Bridal Chair (4 page)

André and Elsa were engaged to be married. Their future was their own. Ida admired Elsa and envied her independence. Elsa had no parents to answer to, no famous family name to uphold. She was free to live her own life. It occurred to Ida, with a shudder of guilt, that she envied Elsa her orphanhood.

“Are you enjoying the encampment, Ida?” Elsa asked, passing her a comb.

“Very much,” Ida replied cautiously.

“You and Michel have grown very close, I’ve noticed,” Elsa continued.

“We met here last summer and wrote to each other throughout the year. We are very good friends.”

“I think that you are more than friends,” Elsa said knowingly.

“Yes. You are right. We are more than friends.” Her cheeks burned with a crimson brightness that would be foreign to her father’s brush. She wanted to share her secret with Elsa, who stared at her gravely. Elsa would understand. She might even approve.

“We are
amoureux
, lovers,” she added, her heart beating rapidly, her body suffused with warmth. It was a relief to have spoken the words aloud.

“I am not surprised. I thought as much,” Elsa said. She smiled. “I assume you are being careful.”

“Careful?” Ida was briefly puzzled.

“Surely you know what I mean.” Elsa looked at her in surprise.

“Yes, of course I do,” she said too swiftly.

Careful
. Michel had used that very word and she had laughed his concern away. She understood the rhythms of her body, the days of fertility and infertility.

There was no need for him to worry, Ida had assured Michel. She was not worried. Why would she worry? She carefully recorded the dates of her menstrual cycle and understood its vagaries. Nothing could go wrong. She was fortune’s favorite, always cherished, always protected, her parents’ magical daughter imbued with zest and energy. And now she was Michel’s
belle
amante
, his beautiful beloved. She had ruffled his hair, mocked his concern.

Impulsively, she turned to Elsa and hugged her. “It is good of you to be concerned about us, but we are fine.”

“Yes. Of course you are. Everyone is fine until they are not so fine,” Elsa replied wryly.

On the last day of the encampment, Elsa handed Ida a slip of paper. “My address in Paris,” she said. “Should you ever need me.”

“
Merci
. But may I come to see you even if I don’t need you?” Ida asked mischievously.

“Of course. We are friends, after all. I am on duty on the wards at night, but I am at home in the afternoon. And my door is never locked.”

“I plan to come to your room and kidnap you. Michel and I will take you and your André to a wonderful café on the Rive Gauche.”

Ida was aglow with excitement. Friendship with another young woman was a new experience for her. It would be wonderful to sit at a table on the terrace with her lover and her friends and watch the lights of Paris dance across the waters of the Seine.

She tucked Elsa’s address into a corner of her case, next to the sachets of lavender that she had never placed in her drawers.

She and Michel traveled to Paris together. He carried a bouquet of the late-blooming alpine roses for his mother. It pained him that his mother who so loved flowers and gardens had been imprisoned in their small shop throughout the summer, fearing the loss of even a few francs. His parents’ poverty saddened him. The sacrifices they made on his behalf filled him with guilt.

Ida carried no floral offerings. Marc and Bella had left Montchauvet and were settling into their Paris home near the Bois de Boulogne. She knew that Bella went to the flower market each day and returned home, her arms laden with the russet blooms of autumn. Always house proud, Bella obsessively arranged and rearranged furniture and paintings, filled bowls and vases with flowers. Her home was her insular fortress, her safe haven in the face of an ugly and uncertain world.

She had written to Ida, describing the way she had redecorated her bedroom. Sheer white draperies were at the windows, a rug of oriental design on the floor, a silk canopy of deep purple above the bed. The new comforter was pink and she had scattered plump pillows across it. Ida’s books were on the shelves, the carved wooden animals she had collected since childhood on the bureau.

“How happy you will be there,
ma
fille
,” Bella had written.

Ida had smiled when she read the letter, smiled when she passed it to Michel.

