc Chagall now,” he said bitterly. “If his bitch of a daughter will allow it.”

Virginia was silent. He was right, of course. She would live with Marc if Ida allowed it. Ida ruled her father; Ida mandated every decision.

Virginia bought all the morning papers the next day and carried them to the Riverside Drive apartment, eager to show Marc and Ida the enthusiastic reviews. But it was Michel who opened the door.

“Ida’s left,” he told her. “She’s left the apartment and she’s left me. Of course, she left me long ago. As I suppose I left her. But I’m sure you know that.”

His voice was calm, his gaze steady. His sadness was palpable, as Ida’s had been, but their separation had long been inevitable.

The premiere of
The
Firebird
represented a closure of a kind for Ida. She had returned to the apartment infused with a new decisiveness. It was time, she had told Michel, in the hushed stillness of dawn, that she claim her own life. She wanted to live alone, neither with him nor with her father.

Michel had offered no argument. He watched her pack, carried her suitcase down to the street, and kissed her on the cheek as he helped her into a cab. Marc awakened late in the morning. When Michel told him of Ida’s departure, his face crumbled in sorrow and disbelief.

“How could she be so cruel? She has left me alone,” he moaned.

“You will not be alone,” Michel had assured him. “You have Virginia.”

“Yes. Virginia. She will live with me. She must,” he murmured.

Michel repeated his words to Virginia as she stood there clutching her newspapers.

“Will you and Jean come here to live?” he asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said and walked past him into the bedroom where Marc stood at the window. He turned to her. She read the fear and sadness in his eyes. Wordlessly, he opened his arms, and wordlessly, all indecision vanished, she walked into them.

* * *

Their new life began. The configuration of the Riverside Drive apartment shifted. Michel remained, an odd occupant, neither guest nor resident; he came and left without explanation. Virginia and Jean moved in.

Ida appeared regularly and sat at her desk to deal with the flood of correspondence, with contracts and invoices. Wary and watchful, she occasionally asked Virginia about a bill or discussed the sale of a painting with Marc. Father and daughter were cold and polite to each other, careful acrobats balanced on the dangerous high wire of their uneasy relationship.

Occasionally Virginia and Ida discussed household matters. They recognized that they were discretely bonded to Marc, who dominated both their lives.

“Jean will soon be going to a boarding school in New Jersey,” Virginia told Ida one afternoon, her eyes lowered. “We think it will be best for her.”

“You mean my father thinks it will be best for him. But do you think it will be good for her to live apart from you?” Ida asked. Jean, who reminded her of her own lonely childhood, had always aroused her sympathy.

“I want to make your father happy,” Virginia replied. “Jean will adjust.”

“Perhaps you should think about making yourself happy,” Ida retorted. “Women, even the great Marc Chagall’s women, have the right to their own happiness, the right to make their own choices. I learned that, but it was a hard lesson.”

“I am happy,” Virginia insisted. “And soon I will be happier still.”

Ida stared at her, studying her with a penetrating gaze. She had noticed the subtle changes in Virginia, the new fullness to her slender form, the pallor of her fine-featured face newly aglow. Of course. Virginia was pregnant. Her father would be the father to another child. All their lives would change yet again.

“Does my father know that you are expecting a child?” she asked.

Virginia shook her head.

“Not yet. But I will tell him soon.”

“You mean when it’s too late.”

Virginia averted her eyes. Ida knew the reason for her delay. Abortion was illegal in the United States, although with the right contacts and enough money, illicit arrangements could be made. But after the first trimester, the procedure was too dangerous. No doctor or midwife, however corrupt or compassionate, would attempt it. Clearly, Virginia did not want an abortion.