Mistral's Daughter (2 page)

"No, stay here,
darling.
 
I'd like to see it and I don't
have all that much to do today.
 
I hear
that Angel's interviewing business managers...
 
she's doing as well as you thought she would."

Fauve turned on
the set and sat down in, the chair in front of Maggy's desk.
 
The two women both turned their eyes to the
screen and watched as Angel managed to convince even them, for thirty
astonishing seconds, that
skim milk cottage cheese could be an object of gourmet devotion.

When the commercial was over
they shook hands in congratulations, laughing together, each on the same
rollicking thrilling note of freedom from all convention, a laugh that made
everyone who heard it stop to listen and wish fervently to hear it again.

"You were right to move
Angel to the Big Board," Maggy said.
 
"That spot should run forever."

"I can just see her
trying to decide whether to buy an apartment house or a
herd of cattle
with the residuals.
 
She'll probably
settle for a Jaguar."

As Fauve reached up to turn
off the set, the words "News Center Flash" popped onto the screen
and she kept it on to see what had happened. An anchorwoman appeared, speaking
rapidly.

                       
"Julien Mistral, considered to be
France's greatest living painter, died today of pneumonia at his home in the
South of France. The artist was seventy-five years old. His daughter, Madame
Nadine Dalmas, was with him at the time of his death. Details at noon."

Neither Fauve nor Maggy
moved.
 
Shock held them in their chairs
as another commercial ran its course.
 
Suddenly Maggy jumped up and turned the set off but Fauve still sat
immobilized, the light of her eyes extinguished. Maggy went to her, leaned
down, put her arms around her shoulders and pulled the motionless red head to
her breast.

"My God, my God, to hear
it like that," she murmured, rocking Fauve in her arms.

"I don't feel anything.
Absolutely nothing. I should feel something, shouldn't I?" Fauve said,
almost too softly for Maggy to hear.
 

"It's the
suddenness...
 
I don't feel anything
either, but I will."
 
For
a
moment they were both silent, clinging together, listening to the wail of a
siren in traffic on Fifty-seventh Street without hearing it.
 
Julien Mistral was dead and time had come to
a stop for the two women, both of whom had loved him.

On Maggy's desk there was one
framed photograph. As if they were joining her in their shock, each of them
found herself looking toward that picture of Teddy, the greatest fashion model
of all time;
 
the
girl who had been
Maggy's daughter, Julien Mistral's mistress and Fauve's mother.

Finally Maggy
stood up and released Fauve as her French practicality swept over her arrested
emotions and told her what had to happen next.

"Fauve, the funeral...
you’ll have to go.
 
Come on
—
I’ll go back to the apartment with you
."
I’ll help you pack.
 
Casey can get your plane ticket.
"

Fauve
moved for the first time since the television announcement.
 
She walked over to one of the windows and
looked out at the rain.
 
She spoke
without turning her head to Maggy.

"
No.
"

"
What do you mean, ‘no’?
 
I don’t understand.
"

"
No, Magali, I can’t go.
"

"
Fauve, you’re in shock.
 
Your father is dead.
 
I know you haven’t spoken to him in more than
six years but of course you must go to his funeral.
"

"
No, Magali, no, I won’t.
 
I’m not going.
 
I
can’t
.
"

2

Paris was
en fête,
in
love with itself.
 
It was a Monday in May
1925 and everywhere neighbors agreed with each other that never, in their
memories, had the chestnut trees carried so many creamy pyramids of flowers.
But they only stopped to notice the parade of blue days and star-filled nights
when they weren't busy gossiping, for never, even in the history of this
capital city of all capital cities, had the ferment of the worlds of art and
fashion and society yielded such a pungent, intoxicating wine.

In her workroom on that
morning in May, Chanel was busy creating the very first little black suit; on
that morning Colette was putting the finishing touches to the scandalous
manuscript of
La
Fin de Cheri
. Young Hemingway and the half-blind
James Joyce had been out on that dawn, drinking together, while Mistinguette
had opened the night before at the Casino de Paris, proving once again, as
surely as a great bullfighter claims the applause of the crowd, that the art of
descending a staircase belonged to her. The Cartier brothers had bought the
most extraordinary necklace in the world, three perfect strands of pink pearls
that had taken two centuries to gather
—
and many people wondered to
whom they would sell it.

Maggy Lunel cared nothing
about pearl necklaces as she stood on a street corner in Montparnasse, called
the Carrefour Vavin. She was devouring her second breakfast, a handful of hot
fried potatoes she had just bought for four centimes from a street vendor. She
had
been in Paris less than twenty-four hours and, at
seventeen, she found that running away from home in Tours to seek her destiny
was an infernally hungry business.

Passersby on the rue de la
Grande Chaumière turned to cast a second and often third glance at her, planted
there as if she owned the pavement, tall, long-limbed, unselfconscious and
apparently totally unaware of the contradiction between her face and her clothing.
She wore the boyish, athletic silhouette of the day following the latest mode
in a trim skirt of pleated navy serge that covered her knees and a white crepe
overblouse, which was belted below her waist.