“My mother has furnished a child’s room. Toys and picture books and fluffy pillows. She doesn’t recognize that I have grown up. I am not her
petite
fille
. I am a
jeune
personne
.”

“She wants to please you. Don’t be angry with her,” Michel cautioned.

Soft-spoken and gentle, Michel always chose the path of peace. His parents had cautioned him to remain unnoticed and avoid confrontation. In silence, they, like the Chagalls, though without their resources, had navigated their way from Russia to Berlin and then finally reached France.

“We must not call attention to ourselves,” his father had reminded him again and again. It was important that Jews cloak themselves in silence and anonymity.

His father’s advice had impacted on Michel. Ida’s exuberance, her vigorous assertiveness, was alien to him. Her passionate energy both intrigued and exhausted him. Her father’s fame intimidated him. But none of that mattered. She bewitched him. Her self-confidence and her beauty, her vitality, the tenderness of her touch fascinated him. He loved her. Of that much he was certain. He fell asleep thinking about her and awakened to thoughts of her laughter, the exciting explosions of her joy.

“Of course I won’t be angry with her,” Ida assured him. “We are never
enragé
with each other, my parents and I.”

The Chagalls dared not indulge in the luxury of anger. They were too dependent on each other, too conscious of their visibility, always in costume for the tableau they presented to the world. They knew that they were perceived to be an enchanted trio—lively, elfin-faced Marc; fragile, dark-haired Bella; and Ida, their precocious, vivacious daughter whose hair was the color of firelight.

As their train pulled into the Gare de Lyon, Ida and Michel, as they had agreed, went into separate compartments. They did not want their parents to see them disembark together. They had decided that they would explain their closeness, their “friendship,” in due course. For the present, Michel would return to his legal studies and Ida would enroll in studio classes at La Palette in Montparnasse, close enough to the Sorbonne for them to meet with relative ease. Her parents had already agreed that La Palette offered more sophisticated training than the academy where she had previously studied.

The coming months stretched out before her in an enchanted highway of time. She and Michel would snatch the hours between his classes and hers for hasty lunches in the cafés of the Left Bank. They would walk hand in hand along the Seine and, at the twilight hour,
l’heure bleue
, they would stand together on the Pont Neuf and watch the reflection of the first stars of evening dance across the dark waters.

Smiling, Ida listened to the screech of the train’s brakes and then watched Michel alight and stride across the platform to greet the short, silver-haired woman in the dark suit who stood on tiptoe to kiss her tall son and smile as she accepted the bouquet of roses he offered her. She waited, and then she too descended and rushed toward her parents.

“
Mamochka
.
Papochka
. How happy I am to see you. I had the most wonderful time, but I missed you. I missed you every single moment.”

A dynamo of exuberance, she fell into her mother’s arms and smiled happily at her father. Marc placed his hand on her head and lifted a cluster of her silken curls to his cheek. He studied his daughter’s flushed face and wondered why it was she looked so different to him.

“Welcome home, Idotchka,” he said softly.
“Soyez la bienvenue.”

Arm in arm, they left the station, and as they waited at the exit for their driver, Ida saw Michel and his mother disappear into the Métro station. Michel’s arm rested protectively on his mother’s narrow shoulders and she clutched the bloodred roses to her heart.

Ida had slept peacefully at the encampment, but the terrifying recurrent dream assaulted her when she returned to Paris. Once again, there was the desperate race down dark and unfamiliar roads, the harsh shouts and the thudding hoofbeats of mounted pursuers whose eyes glinted with hatred, and then the mysterious celestial escape. Then suddenly the dreamscape was dangerously altered. As she floated through the flower-studded sky, dizziness overwhelmed her. She rocketed away from her parents’ protective grasp and plunged into a sea of fetid darkness, struggling against a wave of nausea that thrust her, gasping for breath, onto the shore of wakefulness. Sleep was abandoned. She sat up, her eyes open and burning, her throat raw. Sour vomit filled her mouth.

