Mistral's Daughter (42 page)

Julien Mistral stood poised
on the edge of the diving board.
 
His
powerful, tanned body was bisected only by the thin strap of narrow elastic
bikini that men in Europe had been wearing for the past four years.
 
He was fifty-two and his heroic proportions
were those of a man of thirty. He had painter's muscles, the firm solid legs of
a man who spends his life standing before a canvas or walking around a studio,
and the well-developed arms and back of any man who wields a tool, whether it
be a paintbrush or a shovel.

The look of a gentleman
trained to knightly swaggering, that he had worn so haughtily in his youth, had
not changed with years of ever-growing fame, greater mastery.
 
But the arrogance with which he had held his
head, that air of a conqueror, was no longer perceived as arrogance but as the
outward sign of validated genius.
 
His
neck had grown somewhat thicker, there were deep lines around his eyes and
others that led from his high-bridged nose to his mouth, yet the prodigious
blaze of blue that had been imprisoned in his eyes had not changed in its
fixity or intensity.
 
His thick dark red
hair was cut short, at the temples it was almost sandy, and his mouth was still
hard, dominating, uncompromising.
 
Mistral had the face of a chieftain.

He paused before diving into
the pool that had been built two years before and looked about him, his hands
on his hips.
 
He frowned and seemed to
forget the invitation of the water on this hot September day in 1952, as he
listened to the sounds around him.
 
The
buzzing silence, that paradise of bees that had once surrounded
La Tourrello
,
had vanished long before, almost from the first day that Kate had bought the
farm and organized a battalion of builders and plumbers and electricians.

Now, new noises invaded the
air of Provence; a half-mile away automobiles passed frequently on the road to
Apt where once they had been rare; a tractor ground and rattled in a distant
field where so recently men had worked with their hands; from time to tie the
plane from Paris to Nice passed directly overhead; in the kitchen of the
mas
the voices of three servants were raised in a sudden quarrel as they prepared
for the dinner party that Kate had planned for that evening.
 
The door of Kate's new Citroën could be heard
on the other side of the house as she slammed it briskly and drove off with a
squealing abruptness that indicated her habitual pre-party discovery that some
detail had been neglected that made necessary a last-minute trip to set it
right.
 
While Mistral stood there, his
senses concentrated on all the sounds that were eroding the peace of his
countryside, he didn't hear the light footsteps that approached cautiously
along the length of the diving board...

"Papa!" shrieked a
child's voice right behind him.

"
Merde
!"
Startled, Mistral jumped, slipped, lost his balance and fell into the pool.

Three months following Kate
Mistral's return to France after the war she discovered she was pregnant
again.
 
She had had several miscarriages
during their marriage but Mistral hadn't been particularly disappointed.
 
He had never wanted a child the way other men
did.
 
Children, he would have said if
he'd given it any thought, were disruptive, time-consuming, probably
disappointing and certainly the source of unforgivable interruptions.

He had deeply begrudged the
need to worry about Kate's new pregnancy at the ridiculously late age of
forty-three.
 
He wanted her full
attention to be turned to putting the
mas
back in working order.
 
He never intended to have to deal with
practical matters again, and when Kate had arrived in the spring of 1945, her
two suitcases crammed with Ivory soap, Kleenex, toilet paper, instant coffee,
needles, thread, flashlights, and white sugar, luxuries unimaginable in France
for five years, he drew a breath of relief.
 
He wanted only to disappear into his studio at first light and forget
the nagging problems of daily existence.
 
A child would complicate his life
—
 
but certainly she would miscarry again.
 
Ordinary men needed sons to prove to
themselves that they had existed and left something behind on the face of the
earth.
 
Julien Mistral knew that he was
immortal and that a son could add nothing to his place in the history of art.

However, when Kate gave
birth, in February of 1946, to a skinny, solemn and somehow sour-faced baby
girl, she was so proud of herself that even Mistral felt a certain sense of
participation in her happiness.
 
Kate
named the baby Nadine and reassured Mistral by promptly putting her on a bottle
and getting her own strength back in a few weeks.

In the next years Kate's
organizational abilities were taxed to the fullest.
 
Jean Pollison returned from Germany with
teeth missing, skeletal from malnutrition, but he recovered rapidly and
La
Tourello
was the first farm in the Lubéron to bloom again, thanks to
Mistral's money that Kate spent so liberally as soon as there was anything
available for sale after the war.
 
A
Swiss nurse was imported to take care of Nadine while Kate dealt with the
renewed explosion of interest in Mistral.

As early as 1946 France
swarmed again with American dealers, greedy to see what had been painted during
the war, and Mistral's Studio contained more canvases that he considered worthy
to be sold than it had ever held before:
 
all the paintings he had done in the five years since
Les Oliviers
had
been completed.

"Have you heard from
Avigdor yet?" Kate asked Mistral soon after her return.

"No, I've decided to
change dealers," Mistral answered. "The man has always been more
interested in discovering new talent than getting the best prices for the
artists to whom he owes his due.
 
Why did
he never open an American branch, I ask you?
 
That alone has cost me a great deal.
 
My contract with him lapsed during the war
—
take advantage of
it."

As Mistral had known she
would, Kate obeyed him without further question.
 
He had calculated from the beginning of the
marriage that as long as he allowed her to feel powerful in certain areas she
would be satisfied.
 
Any dealer would
have to reckon with Kate before he even got near Mistral.
 