But, in a day when no lady,
rich or poor, was seen on the street without a hat, she was bareheaded and her
face had not been tweaked and painted into the cupid-bowed, heavily powdered,
highly rouged version of a Kewpie-doll that was so in favor that women everywhere
had managed to make themselves all look alike. She had the strong, bold beauty
of a day in the future, of an era that wouldn't dawn for another
quarter-century.
 
Her cheekbones were
twin scimitars under the white stretch of her skin and she carried her head on
her long neck as proudly as a war flag.

In a time when all women had
cut their hair, hers was a long, straight fall of shiny stuff, the dark orange
of apricot jam, and her thick, unfashionably unplucked eyebrows were only a few
shades deeper over eyes that were set almost too far apart. They were frank and
spangled and wide open, the whites fresh and bright, the irises the
yellow-green of a glass of Pernod before it has been diluted by water. Maggy's
lips were so full and well marked that they were the focus of her face, a
signal as emphatic as a signpost.

As Maggy Lunel regretfully
chewed the last of the potatoes she looked like a large golden cat who had
walked into a breeze.
 
Nothing about her
self-confident stance would have revealed her age to an observer, but her skin
was as tender and new as a baby's palms and where it lay over her well-formed,
straight nose, it was dappled with faint freckles.

Maggy dusted her hands off
with her handkerchief and looked about the Carrefour Vavin. She was standing a
step away from the boulevard Raspail.
 
Across that wide thoroughfare was the beginning of the rue
Delambre.
 
From her spot on the sidewalk
every other street seemed to be going downhill.
 
She had the feeling of being on top of a gentle hill in the center of a
great open place, as if this crossroad were the main avenue of a great city,
complete in itself.
 
In every direction
she had large views of the fresh, blowing sky of spring, pierced by the tops of
the chestnut trees.
 
But there was
nothing peaceful in the prospect.
 
The
very air was charged with sparks of energy, and even the pigeons looked
busy.
 
It seemed to Maggy that the
passersby were almost running to get to their mysterious destinations.

Oh, she thought, how madly
she wanted to crunch Paris between her teeth, to chew and chew until she
possessed this city; this unopened treasure chest crammed with objects of
desire. She shifted from one foot to another with impatience
—
to begin,
tapping her neat, "Louis" heeled pump with the instep strap buttoned
on one side, swinging her head to try to look into the windows of each passing
taxi, so overwhelmed with curiosity and eagerness that she didn't notice that
she herself had become the object of the attention of a growing group of people
who had clustered around her.
 
They were
an oddly assorted band:
 
young women in
cheap, brightly colored clothes, old women in aprons and slippers;
grandfathers smoking and small children tugging at their mothers' hands; boys
and girls who should, surely, have been in school, all waiting with an air of
resigned patience that made Maggy look like a nervous filly straining at a
starting gate.

Gradually they formed a rough
circle around her and their conversation trailed off as they looked at the
stranger and nudged each other.

"Are you waiting for
someone?" asked a buxom woman of thirty-five.

Maggy looked up in surprise,
glanced around the circle and smiled.

"I certainly hope so,
Madame. I'm in the right place, aren't I?" "That depends;'

"The models' fair? Isn't
it here that I wait to get work as an artist's model?"

"It's the spot,"
said a twelve-year-old boy, peering at her with ardent interest. "Me, I'm
of the métier. I wasn't even born when I was painted for the first time,"
he boasted. "But my ma, she was in her last month."

"Shut up,
imbecile," said his mother, shoving him behind her. "You're no
model," she said to Maggy, accusingly.

The foire aux models was an
institution that had started in Montmartre some seventy-five years earlier,
when professional artists' models gathered to be hired around the fountain of
the Place Pigalle.
 
As the artists had
moved to Montparnasse the models had followed them, still standing on the
street waiting for work every Monday morning.

Entire families had lived by
this trade for generations and Maggy's appearance among them was greeted with
the deep resentment any group of professionals shows toward an obvious
amateur.

"If someone will pay to
paint me," Maggy retorted, "won't that make me a model?"

"So you
think that's all there is to it, do you? It's a stinking hard job of work, my
fine young lady."

"Good," Maggy said
decisively, jamming her hands into the pockets of her skirt and standing
straight and sure in her tight new shoes.

The models who
had gathered closely around to hear this exchange, blocking the pavement,
suddenly drew back as they all turned to watch a pretty girl wearing a
close-fitting, jade green

cloche over her
shingled dark hair, who was swinging along the street with an admiring man on
each arm.
 
As she caught sight of Maggy
she looked her up and down with a sharp eye.
 
She raised her eyebrows in surprise and then shrugged her shoulders in
dismissal.
 
Loudly enough for all of them
to hear she commented, "So that's the kind of savage coming from the
provinces these days, is it?
 
That
beanpole's never seen a pair of scissors obviously.
 
I wonder if she's even heard of soap and
water...
 
there's a strong air of the
farmyard somewhere."
 
She laughed in
contempt, pretending not to hear the wave of sniggers her comments had caused
and disappeared down the street.

"Who is that...
 
individual?" Maggy asked
indignantly.
 
"That's Kiki of
Montparnasse, and you didn't even recognize her?
 
Now
there's
a model
—
the queen of us all."
 
The woman was
glad to underscore Maggy's ignorance.
 
"Everybody knows Kiki, and Kiki knows everybody. You
are
wet
behind the ears and no mistake."