Startled and frightened, she struggled out of bed and stumbled through the milky predawn light to the bathroom, where she retched, clutching her abdomen. The room whirled about her; she gripped the wall and lowered herself onto the cold tile floor. At last the dizziness abated, the nausea passed. She washed her face with cold water, brushed her teeth, and, moving very slowly, returned to her bedroom.

I’m sick
, she thought as she tossed uneasily, tangling herself in the sweat-dampened bedclothes.

She remembered then that Yvette, the student who worked at an adjacent easel in the La Palette studio, had complained of stomach pains. Perhaps she had infected Ida, who, like her mother, was vulnerable to viruses. Ida was familiar with Bella’s toxic headaches, her bouts of intestinal discomfort, and inexplicable muscle aches. Oddly shaped jars of patent medicines and homeopathic mixtures stood beside gem-colored vials of perfume and tubes of kohl on Bella’s cluttered dressing table.

Only toward morning did she fall into a fitful sleep, and when she awakened, the nausea had passed. She smiled wanly at her mother, who stood in the doorway of her room holding a croissant and a cup of café au lait.

“I’m not really hungry,” she said apologetically.

“But you must eat,” Bella protested.

“I’ll eat something at the studio. I don’t want to be late this morning. A nude model will be posing.”

Bella looked at her daughter searchingly.

“Are you feeling well, Idotchka?” she asked. “You look pale.”

“I’m fine. I felt a bit ill earlier, but I’m perfectly all right now.”

“Perhaps it’s your time of the month?”

“No,” Ida replied curtly.

Her mother’s question irritated her. She resented its invasiveness. She was capable of calculating her own menstrual cycles.

“I thought that perhaps it was,” Bella persisted. “Katya mentioned that she had not found any of the cloths you use for your monthly in the laundry.”

“Katya should mind her own business. Perhaps it should have occurred to her that I prefer to do such intimate laundering myself. In fact, she should be grateful that I relieved her of such an unpleasant chore.”

Ida kept her tone even, but she did not look at her mother. She concentrated on buckling her shoes, her head bent low. She ignored the dizziness that took her by surprise when she rose to brush her hair and countered it by drawing the brush vigorously through her tangled copper-colored curls.

Bella glanced at her watch and left the room.

Ida rummaged through her desk drawer and found the calendar on which she carefully recorded the dates of her menstrual cycle. She realized that it had been some weeks since she had made an entry. No, not weeks, she noted with a sinking heart. Almost two months had passed.

She willed herself to calm; she reminded herself that she was often irregular. She tried to remember if she had ever been this late. But of course, she had never before had reason to be concerned.

She counted the days since her last menses, then counted them again and recalled her nocturnal nausea, the light-headedness that had overcome her that very morning.

“No,” she said aloud. “It can’t be.”

She turned to her long mirror and studied her reflection, concentrating on the narrowness of her waist, the flatness of her abdomen. There was no intimation that her body had been invaded by nascent life. She touched her breasts, so full and firm beneath the high-collared green bodice that matched her eyes. She never imprisoned them in either a brassiere or the laced tightness of a restraining chemise. She slipped her fingers between the buttons of her bodice and felt their tenderness. Were they perhaps unusually tender, she wondered, and, if so, did that signify anything?

Her hands trembling, she went to her drawer and fumbled through her handkerchiefs and found the scrap of paper on which Elsa had scrawled her address. She tucked it into her bag, tossed the croissant out the window, poured the coffee down the toilet, and hurried downstairs.

“Good-bye,
Mamochka
,” she said, handing Bella the empty cup. “Thank you for breakfast. I’m sorry I was so irritable. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I won’t be home for dinner. I’m meeting a friend.”

She kissed her mother on both cheeks and rushed out, closing the door against Bella’s protest, her inevitable questions.

“What friend? Where are you meeting? Will you call?”