He wasn't giving up an authority he wanted to
retain in letting Kate choose a new gallery since it was the sort of necessary
business that he loathed, on a level with coping with the neighboring farmers
who were beginning to think of forming a cooperative to which they would all
sell their grapes.
 
An artist choosing a
dealer, he told Kate, was like an elephant picking out a favorite louse.
 
The dealer Kate finally settle on, Étienne
Delage of New York, Paris and London, soon discovered that Julien Mistral was
an exception to the rule that most painters only grow rich in the grave.

When the São Paulo Museum of
Modern Art had its major Mistral exhibition in 1948 he didn't bother to make
the trip although Kate was there for weeks in advance, overseeing the
installation of the canvases.
 
A year
later she went to New York for the opening of the big Mistral retrospective at
The Museum of Modern Art, but again Mistral preferred to stay at home. In 1950
and 1951 he had finally been persuaded to be present at the important
exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the
Palazzo Reale in Milan, and the two-month-long celebration of the twenty-fifth
anniversary of his first show which was celebrated by an exhibition that took
over the entire Maison de Pensée Française, in Paris.

Once that was over Mistral
declared that he would never go to another museum show, no matter how
significant.
 
He detested that kind of
elbow-rubbing and the ceremonial duties of these occasions, he loathed the
crowds of strangers who felt that because they loved his work they had the right
to talk to him about their reactions to particular paintings.
 
"Let Picasso, that mountebank, that
market place of every kind of art
—
not excluding pots and pans
—
encourage the lionizers
—
I have better things to do than act like the
ringmaster at a circus."

He kept to his resolve but
each exhibition
—
and each major art auction
—
saw a dramatic
rise in his prices.
 
Étienne Delage
discovered, as Adrien Avigdor had before him, that the very scarcity of
Mistral's paintings made them unusually valuable.
 
After his wartime
paintings were sold,
he took to retaining most of his new work that survived his annual bonfire, but
in 1951 alone he earned the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars in
American money without having to part with more than a half-dozen canvases.

In the late 1940s and early
1950s more and more journalists found their way to Félice and for the many
dozens who were denied entry to
La Tourrello
there were invariably
several so important that Kate eventually persuaded Mistral to grant a few
grudging interviews.
 
On the other hand,
she protected him from art historians who were writing books on him, tourists
who wanted to have their photographs taken with him, college girls who wanted
his autograph, scholars who were doing monographs on his work, collectors who
thought that he might be charmed into selling them a picture when Delage had
nothing to offer.
 
Yet nothing was so
disruptive, so distracting to him as Kate's growing interest in playing the
hostess.

Perhaps it was the swimming
pool, put in by a special company from Cannes, Mistral thought, that had set
her off, but during the last two years she had become the social queen of the
region.
 
Aristocrats from England had
bought a château near Uzès, a great American expert on Cézanne had settled in
Ménerbes, the Gimpels, art dealers for generations, had bought another château
not far from Félice, and now all of them and others like them were entertaining
each other and being entertained by Kate.

Mistral had lost any interest
in her body soon after Nadine's birth.
 
Otherwise he would have stopped her
—
what did he care to meet
strangers, no matter how famous, what possible interest could he have in
listening to their absurd, excited chatter about the new, so-called Abstract
Expressionists, a scum-filled sewer of hopeless drooling idiots, every last one
of them, who, lacking talent, vomited up their last meals and called it art, as
if an apple could be abstract, or a full moon or a mountain or a naked
woman...
 
why waste time talking about them
any more than telling malicious stories about that
pauvre con
of a
Picasso and his ludicrous involvement with the Communists who used him to paint
propaganda portraits of Stalin, but never understood what his work was trying
to do...
 
not that he had ever succeeded.

No, the only thing he agreed
with Picasso about was Dubuffet.
 
Picasso
loathed him as much as Mistral did.
 
And
the only thing he agreed with Dubuffet about was Monet
—
they both liked
him.
 
Degas had had the right idea,
Mistral thought.
 
When he knew he dying
he'd said to his artist friend, Forain, that there was to be no funeral
oration, but, "If there has to be one, you, Forain, get up say, "He
greatly loved drawing.
 
So do
I."
 
And then go home."
 
There was a man! But Degas had not had an
American wife to whom he made love less and less.
 
There was just enough guilt in that, he
admitted to himself, to make him feel that Kate had to be allowed the pleasure
she got in dining with Charlie Chaplin and the Duchess of Windsor.
 
Yes, ambition came to a woman as the life of
the body denied to her, he mused.
 
He had
his women, of course, in Avignon now, for the sake of decency, one young and
willing girl after another, no more important than a pair of shoelaces, yet
indispensable as shoelaces are when you don't have them.

But Kate seemed content with
her ever-expanding guest list and Nadine, who was growing into more of a
chatterbox every day.
 
He had tried, once
or twice, to let Nadine sit quietly in a corner of his studio because she had
begged to be allowed to see him work, but the child had never learned to
maintain a decent quiet.
 
"Why are
you using all that red, Papa?
 
Is that
big yellow thing a sun, Papa?
 
Can you paint
a bird, Papa?
 
Paint me a dog!"
 
And even, God help him,
 
"Why are you standing so still, Papa...
 
is it because you
are
thinking?"
 
No!
 
It was too much to be endured.
 
He forbade her the studio although her tiny
chin trembled and she pouted in the way the servants thought was adorable and
pulled ever so wistfully on her pale blond hair.