Bella’s strained voice, her unanswered questions, echoed through the empty room, startling Marc, who entered soundlessly. It was his habit to work in stockinged feet, always fearful that droplets of paint might stain his shoes. He had not forgotten his impoverished boyhood when he and his brother, David, had shared a single pair of shoes and attended school on alternate days.

Bella sighed in reluctant recognition of how their painful past haunted their present.

“To whom were you speaking, Bella?” he asked as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

“I thought I was speaking to Ida, but she left so quickly, she never heard me. She said she wouldn’t be home for dinner because she was meeting a friend, but she didn’t say whom she was meeting or where,” she replied plaintively.

“Perhaps it’s that law student, Michel Rapaport,” Marc speculated. “She said that they became good friends at the encampment. I expect that she’ll tire of him soon enough.”

“Yes, probably,” Bella said wearily. “I worry about her. She’s so young, so naive.”

“No younger than you were when we first met,” he said, smiling.

“I know that. But we lived in different times, a different place. We understood boundaries. We knew what was permissible and what was forbidden.”

“Did we have any choice?” he asked bitterly. “There was no escape from the prying eyes of the gossips of Vitebsk. We could not play deaf to the voices of the rabbis, the warnings of our parents. They were so frightened that we might do something that would bring shame upon them.”

“Were they so wrong to worry?” she asked.

“Perhaps not. They worried us into marriage. They worried us into happiness.” He smiled.

They knew that their hard-earned happiness relied on the firm foundation of communal acceptance. They still adhered to conventional Vitebsk, its embrace of respectability.

He stirred his coffee, added more sugar.

“But there is no need to be concerned about our Ida,” he added. “She’s a child still, a wisp of a girl.”

“Not quite a wisp,” Bella said, smiling for the first time that morning. “Our Ida is a beautiful young woman. Your artist friends see that. Surely you’ve noticed how young men stare at her whenever we’re with her in a café, how they turn to look after her when we walk down the street?”

She did not tell him that their daughter’s loveliness filled her with an odd commingling of pride and fear.

“Bella, Bella, you are creating worries where none exist. There are problems enough in the world. So our Ida is beautiful and men are aware of it. There is no need to be concerned.”

“And what concerns you, Marc?” she asked caustically.

“What concerns me? Adolf Hitler concerns me. What’s happening in Germany concerns me,” he replied.

“Germany is across the border. We live in France,” she said flatly. It was the mantra she intoned whenever he discussed the ominous headlines in
Le
Monde
or the monitory newscasts.

“The Great War ended only sixteen years ago,” she continued. “Do you think the German people actually want another war? The very idea is ridiculous. Of course there is anti-Semitism in Germany—we knew that when we left Berlin—but anti-Semitism does not mean war. You worry too much, Marc.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps. Let’s agree: you’ll stop worrying about Ida, and I’ll stop worrying about Hitler.”

“A fair exchange,” she said, and they laughed.

They smiled at each other and she moved toward him, rested her head on his shoulder. He gently stroked the silken cap of her dark hair.

“We have an invitation to a performance at the Théâtre de l’Athénée this evening. Shall we go?” he asked.

It was, she knew, a gesture of conciliation.

She nodded, grateful for the diversion, which would free her from worrying about Ida, about where she was spending the evening and when she would return.

“It will be a pleasant evening,” he said. “All the artists of Paris will be there. Even the Spaniard.”

“He’s so arrogant, that Picasso,” she said.

She did not add that when she and Ida had stopped for coffee at Les Deux Magots, Picasso had quickly sketched Ida in profile and flashed his pad at them as he left. A charcoal drawing, deft and minimal, but he had captured their daughter’s latent sensuality.

Marc shrugged and left the kitchen, anxious to return to his studio. Bella went to her study and reread the prose poem she had written the previous day, a memoir of her childhood in a family and a community that no longer existed.

* * *

Ida spent the morning at her easel, becoming increasingly frustrated. She had always been fascinated by the way her father worked, his swift and certain brushstrokes, his instinctive selection of daring colors. Her own efforts were labored. She stared at the nude model standing motionless and bored on the platform, her greasy ash blond hair tied into a scraggly knot. Ida struggled, without success, to paint the woman’s sagging breasts, her heavy legs, but she knew her efforts were unsuccessful. The maître, who patrolled the cavernous studio critiquing his students’ work, paused and studied her canvas.

“It would be helpful, perhaps, if you outlined your subject before you start to paint,” he said.

“My father never does that,” Ida protested.

“But you are not your father, Mademoiselle Chagall,” he replied, smiling maliciously.

She was relieved when the afternoon recess was declared. The model slipped into a faded blue dressing gown and accepted a cigarette and a glass of water from the studio assistant.

“She’s so ugly,” Ida muttered, and Yvette, who once again had painted beside her, frowned.

“Is it because she is so ugly that you find it difficult to paint her?” she asked sardonically. “You should have more sympathy for her. How can a woman who is ugly and poor support herself? Do you think she actually wants to pose naked in this freezing studio? What choices do women like her have?”

Ida did not reply. Yvette’s words shamed her.

Despondently, she discarded her smock, smoothed her hair, and left the studio. The sweetness of the autumn air, the gentleness of the breeze soothed her, and she walked briskly to the café where she and Michel had agreed to meet.

He sat, as she had known he would, at a small table in the rear. It was their habit to rendezvous in the darkened corners of unfashionable cafés. They were reluctant to encounter either their parents’ friends or their own fellow students. That self-ordained secrecy added romantic mystery to their stolen shared hours. Michel leaned forward, took her hand, and pressed it to his lips. Half a baguette lay on his plate, and his coffee cup was nearly empty.

“I’m sorry,
chérie
, but I have very little time today. I have books on reserve at the law library, and I promised my parents that I would help in the shop. Do you forgive me?”

She swallowed her disappointment. “But will we see each other this evening?” she asked.

“It’s not possible. I have a study session with the students in my class on the laws of property. We have an important examination next week. Please don’t be angry.”

He feared Ida’s anger as he feared her sudden moods, her irritation if he rejected her plans for an afternoon outing or her choice of a café. She had, from childhood on, always had her own way, while he had always prioritized the needs of his parents, unwilling to add to their heavy burden of sadness and pain. Still, her explosions were brief, his forgiveness inevitable and immediate.

“No. I’m not angry.”

Relieved, he kissed her cheek. She watched him hurry out, bowed by the weight of his book bag. It occurred to her that he looked very ordinary in his shabby brown cloth student jacket. The disloyalty of the thought surprised her. She ordered a coffee and a croque monsieur. She had thought to tell Michel about her predawn illness and its implications, but she did not regret her silence. It would have been foolish to speak to him before she was absolutely certain of her condition. She fished Elsa’s address out of her bag. She knew how to establish that certainty.

She ate very slowly, turning the oil-stained pages of the café’s copy of
Le
Monde
as she sipped her coffee. There was more bad news from Germany, more warnings from Winston Churchill about the likelihood of war. She sighed. Many of her parents’ friends were already planning to leave Europe. She would urge them yet again to file visa applications at the United States embassy, although she knew they would be resistant. They had spent so much of their lives in flight. Her mother was exhausted, and her father, for all his apprehensions about Hitler, assumed that his fame would protect him. She replaced the newspaper on its wooden rack, paid her bill, and left the café.

But she did not return to the studio. The thought of the sad model’s coarse features, of Yvette’s unkindness and the maître’s criticism, impelled her to walk in the opposite direction. Exhilarated by her new leisure, she wandered into a fashionable shop in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. She fingered several garments and then tried on various cloaks before selecting a sky-blue cape of the softest cashmere. The eager saleswoman offered her a matching beret, which she also bought, setting it at a jaunty angle and arranging her hair so the coppery tendrils fringed her forehead.